The Magpie Trap: A Novel

by AJ Kirby

  ‘About what you were saying,’ he said, affecting weariness in his voice, ‘I think I would like to talk. I need to talk. Can we go for a drink at lunch-time?’

  ‘I think the pub is the last place you need to be at the moment, but I’ll happily get a coffee with you?’

  ‘I’ll only forgive you for siding with Cheryl if you come to the pub,’ said Danny, only half-joking.

  ‘Well, I’ve got no choice then, have I? The Adelphi, I presume?’ said Paula, flashing him an almost seductive smile, compassion burning like a flare in her eyes. She was that something out of the ordinary that brightened his day. She was almost out of place in a hell-hole like EyeSpy.

  The teasing hands of the clock finally ticked round to one o clock, and he escorted Paula outside to the car.

  ‘I’ll drive there and leave the car, if that’s what you’re worrying about,’ he chided.

  ‘Honestly Danny, I wasn’t thinking that at all. I would have thought that it would be completely stupid to drink more than the drink-drive limit at lunchtime anyway, after all, how do you expect to work this afternoon?’

  Danny laughed: ‘Ah, Paula, always the voice of reason in my head.’

  Their jovial mood continued throughout the brief car journey, through their purchasing of the drinks - an orange juice for the lady, and a pint with whisky chaser for Danny - but was abruptly brought to a halt when they were finally seated. They had chosen the no-smoking room, as it was the only quiet room at the Adelphi during the lunchtime rush. Some habits die hard, and it seemed that even in pubs that do food, the desire to be free to drink and smoke at the same time, without having to go outside, drove most people into the Adelphi’s many smoking lounges.

  ‘Cheryl’s right, you need to sort your life out,’ was Paula’s opening gambit.

  ‘I know, I know. I need to get a new job, maybe move away from here: get rid of all of the bad influences on me. I just want something good to fall out of the sky and change my life.’

  Danny took a huge gulp of his bitter, before continuing: ‘I’ve had a bad time of it. I need to get away. If I’m not in Leeds, everything will be different.’

  ‘You make your own chances in this life,’ said Paula carefully. ‘You have the power to change your own life. Don’t go expecting something to drop out of the sky. It just doesn’t happen; I should know. I’ve been waiting for somebody to notice me for years now.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. Of course people notice you. Look at you, you’re stunning.’

  Paula looked at him, wide-eyed in disbelief and frustration. Danny nervously began tearing at one of the beer-mats.

  ‘I was talking about my music, you fool. Do you never pay any attention to anybody else? Am I wasting my time here? You have to listen to people. Listen to Cheryl. Don’t go shutting yourself away.’

  Danny was shocked at the severity of Paula’s frustration; but he was also a little encouraged. If she cared about him enough to get that angry, maybe she cared for him in other ways…

  ‘I’m sorry. Can you just give me a hug? I need some human contact.’

  Paula looked at him suspiciously, and he lowered his eyes, in perfect imitation of sadness. In reality, Danny was trying to hide an incredulous smirk. She suddenly pulled him toward her and wrapped her surprisingly strong arms around him, rough hands stroking his neck.

  Ah, thought Danny, that’ll be from playing the guitar; she’s not got any finger nails either.

  He began to feel that same stirring from earlier that morning and he slowly turned his head to meet hers, brushing his lips against her cheek.

  She quickly withdrew, cheeks already burning red.

  ‘Erm, Danny, what was that?’

  ‘I don’t think Cheryl’s ever been right for me. It’s you; it’s always been you. Run away with me, Paula? I’m going to go away soon, and for a very long time, perhaps forever.’

  ‘When Cheryl told me that she’d given up on you, I thought she was being too hasty. I now see that she was right. You are a lost cause; a child. All you’ve ever talked about is escaping Leeds, escaping the reality of your life. My little brother used to threaten to run away every time he wasn’t allowed ice cream...

