Dark Oceans

by Mark Macrossan

  In any event, he had more pressing concerns.

  ‘Well they do all involve gravity, in a sense.’

  He was in the room of another barrister in his chambers, Ryland Pugh – also known as the Killer – who was explaining his theories about what was going on with the incidents. Everything about the Killer was short, including his height (five feet six inches, at best), his hair (crewcut) and, reputedly, his temper. Despite claims to an aristocratic lineage, he had the face of a nineteenth century convict – it was both brutal and mischievous – or some sort of satanic pixie, the sort of face you might see in an old political cartoon. Jon couldn’t attest to how many loaves of bread the Killer had stolen, but he had a formidable record as criminal defence counsel. He was also the most generous person Jon knew.

  ‘When you think about it. Runaway car… falling bricks…’, the Killer was counting them out on his short, dangerous-looking fingers, ‘… the murderous train door… and…’

  ‘The tree,’ Jon said glumly.

  ‘The fucking tree. Exactly. Gravity. And also… all, somehow, so incredibly banal. Not even remotely newsworthy. And… all in… when was the first one?’

  ‘A week ago. Today.’

  ‘Four in seven days. Has anything happened today?’

  ‘No. Not yet.’

  Ryland went quiet for a moment.

  ‘So what are you telling me Ry,’ Jon said. ‘It’s the Universe. I’m a prisoner of Quantum Theory.’

  ‘Hmmm. It’s a bit of a bizarre… concurrence, isn’t it, all of this.’

  ‘A bit? It’s ridiculous. What are the chances?’

  ‘The chances,’ Ry nodded. ‘Probability theory can be a little complex. You could calculate it, but look, flukes and coincidences, they do happen you know. The most improbable of things. Life, for example.’

  ‘Life.’

  ‘Originating as it did in the primordial soup. A bunch of chemicals finding each other in the right combination etcetera, etcetera, I read somewhere the chances of it all coming together the way it did… About as unlikely as a tornado tearing through a junkyard and randomly throwing together a jumbo jet.’

  ‘Yes, well, with a bit of luck I’ll be spared the tornado at least.’

  ‘Luck, yes, and that’s kind of the point,’ Ry said, suddenly animated. ‘The wildest improbabilities do occur. And far too often, people attempt to ascribe meaning to them when they shouldn’t. When it’s really just a random throw of the die… so to speak.’

  ‘So why has this lotto-win-from-hell fallen on my head? Why me?’

  ‘Well that’s the way it…’ Ry began.

  But he’d stopped, frozen in time and space; he was staring at Jon, looking through him though, not at him. It either meant Ry was thinking, or the arrow of death from the fourth dimension had missed Jon and killed the Killer.

  ‘What.’

  ‘Of course,’ Ry said, finally, ‘there’s another way of looking at this. Anything as improbable as this series of so-called accidents is more likely than not to have a rational explanation… a link, if you like. Goes without saying.’

  Jon just looked at him.

  ‘No, I mean,’ Ry added, ‘just because you can’t see the link, doesn’t mean there isn’t one.’

  ‘Right. Aren’t you contradicting yourself?’ Jon looked out the window, keeping one eye out for malevolent weather. This wasn’t helping, it was time to go. Time to move on. He’d only really been looking for someone to tell this to, to complain to, and someone who wouldn’t think he was mad, and so the job had fallen to the maddest person he knew. He was reminded of why he was called the Killer: because all his ex-girlfriends had so comprehensively disappeared after they’d broken up with him that everyone reasoned he must have killed them. It certainly put to shame Jon’s ‘moving-on process’ (for want of a better phrase, there was no process, let alone time period, just the ‘moving’). It should be said that Ry, who was Jon’s age, was no longer being accused of these particular crimes – he’d married a nice solicitor seven years ago, and now he had two nice little boys and a nice twelve month old baby girl to juggle and hold him well clear of any temptation to plunge back into his earlier life of villainy.

  ‘I mean, OK,’ said Ry. ‘As things stand, there’s no evidence of any connection, no demonstrable link. That you know of. That you know of. Right?’

  It was a rhetorical question – like nearly every question Ry ever asked – so Jon just stared at him and said nothing.

