by Nick Fisher
“What’s your mum think?” she’d asked a 21-year-old gang-banger with one blood-crusty closed eye and vomit down the front of his Southampton football shirt. “What’s she think, when you keep getting in trouble, Mikey? It doesn’t make her sad?”
Sure enough, Tug had seen Michael Keane, one of the most mental little thugs in Weymouth, cry big snot-bubbly tears at the questions Jackie probed him with, in her quiet, warm, motherly tone. Questions she asked between bites of a pink-iced doughnut.
She was a good cop was Jackie. Fat. But good. Tug wouldn’t want be stuck in a car with her for a day doing surveillance. Wouldn’t want to see her in a stab vest. But he was always glad to see her big grinning caster sugar-dusted face behind the Custody Desk when he brought in a ‘client’.
Sara Chin was a different kettle of cop altogether. Half Chinese or Japanese or Taiwanese or some kind of ‘ese’. She’d transferred, from the Met, three weeks ago. Detective Constable. With full firearms ticket and a whole list of tech surveillance qualifications. Way more than Tug had, if he was honest.
Which he wasn’t.
Because, in this new partnership situation, even though they are both of equal rank, he is more than happy to assume the upper hand. He does after all have the local knowledge. He was Weymouth born and bred. Knows everyone. Knows more bad guys than good ones. And more than anything he loves nicking people. Absolutely loves it. Always has. Ever since the early days when he was only giving out speeding tickets and out-of-date road tax violations. Sometimes Tug actually looks back on his uniformed career with a real sense of fondness and even regret.
Of course every young cop in uniform wants to grow up one day and wear his own clothes to work. Tug used to think that part, the no-uniform part, was great. Just like school. You have to wear uniform through all the first five years of school. Then, a select few go on to sixth form where, suddenly, you can turn up in your jeans and trainers wearing your best Stussy top. All dressed up like you was on a Saturday night down Wetherspoons.
His main regret about moving up to plain clothes into a detective rank was he lost the opportunity to just go out and nick people committing crimes. The chance to nick people, who he could hold down on the floor, kneel on the back of their neck, and write up that very night as another statistic on his arrest record, was sadly missing. As a detective, nicking people happened way too infrequently. It took too long. Was too complicated. It involved far too much paperwork. And time and time again, it just ended up in a courtroom with two smart lawyers, being smart with each other, while a perp walks free, on account of some ‘legal technicality’, at the fag-end of some painfully long court case.
And more often than not, the ‘technicality’ was to do with the arrest, or the evidence, or the surveillance, or the lack of surveillance. So then, it was yours truly who’d get a bollocking. While the guy – who without a shadow of doubt, had done exactly what he was accused of doing, and which everyone from the judge to the prosecuting barrister, to the bleeding court usher, knew he’d done – flipped you the finger as he walked down the courtroom steps. Sometimes being a detective isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Today though, just now, this very minute, the job appears to have its perks. Not least, watching Sara Chin slip into her extra small, female-cut, regulation-issue West Dorset Constabulary stab vest.
God, she looks cute in a stab vest.
They are stood on the small forecourt of a classic car showroom, down a side street in the middle of Sandbanks, on Poole Harbour. Real estate on Sandbanks, a long chunky spit of land that was once an island but is now joined to the smart end of Bournemouth by a narrow causeway – the English Channel on one side and Poole Harbour on the other – is the second most expensive real estate anywhere in the world. Houses and apartments on the half-mile long, 400 yard wide, spit of sand and concrete, are more expensive per square foot than anywhere else, except Hong Kong.
Maybe Detective Chin is from Hong Kong? Tug thinks. Chin certainly sounds Chinese and Hong Kong is in China. Isn’t it? He’d have to ask her. Not now. Not in passing. Not just chitty-chat. No, he’d save that for when they had a beer and a bite some evening after a shift. Which they were bound to do, one day. Weren’t they? Because that’s what partners do, right?
He could ask her about where she was from originally, and put his chin on his hand and act all interested at the things she says. Because women love all that shit. He might even try to find out if Hong Kong is in China before then, so he doesn’t make himself look like a dumb Dorset country cop. Yeah. He’d Google it.
