Escape and Evasion

by Christopher Wakling

  40

  The old lady is talking again, telling Joseph her name, Emily, and something about how she’s returning from a visit to her son. He’s a dentist called Geoffrey, recently divorced. It wasn’t amicable. Twice a month she travels up to do her bit, as she puts it, looking after her grandchildren, making sure there’s proper food in the fridge. The divorce, it turns out, was Geoffrey’s fault. He cheated on his wife, Caroline, with an old schoolfriend he met on Facebook. But his mother understands: she’d seen how cold Caroline could be. The way she walked out on him and the kids confirmed it, did it not? A mother, leaving her school-aged children, never mind that her dentist husband wanted to patch things up. Cold.

  ‘It does sound that way,’ Joseph concedes.

  ‘And now Geoffrey has to work all the hours God sends just to meet the payments.’

  Geoffrey, Joseph thinks. Does he feel his regret in his guts, or do his fingers shake inside his patients’ mouths?

  ‘Clare’s twelve already but she’s started wetting the bed.’

  Of course, the kids.

  41

  ‘What’s she crying about?’ Joseph asked the group around the woman with the rock. He saw the burnt hem of a shawl, red-rimmed eyes, a birthmark low on her jawline. Saw? Still sees! This girl here with the bad teeth was the only person to hold his gaze. ‘What’s happened?’ he asked her.

  She replied unintelligibly, grabbed the nearest child by both shoulders, pulled him to her, and said something else.

  ‘English,’ Joseph said.

  Another young woman stepped forward, the one with the singed headscarf. ‘Her brother. Her little sister,’ she said.

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘Come on,’ said Lancaster. ‘Let’s go.’

  (Why didn’t he listen to Lancaster? He should have, but he didn’t, and the not-listening grew teeth and bit him and still won’t let go!)

  ‘They took them.’

  ‘Who?’

  She said a word Joseph didn’t understand and added, ‘Bosniak family.’

  ‘Another family? Not hers?’

  The girl’s look said he was an idiot. ‘Yes. Not hers!’

  ‘Okay, another family took her kids. Why? When?’

  ‘Three hours.’

  The bloodied woman raised her fist again. Joseph reached out, saying, ‘No, no, no.’ And he was surprised when she placed the rock in his palm.

  Very good.

  She didn’t let it go immediately, though. He had to sort of work it free with accompanying reassurances.

  She’d stopped wailing now, he noticed. They all had. Her face was wet with snot as well as blood. She had a white mark running from the corner of her mouth up across her cheek, at odds with the homeliness of her youthful, beautiful even, skin.

  Despite the icy breeze Joseph could feel his ears burning.

  42

  Now Radio 4 fill the car. ‘I like to catch up on the news when I can,’ Emily says.

  ‘Sure,’ he says.

  And it’s a relief, at first, to hear of a fresh uprising in Syria, lower than expected unemployment figures, broken manifesto promises, and an unexpected win on the cricket field.

  But hold on.

  A stab of what’s really happening prods Joseph to concentrate.

  He’s left a man for dead in a flowerbed!

  No, no, no, not dead.

  And he’s right. Even as the more detailed news starts up after the headlines, there’s no mention of anything that could be that.

  Nor is there any reference to a missing banker, Airdeen Clore, or any late snippets about a financial angel hitting random strangers’ bank accounts with Hail Mary gifts. Joseph feels the seatbelt tight across his chest and realises he’s leaning forward to listen. He’d like to hear, say, that a dairy farmer in Normandy or a childminder in Prague has reported a suspect payment of, for example, $41,345 into their bank account, but … he doesn’t. The news just fizzles out into the weather.

  Meaning everyone’s keeping quiet.

  Well, you would, wouldn’t you!

  The bank is pulling the mother of all cover-ups: that much is clear.

  And nobody is keen to give away what they’re so grateful to have received.

  Possibly.

  Joseph is wringing his hands.

  No, no, no, he thinks: even if said dairy farmer, childminder, car-wash owner, priest, whoever, did query a deposit, the whole point is that he, Joseph, with the help of his man in Milton Keynes, has successfully short-circuited the electronic money trail.

