Geoff wondered how long he had been so shallow. Despondently, he realised he had only become so self-serving since he first touched the stranger’s money. Since then, it had been a constant downhill slide. The one reassuring thought that crossed his mind was the idea that he probably couldn’t sink much lower.
34
‘You could do it during the day,’ Nicola told him.
It was lunchtime. They sat on opposite sides of a canteen table amid the teeming bustle of their fellow, faceless colleagues. Nicola had a plate of salad in front of her. Geoff didn’t feel up to attempting much more than a bowl of soup, and that was only to line his stomach as he chewed on more painkillers.
‘Good idea,’ he agreed. ‘I steal the damned thing during the day. That way the guards reviewing the CCTV cameras won’t have any trouble recognising me when the police are going through the records. That should make everybody’s job a lot easier. I might even save everyone a whole lot of time just by walking straight down to the police station and turning myself in. What do you think I should wear? A stripy sweatshirt, an eye-mask, and maybe carry a big bag that has SWAG written across the side?’
‘You’re really in a mood today, aren’t you?’
Geoff slurped a spoonful of soup. It tasted as though it had come from a rusty tin. ‘Having your boyfriend kick the shit out of me, and then threaten to cut my bollocks off if I go near you, is not something that is likely to put anyone in a good mood.’
He took another spoonful of soup. The taste had not improved.
‘Don’s the jealous type,’ Nicola said, lightly. She said the words as though this explained and excused his behaviour. Lowering her voice she added, ‘And if you can put Don out of your thoughts for a minute, have a think about what I’m saying. Why not do it in broad daylight? All the office doors are unlocked during the day. It would be the ideal time.’
‘And the CCTV cameras?’ He pointed towards the unit that covered the canteen. It was an antiquated piece of machinery that sat large in the corner above the canteen doorway. A single red light beneath the camera showed that it was working and recording events in the room. ‘What would I do about the CCTV cameras?’ he asked.
She shrugged. ‘Take them out.’
‘Yes,’ Geoff agreed. ‘Why didn’t I think of that before? I should just take out the CCTV cameras. Oh! Wait a minute! I know why I didn’t think of that before. It’s because I don’t live in one of those Ocean’s Eleven movies.’
He dropped his spoon into his soup bowl. It landed with a heavy clatter that had other diners in the canteen startled and staring at him. Geoff glared ferociously at the faces fixed in his direction until they each turned back to their own business.
‘Did you know the CCTVs were fitted in here ten years ago?’
‘How interesting.’
‘Did you know that the cabling was installed without compromising the incumbent structure of the architecture?’
Annoyed with himself, Geoff studied Nicola. He could sense she was building to a point and he wanted to hear it. It occurred to him that she’d clearly spent a productive morning researching ways for the theft to go ahead whilst he had been wallowing in self-pity and doing nothing more productive than chewing painkillers and typing names into Google.
Not that he considered his morning to have been unproductive. He had typed the names Despre, Rillieux and Manumishon into the search engine, and discovered several interesting facts about the founders of the Church of the Black Angel.
Despre was the most innocuous of the trio. Affiliated with a handful of radical groups, Despre was only suspected of murder, human trafficking, drug running and kiddie-fiddling. His whereabouts were currently listed as unknown, although the two websites that Geoff had consulted both suggested he was somewhere near the Amazon.
There were pictures.
They were old, sepia-tinted images, clearly scanned and uploaded from a private collection of black and white photographs. Some of them showed Despre scowling at the camera. One disturbing image showed Despre smiling with a gaggle of sad and frightened urchins kneeling at his feet. Another showed Despre holding a naked woman. The woman’s posture was so relaxed Geoff couldn’t work out if she was drugged or dead. But the most disturbing things about the images of Despre had nothing to do with what the man was doing. The most disturbing thing was that Geoff thought he recognised the man’s face. Geoff wasn’t sure if the stranger in Shades had described Despre to such a level of detail but he felt certain, staring into the images of the houngan’s cold eyes, that he knew the man and had seen him recently.
