back. Whenever that was. And if she was still there.
As I stepped onto the platform, carry-on in hand, I had a go at wiping off the dribble soaking into the front of my leather bomber jacket. The old lady must have thought I was pissed.
I wandered out to the taxi rank. Not much seemed to have changed. There was a new superstore opposite the station, but that was about it.
I climbed into a cab and asked for Bobblestock. The driver, a guy in his mid-fifties, eyed me knowingly in the rear-view of his old Peugeot 405. ‘Been far, have you?’ The locals loved the Regiment being based in their town, and not just because of the amount of money they spent. This guy was drawing all the wrong conclusions from a bloke with a tan who looked like he’d slept in a hedge.
‘Yeah.’ I tried to rub my face back to life. ‘I can’t remember the name of the road but I’ll show you where it is when we get there.’
I spotted a new pub and a couple of shops that hadn’t been there long, but otherwise Hereford was exactly as I remembered it. I’d left the Regiment in 1993, and I’d never been back since. The only thing I’d left behind was my account at the Halifax. I wondered how much interest I’d made on ?1.52.
Bobblestock had been one of the first of the new breed of estates that sprang up on the outskirts of towns in the Thatcher era. The houses were all made from machined bricks and looked as if they were huddled together for warmth. With 2.4 children inside, a Mondeo on the drive, the minimum of back garden and front lawns small enough to cut with scissors, these places had about as much character as a room in a Holiday Inn. The developers had probably made a killing, then bought themselves nice period mansions in the outlying villages.
Crazy Dave lived on the high ground of Bobblestock, which he proudly told me had been Phase Three of the build. That was the only landmark I had in my head, but it was good enough.
‘Just here, mate.’
We stopped outside a brick rectangle with a garage extension that looked as if it had been assembled from a flat-pack. The house to its right was called Byeways, the one to its left, the Nook. Crazy Dave’s just had a number. Typical. Crazy Dave had been in Boat Troop, A Squadron. I knew him more from the cafe downtown than from work. We both used to spend our Sunday mornings there, drinking coffee, eating toast and reading the supplements. Him because he was trying to avoid his wife; me because I didn’t have one.
Crazy Dave had earned his name because he wasn’t; he was about as zany as a teacup. He was the kind of guy who analysed a joke before saying, ‘Oh yeah, I get it. That’s funny.’ In all the time I knew him, he never understood why shitting in someone’s Bergen was funny. But for all his faults, being as straight as a die made him perfect for his new job. Discretion was everything. When I’d asked him about Charlie over the phone, he’d admitted the old fucker was on the books, but wouldn’t give me any wheres or whens. He did invite me round for a brew, though, any time I wanted to chat; so, well, here I was.
There was no car outside, but I could see movement through the living-room window. I paid the driver and walked up the concrete ramp that had replaced the front steps.
I rang the bell and the door was opened almost at once by two guys on their way out. They looked young and fit, obviously either having just left the Regiment, or being about to. They were both dressed, like me, in Timberland boots, leather jacket and jeans.
I closed the door behind me as the two guys walked away. The staircase was dead ahead, and fitted with one of those stairlifts that Thora Hird used to flog in the Sunday supplements.
Dave’s voice came from down to the right somewhere. ‘Straight through, mate. Out the back.’
I walked into a no-frills living room; laminate flooring, three-piece suite, a large TV and that was about it. The rest was open space. French windows opened onto the garden.
‘I’m in the garage, mate.’
I crossed a small square of lawn to where another ramp led up to a pair of doors set into the garage wall — a recent addition, judging by the fresh mortar and brick edging.
The garage had been converted into an office. There was a stud wall where the up-and-over door would once have been, and no windows. Crazy Dave was sitting behind his desk. He didn’t get up. He couldn’t.
2
I went over and shook his hand. ‘What the fuck did you do to yourself?’
Crazy Dave wheeled his way round in front of me, in a very high-tech aluminium go-faster chair. ‘Not what you think. Got bounced off my Suzuki on the M4 by a truck driver from Estonia and took the scenic route. Did a tour of the central reservation, then checked out a fair amount of the opposite carriageway. Six months in Stoke Mandeville. My legs are fucked. I’m still in and out of hospital like a bleeding yo-yo. Plates in, plates out; they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.’ He looked me up and down. ‘Fuck me, you don’t look too good yourself. Fancy a brew?’
Not waiting for my answer, he spun the wheels past the sink and towards the kettle in the corner. ‘So that was me out of the Regiment. Too handicapped even to be a Rupert. I get disability pension, but it hardly keeps me in haircuts. Then this landed on my plate. Madness not to.’
There had always been a broker knocking around Hereford. He had to be ex-Regiment because he had to know the people — who was in, who was getting out — and if he didn’t, he had to know a man who did.
There was a clink of mugs. ‘Had to turn the garage into a fortress, of course. The doors have drop-down steel shutters. Got to be firearm secure because of all that gear.’ He nodded at the desk. All he had was a phone, a notebook, and two boxes of plain postcards, but to people wanting to know which companies were doing which jobs, they’d have been worth more than a whole truckload of AK47s.
‘How’s it all work, Dave? I’ve never been to a broker.’
‘Guys come in, or phone me and say they’re looking for work. I bang their details down on a card and put them into the box marked “Standby”. See the other box? That’s for “Bayonets”. They’re the boys who are actually working.’
I hoped the kettle was going to boil soon. Admin stuff might be fascinating to Dave, but I now knew all I needed to.
No such luck. A light started to burn in his eyes. Maybe he was crazy after all. He was like a trainspotter who’d just been asked to give a guided tour of the Orient Express. ‘The system’s simple. A company calls and asks for four medics, say, and a demolitions guy. I go into the Standby box and shuffle through the cards from the front, until I’ve got the requirement. They get a call. If they want the work they get moved from Standby to Bayonets. If they don’t, their card goes to the back of the box. Once they’ve finished that job, if they still want to be on the books, they go into the back of the Standby box.’
What could I say? I gave him the sort of look that I hoped he’d mistake for total fascination.
The kettle finally rescued me. Crazy Dave busily squashed teabags as I settled in the chair the other side of his desk. He wheeled himself across to me with two mugs in one hand.
The choice was Smarties Easter Egg or Thunderbird 4. I settled for Smarties; it wasn’t quite so chipped and stained.
‘So, what do you want to know about Charlie?’
‘He’s a dinosaur, Dave; he’s far too old to be fucking about. Hazel wants him home.’
He manoeuvred his way back to his side of the desk. ‘She still putting up with the old fucker then?’
I nodded. ‘Talking of which, your kids OK?’
He sat back in his wheelchair and had a sip of the brew. ‘Married and gone, mate. The boy’s in London, fucking about with some Polish model, and the daughter’s married a pointy-head. Got a nice place in town.’
Dave had lived here for over thirty years now, but he still called everyone a pointy-head, as if he’d just turned up.
I took a sip of my own tea and nearly choked. It was three parts sugar.
He grinned from ear to ear. ‘Even the exmissus has married a pointy-head. One of the local coppers. What about you, Nick? Married? Divorced? Kids? The whole catastrophe, I shouldn’t wonder…’
I shook my head and smiled. ‘I think I may still have a German girlfriend back in Australia, but I had to leave her in a hurry because of you. She isn’t going to be impressed.’
