by Nick Fisher
Sara Chin putting her hand on his big sloping shoulders, to calm him, reassure him, offer him a little human solace. But the touch is like a trigger, like a volume control that makes Robbie Rock cry and sob and sob and cry, even louder than before.
A good 20 minutes Robbie sobbed. Chin never once leaving his side, saying nothing. Just looking at him. Looking down at the balloon photo. Meanwhile, Tug was creeping around the bedroom, the bathroom, checking out the contents of the bathroom cabinet, even crunching his way across the kitchen floor, down the stairs to check out the office again. Tug matching the printed inventory on the desk against the number and make of cars still parked in the showroom.
All the time, Chin just standing beside Robbie as he cries. Waiting until his loud heart-wracking sobs dwindle into small quiet whimpers and the flood of tears begins to dry.
Then, and only then, when Robbie had almost literally cried his eyes out, he stops. Then he blows his nose on kitchen roll, over and over again, like he’s got a gallon of snot to shift. Then with a wad of kitchen roll he wipes his eyes. Drying them. Leaving them red and puffy. With a big ball of soggy tissue paper cupped in his hand, his voice still a little hoarse and shaky, and with Sara Chin finally sitting down on the chair facing him, Robbie Rock tells her everything.
It’s just like he’s stepped through the doors of Clouds House rehab and treatment centre and someone’s told him: “This is Sara Chin. She’s your counsellor”. Robbie pours his heart out. The floodgates are open. Robbie looks into Chin’s deep brown almond slanting eyes and tells her all about the lap dancing, the escorting, the coke, the fun, the sex, the love, the boat, the balloon, the Poles, the widow’s peak, carrots in the shape of little fish, the lat-long numbers, the dope, the deal, the sea, the rope, the cars he doesn’t even own, and most of all the way he feels about beautiful, sweet, funny, gorgeous Elsa, who says his name ‘Robbie’ with a tiny little Slavic growl on the ‘R’ that makes it sound like ‘Grrobbie.’
Driving back to Weymouth with Chin behind the wheel didn’t feel so bad this time. What Tug likes about it is that it leaves his hands free to do stuff, like make phone calls and he can stare out the window at all the Poole Harbour yummy mummies pushing their top-of-the-range buggies across Boating Lake Green, at the bottom of Lilliput Hill.
Chin asked Robbie if he still had the A4 sheet of paper with the lat-long numbers that Lech had given him. Then she’d put it inside an evidence bag, so they could check it for prints. She was sussed enough to put in it in one of the large-size evidence bags. Big enough so the paper’d be opened right out so Tug can read the numbers through the clear plastic bag as they’re bowling along towards Weymouth.
With his free hands Tug redials the mobile number he’d got from the Harbour Master earlier to get hold of Dougie out on the Nicola B again.
Dougie not sounding pleased to get two calls from the Old Bill in one day. But relieved this time when Tug says he only wants him to check out some lat-long numbers on his chart plotter, and tell him whereabouts they are located.
“Way down on Hurd’s Deep,” Dougie says. The signal on his phone was no better than before. “South,” he says, “Way south. Down past the drop off.”
“Does anyone from Weymouth put out gear around those grounds?” asks Tug. “Like crab pots and stuff?”
Now Tug hearing the laugh in Dougie’s voice, like this stupid cop had just asked a stupid land-lubbing cop-like question.
“No one with any sense,” said Dougie.
“No one? Definitely?” asks Tug again.
“Brothers on Kitty K might,” he says. “But, like I said. No one with any sense.”
OK, not exactly a boner.
Not a hard-on. Not hard, hard. Not even a semi, really. More than a tingle though. A twitch. A little throb. Like a heart beat that traveled all the way down to his knob.
Tug had felt that throb in his Calvin’s before, at work. Because of work. His cock stirring like a sleeping mole having a dream about worms. Not, like when he caught a flash of side-boob. Or got a glimpse down a yummy mummy’s cashmere top as she stooped to reposition the bottle in her baby’s mouth. Not even like the rumble he felt when he got a chance to check out Chin’s tight cheeks. Nothing sexual.
