The Magpie Trap: A Novel Read online

  Evidently, Paula had grasped the urgency in Mark’s voice for within seconds, she breezed into the room. She was good looking in an unconventional kind of way; all short-cropped dark hair and angled features. She seemed to radiate calmness; she shot Mark a brief encouraging smile and then walked to the front of the room. The guests got a good look at her bottom in the extra-tight trousers as she walked past.

  ‘Hello there everybody; I’m Paula and I’m here to take your sandwich order in this brief intermission,’ she said confidently.

  Immediately, the fat brewery men started to rearrange their great guts in their seats when she arrived. They smelled the scent of the feminine; something so sadly lacking in so much of the security industry. They wanted more of it.

  ‘Hello there darling,’ piped up one of the men. ‘You can make a sandwich with me any day.’

  ‘EyeSpy with my little eye a nice tidy piece,’ said another, before shouting to another man: ‘Eh, Cliff; at least the scenery’s got better!’

  Paula shrugged off the man’s comment and produced a spiral-bound notepad. ‘What do you fancy? Bacon? A big sausage?’

  A couple of the men were wise enough to look embarrassed.

  ‘We’re not interested in sandwiches,’ said the brewery boss to groans of disappointment from the rest of his staff. ‘We’re interested in where that salesman has shot off to. He was telling us all about how we can get more blood out of the stone that is our staff. Would you like to continue this presentation for us, love?’

  ‘Present your tits to us,’ shouted one of the men.

  Paula fixed them with an icy glare; evidently she’d had enough.

  ‘I don’t know the first thing about security,’ she said. ‘I’m working here as a receptionist while I try to earn enough money to do something more interesting with my life. Do you want sandwiches or not? If not, then I’ll leave you in peace.’

  The men looked at each other in confusion. They wanted sandwiches. Sandwiches were the most important aspect of any meeting.

  ‘I’ve never been so insulted in all my life,’ said the brewery man, climbing up from his seat. ‘Your boss will get to hear of this. We’ll never do business with a company that’s run like this!’

  ‘And I’ll tell him about the sexual harassment,’ said Paula, flouncing out of the room. Touché.

  Parkers’ Fine Foods

  Chris Parker kept the nature of his father’s business a guilty secret from his employers. Peach Marketing Agency had been founded by an idealistic, forward-thinking vegetarian named James Rush, and Chris figured that it was pretty obvious that Rush would frown upon his father’s old-school meat production racket.

  In fact, Chris told them very little about his former life: nobody there knew anything about what had happened to his brother, for example. He therefore appeared to them like a force of nature. He had arrived from nowhere, like a whirlwind and had dragged the ailing company forward into the twenty-first century by embracing new technologies which had previously been frowned upon by the senior management, and particularly by the overly moralistic Rush.

  What Chris Parker delivered was results, creativity, and enthusiasm. Yes, he made mistakes, but these were more than made up for by his sweeping successes. To them, he was like a young shark that had made his first kill, and now could sense the smell of blood from miles away. His senses were all attuned to attracting attention to the clients which employed the agency. The thing was however, Chris simply didn’t care about his job, and it was this sheer effortlessness which translated itself into his work and made it brilliant, and so easy to grasp. He would sketchily propose a few uncertain comments onto a spider diagram on a piece of scrap paper, and somehow stumble upon the essence of what the particular company wanted to portray to their customers. He would barely pay attention to what his customers said, and therefore came up with new insights on how they could sell their business ideas. He relayed ideas in simple terms, which everybody could comprehend and they loved him for it.

  Chris was allowed the space for his creative powers to flourish; they tolerated his long boozy lunches, they virtually encouraged his ‘thinking time’, which roughly translated as lie-ins, and they employed others to take on the administrative slack which he left in his wake. This simply gave him more time to day-dream, to plot and plan how he could actually get out of the job. At the back of his mind was always the promise which he had made his brother on his deathbed. He had to make good that promise.

  That Friday morning, as was customary, Chris had arrived early. This was because everyone knew that he left at 2pm, and he did actually have to do some work. He opened his laptop on his big bare desk and loaded up some files. Reminders about meetings (some of which he’d already skipped) and deadlines (most of which he’d be able to buy extra time on) popped up. It was depressing, he thought, the way that his life was now governed by these reminders; by the computer’s electronic clock. When a reminder popped up, accompanied by that jolly ‘ding’ sound, he was supposed to do something. He’d become like one of Pavlov’s dogs that know food is coming when they hear the sound of the bell.

  Chris was presently involved in a couple of projects which demanded urgent attention. One of the projects in particular made him uneasy. He was supposed to be coming up with the bare-bones of an advertising campaign which would herald the launch of a new drink from one of the local breweries. At first he’d been faintly excited by the idea; he liked a drink himself after all. But when he’d actually encountered the men, he’d found them to be so much like his father that it made him feel sick. They were men from a bygone age, still clinging on to their positions of power in spite of everything.

