by Nick Fisher
Carole’s neighbour had a bottle of Valium. In her bathroom cabinet, left over from when her husband died, six years ago from cancer. The doctor prescribing them for depression and grief. She’d taken a few back then, but they made her feel woolly. If anyone needs them now, it’s Carole. Her eye black and her cheek swollen. The A&E department’s bandaged up her knee and put it in a temporary nylon splint with Velcro straps to keep it in place.
Carole took two of her neighbour’s Valium and soon started to nod off in her chair, her leg stretched out on the coffee table. Rich took four Valium, had a can of Special Brew and snorted two chubby lines of speed.
As he feels the bitter rivers of industrial strength chemicals run down the back of his throat and feels the end of his nose turn cold and wet, he thinks to himself what a perfect cocktail Special Brew, speed and Benzos is. The Valium giving a smooth, heavy, mellow base-coat on which to pour the belly-fire of booze, then tuning it to pitch perfection by the corrugating, pulsating ripples of the speed. High notes, melody and a thumping bass, running along underneath. A chemical symphony.
The only thing that could possibly improve the combination would be a rock of crack, smoked in a glass pipe or sucked down a biro tube stuck in the arse end of a Red Bull can. A rock of crack would be the perfect addition, if he was just going to stay home and mong out. Perfect if he was intending just to watch the telly and maybe drink a few more Brews.
But the job that Rich is determined to do tonight will not be improved by crack. Careful negotiations with a cunning snake-like negotiator is not something that crack would enhance. If all goes well and he achieves the desired result from these negotiations, then that will definitely be the time to celebrate with a rock or two. Before the negotiation begins, he needs to stay sharp and focused. Speed is the way to achieve focus. A nose full of speed and two sticks of Orbit chewing gum to stop him grinding his teeth too loudly is the perfect pharmaceutical preparation for what he is about to do.
At The Sailors, Rich soon finds that losing a family member, even though Tim wasn’t his flesh and blood exactly, is an excellent way to get bought free drinks. Men who’d normally blank him cold, are sending pints and shorts down the bar to where he sits on a tall stool, back resting against the wood and glass partition to the snug.
Those who make an effort to actually come over and talk to him – something that would never normally happen unless he owed them money, drugs or both – want to stand and talk about Tim. Not Tim while he was living, but more specifically, the circumstances of Tim’s death. Very soon after expressing their monosyllabic words of condolence – “Fucking gutted to hear ‘bout Tim, mate” – they rapidly move on to seeking details. They buy him a pint and roughly pat him between the shoulder blades a couple of times, before they start hunting for the graphic account of what Tim’s skull actually looked like when he was fished out the sea. And how much blood was spilled on the deck.
As the night progresses, the questions get bolder and less inhibited by the conventions of grief and acceptable behaviour, and more like rubbernecking at a motorway pile-up. It wasn’t long before Rich found himself describing the way that part of Tim’s skull had been ripped clean off, clearly exposing a chunk of brain underneath. None of it was true. Rich had seen very little of the corpse from the harbour wall and by the time Tim reached the ambulance he was zipped up in the body bag. But with free booze flowing so unexpectedly thick and fast, Rich wasn’t about to let fact get in the way of his good story.
Later, Rich would blame the booze for rounding the sharp clean edges off his speed buzz. Even though he snorted a finger-thick line off the lid of the cistern in the gents at The Sailors around 10.30 pm he still couldn’t get the whizz to cut through the slurry booze fog that was muddying up his brain, and making him say some words like he has Alzheimer’s, or some other brain-fucking disease. He is wobbling too. When he stands and tries to piss into the toilet, he can feel his knees knocking and almost buckling, sending his deep yellow piss stream all over the seat and floor, even splashing on his best white trainers. The ones he kept for prison.
On D Block, the whiteness and newness and overall pristineness of your trainers says everything about you. Status in prison is about a lot of different things, but you’re a total non-starter nobody, if your trainers don’t look like they were just plucked out the stock room at Foot Locker.