Juliet Rillieux was a more controversial figure. She had turned up dead in London fifteen years earlier. Geoff discovered that she had been on the run from Haitian authorities, who had not taken kindly to the extortion rackets she organised in Port-au-Prince. She left behind a following of devout believers, who were possibly spurred on in their worship by her threats of curses and hexes. Rillieux, according to one website, left behind an army of effigies. Each effigy was adorned with human hair. Each was penetrated by at least three pins and each was responsible for a brand of suffering that could only be attributed to the black arts. Rillieux, according to another website, had often been seen in the company of an entourage of her own private slaves. The associates were made up of those she had raised from graveyards. Rillieux, it was said, could make the rich and famous succeed or bleed, depending how much they paid her. Geoff read one article where the author said Rillieux was the only bokor they had ever witnessed who could genuinely call on Baron Samedi – loa of the dead – and have him do her bidding.
Geoff read the words from his monitor. He wished he didn’t believe what he was reading. He also wished he wasn’t reading about people who were clearly more successful than himself. Even though Juliet Rillieux had died fifteen years earlier, the fact that she had once had the ability to control spirits, life and zombies suggested it might still be wise to regard her as a potentially formidable opponent.
There had been no available photographs of Rillieux. The few places where he had expected to see images had been websites where the picture refused to download and, instead of showing her face, displayed an empty oblong. One link promised it had a photograph of the elusive woman but, when Geoff tried to open that page, his PC crashed. Not wanting to run the risk of making his enquiries known to the IT department, Geoff decided he had discovered enough about Queen Juliet Rillieux. He concentrated the remainder of his search on the remaining founder of the Church of the Black Angel.
Manumishon, the supreme houngan, turned out to be more of a mystery figure than his associates. Whereas Despre and Rillieux apparently had control over life, death and the afterworld, Manumishon’s skills extended to the internet. Even though Geoff invested an hour in trying to search for the man’s name in an article, blog or linked to a photograph, he found nothing at all relating to any vodun, voodoo or vodou practitioner with a name remotely resembling Manumishon’s.
Manumishon, it transpired, was a common surname amongst those descended from former slaves. The name was derived from the noun manumission: formal release from slavery or servitude. Geoff had read the definition and told himself it would be one of those words that he would never be able to use in a sentence. That thought had been immediately proved wrong when he realised that, stealing the skull from Roger Black’s desk would be the first step on his manumission from Raven and Skull.
‘Are you listening to me here?’ Nicola asked. She snapped her fingers in front of Geoff’s face, bringing him back to the noisy reality of the canteen. ‘Do you understand what I’ve just told you about the CCTV cables in this building?’
‘Explain it again,’ Geoff advised. ‘Pretend that I wasn’t listening.’
Nicola did not bother hiding her frustration. ‘The CCTV cables were laid inside existing conduit so as not to compromise the architecture. Also, because the equipment is more than a decade old, there’s no wireless stuff. There’s none of this special fibre-optic
stuff inside inaccessible plastic housings. Are you with me so far?’
Geoff nodded. He had understood the words but he couldn’t yet see her relevance or the point she was trying to make.
‘All the cables from each floor are linked together in one big snaky bundle,’ Nicola explained. She lowered her voice so there was less risk of anyone overhearing and said, ‘They’re linked together in a big snaky bundle that feeds to the main security network downstairs.’
‘So?’
‘So,’ Nicola now sounded impatient. ‘If you take out the bundle of cables for this floor, the CCTV cameras won’t see a thing of what you’re doing. And taking them out should be as easy as cutting through a bunch of cables.’
Geoff shook his head. ‘Pointless,’ he snapped. ‘As soon as the cameras went off, there’d be a team from security patrolling the offices until they found out what the problem was.’
‘They wouldn’t get up here straight away,’ Nicola argued.
