by John Macrae
To say that the evening was gloomy would be an understatement. It was a catastrophe. Barbara sniveled occasionally, and Wet Eric kept saying, "What are we going to do?" like some kind of dismal chanted counterpoint. I offered what money I could from my gratuity, but much of that had already gone on buying the flat and I couldn't begin to meet the kind of pressures that would soon engulf their family. They would have to sell their house and start all over again, probably in a rented place. Fortunately they were both sensible people and their desperation was tempered by common sense. No-one, thank God, was contemplating anything drastic.
Finally I had to go. Barbara showed me to the door. Her eyes were red-rimmed from weeping and the blue shadows that had half-circled them on my last visit were more marked. I looked down at her and then put my arms round her and gave her a kiss. "Cheer up, Sis." The tears glistened in her eyes. "It'll all work out - you'll see."
"Will it? I hope so." She sniffed and tried to smile bravely but only succeeded in a weak half-sob.
"C'mon, love, things will look different in the morning. Don't cry. I'll help all I can."
She buried her head in my lapel. "I know. I just wish someone could make that bloody man pay for all the misery he's caused us.”
"Who? Eric?" I was puzzled - the idea of the blazered, desperately anxious and fussy Eric being 'that bloody man' was laughable.
"No, silly." She half-laughed. "Not Eric. It's not his fault. Well, not really. No, Varley. The one that Eric went to see in the City; the one with the Bentley and the office. Him."
A hot glimmer of something sparked deep in my mind. "Ah: the unacceptable face of capitalism, you mean? How do you mean, 'make him pay?' "
She looked at me, her head on one side. "Well, someone like you. Teach him a lesson."
"Someone like me?"
"Oh come on big brother - it's not as if I don't know what you get up to."
I pulled away from her. "Oh yes..... what’s that then?"
She was coy. "I know what you used to do. It was in all the papers last year. And let's face it, you're hardly the world's leading expert on insurance, are you?"
"What of it?" I said roughly. "I do work for a Lloyds firm. You know I do."
Barbara laughed. "Yeah, sure. But your brand of insurance is a bit different from Eric's, isn't it?"
I was worried and wondered how much she knew. "What are you saying, then? That I'm running some kind of protection racket?"
She took a deep breath. “Come on, little brother… this is me. I know you. You’ve always wanted to be the hard man. Even when you were a little boy. Always playing on your own. Always quiet and watching. Never cry, hide your feelings, never show you’re frightened. Hit back hard if you’re cornered. That’s you." She brushed something imaginary from my lapel, avoiding my eyes. "You haven't changed. Ever: that's why you joined the Army: that’s why you joined the Corps. That's why you went for SAS selection.” She clutched my lapel.
She stared up at me and suddenly said, “Have you ever killed anyone?”
She must have spotted my startled blink. “Thought so. Well, as they say, your silence speaks volumes. Just the same as when you were little. You always were a cold hearted, punchy little devil. You don’t fool me with this insurance stuff.”
I bit back hard. This was a dangerous conversation. Very dangerous. "Well, you're wrong; I do work in insurance. And I can prove it. Call the number on my card if you don’t believe me. I just use my knowledge of the Middle East to help Lloyds with bodyguard contracts, OK? All that stuff's behind me, since I left the Army. Right?"
"OK. If you say so."
"Well, I do say so." I was too rough and Barbara’s face began to crumple again. "I'm sorry, Sis. I didn't mean to be so sharp. I know this has all been hard for you, what with the baby, the money….”"
"I know," she sniffed. "It's just that I wish something could be done about people like that Varley man. I just thought..."
"Can't you go to the Police?"
“No, Eric says that the man’s not actually done anything illegal. Bastard….”
"Just immoral?"
"I suppose so."
There was a long pause. Eric's voice floated through from the living room. "Come on, Barbara. It's getting cold." She looked up at me, and called back to him,
"Coming, love." Then in a softer voice, she added, "Don’t you know anyone who could help? Even if we could only get some of the money back…. The eyes pleaded.
"Barbara," Eric called again
She turned back to me. "Please try. Think of little Theo. You must know someone who could help… Could you do something about him? Please?" she pleaded. “Can you ask him to give at least some of it back?”
“I'll see. No promises, though."
"Thanks, love." She kissed me gently on the cheek. From upstairs came the spluttering, mewling wails that babies make preparatory to full scale crying and Barbara smiled, half apologetically. "There’s Theo. See you soon, love. Take care."
I made my way slowly back to my flat, my mind in a turmoil. I thought about how little I really bothered about money, yet how vital it was. As long as I'd got the stuff in the bank and could get what I needed out of the hole in the wall. I hardly ever thought about it. I didn't even know my bank manager's name. Yet money ruled all those lives, really: mine too. Bankers were Public Enemy Number One at the time. I thought about how all that stuff in the papers about how bankers could devastate whole families by manipulating commodities and people. Money's never exactly been my scene.