Rich blamed the spirits. Mostly he was a cider and super-strength lager man, especially if he was taking pills at the same time. Except when blokes kept asking him if he wanted a short, because at the time he’d already got at least one full pint in front of him. So of course he’d say yes. He’d say he was drinking “Jim Bean”. Or even, occasionally he’d just say, “JB on the rocks” because it sounded very cool. Trouble is, no matter what it’s called, it tastes like earwax and badly collides with all the Valium, to make Rich sound like a messy, fucked up drunk. Which is no way to start a tricky negotiation with a tricky negotiator.
So when the pub empties out a bit and Rich asks Paulie, who has been behind the bar most of the night, if they could “have a private word”, he wasn’t probably in the sharpest focus that he could be. Consequently, when he came to discuss with Paulie the real reason why he had come to The Sailors tonight, not just for himself “but on behalf of Carole too, see”, he maybe didn’t express himself as well as he might.
The words ‘police’, ‘compensation’ and ‘insurance’ were all part of Rich’s badly-rehearsed and alcohol-muddled speech. The long and the short of it, he says is that Carole is “devastated” by her loss. Tim was her only son. No mother ever gets over losing her son. And when it’s your only son, it’s much worse.
Rich saying how he knows how terrible Paulie must feel because Tim had lost his young life so tragically on board the boat that Paulie owns. And of course everyone knows what a kind-hearted man Paulie is and how he’d want to do whatever he could to “square things” with Carole “in her hour of need”.
And then Rich adding how complicated and ugly it could all get if police and legal proceedings were commenced on account of Tim’s age, and him supposed to be at school, and him not having a Basic Crewman Training qualification, so the boat consequently is not insured for him to even be on board, let alone be working the pots.
When Paulie says nothing, absolutely and totally nothing, after Rich finishes his first five-minute-long speech about Tim’s death and what Paulie should/might/could/ought to do, for Carole, in the aftermath of the tragedy, Rich decides to change tack.
Paulie’s wordless silence throws him off his game. The booze doesn’t help. They’re sitting in Paulie’s office, one flight of stairs up from the door at the back of the bar. The one with the bags of dry roasted nuts and pork scratchings hanging from it. Rich has never been in Paulie’s office before. Doesn’t know anyone who has, other than the barmaids and barman, who he assumes must come through it and up the stairs to the office, to bring Paulie the contents of the till and stuff.
Rich certainly doesn’t know anyone who’s been in Paulie’s office to discuss business. Not like he’s discussing business with Paulie now. Only the discussion still seems to be very one-sided, with Rich doing all the talking and Paulie just staring at him, mouth closed, an unlit fag between his fingers.
It strikes Rich as weird that Paulie could sit up here and smoke himself silly in this small box-lined office, and yet downstairs in the bar, no one was even allowed to light up. Instead, everyone standing out on the front doorsteps, freezing their tits off in a knife-cutting south-easterly wind, sucking on their snout like there’s no tomorrow.
After Rich could bear Paulie’s protracted silence no longer, he launches into his second speech, the one with the clever twist. The one that made Rich not a bearer of bad news and the potential threat of legal proceedings (unless a suitable out-of-court financial settlement could be reached) but the clever man who can save Paulie from an unnecessary storm of shit.
It is Carole, he explains. In her grief a
nd loss she feels bitterness and pain. She wants retribution. Revenge even. She wants to see someone made to pay for her loss. And that someone in her eyes is the owner of the boat on which her son died. She wants to see them suffer as she is suffering. In a way it’s understandable. That’s how grief hits some people, makes them mean and bitter. It makes them seek the advice of certain types of solicitors and legal advisors who will work on a ‘No Win, No Fee’ basis, because they specialise in compensation claims relating to industrial accidents and work-related injuries and deaths.
