by Jan Needle
Totally exhausted, he tore his clothes off and fell into bed. His time with Sir Gerald Turner had been a great conclusion to a great, successful day. Donald Sinclair – was on his way.
*
On the cut. Sarah Williams.
It was cold now, alone on Cynthia’s Beam. Sarah Williams was not cold, but she knew that when the stove died down the air would quickly chill. She was up, curled in an Ikea comfy chair, but it was getting very late, and Michael would not come. She knew for certain he would not come tonight, and that was better, somehow, than the normal state. Normally, as a mistress, she was a slave to hope, which was a constant torture, and demeaning. So many times she’d sat here, reading or listening to music, her ears alive to every little sound outside on the towpath. Tonight he would not come, for sure. There was a party at his house, a huge defiant celebration, before he went to court to be sentenced in the morning. His wife would be the hostess. The lovely Barbara.
Earlier in the evening, Sarah had had a sudden wild desire to go cross country to his house, to walk in through the grand French doors, to gatecrash. That was the wonderful thing about the canal system – the boat was moored in empty, lonely countryside, unfindable, untraceable. But her bike was chained on to the roof, and in fact she could be at Michael’s mansion in less than half an hour.
The urge had been quite strong, but she had been much stronger. Sarah was a good mistress, she knew the rules. She also knew, with certainty, that one day he would come to her, for good, for ever. Hard though it could be sometimes, she could wait. She found herself smiling now, and she threw on some more coal. Tomorrow he would go to prison, and his reaction was to throw a party. She loved that in him, that defiance, that amazing joy at life. Only six months away, he said, and in an open jail, a sort of holiday camp with all mod cons. She was to keep the boat ready, to chug down through the system to the nearest mooring point to him, because he’d bribe his way out some weekends. Dirty weekends, love weekends, weekends she would almost die for, happily.
To be at the party, in that enormous house, in all that rolling parkland – was that part of the dream? No. She would rather be here, on this narrowboat, alone and waiting. For the day she’d be on Cynthia’s Beam with him.
It would be the pair of them, for evermore. It was coming soon.
FOUR
Charles Lister. London.
Charles Lister lay on the narrow bed in the dimness of the heavily curtained room, counting the warbles. Two sets of three, then stop. One set of four, ditto. When it rang again, he answered on the seventh ring. That way the guys in Florida knew that he was uncoerced. Ridiculous, maybe, but there were lots of dollars hanging on it. One hundred sixty million, to be exact.
‘Charlie,’ said the voice from Florida. ‘Is this you? I have a message from Mae. Come up and see me sometime.’ Crazy, thought Charles Lister. We don’t even crack a smile. He completed the code.
‘Owney says what’s wrong with rackets, anyway?’
‘Shit,’ said the voice. ‘The things we do for money. Listen, Charlie, trouble. This is the big one. This is serious.’
Charles Lister’s stomach fluttered. It had been too easy, so far. He’d been expecting something.
‘Shoot,’ he said. The signal on his cell was crystal clear.
‘They’ve got a smell of you, OK? We spoke to Jean Claude in Paris. We think they’re going to jump.’
Lister lay flat on his back. His breath was coming faster.
‘They don’t know where I am. I ain’t been in this hole upwards thirty hours. No one could have tapped me, no one’s seen me, I haven’t moved.’
‘Yeah. And Alice is in London, ain’t she?’
A flash of anger.
‘Alice knows fuck all. She don’t know where to find me, think I’m crazy? So what, Alice is in London?’
The voice from Florida was conciliatory.
‘Yeah, so it’s a mystery, OK? But the Customs men are going to jump, that’s the buzz from Paris. Or maybe Jean Claude got it wrong, maybe it’s horseshit. Or maybe they’re trying to scare you out, make you jump. You tell me, Charlie. You’re the fucking brains.’
Lister did not reply. He was thinking.
‘Listen, buddy,’ said the voice. ‘There’s one hundred sixty thousand thousand out there on the ocean, right, so you want we shouldn’t tell you this? You want to end up in some oldie English fucking Alcatraz, or something? If that ship turns up off the keys and you ain’t there, we in the shit. Does that make sense? You gotta be here, Charlie. If them English Customs cunts are moving in, you gotta jump.’
