The Magpie Trap: A Novel

by AJ Kirby

  He reached for the phone with one hand while putting the finishing touches on the cock-shaped bottle with the other. It looked good; despite the fact he’d designed it as a joke, he could well imagine the women in god-awful places like the pubs on

  Boar Lane actually going for a drink like this after spewing the multi-coloured contents of their curries back up over their shoes. The cock-shaped bottle; it had been worth coming in to work after all…

  Just as he was about to dial Mark’s number, a call came through on his mobile phone. It was from a withheld number.

  ‘Mr. Parker? Mr. Chris Parker?’ a woman’s voice crackled down the line.

  ‘This is he,’ Chris replied. He loved putting on extravagantly posh voices on when speaking on the phone to people that he’d never met.

  ‘This is Dawn Foster from the Yorkshire Evening Post…’

  ‘Not interested,’ Chris interrupted. He was constantly being pestered by newspapers and magazines who wanted him to place his client’s adverts in their publications. He wondered why the hell Gemma had allowed the woman through her usually so impenetrable barrier.

  ‘I’m afraid I’m not trying to sell you anything. I’m calling out of courtesy actually. I’m calling to make you aware that we are going to be running a story about your father’s meat business in tomorrow’s weekend edition of the paper.

  Basically it’s an expose of the cheap meats which your father’s company sells into the schools, the health risks this causes for Leeds children, that kind of thing. The article makes reference to you, Mr. Parker, and also to your brother. We just wanted to make you aware of this, and invite you to make any comments before we go to press.’

  Chris froze: speechless.

  ‘Mr. Parker; are you there?’

  Chris grunted a response, and grabbed a cigarette from his desk drawer, sparking it up, despite the fact that it was a no smoking building.

  ‘What can I do to stop you running the story?’ Chris appealed.

  ‘That’s exactly what your father said. The reason I wanted to call you is because I know that our paper has a good relationship with your agency, and when I realised that you were his son, I thought I’d better warn you because this is going to stir up a whole heap of shit, if you’ll pardon my French.’

  ‘I want all reference to me taken out of the article. And if my brother is even referred to I will have your job,’ Chris snarled.

  ‘Again, Chris, you could almost be your father speaking. I’d better let you know; we are meeting at twelve at Manners’ Restaurant. You know where that is.’

  With that, Dawn Foster clicked off, and Chris was left open-mouthed, his worst fears realised.

  The Conversations

  Callum Burr’s Jaguar stayed behind the bars of its cage; not allowed to come out to play. He’d bought the car on a whim, almost as though he knew that he was going to come into some money, but had then lost his nerve; such an obvious show of wealth was dangerous. It would bring unwelcome questions, snooping, and twitching of curtains. It might also bring him a beating; the voice had told him not to do anything out of the ordinary, to behave just as he would usually.

  Burr still carefully groomed his pet though; he waxed and polished it within the garage, he tuned the engine, he buffed up the upholstery. It was as he was bent right over the driver’s seat, trying to brush away a cobweb underneath the cramped back seats that his mobile phone began to chirp. He twisted himself back out of the car, bum first, twisting his heavy frame through the narrow, low door. Breathing heavily, he pressed an approximation of the ‘answer’ button; instead his thick thumb pressing about five buttons at once.

  Through pure luck, he answered the call.

  ‘Burr?’ he gasped.

  ‘Ah; just the man. Are you currently participating in a marathon-run? You sound out of breath. We need to talk; remember I told you to keep your phone on. Well, this is the moment that you needed to keep your phone on for.’

  ‘You sure we can talk about this on a mobile?’ asked Burr. A nervous edge was immediately apparent in his gruff voice.

  ‘This is only a simple conversation; that new code I asked you to put into the printer? I need to know what is happening. My intelligence tells me that somebody’s been asking questions.’

  ‘That’ll be the new boss; Hunter. Only started today and already he’s snooping. I get the feeling that not much gets past him.’