Well… kind of. But not because he was thinking about it in a sexual way. Just because it turned him on. Tweaked his thong.
Police work could do that. The right set of circumstances. Catching a break. Fitting a new piece in a crime jigsaw. Making connections. Smelling a collar. The sweet scent of culpable un-fucking-deniable guilt. Now that stuff is sexy.
Knowing when some little scrote is edging nearer and nearer to a bang-to-rights situation is sweet. In that delicious moment, Tug would feel himself practising the expression he was going to adopt, when he walked into the Detective Inspector’s office. All cocky. Good news to impart. That moment always made his threads feel a little tighter.
So now, in the car, when Tug hung up his Samsung after talking to Dougie out on his crabber as it slammed the ebb tide across Portland Race, Tug’s little dreamy mole tossed in its duvet. He was about to impart to Chin the sexy jigsaw-piece crime news he’d just gleaned. And…
She was going to fucking love this.
Joining the dots from Robbie Rock’s snot-dripping tale of disorganised crime to the pot-pulling, bait-stinking, lying-through-their-teeth brothers, Matty and Ade, was going to truly put some damp in her panties. Of this he had no doubt.
And even though there was a vein of snotty that shone through Chin’s hot oriental features, hiding way too close to the surface, he still wanted to impress her. Fuck, yeah.
Anyway, a little acid could be sexy. Especially if this new news meant suddenly she was a little more awed by him, and yet meantime he’d turned a tad frosty on her. Yup. That could very well be the perfect recipe for a proper full-on boner.
Sex and police work. Always got a roar from the crowd. Tug was as sure as shit Chin got a lady-boner from a nice hunk of crime-solving falling into her lap too. And what he was about to tell her, about the brothers being the only ones Dougie ever knew to voluntarily go anywhere near Robbie ‘I-fucked-up-so-bad’ Rock’s lat-long numbers, was as close to blue-on-blue foreplay that Tug could possibly imagine.
“These numbers,” says Tug, his finger tapping the A4 plastic evidence bag, “Are way the fuck across the Channel nearly.”
“We know that,” says Chin, her voice flat as a witch’s tit. “Robbie Rock went there. Remember?”
“Yeah, but. It’s a bad place. Big rocks and shit. No one fishes it because it’s so dangerous. Except– and you are going to absolutely fucking love this. Except the–”
Tug faltering a beat as Chin’s phone only goes and fucking rings. As it does she gives him that finger. That one finger. Pointing up. That one fucking International Language of Phone Etiquette finger that means: Hold your cock. Cock. ‘Cos, I have got to take this one.
“Gotta take this,” she says, pressing ‘Accept’ on her phone with the same fucking finger she just shut him up with.
“The fuck?” says Tug. As Chin goes and calls the person on the other end, ‘Sir’.
Dick-swinging is a perfectly acceptable part of police work. In any nick, in any part of the country. Any country come to that. The business of holding your business, in your hand, and then thrusting it in the face of your fellow work mates, is not only permissible, it’s half way to being essential. If you’ve pulled off a coup. Cracked a case. Opened a line of enquiry that was hitherto shut. Then you want to let your colleagues know what a big fat cock-swinging job you’ve done. And not just for your own good. But for theirs too. A little healthy competition. Gagging on the girth of another cop’s job is only going to make you sharpen your pencil. Right?
Partner-on-partner is a slightly different bucket of sprats. You don’t want to make the guy you got to sit next to day-long, day after day, feel like they just got bitch-slapped, because you done a nice job.
No. Partner-on-partn
er dick-swinging must only be done in strict moderation. Envy is something that feels better from a distance.
In the case of Chin, Tug didn’t feel so sensitive. It wasn’t like they’d been partners for any length of time. And he really did just want to show off what a well-connected, top dog cop operator he was.
Only, just when he was about to impress her, she had to go and piss all over his parade. Just when he was telling her about his call with Dougie and the fickle finger of you’re-so-busted was pointing towards the crab brothers, she had to go and fucking spoil it.
“My ex-boss,” she says as she ends her call, “Sending something we might be interested in.”
