He’s not short of cash. It looks like he has fingers in every pie. Oil, gas, real estate. He backed Putin when he reorganized things. He’s no good guy, but he has class. He doesn’t own a football club or run for provincial governor. He keeps himself to himself. For him, it’s all about business, all about the deal.’
‘Are you sure he’s the one?’
‘I’ll send a picture.’
‘What about you, Anna? You OK?’
‘I’m fine. But, you know, I’ve been thinking … Maybe … Maybe I should stay a while longer. If Gaddafi retakes Benghazi, I should be here.’
‘And maybe Bahrain, maybe Syria?’
I kept it light, but we both went quiet for a while.
‘So when will
‘If they’re alive, I’m going to have to go and get them.’
I heard an intake of breath. ‘Yes … Of course.’
There was a pause.
‘Nicholas, I have to go.’
‘I’ll call you tomorrow. But I won’t have a clue what you’ve been up to because pointy-head TV doesn’t show RT.’
She’d have no idea what pointy-head meant, but she started to laugh. I liked it when she did that.
‘Be safe, Anna.’
‘And you, Nicholas.’
The line went dead.
I sat on the bed, trying to make sense of our non-conversation.
My iPhone alerted me to the arrival of Anna’s MMS. I opened it up. The photo was slightly fuzzy and taken from a distance as he got into a limo, but it was Francis Timis all right.
I juggled tubes of instant coffee, fired up the small plastic kettle and worried about Anna. It was becoming a bit of a habit. It wasn’t just the danger she put herself in. I missed her. She was too busy saving the world for us to spend much time together. But I couldn’t blame her. Whoever said war is a drug was right on the money.
I called Crazy Dave on the room phone. I was pretty sure he’d ignore a withheld number or one he didn’t know, but pick up on a local call. I wasn’t wrong.
‘Dave …’
‘What?’
‘You about for a brew in, say, an hour?’
‘If you want work, you can shove it up your arse. As of sixteen hundred hours today I’m retired.’
‘Then get the kettle on for half three. You can still present yourself with a gold clock at four.’
‘Yeah, funny. What do you want?’
‘I’ll explain when I get there.’
I was glad I’d caught him in a good mood.
5
The Green Dragon’s car park was at the rear of the building. The garaging had probably once been filled with horse-drawn carriages. I checked out and drove my grime-covered 911 past Ascari’s cafe and onto Broad Street. The sky was dark and heavy with cloud.
I used to spend a lot of my time-off in Ascari’s, eating toast and drinking coffee. It was where I’d really got to know Crazy Dave. When I joined he was already a sergeant, something like three generations above me. He was in A Squadron, I was in B, so I didn’t get to see him that much. But over coffee and scrambled egg, we’re all the same. We both used to spend our Sunday mornings there, reading the supplements; him because he was trying to avoid his wife, me because I didn’t have one. Crazy Dave didn’t need to go there so much now. His wife had left soon after he’d got himself fucked up. His legs were useless, and as far as she was concerned, so was he. He was in and out of hospital like a yo-yo, and she didn’t fancy joining him for the ride.
There was a bit of bad blood between us too. I’d felt sorry for him when we met up again in 2005 — but it only took me a week or two to start thinking two fucked-up legs weren’t enough. A friend of mine from Regiment days tapped Crazy Dave for some work. He was in the early stages of motor neurone disease and wanted one last big pay-off so his wife would have a pension. So far so good, but Crazy Dave had found out and taken advantage of him. Charlie was so desperate he’d accepted only a fraction of what the job was worth, and Dave had trousered the rest.
I made him give Charlie’s widow the lot. In return, I’d hold off telling the guys who came to him for work how much of a markup he liked to take, or telling the companies that used him that he had a quality-control problem — he didn’t even check his workforce had fully functioning limbs.
The bit I’d enjoyed most was telling him that if he didn’t get his finger out and have the cash in her account within twenty-four hours, I’d be straight over to separate his bony arse from his wheelchair.
Next time I saw him, a year later, that was precisely what I did. I’d needed some int, but I’d fucked up. Instead of just asking him for a favour, which would have given him a bit of a kick, I’d tried to blackmail him. He gave me the int, and told me we were all square. Then he told me that if I made the mistake of thinking otherwise, he had three hundred guys on his Rolodex who’d happily take a shovel to my face.
If only I could have left it at that.
There are times when you have to accept you’ve been fucked over, and that was one of them. But it pissed me off that he made so much money from scamming his own people, and something in me snapped.
I grabbed his right calf and started towards the door, dragging him and the wheelchair behind me. He screamed and shouted at me to stop, but I kept right on going. When we reached the door Crazy Dave couldn’t hold onto his chair any longer and fell out on his arse. I dragged him through the rain and only let go when we reached his Popemobile. He flailed around on the wet tarmac, trying to pull himself along on his elbows, back towards the house.
To this day, I didn’t know why I did it. It was immature, gratuitous and got me nowhere — but, fuck, it put a smile back on my face.
Unfortunately, I now needed his help again.
6
I turned right at the junction with Broad Street, passed the front of the hotel and headed towards the River Wye.
The only crazy thing about Crazy Dave was that he’d earned his nickname 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.’ But then again, he wasn’t trying to find work for a bunch of stand-up comedians — even if we sometimes thought we were pretty fucking amusing.
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. When Crazy Dave left after his twenty-two years, he became an intermediary between ex-Regiment guys and the private military companies and individuals who wanted competent people. Dave got his cash by providing the right person for the right job. There’s an HR department in any civilian organization, so why not in a military one? After all, it would be a shame to waste all those skills the taxpayer had paid for us to learn.
Dave’s business was a perfect fit with Cameron’s Big Society. We get the guys into the army; we pay for them to be trained; we pay them to fight, and then we let them go and use their skills in the outside world. Some of them even filed tax returns.
I was heading for Bobblestock. It had been one of the first of the new breed of estate that had sprung up on