  Burr, leant against his car, sweaty palms leaving greasy streaks across the bonnet; for once he didn’t immediately wipe them away.

  ‘But you already saw to it that he wouldn’t be mobile on site. You told me that you already commandeered his access badge.’

  ‘But he’s ex-police; he knows what to watch for,’ breathed Burr. ‘He went to the Precisioner Unit with Stephenson and came back asking me all sorts. He even asked me about the Mauritius visit… He’ll put two and two together; I know he will.’

  The voice became colder now, calculating: ‘Do not worry about Hunter. He is a wash-up now; he is pickled in alcohol like an exhibit in a museum. He is preserved for future generations to look at. Look childrens; this is what primitive policemen used to look like…’

  Burr stifled a laugh. He wished that at some point in the future, he’d be able to use that exact line to Hunter’s face. Then we’d see about his goddamn interrogative questions and his mistrust. Then we’d see who was boss.

  ‘I like that description of him,’ said Burr.

  ‘Very good; now I must make another call. And Burr,’ continued the voice, ‘how do you think you’re going to pay for that car you are leaning on right now if you don’t make sure that this problem goes away?’

  The phone clicked off but Burr hardly heard it; he leapt away from his beloved Jaguar as if it was on fire. He now knew for sure that he had gone in far too deep.

  Danny Morris was next.

  When Danny saw the number which was displayed on the screen of his mobile phone he wanted the ground to swallow him up. He wanted one of the brewery men to smash him over the head with a bottle. He wanted his laptop to explode.

  For a moment he stared at the number and wished it away, like he used to do when he was a child and he closed his eyes and the world disappeared. He tried to shake off the brief recollections of the conversation he’d had with the man while he’d been horribly drunk. He remembered swearing a lot. He remembered saying something stupid like: ‘You’re really proud of your ability to speak English, aren’t you?’

  Suddenly, all of the brewery men looked like cardboard cutouts. They weren’t real; they weren’t in the same ballpark as the man on the other end of the phone that was trying to get through to him; a man whose call he could not possibly ignore. Before he knew what he was doing, Danny was walking out of the room.

  As he walked past them, he saw the incomprehension scrawled across their faces and wondered if he should make up some story to tell them about a relative being rushed into hospital or something. But there wasn’t time. There simply wasn’t time. Time was no longer something that could be weighed out like portions of sweets in a corner shop; it was something pressing, like gravity.

  The door closed behind him and he answered the call.

  ‘Can you call me back in two minutes? I’m in the office. Let me go outside,’ he said in a breathless rush as he half-ran past reception. He saw Paula’s raised-eyebrows and he mouthed the words ‘cover for me’ to her. He hoped that she would understand.

  ‘Fine,’ said the BBC-accented voice. ‘You have two minutes, Mr. Morris. And I’m pleased to hear that you no longer sound drunken-bum.’

  Danny crashed through the double-doors at the front of the EyeSpy offices and stumbled to his car. He pushed a mountain of paperwork off the driver seat and sat down, already keying the engine.

  I can’t piss off this man, he thought. He has too much on me. What if he goes to the police or something?

  The hangover was increasing Danny’s paranoia by at least three notches on the dial. When
he saw the tell-tale twitch in Fartin Thomas’s blinds, he was almost sure that the feds would be there already, discussing his crime with the boss.

  Must get out of here; away from the offices, away from the eyes. Must put enough distance between myself and them before this call comes through.

  For some reason, call it the deciphering of signs – the single magpie perched on top of one of the security camera for example – or premonition or a knowledge deep-down that almost every piece of news that he received these days was bad news, Danny knew that the call would be the one that would change his life. In those brief moments, it felt as though the world had stopped spinning; it was sucking in its breath in readiness for a new, altered reality. Things would never be the same again; Danny’s throat burned for a drink.

  Danny received the call as he was negotiating the one-way system in Leeds city centre, not really knowing or caring where he was going. Hands-free and so abiding by at least one law, which was a rarity, he answered the call.

