Pot Luck

by Nick Fisher

  Lifting the radio out her belt, about to push the call button, Chin looks up, directly into the sweating face of Adrian Collins.

  “Shit!”

  Adrian now stopping his stride out the lane, so hand-brake quick, his brother Matty rear-ends him. Matty knocking Adrian another step nearer to the Chinese detective who already rattled his cage on the Kitty.

  As Matty cannons into Adrian. All eyes meet.

  And before anyone draws another breath, Adrian’s dodged round the rear of the truck and is sprinting fast down Ripcroft Lane towards the cliffs and Tout Quarry.

  Teeth clenched, legs pumping.

  While Matty is backing up the lane like a polecat ferret working arse-ways down a rat hole. A heartbeat later Matty’s vaulting a shiplap fence into a terraced back garden. Followed by another, and another. Flashes of Little Tikes toys and rubber-lined goldfish ponds passing the corner of his eye as he crashes into yet another fence. This one feeling like it’s made of bread sticks. Pieces splintering under his boot as he tries another vault, but ends up just ploughing through.

  On he goes, heading south one garden at a time.

  Tug never really liked to run. At the gym he was strictly a weights man. Free weights. Proper job. Not those spastic machines that’re supposed to mimic the action of free weights, but without all the wobble and clatter and the need to rack and unrack barbells.

  Tug liked the clatter. Dropping a pair of 20kg dumbbells into the weight rack made a good beefy thunk. A heavy chunky steel sound, that told everyone around that you’d just been pumping some big-ass iron.

  Tug liked the moments inbetween each weightlifting set. When he could rest his muscles, have a butcher’s in the mirror at his biceps, or the deepening valley that cut across the top of his deltoids.

  Or better still scope the treadmills, steppers and cross-trainers for trim Lycra-wrapped buttocks. Tug loving the rear view of a fit girl in black or pink stretchy stuff, just beginning to break out into a delicate sweat. Nice.

  But not in any way liking to get on those treadmills himself. Nope. The whirring whine of the belt, the thud-thud-thud-thud of trainer against rubber tread. No thank you. Made him breathless just thinking about it. Tug preferring the muscle-burn of weights to the lung-fucking exertion of running.

  Tug never really liked to run.

  Which made chasing the brother, Adrian, down Ripcroft Lane such a massive haemorrhoid pain in the arse. Adrian older, heavier, wearing clumpy great work boots, and yet still accelerating fast away from Tug.

  This does not look good. As Adrian climbs up a white Portland stone wall and disappears over it into the massive cave and tunnel-riddled Tout Quarry, Tug well and truly fucked off to be losing such a lot of ground so soon in the chase. But all the same, pleased as freelance pie-tester that Chin isn’t going to be watching him perform so badly in the perp-pursuing stakes. On account of her choosing to take off after Matty herself.

  Chin loved to run. On the flat she was like a whippet on crack. Juiced to the max. Slender petite legs pumping a sprint-time more in keeping with some giant-legged Afro-Caribbean jock rather than a tiny oriental girl with a pony tail and black shoes sold in the ‘Back To School’ section of Clarks.

  Chin loving to run on the flat. Not at all loving this raggedy arse steeplechase that Matty was taking her on, through the jagged detritus of booby-trapped Southwell back gardens.

  Jumps and fishpond trenches, trampolines and outraged dogs withstanding, Chin was still gaining on Matty across this garden obstacle course. Chin could have easily matched Matty’s pace. Exceeded it. Brought him down with a twat from her baton. Stood on his neck and cuffed his rope-gnarled hands behind his back.

  Could have done. If he hadn’t made a tight right as he landed on the potato bed of Number 16 Mead Bower and dodged around their Fiat-sized greenhouse.

  Chin following his swift right turn, only a pace behind. Two at the most. Accelerating around the back of the greenhouse, her head down, powering fast, digging deep and running, balls up, straight into his fist.

  Bosh!

  Matty sure he could feel some sort of bone crunching just before the Chinese-looking detective went down like a poleaxed rag doll. Knees buckling under her in response to the brute force of his swing. Her accordion-like collapse not quite spectacular enough to dissuade Matty from stomping his Caterpillar boot on her ribcage – twice. Before he continued on towards Tout Quarry.