  I can’t continue this conversation; it would be unfair to Cheryl, but needless to say, I think you have cried wolf too many times. When you really do run away, nobody will be left to care, or even notice.’

  With that, she wrenched her coat off the back of her seat and stormed out of the no smoking room. Danny made as if to chase after her, but was waylaid by ordering another pint at the bar.

  The Cover

  Chris and Danny had finally tired of drinking coffee, and had retired to the closest pub. They had both appreciated the irony of drinking in Chapel Allerton’s Old Police Station as they had discussed their plans to conduct a heist on Edison’s Printers. The Old Police Station was actually an old, refurbished police station and had even utilised its old cells as private drinking areas. It was in one of these narrow enclosed spaces that the pair were conducting their private conversation.

  ‘So you’re definitely up for it then? Because we need to move fast,’ said Danny, his voice sounding too loud against the stark, whitewashed walls of the cell.

  ‘I’m up for it,’ answered Chris, in a quieter tone.

  ‘Good. I have the plans to the site now. We can work on the…’

  ‘What we need to work on is an iron-clad cover story,’ interrupted Chris, grinding out his fourth or fifth cigarette. ‘We need to be able to walk away from this with no worries in the back of our minds that it will come back and haunt us. We need a story which we can tell friends and relatives and they can tell the police, if needs be. We need to be believed to be out of the country before the heist. We also need Mark and you to quit EyeSpy Security. I know that this will raise suspicions, but you’re already on your last legs there, aren’t you, and Mark is an engineer. Engineers are always changing company, you told me that…’

  Danny, squinted through the cell’s bright lights and the low-lying of layer of smoke. ‘Mark’s still not on board. I’m working on him, but he’s not answered his phone all day. He’s going to be a lot harder to persuade than you were.’

  Chris glared across the table: ‘First up, I was not easy to persuade. I am in this plan for my own reasons. Second, what do you mean, we’ve not got Mark?’

  ‘Stop looking at me like that; like I’m one of your secretary-birds that’s typed up the wrong bit of a document. Mark will come back on board. It’s just a matter of time. And I didn’t mean anything bad about you, saying that I persuaded you to join me.’

  Chris sighed.

  Danny tried to change the subject: ‘You think we’ll definitely need to go abroad then?’

  ‘Life in Leeds is over for both of us, you know that. I don’t think Cheryl is coming back… sorry mate, but I don’t see it. My life here ended three years ago; I just tried to hang on to it, like you’re doing now.’

  Danny continued shredding the ubiquitous beer-mat, suddenly realising that they were no longer playing make-believe cops and robbers. It seemed strange, them talking so openly like this about a crime; two supposedly nice middle-class boys. They should have been talking-up their next trip to Ibiza, perhaps.

  Chris passed his friend a cigarette and continued, ‘If we are really going to pull this off, we have to understand that we can never come back. Remember what you said in Sela Bar about university; those discussions we used to have about travelling? Well, this is our golden opportunity, and we have to make it happen.’

  Danny took a long thoughtful drag of his cigarette, ‘I can’t believe you’re trying to persuade me now. It was my idea!’

  ‘It was your fantasy. Don’t get that confused with an idea; you’ve not properly thought any of this through have you?’

  ‘Well, what are we doing now smart arse?’ Danny snapped, stubbing out his only half-smoked cigarette. He liked smoking and the aura that smoking seemed to give him, but smoking at the p
ace that Chris smoked was a step too far.

  ‘Whilst you’ve been drinking your way to oblivion over the past few days, I’ve been working on our cover story. I may not know about security systems, I may not have got the site drawings like you, but there’s one thing I am good at, and that’s making up stories. I’ll cut to the chase.

  I handed my notice in at Peach this morning, probably before you even got out of your pit. They obviously wanted to know why, so I told them that I am starting up a new business abroad; a travel company for backpackers, some such bullshit. Believe it or not, one of those very secretary-birds started crying when I told her. She thought it was the nicest thing that anybody had ever said to her. She thought I was a hero.’