‘They’d get here soon enough,’ Geoff snapped. ‘It certainly wouldn’t leave much spare time in case there were delays or setbacks.’
‘Delays or setbacks?’ she scoffed. ‘Like what?’
‘Like, maybe Black being in his office,’ Geoff suggested. ‘Or someone who knows me maybe being around Raven’s office, stopping me from getting in there, or asking me what I’m doing there?’
‘Shit,’ Nicola muttered. ‘I hadn’t thought about stuff like that.’
Geoff said nothing.
‘What you need,’ Nicola decided, ‘is for the cables to be cut at exactly the same time as there’s a massive distraction that has everyone rushing out of the building.’
‘Yes. That’s exactly what I need.’ Geoff sighed heavily and said, ‘Or, in other words, I might as well give up now.’
Nicola considered him guardedly. ‘Are you seriously thinking of backing out?’
Geoff shrugged. ‘What have I got to lose?’
‘You owe Don ten grand. And he’s going to want that money regardless of whether you do the job or not–’
Geoff opened his mouth to protest that Nicola was being unfair. If he simply gave the money back to the Church of the Black Angel, surely Don could accept that he wasn’t going to get his money and everyone could forget about Geoff’s limited involvement in the planned robbery. He closed his mouth when he realised that Don would never accept such a situation. Geoff had touched the stranger’s money and accepted the responsibility of stealing the skull. He was now committed to a course of action regardless of whether or not he wanted to continue.
‘I also want my twenty grand,’ Nicola continued. ‘And I’ll use every resource at Don’s disposal to make sure I get it.’ She stared solemnly at Geoff and said, ‘Are you really thinking of backing out?’
‘Not anymore,’ he sighed, bitterly. ‘Not anymore.’
35
Geoff’s journey home was exhausting.
He supposed he was tired from not having slept properly the night before. And he reasoned that the tiredness was making him paranoid. But, whilst that argument made sense to the rational part of his mind, it didn’t lessen the anxiety that accompanied him on his walk to the station, or his bus ride home.
The cool caress of an unseen gaze grazed the back of his neck. The disquieting sensation that he was being watched made Geoff study every stranger with wary hostility. Judging by the puzzled expressions being flashed in his direction, Geoff supposed he looked like one of the evening’s typical bus-travelling lunatics but it wasn’t until he caught a glimpse of his own reflection in the bus’s window that the thought was confirmed. One eye was almost swollen shut from the blow Don had landed at his head. His cheek was a raised and black landscape that, on anyone else, he would have attributed to dirt or disease or both. Grudgingly, he conceded that the reason he thought everyone was staring at him was because he looked strange enough to merit their curiosity. And, whilst that thought offered some reassurance, it didn’t shake the idea that there was one set of eyes fixed on him that belonged to someone with sinister intentions.
He climbed off the bus, walked half a mile home, and then slipped into his flat. With the kettle on, and a change of clothes thrown into the bathroom for when he’d finished showering, he tried to shake some of the day’s worries from his shoulders. His entire body was stiff. Those parts that didn’t ache with cuts and bruises shook from the tension of being held in a position of tight and nervous readiness throughout the day.
He went into the bedroom without touching the light switch. The room was held in shadows but he reasoned if he was being watched, he didn’t want to alert anyone outside the building that he was going into his bedroom. He knew the thought was irrational and paranoid. But he also knew that, sometimes, irrational and paranoid people were being watched. Common sense told him that acting irrational and paranoid was the most sensible option for someone who was dealing with criminals and planning to steal a hundred-thousand-pound artefact from his employer. Pulling clothes away from the front of the wardrobe door, he moved the shoes and jumble he had placed in the corner, lifted the edge of the carpet and then removed the two loose floorboards.
The biscuit tin was missing.
The moment’s panic was almost enough to stop his heart from beating. Geoff came close to screaming. His mind raced through the ways that his tin of money could have been stolen. His fingers scrabbled against joists, dust and spider webs as he tried to blindly find the tin. The sting of an old and rusty nail scraped across his knuckles. The pain was sudden and intense but barely registered on his thoughts as his search continued.