  Hence no story to report.

  Makes sense.

  The seatbelt goes slack again but his mouth still feels dry.

  Think the thing through again.

  First, Milton Keynes man, with his ingenious binary witchcraft. Expensive chap, bastard clever. Though he drove a Lexus coupé he wore trainers and below-the-knee shorts to the meeting at McDonald’s in Luton. Isn’t it amusing that Joseph only met him as the digital watermarking expert on that Uzbek oil and gas arbitration? Because he was suggested by Lancaster, no less!

  Ha.

  Ha, ha.

  The legal team replaced him before the hearing for some reason or other, but Joseph kept his card. Instinct. Set a thief to catch a robber, et cetera.

  So far the fraud team at the Financial Services Authority, working with the bank’s enforcers, will have traced the missing funds into accounts held by a Russian doll sequence off offshore shell companies. Joseph sees them stretching into the foggy distance. And where the dolls blur out, there’s a sort of cliff wall, invisible but there, he can sense it, beyond which: Switzerland.

  Costly peaks!

  Tranche after tranche of inaccessible, veiled, Swiss bank accounts.

  Even if those banks could be penetrated, which, given the amount Joseph coughed up, they cannot, the money only stayed there for a heartbeat, before being dealt blind through a further kaleidoscope of offshore accounts, each one held in the name of a dead World War One soldier, as it happens.

  Joseph’s idea: thank you Commonwealth War Graves Commission, handily online.

  From the trenches the money passed to the beneficiaries, who, though they might try to find out where it came from, will discover zip re its true origins, because said origins are through a trench and up an Alp and down a cliff and across an endless plain shrouded in mist. Gone. Beyond gone, in fact. Expensively! It cost Joseph three-quarters of a million dollars to ensure they never existed.

  What didn’t?

  Ha.

  ‘I always take a few provisions when I visit,’ Emily is saying now. When Joseph is slow to respond she says, ‘Just to stock up. Geoffrey isn’t the best shopper.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Porridge oats, for example.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘He feeds the children all sorts of sugary cereals, but a bowl of hot porridge is better for them. Particularly if you put some banana and golden syrup on it. I took two boxes.’

  ‘I’m sure they appreciated that.’

  Hedgerows slide past in the pause that follows. Eventually she risks a quick glance at Joseph beside her and smiles. ‘Possibly,’ she says. ‘Either way, it’s a nice feeling, trying to help.’

  She’s right, of course.

  Ha.

  43

  That’s all he wanted to do himself, help the woman with the bloodied head.

  ‘The other family took your kids three hours ago,’ he said, still squatting beside her. ‘Where did they go?’

  ‘Home,’ said the other one, with the singed shawl.

  ‘Where’s that, then?’

  ‘Next village.’

  Lancaster’s gun had dropped to his side. He said, ‘So it’s a domestic. Come on, Joe.’

  ‘I don’t think so. It’s not her family that took them, is it?’

  ‘No,’ said the woman with the shawl.

  Joseph’s boots creaked beneath him in the mud. Somebody sniffed. The woman whose kids were missing had
the same dark hair as Naomi. ‘Tell her it’ll be okay,’ Joseph said.

  The shawl’s voice: ‘It is not okay.’

  ‘She’s probably right,’ said Lancaster.

  Joseph looked up. ‘Are we here just to stroll about or what?’

  ‘That’s right, stroll about following orders. That’s our thing.’

  Joseph patted the woman’s shoulder. ‘Tell her we’ll help,’ he said. ‘Show us which way they went.’

  ‘Christ,’ said Lancaster, and, ‘Fucking hell.’ But he didn’t object further when they started out to walk three miles down a slab road whose verges were, for the most part, greyscaled out. Something with caterpillar tracks had torn the concrete edge to bits, so that what grass there was either side of them was covered with cement-coloured dust. Joseph took charge. Lancaster therefore held back. Literally: he brought up the rear. The longer they walked, the more Joseph could feel eyes on the back of his neck, though every time Joseph looked over his shoulder Lancaster’s gaze slipped off over the hedge, the fields of weeds, that fir copse. Lancaster’s rifle butt was jammed up against his right bicep, showboating alertness. He didn’t want to do this, but if that’s what they were doing, he’d do it properly.

