“On second thoughts,” I said. “I can call there some other time.”
“Where else are you going, then?”
“Me? Up the Cow’s Arse.”
Everyone knows they can find me up the Cow’s Arse when I’m not out on business. Officially, it’s called the Black Bull, and that’s the name over the door. But then, who ever cared about ‘officially’ round here? The sign outside the pub looks like a cow’s arse, so that’s its name. Medensworth folk aren’t too good at reading, but they can make out pictures. Besides, the landlord there is Baggy Prentiss, and he has a wife who looks like a... well, I’ll let you guess.
I had to make a bit of a detour out of Medensworth to drop Lisa home, and by the time I got to the pub Doncaster Dave was there waiting for me. When I say waiting, I mean he had his face in a plate of steak pie and chips, with plenty of gravy. It was a bit late for lunch, but at the Cow’s Arse they tend to serve him whenever he feels hungry, which is all day. The pub was full, except for two spare seats at the table where Dave was sitting. It wasn’t that he was saving them for us exactly — just that no one else wanted to sit with him.
“Lo Hones.”
I rocked back in admiration. The standard of Dave’s conversation is blistering, even when he’s concentrating on destroying a steak pie. Oscar Wilde, eat your heart out.
I looked around for Slow Kid and sent him to buy the drinks. It’s easier than writing it down for Dave. Besides, I wanted a tequila, and Dave has never seen a word with a ‘q’ in it before. He’d probably think I’d written a ‘g’ the wrong way round.
Oh yes, a tequila. So you thought the Cow’s Arse would be the sort of place where the bar has a choice between lager and lager, and you don’t dare ask for anything in it? Wrong. Didn’t I tell you not to be fooled by a name? You maybe pictured a scabby pub with bloodstains on the walls and sawdust on the floor to soak up the spilled beer? Wrong again. Baggy had the bloodstains painted over last week.
“How’s Denise then, Donc?”
“Aw-right.”
“Yeah? She’s got over that flu, has she?”
Dave shrugged. I took this for a ‘yes’. Dave and his sister are really close, actually. Denise has been married once, but she left her husband to move in with Dave and look after him when their mum died. That’s what it seemed like, anyway. Of course, she knew that Dave would have eaten the furniture in no time if she hadn’t. Now they share a council house and Denise has a full time job trying to feed him. She worries like mad that he’s not eating properly when he’s out of the house.
“She went to the doctor,” said Dave.
“Oh good. Did he give her something?”
“Useless bastard.”
That seemed to be the end of the conversation. I’d distracted him from his food for too long. He went back to the pie. Watching Dave eat isn’t much fun at the best of times. The way he constantly has to stoke up his reserves reminds me of a Sperm Whale I once saw on one of those wildlife programmes on BBC2. This huge animal ploughs through the sea with its mouth permanently stuck open, sucking in plankton and seaweed and whatever else drifts about in the water out there, including beer cans chucked over the side of cruise liners probably. Anyway, the point is that it can never stop feeding, because its bulk uses up so much energy keeping it moving. And it has to keep moving to take in the food to give it the energy... What a life.
Come to think of it, a whale is shaped a bit like Dave too. And doesn’t it have a very tiny brain, about half the size of a human’s brain? That’s where they differ then — Dave’s is much smaller than that.
I had to get a stiff drink inside me to make sitting with Dave even halfway tolerable. At least Slow Kid was reasonably articulate. And there was something niggling at me that I wanted to ask him.
“Hey, it’s like a madhouse in here,” he said when he came back with the drinks, winding his way through slot-heads playing fruit machines and video games. Trivial Pursuit, Cops ’n’ Robbers. Baggy Prentiss’s idea of irony, I always thought.
Slow was drinking some expensive American beer straight from the bottle, but Dave was putting up with Baggy’s bitter, which is about as interesting as those dregs in the bottom of the milk carton that’s still in my fridge from last year.
“Slow, I need to know what went wrong with that load.”
“Oh yeah. What a pisser.”
“Pisser is right. I’m seriously dischuffed here and I need to hear what went off.”
“Well, it seems their bloke stopped at the services on the M1, near Leicester, you know it? And when he came out there were the cops, all over the rig.”
“Silly sod.”
“Obviously the bloke stayed well clear. He legged it as fast as he could. Got a lift out of there with a trucker. Left ten grands’ worth of gear sitting in the service station car park. Mind you, it could have been worse. If the cops had any sense, they’d have laid low and waited for him to come out, wouldn’t they? No sense, Stones, eh?”
“The cops were quick off the mark for once, though. You don’t think they had a tip-off?”
“What? How could they?”
“I don’t know. But I don’t like it.”
“Hey, Stones, it was just bad luck. The next one’ll be okay. Just watch.”
“This was the first. It should have gone right.”
“Like I said, bad luck.”
“That van’s bothering me too,” I said. “Rawlings and the other bloke.”
“Wow, yeah. That was real, that fire. You’d never have guessed Reeboks would go up so well.”
“What would make it burn like that?”
“Big fuel tanks on them things, Stones. Smash it sideways into a tree or something and do it hard enough, you’d split the tank. Bit of a spark from the electrics, and wham! Get that smell of burning rubber.”
I shook my head. “That van hadn’t crashed into anything. There were no trees, no concrete bridges. And there was no third party involved.”
Slow Kid looked at me curiously. “Yeah, well. There’s other ways of making something go bang, if you really want to.”
“Like?”
“Like, well...”
“A bomb?”
“Right. A couple of bags of sugar, some fertiliser, a milk bottle full of petrol. No problem.”
“And a timer maybe?”
“A doddle, Stones. There’s plenty of blokes round here who know how to do that. There were a couple went off in Worksop a year or two back, remember? One at the cop shop, one at the Miners’ Welfare.”
“They didn’t do much damage, though.”
“Nah, they weren’t planted right. They were shoved up against brick walls or something. They go off, see, but they don’t get hold on anything.”
“But plant one in the right spot, over a fuel tank for instance...”
“Right on. Barbecued van. You reckon somebody had it in for Rawlings and his mate, then?”
There was something that wasn’t right about Slow Kid. He always plays his cards close to his chest. Well, don’t we all? But I had the feeling there was something here he wasn’t telling me.
“No, not them,” I said.
“What do you mean, Stones?”
“I think somebody had it in for us. If I’d gone for that deal with the Reeboks, the stuff would have been in our van.”
“Yeah. I got you.” Slow Kid stuck the neck of the beer bottle in his mouth and squinted at me over its base. “But who’d do that? Who’ve we pissed off recently?”
“If you’ve got a bit of paper, we’ll make a list.”
“Nah. We always treat folk fair.” He sucked a bit of beer out of the stubble on his top lip. “Except the ones we nick stuff from, obviously.”
But then, before I could get to the bottom of what Slow Kid knew, before I’d even got halfway down my tequila, before Doncaster Dave could even stuff away six more mouthfuls of pie and chips, my whole afternoon was ruined. A shape appeared in the doorway, lurking in a vaguely familiar manner that could only mean one thing. Wow, what a treat. My favourite visitor, Detective Inspector Frank Moxon. And behind him, the untidy bulk of his sidekick, DS Wally Stubbs.