  Maybe when people like his father and the men from the brewery finally retired, the world would work to a different model. Maybe business would become less slippery then; perhaps the golf-club buddy mentality would go away.

  But the idea was a stupid one; men like them would never retire. They would hang around and make sure that things were done right all the way to their graves. It was their job to frustrate, aggravate and belittle the thrusting shoots of growth from the generation below them until finally, what grew out of the ground were men just like them.

  And Chris had tried the new drink too. Part of him wanted to bring in Danny Morris on the project, just so he’d be able to tell the men just how crap their drink really was. It was basically a reinvention of Babycham - ‘something for the ladies’ – but it tasted like water which had been dredged from the depths of the Leeds-Liverpool canal. Chris could have sworn that he saw an old boot in one of the sample bottles. Ship in a bottle? Shit in a bottle more like.

  Instead of bringing Danny in on the campaign, he’d tipped Danny the wink that the brewery might be after some extra security on their site. Well; if a company is going to shell out thousands and thousands on a shoddy advertising campaign, they might as well spew up a little more in order to make sure that their new drink was safe. Because if anyone actually broke in and somehow tried the drink, it’d all be over; the brewery-men would be exposed as the golf-club charlatans that they were. They knew nothing about what today’s generation actually wanted.

  Golf; once upon a time, Chris had tried to get into golf himself, he reflected, with some embarrassment. He remembered the wild swings on the tee; the five or six shots he’d had to play en route to the fairway, where his father’s ball had landed plumb in the middle. He remembered is father’s sneering and the way that he’d brought the game to an end after three holes.

  ‘You’re fucking useless, son,’ he’d said. ‘Don’t bother coming back here. I thought you said you could play?’

  Both of them had retired to the nineteenth hole, where Babycham was still served, where they still had those old peanut-boards on the wall like an advent calendar; with each bag of nuts removed, more and more of the picture of the scantily clad woman on the board behind was revealed. Chris had the sneaking suspicion that his father thought marketing was all about the tits and arses
still, and realised that in a way, Mal was probably right.

  Take Melon Masher; that’s what they wanted to call the new drink; Melon Masher. At their first meeting, the brewery men had joined him in some blue-sky thinking regarding what the overall message of their campaign was going to be. From the looks of it, Melon Masher was going to be marketed to men as something they could buy women in clubs and pubs so that it’d get the women so drunk, they wouldn’t be able to say no. Chris had been able to say no though, and he’d informed them that he’d come up with some alternatives.

  His first idea was to change the name. Only problem was, he had to think of another one. For some reason, the name of that horse, Quick Fix, kept suggesting itself to him.

  ‘Quick Fix,’ he whispered. ‘Does exactly what it says on the bottle; fixes you up quick so you’re drunk enough to give in to your wild side…’

  Or perhaps something else…

  ‘What about calling it ‘You are a cunt’?’ he asked himself. ‘After all, that’s basically what they are saying to their customers by selling them this muck. That is the overall message that they are communicating.’

  Chris opened up the image file which had the design work for the new bottle. He deleted the words Melon Masher and started to type in his new alternative, sniggering away all the while. The brewery men were so stuck up their own arses, they probably wouldn’t realise the change until it was too late…

  He was still laughing as he answered his ringing mobile: ‘Chris… ha, ha… Parker?’

  A quick-fire, urgent voice on the other end: ‘Chris? That you?’

  ‘I’ve just said it was, haven’t I? Who’s this?’ asked Chris, rather absently. He had the phone cradled between his ear and his shoulder and was using both hands to manipulate the image of the bottle on screen. He’d now altered the shape of the bottle so that it resembled a penis.

  ‘It’s Mark Birch. I work with Danny…’

  ‘Oh, hi Mark; I know who you are. There’s no need to explain… Why are you calling me?’

  ‘Houston, we have a problem,’ said Mark, rather bizarrely. ‘Danny’s done a major disappearing-act and I wondered if by any chance you’d seen him?’

  ‘He’ll be in the pub; what you worried about? He’s always in the pub. Mind you, he’d better not be in the bookies. If he’s in the bookies, I’ll…’

  ‘He’s not in the pub,’ breathed Mark. It was clearly an effort for him to explain and to rein in the galloping horses of his worries. ‘And what I should have said was that his disappearing-act was right in the middle of a company presentation to some top men from the brewery.’

  Chris couldn’t help but laugh. ‘What? He just upped and left a presentation? To those fat bastards; that’s too funny!’

  Mark paused a moment as though collecting himself. ‘He got some kind of phone call. All his face went white, like, as though it was someone he really didn’t want to hear from…’

  ‘Ah, there’ll be plenty of people our Danny-boy doesn’t want to hear from. Think about it: how many people does he upset in one single night out on the town? Multiply that by the number of times he’s actually been out in the last year – probably three hundred and sixty five times – and you’ve got a lot of angry people out for his blood.’