Tug looks around, he’s never seen a second-hand car lot as small as this one. He supposes it’s to do with the Sandbanks property prices. If land is so expensive, you can’t really expect a local Sandbanks car dealer to have a lot the size of a football pitch, not like the dealers on the edge of Weymouth. Mind you, the cars in this tiny little lot – just a glass-fronted showroom with an apron of concrete outside – aren’t exactly ordinary cars. No Nissans or Fords or Vauxhalls in this guy’s inventory.
In total there’s only a handful of cars parked skinny-bitch close to each other and none of them has everyday car names. These all called things like Lamborghini, Maserati, Bristol, Alvis, Bugatti. Tug has driven some motors in his time. Pool cars, rental cars. He’d owned a whole selection of his own over the years too, especially in his early twenties, when he swapped cars like most guys swap boxer shorts. But he’d never driven a single one of the makes on show on this forecourt, or parked behind the showroom glass window of this posh little classic car dealership.
The dealership is called just Sandbanks Classic Cars. Tug isn’t impressed. You’d think if you were selling such fancy-name cars, you’d want to have a fancy-name business too. It’s because of the showroom’s glass door that Tug and Detective Chin find themselves standing on the forecourt this morning.
A neighbour had called the police on 999 to report that the glass-panelled door to the showroom was smashed. “From the outside,” he’d said to the Emergency Operator, like it was significant. Everyone these days thinking they’re in an episode of CSI. The neighbour saw the inward-broken glass when he was walking his dog at precisely “11.19 am”.
Sometimes Tug wonders why the county even bothers to employ police detectives at all. Because just about every crime ever committed these days is discovered by a dog walker. It’s like everyone who owns a dog is now some kind of wannabe Sherlock, or Kojak or Hercule fucking Poirot.
The dog walker in question now stands on the forecourt too, with the dog in question – some sort of long haired lap-dog thing, with a ribbon in its head hair. Doesn’t look much like a man’s dog to Tug. Like it must be this guy’s wife’s dog maybe. Unless he is gay. Which is certainly possible around here. Fact quite likely. Unlikely in Weymouth though. Don’t get a lot of gays in Weymouth. Probably ‘cause they all moved to Poole.
“You didn’t hear any alarm?” asks Chin as she shuts the Velcro straps along the sides of her stab vest. “No,” says the man with the little poofy dog.
“Or hear any crash in the night,” he adds. “And I would. I’m only two doors away.”
Chin points with her stun-stick to a burglar alarm fitted to the outside wall of the flat above the little showroom. Just in case Tug hadn’t clocked it. The burglar alarm with a blue glass light attached to it. The blue light designed to flash when the alarm is triggered. The alarm then sending an electronic relay to the local police, or some private security service. The blue light supposed to warn the owners that there’s possibly intruders inside and, Tug supposed, to also warn intruders that the long arm of the law is about to feel their collar. But this blue light isn’t flashing.
“You know the owner?” asks Chin.
“Not very well,” says the dog walker, shuffling from foot to foot in his blue yachtie deck shoes. Like he needs the toilet. Chin now checking data on her iPhone. “We got him down as one Robert Rock?”
“I know him as Robbie. Not well,” says the dog walker. “Ju
st to say hello.”
“Robbie’s not here, I take it?” asks Tug.
The man shrugs. Not wanting to commit. Although in fairness, was a pretty dumb question. If he was here, he’d be down here. Standing out on the forecourt asking these fine police officers why they didn’t go catch the low-life scum that broke into his classic car showroom.
Unless, of course, Tug thought, unless Robbie Rock is inside the showroom, lying on the floor in a pool of blood with his throat cut. Sliced through by some low-life burglar scum. Now, that would be a crack. A real honest-to-God murder to investigate.
With a big case like that to solve, he’d be sipping fancy cold beers and eating nachos with Detective Chin before the week was out. But statistically speaking, the chance of a juicy murder case cropping up this Thursday morning, in the over-priced chi-chi neighbourhood of Sandbanks, is pretty fucking slim.
