Pot Luck

by Nick Fisher

  Tug is moaning about the size and the weight and the grief of the jib. But really it’s because he’s bummed out that bringing it along had been Chin’s idea and not his. His moaning getting cut off mid-sentence, when Chin takes a call on her mobile. And, it’s a bit of a cryptic one. Sounding to Tug like it was her old boss or something. Her calling him ‘Sir’ on the phone.

  Even worse, when they get to Weymouth Hospital, Tug backs the car all the way up to the entrance to the morgue, where the meat wagons come to deliver the stiffs. Backed right up to the loading dock so that he and Chin and hopefully the mortuary assistant – a really great girl called Viv, who used to work nights as a paramedic but gave it up to become a mortuary assistant – would all together lift the jib out the back of the car. Only when Viv opens the electric shutter to the loading dock, it clattering up with a whining noise, she tells Tug the post-mortem’s been postponed. Won’t happen until 11 am now, probably nearer noon. All because the Health and Safety Executive have been in touch, to say they’re sending down two of their representatives from head office in London, to observe and report.

  “Fuck,” says Tug. Seeing this turning into a whole new brand of agony.

  The fact that, after never even mentioning driving the detective pool car all the three weeks they’ve worked together, Chin chooses this very moment to say she wants to drive, is bound to bunch up Tug’s panties. And to top that, now she’s saying she wants to drive them to Poole Harbour and back, just to check out the thing about Robbie Rock having a boat, and it getting broke into last night. But in truth, these annoyances pale into insignificance compared to the newsflash that the Health and Safety Executive want to stick their oar in this business about the Kitty K.

  It’s actually a good job Chin’s driving, because it means Tug can wave his hands about, a lot. He slaps the back of one of them into the dashboard several times, to punctuate and emphasise just how monumentally fucked up this is fast becoming.

  He says, “Sea Fish Authority is responsible for providing licences and certificates of competency to skippers and crew, right?” She nods. “The Maritime and Coastguard Agency are responsible for licensing the boats and making sure they carry the right safety gear: life jackets, flares, life-rafts and shit. Yeah?” She shrugs and raises an eyebrow. Cute little arched thing. “Neither of them wants a licensed boat or skipper to be charged or convicted for not behaving properly, in the event of an accident. Or heaven-forbid, not carrying the right safety gear. Because that looks very bad for the sea fishing industry. And the sea fishing industry is already a political trapped fart.”

  Tug is clenching his jaw as he rants. Chin glancing at him out the corner of her eye as she takes the big dual carriageway out of Weymouth, the one they built for the Olympics. “So, the Sea Fish Authority calls in the Health and Safety Executive, who just happen to be the biggest bunch of clipboard-carrying red tape-loving wankers on Planet Earth.”

  Tug saying Health and Safety have been sicked on the case to help prove there wasn’t an accident. To suggest that instead there was foul play or criminal neglect. Criminal neglect being best for the H and S. Because that way it turns it into a crime and not an accident.

  “H and S’ll be as happy as pigs in shit if they can make this into a ‘crime’.” Tug finding himself making quote marks round the word, with two fingers on each hand – which is something he’d seen, but never knowingly done himself before. And, he kind of likes it. “A crime, for which we will then have a crime number, a statistic and a boss breathing down our necks, to solve.” Tug is on a roll now. He can’t stop. “A crime that might not even have a name. Or a suspect. But will be our crime, to put to bed. It’ll be our problem, not theirs. All because the Health and fucking Safety Executive climbed up the gantry, pulled down their budgie-smugglers and took a dump on us.”

  By the time he’s completely finished ranting about the ramifications of the whole Kitty K death thing, they’re driving along the long thin causeway that leads onto Sandbanks. Poole Harbour on one side, breathtakingly expensive real estate on the other. As they turn off into Robbie’s road, a steel blue Aston Martin DB4 drives past them, with two men in the front seats, one of them in a checked tweed jacket and big widow’s peak growing on his forehead.

  Both Chin and Tug recognising the car from Robbie’s showroom. Robbie must’ve sold a car, thinks Tug. Maybe things are looking up for the economy at last.