This special breed of legal professional knowing exactly how to wring the most compensation out of an institution or business, even if it means bankrupting that business in the process. Rich explaining that Carole’s already researching into exactly this type of legal firm. Firms, which she’s seen, advertised on Sky Living and ITV3, in between the Jeremy Kyle Show and re-runs of Wife Swap. Firms whose targeted advertising campaign is aimed directly at anyone who has suffered unjustly in any sort of work-related accident, where substantial compensation might be awarded, if the right legal buttons are pressed.
The way Rich spins his second speech is to try not to impose any kind of threat of his own to Paulie, quite the contrary; it’s to offer himself up as the man most likely to be able to dissuade Carole from taking this particular course of action. He knows how her head works. He knows when she’s vulnerable and when she can most easily be talked into or out of a specific mindset. He knows how to make her see sense when her head’s full of nonsense. She listens to him. He is her man. She turns to him for advice and support on things that she doesn’t understand.
So, if she needs to be steered away from a particular course of action, he, Rich, is the very best man to do exactly that. Left to her own devices, in her hour of gut-wrenching grief, she could become a lawyer-seeking missile, that might wreak financial havoc upon those she imagines are responsible for her son’s death. But, with careful guidance from Rich, she could be pacified and neutralised. And would present no potential legal or financial threat.
That is, of course, if a mutually agreeable settlement can be reached between these two men of the world.
Rich is much happier with his second speech. He achieved much better control of his tongue this time around, and although the whole I-can-do-you-a-really-big-favour approach was totally improvised, after he’d experienced Paulie’s first impenetrable silence, Rich is confident, second time around, he’s nailed it perfectly.
So he is kind of surprised when this time around Paulie still says nothing, for a very long time after Rich has clearly reached the end of his very reasonable and very helpful offer.
Paulie finally lights his cigarette and finally gets around to speaking. Softly. “You finished?” he asks. Rich nods. Eager.
“Good. Well, get the fuck out of my pub now, and don’t ever step foot in it, or even in its shadow, so long as you live. Do I make myself clear?”
His failure to achieve anything resembling the result he expected put Rich in a right skanky mood. Being barred from The Sailors for life had a very sobering effect. This just isn’t right. Rich can smell that this is a golden opportunity. The woman he’s been fucking for donkey’s years has just lost her teenage son due to some very bad stuff occurring on a boat that belongs to the richest man Rich knows. And yet, here Rich is, stuck bang in the middle of it all, with his pockets hanging out and still no idea how to milk his share. He just knows there’s a big pay day attached to this situation, and he’s so fucking pissed off that he can’t work out how to skin this fat cat.
It’s because of being barred, and because of feeling suddenly sober, that Rich finds himself at the end of Weymouth Harbour pier standing on a bench pissing over the railing. It’s just then, when he’s shaking his dick dry, that he hears the low irregular thump of a diesel engine, no more than 50 or 60 yards out in the bay.
Rich can hear it’s a four-cylinder single-stroke marine diesel. Rich knows a lot about single-stroke diesels, from all the workshop training certificates he’s taken in various prisons. Rich can even tell from the sound that this four-cylinder marine diesel is a sick one. A cylinder is grinding, a dry growl coming from its main bearings, where the con-rods meet the crankshaft.
Rich can tell a lot about this engine just from the sound, but he still can’t see the boat. Mostly because the spill of light from the pier lamps – the few that haven’t been broken by glue-huffing teens hurling beach pebbles – is so piss-weak.
Rich stares into the blackness, searching for the source of the noise but doesn’t even see any nav lights. Finally he just manages to make out the source of the sick growling thump, a light-coloured rusty crabber that seems to be steering a course tight-in close to the pier. Inside the wheelhouse he can just see the outlines of two faces, intermittently lit by one dim glowing amber warning light. The two faces look like... brothers.
What the fuck are they doing out on a crabber at night? And why are they doing whatever they’re doing without any navigation lights? These are just two of the many questions rattling around Rich’s tenderised brain. Then he hears the angry gearbox being slipped into neutral. The engine chugs with an unhappy rhythm as it ticks over and the boat coasts in close, almost touching the west side of the pier, moving deep into the dark shadow.
