Pot Luck

by Nick Fisher

  The voice-activated microphones in his BMW are a different thing entirely. Voice-activation for the purposes of recording makes perfect sense. If you’re covertly recording a conversation, you definitely want the machine to know how to switch itself on. And, the team who fitted the surveillance kit to Max’s car, at the tech-base in Farnborough, did a bang-up job. Not only are the mics voice-activated so they start recording soon as there’s a conversation in the vehicle, there’s also a back-up manual switch too. On Max’s key fob, there’s a little red LED light on one side; looks like it all part of the central locking system, but actually it indicates when the four hidden mics are recording.

  Max the Sikh has already downloaded the entire BMW conversation – with the man who identified himself as ‘Matt’ and says he was from Weymouth – onto an MP3 file. This file is also being copied onto the same disc.

  Max labelled it in a separate file as ‘Possible Purchase Conversation’ and sent it to his handler as an email attachment as well. All this copying is just belt and braces stuff. Max has done undercover work for over five years and he’s seen far too many convictions go tits up or melt away because evidence had been wrongly obtained or badly collated and catalogued.

  Max’s handler, like Max, is a stickler for accuracy and detail. He leaves nothing to chance. The reason Max’s career as an undercover police officer had been so successful and led to such a long list of solid convictions had nothing really to do with having big balls and a brass neck. It’s all about knowing how to use the technology correctly, and also logging evidence clearly. Sometimes his job was more like being an accountant than a cop.

  The Bristol Cash Converter was the third ‘Red Herring’ shop Max had run in his career as a UC. Red Herring shops being a very basic, but very effective first line of offence for gathering intelligence on the criminal community of a given area.

  An old style pawnshop or a Cash Converter would be taken over, or sometimes a new one opened up, in an area known to be experiencing a volume of burglaries, home invasions, car thefts and car crimes. Normally, they had to be sanctioned by the local Borough Commander, but most of the time if the Commander was in charge of an area that was experiencing high levels of house and street crime, then he’d already be getting it in the neck from residents’ associations and Neighbourhood Watch schemes.

  If the rates of crime were on the increase, then the Commander would also have his local MP and the local Board of Commerce and the Rotarians giving him a hard time too. Chances are he’d be more than delighted to sanction a Red Herring shop and would even find money in his budget to help with the rent, and tech costs.

  Red Herring shops had proven time and time again to be useful tools in controlling certain types of crime and criminals, if they were manned and operated properly. On a very simple operational level, Red Herring shops worked by providing a premises where it became known that you could unload a bit of knock-off gear. A Cash Converter that didn’t ask too many questions, was reasonably lax about proof of ID and that paid just about the going rate for stolen goods, would soon see a steady trickle of sellers beating a path to its door.

  Obviously junkies and crack-heads and cat burglars and creepers (who steal from offices and gyms) would be regular visitors. They need to convert the smaller items they’ve nicked into quick cash. Good backroom police work could match individuals to crimes, could establish patterns and geography and habits.

  The real trick with Red Herring shops was to keep the shop and any consequent convictions very remote from each other. Good handlers and backroom officers would use the intelligence to discover who was doing what, where and when, in order to set up a series of arrests, further down the line. Well away from the shop or unconnected to any recently pawned and stolen item. Putting distance between the source of the intelligence and the conviction is known in the trade as ‘dry cleaning’.

  Sometimes the items, although they’re nicked and therefore pertinent to a specific crime, weren’t of any real police interest. Sometimes it was simply the person bringing them in who was interesting. Not interesting to nick and convict and put away, but to ‘turn’. To manipulate into becoming a ‘criminal informant’, also known as a ‘Chiz’, or Criminal Human Intelligence Subject.

  To have a lot of evidence on someone who’s at the centre of criminal activity and in turn knows a lot of other criminals can be wonderfully fertile. Once faced with the cold hard evidence against them, and reminded just how long they could be banged up for, it’s amazing how many colleagues a criminal will shop or entrap, in order to save his own skin.