“I’m telling you something we are interested in,” he says. “At least I am,” he adds, trying not to sound too pissy-pants. “If Dougie says the only boat thick-as-shit enough to fish the Deeps is the Kitty K, and Robbie Rock’s lat-long drop is bang in the middle of the Hurds. And when he went out there, he didn’t find sweet fuck–”
“Gave his name as ‘Matty’,” she says, interrupting his stream.
“Who?”
“Man who made contact with a UC runs a red herring in Bristol.”
Oh Jesus, Tug loves a lump of police-speak. Who the fuck doesn’t? When you’re on the job, you want to sound like you’re on the job, and ‘UC’ he can compute… But ‘Red Herring’ is one fucking step too far. One step that he is so not about to admit ignorance to… When Chin just smiles. Giving Mona Lisa a run for her money on ‘enigmatic’.
Bitch. Tug thinks. Cutting me off and now smirking because she knows he doesn’t know what she’s talking about, and then she goes and turns her Samsung around to face him.
“Offers the UC a buy. Large amount of high grade Afghani black…”
Tug was trying to catch his brain up which he knew was going to make his face look dumb, when his eyes focused on her Galaxy.
“Identified himself as being based in Weymouth,” she says.
Tug stared at a CCTV grab of Matty, wearing a jacket made him look like a Jehovah.
“Just how stupid can a man ever be?”
“Matty,” says Tug. “The fuck?”
She turns the phone to glance at the grainy shot again. “Better go pay a visit,” she says, swinging the car into the Harvester car park, throwing a 180 back towards Portland.
Tug sucking his teeth now, conflicted. Excited to be going to lean on a perp, definitely. But gutted to find that Chin’s dick was so much bigger than his.
They watched the baby boy bounce. His little feet in tiny blue leather shoes, like ballerinas wear. Or tightrope walkers when they slide across wires with big poles.
A little boy baby bouncing in this thing, like a big pair of pants connected to a spring. Bounce. Bounce. Bounce. The spring extending and contracting as the little snot-gobbler flies up and down. His stretchy-out toes just brushing the floor enough to boing him back up. The long spring fixed to the lintel of the living room door above his head.
Fuck, that looked fun. Should make those bouncers for adults. Bounce up and down for half an hour watching Top Gear on the 50 inch flat screen. What could possibly be wrong with that? Thinks Tug, before tuning in to the conversation between Chin and Adrian’s wife, Helen, once more.
The house a big surprise to him. Neat and warm with a smell of those sweet wood things hot yoga-bunnies like to burn, when they do all that bending. Not that Helen looked like a hot yoga-bunny. Not a moose, though. Just normal. Really normal. Kind. And in Tug’s estimation, boringly, unhelpfully innocent.
At this part of the hunt they do not want or need innocent. They want to smell guilt. They want to sense lies. To glimpse deceitful looks. Stare into eyes that won’t quite meet theirs. So they know they’re on to something. Know they’re in the presence of dishonesty that they can chip away at. Manipulate. Bully. Even scare the fucking crap out of, if necessary.
Guilt is great. Innocence is sweet. But absolutely no fucking use in police work.
When Tug zoned back in from the bouncing, he could tell Chin was no nearer anything of any use. Helen’s face, so annoyingly open and smiley. Her offer of a cup of tea… “Or, I’ve got some instant?” So obviously coming from a place of syrupy innocence that isn’t going to offer them any insight.
She knows nothing. With her honey-coloured hair and her happy chubby-cheeked baby and her description of her husband leaving early doors to go help out another crabber. And her, “Well that is odd,” when she’s told hubby isn’t on the Nicola B pulling Dougie’s ropes.
But none of it seems to phase her one iota. She’s sure she’ll hear the whole story when Adrian gets home. And, is there any news of that poor woman who lost her son on the Kitty K? She sent flowers, and a letter, of course. And she’s thought of popping around, but wasn’t sure. Felt she probably should wait a day or two.
Absolutely none of this is making Tug think they were going to get anything out of Helen, because she plainly knew nothing. Lived in a box of baby fleece. On the subject of Adrian’s brother Matty, she was a little wrinkled around the eyes. She knows he’s had problems with the police in the past, but she and Adrian were really pretty sure he’d managed to put all that behind him now.
