The Dance of the Pheasodile

by Tim Roux

“I don’t know yet, but I will keep you informed of what their plans are.”

  “And you want precisely how much for this trivial information, Harry? The Royals are not exactly the most fearsome gang in town.”

  “I was thinking of proposing a merger with the Inbies, then I can inform on them too.”

  DI Martin reached back in his chair, and winged his elbows to the side of his head. “Now they are much more like it. If you can tell us about their movements, that would be much more interesting to us.”

  “I am sure that I could.”

  DI Martin leant forward across the table. “And what exactly is there in it for you, Harry? You know what the Inbies do to snitches. We found the last one floating in King George Dock without any of his wedding tackle. It looked like it had been hacked off with a deliberately blunt knife. Is that what you want to happen to you? Have you given up satisfying your missus? She was quite attractive, if I remember rightly.”

  “I think I can look after myself.”

  “I doubt it, Harry, I doubt it. Still, if you want to tell us stuff, and you are not expecting to be paid for it, then it’s a free world. You just go ahead, and if the leads you give us prove valuable, we can reconsider your remuneration. That is all I can promise you.”

  “That’s enough,” I confirmed, stood up and offered to shake DI Martin’s hand. He was so baffled, poor man, that he acquiesced. If he had had the time to think about it, I bet he would have refused. The police track down criminals as best they can, but grasses make them sick.

  I left him shaking his head, and no doubt reflecting on the strange and unexpected ways of the world.

  * * *

  So that bargain at least bought me a few days of freedom. They were bound to leave me loose a short while on the off-chance that I might come up with something useful, perhaps until the coroner’s hearing into Martin Jenson’s death.

  When I got back to the house, Fran and Tommy were still out, and a tired and dishevelled, not to mention barely-dressed, Kathy answered the door. She held it open for me, without saying a word, then yawned in my ear before climbing back upstairs.

  I followed her into her room, where she slipped straight into bed and showed me her back.

  “Kathy,” I said. “I need to ask you something. It is urgent.”

  “Not now, Harry,” she murmured, “unless you want to fuck me.”

  “No, I wasn’t planning on doing that.”

  “Then fuck off and leave me be. I need to sleep. I’m working again this evening and I have to have my wits about me. Come and talk to me just before I go out.” She turned and gave me a sweet smile. “Okay, Harry? I love you really.” Then she turned back towards the wall.

  * * *

  I suppose that one advantage of having been sent to all those foster homes is that I have learnt to try to blend into a family of total strangers at great speed. It was an aptitude that never turned into a skill when I was young, but I had evidently improved with the passage of time.

  Fran and Tommy came back in about five o’clock. They returned empty-handed and yet Tommy was smiling, a combination I could not imagine Ella and Mark managing. Chrissie always bought them something when they went out shopping together.

  “Hello, Dad,” Tommy greeted me. “Are you feeling better?”

  “Funnily enough, I am, thanks, Tommy, and all the better for seeing you.”

  That made him beam all the more, and he rushed over to give me a kiss.

  “So you’ve been able to get your head around a few things, have you?” Fran quizzed me, not as aggressively as it may come across. It was a question posed more in hope than in bitterness.

  “Yes, Fran” I replied, “I think I have a few things worked out. The situation is not as dire as it was.”

  “Come upstairs and tell me about it.”

  We both sat on the bed together, and it was almost as if we really were a married couple.

  “What happened?” Fran asked.

  “I think I have bought us a few days.”

  “And then?”

  “By then, with a bit of luck, we are home and dry.”

  “How do you figure that one out?”

  I didn’t know how much to tell her. I felt I could trust her, but a secret is no longer a secret once it is shared. “A plan is forming,” I commented mysteriously.

  “I am delighted to hear it.” She fixed me fiercely. “If anything ever happens to Tommy, I’ll follow you to the ends of the earth to avenge him. Do you understand me, Harry Walker, or whoever you are!”

  “I would never do anything to hurt Tommy.”

  “I think you already have done. You told him you would never leave him.”

  “I know.”

  “But you will, won’t you, the minute you can.”

  “It was a reflex response because I have become very fond of him. As for the rest, I cannot tell you. I will carry on trying to connect with Chrissie, but I don’t know if she will ever listen to me. And if she does, maybe she will still have nothing to do with me, especially looking as I do. We have fought too hard to drag ourselves out of the mud for her to leap at the lowlife I would appear to her to be. My face alone would churn her stomach.”

  Fran smiled in recollection. “It churned mine the first time I saw you. Do you remember, at Hull Fair?” She hesitated. “Of course you don’t, or pretend not to. You were with some of those old friends you never see anymore, looking very slick. You gave the impression of being wild and fun, as well as ruthless and sharp. It’s tragic how first impressions can be so wrong.”

  “And you we wearing a blue flowery dress ……” I stopped. Where did that come from?

  Fran snapped up my description immediately. “How do you know that, Harry, if you claim only to have known me since Tuesday? Is your memory coming back?”

  “I don’t know. It suddenly slipped out, and I felt a warm glow as I said it. I also have this phrase ‘He thinks a lot of himself’ in my head.”