  A mangy horse stood tethered in a gateway. The woman with the burnt shawl led the patrol past it alongside a broken-faced house. Out of the corner of his eye, Joseph thought he saw a shape lurch through the blackness inside, but nothing came of the movement, nothing other than a swoop of fear so similar to the feeling he’d had in the moment of finding his father dead in his armchair that Joseph stopped. Something horrible lay ahead. He knew it. What’s more, he understood himself completely: given the chance, he’d turn back.

  But, he just couldn’t.

  Not then.

  Because … Lancaster!

  Couldn’t admit it to him. ‘It’ being … his mistake.

  The patrol concertinaed to a stop, Lancaster last.

  Joseph pretended he’d halted to ask the woman how far they had to go.

  As it happened, not far. The houses here stood spread out along the road in their own plots of land. Two or three more plots later, and they were there, next to a stone wall, set back from which stood a neat, whitewashed cottage. Very Disney. A leafless vine of some sort hugged the lintel, and smoke curled from somewhere behind the pitched roof.

  ‘This is here,’ said the woman with the shawl.

  Everyone stopped. It was quiet.

  ‘Her kids,’ Lancaster started. ‘The family she says took them. They live here?’

  The woman with the bloodied head pushed past him to the garden gate, which was painted dark green. Joseph stepped aside to let her through. As he did so there was a quick cracking noise, then another, and another.

  The air was unzipping.

  With bullets!

  Spitting dirt there, there and there, behind them in the road.

  44

  Apropos of nothing, the car slows down.

  ‘What’s this?’ says Emily. ‘Something’s not right!’

  She pulls herself forward on the wooden steering wheel.

  Joseph tenses up. What does she mean?

  She’s not looking at him.

  Sort of shuddering, though: is she ill?

  No. It’s a problem with the car. The engine slurs and gives out and Emily panics and lets go of the wheel entirely, the car coasting across the gentle curve of the dual carriageway.

  Jesus!

  He quickly leans across to steady them into the slow lane. A truck ploughs past. Their speed drops from forty miles an hour to thirty, to fifteen. Ah. Below the speedometer the petrol gauge is orange, the needle levered down beyond empty. Joseph drifts the Mercedes onto the hard shoulder where it rolls to a sedate stop. For good measure, still hanging onto the steering wheel, he pulls up the handbrake. Emily’s breathing, quick and shallow and panicky, is audible in the traffic gap. She’s shaking. Joseph pats her arm.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he says.

  ‘Oh goodness.’

  ‘We ran out of petrol,’ he says.

  They sit in silence until another car whips past close by, the Mercedes rocking in its slipstream.

  Emily says: ‘I could have sworn I filled it up last Tuesday, but I must have … forgotten to.’

  He looks sideways at her.

  ‘My cousin Ralph lives in Glasgow,’ she says. ‘They have a terrible problem there: he’s had the petrol sucked out of his tank twice. But this is my fault.’

  ‘Do you have breakdown cover?’

  ‘The AA, you mean?’

  ‘That kind of thing.’

  ‘No. My husband always said insurance was for pessimists.’

  Joseph has a policy, and he’s pretty sure it attaches to the person, meaning him, not the car he happens to be in, so he could call somebody out to help himself, except that he can’t, of course.

  ‘It’s one view,’ he says.

  Emily is checking the road map. ‘We’re about here, I think, and if I remember right there’s a garage at the next junction. Not too far. But if we’re only …’

  Joseph is still looking at Emily. She made an effort for her visit, with eyeliner and a dusting of something on the wrinkled plane of her cheek. Damnit! How has this old lady managed to beach herself on a dual carriageway with a mud-stained fugitive?

  ‘I’ll go,’ he says.

  ‘Really?’

  He can’t tell if she doubts he’ll return, doesn’t know for sure if he will or not himself.

  ‘Yes, I’ll go. Just sit tight. I’ll be back with petrol.’