Still Charles Lister thought. His options were strictly limited. The job was not finished yet, there were ends to be tied up. But if the Customs teams were really on to him, he was in trouble, he was in trouble bad. Three times he had evaded them, in only eight short weeks. If they got him, they’d watch him like a hawk. They’d move into his brain. They’d even have his shits for him.
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘There’s things I gotta do, in Europe. If I don’t do them, the ship don’t even get there, in the first place. Like it or fucking hate it, bro, I’m going to have to take some risks.’
Now it was the turn of the iPhone to stay silent. Lister allowed himself a smile. A hundred sixty million of risks. It wouldn’t sound so good over the Atlantic, would it?
‘What sort of risks? Them bucks is—’ Lister cut him off.
‘There ain’t no bucks if I don’t get the job sewn up, is there? I gotta call some friends. An outfit.’
‘An outfit! There ain’t no outfit over there! You’re on your own!’
‘Listen, you said just now. I’m the brains, right? Just think about it. Just watch your mouth. There’s an outfit.’
A pause. Lister could almost hear the cash register in the Florida brain. Another outfit? This could cost... He waited.
‘OK, Charlie. We ain’t arguing. You’re on the ground. We all trust you, here.’ There was a small but significant edge to the voice. And the speech.
‘Yeah, sure you do. Me too. A mutual trust society. Listen – I ain’t chucking up that sort of money, no way am I. So just don’t call again, OK? Not for any reason on God’s earth. You’ll hear from me. OK?’
‘Sure. We understand.’
‘Good. And thanks for the information. Save my life, save us one sixty thousand grand. Cool.’
‘Sure.’
‘And don’t mess your pants, OK? If you hear I’ve been arrested. You got that?’
‘Arrested! What the fuck? But—’
‘Just hang in there. I mean it. Just don’t do anything, right? Until you hear from me.’
‘Jesus, Charlie! Jumping Jesus fucking Christ.’ Charles Lister cut the call. He looked round the cold, impersonal, badly furnished London room. He wished that he was back in Florida, in the sun.
He thought for a very long time. A trip to Holland, and another little trip to make. Ferries and connections moved through his head, cold, efficient. He did not have to check, he knew them all. He turned them round and round and over, until he had it, till all the lines were straight. Then he took his iPhone up again, and punched a number.
*
Old Bailey. Michael Masters.
After his first two hours in the dock, Michael Masters found it very hard to stay awake. He was dressed sombrely, in a dark pinstripe suit, and his counsel, Sir Cyril France, had impressed it on him to be alert at all times, to concentrate, however difficult it might be. The press gallery was full, with a certain tired cynicism hanging over it, a cynicism about the sentence he was going to receive. Nothing in his body language, Sir Cyril said, should compound that cynicism.
The trouble was, for Masters, that he already knew the sentence. Even before the original trial had ended, seven months before, the verdict and the punishment had been hammered out behind locked doors, and the judge, indeed, would probably have come to the farewell party the night before had not that been considered a bit beyond a joke. Masters’ own head was thr
obbing slightly from the alcohol he’d consumed, and this dry-toned judgment, this legal rigmarole, this farce, seemed set to last all day. Why the hell couldn’t the man just dish out the sentence? Two years imprisonment with eighteen months suspended, and a fine of fifty thousand pounds. Or to put it another way – three months inside an open prison, and a financial tap upon the wrist.
He let his mind wander lazily over the events of the night before. It had been a hell of a thrash, with almost as many security men cruising the perimeter to keep out hacks and snappers as there had been drunken yuppies cruising round the dimly lighted rooms seeking champagne and PAs’ thighs to squeeze. The count of bright young City types had been a shade too high in fact, although there had been a solid ground-base of the genuine Establishment. The problem was the press, camped out at every entrance to the huge estate despite the best efforts of the local cops to harass and intimidate them. On seeing them, some of the most distinguished guests had had their chauffeurs turn the limos round and gone away.