  When they pull up outside the showroom, the concertina glass door is wide open, and now there’s gaps where yesterday there were cars. Three gaps? Is Robbie doing a sneaky runner, thinks Tug. Is he liquidating stock, preparing to suddenly disappear? Funny, because just yesterday he didn’t look like he could even walk to the posh little off-license on the corner and back without having a coronary.

  “We have to do it,” says Matty. His hand moving, touching stuff in the shed. Things leaning against the wall. A broken oar. A spade. The sledge hammer dad used to knock in the posts of the fruit cage, which is now just posts and ripped netting and weeds. The fork with the broken tine. Matty picking it up now, looking at it like he’s remembering that pile of dark clotted horseshit. Feeling the blisters again. His wandering hand touching stuff, like he’s searching for the right thing to do it with.

  “We can’t,” says Adrian, his voice sounding weak.

  “We got to.”

  “No.”

  “Think we can just untie him? Say ‘All right Richie, mate let’s call it quits now’?”

  Adrian crouching again. Feeling his heels on the back of his buttocks. Hunching his shoulders. There’s something about wanting to curl up small, make himself into a tiny ball that feels instinctive in this situation.

  “He doesn’t even know what’s in the pot,” Adrian hisses, like he’s half-trying to avoid Rich overhearing them. Which is ridiculous. Rich lying only feet away from them. Eyes bulging open, following their every move. Air sucking in and out around the sock, fast, like he’s panting.

  “He’s a stupid prick. But he’s not that stupid,” says Matty. “He knows where we dumped the pot. Fuck knows how. He seen it’s rammed full of something. He knows we jumped him cause he had the pot. Chucked him in the truck. Sat on his head. Cause he had the pot. He fucking knows something about that pot is worth having.”

  “But, he doesn’t know what,” repeats Adrian, like it matters. “What if,” he says, like he’s just thought of something profound, “What if we just let him go?” Even as he’s saying it, he knows that is the one thing they’re never going to do.

  There’s no such thing as a big male pike. Big pike are female. Every pike over 30 pounds is female. Fish as long as a greyhound and as vicious as a sociopathic stoat, are always female. Male pike don’t ever grow big.

  Female pike are the future. The carriers of generations. Female pike make pike eggs. They carry the seedpods of pike to come. For 62 million years pike have survived where other fish have failed. From Alaska to Alicante pike have endured meteor strikes, earthquakes, ice ages and glacial melts.

  Dinosaurs came and went. Humans evolved. The planet froze and thawed, froze and thawed, the seas rose and fell, land erupted and dissolved. Plates shifted. Volcanoes erupted and still pike prevailed. All because of females. Big fat females.

  One big fecund female can carry a couple of million eggs. Enough to repopulate even the most devastated stock in one dump. Just one fat female with her precious cargo of eggs can pull the entire pike population back from the brink of collapse. One fat female pike is a living, breathing, floating mother ship. A mother lode of potential pike procreation.

  As she lays down her stringy sticky threads of ripe pike eggs that cling like Nature’s Velcro to weeds and fronds, all she needs to finish her epic work is a little squirt of semen. Some pike sperm to mix with and mingle and fertilise her eggs.

  Pike milt. Thin and milky, washing amongst her eggs, the tiny spermatozoa piercing the thick membranes of her ovaries’ crop. But one male’s sperm, one pike’s milky milt
could never be enough. Or could never offer enough genetic diversity to ensure the robust endurance of pike down through multi-millennia. And so the big fat ugly female pike needs many mates. Multiple males are required to squirt their seed upon her mammoth cargo of precious eggs.

  The small pike’s squirt attracts the attention of other small ambitious males, who jostle and compete to sow their pike spunk amongst the big girls’ carpet of sticky eggs.

  Male pike never grow very big, partly because Mother Nature doesn’t need them to be big. She just needs them to be many. And spunky. A few huge females and a rash of little males is the way pike have become the most long lasting fish species in the waters of our planet.

  The fact that their teeth are so large and their jaws will articulate to fit in food objects almost as big as themselves helps a lot. And of course, there’s nothing a big pike won’t try to eat. Dead or alive. Fish, fowl or fur.