  “You heard that, did you, Harry? I have always wondered. That is what Ellie said to me when she saw you.”

  I felt faint. How could this be? How could I access traces of memories of Harry and Fran meeting up? Was the memory stored in Harry’s body somewhere, like addresses on a mobile phone being stored on the phone itself, not on the chip?

  “This is really weird,” I said.

  “For me, the Harry who cannot remember a thing is the weird one. You must have been so traumatised by something you discovered during your trance that you got amnesia or something.”

  Well, it would certainly have been easier if I could have accessed Harry’s thoughts and memories, but it did freak me out. What was happening to me, Keith McGuire?

  * * *

  I stayed talking with Fran for another hour, during which time it felt that we had made up, so I missed catching Kathy before she went out, which was frustrating because I really needed to sound her out.

  Fran cooked supper. She is an excellent cook. In fact, she is a far more accomplished woman than I would ever have expected from someone living in this sort of area and married to Harry Walker. Her speech is incisive and articulate, her mind is sharp, and she knows her etiquette, as adapted to the local environment.

  I put Tommy to bed and read him a story. Fran had been reading him the “Faraway Tree Stories” by Enid Blyton, and he was transfixed.

  Once he was asleep, I came back downstairs, and Fran and I started talking again.

  She filled me in on Harry and her life in the hope that it would lift my amnesia.

  It turned out that Harry was basically a heavyweight petty crook – able to fight his corner, but a man of limited ambitions. He had been to jail twice before Fran and he met, and a third time while she was pregnant with Tommy, and into Tommy’s first year. He was basically a conman, defrauding people by selling them non-existent insurance policies and pocketing the premiums, much like real insurance companies do in fact. He also fenced used cars, and managed to pickpocket people’s credit
cards, having watched them entering the PIN in the shop. That was always good for £200. He only ever withdrew money off each card once, immediately after he filched them. His thieving skills and his physicality had always meant that he was taken seriously by individual members of the Royals, but Martin had never rated him, refused to let him join them, and tended to humiliate and demean him in front of the others who liked him, but were not about to cross Martin.

  “I want Kathy to go,” Fran announced suddenly.

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t want that sort of woman around Tommy in his formative years, and I don’t want her around me either. People keep looking at me asking themselves if I have become a prostitute too.”

  From what I could gather, it was a fair question as Fran did not work, and Harry’s erratic income was never felonious enough to afford them regular food on the table. It turned out, though, that Fran’s dad pitched in with spare cash. He was a builder on the make in the Hull and East Riding Area (he probably still is), and Fran was the apple of his eye. He had wanted to give Harry many black eyes over the years for his carelessness with his daughter, but he found Harry too intimidating for that. However, when Fran confided in her dad that she thought Harry had slept with his sister, Kathy, on several occasions, her dad was round in no time to tell Harry to sling his hook and leave his precious daughter alone. Harry had denied all, and as Fran’s dad had no proof, as neither did Fran, then the confrontation was stalled into a stalemate.

  “You can’t just kick Kathy out. What would she do?”

  “She earns a damned site more money lying on her back than you have ever earned standing on your two feet. She can afford to rent a house more than we can. And now that Martin is dead and not bleeding her dry, she is well away, protected by her elder brother, naturally.”

  “Of course I will protect her if I can.”

  “You will do a lot of things to her if you can.”

  “Oh not that load of old rubbish again, Fran. Wash your mouth out, and your brain with it.”

  “What load of old rubbish would that be, Harry?” And I had to admit that I didn’t know, but that somewhere in the back of my mind I felt that it was the basis of a longstanding row between us.

  Fran also filled me in on Harry’s childhood which, similarly to mine, had never been a childhood at all. Harry’s parents had died when Harry was six and Kathy two. They both ended up in care. From all accounts, Harry doted on his sister, and stuck by her through thick and thin. Indeed, he was a rather mature child whom the social services believed would do well for himself in later life. However, like most such children, he had been processed off the end of the conveyor belt, straight into the dung heap which is adolescent life. Without qualifications, Harry had to scratch around for a living wherever opportunities presented themselves, and Kathy did much the same, using her body as the scratching post.

  The parallels with my own life were obvious, as were the differences. Which qualities determined that I would become a successful architect and Chrissie the partner of a law firm, against all the odds, whereas Harry and Kathy ended up doing exactly what could have been predicted for them? What quirks did we have, or talents, or turns of the cards, or virtues – and, ultimately, what did the discriminating factor matter when I was destined to end up back here anyway? I might as well have done nothing, fought for nothing, have achieved nothing, because the sodding great master of fate fully intended to wreck it all for me whatever I managed to construct for myself, and for others, my wife and my children. Shit lands on the just beetle as well as on the unjust one, and only dung beetles appreciate that fact.

  This was the state of mind with which I turned into bed alongside the woman who was not my wife, but whose good opinion I valued nonetheless, and with whom I could probably manage to construct a passable life if I could not find a way to escape my slam-dunk fate.

  So, I thought to myself, here I am, now how do I make a success of this life? That was one fundamental difference between Harry and me. He expected to be a failure; I intended to transcend misfortune.

