Aggressor (9 page)

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.’

He grinned again. ‘Them box-heads have always got the hump about something or other.’

We could have waffled on. I could have told him about Kelly – he’d known her dad, Kev. But we’d done the social bit, and I was here to find Charlie.

‘Can you give me some idea where the old fucker’s gone? I promised Hazel I’d give him the lecture. You know how it is.’

Dave gave a smile that told me he did, and he’d heard it a hundred times. ‘You know I can’t tell you anything, mate. It’s the deal with the companies: they don’t want anybody knowing what jobs they’ve got going on. And if everybody went home as soon as their wives started honking, there’d be hardly any fucker working.’

He put down his mug and gripped the arms of his wheelchair. He lifted himself a couple of inches out of the seat and held himself there; maybe something to do with circulation, or to stop pressure sores developing on his arse.

‘What about yourself, Nick? I haven’t heard your name mentioned on the circuit; what you doing?’

‘Oh, you know . . . Stuff.’ I shrugged and smiled. ‘Look, Dave, I don’t need to know what Charlie’s up to. I just want to be able to phone up Hazel and say I spoke to him.’

He put his tea down and wheeled himself back alongside me. ‘Sorry, mate, but you’re fucked. Apart from security, what if you convinced him to head back for the pipe and cocoa? I’d have to find a replacement. And anyway, he was gagging for a job. I didn’t make him come to me, did I?’

He swivelled the chair and headed off towards the door. ‘Tell you what, I’m going for a dump. I’ve been trying to put a toilet in here, but planning won’t let me, the bastards.’ He whistled through the French windows and down the ramp.

‘Hey, Nick, watch this!’

I got up and went to the door just as he lifted his front wheels and did a 360. ‘I’ve got to close up, mate. Want to wait in the front room and finish your brew? What about a pint, later?’

I followed him outside and watched as he locked the garage doors with one of a bunch of about half a dozen keys.

We went into the living room and he carried on to the bottom of the stairs. As I sat down he transferred himself onto the lift. Then he selected another key from the bunch, pushed it into a control box on the wall, and gave it a turn. The chair glided slowly upwards.

‘You need a hand, Dave?’

‘Nah, it’s rigged up like a monkey’s climbing frame up here.’

The moment I heard the bathroom door close, I was on my feet and heading for the kitchen. No sign of the fuse box. I tried the cupboard under the stairs. There were two rows of cutout switches encased in a neat rectangle of plastic, but not one of them was labelled. Fuck it; I turned the whole lot off at the master switch.

I went to the control box, grabbed the bunch of keys, and headed for the garage.

Charlie’s card was right at the front of the Bayonets box. It didn’t say who for, where, or what the job was, just that Dave had booked him a hotel room in Istanbul.

I locked up and went back to the living room.

‘Nick! The fucking power’s gone. Nick, you there?’

‘Coming, what’s up?’

I got the key back in the box just as Dave eased himself off another wheelchair at the top of the stairs and onto the lift. He hammered away at the down button like a lunatic.

‘See? I can’t even have a fucking dump in peace. Try a light for us, see if the power’s gone.’

I hit the hall switch. ‘Where’s the fuse box?’

Dave told me and I headed for it. A few moments later the microwave in the kitchen buzzed a power-cut warning and he started to make his way back down.

‘Dave – sorry, mate, but I can’t stay for that pint. If Charlie’s in touch, tell him to phone home – Hazel’s lost something and he’s the only one who knows where it is.’

3

Istanbul

Thursday, 28 April

One of the first things I always noticed about a new country was the smell. In the arrivals lounge at Ataturk International it had been of strong aftershave; in the back of this cab it was even stronger cigarettes. The driver was already sucking on his second since leaving the airport.

