24
We hit another post office later the same morning and three more in the afternoon. On each trip I cleared the counters. All these post offices were grouped in one area, to make it look as if thieves had travelled from one to another in quick succession. That way post offices in other parts of London would think it was planned and executed by a local gang, and they wouldn’t be expecting to be hit themselves. It was Mike’s idea.
We did seven more post offices the following day. By that time the Press had got hold of it. The Evening Standard carried an item on our first three raids. I was tweaking the equipment at the time, so Mike read it out to me.
“It says here: ‘It appears that the armed robber laid in wait for the postmistress, Mrs. Lucille Ambrose, and attacked her when she came to the counter in the morning. He subjected her to a violent sexual assault and got away with a small amount of cash…’ Sexual assault?”
“She’s just milking it, Mike. She’s probably going to claim compensation so she’s laying it on thick. Go on.”
Mike gave me a searching look, then returned to the newspaper.
“‘Following the incident Mrs. Ambrose was taken to Charing Cross Hospital and is being held there under observation.’ You weren’t that rough with her, were you, Rodge?”
“Of course not. What else does it say?”
“‘In spite of her terrifying ordeal, brave Mrs. Ambrose agreed to help the police with their enquiries. A police spokeswoman said that a description of the assailant will be issued in due course.’”
“I don’t know what kind of description she could give them. She could see my hands so she knows I’m white and she can say roughly how tall I am. That’s about it. Anything about the other jobs?”
“There’s a bit here about the third one. ‘During his army career Mr. Barton served with distinction in a number of postings, including Northern Ireland and The Falklands. He attempted to resist the robber, but he was overpowered and subjected to a vicious beating. He is currently recovering in hospital.’ Rodge…?”
“He had a go at me, Mike. I didn’t have any choice. Anyway it wasn’t as bad as all that—they always exaggerate, these reporters. Is that it?”
“Just a statement from the police to warn members of the public. It says ‘The robber is dangerous and in no circumstances should he be approached or tackled.’”
“Nothing about how the thief gained access?”
“Nope, that’s it. Obviously the cops haven’t a clue so they’re not saying anything.”
*
On the Thursday we did another seven post offices, starting a little earlier to take advantage of the pension payouts. Mike was neglecting his course, but he seemed reconciled to that. We put the money into a suitcase, all ninety-five thousand pounds of it. It seemed like a good week’s work to me.
*
We weren’t planning any more raids, at least not for the moment. Mike wasn’t coming in to the lab; he was catching up on his studies. The sudden inactivity left me filled with a restless energy. I couldn’t settle down to anything. The events of the last week had given me a feeling of exhilaration, and it wasn’t just the money: it was the feeling of potency. I could go anywhere, do anything. I’d barely scratched the surface of what was possible. It’s true there were limits. I couldn’t do a whole lot about money that was locked in safes. Usually a room with a safe would be kept locked, and unless I knew exactly where it was I wouldn’t be able to set coordinates for it, much less open the actual safe. I’d just been lucky to find the ex-army chap opening his, and even that could have ended badly if he’d taken a better shot at me. Daytime raids on jewellery stores or places like that would be risky too, and then I’d have the problem of fencing the stuff. I had no idea how to develop the contacts, and I didn’t want to do that anyway; involving other people was a sure route to disaster. But there were plenty of other possibilities.
I took the Tube to Piccadilly Circus and walked endlessly around Soho. Late on Saturday evening it was still warm and some of the clubs were spilling out onto the pavements. Noisy, mindless kids, drinking wine and beer. Teenage girls with long blonde hair, dresses cut low to show off their cleavages. Girls in short tight skirts, or longer skirts slit to reveal pale, well-turned thighs. They didn’t know what it was all about. I could show them.
I found myself wondering about my appetite for women. It wasn’t the first time I’d thought about it. Was it just a normal masculine drive or was it something I’d inherited from my father? It was curious to think that something like that might have been passed down to me. If it had, I didn’t mind. I didn’t hate my father. To hate someone you need to have had some sort of adverse relationship, and I’d had no relationship with him at all; it was more like I’d never had a father. I knew he’d pretty much ruined my mother’s life, and I suppose I should have resented him for her sake, but then I wasn’t close enough to her for it to matter. It was family history to me, as I might have read it in a dry book. It didn’t stir up any emotions, one way or the other.
Another girl emerged onto the pavement, a slim girl in tightly haunched jeans, with two or three inches of bare midriff showing. I watched her, savouring the sense of power. It would be so easy. I’d just follow her home, watch the light come on in her bedroom. Set the GPS coordinates in the street, take an ultrasonic distance reading, go back to the lab and project straight into her room. I fantasized about gagging her, tying her to the bed…
I watched her as she walked up the street with her friends. It was no good. I’d risk attracting attention by going into the Department in the early hours. In any case it wouldn’t take Mike long to twig what I was up to. He’d never stand for it; he was too straight-laced for that. No, I needed to make another set-up somewhere else. My equipment had been cobbled together from what was available. It was the sort of string-and-sealing-wax prototype you had to start with in research. But now I knew exactly what was required and I could do it all so much more elegantly.
