Pot Luck

by Nick Fisher

  Adrian now realising he can’t trust Matty not to fuck up. Not to tell someone where the stash is at. Or worse, lead them to it. No. Fuck-up amateur-hour is officially over. Adrian is taking charge until it’s all sold. Matty can have it in bits and pieces as he sells it. And Adrian will produce the gear and wait until Matty produces Adrian’s half of the cash from that sale, before they move on to the next buy. No way he’s letting Matty have any control of the bulk. Time for Adrian to take control is now. The only good thing to come out of this will be if Adrian can get his share of the cash and get his independence from Matty and Paulie, and start his life with his family all over fresh, with his own boat or his own business. And that isn’t going to happen if Matty has his hands on the reins and his head up his arse.

  Two things Adrian is determined to do, is avoid getting ripped off, and avoid going to jail. In order to achieve these things he will have to keep Matty on a very short leash. Starting from today.

  First though, they have to go get their crab pot of hash back from the base of the pier stanchion beneath the eleventh railing from the sea. And so, after he leaves the house, Adrian stops at his shed and digs under a pile of pot frames by his work bench to find the small grapple anchor their dad used to use on his tender dinghy, back in the days before he got a mooring against the harbour wall. Adrian grabs a short coil of polyprop rope and lays the two things quietly in the flat bed of his truck. Time to take control.

  Rich was getting all wound up. He’s on the pier, 11 railings from the southern end and now he’s probably chucked the little grapple anchor more than a dozen times. Trouble is, the angle’s all wrong for snagging anything. He’s too high up and the rope’s a little too short to give him much room to drag the anchor across the harbour bed. He needs to be lower, which is impossible, unless he was chucking from a boat down at the water level, or else got hold of another 15 or 20 feet of rope.

  It’s not that he hasn’t hooked nothing. Second throw he snagged something big. Turned out to be a Morrisons shopping trolley, all covered in weed and slipper limpet shells. Must’ve been in the water for a year or more. The fucker was, once he’d hooked the trolley he couldn’t unhook it. Again, he didn’t have enough rope to give it enough slack, or else be able to walk down the pier ten yards and pull the hook out from another angle.

  Instead, after tugging and shaking and tugging and shaking, trying to trip the grapple out of the stainless steel mesh of the trolley, and failing time and time again, he eventually had to pull the whole fucking thing up and out of the water. Weighed a fucking ton. Pulling it, hand over hand up and out of the sea, in the light of the breaking dawn, a big weedy shopping trolley.

  Worst part was once he’d got it up as far as the pier railing, he had to flip it over the top rail, but it was so fucking heavy, and the wet rope was biting into his hands. In the end, he had to clinch the rope around the armrest of a bench, and just suspend the trolley on the seaward side of the railing. Then he had to lean right over and drag the stinky green weedy fucker up over the rail and on to the bench, where it stood now, smelling like a tub of over-ripe whelk bait.

  He could’ve just unhooked it when it was the other side of the rail. Pulled the grapple anchor out of the stainless mesh and let it fall back into the sea. But then he’d probably just keep hooking it again and again, while he’s trying to dredge and drag around the bottom of the stanchion. Rich also didn’t want to make that much noise. Even though he didn’t know what he was going to find, he knew he didn’t want to share any discovery with anyone else.

  By about 4.55am, after he’s been fucking around with the anchor and the trolley for the best part of an hour, and now the sky was starting to lighten in the east, Rich began to wonder if he was just chasing some fat wild goose. He knew the brothers dumped something off the Kitty K. He knew it had to be something they didn’t want anybody else to see, or to have, else they wouldn’t have risked taking their police-impounded boat out, and they certainly wouldn’t have done it all without navigation lights. But, just because it was something they didn’t want anyone else to see, or to find, didn’t necessarily mean it was something that was going to make Rich rich.

  He thought about what it might be that was so dodgy they had to dump it at night. A body is what he kept thinking. But, whose body? And if they was going to dump a body, surely they’d dump it much further out to sea. Out to where the big west-east flood tide could catch it and drag it up to the Isle of Wight. They wouldn’t just chuck a body by the pier where, it could be hooked by some kid with a crab line and become a lead story on BBC Spotlight West by the end of the week.