  Matty knowing she’s a tough little fucker. Anyone could see it in those cold conger eel eyes. So Matty not taking any chance she might get up again in a hurry.

  Rich Tovey had a spider’s web tattooed below his left ear. Stretching down his neck and under his grubby collar. To the right of centre, a spider clung to the strands of its web, looking like a mongrel-cross between a ladybird and a starfish.

  “Black widow,” Rich would say to anyone who asked. “Fucking kill a man with one bite.”

  Rich didn’t say anything at the moment, what with the black wet sock still jammed into the back of his throat.

  But when Helen pulled the sock out his mouth, dirty words flowed in a torrent like she’d just yanked the plug out a dam. Gushing out in a fuck-filled flood of abuse.

  “Untie my hands, you fucking cunt bitch,” was Rich Tovey’s opening volley. “Your fucking husband and his halfwit brother are so fucking busted.”

  Helen flinching from the fetid stench of his breath.

  “Undo. My. Fucking. Hands!”

  Helen now watching the spider shudder in its web as the veins and sinews on the side of Rich’s neck pulsed and swelled as he shouted more filth.

  “They’re getting done for this. End of fucking story,” he spat. “Fucking jumped me. My pot. Finders fucking keepers. And Matty is so fucking going–”

  She quickly wedged the wet black sock back into his mouth. Hard.

  Rich now shaking his head like a Jack Russell trying to kill a mouthful of rat.

  Then, with her knee leaning down on his throat and her left hand yanking up his greasy, slimed hair, Helen using the garden dibber that Adrian’s dad made 20 years ago out of a foot of sharpened broom handle to pound the sock in between Rich Tovey’s tonsils.

  His eyes bulging and leaking as she rammed the sock hard against his throat. The wooden point tearing through the sock into soft flesh.

  This shut up his filthy swearing, and made his eyes boggle wider with surprise and fear.

  Helen took the garden dibber out of Rich’s mouth. The point now red wet and dripping.

  Her ‘netball knee’ cracking like a Ryvita, as she stood up and walked around Rich’s body, to where the fork with only three tines leaned against the wall.

  Tout Quarry, Bowers Quarry, Kingbarrow Excavations, Albion Jordan’s Mine and Thrutch Cave are all stone-working sites located on top of the huge lump of rock that is the Island of Portland.

  From these gouged and blasted and drilled and sawn and chipped workings into the lump, came the centuries-old, seemingly endless supply of Portland stone.

  The Bank of England, the Cenotaph, Somerset House, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Hampton Court, the British Museum and Eddystone Lighthouse, all constructed from the oolithic limestone that forms the sperm-shaped rock whose head is sniffing at the arse of Weymouth, and whose slender tail becomes Portland Bill, pointing a jagged upright fuck-you finger towards France.

  Tout, Bowers, Kingbarrow, Albion and Thrutch were all historic quarry sites of Portland, they were also the illicit playgrounds of Adrian and Matty and all their dip-shit schoolmates ever since Miss Killick’s class in Underhill Junior School.

  As schoolboys they’d investigated every hole and cave and ‘Danger Do Not Enter’ shaft they could find. Lighting fires, killing rats, stealing tools and taking dumps down shafts in order to hear the sweet satisfying ‘plop’ of turd hitting groundwater a hundred-and-fifty foot below.

  The fork with three tines instead of four was always a kack-handed tool to use. Forking soil it was 25 percent less efficient
. Hefting manure it would always tip slightly to one side, making it necessary to grip the shaft tighter to stop it trying to swivel in your hand.

  But having one less tine on the left side made no difference to Helen’s job of pressing the far right tine against the badly-drawn black widow spider’s spastic body, while lifting her cracking knee high above the fork’s head and stamping down with her mock Croc, as hard as if she were breaking a layer of winter ice frozen on a pig trough.

  Adrian and Matty knew every place to hide in the bowel-like innards of Tout Quarry. But an island is always an island, even if it is now joined by a long thin causeway to the mainland. There is only one way on. And one way off. One road. One exit. Unless of course you’re prepared to dive into the sea and take your chances swimming around Portland Bill, all 13 miles of its coastline, against the second fastest tidal race in Great Britain.

