Love Sex Work Murder

by Neal Bircher

  “Jason … insecure?”

  “Yes, I reckon. All the bravado’s just a cover,” Nick paused to give Martin chance to respond, but there was no reaction.

  “People who are really successful are in that category too. People like Tony Clarke – who is destined to be a director before too much longer – who live and breathe work, and are happy to do fourteen hour days because there’s nothing much else going on in their lives. They call themselves ambitious, but they’re not they’re just lacking in imagination. If they were ambitious they’d do something interesting and worthwhile with their lives, but they choose the safety and structure of a corporate organisation. OK, they’re not insecure, and they’re usually pretty good at what they do. But the only thing that they are really able to do so much better than the rest of us is get really excited and enthusiastic about things that to ninety-nine percent of people are just mind-numbingly dull. So they’re definitely sad bastards as well.”

  Martin nodded, by his standards, vigorously.

  “And then there’s the third category, the ‘pragmatists’: ordinary blokes like you and me who just want to get on and do a reasonable job of whatever the job is, and who recognise that we’re getting paid for it, so expect to have to give something in exchange. I reckon we’re the happiest though because we get on well with other people in the team environment – people like working with us – and we are aware of our own limitations, and are comfortable with that.”

  Martin wasn’t so sure. “I’ll have to think about that one.”

  Then they each looked into their respective beers for a few seconds, before Nick decided that he’d been quite philosophical enough for one day, and that it was time to lighten-up the conversation. “So then, back to football …”

  Number Plates

  Nick pulled up at another public phone box to transfer the insurance from his un-used Porsche onto the Celica. Absconding murder suspect he might be, but he still had a social conscience. He also called the Alfa guy to let him know that he wouldn’t be turning up. When he put the phone down he glanced at his watch, and his heart sank/jumped once more when he saw that it was nearly four o’clock.

  He got back into his car – now fully legal – and set about his next mission, one that set the trepidation butterflies fluttering again: operation disguise the Celica as a different one. He’d only had the idea on the way to Mrs Parrington’s house: he would get hold of the identity of a car similar to his and dress his car up as the other one, in order to make himself less likely to be identified.

  The plan was to find himself a dodgy looking scrap yard, probably somewhere out east, or “south of the river”. There he would get chatting to the owner to gain his confidence, and then do what he’d seen on the TV that car thieves were able to do: buy a nice little package of number plates, chassis plate, and documents, from a scrap Celica similar to his. However, time no longer allowed for such a ploy, and in any case he had already rather gone off the idea of being told to “Fuck off!” by a big oily East-End scrappy accompanied by an equally big, vicious dog. So, plan B, which was just as dodgy but slightly less scary, would have to do.

  A drive out towards East London found him soon where he wanted to be: a run-down but bustling street lined with bookies, grubby-looking fast food outlets, minicab offices, and, what he wanted first: an Internet café. He parked up in a side street and walked back to the small and grubby former hairdressers’. One pound bought him an hour’s-worth of access and he took his (broken) seat among a hubbub of occupants.

  Nick didn’t need an hour; five minutes was enough to find a suitable silver Celica on theAutotrader site, pictured with its number plate showing. It was located in Portsmouth, and he was pleased to see that it was being offered for sale by a trader, not a private seller; hopefully it would remain unsold and unused for a while. The car’s registration number memorised, he left and sought the next requirement, which was a small independent car spares shop. He found one almost straight away, and ten minutes or so later, having handed fifty quid to a humourless Indian shopkeeper, he emerged with a set of Perspex number plates, a hand-drill, a cheap set of screwdrivers, and a pack of drill bits. The price included a premium (bribe) to account for Nick not being in possession of documentation to prove his entitlement to the registration number – a legal requirement. Next task was to find somewhere to transform his Celica into the one that was for sale. He would need to hurry too; darkness was falling fast to remind him that he had a schedule to meet.

  He headed off through slow-moving traffic, travelling in a vaguely north-westerly direction. He peered into each side-street and car park, but all seemed too well illuminated or too highly populated. Time dragged and Nick was getting anxious. That anxiety grew further when a police car passed in the other direction, like him, edging slowly through the traffic. He had to make a conscious effort not to look the driver in the eye, and he could feel the sweat welling in the pores of his skin. The police car passed harmlessly by, and he breathed a little easier again, having first confirmed with a look in his mirror that it wasn’t turning around. This was of course ridiculous as he wasn’t committing any crime … not yet anyway.

  A rail bridge crossed the road just ahead and –Bingo!It was one of those bridges with red brick arches housing little businesses. He took a left turn, immediately before the bridge, onto a track with a very bumpy surface. On the right-hand side of the track were the archways, and on the left a multitude of shabby home-built-looking business premises. Parked vehicles were all over the place, but there was very little life and, but for that escaping from door cracks in a couple of the ramshackle places on the left, very little light either.

  Nick drove slowly past all of the buildings, but even at five miles an hour the Celica was bottoming out on potholes. The track was three hundred yards long, and at its end opened out onto a patch of wasteland.