The party, on the night before he was due to receive his sentence, was a typical Masters gesture. At thirty eight he was a millionaire a few times over, a handsome, fit, flamboyant man who invited envy from the gutter press in the same measure that the more serious papers hinted at unease.
Most multi-millionaires, except the Russian gangsters and the eastern oil sheiks, were quiet, careful men who had the sense to bury their excesses on their private Carib fortress islands. But everyone had heard of Michael Masters, and he revelled in it. He had a classic English country house with eighty acres, he had a classic English wife he’d plucked and married while her parents were too busy looking down their noses at him to notice she was pregnant, and he had two sons at Eton and a pack of hounds. He had never, it was his proud and constant boast, had a proper job.
Masters was a money man. His dealings in the City and on the world’s exchanges were so complex that it had taken a team of thirty lawyers more than two years to prepare charges against him. Revenue and Customs had had a hand, and the VAT division had spent hours by the thousand on his case. Sub-prime collapse, Lehmans, the Royal Bank and Natwest, Fred the Shred and all the other clean-hands bankers – he was up to his neck in everything, although his name could hardly be detected. Nobody, most of all the top investigators, knew how much money he had clawed down in the Great Chaos. He had studied maths to O-level at a Norwich comprehensive.
The party was noisy, but as such bashes go, was relatively restrained. Although Masters enjoyed the trappings of gentility and now spoke with as Home Counties an accent as one could wish for, he did regret the innate respectability of the high-middle and the upper classes. Even the super-rich kids, with their ridiculous little Porsches stacked three deep in the drive and their silly suits and ties, were careful in their drunkenness. They only insulted people of their own age – mainly women – and they threw up strictly in the lavatories or the shrubs outside. Watching the Fionas and their Daniels swilling champagne and chattering noisily but so nicely, Masters wished someone would shout, or rave, or get a tit out for the lads. He had a sudden thought of Sarah, and her own lovely pair. He checked his watch and found a quiet spot to ring her from.
Sarah, in the bed now but still fighting tears, tried hard to hide them as she heard his voice. Belatedly, he tried to hide his own elation, and guessed he’d failed.
‘Thing!’ he said. ‘What’s up? I love you! You know how much I love you.’
Oh God, he thought. Why do women want so much? Of all the good affairs he’d had in the last few years, that this should happen. That love should raise its greedy little head. Sarah did not cry, though. She read his voice completely.
‘I’m sorry, Mike, ‘ she said. ‘It’s just the court tomorrow. What if it goes wrong?’
He felt a touch of irritation.
‘It won’t go wrong, I’m fed up telling you. Three months in Ford, it’s guaranteed. Mr Justice Pisspot Harper wouldn’t bloody dare! One law for the rich, love – and that’s me.’
‘But those men in America. They weren’t charged with half a much as you. They got— Oh, Michael.’
‘But that was in America! They don’t like rank corruption over there, people go to jail, people get busted, even Presidents. This is England, where the buck never stops, where you’re only ever guilty if you’re powerless.’
He realised, just in time, who he was talking to.
‘That’s a joke, Thing. I’m sorry; not good taste. I’ll get sent to Ford actually because I’m almost innocent, I just made mistakes. And within a fortnight I’ll get you smuggled in as well. Dressed as a boy, maybe, how does that sound? If it’s warm out you can wear wide-leg shorts. Oh Thing, we’ll have such lovely, dirty fun!’
Sarah was a tough girl. Whatever she believed, she found humour for him.
‘Talking of good taste,’ she said drily. ‘Look, maybe I should bike over to you now. I could meet you by the lake and you could have me up against the boatshed, couldn’t you? Then go back to little Barbie-doll and make upmarket small talk.’
At this point, fortunately, Masters was brought back to his senses by the banging of the judge’s gavel. He was in the courtroom still, and he was being stared at by many eyes. She would have, too, he thought. She’d have cycled over and had me up against the boathouse wall, even with the floodlights on and the Fleet Street reptiles buzzing all around. Wonderwoman.