Wherever I set it up, I’d need a good power source. I’d have to buy a disused factory, one where they’d run a lot of three-phase electrical machines or a big induction furnace. It would take a lot of money. That was the major problem; the rest wasn’t difficult. The lasers were commercially available, and I didn’t need the extra adjustments any more. The drives to the photodiodes and the microwave generators were pretty standard. I could over-specify everything to make it really stable and reliable. If I linked all the power supplies and the charging circuits I should be able to initiate the whole procedure automatically. Then I could use a remote control from the cage to project myself and bring myself back. I wouldn’t be tied to the college, so I could come and go as I pleased. I’d dispense with Mike, of course; I wouldn’t need him any more. Then I could do anything I liked.
*
The post office robberies were news, of course, but people have short memories for such things. It only takes a gruesome murder, or a terrorist attack, or a win for England at cricket, to put it out of their minds. After a few days I phoned my bank and made an appointment to see the Manager the following Wednesday. By that time, I thought, I could do it without raising suspicions about my sudden affluence.
I got to the bank about fifteen minutes early. Only two of the three counter positions were manned; there was a chap and a girl, and I didn’t recognize either of them. That was good; I didn’t particularly want to be seen there by Suzy. I went to the enquiries desk.
“Can I help you?”
She was Indian, I think. Her complexion was dark, and her hair and eyes were even darker. I thought she could have been quite beautiful in an exotic sort of way, until she smiled and I saw the two long front teeth with a gap between them. Her badge said “Nadine”. I held up a large envelope for her to see, and said quietly:
“I have a sizeable deposit to make. Do you think we could use a private room?”
“Certainly. What’s the name, please?”
“Dukas.”
“Just
one moment.”
She picked up the phone and punched a number.
“Caroline? Can you see a customer? Mr. Dukas. He’s at the enquiries desk.”
She put the phone down, turned to me, and smiled toothily.
“Caroline will be with you shortly.”
A few moments later a tall red-head appeared at the desk and said, “Would you like to come through?”
I followed her down a short corridor, watching her white and green flowered dress move over gaunt hips. Not bad, but a bit willowy for my taste.
She led the way to a small room, empty except for a couple of chairs and a table with a computer monitor on it. She motioned me to a chair and took the other chair herself, sweeping her skirt under her thighs with one hand as she sat down.
“Now, how can I help you?”
“I’d like to deposit this in my account,” I said, sliding the envelope over to her. I took my bank card out of my wallet and put that on the desk as well.
The envelope contained five thousand pounds in twenty-pound notes. She took a peek at it and then excused herself for a moment. When she came back she had a deposit slip and a portable machine for counting bank notes. She made pretty short work of it. Then she filled in the deposit slip for me, taking the account number from my bank card. She tore off the receipt portion and handed it to me.
“That’s fine,” she said brightly. “Is there anything else I can do for you?”
“I have an appointment with the manager at two forty-five.”
“If you’d like to wait here I’ll just see if he’s free.”
I’d made up my mind to swallow my pride and play the repentant sinner. Even so, the mere sight of the man made my gorge rise again.
“Do have a seat Mister Dukas—oh, excuse me, Doctor Dukas.” He gave his steely, condescending smile. “Now what can we do for you?”
“You know, Mr. Meredrew, our conversation a couple of weeks ago came as something of a shock to me. I’d been totally immersed in my research, and I hadn’t realized how out-of-hand things had got.”
He said nothing, just watched me closely. On someone else the slightly upturned lips and crinkling of the eyes would have registered as a smile, but not on this cold fish.
“I just wanted you to know that I’ve been taking steps to, er, correct the situation. I’ve rearranged my personal affairs and a moment ago I deposited five thousand pounds in my account. It’s only a start, I know, but I plan to be making regular deposits over the next few months. I should be in the black again within about six months.”
“Well now, that is most welcome news. I’m delighted to hear it. Of course,” he leaned forward and smiled even more ingratiatingly, “we’ll continue to monitor the progress of your account so that we can let you know in good time if there seems to be any further problem.”
“Thank you,” I said, through gritted teeth.
“Is there anything else we can help you with at this time?”
“No, I just… no, that’s all.”
He got up and extended a clammy hand, which I released as soon as possible. “Thank you so much for coming in, Mister, er Doctor, Dukas. I’ll see you out.”
As soon as I was outside I wiped my hand on my trousers and breathed deeply to rid my lungs of the air I’d been obliged to share with that loathsome creature. It had been hard, it had been humiliating, but it was done: for the moment he was off my back. I swore that some day, somehow, I would make him pay for this episode. My favoured option involved a red-hot poker.
25
Her clothes came off on our first date. When I say “date” I mean the first time Suzy and I were able to get together without the watchful Mike in tow. Her girlfriend had gone away for a few days so we used her flat. I’ve had better sex, but only with very experienced women. One of the French ladies, in particular, sticks in my mind. She taught me a lot. She told me she used to be a dancer. I could just imagine the sort of dancing she did.