  ‘So the filth. Have you spoken to them?’

  ‘The cops? I’m sure they have better things to do. And anyway, say what? Check the tree doesn’t have a criminal record?’

  But Ry didn’t smile at this. He was deep in thought.

  ‘To check…,’ Ry said eventually and not just a little enigmatically, ‘to check they really were, in fact, all accidents.’

  All Jon could do was shrug. Shrug at the question and shrug at the whole situation.

  ‘What about…,’ Ry continued. ‘What about the footpath being closed.’

  ‘In Serle Street.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘You think there could be a connection? Like someone paid off the police to close off the whole of the… eastern side of the street just to make sure I walked under their brick booby-trap on the western side? Gee, I didn’t think of that.’

  ‘I’m not sure sarcasm would be my first weapon of choice in your position Jon, but there you have it.’

  Jon sighed. But Ry had a point.

  ‘OK,’ Ry went on. ‘Leave aside how you think these things might be connected. The how is the hard bit. The why might be easier of the two to answer.’

  ‘Why what.’

  ‘Why someone might want to… I mean… Why are you so sure that there’s no-one who wants you dead?’

  A great help he was, the Killer. A great help, that is, if Jon was trying to find any solace, which of course he wasn’t. Not solace, but he was however looking for a rational explanation, and it did get him thinking. Was there a “why?” Was there any reason someone would want to kill him? And then something emerged from his subconscious, rising up out of that stagnant swamp of memories, something that had been there all along. He’d been blanking it. He’d been ignoring the money.

  And as everyone knows: it always comes down to the money.

  8.

  He didn’t know why he hadn’t thought about it before. He must have been ‘blocked’ in some way, because it seemed so obviously relevant now, now he came to think about it. Two years ago, almost to the day, an extraordinary thing happened. Extraordinary, in the true sense of the word.

  It was a Monday morning and Jon had just arrived at his chambers. He wasn’t due in court, and yet again, had no conferences in his diary either. This was back in the days when his practice had taken a bit of a downward turn, indeed spiral if one were to be frank about it: after a promising start at the Bar, there’d been a serious hiccup, never really explained, although it coincided with the deterioration in his marriage to Romy, so there was your answer right there, he supposed. In any event, things were quiet, and he was doing “paperwork”, as hanging around in Chambers with nothing to do was euphemistically called (in other words, reading the paper). On this particular morning he’d set about doing some internet banking, paying bills, that sort of thing. He logged in and cast an eye over his accounts summary before moving some funds out of his savings and into his general account. Which was when he noticed something wrong. It had to be a mistake. His net position – which should have been around twenty thousand pounds or so (not including a quarantined tax debt of about thirty thousand) – was over a million pounds in credit…

  One million.

  After the double-take – and the triple-check of the number of digits (and the positioning of the decimal point and the commas… all those commas!) – he looked at his account more closely and ascertained that a total amount of one million, sixty-six thousand, nine hundred and thirty pounds (£1,066,930.00) h
ad been directly transferred into his savings account over a period of five days the previous week: £250,000 each day from Monday to Thursday, then £66,930 on the Friday. The transaction details were unhelpful – they were all made from different, unnamed bank accounts, none of which he recognised.

  Did a rich relative die somewhere? Not that he knew of. No doubt there were a number of obscure relatives of his out there, but if any of them were rich enough to be bequeathing this sort of money he would have heard about them.

  Obviously there’d been a mistake. He hadn’t been expecting any payments of anything like this. About the most he’d ever been paid at any one time was around a hundred thousand pounds and even that had been a rare occurrence – he made sure he billed his solicitor clients at the very least monthly as a rule and it was pretty hard for all but the most senior of barristers to manage to accumulate fees of that magnitude, attributable to a single client, over a thirty day period.

  He was fairly certain the five payments had to be connected, despite the different bank accounts, or the coincidence would be too great. It was most probably due to some sort of daily limit, particularly if no more payments came in after the smaller Friday payment (they didn’t). Of course a daily limit alone didn’t explain the different bank accounts, but there was, no doubt, some similar reason behind that too.