  Pike have been known to eat whole geese, yappy dogs, otters and ospreys.

  But, most commonly, what a big fat female pike will turn to snack upon just after she’s exhausted herself and dumped her huge load of eggs, is a little male pike.

  Or two.

  Female pike are the only pike that grow big and grow old. They hang together in all female groups on the edge of fast water, inhabiting the back-eddies and dead zones where there is fresh oxygen, but little current to fight against. They can hang, neutral in their buoyancy, together eye to eye, tail to tail, with other big females, growing and nurturing a new stock of eggs in their primeval ovaries, while in their stomachs they slowly digest the flesh and bones of their skinny male mates.

  Female pike hang together. Safe in their size. Unified in their gender. While the spunky little males idiotically compete and jostle with each other, to get their squirt over those precious sticky eggs.

  And in so doing, they inadvertently provide the big ugly female pike with something easy and stupid to eat.

  Female pike hang together.

  And Helen’s phone rings only three times, before she picks it up, to hear Dougie’s wife Fiona’s accusing voice.

  “So,” she says, as Helen finger-wipes a smear of Nutella from the arm of Jack’s high chair, “What the fuck is your husband up to now?”

  Sort of getting a bit of a habit. Turning up at Sandbanks Classic Cars to find everything open, but nobody at home.

  Three cars less than yesterday. The office door wide open. Papers and files spread across the big office desk, like someone has been searching, looking for stuff. The top drawer of the filing cabinet open. And so is the little key locker on the wall, with the rows of ignition keys, pertaining to the cars in the showroom. Gaps between the sets of keys, with the same Sandbanks Classic Cars key fob attached to each one. Gaps, like missing teeth.

  Chin calling “Hello!” again. Into the office. Up the stairs. Like it’s déjà vu. One of those recurring dreams where the same sequence happens over and over again. Only this time there’s no cat with no head.

  “Hello!” she calls again. Tug looking around the showroom, nothing changed except the missing cars and the boot of a big British Alvis, a maroon one with brown leather interior, is open.

  Tug looks in. The carpet’s been pulled back to reveal a compartment with a little chrome handle to open it. Tug seeing it’s where the scissor-jack and tyre wrench is kept. A whole breakdown kit. Little red reflective triangle thing in there too, with a fold-out wire strut, that you use to prop up in the road. Warn any cars coming along that there’s a problem. Even a pair of cotton work gloves and a foot pump in there too, all fitted into compartments around the spare tyre. Tug thinking that if he dug around a bit he’d probably find a custom-made towrope in there as well. With a proper spliced-eye on each end and a red square of cloth spliced in the middle to warn other motorists that the car was under tow.

  Those were the days; when cars had proper tool kits and owners’ manuals and useful items stashed away in custom-built compartments, to assist you should you ever be so unfortunate as to break down. Now, drivers with a mechanical problem, just stick on their hazard warning lights and call the AA. Sit there listening to Heart FM until a big yellow van pulls up. Never even get out the car.

  Chin about to shout out again, when there’s a noise from upstairs: a scrape and a bump and a muffled voice. Tug looking at Chin, she’s already moving towards the office door leading to the stairs. She glances back at him, her hand snaking around to the back of her hip where she keeps her auto-lock baton in a nylon case on her belt. The harsh ripping sound of the heavy duty Velcro safety strap being pulled back has a physical effect on Tug, like the tinkle bell on Pavlov’s dog. A great sound. The sound of action about to happen.

  Really was déjà vu, he thinks. God, he wishes they could carry guns. Wouldn’t it be so sweet to be able to unholster your Glock 9 millimetre and pad carefully up this staircase, one on either side, like they teach you in the FBI Academy.

  Instead, they only got telescopic twatting-sticks. Chin not even taking hers out, just loosening the strap. No stab vest this time. So not quite déjà vu. Tug now getting a really good look at Chin’s arse, a perfect round gym-fit peach, as she moves up the stairs stealthily ahead of him. Cocking her head to listen for more sounds. Tug just now realising that the fact he can watch her cute bum so well, is because she is in front of him. Because she is leading the way, again. He is following. It’s like with her wanting to drive over here. Is this the way it’s going? Is she taking over the power in this relationship?

