Raucous

by Ben Paul Dunn

  “You said a lot was invented,” Charlotte said.

  “Less invented and more borrowed. Plagiarized an academic would say, but that is such a horrid word.” Belfour linked his hands through his fingers and placed his elbows on the table. “Have you ever read Private Eye?” He asked.

  Charlotte and Roach did not answer.

  “From your blank expressions I take that to be a no. It is a magazine with all the information you require, if you understand the code they use to expose certain people. Pick up some old copies and read. And then make the leap you need to associate their heavy sarcasm and humor to the vile acts they are actually reporting. I use much of what they write to create my own works. As long as certain names are left out and only persons alluded to, there is no legal comeback. If someone takes chagrin to an article in which they are not mentioned, then they are as good as admitting their guilt. The general readership already knows the facts, so why cause a commotion that will slip into mainstream redtop nonsense? And the real fanatics buy up what I peddle to reinforce their profound beliefs. So, Mr. Roach, in reality you know more than me. It is I who should be grilling you for information. You have seen things, have seen people, have spoken to these people, and are certainly more expert than I on all such matters. Which brings me to the question I need to ask. Why are you here?”

  Charlotte looked to Roach; she wanted to know the answer too.

  “You came into public conscience through something else. Something you seem to be avoiding,” Roach said.

  “Forgive me my initial reticence. Initially I thought you were involved with the very people we are talking about. I had anticipated a meeting with other types of people. A visit from men I would prefer not to be in my life. The man Parker, for example, even at his advanced age and liver abuse, is not a man with whom I want to chat. Hence my own man here.”

  They all looked to Michael who showed no sign that he had been mentioned. He stood and stared ahead.

  “We are more interested in your earlier journalistic output,” Roach said.

  Belfour looked puzzled. He sat upright as if he had just been asked by his teacher to answer the question. His stiffness lasted seconds and he relaxed, because on second thoughts he was confident he could.

  “My first book? Excellent. I was working as a civil servant. The halls of that place are a constant stream of whisper and gossip. If any of them say they have heard nothing then they are liars or so far removed from the real mechanisms of governance as not to be of importance at all.”

  “Your early work. Was of a different type,” Charlotte said.

  “The robbery? A long time ago. Made me more money than anything else, and I churn out an article or two every year or so on the anniversary. Luckily for me it happened in the summer. Dead months for the press, so they turn to old news to sell papers. The robbery was big news back then. But it has faded from collective conscience over the years.”

  “We would like to hear your take.”

  “Have you read anything I wrote?”

  “Your original book," she said. "And a few articles after.”

  “Then you know my thoughts.”

  “You change tact after a few years. Your outrage turns to whisper and then you stopped.”

  Belfour shrugged.

  “The story lost importance. Things moved on. I made money by entering a more in-depth market. The robbery happened, everyone involved, more or less, was eliminated. Most of the cash and bonds returned and the gold lost. No longer news that sells.”

  “Do you know what happened?”

  Belfour raised his bushy eyebrows.

  “No. There are many theories. The gold was stolen. This is obvious but not in the manner reported. Probably over a period of years it was shipped out and taken by someone and melted down, while the stash was replaced by tungsten. Maybe the gold never existed, and was fake from the start. Maybe the gold was actually in that warehouse, and maybe it has been melted and sold in the market. Some claim that over the last 20 years the majority of those ugly gold necklaces and rings you see on the high street contain parts of the bullion from the robbery. I doubt it.

  “If I had to bet, I would say the gold had long since disappeared. Handed out in bribes and pilfered by those in the know because the bank that stored them was a joke. A criminal organization running at an official level. But that robbery, what a thing. A generation of gangsters eliminated over the course of a summer. Tit for tat or simple executions by a single man, I don’t know. One called Turk stayed clean. Wasn’t involved at all, and this is strange. A robbery of that size, using his people, in his territory and he stayed out. Why? I never could truly figure that out."

  Charlotte watched Belfour, and for all his bluster and the manner he had developed over the years, he had a passion and a mind that would not stop. She watched him as his ideas ticked over. He was involved in his own brainstorming session and finding new connections and silly ideas that could be spun out on the next anniversary. Belfour came back to them as if he had taken only a split seconds pause in his speech.

  “I would say that the gold claimed to be in existence on paper, no longer existed, and this rather unfortunate state of affairs needed to be hidden. So a robbery was concocted. The Turk knew that there was no actual gold to steal so he backed out. His rivals for top dog took the opportunity, and luckily for the Turk, they were all eliminated. His competition gone and he did nothing to bring it about. Or maybe I am doing him a disservice and maybe his intellect was unrivalled and the whole plan was his to eliminate competition. Now isn’t that a thought. But I have heard of this Turk many times, and each time he is described as little more than a dullard.”

  Again Belfour drifted away. Charlotte looked to Michael, and she saw a concealed smirk play on his face. Belfour clicked the mouse next to his computer glanced across the screen and opened a file. He typed rapidly and smiled at the result. He leaned back looking all the time at the words he had placed there. He smiled as content as a small child who has just belched away indigestion. The realization he was in company sank in and he turned to Charlotte once more.