And then his fingers found the side of the tin.
The smooth metal was reassuringly cold.
The relief was so strong it left him light-headed.
The tin hadn’t gone. It hadn’t been stolen. He simply hadn’t been able to see it in the darkness. Dragging it from its hiding place, wrenching the duct tape from its lid, he carried the tin into the kitchen and left it on the table whilst he made himself a coffee.
The gashes across three fingers of his right hand surprised him with the amount of blood they produced. In his panic to find the tin he hadn’t realised he had cut himself so badly. Running the cuts beneath a cold tap, trembling with the pain of cleaning the wound, his gaze constantly returned to the tin of money on the kitchen table.
He dried his hand on a kitchen towel, made a quick coffee, and then opened the tin. There was one disquieting moment, just before he removed the lid, where Geoff thought he would find the tin empty. In his mind’s eye he could picture the shiny interior staring up at him and containing nothing more than the scent of long-forgotten biscuits and a reflection of the kitchen light. When he saw that the money was still there, he released a breath that he hadn’t realised he had been holding.
Quickly, as quickly as his trembling and aching hands could manage, Geoff counted out ten thousand pounds. His coffee turned cold whilst he was counting the sum for the third time. Once he had assured himself that he had accurately counted out five hundred twenty pound notes, Geoff placed the money to one side and then took five of the twenties for himself. He found an empty envelope for Don’s money and then put his own meagre hundred into his wallet. The amount he had taken for himself almost covered what he had spent on gloves, sugar and the pilot’s case.
It took another ten minutes to reseal the biscuit tin, return it to its hiding place, and then conceal the fact that the hiding place existed. By the time he returned to the kitchen he realised the evening was slipping away from him. The need for a shower and a warm coffee were like desperate cravings. But the memory of Don’s casual threat was a more powerful motivator. Methodically, Geoff stuffed the envelope containing Don’s money into the bag he usually used for taking his sports gear to the gym. The bag had a vague fragrance of sweat and old laundry but it looked tired enough to be considered innocuous. Trying not to let himself worry that the time was fast approaching nine o’clock, and that Don’s deadline was loom
ing ever closer, Geoff left his apartment, twice checked that the door was secure, and then headed for The House of Usher.
He walked half a mile towards the nearest bus stop. When he passed a group of loud, arguing teenagers, their faces hidden by hoodies and their bodies concealed inside designer tracksuits, he suddenly grew uncomfortable with the idea of carrying ten thousand pounds through the darkening city streets. As soon as he was able, Geoff hailed a passing taxi.
The driver asked where he was headed, and then fell into silence.
Geoff supposed, given the way he looked, the driver couldn’t think of much to say. He caught a glimpse of his reflection in the cab’s glass partition and realised he looked grotesque. With his face still battered and a wild expression in his one visible eye, he could sympathise with the driver’s preternatural silence because he wouldn’t have known what to say to someone who looked so desperate. He wanted to use the journey to think his way through the complexities of trying to steal the skull. However, with the fear of missing Don’s deadline growing larger with each passing second, Geoff couldn’t concentrate on the problem.
The driver pulled up outside The House of Usher and slid the partition back. ‘Thirteen quid.’
Geoff paid for the ride with a single twenty and told the driver to keep the change. Then, standing alone outside the restaurant, he wondered what mad impulse had made him agree to steal the skull.
The House of Usher was a large, detached building. Fronted by plate windows the warm interior lights presented a middle-class utopia filled with couples, families and friends who were laughing and eating in cosy splendour. The soft lighting suggested a warm, ambient welcome. Touches of gold trim on the rich red furnishings hinted at the comfort and reassurance of wealth. He could see the restaurant’s courtyard from where he stood. A huge fountain stood in the middle of the courtyard, burbling pretty patterns of water for the solitary couple sat by its edge.
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