  So a million, it simply had to be an error. Undeniably, the only thing to be done was to immediately notify the bank.

  On the other hand…

  There was the state of his practice, which was definitely approaching ‘endangered’ status, and of course, in the meantime, his bills were mounting. Including that nasty tax bill which he couldn’t otherwise cover… In short, he badly needed an injection of funds.

  And here it was, apparently.

  Still, he held off for a while, to see what would happen, who would claim it. But nothing eventuated. No-one came forward. Two weeks later, and the money was still sitting there.

  Off the top of his head, he knew that as a general rule, moneys paid by mistake could be recovered – the payer could successfully sue for them if the payee refused to pay them back. However he also knew that this wasn’t necessarily the case if the moneys had been spent, particularly where the payee honestly didn’t realise they weren’t his…

  Normally Jon would not have done what he proceeded to do, but he was, it was no exaggeration to say, becoming desperate. Desperate to pay his bills, and not sink beneath the waves as he’d seen happen to so many others. Times were tough. So he made up his mind to spend the money and be damned. Spend it, he thought, and let them sue me. And if I lose, they can bankrupt me and I’ll be no worse off. They’re probably up to no good themselves anyway, whoever they are.

  So after nearly three weeks of waiting for the call that never came, he started spending. It was his shout. Stretched resources, British reserve and simple greed ensured no-one questioned why it was his shout. (The provenance of the cash, he kept to himself: as far as his friends were concerned, he’d simply been having a good year.) From impromptu drinks beating around the bush with envious colleagues (always in the same humble pub, the Lamb, in Lambs Conduit Street), to boozy meals in flash, celebrity-ridden restaurants in Mayfair and thereabouts (Scott’s, the Wolseley, Le Caprice) with small groups of thirsty, grateful acquaintances to celebrate some new baby or flat or job. There were weekend flights to Corsica, and Cádiz, not to mention a week in Paris sharpening his French and making new friends. He had the most fun he’d had in years. He even made space for a bit of downtime exploring the property market, resulting in the purchase of a five bedroom ‘cottage’ in Wiltshire. The rustic, green sandstone hideaway in a garden setting complete with two majestic oak trees was a bargain at £490,000 (the owners had their backs to the wall, something Jon knew a little about). And on top of all that, he got to pay off his debts and buy some expensive new furniture for work.

  After a whirlwind three weeks of excess and countless hangovers that almost, but not quite, merged into one, he splashed water on his face one crisp and clear autumn morning and the thought suddenly occurred to him: if his unwittingly generous benefactors, whoever they were, were indeed up to no good then why was he assuming they were going to be polite about recovering their money? Why was he assuming they were going to do it the legal way? Sure, it wouldn’t necessarily be all that simple for them to get the money back if they murdered him outright, but presumably they had their ways…. In any event, he decided, should they come knocking, it’d be far better for his health and general wellbeing if he could pay them back straight away, no questions asked.

  Trouble was, now he’d gone and spent a decent-sized chunk of it, roughly half – enough to look like a large rat had got at it, in other words. Of course, he could invest the rest, and earn it back, but that would take time, particularly in the current climate, and if he was going to be receiving any nasty house calls, it was likely to be soon. And then he got an idea.

  After making a number of overseas telephone calls, he left work one Friday evening, caught a Piccadilly line tube to Heathrow Terminal 3, and boarded an Air China flight for Beijing. His ultimate destination was Macau. He had no desire to draw attention to himself any closer to home.

  Three films and sixteen and a half hours later, his Air Macau jet touched down in the dark, China night. He had no need to wait for his baggage – it was a hand-luggage-only trip – and so made a beeline for the taxi rank, and headed straight for the Venetian Macao, the largest casino in the region and one which had indicated to him it would be willing, on a one-off basis, to take a bet of the kind he wanted to place. After checking into his hotel room and introducing himself to the relevant casino managers, he bought the equivalent of five hundred and thirty-five thousand pounds sterling in casino chips, representing a touch over his total expenditure to date out of his recently acquired treasure chest (including paying off his tax debt). He then took up his prearranged seat at one of the roulette tables there, and placed all his chips on black.

  It came up black.