Suzy put up a token protest but I knew how to deal with it. I’m pretty sure all the lights went on for her, and there weren’t any protests after that. We used her flat for the next two days, but then her girlfriend came back. After that it was just a question of where to go. She borrowed her girlfriend’s little Renault once and we went out into the country and did it under the stars. The ground was lumpy so I let her sit on me. Then I turned her around; I preferred it like that because I could feel the squash of her cool buttocks in my loins. She said it hurt her a bit but I noticed she didn’t stop. At the end she was still trembling. Quite a little number, Suzy, when you lit her fire.
It wasn’t all sex. She tried to find out a bit more about me, and she wanted to know about the research I was doing. So I showed her one of my notebooks and started to work through a calculation—actually it was the calculation I’d used to establish that I could bring objects back to the cage. It had a lot of triple integrals and vector algebra in it. As I’d anticipated, she glazed over in half a minute. She didn’t ask me again, which was the way I wanted it. It didn’t seem to bother her. Mostly it was the physical thing that kept us together. So far as I was concerned it was the only thing.
Towards the end of May, Mike sat his M.Sc. exams. On some pretext I had a look at his timetable. His last paper was a multiple choice and it was in the afternoon, so Suzy took some time off and came over to the flat. That was how he found out. He must have finished the examination early and decided to call it a day. When we heard the key in the front door we looked at each other for one shocked moment and then leapt out of bed. I just had time to pull on a pair of trousers. Suzy grabbed my dressing gown and slipped it on. He must have heard something in the lounge because he opened the door and came straight in without a care in the world. I was standing there, naked to the waist, Suzy was wiping her tousled hair back from her eyes, and the convertible sofa was a rumpled bed. He took it all in at a glance. I was stuck for words, but Suzy surprised me. She walked up to Mike, gathered him by the arm and asked him how the exam went. I noticed him glance down and away from her front where the dressing gown was gaping slightly and his mouth set a little.
“I thought you liked me,” he said gruffly.
Actually I think he meant to put some emphasis on “me” but he couldn’t quite bring himself to do it.
“But I do like you, Mike,” she said soothingly. “I like you very much. Now please don’t look so glum. We’re all going to be good friends.”
Still holding on to his arm she led him towards the kitchen, glancing over her shoulder at me and shooting her eyes meaningfully around the room. I got the message: I had to clean up fast.
I converted the bed back into a sofa, stowed the sheets and blankets in a drawer, gathered up Suzy’s scattered clothes, put them on a chair and laid her skirt on the top of the pile to hide her underwear, straightened out the other chairs and looked round the room. As an afterthought I pulled the chair with Suzy’s clothes over to the corner so that it was less obvious. By the time I went into the kitchen I’d recovered my equilibrium. Suzy had made a mug of tea for herself and Mike and the two of them were sitting at the table. She was still in my dressing-gown, of course, but she showed no signs of being in a hurry to get dressed. Mike was sitting forward with both arms on the table, and Suzy’s posture echoed his, except that her hand was resting on one of Mike’s.
I stood there, feeling a bit clumsy.
“You see how it is, don’t you, Mike?” I said. “It couldn’t be helped. Sometimes it’s just a matter of chemistry.”
Suzy’s eyes stopped me from saying anything more.
“I’ve been over all that with him,” she said, “and he’s been perfectly sweet about it.”
“Good old Mike,” I said, and sat down at the table myself. There was a bit of a silence, and then I added, “Look, now this is all out in the open would it be all right if Suzy moved into the flat with us? We have the room, and it would be a lot more fun with the three of us.”
Suzy shot me a sharp look
.
Mike was gazing at a point somewhere in the middle of the table. His voice was expressionless.
“I suppose so.”
Suzy gave his hand an extra squeeze.
“That’s very noble of you, Mike. I won’t be any trouble. Maybe I can help you with the cooking.”
Afterwards Suzy told me she thought I’d been horribly insensitive to make such a proposal at that moment, but it just seemed the obvious thing to do. And although she ticked me off properly about it, she seemed quite prepared to go along with the idea. She moved some of her stuff into the flat, but she left most of it at the place she’d been sharing with her girlfriend. She went back there from time to time. Obviously the new arrangement solved a lot of problems for the two of us. It also meant that Mike would get to see a lot more of Suzy, although not nearly as much of her as I was seeing.
*
The five thousand I’d paid into my bank account would keep the wolves from the door, but there was no suggestion that we were going to stop there. We’d learned quite a bit from hitting the post offices and we felt confident enough now to embark on a series of raids on bank counters. That meant visiting different branches and looking at their general layout and suitability. They all needed to be branches like Suzy’s, where the counters weren’t overlooked from behind by open-plan offices or in a direct line of vision from the street. Mike had finished his course and exams so he could help me in the mornings as well as the afternoons. We couldn’t do anything after the banks had closed to customers, of course, so we’d return to the flat and compare notes. That way we were always there before Suzy got back from work. Mike would already be doing something about preparing dinner, unless we were eating out, which we could afford to do more often these days.
The Man in Two Bodies (British crime novel): A Dark Science Crime Caper Page 13