  Nick did a three-point turn, carefully avoiding an upturned pram and a pile of dead cookers. Heading back towards the road, the first parked vehicle he would encounter was a white Transit Luton van, on the right, adjacent to a large, dark, and rather foreboding wooden hut. He pulled in behind the Transit and switched off his engine. He looked at his watch: nearly five thirty. His venture was only a matter of hours old and already it had caused his heart rate to rise above its normal level several times. Now it was at it again, due to a combination of the continued time pressure that he was under, the location, what he was about to do, and – he had to admit it – the thrill of the whole experience.

  He sat still for a minute, but outside of the car nothing stirred. Then he gathered up his tools, got out, and went to work. First the back number plate unscrewed nice and easily. Then he went around to the front. The front plate was tricky to get at and required him to lie on the ground and contort his fingers through a tight gap in the car’s bodywork to hold onto each of two nylon nuts, while his other hand turned a screwdriver to undo slotted bolts from the front of the number plate. It was slow and painful work, but the first bolt was almost off when a flood of light alerted him to the approach of a vehicle. He froze and listened. A large vehicle was coming slowly down the track from the direction of the road.Shit!

  Nick pulled his hand out from the car, scraping the skin off three knuckles, grabbed his tools and rolled quickly under the Transit Luton, just in time to see another Transit – a blue breakdown truck – roll slowly by, with a fat oily scrap-yard-worker (of the type that he had earlier on specifically changed his plan in order to avoid) peering out of the passenger window. The truck passed by his car, but that was of little comfort, as it would have to either turn around or stop almost immediately, at the end of the track. Turn around was definitely the better of the two options. At least it wasn’t a police van. He chuckled at his own view of relative good fortune.

  The truck then went through a lengthy five point turn in the same place that he had turned around the Celica, and started coming back, even more slowly than before. The beams from the truck’s he
adlights bounced along the ground and into his eyes. He was hopeful, and quite confident, that the occupants would not be able to see him yet. He gently rolled further under the van, so that he was now just in front of the rear axle.

  The back of his Celica would be right in the view of the truck, and it would be minus its back number plate. Bollocks!Why hadn’t he done the front one first? The noisy truck drew alongside the Celica, and stopped. He could hear voices, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying, partly because they were being drowned out by his own heartbeat. The truck’s engine picked up revs, and it moved off – relief – only to stop again no more than three yards later.Shit! Shit! Shit!

  A man got out of the truck, and did a circuit of the Celica … the Celica that had five thousand pounds in cash stashed in its glove box.Please don’t notice the keys in the ignition!Then he went back to the truck and spoke a few unintelligible words to the other man. Meanwhile Nick was doing his best not to choke on the oily fumes that their exhaust was chucking out. The man moved again and then opened the door … of the Luton van.Great! And bollocks!The van fired up; it was even noisier and smokier than the truck. Then the two drivers took part in a smoke-belching revving up contest. Nick was genuinely concerned that he was about to pass out, but he daren’t move. His ribcage was squeezing in on his lungs, which in turn felt as if they were about to burst. He couldn’t hold off any longer. Turning onto his stomach he launched into an uncontrollable coughing fit. At the same time the truck revved yet faster and started to move away, its noise hopefully drowning out the sound of his gasping for his dying breath. The longest fifteen seconds of his life followed before the van too pulled away from above him, belching forth one last defiant fog of diesel smoke as it did so. Nick let the van get close to the main road before rolling onto his back and looking up into the night sky. There were stars peering out between dark clouds. His head ached like it he’d been hit with a mallet, and his rib cage felt as if it was supporting a small elephant. But as the diesel fug began to waft away, the (relatively) clean East London air that replaced it smelt fresher than the freshest of daisies. He lay there unmoving for a number of minutes. It was starting to rain. A train roared by blasting its horn, what seemed like inches from his ear, just to add one more assault to his senses. He stretched out his limbs, confirming that at least some parts of his body were still functioning, and then he did the only thing that he could think to do under the circumstances: he laughed and laughed out loud like a mad man.

  Getting Away

  Gail had on a new pair of Levi 501s; she knew how Nick liked her in those, and she was also well aware that she had the figure to carry them off. With them she wore a tight black top, and a blue denim jacket. She checked her hair and make-up in her front room mirror, and gave a quick glance around the room. Her gaze didn’t linger on any family photos; it was no time for sentiment. And even if there was any temptation to do so, the sight of the clock on her mantelpiece – showing just after five o’clock – would have jolted it out of her mind. She picked up her suitcase and dragged it out to the boot of her car. Then she returned to the house for a long overcoat and hat. She pulled the front door of her house to, and (unusually) turned her key in its Mortis lock. Then she placed the hat and coat on the back seat of her car, and backed quickly out of her driveway.

  The journey to her workplace was less than a mile long, and she had driven it, literally, thousands of times. Today though the familiar route seemed somehow not so familiar, and somehow part of a different world. Without consciously thinking it, Gail was, like Nick, aware that so much about her life was changing so quickly and that very little would ever be the same again. That knowledge was as invigorating as it was worrying. Such thoughts put her not in an observant mode, but she did follow Nick’s instruction to keep an eye out for her journalists, and she did see the grey Ford Focus pull out and follow her.