  Danny raised his eyes to the ceiling. Chris was starting to grate on him, just as he usually did when he joined in with something and began to make it his own. It was as though he naturally assumed that he was the leader of everything. But then the real leader is the one that knows the most, isn’t he? And Chris didn’t know anything about the BBC-voiced man’s new demands. Danny wanted to keep it that way.

  ‘Blimey, you have done your research mate; I have to give you that. This plan almost sounds good enough to do rather than the heist,’ he said. ‘But have you even thought about where we might go?’

  ‘How about Australia or New Zealand? Loads of backpackers there… Or how about somewhere along the old hippie trail; somewhere undeveloped.’

  ‘How about Mauritius?’ asked Danny, remembering what the BBC-voiced man had said. He tried not to sound too enthusiastic about the idea. If he could somehow guide Chris into believing that he’d reached his own conclusion, then things would work out better. It would be a sign.

  ‘Hmmm, Mauritius; you know, that isn’t a bad idea,’ mused Chris. He sounded oddly enthusiastic. ‘Not bad at all.’

  ‘Supposed to be pretty much like paradise out there,’ said Danny, dangling the carrot

  ‘They have pretty bad rainy seasons there, and I know for a fact that some of its coastal towns were devastated last year by the storms. Our phantom business will be to set up a volunteer workforce of the backpackers that travel through the country to rebuild some of these coastal towns. We will be charging them to stay at our resort on the north coast.’

  Danny narrowed his eyes. ‘How come you know so much about Mauritius all of a sudden? Who’ve you been talking to?’

  ‘Chill out mate,’ said Chris. ‘I researched it for a diving holiday I was once planning on going on… Anyway, what am I going to need to start up an imaginary business like that? I’m going to need a good salesman; someone like you to rope the unsuspecting traveller into spending rather more of mummy and daddy’s money than they’d like on staying at our resort. And the people will come, just like in Field of Dreams, they’ll come. And best of all, everyone will believe such a cover story.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Danny. He didn’t want to show Chris ho impressed he actually was, or how happy he was that he’d been able to persuade him that Mauritius was their ideal post-heist destination. He felt like Hannibal Smith in the A-Team; the plan was coming together all around him and he hardly needed to try.

  ‘We bring in Mark as an expert on site engineer to do the electrics or something,’ continued Chris, on a roll now. ‘We set the business up properly, and we channel the money we steal through that. It’s the ideal cover story, Danny, and it means that we can have our dream of travelling!’

  Chris had a self-satisfied smile on his face, and he winked across at Danny, gesturing wildly towards the cell walls. ‘Think about it mate, in a week or two we can be on a beach, away from these bloody walls that keep us in.’

  ‘All we need to do now then is get the actual heist done then,’ said Danny, bringing his friend back down to earth with a bump. Well, he didn’t want his troops overly cocky, did he?

  Evicted

  Mark thought that after his performance at the funeral, his mother would never speak to him again. He had shown an unacceptable level of feeling; he had insulted his father’s memory. He was therefore amazed to be woken from his first sleep since his father had died by his mother’s phone call.

  ‘I was ashamed by your lack of respect this morning. St. Andrew’s did me a real favour letting us have the funeral so soon after his death. We had the Church Hall booked for tea and sandwiches after, and I lost count of the amount of people I had to apologise to on your behalf.’

  ‘You don’t have to speak for me mother. I said what I needed to say… I’m sorry if it offended you, but it had to be said. You never let me say goodbye at the hospital.’

  ‘Oh Mark,’ and suddenly his mother’s voice dissolved into a lake of tears, ‘I vowed that I would never speak to you again, but now…’

  ‘Mother?’ said Mark, suddenly very worried. There was something else in her voice as well as the grief and disappointment.