  (As to what he would have done if it had come up red, there was no plan B, not for Macau at least. It was only ever going to be the one bet. The million restored or the million lost, that was his preferred scenario. Good, stark choices made for easier decisions. Luck – and Chance and Chaos for that matter, and the likelihood of the silver ball falling in the right slot, 48.65 % – was irrelevant. Events had unfolded; at any given moment you have to work with what you’ve got.)

  Jon calmly exchanged his chips – which had now, so very suddenly, doubled in size – for a cheque the weight of a feather, convivially said his goodbyes to the casino managers who were all wearing smiles about as genuine as the Canaletto paintings behind them, and made his way back up to his 3,800 square foot Cielo suite, the “complete royal retreat”. In kingly fashion then, he rang room service and ordered one, no, make that two bottles of Billecart-Salmon vintage champagne. By this stage he definitely wasn’t feeling himself, as it were, and he continued the trajectory of his evening by doing something he’d never done before (or rather, never admitted doing before) and he rang an escort service and ordered a girl. Then he thought to himself, don’t be ridiculous and rang the escort people back and changed his order to two of them as well.

  He knew he was no angel, but after all, wasn’t this supposed to be a “royal retreat”? Since when did any great king, or emperor, ever behave like an angel?

  And anyway, the person experiencing this was not him. It was his double, his doppelgänger, leading this strange second life that was somehow being constructed around him.

  The champagne arrived in ten minutes. The girls in thirty.

  They were so similar, he could have sworn they were sisters. Maybe they were. One was called Tina, and the other Tracy. He’d already opened the champagne and the girls said yes to a glass each although neither of them ended up drinking very much. On the job and all that, he supposed.

  And business it was. One of them – Tina?
– came up behind him and lifted his shirt up over his head and then stopped and held it there, so he couldn’t see. For a horrible moment, he wondered if he hadn’t made a terrible mistake and his debt was going to be repaid after all. He was pushed down onto the bed, and another pair of hands began undoing his belt – possibly to strangle him with: he realised it was eminently possible that a Triad organisation was responsible for the mistaken payment and he’d walked straight into the lair. Behind enemy lines. (He’d acted for them once too, in his one and only case in Hong Kong, but why was he only remembering this now?) Other equally grim thoughts began to form, and then a cold pair of hands was removing his underpants and a mouth was closing around him and his conclusions were lost in the ether.

  An hour later, after he’d failed to persuade Tina and Tracy to stay for more champagne and then sadly watched them leave, he noticed for the first time, on top of one of the television sets – the one facing the bed – a little red light that he was sure hadn’t been on earlier.

  He amused himself with the thought that there was a hidden camera and smiled at how disappointed the blackmailers were going to be when they realised he didn’t have a reputation – or a wife and family – to worry about losing. Or even any money he could properly call his own.

  The following evening, with a surprisingly clear head and a relatively well-rested body, he took the four minute taxi ride back to Macao International Airport and boarded his return flight to London which delivered him there on time at 7.15am on the Monday morning and enabled him to comfortably make it into chambers at an eminently respectable hour.

  So he was back to square one. But not really. It was getting on for a month since he’d received the funds and still, nothing. Not a word from anyone. No sign. He decided to start being a bit smarter about it all. He’d done well – and, yes, been ‘lucky’ up to a point – so now was the time to consolidate. In fact it had been on the plane home, in his first class seat, just out of Bangkok, relaxing into a viewing of Margin Call over a glass of yet more French champagne (it was the only alcoholic drink you could never have too much of, it was impossible) and a packet of Thai Airways mixed nuts. He’d congratulated himself for his coolheaded approach and for not placing another bet, and for realizing his luck or whatever you wanted to call it would run out eventually (it was one of the inescapable laws of Probability, as he remembered noting at the time – and oh how ironic that seemed now). And it was then that it had become blindingly obvious to him that all he had to do was invest the money wisely: a five percent return would supplement his earnings from the Bar and he’d still be in a position to pay them back reasonably quickly, if they showed up, whoever ‘they’ were. They could hardly expect interest as well, especially with U.K. interest rates being so low they were virtually non-existent.