  ‘Hello?’ he yelled, believing that he had to shout louder in order that he could be heard from the faraway handset which was clipped into its holster close to where ashtrays used to be, back when cars were even built with proper ashtrays in them. Now it was just a pointless plastic gap.

  ‘Danny; the speaker for your phone is next to your steering wheel. It can pick up your voice even if you speak at normal levels. Please speak in normal levels to me now.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, quietly. ‘And I’m also sorry for what happened last night. For what I said; I was drunk. I can’t remember it properly…’

  ‘Stop,’ interrupted the voice. ‘While I must admit that our conversation last night was not enjoyable, there is something more pressing that we must discuss.’

  Ah, here’s the rub, thought Danny, unhappily.

  ‘My intelligence tells me that there is a new security manager and Edison’s Printers. An ex-policeman; always snoopering around and sticking his nose in aspects that do not concern him. This means that our plans have changed somewhat. We need to step-up our game, as the Americans say. We need to move quickly on this.’

  ‘On what?’ asked Danny, although he feared the answer.

  ‘You’ve already shown that you can access the networks at the site in theory. You have already infiltrated Edison’s Printers electronically. I’d now like it very much if you could infiltrate the site physically.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ breathed Danny, turning a hard-right in order that he could pull up into a parking spot. He didn’t trust himself driving, not while he was hearing world-changing news like this.

  ‘This new security manager is old-school. We need to do something which will appeal to his old-school way of thinking. We need to actually get in to the site. Take Mark Birch with you if you like. He’s already proved that he has the technical expertise. Take that other man – the one you sting for money all the time – as well if you like. But just get it done. If you do things right, we’ll all be onto a winner on this.’

  Danny’s car pulled up in the middle of the side-road. A couple of cars queued behind him and started beeping their horns. He couldn’t move.

  ‘You’re asking me to break-in to Edison’s Printers?’

  The man at the other end of the phone gave a brief snort of laughter. ‘Oh Danny Morris; the time of asking you to do anything has long-since passed. Now is the dawn of the era where I tell you.’

  ‘What if I won’t?’ asked Danny, ignoring the fact that a man in the car behind was no climbing out, ready to confront him for pulling-up in the middle of the road.

  ‘If you won’t do it, then I’ll simply go to the police and to your boss with the documented evidence of your criminal activity up to now. If you won’t do it, I’ll simply tell your friend Chris Parker about how you sold him down the river. How you told that journalist at the Yorkshire Post about his family’s meat-business in return for a couple of thousand pounds which you bet on another horse that contrived to not finish a race.’

  Danny jumped at the knock at the window. The man from the car behind was glaring through, mouthing something like: ‘You can’t park here, mate. Get out of the way.’

  ‘Your life is falling apart, Mr. Morris, and I have kindly offered you a way out of this mess.’

  Another knock at the window; in a moment, the man’s fist was going to smash through it.

  ‘And I’ll even give you this piece of advice; look to the Intertel Shift. Ask your friend Mark Birch about it. This will help you get onto the site. This will help you get off the site.’

  Without knowing what he was doing, Danny gunned the engine again and screeched away from where he’d stopped in the middle of the road. Part of him wanted to drive headlong into the wall of a nearby office block, or perhaps into oncoming traffic. Part of him wanted to drive straight into the River Aire or the Leeds-Liverpool Canal.

  Close your eyes Danny. It’s not real. If you close your eyes the whole world will disappear. Driving into that brick wall would close your eyes for you, no problem. Do it!

  In the rear-view mirror, Danny watched the man climb back into the car behind. He half-hoped that the man would come after him in some kind of crazed road-rage attack, but the man idled along and then pulled in to a multi-storey car park.

  Come back! Come back and smash your fists against my window. Let the glass rain down into my pathetic face. Do it!