Anyway, it's dog eat dog out there in commerce, isn't it? They're the really hard hearted ruthless bastards.... The Building Societies, the Banks and the lawyers: 'we only repossessed your house because we were obeying company policy, you see… “The computer says…” “Head Office's orders are orders and we have no discretion.....” Orders are orders. Now where had I heard that before? Not that it really hurt me.... Except when it's hurting one of your own family. Suddenly Yusif's words floated back to me, "Who else will act for us, if a man will not act as a man to support his own kin...?"
Surely I owed my sister something? Christ, if she couldn't get justice from the law, then who could provide justice? Barbara was kin, wasn't she? Blood's thicker than water.
And finally, as I lay in bed, some gentle piece by Rameau fading away in the darkness, I thought about fraud and crime and justice and the law and the police. As sleep eluded me, I thought about my nightmare policeman, Detective Sergeant Harry Plummer of the Metropolitan Police. Maybe he was right; maybe whoever had done Spicer wasn't normal..... that meant I wasn't normal..... Hepworth had said I wasn't... psychotic personality….
I grinned to myself. Hepworth. What an arsehole... I could show him a few bloody psychopaths…real ones. He should go on the piss with the lads in B Squadron one day. Then he’d see some real psychos…. Well, if the law couldn't look after my sister, maybe I should...... Now, Jamal, he knew about an eye for an eye... he looked after his sister... a bit late...and poor bloody Nusret, who'd said that we made our own law.... burnt alive by the Ayatollah’s goons..... Christ! What a way to die..... I'd fix bloody Varley.....
An image of Spicer's blood-slimed torso crept into my dreams and to the faint music on the stereo I slept....
CHAPTER 15
Prelude
Fixing Spicer for the world at large was about as far as I had intended to go as an avenging angel. But suddenly I was back in the private vengeance business.
Spicer was meant to be a one-off, but this business with Barbara was family. Curiously enough, the bad dreams I had been having on and of ever since my return from Iran stopped as soon as I had taken the decision to do something about Varley. I wondered what Hepworth, the creepy little psychiatrist at the London clinic would have made of that. Even my stars were looking up; according to the Sundays, 'I was due for a memorable month, that could see the fruition of a long cherished dream....'
In my position as Operations Chief for a Lloyds-based compa
ny, it was easy enough to mug up on Varley. The database had lots on him. Like Spicer, it made unpleasant reading. He was an ex-public-school boy and had worked in the City at first. Then there had been some odd mail order business that had folded and a first wife. Rumours that he’s peddled cocaine as a young man. He'd stood for Parliament, done two terms as a Tory MP and then left. The sleaze allegations were financial. He had a string of directorships in a string of businesses.
Now he lived in a farmhouse down in Kent with his second wife, two kids and some horses. He still contributed to the Tory Party and some other more fashionable charities, owned shadowy holding companies in the Isle of Man and Jersey that seemed to control a series of remarkably unsuccessful businesses, while he kept getting unaccountably richer, and worked out of a floor of discreet but expensive Victorian offices in the City of London.
It all seemed an odd set-up, and the more I delved, the more he stank. To my surprise I discovered that it had been one of his holding companies that had gone spectacularly bust the preceding year, leaving thousands of trippers without their paid-for holidays. The Press had had a field day, I remembered; but they hadn't uncovered Varley. The tour firm had lost its ABTA bond, but I didn't have to be an accountant to work out how much cash had flowed from “Sunburst Tours Ltd.” into a holding company before the former had crashed. The holding company was a Jersey Company. I had a pretty clear idea who the beneficiary owner of that hidden Jersey company might be.
By now my interest was thoroughly whetted. I got every shred on Varley I could, and I didn't like what I kept finding.
After a couple of weeks delving, I felt that I had enough background to go and have a look at him in person. Normally this would have been a background inquiry, delegated to one of the support boys: but I dare not take the risk, so I had to do it myself. I called round at the City offices of Varley's holding company and made a point of 'accidentally' bumping into him. My good old theatrical moustache and horn rimmed glasses gave me enough cover to risk a brief encounter.
We met in the corridor and I read him as we dropped down in the lift together. With the studied indifference of Brits we avoided each other's eyes; yet while he watched the numbers unwind, and I hummed to distract him, I examined him discreetly but in great detail.
He was a large, slightly beefy figure with thinning fair hair and a reddish face. He looked older than his fifty odd years, and in an expensive tweed suit he looked more like a prosperous country farmer than a bent financier. But he certainly looked like a sleazy ex-MP on the make, which is precisely what he was. As we got out I rather shyly asked him if he had any idea where Mr Cunningham worked. His brusque ''No, I don’t. Never heard of him….," as he pushed past me told me a lot about his attitudes to his fellow men. I'm glad I hadn't ever voted for him. It would have been a terrible waste. He was undoubtedly a pompous, arrogant, overbearing public school bastard of the worst kind, and taking the wind out of him was going to be a positive pleasure. And a public duty, too.
Having got the measure of the prey, I now wanted to see its lair. From the map it lay well off the main A20 near Pluckley down in rural Kent, so I made a telephone appointment to inspect the electricity meter. I telephoned a friend of mine at the local electricity company and said that we needed to use an official Electricity Company cover for a special operation for a few days. He readily agreed, without knowing the target.