The traffic was chaos, and to add to the misery the driver sang along, between drags, to the loud Arab pop music that blared from the radio. He kept turning his head for approval, like he’d mistaken me for Simon Cowell and I was about to sign him to a billion-lira contract. His blue-eye talisman swung wildly from the rear-view mirror as we hurtled from one side of the road to the other. I hoped it worked as well with articulated lorries as it did against evil spirits; the driver’s eyes were everywhere but on the road.

Every leg of this journey had been a nightmare, Australia to Hereford, Hereford to Stansted, Stansted to Turkey. Stansted on its own deserved some sort of prize. It felt like I’d spent longer there than I had in the air from Brisbane.

I’d made my way to it from Crazy Dave’s without checking flights. I’d assumed one of the bucket carriers would be my best bet, and I just hoped I’d walk straight on. But of course I’d missed the last one by an hour, so had to spend the night stretched out on a row of anti-sleep seats in the terminal. And because I got there late, I’d missed the last of the baguettes at the only café still open. I settled for four packets of salt and vinegar instead, and two large coffees that proceeded to keep me awake all night.

Even though the weather was cold, grey and blustery, I kept the back windows of the taxi open, partly because I needed the ventilation, and partly because I thought it might help me in a crash. We finally got to the Barcelo Eresin Topkapi Hotel without being flattened. The journey had been only three cigarettes long.

I hadn’t had time to go online and check the place out, but it looked pretty impressive. A drive swept past the front of a large, four-storey building that wouldn’t have been out of place among the grand hotels along the Croisette in Cannes.

A huge banner over the entrance welcomed the architects of Germany to their very important conference. That was what I assumed it said, anyway. All I’d learned during my two years in Sennelager as an infantry soldier was how to ask for a beer and half a chicken and chips, and I’d normally ended up with two; if they asked me whether I’d like anything on it, I’d just order it all over again.

I paid the driver and headed through a pair of towering glass automatic doors into the lobby. An ornate rope barrier guided me towards a metal detector, maybe a hangover from the bomb attacks in 2003. Whatever, the security guard, whose shirt collar was at least three sizes too big for his neck, just waved me past, then busied himself hassling a couple of locals coming in behind me.

Three or four blonde girls were clustered on a portable exhibition stand to the right of reception. The display space behind their hospitality desk was lined with photos of glassy, high-tech buildings, and they could hardly move for the piles of goody bags on either side of them. The architects were clearly getting the warmest of welcomes.

The lobby was constructed entirely of dark wood and pale marble. I kept walking, looking for signs that would point me to the bar, a café, even a toilet – it didn’t matter, so long as I looked as if I knew where I was going.

I headed for a big leather armchair at the bottom of a flight of marble steps where people sat drinking tea. I ordered myself a double espresso, and tried to resist the urge to put my head back; it wouldn’t have taken me long to flake out.

The coffee took for ever to come, but it didn’t matter. I waited and watched. A group disgorged from a plush Mercedes coach and were shepherded straight to the hospitality desk.

I picked up one of the ‘This place is great’ type brochures. The hotel, it told me, ‘distances itself from and to the following point of interests: only 3 kilometres from the famous Covered Bazaar, Suleymaniye Mosque, Blue Mosque, and Topkapi Palace’. All the rooms had a ‘luxurious bathroom’ and, what was more, ‘own private hairdyer with a parallel line are all individually yours’. Wasn’t Charlie the lucky one?

I’d never been to Istanbul before. All I knew about it was that spies used to be exchanged at the railway station, and the Orient Express stopped here before it crossed the Bosphorus. When it came to the Turks themselves, I just had my stepfather’s words ringing in my ears. ‘Don’t stand still or they’ll nick your shoelaces,’ he used to say about anyone east of Calais. I guessed it might have been like that once, but when I looked outside I didn’t see a steamy bazaar full of shifty conmen. I saw sleek women in Western dress and steel-and-glass trams gliding along a broad, boutique-lined boulevard. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have said I was in Milan. The newer cars had a little blue strip on the side of their number plates, optimistically preparing for EU membership.