  The Focus kept its distance, and Gail felt quite smug to see it turn the corner some way behind as her pass let her into CountrySafe’s car park. CountrySafe’s workers wouldn’t generally be leaving work until around five thirty, but there were already some spaces available on all of the lower floors. Gail though drove quickly to the fifth floor. She smiled at the sight of Nick’s little Reliant van. There was a free space next to the van, and normally Gail would park next to Nick, but this time she chose not to. Given that she and Nick had just been jointly arrested on the same murder charge, then parking cars next to one another was hardly likely to fuel any gossip in itself, but all the same, she resisted the temptation, and parked her Vectra some spaces away.

  She looked at her watch: the time was nine minutes past five. She got out of the car and opened its back door to get out the overcoat and hat. She slipped the overcoat on, hastily tied her hair in a bun, put on her reading glasses, and then topped off her new outfit with the neat rimmed blue hat. Then her attention was drawn to the sound of a powerful car being driven fast up the ramp from the fourth floor. The car popped up from the top of the ramp and steered squealing towards her, its four headlights dazzling her, and the noise of it accelerating reverberating around the bare low-ceilinged structure to deafen her at the same time. Martin Broome pulled up right next to her and, at ten past five, right on time. Gail opened the rear hatch of her car, and Martin lifted out her suitcase and squeezed it into the boot of his gleaming red Alfa GTV, where it nestled next to Nick’s holdall. They both got into the Alfa, having not yet said a word to one another.

  “You’d probably better get in the back; there’s a couple of blokes hanging around outside,” Martin suggested. Gail looked over her shoulder and laughed at the sight of the car’s diminutive back seats. But Martin was right. Gail got back out of the car, tilted the passenger seat forward, and climbed into the back, doing her best to lie down across the seats. It was a good job that she was small, it would also help that she was wearing dark clothing, and that the Alfa’s rear windows were tinted.

  Martin closed the passenger door and pulled gently away, driving carefully down the car park so as not to draw attention. They saw nobody else, not until Martin’s pass opened the exit gates and two men went running in right past them. Martin exited the car park and the big gates closed behind his car. Then he put his foot to the floor and chuckled at the little victory: one more person was getting a buzz out of being dragged into Gail and Nick’s “adventure”.

  Ten minutes later Martin dropped off Gail at a pre-arranged Tube station and quickly drove off to make his planned rendezvous with Nick.

  Love

  It hadn’t been the most romantic of ways of celebrating the first anniversary of their first date, but it had been a good night. The quick-beer-after-work-on-a-Friday club had gathered in the Carpenter’s Arms shortly after five o’clock to indulge in an evening of darts, pool, and, of course, excessive drinking. They were eight-strong at the start, and, as was the norm, the numbers decreased as the evening drew on and incoherence took over from discussion. Gail and Nick were the only two left for last orders, and they got in two drinks each to keep them going. It was twenty-to-twelve, and as they exited the darkened pub to the weary thank-you of the landlord, only one hardened whisky-drinking regular remained at the bar.

  The October air was cold, but they were both well wrapped-up and prepared. Nick put his arm around Gail, and guided her not in the direction of her home, or of the taxi rank, but across the road, where lay Meadow Park, with its darkness, space, and clumps of mature trees in which to hide. Gail took Nick’s hand, and kissed him on the cheek as they crossed the deserted road.

  They passed through a gate into the park. If there was anybody else out there in the darkness, then Gail and Nick would be unlikely to see them. But there wasn’t anybody else; there never was. Nick thought about that – why did he and Gail never bump into anybody else when on their outdoor adventures? Surely there were other people who had sex in the park from time to time! They walked hand-in-hand, with thick frosty grass brushing around their ankles. They didn’t
speak, but walked quickly, both looking out for a suitable location. They found themselves making for a clump of large trees that they hadn’t visited before. The trees would not have provided much cover in the daylight – and certainly not during winter – but with the aid of the darkness, the knowledge that there was nobody else about, and the inhibition-reducing qualities of alcohol, the spot was ideal.

  Gail stood with her back to one of the trees and her arms around Nick’s neck. He placed his hands on her hips, and they kissed. After a year together, they each knew just which buttons to press with one another. Gail unzipped the front of Nick’s jacket with her right hand, placed her hand on his chest, and then moved it down towards the buckle of his belt. Nick in turn stood to kiss her again gently on the lips, but then he pulled back a little and looked her in the face. Her eyes were closed and she was smiling. Nick kept looking and Gail opened her eyes. She eyed him quizzically, wondering if there was something wrong.

  “So, do you like me then?” Nick asked her.

  Gail frowned, a little confused, “Of course I like you!”

  “How much?”

  Gail thought for a second before saying “A lot!” in a suggestive tone.

  Nick looked down into her eyes and hesitated for a moment before asking gently, “Only a lot?”

  Gail hesitated longer than he had and braced herself before boldly saying “I love you, Nick … I love you so much!”

  Nick smiled, “I love you too, just as much!” Then they kissed long and hard, each helping the other out of their respective sets of clothing as they did so.

  They may never have shared the words “I love you” before, but by the time they parted at the end of the night Gail and Nick had done so a hundred times.