  “The bank who owned the gold collapsed, and the Bank of England, the government run bank, bought it up for £1. Essentially taking on the debt, which was huge. But it was necessary. Gold was, and occasionally continues to be, the asset on which governments are able to obtain loans. The government by buying up the debt, and imprisoning those who had borrowed money from the bank hid the hit they took. Gold worth around seventy five million in today’s money covered with other people’s money and we all carried on as normal. The taxpayer covered the cost. 75 million among the billions in tax is nothing. Prestige restored, market confidence back. A decisive action by the government. England proud and strong.” Belfour clenched his fist and punched the air at the end of his speech and laughed a guttural boom. He started to type again at his computer.

  “The Italians who got caught bear that out?” Charlotte asked.

  Belfour drummed the table with the fingers on both hands, he was energized and unable to start what he wanted to start.

  “I imagine the Italians were handed the gold in faith. The serial numbers coincide with the real codes from the original bars. One of the robbers pocketed some of the gold is the most plausible answer. A genuine belief that it was real. They didn't know it was fake, and tried to sell it on. They were not overly smart. Which is another question. Were they set up to provide evidence that the gold was fake or were they genuinely oblivious to the nature of the bars? Impossible to ask them as they lasted seven days in prison before, rather surprisingly, killing themselves.” Belfour paused. He shook his head. "This is all plausible and brilliant,” he said.

  Belfour rose and walked to the door; he indicated that they should follow. He was walking them to the open front door. He stopped just before the threshold and indicated they should leave with a sweeping motion of his left arm.

  But he stopped Roach by touching his left shoulder to make him turn around.r />
  “I spent a lot of time with Chamberlain. A lot of speculation about his sexual preferences. I can assure you, he is essentially asexual. He has no interest at all. The man is strange. He cannot be turned on, but many things turn him off.”

  “And nothing is done,” Roach said.

  "The DJ, comedians did stand-up routines in the 80s about the man, a book was written by a Scottish writer in which a famous celebrity was employed in a morgue and enjoyed his time with the dead. This was not thinly veiled. Every media outlet had information on the man, employees in the industry were in full knowledge of his heinous activities. So what did they do? They gave him a kid’s TV show. Rather sick, don’t you think?”

  “Chamberlain is one of the untouchables."

  "Mr. Roach, you know more about these things than me. You investigated. And as such I have to ask you a question. What did you find on me?

  “Nothing. Your name never came up.”

  “And yet I live with regular innuendo in my professional life. Why do you think that is?”

  “Regular smear tactics, and when there is a little scandal and a prominent man, as you were, steps down and finishes a promising career early, people put two and two together,”

  “And in my case, end up spelling Pedophile, very badly.”

  “Are you not?” Charlotte asked.

  “No, I am not, Charlotte, I believe is what you are calling yourself nowadays.”

  “Now, Roach here is much more of an expert than me. Twenty years dedicated to your job, and I really should have recognized you from our meetings.”

  “Only twice, and they were hardly meetings.”

  “Confiscations.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “Officially destroyed, almost certainly stored in a private wing of some building somewhere to act as leverage against some very influential people.”

  “Why did you take them?”

  “I believed in many things back then, the idea that intelligent people should run the country, should make decisions for the less intelligent. And yes, I mean the Oxbridge crews were the brains, and anyone else was not able to make rational decisions. I was lied to as well, but worst of all I lied to myself. Arrogance of the privileged is the correct thought.”

  “But you are not one of them now, you are an outsider.”

  “I’m sure they would like to paint me as some type of mad figure, a man who has lost his mind. A conspiracy theorist who gets to write his insane ideas for money in a Sunday paper. But I’m not. I would like to tell you that I made the choice to escape, of my own free and morally superior will, but I genuinely thought I could change things from the inside. Others had different ideas.”

  “You quit.”

  “No, I resigned. Different ideology, see. My son and daughter were of an age at the time when travelling and enjoying life were paramount. My daughter was mugged and beaten badly, the day after the same thing happened to my son. Coincidence I thought. Then when I didn’t shut my mouth, we had a burglary. I was tied to a chair, my wife was stripped naked in front of me. I wasn’t told anything, not asked for cash, nothing stolen, my wife was untouched. The man, who I didn’t see and couldn’t ever finger as Detective Parker, although I would bet my fortune it was him. Simply said, your family is passing through a moment of turmoil. For it to stop you need to resign. So I did. And I became a journalist.

  “They are untouchable, Mr. Roach. They run everything. They ran me, and through me they ran you. Official secrets act is a catch-all law that makes your objective impossible. But, if you simply want the man, and you have some of your old detectives tendencies, then following Charlotte here and her quest for familiar justice, would increase the possibility from the current zero it stands on. Rollin is an interesting man, with an interesting past.”

  “Would you care to elaborate,” Roach asked.

  “Now where would be the fun in that?”

  Belfour looked at his watch.