There are a surprising number of people who will do things for the SAS or for the secret world, and never say a word to question it. Everyone likes to be associated with the magic world of secrets. Glory by association, I suppose. Very glamorous. Makes people feel important. People are gullible. I had often used them in the past and held an array of spurious work-names and IDs. And I didn't tell Mike that I had left the Army and was no longer serving with the Counter Revolutionary Wing team at Hereford: it seemed unnecessary to go into that kind of detail.
With this protection against embarrassing phone calls to check my authority, I called at the house about a week later. It was, by any standards a desirable residence. From the gate a long drive swept up to a mock-Georgian front door, and the Victorian pile had been expensively worked on.
His wife let me in. I insisted on showing her my Electricity ID card, and invited her to phone in and check my bona fides. Thank God, she didn't, but then they never do, do they? She didn't really ask to see it. She was a thin, harrassed-looking soul, with wisps of straggly blonde hair framing a permanently worried face. Like her husband, she looked older than her thirty-nine years. I wondered if she knew about Varley's affair with his secretary, as I did.
While I was taken to the meter in the utility room, I cased the house as quickly and expertly as I could. There were a number of alarms evident; all the windows had security locks and a display panel in the utility room was quite clearly the nerve centre of a standard domestic alarm system. A glimpse of the dining room and living room, ('I only want to check the downstairs wiring, madam,') revealed some good pictures on the walls and attractive silver on the sideboard, but nothing both portable and really valuable. Or, more important, anything that would get to Varley and make him suffer.
On an impulse, I asked her if the alarm system wiring was independent of the mains. There had to be a safe in a house like this. She looked flustered; not unnaturally, she wasn't sure, but a quick inspection revealed that the system went to an independently charged battery if the power was cut. Her puzzled fumblings also revealed that only one of the pictures was wired to the alarm. When I asked why, she became nervous and cagey. I grinned and said that it didn't matter. "I see a lot of safes and alarms in my job, madam. I quite understand."
She smiled, still embarrassed, but more relaxed. "It's just that my husband doesn't like people knowing ... you know, about the alarm system."
On a total guess I said, "Quite right too. All I need to know is, is the picture alarm linked to the safe with a separate circuit, or does that use mains electricity, too?"
She looked startled and glanced instinctively at the picture. "No, I think it's all the same system."
I tried to make her relax. "Good, good. Well, I won't need to see any of that. Can I check the fuse box, now, please? And then we've finished." And off we went to the fuse box in the utility room. My eye had already noted the bowl of cat food and the small open top window.
She invited me to have a cup of coffee before I left. She was clearly lonely out there in the country and needed to chat. I had seen no evidence of a daily cleaning woman; I expect that the nice Mrs Varley was starved for human company. Every rule in the book said that I should decline her invitation and not stay a moment longer; theoretically I had already exposed myself too much already. The counter argument was that time spent on reconnaissance is never wasted, and I really needed a first hand report on Varley. Curiosity won, and, secretly praying that my horn-rimmed glasses and scrubby stick-on moustache would last the course, I joined her at the kitchen table.
She was a decent, kind enough woman. Her mannerism of pushing back the strands of hair at the side of her face with the back of her hand reminded me of bakers or harrassed mothers, and her permanently apologetic manner - "I'm sorry it's only instant" as she handed me coffee - was clearly based on an unhappy and doubtless bullied background somewhere down the line. It didn't take any great skill to bring the conversation round to her husband and the house, and she fleshed out my picture of Varley very well. She missed her two kids away at some expensive school and proudly showed me a picture of them in coloured blazers on the cliffs at Eastborne.
She was a nice woman, and deserved better from life than she had got, even with the fancy house and all. I could sense a desolation of the spirit, and when she talked of her kids she stared out of the window as if hoping to see them playing on the lawn. But they weren't.
Just as I was leaving, though, she gave me a nugget of information, while I was fending off some too-detailed questions about the promotion prospects of local Electricity Board employees. She
revealed that she was off to Wales the following Thursday to see her parents. I realised that would give me good access to the house, because she'd already told me that Varley rarely got home before eight o'clock. We parted cheerfully, although not before she'd confirmed that there were no security TV cameras, "should the workmen come round madam..." I crunched across the gravel to the hired car, mentally deciding not to take any risks but relieved that I now had a date to strike. Moreover, at least I knew how I was going to give Barbara a very practical revenge.
I was going to rob Varley of enough to pay Barbara back. It was probably in the safe.
And if it wasn't, then Varley could pay up. Personally.
I was sure I could find some way of convincing him.
CHAPTER 16
Kent
If you’re going south, always make sure you buy a ticket north. If you don’t want to leave a trail, that is.
The following Thursday I left the office mid morning, with an authorisation for expenses to do a job in Peterborough. It was one of Mallalieu’s sops to my dignity even though I did the business on the telephone in less than ten minutes. The rest of the day was my own.
I bought a first class railway ticket by credit card at King's Cross, threw it in a waste bin and took a car hired under a false work name down to Kent. If anyone ever checked, I'd gone north; the plastic put through King's Cross would prove it. It wasn't much of a cover story, but it would survive a casual check, and might discourage further investigations.