the outskirts of town when Thatcher tried to turn us all into homeowners. The houses were all made from machined bricks and looked as if they were huddled together for warmth. They all had 2.4 children inside and a people-carrier on the drive.
Crazy Dave lived on the high ground. He’d told me proudly that he’d bought into phase three of the build. The window frames were painted brown instead of white to distinguish it. Apparently that gave the houses a more substantial look.
I drove into the estate. Nothing had changed in the five years since I’d last seen him. I stopped outside his brick rectangle and got another chance to admire the garage extension, which looked as if it had been assembled from a flat-pack.
The house to the right had been called Byways last time I was round. Dave must have new neighbours. Number 53 was now called Rose Cottage. There was fuck-all cottage-like about the place. A net curtain twitched inside. Maybe they’d bought it recently and were still coming to terms with the guy in the wheelchair next door having rough men arriving at his house at strange times of the day and night. They probably thought there was some sort of sex thing going on.
Number 49, to the left, was still called The Nook. Crazy Dave, of course, just had a number. How crazy was that? A ‘60’-plate Peugeot Popemobile was parked outside, the correct nine inches or whatever it’s supposed to be from the kerb. The road was a dead end, so he’d even gone to the trouble of finishing his last trip with a three-point turn and aiming it in the right direction for a quick getaway.
The whole thing was rigged and ramped, even down to levers and stuff instead of pedals. I could see bags on the passenger seat and down the sides of the pope’s throne in the back.
7
I walked up the driveway towards the concrete ramp that had replaced the front steps. I waved at the small CCTV camera covering the front of the house. The door buzzed. I pushed it open and let myself in.
The house was exactly as I remembered it. It still smelt like it’d been given the once-over with a couple of cans of Pledge. There was still a Stannah parked at the bottom of the stairs, and at the top, enough climbing frames to keep a whole troop of baboons happy. Down in the hallway, some shiny chrome bars had been stuck to the walls. A couple of dangle bars hung on nylon webbing. It looked like a gymnast’s idea of heaven.
My Timberlands squeaked on the laminate flooring as I walked into the no-frills living room. There was a big fuck-off TV, and that was about it. The rest was open space. It wasn’t as if Crazy Dave needed an armchair.
French windows opened onto the garden, accessed via another ramp. I followed a narrow path of B&Q’s best fake Cotswold stone up to a pair of doors set into the garage wall. The garage had been converted into an office.
Crazy Dave was sitting behind his desk, within easy reach of the two most important assets his business possessed: a pair of small plastic boxes stuffed with index cards containing the names and details of more than a hundred former members of Special Forces. No wonder the garage had drop-down steel shutters and weapons- grade security. To people wanting to know which companies were doing which jobs, those cards would have been worth more than a container ship full of RPGs.
I closed the door behind me. ‘Better late than never.’
‘What?’
‘About time you got that thing paved. It was like walking through the Somme with that wheelchair of yours fucking up the grass.’
He wasn’t smiling.
‘Don’t get up, mate.’
Still no smile.
I held up my hands. ‘Dave, I want to call a truce. End-Ex. I’m sorry about what I did. I fucked up. Simple as that.’
‘Yes, you did.’ He hesitated for a moment. ‘But you know what? Fuck it.’ He slapped the arms of his chair. ‘When you’re in one of these fucking things you realize life’s too short to get pissed off about stuff like that. So fuck you, and fuck the problem. What do I care? I’m living in a soap, am I?’
That was good enough for me.
Where the up-and-over door had once been there was now a stud wall. There were no windows in here — just three sets of fluorescent lights. The brew kit still sat on a table against the opposite wall. The Smarties and Thunderbirds mugs were still going strong. I wondered if he’d saved the Easter eggs they’d come with.
He nodded at the CCTV monitor. ‘Nice motor. You kill someone for that?’
‘Yeah, I did.’ I made my way to the desk. ‘So, how’ve you been?’
The last time I saw Crazy Dave he was balding, with a moustache, like Friar Tuck in a 1970s porno. Now all the hair had gone, but the moustache was still hanging on.
‘Fucked.’
‘So I can see, mate. The Charles Bronson look ain’t doing you any favours.’
He gripped the arms of his wheelchair, lifted himself a couple of inches out of the seat and held himself there, perhaps something to do with his circulation, or to stop pressure sores developing on his arse. ‘Yeah, well, we’ve both got life sentences, haven’t we?’
He careered round the desk in a maroon space-age chair. It looked as though it could use some go-faster stripes. ‘But at least I can get out on the piss when I want to.’
‘Can you do a wheelie in that thing yet?’
He reversed, jerked, and the front wheels came up. He grinned like Evel Knievel. But we both knew that was as good as it was going to get. Crazy Dave had been invalided out of the Regiment after a truck driver from Estonia bounced him off a motorbike on the M4 and forced him to take the scenic route. As if that wasn’t bad enough, he’d borrowed my Suzuki 650. Six months in Stoke Mandeville hadn’t sorted him out. His legs were still useless.
8
His next party trick was to get us both a brew.
‘So — you come here with something you know, or something you want to know?’
‘BB.’
‘The principal’s wife getting a seeing-to again, is she?’
‘That’s the least of my worries. Do you know who the wife is?’
He spun round to face me with a bag of sugar in his lap. ‘I don’t get involved at that level. The job’s gone through about three or four middlemen before it gets to me. They wanted a BG for a mother and a child. I pick — I used to pick — the best available at the time.’
I shook my head. ‘Mate, how come you were the only one—’
‘To give him work?’
I nodded. ‘He was even a nightmare on the tsunami job, when there wasn’t anybody to shag. What’s he got on you? Is he giving you one as well?’
He spun back round to the kettle and put the sugar down. ‘Shit!’
‘Touched a nerve, have I?’
The wheelchair raced towards the door. ‘No — a shit, I need a shit.’
I followed him into the garden.
‘Look, Nick. He finished that anti-piracy job after about six months. That was fuck-all to do with me. I gave him a job with the oil companies looking after the pipeline in Georgia. It was a good little number in Tbilisi. But he fucked up by falling out with the company over expenses.
‘Then I gave him a job working for an American family in London, which he fucked up big-time. I think the husband was a computer mogul, downloads, some shit like that. While the husband was away, BB started thinking