Detective Chin finishes Velcro-ing up her vest, holsters her Taser and unleashes her stun-stick from the boot of the detective pool car, because there is, theoretically, still a possibility that whoever smashed the glass door is still inside the premises, crouching, hiding, cornered and dangerous.
Wouldn’t that be sweet, Tug thinks. A proper fight, and proper messy, kneel-on-the-neck style arrest. Show Sara Chin just what her new partner was made of. He may be just a Dorset county cop, but bet he could show her some moves. Little Tae Kwan Do. Little hand-to-hand combat stuff he learnt on a special course he did up in Bristol, back in the day when the county still had some funds to spend on police training.
“You got a mobile number for Mr Rock?” Chin asks the guy with the deck shoes. He shakes his head. Guy doesn’t waste his words, thinks Tug, as he slips on his own stab vest. His own vest looking worn and old and well-used – just how he likes it. Gives him an air of history, he thinks. Truth is, he put it in his Nan’s tumble dryer with a handful of pebbles from Chesil beach one Saturday afternoon, when she was out at bingo. It had made the most ungodly rattling noise but 20 minutes’ abuse gave it exactly the ‘distressed’ look he wanted.
Chin has edged to the broken glass door and slipped a gloved hand in through the shards, before Tug has even properly tooled up. He wants to tell her to hold up. He wants to be the first inside the premises – you know, as lead partner of this partnership and all. But before he’s got a chance to even Velcro up his vest, she’s swung the broken door open, having turned the latch from the inside.
Tug has to do a little run-skip thing to catch up with her as she steps across the threshold. Picking her way through the broken glass, he is right behind her, carrying his big-arsed Maglite torch and his stun-stick. He’d moved so fast from the still-open boot of the pool car, he’d forgotten to put on any gloves. Chin spots his schoolboy error in a heartbeat, and takes a spare pair of latex gloves from her pocket. She holds them out to him. Doesn’t say a word. Just looks at him with one fleeting expressionless glance. Tug feels about the size of a prawn, as he slips on the gloves hurriedly, holding the Maglite uncomfortably between his knees.
“Why’d the alarm not go off?” asks Chin, almost to herself, as she walks across the narrow showroom floor, checking in between each of the cars. Back seats too.
“Not set properly?” says Tug.
“Why have an expensive alarm and not set it?”
“Maybe,” says Tug, thinking about his throat-slit on the office floor theory, “Maybe cause the owner didn’t leave the premises.”
“Hello!” shouts Chin, her voice controlled, hand flexing around the Taser. “Hello. We’re police officers. Investigating a break-in.”
A piece of glass crunches under Tug’s foot, but otherwise everything is quiet. There’s four cars parked along one wall. All beautiful. All built before 1975, each one with a square of white muslin laid beneath their engines, pristine muslin on a pristine polished oak floor. White muslin to show that not one single drop of oil had dripped from the sump or the gearbox of these perfectly preserved specimens of automobile history.
On the other wall are only three cars, in similar perfect condition, although they’re for sale, none of them displaying price tags or figures written up on the window. Nothing so crass. The space for a fourth car is taken up by a tiny office with frosted glass windows and a door covered in sparkling chrome decal badges from every make of fancy classic car you could care to mention, and a few more besides.
The door of the office is open just a crack. On the floor, just outside the door is one solitary drop of blood.
Chin points at it. She eases towards it slowly, stun-stick in one hand, Taser in the other. “Hello,” she announces. “Police officers”.
It was at times like this that Tug would like a gun. No shit, that’s a lie. He’d like to carry a gun all the time. Like on TV. On The Wire, or The Shield or Southland. In one of those holsters that goes under your armpit, with the strap that goes up your back.
Chin doesn’t even hesitate a beat. She pushes the office door open with her foot and walks straight in. She has some big ‘nads, thinks Tug as he moves to follow her. His heart thumping. When he gets inside the office, he finds Chin standing, hands on hips staring down at a big green leather-topped antique desk, with a brass lamp angled across it. Huge great desk. Takes up most of the room in the tiny office. The brass lamp is switched on, getting hot, illuminating a pretty cream-coloured Persian cat that is lying across the centre of the desk.