  No, if it was a body they would’ve gone further out. And yet, thought Rich as his addled brain sifted through recent data, when he heard them pushing whatever it was that they pushed off the portside gunwale of their boat, the brothers were heading into port, not heading out.

  Coming in. Like they’d already been out and now were heading home, carrying something. Something they’d just picked up maybe? Out at sea. Something they didn’t want to be seen bringing back to their berth, even though it was dead of night.

  None of it made any sense. Still, Rich decides to give it another ten more chucks before he’ll give up and jack it in. He could hear one of the crabbers start their engine, round the river bend, in the main town harbour. The crabbers and netters would be starting to head out soon and he could certainly do without any of them inbreds seeing him fishing Morrisons’ trolleys out the harbour. Ten more chucks and he was gone.

  On chuck number six, a chuck that he threw a little more down stream and much closer to the pier ironwork than he had before, he hooked up to something new. At first he thought he’d hooked the stolen anchor over one of the pier’s cross braces, because when he pulled hard with both hands – the rope coiled like a snake up his forearm, to give extra grip – the thing didn’t budge an inch.

  He slackened his grip and repositioned himself on the other side of the bench, upwind of the stinking Morrisons’ trolley and tried again. One more big pull before he’d try to unhook it by dropping it back down and jiggling the rope to rattle free the grapple blade. One more pull, only this time using the pier rail strut as a post to yank it around, and give it an extra angle of leverage.

  So, with the rope wrapped around his forearm, over the top of his hoodie sleeve, Rich pulls so fucking hard his lips are stretched right back over his dying gums, as he sticks his once lily-white trainer against the seaweed-dripping, silt-covered bench and hauled like he was trying to bust himself a new hole. And yes, the fucking thing moved! Whatever it is moved nearly a foot. It isn’t a cross-brace he’s hooked, it’s something big and heavy and his grapple anchor is dug right into it.

  Next haul, he moves back downwind of the trolley again, so he’s positioned directly above where the rope enters the water. Again, he uses a rail post like a capstan to haul around. Again, he pulls so hard he can feel his arsehole pop, but again the thing moves. This time it moves up off the seabed, up through the water by maybe a foot or more. Of course, as soon as he gives any slack to the rope, the thing sinks back down fast. Back to the seabed. Whatever it is, it’s fucking heavy. So next pull he’s prepared, and uses the bench armrest to loop the rope around, holding the thing up off the bottom. A few more big pulls and he’ll be breaking the surface with whatever it was. The sky lightening up just enough now for him to probably see it, from the pier edge, if he hangs right over the rail.

  Rich is like a ferret or a weasel or a stoat. Thin. Sinewy. Skin and bone and tight little stringy muscles. Naked he looks like a streak of badger piss. But Rich has learned how to use his wiry strength. Unlike the brawny muscle-bound guys who work out every day in the prison gym, and get the screws to smuggle in protein shake powder, rather than spliff, Rich can easily lift his own body weight. The drugs and the fags and the pipe are shredding his lungs, but his shoulders and biceps are still rigid balls of knobbly muscle.

  By putting both feet on the rail and leaning right bac
k into each haul, and whipping the slack around the armrest in between the pulls, he’s making some ground. After one mammoth grunt of a pull, he can hear the noise of water splashing, way down below. Whatever he’s hooked is now, at last, hanging above the surface dripping water back into the harbour.

  Picking his way across the mud-splattered bench, Rich leans far over the rail and peers down into the greyness, to finally see what he’s snagged on his stolen anchor.

  Of all the different fish that swim in our sea, there are really only two basic types: fish that eat fish and fish that eat other stuff. The other stuff includes plankton, algae, weed, worms, sea lice, crabs, shrimps – although, to be fair, just about anything with a mouth big enough will eat shrimps. Shrimps are God’s little gift.