  And if you did that, you’d really just be a prick. A dead prick.

  Bouncing is fun. Definitely. Sitting in your pushchair in the vegetable garden watching a cabbage-white butterfly flutter from one broad bean stalk to another in the slanting sunlight is fun. No question. Dropping your Peppa Pig beaker onto the ground and watching Ribena juice leak out the mouth holes into the earth is fun too.

  But not nearly as much fun as riding in a wheelbarrow while your mummy pushes it from the allotment shed to daddy’s truck and back.

  Sooner or later the brothers were going to have to hold their freezing cold damp, shivering hands aloft and walk out of the workings of Tout Quarry into the eye-squinting glare of a police-issue million-candle LED flashlight beam.

  The cold night air making clouds of steam curl out with each breath, as Chin, face bruised and plastered, ribs bound, pressed the button on her radio and hissed…

  “We’ve got them.”

  There was only so many times Tug could say, “I don’t fucking believe this,” over and over again, stressing every word differently every time he said it. Shouting it. Roaring it. In the faces of the two police constables standing in front of him outside of Interview Room 2.

  “I do not fucking believe this,” he said again, slightly changing his sentence construction, but looking more and more like he was about to rip a wooden top’s head off.

  There was only so many times Tug could say it before Jackie, against all her instincts and desires, would have to put her shoes back on, suck in her belly and walk around the custody counter to throw some water on Tug’s wrath-filled flames.

  There was a lot of questions Adrian could answer as he sat, hands cuffed in front of him, in Interview Room 2. Seated on a hard orange plastic chair opposite the Chinese-looking detective, whose blackened eyes he did not want to meet. Meanwhile, her bloodshot pupils drilling holes in his face. His own eyes staring down at his hands, covered in plasters and blood-dried scratches from all the blackthorn and brambles growing down the Tout Quarry cut cliff faces.

  There was a lot of questions she asked about what happened that day out on the Kitty K. Where they went. What they found. What really happened to Tim? Did he fall? Why was he up on the roof anyway? Was he really on the roof? Because, they tested the jib boom for DNA. Hairs. Blood. Anything human matched to Tim’s unique human genetic code. But there was nothing.

  So if he did hit his head on the steel L-shaped boom with the rope pulley, why was there no evidence of it ever having happened? Why did he and Matty take the Kitty K out at night? She knows they did. Broke the seals. Ripped the tape. Why? Where did they go?

  They know all about his brother, she tells him. Bristol. Handing out samples of hash. Making deals. Talking big. Dragging Adrian deeper and deeper into a hole that he’s not going to climb out of in under a ten-stretch. Minimum.

  A hole that is going to swallow up his wife and his marriage and his mortgage. His two little boys. Oh, and her job. You have any idea how quickly she’ll get kicked out of her teacher assistant training programme when the local education authority finds out about her husband’s criminal activities?

  Adrian got any idea how twitchy schools are about teaching staff and CRB checks? Know how many fingers you’d need to count up the days before she gets called into the Headmaster’s office? Sent home. Eyes downcast. Teachers in the staff room wagging their tongues come break time. Eating up the delicious scandal like a plate of free nibbles at a Waitrose deli counter.

  Does Adrian truly understand what a hot, bubbling jacuzzi full of shit he’s lowering himself, his tiny innocent boys and his heart-of-gold wannabe primary school teacher wife, into?

  All this ‘cause of his dead-in-the-water brother, acting like a retard? And possibly a murderer? Huh? How’s that sound?

  Is that what really happened on the Kitty? Is that what they’re all going to be looking at? Because if it goes down that particular dark alley, then Adrian better cut his bad blood loose very quickly. Like now, quickly. On account of the fact that you can bet the farm, the boat, the shoes off your little boys’ bouncing feet, that Matty will be sat next door in Interview Room 1 – facing her colleague, gripping the handle of a big old spade – as he digs a stinking pit to bury his brother?

  You think Matty’s sat there saying nothing? She asks.

  You think he’s just sat there schtum in the face of evidence, photos, testimony, tape recordings, CCTV, prints, samples, intents and conspiracies?