  As a rule Max doesn’t get involved in any activity outside the running of the shop and making sure that all transactions and ensuing conversations have been perfectly documented from as many angles as possible. Any of the intelligence he gathers, or faces and names he can put in the frame, are the currency of his handler and other UC field officers who follow up and put together the game plan of manipulation or arrest.

  Occasionally oddities walk into his shop; people asking for other people, bad guys trying to find other bad guys. Men asking about where to buy guns, explosives, slaves and recently a Pakistani guy asking if Max knew anyone who could kill his wife for a price.

  All these exchanges were passed down the line. Like the man from Weymouth, with the very unusual but very good quality hash. Of course Max would initially talk up a deal, and exchange contact numbers, but he’d then pass it over to his handler and hope it was a ball someone else could run with. Max the Sikh being happiest when he was in the shop and working with the technology.

  He was neither called Max, nor was he a Sikh.

  Didn’t take Tug long to decide he really needs to talk to the brothers. The crime scene officers with elasticated bags over their shoes were tut-tutting about the state of the Kitty K. One of them holding the broken tamper-proof police issue seal in one gloved hand while another held an evidence bag open for him to lower it into. Taking it away to dust for prints.

  One of the other CSOs was looking away from the harbour, downstream towards the sea, talking quickly and quietly and seriously on his mobile.

  Tug would love to know who was on the other end, and if the conversation they were having was going to sink him any deeper into the shit than he already was. The Kitty K being his responsibility. At least that’s what his boss was going to say, as he himself carefully dodged any out-pouring of shit, to keep his own neck lily-white and free from stain. Shit-dodging being an art practised by the higher ranks. An art that goes hand-in-hand with shit-dumping. Something that was about to occur in Tug’s vicinity very, very soon, unless he could find some answers to do some super-slick arse-covering of his own.

  When he told Chin he saw the brothers driving away from the harbour in their truck at sparrow’s fart, and how big brother was driving and Matty was sat in the back, bouncing, she just looked at him, with that blank stare. No movement of her mouth. Eyes, unblinking, like she was looking at something she didn’t quite comprehend, or dealing with a retard.

  She was hot. And she was cool. And she looked very cute in a stab vest. But she was beginning to piss him off a chunk too. Today was not officially Tug’s Fault Day. He needed to make that absolutely clear. To everyone.

  The post-mortem on dead Tim was to be carried out this morning by Tony ‘Eyebrows’, the Coroner from Dorchester. It was starting at 9 am. In the mortuary in Weymouth General, and Tug would really like to take Chin along. Like to show her how cool and at ease he was around mortuary assistants cutting skulls open with surgical angle-grinders and stuff.

  Tug had never minded post-mortems. He’d seen plenty of detective level officers chuck their ring, or even faint, at a PM. Especially, on drowned victims, or burned ones. Burned ones were the worst – everyone said so – because of the smell. Tug didn’t mind the smell, didn’t mind the sights either; like when they peel the face up and curl it back from the skull. He didn’t even mind the bone-sawing noise that makes some of the detective guys stick f
ingers in their ears and turn away. None of it made any impression on Tug whatsoever. He didn’t know why. They’re dead. No one is in pain. No one is suffering. To be honest he’s felt worse standing in a butcher’s shop watching a big fat butcher saw through loin chops. Knowing that’s something you’re going to eat – that made him feel weird. But dead bodies? Nope. He could watch them being sawn up all day long.

  He wondered about Chin. She didn’t strike him as the squeamish type. The headless cat hadn’t freaked her one bit. But a cat is a cat. A dead body is a whole different kettle.

  He quite liked the idea of taking her to the PM. Let her see how funny he was with Tony ‘Eyebrows’. Tony’s favourite game, trying to freak people out with his latest tales of amazing and disgusting deaths he’s attended, or knows a guy, who knows a guy, who attended. Tony being a kind of collector of truly sick death stories. Old ladies who died and had their face chewed off by their cats. Roofers who impaled themselves on railings. And celebrity deaths. Tony always had some little professional coroner-nugget to share about the celebs who’d died. Michael Jackson, Whitney, Amy Winehouse, some little detail didn’t never get in the papers. Something only coroners know. Didn’t really matter if it was true to not, Tug just loved it.