Mr Justice Harper put down his gavel. He regarded Masters balefully, over his half-moon spectacles. He continued from where he had clearly broken off.
‘Given, as I was saying before I lost your interest Mister Masters, that there is an expectation that justice must be seen to be done, given that although the losses you sustained were undoubtedly enormous ones, and given the discomfort and embarrassment suffered by you and indeed your family – given all that, I feel the sentence I must pass should reflect the climate of the times. There has been an air of unreality, for many people, in this case. An air of Never-never Land, of sums of money well beyond the grasp of normal minds, beyond the dreams of avarice. Many people have talked almost openly of double standards in the law, many commentators – sailing, I would say, very close to the brisk winds of contempt – have muttered darkly of friends in high places, of coteries, of arrogance, of other arcane things ...’
Slowly, it began to dawn on Michael Masters that something had gone wrong. This was not the script, Mr Justice Harper was saying the wrong words, there had been some huge mistake. Furiously, he tried to attract his barrister’s attention, but Sir Cyril was staring resolutely straight ahead. Frantically, he glanced around the room at the lawyers he had spoken with, had eaten food with, shared laughter. Grey-wigged heads examined papers carefully.
Five minutes later, Michael Masters, stunned, stood in the dock and watched the judge destroy his life. Six years. Six years imprisonment. Not in an open prison, not in Ford, but in Bowscar Jail, in Staffordshire. A real jail. One of the fortresses. Michael Masters opened his mouth to shout at his counsel, but Sir Cyril France was ducking out of sight. Two court officers, recognising signs, moved smartly down the dock from either side of him and took his arms. Not rough, but firmly.
‘You can see him down below,’ said one. ‘Come on, let’s get you out of this. We’ll bring you a nice drink of tea.’ Masters turned his head towards the public gallery. His wife, a slender, dark-haired woman of thirty-four, was in the front row, her hands gripping the rail, her chin almost resting on it. Her clear grey eyes regarded him, from under fine brows. Her face held no expression. Is it Sarah, thought Masters? Does she know? His wife’s uncle was a judge. Two more were in the House of Lords. Had quiet Barbara finally had enough?
*
Queen Anne’s Gate. Sinclair.
If Donald Sinclair had been the most modest of all politicians, he could not have prevented the triumphs of this day. The bolder of the morning papers had named him as the mystery man of Buckie, by midday he had ousted Cyril Richardson officially as the junior minist
er for prisons, and by early afternoon the news that Michael Masters had been locked away for six whole years had swept the country. His first news conference was scheduled for 3.30 to give every branch of the media a good bite at the cherry.
Sir Gerald Turner visited him in the ante-room in Queen Anne’s Gate where the make-up girl was putting the final dabs of powder on his cheeks and forehead.
‘Nervous, Donald? You shouldn’t be. Just remember the formula that worked so well for Tony Blair – don’t ever be afraid of lying, it’s the truth we’ve got to fear!’
Sinclair laughed at the joke, but added a serious tone to the sycophancy.
‘I still wish you’d agree to join me, Gerald. I’ll feel pretty damned exposed with only Christian Fortyne backing me. And any credit’s really due to you to start with.’
‘Nonsense. My only wisdom was giving you your chance. You’ve put the prison question firmly on the map, and that’s just where it should be. And I can tell you, Donald, it’s bloody nice to have some good news for a change.’
The press conference was a delight. With Fortyne at his elbow to feed him facts and figures, with the obligatory pretty women to dish out pics and handouts, it went like clockwork. The atmosphere was friendly, the questioners radiated goodwill. For once, they felt, there was a man in charge who knew his stuff, was bold, imaginative, and fully in control.
Firstly, would there be an inquiry into Buckie? No, said Sinclair earnestly, because there had already been three into the condition of the Scottish system in the last eight months. And did you know, he added, with an air of vague surprise, they all drew the same conclusion? Basically, the problem was the prisoners, not the jails. A small body of desperately disruptive men who terrorised and bullied other inmates into actions they neither wanted nor approved of. It was a problem that he would urgently address.