  You think he’s not giving his version quick as he can? Signing a statement. Pointing a finger. While you watch a nice little home life collapse and crumble around your ears, as you sit staring at your hands over and over again, just saying ‘no comment’.

  “You think he’s saying ‘no comment’?”

  “No comment.”

  “You think he’s not giving us the Story According To Matty?”

  “No comment.”

  “You honestly believe keeping quiet while he talks, is the best possible course of action?”

  “No comment.”

  There were a lot of questions Detective Chin asked of Adrian over and over again, that he could answer. But, chose not to. Lots of questions he knew the answers to. Answers that filled his stomach full of acid. And fear. Shame. Pain. And guilt. Answers that threatened the innocent little lives of people he professed to love.

  And yet there was one question she kept asking over and over and over again, that he really truly could not give her the answer to.

  “So. Where the fuck is your truck?”

  Parsnip was such a sweet name. Lovely. Childishly innocent and very original. Helen was pleased Jack had held his ground. It showed pluck. She’d tell the story at her school, to her Key Stage 1 pupils. And show them a picture of the wooden sign she and little Jack’d painted together with a flower in place of the dot of the ‘i’ in Parsnip.

  Parsnip was a sweet name.

  For a shitty sow.

  Helen’s father never took to her. Hard to handle. Quick to snap. Ugly. Her snout long and scarred and her temperament, pure evil. When she was in season, he’d let the boar into her sty but even he wasn’t that interested. Scared almost. He’d follow her around but half-hearted. When he tried to mount her, she’d whip her head round, tear into him. A few times she’d left bloody teeth marks in the boar’s cheek. Ripped the lower edge off one ear.

  Parsnip was not a nice pig.

  Helen was glad Parsnip turned out bad, though. Not for her father. Or for little Jack. But for herself. Because when she tipped the chunks out of the thick black industrial rubble sack onto the wet mud, Parsnip would rip into them with the rabid hunger only a slightly inbred bad pig could muster.

  She’d eat anything.

  Bad or not, Parsnip was more than happy today, to sink her dirty yellow teeth into the slabs of white-grey meat. Including the one with the faded blue writing across it.

  Writing that just said ‘Rich’.

  It started with a Cup-a-Soup. Ainsley Harriott. Stilton and Broccoli. Three Cup-a-Soups to be precise. Two Stilton and Broccoli and a Chicken and Country Vegetables.

&
nbsp; Ainsley’s shiny bald black head and unfeasibly white teeth glinting from the cardboard cut-out beside the nipple-high display stand at the end of Aisle Three.

  Matty only in Asda to get a pork pie or a pastie, or one of those ten-inch-long sausage rolls with the flaky pastry that blows away in any south-westerly when you bite into it out on deck. Half your fucking wrap-around blowing off towards the Isle of Wight.

  Pastie, sausage roll or pork pie, didn’t matter. Whatever had a red marked-down sticker stuck on it. Something galloping towards its expiry date.

  A spotty teenage girl in a lime green fleece with a half-arsed smile and a wodge of Orbit Freeze on the chew, was giving out free soup sachets to lumpy, tattooed mums as they wheeled trolleys in the direction of a three-for-two White Lightning offer.

  Matty liking the look of her tits. Even in the manky Asda fleece. Picking up a Stilton and Broccoli from her tray as he walked past carrying his two pasties and a Yorkie. Giving her a wink as he slips the sachet in his pocket. She looks right through him though, like he’s a thin spray of rebound piss-mist. Or else she’s just recently turned zombie.

  So he goes around again. Cheeky grin stuck in place. And picks up a Chicken and Country Vegetables this time, with another Stilton and Broccoli just to show he’s a man of appetites. Badge on her very high, very melon-shapely tit says her name is ‘Taylor’.

  Matty asking for her phone number outright, just slightly before she stops chewing Orbit, flicks her gaze up to meet his eyes, and says, “Piss off. Perve.”

  So it started with a Cup-a-Soup. Three. That Matty threw across the wheelhouse, clattering into the corner by the filthy chipped mugs stuffed in a rack just below the two unused, untouched automatic life jackets.

  One of the sachets disappearing down behind the toolbox full of crappy rusted Chinese spanners.