  And most of all, Tug really wanted to do something to take that humouring-a-retard look off Chin’s face. Something clever. Clever police work would probably be best though.

  He’s already been on the phone to Adrian’s home number. He badly wanted to talk to the brothers and also talk in person to Adrian’s wife. Tug remembering her from when she used to work in the Sea Life Centre, helping with dolphins, feeding them and stuff. Wearing a swimsuit all day on account of getting wet with the dolphins splashing. A swimsuit with the naff Sea Life logo on the front. Great tits though.

  So Adrian’s wife, Helen, said Adrian got a call from Dougie on the Nicola B at like four-thirty in the morning, or might’ve been five. Dougie having trouble firing up the Nicola B, and maybe being a deckhand down, so Adrian saying he might crew for Dougie. And as she’s not heard anything since, she assumes that’s where he is.

  And so Tug’s calling the Harbour Master, the slobby drunken twat that he is, and getting Dougie’s mobile number. Then Tug calls Dougie who’s way out somewhere 15 miles south of the Bill, the phone signal as crap as anything, and only able to catch about every third word or so. All the same, Tug making out from these one in three, that Dougie doesn’t know anything about Adrian, or Matty. And the Nicola B is running like a wet dream in Wonderland since Dougie fitted a pair of reconditioned Volvo Pentas two months ago.

  So really, as far as Tug is concerned, he’s already doing good police work. And let’s face it, what is Chin doing that’s so brilliant? Except standing on the deck of the Kitty K, getting in the way of the CSOs.

  “What time’s the Coroner start?” she asks Tug.

  “Nine. Supposed to be. More like nine-thirty by the time he’s got his cinnamon Danish and dug out the angle grinder.”

  “Does that come off?” she asks one of the CSOs, pointing at the Kitty K’s hauling jib.

  “Two bolts on the side,” says the guy in the white paper romper suit and shoe covers.

  “That’s what he’s supposed to have hit his head on?” asks Chin. The CSO nods. “Let’s take it to the Coroner,” says Chin to Tug. “Show it to him. Get him to match it to the skull wound.”

  Tug nods. Not showing any expression. But inside, in his head, he’s shouting, “Aw fuck! Why didn’t I think of that?!”

  “Yeah. Uh huh... Might as well… I guess,” he says evenly. “Cross the I’s. Dot the T’s.”

  As boys they’d both had their own veg patch. They could choose seeds from the packets in the shed and they could have all the manure or compost they wanted too. Both held in plywood clamps at the bottom of the plot. The manure needed digging in. So did the compost. So it was no good just barrowing over a big pile of the stuff to plop on a patch, like Matty did one year. His dad giving him the fork, the one with one broken tine, and telling him to fork it in, until it was all evenly mixed. Every time Matty stopped, his dad telling him it wasn’t enough. Telling him that if the manure was left in big clumps it would ‘burn’ the seedlings. And, that the compost was too wet, so it needed to be dried by mixing it well with the topsoil.

  Matty got blisters on his hands from all the digging with the crappy fork. Put him off gardening for good. Matty didn’t even bother to choose any seeds to sow that year. Even though he’d actually done what dad said, and dug his whole bed over and over, until the soil and the compost and rotted-down horseshit was all blended together in equal measures.

  Way Adrian saw it, by Matty not sowing one single seed into the now perfectly prepared veg bed he was sticking two dirty fingers up to his dad. Saying, you can make me dig it, but you can’t make me plant it.

  After a couple of weeks dad saying if Matty didn’t want to pick some seeds to plant, then dad would pick them, and he’d plant the patch out instead. Sort of like a threat, bit of an arm-twist, kind of little blackmail-move to make Matty finish the job. Didn’t work. Matty just shrugged, like he could give a shit. Dad’s lip curling. Getting riled. But keeping control of his temper. Not wanting to make it a big issue. Not wanting to put Matty off.

  He did though. With the crappy fork and the blisters and the pedantry. So Matty planted nothing. Dad planted nothing. The weeds took over, until about six weeks later Matty’s veg patch was like a bit of crazy wilderness in an otherwise perfectly-tended allotment.