One of the faces disappears from the window. One, grim, tight-lipped face remains, illuminated by the flickering amber warning light. One brother’s at the wheel, the other’s left the wheelhouse, and is presumably walking out on deck.
Although it’s rough and irregular, the tick-over of the ancient engine is still quiet enough for Rich to just hear a sucking, gurgling splash, as something heavy is slipped off the gunwale of the brothers’ boat into the deep dark water up alongside the cast iron pier stanchions.
The same questions remain unanswered as Rich now hears the Kitty K being slipped back into gear and start chugging slowly up the harbour towards the quay. What the fuck are these brothers doing out at night? Why are they doing it without navigation lights? And now, he has a new question: What did they just dump in the sea alongside the pier?
Rich counts the upright railings from the far end of the pier to where he roughly judges the Kitty K was floating when he heard the heavy gurgling weight hit the water. Eleven upright railings along. Just to be sure, he stands an empty Thunderbird bottle he finds under a bench alongside the eleventh railing. Thunderbird marks the spot, he thinks as he walks towards the marina.
Far as Adrian is concerned, Matty is a liability. Everything Matty does is a danger to both of them. From the moment he swung that bat into Tim’s head, he risked not just his own freedom, but Adrian’s too and the future of Helen and the boys. By hiding the hunk of dope and by smashing the tamper-proof seal, Matty is drawing more and more attention. Adrian knows the police’ll be all over them about the broken seal. Could see suspicion in that Chinese cop’s eyes right from the start. If they can get away with returning the Kitty K to her mooring without anyone seeing, then at least they can blatantly deny any knowledge of how or why or who broke the seal.
And if Helen’s still asleep when he gets home, he might at least have an alibi. If he can slip into bed before she wakes, then as far as she’s concerned, he’s been there all night. What they need to do now is get back to the berth, get tied up and get away without anyone seeing them any where near the Kitty K.
With all the navigation lights switched off they stand the best chance of avoiding being noticed. The cold south-easterly will dampen the urge of couples hoping for a grope or a shag on the pier benches. The tide’s too small for any anglers to want to fish off the end of the breakwater, and the time of night should mean most normal people are tucked up in bed.
Of course Matty wanted to bring the dope back to the quay. He wanted to unload the pot and make a dash for Adrian’s truck, which is parked half a mile away in The Loop car park. Which would have meant carrying a crab pot full of black hash right across the bridge and up along the harbour to the mar
ina, under the full glare of the street lights and God-knows-how-many CCTV cameras.
For two men, who have already been brought to the police’s attention, because of the violent death of a teenager at sea, to be filmed carrying a mysterious crab pot through the town centre at 2 am, would not be good.
“How’s that going to look?” asks Adrian
“Fuck it,” says Matty. “Be fine. Then we can stash it at mine. Bury it in the garden.”
Matty is a liability. Adrian keeps telling himself. Everything Matty does is knee-jerk. Nothing thought through. Matty’s going to get them both caught. Adrian can see it clearly now. Adrian at last waking up from his pathetic state of shock, and now he knows he’s got to take control of this situation, or else Matty’s going to get them buried.
“We don’t land it,” says Adrian.
“What?”
“We don’t dock with it,” he says, steering the Kitty around towards the dark side of the pier. “Anyone could be round there waiting for us now. Police, coastguard, harbour master... Anyone sees us and we’re fucked.”
The dim lights of the pier only a hundred yards away now as the Kitty K makes her way through the darkness towards the town.
“Cut the rope off the pot and drop it over the side, when we pass by the pier struts,” says Adrian. “Drop it right close in. Half way along.”
“No fucking way,” says Matty.
“Think about it. We round the bend to the harbour and we see a reception committee, we got nowhere to go. We can’t hide the pot,” he says. “Too late to toss it over with everyone watching. But if we drop it in the deeps up against the pier now, we can come back on foot, drag it out later. Or tomorrow. When we know it’s all clear.”