So, sixty-four-thousand-dollar question: would she let them have a look around?
“For what?” she asks.
“We suspect Matty’s been involved in trafficking controlled substances…” says Chin.
“Your brother-in-law is a scummo drug dealer,” says Tug. Going for wing-pulling cruel. Seeing how that would sit in her butter-wouldn’t-melt mouth. Her eyes just widened.
“We know he’s involved in something big, which is about to blow up in his face,” says Tug.
“I thought, we thought, Matthew was past all that…” she says, a look of concern around her brows.
“And your husband might be caught up in it too.”
“Not Adrian,” says Helen. “Adrian doesn’t even drink alcohol anymore. Nothing. Not a drop.”
Chin and Tug both look at her. Her eyes move with cow-like innocence from one to the other.
So, is she going to let them look around this place or not? asks Tug… Pushing to see if the innocence is as real as it feels.
“Of course,” she says. Standing up. Eager to help.
Fuck and blue bollocks, thinks Tug. No way they’re going to find anything useful here then. Unless Adrian is a total fucking moron, which unlike his brother, he probably isn’t.
“Parsnip,” said little Jack.
“It’s very sweet,” says Helen, “But it’s not really a name, is it?”
“Parsnip.”
“It’s a vegetable, honey. Something you eat.”
“Parsnip.”
“What about calling her after one of your friends at school?”
“Parsnip!” he said, his voice getting louder.
“What about ‘Peppa’, after Peppa the–”
“Parsnip!”
And so it was. A grand daughter of Bugsy, destined to take over as Helen’s father’s latest sow, got named ‘Parsnip’.
Bugsy had been the queen of sows. The sow of sows. Pumping out piglets like a pig-shaped Pez dispenser year after year. The bloodline leaning more and more towards the long snout and scrawny features of the wild boar-cross as years passed. She suckled them by the dozen. Never losing a piglet. No matter how runty.
Bugsy had been a queen pig.
But as the line soured with boar blood, her progeny more and more looked the part. The wild boar strain dominating. Some growing proper tusks to go with the dead black eyes and high shoulders. And they smelled weird too. Not like normal pigs. The boar babies tainted with a scent that clung to the nostrils like rotting fish.
“Couldn’t even count the number of times I’ve pulled a body as he’s walking back from the corner shop,” says Chin. “Carrying a pint of milk. Or a six-pack of Magners.”
Tug beginning to feel like he’s being given a lesson in police work.
“Still
rubbing foil off his scratch card.”
“Ask me, they’ll be down the harbour. In The Sailors,” he says. “In town, not out here on the island.”
“You always do a drive around,” she says. Taking another left and another. Going round in oblongs and squares, street after street, Sweet Hill Lane, Mead Bower, Avalanche Road. Radiating out from the little terrace where Adrian’s son was probably still bouncing his tiny tits off.
Sounding like she’s handing out more Chicken McNuggets of Police Operational advice. Tug dragging his brain for something a bit acid to splash on her smugness. When there it fucking is. Christmas and birthday all rolled into one.
The truck.
The blue piece-of-shit Nissan Navara 250 diesel with the flat bed and crew cab. Scratched and dented and rusted from years of being arse-donkey to a commercial potter. Parked. Two wheels up on the kerb just at the mouth of the narrow lane leading up to the Southwell allotments.
Christmas. Birthday. Valentine and Father’s Day all melted together, in one big ribbon-bowed present.
Two side windows open. Nearside rear door not shut properly. Green stinking slime dripping down the side of the back seat. Splatters of stinky green all up the inside of one door. Up as far as the roof. Crab pot lying in the flat bed. And…
“That’s blood.”
“Looks like it to me,” says Tug, following the point of Chin’s finger, with a nail so neat and curved and white underneath the overhang, it had to have been painted by some midget Korean hunched over in a back street nail bar. While wearing one of those surgeon masks.
“Call it in. Get some Plod up here,” he says, following the splodges of red on the Portland stone kerb that lead to a bigger splatter, that points onwards to the rusty gateway at the end of the lane where it goes up to the allotments.