  ‘You may have let me down son, but its nothing compared to the callousness of the Council. I’ve just got back to the house now, and there was a letter waiting for me; hold on, let me read it…’

  He heard her rummage about for her reading glasses, and a rustle of paper as she started to read: ‘Dear Ms. Birch… I’m a Ms. now apparently… he’s not yet cold in the grave, but I’m a Ms.’

  She cleared her throat, and continued, in her stuttering reading voice, ‘We were very sorry to hear about the death of your husband… very sorry, a likely story… As you know, there is a severe shortage of houses in your area, and we would like to move you to a more manageable home in the lovely retirement village of Daffodil Acres… the cheek of them.’

  ‘Daffodil Acres? I had to install a security system there; it’s like being in the middle of Beirut! We can’t have that mother; I have savings, don’t worry, we’ll sort something out.’

  Mark agreed to call the Council directly, but he was more concerned by calling the bank in order to check the amount that he actually had in his savings; he knew that the funeral had wiped out a large chunk of the money. He quickly had his worst fears confirmed when the bank told him that his funds had trickled away to single figures; £6K would not be anything like enough to save his mother from Daffodil Acres.

  His head felt as though it was about to explode; not only was he surviving on a diet of absolutely no sleep, but he was having to deal with the corrosive mixture of guilt and grief which welled up inside him every time he thought about his father.

  His head was pounding, but it was only when he staggered into the kitchen to get a glass of water that he realised that the metronomic thudding was not an internal pain, but was rather the sounds of some of the local kids repetitively crashing a football against his garage door. He collapsed onto the kitchen floor, clutching his head in his hands, but there was no escape from that sound which hammered into him his lonely tearful inertia; he didn’t save his father, and now he couldn’t save his mother either.

  As he lay on the sticky lino floor, his blue EyeSpy overalls sticking to spilled tea, his mind began to associate mental images with the rhythm being beat out on the metal drum which was his garage door. He saw circuit diagrams from his security training; he saw the pictorial explanation of how the monitoring of security system works. He saw a ball of data bouncing back and forth along a telephone line, ricocheting from one end of the line to the other.

  Mark suddenly raised himself up from the depths of his floor: an idea had been forming in his head almost without his knowing it.

  Thud: the ball smashed against the garage door. In his head, he imagined the ball as a packet of data. It was the remote security control centre sending a message to the security system/ garage door which asked the question, are you alright? It asked further questions; has anybody tried to tamper with you? Has anything got in the way of this packet of data getting through? Then, as the ball/ data ricochets away from the security system/ garage door it sends back its own message, responding by saying: yes I’m all right. No problems here. Nobody is trying to break in. This bal
l/ data ricochets back up the line to the security control centre, and so on. No problem; it is only when one of the lines says No I’m not alright, you have a problem. Mark’s technical mind was suddenly in overdrive; he grabbed a pen and paper from the telephone table and began sketching out his thoughts, giving them meaning.

  ‘What would happen,’ asked Mark, out loud, ‘if I was to create a dummy unit; a ‘substitute’ which gets in the way of this constant ricochet? What would happen if I was able to falsify the I’m all right message, when in reality the lines have been cut? Nobody would be any the wiser; the security control centre would not notice any change, those on site would not. Somebody could quite literally just walk in and take all the stuff. What with the Intertel Shift causing all of that chaos, and this as a back-up plan, we could just about get away with it… We could not only walk in without the alarm going off, but we could affect the live streaming of the images.’

  He stared at his reflection in the wide mirror above the mantelpiece. Talking to himself like he had was supposed to be the first sign of madness, and perhaps he was going a little crazy. But the truth was, Mark had always kept an interior monologue with himself going, even before his father had died. He reckoned that lots of people that spend a lot of time on their on probably did too. And despite his uneasy relationship with religion and the church, perhaps this was his way of talking with God. Perhaps this was his way of praying; perhaps he’d simply been waiting for his God-conscience to kick-in and tell him that such ideas were blasphemous and against everything he stood for.