  “Supper,” he said. “It will be a lovely spread, but you’re not invited. And you are also asked never to come back. It’s been fun, and I actually just wanted to apologize to you, former detective Roach. You did well, and had them all. Perfect work really. And then Mr. Bumbling bureaucratic me turned up with his posh goon squad and messed it all up. You made no mistakes, had no fault, important people just didn’t like to be arrested. And they do not now.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  Jean was awake for five minutes before she was bored. She opened her eyes, immediately alert and sneered at the play apartment of a single adult male. She lay under the soft duvet that smelled of chemical lavender and thought of a man who worked from home but pined for a past they had never lived. An Adams family pinball machine from the mid eighties pulsed lights but no sound in the corner of the vast open space that was the apartment. An arcade machine of heavy wood-chip panels and garish colors arranged in strips on a black background lay idle in the far left corner next to the large window which was blocked by Venetian blinds. You could play any shoot-em-up or scrolling adventure ever created in the 1980s as they were all loaded onto a modern computer hidden in its depths. A small trampoline and boys toys everywhere as if the interior designer had fallen in love with the grown up Tom Hanks in Big. There was no wishing machine.

  Jean slipped out of the bed and cursed at Ben’s choice in nightwear. Always grease stained jogging bottoms. Jean opened the Venetian blinds to reveal the walls of glass that were permanently closed windows. She looked out across the city and tried to trace Ben’s walk from the previous day. She thought of his thoughts, depressed and scared but safe with his follower.

  Jean saw her reflection in the glass. The top she wore bore the action shot of Spiderman. Nearly 38 and the guy wore Spiderman to bed.

  Jean moved to the basic dresser at the foot of the double bed. It was IKEA in design but sold for more: the wood was heavy, thick and dark chocolate in color. She opened the top drawer and saw grey Everlast shorts, vest and sweatshirt. Prize and size tags hung, Jean bit and spat the plastic clips away, slipped into the new clothes, with a perfect fit, found new trainers underneath - they were new Balance, they were the perfect size. She tied the laces, paced and jumped bringing her knees to her chest. She headed to the gym.

  Jean pushed the large door and heard the whoosh of air and the pop of a rubber seal being broken. The gym was for executives who believed breaking beer sweat on a treadmill for fifteen minutes twice-a-week would balance out the accumulated cholesterol gained through business lunches, sat-on-arse desk work and late supper nightcaps of large ports and expensive pungent cigars. They were wrong. The exercise, if that’s what they wanted to call it, was nothing but a trigger for the heart-attack they would inevitably have. They would wear heart-rate monitors to keep Beats per Minute below a set limit, and wear the chest monitor like a badge of honor. Look what this work is doing to me. Dumb fucks.

  Jean saw that the treadmill was the only piece of equipment that was in any type of regular use. Weight machines with stacks of rectangular slabs of black iron and pulleys and cables sat clean and shop-new. Unused because muscle is not the normal businessman look. Just like a tan back in the day showed you to be an outside labourer and thus scum to all the white make-up faced ponces of wigs and idiocy. A body in-shape marked a businessman out as having far too much time to kill. A paunch and pallid skin meant you worked for your money. If premature balding or early grey topped your head then you were on the way to greatness.

  The room was silent. Jean appreciated this. There was no shitty high-paced music to inspire sprints, or a row of TVs blaring the latest and coolest twenty-four-hour music channel of talentless teens that made their names on the Disney channel. They were now touching twenty and growing up by being mentally shot and adding an edge to their output and helping sales by being photographed by pathetic paparazzi as they lay unconscious outside nightclubs, or nakedly on their own Instagram accounts.

  Jean ran in silence. She set the speed at 12 km per hou
r, a steady, easy pace for her. No headphones, no running to a play list of AC/DC or two-tone Ska. The first ten minutes she thought, snapping through ideas in quick steps. She ran into her rhythm and blankness fell, a constant breathing, a repeated step and a meditating state of no thought.

  Jean snapped from her trance as the machine automatically slowed as she reached 12km, just shy of one hour of running. She cursed Ben’s cigarettes. The residue of tar caused a rough edge on the depths of her lungs. She walked in time with the decreasing speed of the treadmill until it stopped. She looked up at the security camera that was fixed on the opposite wall staring at her directly. She remembered Ben’s day, the thoughts Ben had, the reasons they were there. Mitch would be here tomorrow and she knew what he would think, she knew what he would try to do. They had an opportunity here, a way to live. A future in a way their past had once been. An easy ride of freedom.

  She needed to speak to Rollin.

  ******************************************************************

  Jean walked through the reception in sweat-stained grey. The secretary rose, started to speak, sat down and watched. Jean hit the large wooden double doors to Rollin’s office with the palms of her hands. The shudder of impact rippled along her arms, pushing her shoulders back. The doors did not move. Jean turned to the secretary.

  “Only he can buzz you in,” the secretary said.

  “And if he dies in there?”

  “We’ll find him after.”

  “Phone him.”

  “That won’t be at all necessary, he’s watching,” the secretary said, lifting her right hand and indicating above the door then each corner of the ceiling.

  Jean looked and saw the small dark semi-spheres in which cameras worked.

  The double doors buzzed and a solenoid slid with a click from its lock.

  The secretary mimed a double-handed push.

  ******************************************************************

  Rollin sat at his desk, while Jobs stood, head bowed waiting for instruction.