  The fish that eat other fish are predators. They have a well-developed appetite for other fish flesh, as well as their own. Cannibalism is not a taboo amongst sea life. Predator fish are generally as happy to eat their own babies, as they are to eat the babies of their foe.

  There are even more subtle divisions amongst predators and non-predators. There are apex predators and there are lazy predators. There are predators who live to hunt, whose entire existence boils down to their ability to seek out, to chase and to devour other fish and their families. And then there are predators who are just way too idle to be bothered to do much predating.

  The Atlantic sea bass is a warrior-like, gladiator-style predator, heavily armed and heavily defended with stiletto-sharp spines, a bony gill shield, razor-edged rakers, thick scales, and all the speed and agility of a snow leopard. But then, there’s the lazy predators: pollack, whiting, coley, pouting, and the laziest of them all is the cod. Although cod are predators too, in that they will predate upon other fish and crustaceans in order to feed, they are idle opportunists with varying degrees of unfussiness and sloth. While a bass is not satisfied with hunting anything less than a live fish with a beating heart and a fear-blinking eye, a cod will eat just about anything, dead or alive. Fresh or putrid. Wriggling or rotten.

  In fact, a cod is probably happier if its food is already dead, because that saves it the unwarranted effort of having to kill it first. If a cod can avoid work, it will, at any cost. A cod is the biggest, laziest, free-loadingest, scrounger, ponce and couch potato in the sea.

  Researchers examining the stomach contents of large cod caught in the North Sea regularly discover polystyrene cups inside the bigger fish. Big cod see white shapes on the seabed, and assume they’re dead cuttlefish. And, being very hungry and very lazy – as cod nearly always are – they suck them down, one after the other, in the vague hope that they might be food. In fact, they’re just empty coffee cups.

  Bass are very picky about what they’ll hunt. Cod will hoover up any old shit, on the premise that it might just possibly be lunch.

  And by far the easiest fish to catch are the greedy ones.

  As Robbie pads across the kitchenette in his bare feet, heading towards the stairs, he stops at the spotless worktop, that’s never seen much cooking action, and slides a knife out of a wooden block. The block is an angled lump of beechwood out of which bristles eight different knife-handles. Robbie can tell the big knives from the small knives just by the size of the handle. What Robbie can’t tell is what each knife is intended for cutting. There’s no label or guide. No map, like inside the lid of a box of chocolates, which tells you what fillings are inside what shapes. Robbie thinks they should have the same sort of shape-map on the knife block. Outlines of each knife, with a little description of what stuff you’re meant to cut with it.

  All Robbie knows now is he wants a big knife. He takes hold of the biggest handle and pulls a long knife out the block and walks down the stairs leading to the ground floor showroom and office. The meaty bass thump of the Corvette’s eight polished aluminium pistons making the stairway windows rattle as he passes.

  It wasn’t until he opened the office door and stepped down onto the rubber Porsche mat that had once been on the luggage shelf of an ancient Carrera GT, that Robbie realises four separate things at once. The first is that he’s not wearing any slippers. He can feel the rubber treads of the Porsche mat with his bare feet. Number two is that he is still clutching the photograph of him and Elsa in the basket of the Bournemouth wind-up-and-down balloon. Almost as soon as he realises this, he shifts it to his chest, glass front facing into his hot damp bathrobe, as though somehow he might be able to protect Elsa by clutching her to his breast. Third thing is the knife. The one he’d taken from the block with the big handle is outstretched in front of him now, the blade pointing into the office. Only now he realises the big knife he’d chosen was a bread knife with a serrated blade and a flat blunt square ended tip, instead of a point.

  Fourth thing he learns in this avalanche of information is that he knows the man who is now opening the drawers of Robbie’s small wooden filing cabinet and pulling out his folder of log books for the cars he currently has in stock.

  He knows the man is Polish. He’d met him three times before, once with Elsa, when she introduced them, only later to tell Robbie, when they were cutting lines on the little mirror from the hallway, what exactly it was that the Polish man did for a living. Second time was when Robbie went to meet him for a drink, on his own, in the bar of the Sandbanks Hotel, after calling him up on the number he’d copied from Elsa’s phone, while she was finally sleeping off a five-day binge.