  ‘So stupid of me, forgetting to fill up,’ she says.

  ‘We’ve all done it.’ He pops his seatbelt.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says.

  ‘You’re helping me out. It’s the least I can do.’

  He climbs out of the car. A pylon is humming to itself nearby. He should tell her to get out of the car and wait on the verge. That’s what you’re supposed to do, for safety’s sake, isn’t it?

  ‘I won’t be long,’ he says.

  45

  Joseph walks the gritty hard shoulder trying not to remember what came next, but it’s no use: this is one of those days.

  He didn’t see anything in slow motion.

  He exhibited no catlike super alertness.

  He felt no muscle-memory training kicking in.

  He didn’t even see Reid get hit, but there he was, rolling around on the verge of grey grass, clutching at himself.

  Look at him!

  Joseph just stood there.

  And after a pause, and another clipping noise, something struck the side of Joseph’s neck.

  Ouch.

  Something else, much louder, had started next to him, a shuddery whip-cracking.

  Look at Lancaster there, unleashing with his SA80.

  Both the top windows of the cottage had already exploded.

  And somebody inside was screaming, and the vine was quivering.

  The hand that came away from Joseph’s neck was wet with orangey blood. Plus there was the problem of this awkward shape of the woman in the headscarf bent sideways between the gateposts, unsure whether to duck forward or back. At least he understood that. Joseph dragged her behind the stone wall. Her jumper smelled of onions. They ended up huddling beneath Lancaster, whose gun was still trained on the house.

  How infuriatingly fucking competent!

  The screaming had stopped. Lancaster drilled another couple of rounds into the house for good measure and sat back. His face was white but when he glanced down at Joseph he was smiling.

  ‘My arm,’ said Reid, who had already pulled himself through the weeds to sit with his back against the wall.

  Joseph kneeled up, shouldered his own rifle, flicked off the safety catch and trained the sight on the front door. It took all his effort not to pull the trigger: he only managed it because he knew a burst of fire from him, then, would be totally ridiculous.

  ‘You’ve been hit,’ said Lan
caster, which helped. He leaned to look and said, ‘Only a scratch.’

  Joseph later had fourteen stitches down the left-hand side of his jaw to close up the cut, but still.

  For now he was okay!

  ‘It doesn’t really hurt,’ he said, to cement that fact.

  ‘Good. That window. Top right.’

  Lancaster turned to attend to Reid. Why hadn’t Joseph thought of that? Because he was covering the house already! For a long time he looked at the house over the muzzle of his rifle, the empty window socket, the shredded curtain hanging still inside, the render beneath the window split with bullets. The front door was ajar, he noticed. After a few minutes a tortoiseshell cat walked through the gap. It sat down on the front step and looked away. The two women had started talking, a whisper at first, then more loudly. Now they were arguing. The one whose children were missing was loudest. By the time Lancaster had finished strapping up Reid’s arm she was standing beside him, pulling at his shoulder with one hand and jabbing at the house with the other. She evidently assumed he was in charge, too.

  ‘She says what are you waiting for?’ the other woman said.

  Blood had leaked into Joseph’s collar. He was doing a lot of blinking. Beside him the mother had stopped muttering and now moved forward.

  ‘She says she’s going to get them,’ her friend said.

  46

  What’s that ahead? Something else to think about, thank God. The garage. Emily was right: he’s come upon it at a junction a little way down the road. Once this place would have been two pumps and an attendant in overalls. Now it has sprouted a minimart, a kind of garden centre, and a coffee concession. There’s also a toilet, though they call it a rest room. What he would do for an actual lie-down. Joseph runs a basin full of warm water and carefully washes his face and hands, which look bloodless no matter how hard he scrubs.

  He chooses a plastic jerrycan, pays for it, fills it up, and returns to pay for the contents, because that’s what the checkout guy insists he must do. As he’s waiting in the queue a second time he spots himself on CCTV above the counter, swiftly looks down, and finds himself inspecting the bumper packs of Haribo, Murray Mints and whatnot. His eyes snag on the Maynards Sours: these are Lara’s favourites, and before he knows why he’s put them on the counter.