  ‘I’d like you to bring me something from the site. Evidence, if you like, that you’ve actually done what I’ve asked you to do. I’d like you to bring me the Precisioner printer. Oh, I’d like to see the Precisioner printer for my own eyes and appreciate the grandeur of it at first-hand. Will you do that for me, Daniel? Will you bring it to Mauritius?’

  ‘Yes,’ Danny discovered that he was saying. ‘I’ll do that for you.’

  Danny deposited his funereal black company car a little too close to the pavement than was comfortable; he was sure that his alloy wheels were being scraped to buggery, and that the Intertel Phone Box was too close to the passenger door... But, there was so little space for such a large car on the plush cobbled street of the Calls that he really had no choice but to squeeze it in as closely as possible in order to avoid coming back to another wing-mirror lying, wings clipped, in the gutter.

  Why are you worrying about such things? Why, when the whole world now holds different rules for you? Maybe you’re trying to somehow block out that non-stop ringing in your ears; the constant reminder of what the man had just told you. But it won’t go away, Danny-boy. It won’t go away, no matter how hard you scrunch up your eyes.

  Instead, Danny cursed the fact that the local Council had seen fit to make the whole city centre pay and display parking in an attempt to limit the congestion within Leeds. With shaking hands he rifled through his glove-box to find the required loose change, consigning cracked CD cases, empty fast food cartons and business cards to a new home in the passenger foot-well. He had looped the loop of the city centre in a spiralling freefall of desperation on his search for the elusive space, and was now rewarded by the Council’s prohibitive charges. Stressed, he could not contemplate the escapologist manoeuvres which his mate, Chris, a resident of the city centre, had to perform on a daily basis in order to steer clear of the parking attendants’ vice-like grip.

  Do you think that what the man said was not real? Do you really think you can concentrate on your usual worries instead? Do parking attendants really bother you that much?

  Parking attendants ruled the city centre with a sinister power which bordered on that of feudal lords in medieval England. The city centre lured in the cash-rich young professionals and then milked them for all they were worth. High Council tax, extortionate parking fees; many chose simply to forgo the pleasure of owning a car, however then found that there was no provision made for them in terms of supermarkets within walking range, and therefore small local shops made a killing selling gold-carat carrots, bejewelled beans and gold-plated bread.

 
Danny had often contemplated a get-rich-quick scheme such as opening an off-license cum video store cum grocery in the town centre, filling a supposed void in the marketplace, but his inactivity had caused him to miss that gravy train. Now, town was littered with small oasis shops which sold over-priced essential items for the lazy residents of the urban ant colonies which covered the horizon. Now such contemplation seemed consigned to the rubbish-tip of history…

  You’re a dead-man walking now Danny-boy. A dead-man walking, cock. You’ve been a pawn in this strange foreign man’s game of chess all along, and now he’s playing the end-game. His slippery fingers are gripping your piece and moving you across the board. Do you really think you’ll get away with it?

  Pale-faced and sweating, Danny switched his mobile phone to silent and crossed the River Aire on the footbridge which lent his every footstep a metallic bass echo, as if it was the thudding score of a horror movie. Wincing through his returning hangover, he knew that a drink was his kill-or-cure for him; aire of the dog if you will. Breathing heavily, his every sense was attuned to drinking his way back into a stable state where things like what the man had said to him would not matter any more.

  In the face of every pedestrian that passed him, Danny thought he could read knowledge. They must have recognised that he’d just been had. They must have recognised him as a man that had just been suckered into check-mate. Only whisky would do now.

  He made for the closest bar. He knew very well that his usual haunts would probably not welcome him back for a while after last night’s performance, and so to Oracle. Not one of his favourites, but one in which he could slide un-noticed into a plush seat and contemplate what to do next. Is there a move after check-mate? Was he really going to throw all caution to the wind and plan a robbery? Was he only considering such deviant behaviour because of the blurred reality of a single phone call? He had to find out. He had to find out whether his fast-pumping heart, his shortness of breath, his inability to keep still were his reaction to the call or a familiar chemical reaction to the imbibing of vast quantities of alcohol on the previous night.