  Success was going to have to be based on criminal activity, wasn’t it? I wasn’t going to make it as an architect, nor as any version of myself that required qualifications. I had no money to my name, and no access to any sort of seed capital.

  So what criminal activities are profitable? The Royals were already squeezing people for their debts no doubt, and flogging dodgy goods and dodgier drugs. Unless we contrived to wipe all the other local gangs off the face of the earth, there was no chance of a step-change in our fortunes. We had to find something else. Declaring an embargo on moral qualms, what could I come up with – bank robbery, hold-ups, blackmail, fraud? Fraud might prove lucrative, but I would need either a stonkingly good new idea or a degree in computer science. It was worth considering.

  What else? In the middle of the night, I came up with an alternative scheme. It wasn’t complete yet, but I thought it was definitely inspired, coming from someone who had never had a single criminal thought in his being until a few days previously. The Royals and I should be considering the protection business. We would be the Robin Hood and his Merry Gang of the West Riding of Yorkshire, and then of the whole of England. But we weren’t in the West Riding. Exactly. You don’t piss in your own porridge; Slasher Walker can tell you that for free.

  The evil thought that began to formulate in my mind was to threaten to kidnap the children of the rich in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and to demand protection money, say £20,000. For that price, my guess was that they would just do as we asked. Anyone with any financial form could raise that much on a credit card within a few hours, and it certainly wasn’t worth risking your child’s life by involving the police for that amount, which would make collecting the money easier too. And if the pilot scheme worked, we could spread it across the whole country. It was possible that nobody would realise what was going on for some time because the victims would keep their mouths shut. That would be the deal. The rich are paranoid about having their children kidnapped. I knew that from private clients. They always wanted the most elaborate alarm systems, not so much for protecting their Rembrandts, although the insurance companies insist on that anyway, but more to ensure that their children stay tucked up in bed. We just needed a child to be actually kidnapped to set the ball rolling. And guess who was going to kidnap this child. You’ve got it, the Inbies. That way, the Hull police would have their gang boss, and it wouldn’t be me.

  Pleased with my thought, and in a way I was, I started racing through the details. A prodigious architect has to master both form and substance, the big picture and the devilish minor detail that could collapse the project twenty-four years out, just before the guarantees expire.

  Which child? That was the first question. How would I find a child that we could whisk eighty miles away before anyone spotted his or her disappearance? Was a girl better than a boy? No, a boy was better, I decided. People are used to girls being abducted. The disappearance of a boy would signal that not a single child was safe. How would we transport him from, say, Dewsbury to wherever we would hold him? How would we keep him quiet for a week or two while the world looked for him? And then how to incriminate the Inbies in general, and their boss, Trevor Plant, in particular?

  These were all unanswered questions immediately, but that was acceptable. Far more than that, it represented the process solution. That is how I set about my projects. I have a pad to list every single question I can think of. I then encourage others to raise questions too. When I can no longer unearth a single new question, I know I am approaching the home straight. I can’t fail. In creative problem solving, the trick is to pose ingenious questions. If you have those in your pocket, the ingenious answers will inevitably follow, even if it takes some time to generate them. If you are missing a question, you are facing a potentially fatal flaw. If you are missing answers, you have only exciting opportunities.

  Now here came the most important question of all – who a
mong the Royals could I trust? To answer that question, I would need Kathy who would be injecting herself with some scum’s cum about now, or waiting around to do so.

  Kathy was better than this life; so was I, and so were Fran and Tommy. I couldn’t speak for the rest of the Royals. Perhaps they were living precisely the life they deserved, from which some of them would be rescued by the sheer force of my good fortune. Whoever had recommended my leadership of the Royals was a wise man, even if he assumed he was behaving like a douche-bag at the time.

  * * *

  Chapter 9

  Kathy rattled her way through the front door a few minutes shy of five in the morning, crept upstairs and slid into bed. Before she could turn over to fall asleep, I was wrapped up in her bed beside her. She didn’t object. She merely held my arm to her waist.

  “What are you up to?” she asked me.

  “I have the beginnings of a plan. I need your help.”

  “If you can catch me before I fall asleep, I am all ears. And don’t ram your cock up my arse. I have had all that already tonight.”

  I wasn’t planning to.

  “First question, how can you make people pay you in such a way that the money can never be traced back to you?”

  “Cash, I suppose. How much are you talking about?”

  “£20,000.”

  “Too much for a postal order. It could be a payment in stuff that is easy to shift – a car, gold, silver, a lorry load of Nike sports gear - something where you can tamper with the serial numbers. You may get into a spot of bother with the VAT inspectors though.”

  “What if we forced them to give us things they were ashamed to be involved with – some dodgy negotiable instruments issued by the Russian government, that sort of thing?”

  “I don’t know much about negotiable whatsits, but anything involving the Russians must have a good chance of disappearing into a dark hole.”

  “Arms,” I almost shouted suddenly, making her jump. “We get them to pay us in arms, or drugs, or sex slaves. The people I am thinking of wouldn’t want to admit to any involvement in any of those.”