The cat has no head. Just a large gooey pool of blood that spread half way across the desk and is dripping down over the side where a large leather swivel chair is parked. Chin stares at the fur and the blood.
“Jesus,” says Tug. Can’t help himself. It just comes out.
“Not a cat person, huh?” says Chin.
Tug can’t work out if she’s referring to him, to whoever broke the door and decapitated the cat, or to Robbie Rock… He’s about to ask her when his mobile rings. The work one.
As Tug takes the call, from his commanding officer at Weymouth nick, Chin takes photos of the cat corpse, the blood, the desk, the chair.
“Where’s the head?” asks Tug, cupping his hand over the phone, as he half-listens to what Detective Superintendent Firth has to say.
A moment later, Tug’s walking back out the office into the showroom, listening intently now. He nods and makes ‘uh huh’ noises a few times. He even says “Yes, Sir” twice, then hangs up. Looking chuffed with himself. He walks back into the office now, where Chin is opening and closing drawers in the filing cabinet.
“No head,” she says.
“We got a body,” says Tug, barely able to conceal his excitement.
Chin looks at him blankly. Tug looking like he’s about to deliver some killer punchline. When he realises she thinks he’s talking about the cat with no head.
“No,” he says. “I mean, we got a body. A real one. Human one. On a crab boat.”
He knew the fish in the pond were Koi carp. Wasn’t really a pond though, more like a sunken bath. Made him think of Romans. Sort of thing the Romans might have in their villas. With those big amphora vases at each end. He could imagine someone in a toga, bathing their feet in the carp-filled sunken bath. Made him wonder if carp would suck your toes or nibble off your foot-skin, like those little fish in tanks in beauty parlours that do pedicures. Garafolo fish or something.
One of them opened in the little mall of shops on Salter’s Quay next to the boat dealership, beside the hair salon. Was called Dr Fish. Run by a little Korean couple. Man and wife. He’d stopped to read the price list once. Eighteen quid for a half-hour treatment. Must’ve been a dozen, more, maybe 15 tanks inside. Women sat flicking through glossy magazines, feet in the tanks.
He wonders could they be making any wedge. Shit, the hiked-up rent at Salter’s Quay must sting like a bitch. Business rates’d be crippling, even for a tiny unit like that. Could they really be earning good scratch? They was Koreans after all. Koreans don’t chuck their money at loser-ventures. Too proud. Too scared of looking like failures to
all the other Koreans.
No, if Koreans thought the little fish-nibbling-your-feet business was good business, then it probably was. Maybe he should look into it? Check out the figures. Couldn’t be that bad. Just a few tanks, few comfy benches to sit on. Big water bill though. Yeah, that’d be the choker. Still, you wouldn’t be shelling out a lot of wedge for fish food, would you? Not when the little bastards are snacking on all that dead foot-skin all day long. Not exactly going to get hungry.
God, that is so what he could do with right now. A nice little business with minimal overhead, and a steady cash flow. Somewhere where punters came in and fed your livestock and then paid you for the privilege. Nice.
Anything would be better than classic cars. That business has just got way too volatile. Sure, when the economy was all rosy and all those hedge fund mangers were creaming off their fat bonuses, shiny chrome classics was the place to be. These guys’d buy a classic Corvette Stingray, or a TR3, just as a little ‘high-five’ present for their best tennis bud.
They’d buy a bright orange 1976 Ferrari Dino V8 with a crossflow head, because they’ve already got a sky blue one. At home. In the garage. They’d start to tell him how much they just love their sky blue one. And so that’s why they want to buy the bright orange one too. Like somehow it made perfect sense.
Like he could give a toss what mental contortions they went through to justify spending 30 grand on something they already had. Albeit in a different colour. He was just happy to be the man they came to.
But the hedge fund guys, the derivative traders and the mergers and acquisitions guys, weren’t buying bright orange Ferrari Dinos this month. If they came in his showroom – which most of the time they didn’t – it was to see if he’d buy back the powder blue one. He has a showroom stuffed with cars he can’t sell, and yet they’d get all pissy with him, cause he wouldn’t give them back their money, three years after they spent it with him.