  Adrian picked his seeds. Grew his vegetables. His mum and dad making a big fuss at Sunday lunch when they were roasting his parsnips or covering his leeks in white sauce. Matty not looking or caring what vegetables they were eating. For two or three years Adrian continued cultivating his veg patch and being the good vegetable-producing son, until it felt like the point had been made, and he too left his patch of the allotment to run wild and ragged. Their dad never using those plots again, even though he kept on running the allotment until the day he died. Like those plots, those squares that he’d given to his sons and that they’d abandoned, were somehow dead to him.

  If they weren’t good enough for his boys to care about and to tend, then he wasn’t going to tend them either. Even though the seeds and weeds that grew up on them spilled over into the good ground, he never touched them again.

  When he died, the whole allotment quickly began to turn to wasteland. Adrian and Matty still used the shed. They ripped out the shelving and the trays where he used to germinate seeds, and filled the space with crab pots and anchors, ropes and buoys, nets and traps, outboard engines and a spare hauling winch they salvaged off a decommissioned Portland crabber. It was a big shed. The biggest of all the sheds on the allotment site, perched on the southern edge of Portland Bill, overlooking the sea.

  Neither Adrian nor Matty ever grew another thing in the soil after their dad died. But three years ago, when she was pregnant with Josh, Helen suddenly got the veg garden bug. She watched the hairy specky guy on TV, who grew all sorts of things to cook. She bought books. Visited garden centres. Started talking to some of the old boys who had allotments to the east of dad’s. An old man who had neat rows of beans growing round hazel sticks with empty Lucozade bottles stuck on the end of the sticks, and strings of ripped-up plastic bags, like bunting, hung between rows of tiny seedlings.

  Gradually, Helen had reclaimed some of the huge allotment in fits and starts, but she never bothered with the shed. It was too full of fishing gear and too much of a mess.

  Now Rich Tovey is lying in the middle of the shed’s brown lino floor. Curled up like a cooked prawn, because Matty has tied his feet together. And tied his hands together. And then tied his feet to his hands. One stinking wet green-slimed trainer is on, the other foot bare. Matty having taken the trainer off to remove Rich’s sock. One of those low-cut trainer socks with a black tick above the heel, which is now stuffed in Rich’s mouth, with a length of boat rag wound round h
is jaw and neck and passed between his teeth, to keep the sock at the back of his tongue, stop him spitting it out.

  Matty wanted to put a sack on his head too. Adrian said no. Rich’s eyes huge and bulging, one of them all bloodshot and red from where Matty sat on his face for so long. Rich still growling in his throat. Fighting the ropes. Adrian the other side of the floor now, down on his haunches rocking backwards and forwards from his heels to his toes, looking like some kind of crazed Muslim praying in a mosque.

  Matty talking, talking, talking. Saying what they need to do with the dope. With the pot. With the truck. With Rich. With the guy from Bristol. The Sikh who wants to buy a kilo. Who is going to ring and come and give Matty money. Or this other man is going to come instead. Man who works for Max. Probably another Sikh. Matty again now talking about Rich. Saying what it is they’ve got to do.

  Adrian rocking. Covering his ears. Trying to get a thought clear in his head. An idea. A sniff of sense. Clarity. Anything that points to a way out of all this fucking mess.

  Tug is not so happy about having to drive his car across town with the boot wide open, lid sticking up in the air. The right angle of the Kitty K’s hauling jib sticking out. A great square section of steel pipe, now all wrapped in bubble wrap and bagged and sealed in two huge evidence bags. Neither big enough to fit it all in, so one on each end, joined in the middle. The crime scene guys more than happy for him and Chin to take it away, because it hadn’t been swabbed on the day of the accident. This being a major fuck up on the CS team’s part. And now that the original CS ‘Do Not Cross’ tapes and seals have been broken, there’s officially no point in swabbing it. Because any evidence, even DNA, would be deemed to have been potentially contaminated, and therefore of no practical use. So they were happy for the Coroner to try and match its profile against the head wound. Least it would be of some use, confirming likely cause of death and being one less item for them to worry about.