  Third time was when Robbie had taken his share of the cash to a Thai restaurant in Parkstone very close to the John Lewis Home shop, where he and Elsa splurged. They had sat across a small table from each other, a plate of mixed starters between them: spring rolls, sesame prawn toasts, carrots cut into the shape of small fish, and Robbie had given the man an envelope full of cash. And he in turn had given Robbie a sheet of A4 paper on which was typed a small set of numbers, which were the latitude and longitude references of a small green buoy, attached to a rope, attached to one single crab pot.

  Although Robbie had owned a boat for nearly three years – owning a boat was practically de rigueur for anyone living in Sandbanks – he wasn’t exactly a confident or adventurous boater. Mostly, if he took his boat out – which he didn’t do nearly enough to justify the fees he paid to keep it at Blue Haven Quay – he’d just potter around Poole Harbour. He’d maybe cruise past Brownsea Island, see if he could catch a glimpse of one of the red squirrels that still enjoyed island-sanctuary there, unharrassed and unmolested by the scourge of the grey squirrel. He never did see one.

  And Elsa wasn’t a big fan of the boat. Probably because she sensed, fairly early on, that Robbie didn’t really know what he was doing, and that made her nervous.

  It was Robbie’s lack of knowledge with boats that made him ignorant to the finer details of latitude and longitude. And, when he stared at the numbers, printed so tiny on what seemed like such a huge expanse of white A4 paper, they didn’t raise in him any doubt or cause for concern. All he knew is that he could type them into the ‘find waypoint’ function of his very expensive split-screen NavMan chart plotter, and if he then pressed the right buttons, in the right sequence, the fabulous technology would give him a ‘route plan’, a ‘total distance’ and an ‘expected time of arrival’. Thing was so smart it could even estimate the amount of fuel the whole journey would use.

  As far as Robbie was concerned that’s all he needed to know. So long as he could operate the onboard computer plotter then it would tell him not only where these mysterious lat-long numbers were located, but also exactly how to get there.

  Of course, he would also have to know when the pot, the rope and the lime green buoy was going to be dropped at the location of the lat-long co-ordinates.

  The Polish man had insisted on counting all the money in the envelope Robbie had given him. He had done it under the table, but not very discreetly. The waiter and the waitress, both in Thai traditional dress, had noticed the man in the very new-looking tweed checked blazer and pronounced widow’s peak count
ing a stack of 50 pound notes out of an envelope and laying them one at a time on his thigh.

  Robbie was a bit surprised at the man’s lack of concern. He assumed someone in his line of business would be more discreet, take precautions and not want to be seen counting 25 grand in cash in public. Might at least go to the toilet to do it.

  Robbie told himself to relax. The guy knew what he was doing. He did this all the time. Robbie is the new guy here. The guy bought and sold quantities of all sorts of things. He had connections to buy stuff. He had connections to sell stuff. What he lacked most specifically, in this instance, was a partner with half the capital and more importantly with access to a sea-going vessel and the wherewithal to reach a certain designated marine location, at a certain designated time, or at least, within a certain time window.

  “Thursday,” the Polish guy said, as he tapped the sheet of A4 with one finger that had an uncomfortably long pointed fingernail. “Wednesday night drop. Thursday pick up.”

  “Thursday it is,” said Robbie confidently as he peered one last time at the meaningless numbers on the ocean of white paper, before folding it into three, lengthways, and slipping it into his inside right breast pocket.

  Robbie had no burning ambition to be a drug smuggler, or importer or dealer. He did need to turn over some cash though. Elsa, God love her, was an expensive habit and he had no intention of making savings or efficiencies where she was concerned. He never wanted to say ‘no’ to Elsa. Only yes. Trying to do Elsa on the cheap would not be doing her justice. Whatever she wanted or desired, within reason, Robbie would provide. He wanted her to think of him as generous, big hearted, fun-loving and sweet.