  Chin stops on the stairs now. Listening again. Tug about to take the opportunity to push past, when there’s a sudden horrendous, almighty crash. The sound of wood splintering. The staircase they’re standing on vibrating, like there’s some sort of mini earthquake.

  Before Tug’s even got a bearing on what just happened, Chin’s thrown open the kitchenette door and stepped in towards the source of the huge noise.

  Shards of glass and wood are still raining down from the ceiling, where a skylight window is hanging down. Two of the small panes are smashed and the frame of the skylight ripped off, leaving jagged ends of splintered wood. The other half of the skylight frame is lying on the kitchen floor still caught in the loop of rope.

  Straight away Tug recognises the rope. Top quality old fashioned sisal. He’d bet good money it’s the one would’ve come from the boot of the maroon Alvis. The rest of the rope now tangled across the kitchen floor in a mess of glass, wood shards and toppled over furniture. One of the John Lewis dining chairs is lying on its side. And there’s a smashed Ikea photo frame, the wood of the frame knocked apart and the broken shards of glass lying in a sunburst pattern across the photo of a man and a woman in a balloon basket.

  The end of the Alvis towrope is looped around Robbie Rock’s neck. He’s sprawled across the floor, his robe wide open, his chubby white belly and shrivelled genitals on full display. Blood oozing from cuts on his face and forehead and even from his fingers. Now he’s rolling from side to side, crunching on the glass, desperately trying to slacken the noose around his neck to catch some air.

  Wrestling Rich from the truck to the allotment shed had been a major feat. Even after tying him up with the rope from the back of the truck, he still fought like a greased-up Rottweiler. It took the both of them, to half-carry, half-drag and half-kick Rich along the narrow hedged path from the lane to the shed. Rich bit Matty’s hand badly, teeth marks gouging into both the palm side and the skin on the back. It hurt like fuck, but while he was biting he wasn’t shouting. Keeping him quiet being a big part of the battle. There’s no one else around at the allotments yet, but there’s houses about 70 yards away, little two-up-two-down brick and flint cottages, where most of the old boys who tend the allotments live. It was a big risk bringing him here. Someone could easily spot them dragging him to the shed. But Adrian couldn’t think of anywhere else to take him. Nowhere that could be made secure. Nowhere they could lock. Where they won’t get interrupted.

  Thing is, wh
at with moving Rich being such a struggle, it means they’d had to leave the crab pot in the flat bed of the truck. It was bad enough the truck being parked out on the lane, pretty much telling everyone that Adrian was visiting the allotment, but leaving a hundred-thousand quid’s worth of dope in the flat bed, inside a stolen crab pot, in broad daylight, is stretching their luck way too far. Before they do anything else, they need to bring the dope in the shed and move the truck out of sight.

  When Sara Chin hooked her finger under the rope wrapped around Robbie Rock’s neck and eased the coil through the spliced eye, at last he could breathe. Taking huge gulps of air like a goldfish, trying to swallow it by the gallon. She brushes the glass from his face, wipes at the blood with kitchen roll, which shows the scratches are really just superficial. She even helps him close his robe, without looking down at his belly or his balls. Helping him to close it properly by tucking one side under the other and tying the belt. His hands are shaking so much he couldn’t tie it himself. She stands the chair back up on its legs by the table. Then opens the loop on the rope noose that he’d put over his own head and tied so stupidly to the strut of the skylight window frame.

  She helps Robbie off the floor, dusting the broken glass from his robe and eases his big frame into the shapely dining chair with the chrome steel legs. He thanks her. Sara Chin sees him looking down at the broken picture frame and she stoops to pick it up. She parts the wooden sides to let the sunburst shards of glass clatter onto the floor. Then she pushes the angle joints of the frame back together.

  “Be fine with a dab of glue,” she says as she hands it to him. Watching, as he turns it around to look at it. Robbie Rock then starts to cry like a baby. The sound of him choking, trying to catch his breath was even worse than when he had the rope looped around his throat. He’s crying and sobbing and gasping. Huge fat tears rolling down both cheeks, splashing on the John Lewis tabletop.