  ‘But nobody’s heard from him since… The brewery men just walked out in the end, we waited that long for him. There was a bit of an argument too. Martin Thomas, our boss, is out for blood. The only one that is not pissed off with him is Paula, the receptionist, who seems to find his whole disappearing-act very funny.’

  Chris stopped fiddling with the image on screen and concentrated on the phone call. ‘What do you expect me to do about it, Mark? I’m not his bloody wife, you know. I’m not his employer. I’m just an old mate that he comes to when he needs a bit of cash or when he gets another of his crack-pot ideas.’

  ‘I just thought you might have seen him, that’s all,’ muttered Mark. ‘And that you might have some ideas on where we could find him.’

  Suddenly Chris felt a little guilty. He was so used to reacting to Danny’s perpetual disasters with a weary shrug of the shoulders that when it came down to something that was potentially serious – certainly Mark thought it was serious – he found it quite hard to break the mould. Danny was like the boy who cried wolf, he reckoned. And he supposed Cheryl would feel the same way.

  ‘You’ve not called Cheryl, have you?’

  ‘Nah; not yet anyway. Paula knows her from somewhere or other and reckons that we should shield her from the worst of this until we find him. And it is bad, Chris; he’s really pissed off these potential customers. Maybe he’s gone and done something terrible…’

  ‘Don’t say things like that,’ cautioned Chris. ‘Don’t ever say something like that. Don’t even suggest it.’

  ‘But you sound like you’re not even bothered…’

  ‘All right; you’ve made your point. As soon as I finish work, I’ll come and meet you and help you look for him. But if this turns out to be another of Danny’s stupid little games like when he goes on a three-day bender and loses his phone, then I’ll… I’ll. I don’t know what I’ll do, but I won’t be happy.’

  ‘Thanks Chris,’ said Mark, sounding too grateful.

  Chris sat for a moment and stared out of the window. A boat was bobbing slowly along the river and he watched the family on board as they laughed and joked. There were two small boys that reminded him so much of the photograph in his desk drawer that he became entranced. One of the boys was holding a fishing-rod and the other was trying to grab it from him. A typical brotherly snap-shot; what one had, the other wanted.

  Danny, he reflected, was like a stand-in brother to him. Yes, that would be a good way of describing their relationship. There was a bond formed by years of knowing each other; years of shared experience. But also, under the surface, there was that uncomfortable competitive-edge that characterises so many male relationships. Chris had long tried to drown this competitive-edge. He’d tried to drown it through exaggerated kindness; lending Danny far too much money and never asking for it back, for example. But Danny had always managed to see these acts of kindness as something else; he’d always seen them as unwanted reparations after their silent war.

  Chris shook his head and picked up his mobile once more. He dialed Danny’s number and waited eight… nine rings until Danny’s stupid answerphone message kicked-in.

  Hi this is Dan the man from EyeSpy Security. If you’re buying, then leave me a message; if you’re selling, then don’t bother. I’ll speak to you when I’m back from wherever I’ve gone, squire.

  He sighed and clicked off the phone, not even bothering to leave a message. He’d have been better off calling the incompetent barman at the Adelphi for answers about Danny’s whereabouts. He’d have been better calling the damn Killingbeck Turf Accountants. He did neither of those things. Instead he called down to Gemma in reception.

  ‘Hi Gem-Gem,’ he said, affecting his usual stupid sing-song voice. Sometimes he thought that she’d just see right through his pathetic act, but she never seemed to. She was always simply high as a kite that he’d called her.

  ‘Oh hi, Chris,’ she said in a voice that seemed to be made up of high-pitched beeps and whines, rather like R2D2 or something. She spoke as though the call had made her day, her month or even her fucking year. She probably liked Friends; probably wanted her life to be just like that of Monica or Rachel. She probably wanted Chris to be her Chandler or her Ross. She probably wanted them to lead this boy-in-the-bubble life where Aire Bar was the caff that they spent all day long talking shit in and letting their minds turn to mush. Didn’t those people have a goddamn kettle in their apartments?

  ‘Did you manage to save any of those cakes so you could take them home?’ he asked. He knew damn well that she hadn’t; he’d been out for a ciggie by the bin store – amazing the lengths the veggies expected him to go to for a simple human right these days – and he’d seen the box jutting out from t
he top of a half-open black bin bag. The local tramps had been at them.

  ‘Oh I loved the cakes. My housemate and I had a real girlie night in in our nighties eating the cakes and watching Sleepless in Seattle for about the seventieth time.’

  He knew such an image was supposed to turn him on; the typical male fantasy of girls together in their nighties getting a little too frisky in their pillow fight and ending up wallowing around naked… But for fuck’s sake, Sleepless in Seattle; Tom Wanks? He changed the subject:

  ‘Good. Anyway, the reason I’m calling is to ask you a teeny-weeny favour if I can… I’ve got a mobile number. I can’t seem to get through to it. Maybe the person is ignoring my calls when they see my number coming up. Can you try it from the reception phone every few minutes or so when you’re not busy. Give me a shout if anyone answers.’

  ‘Oh Chris; it’s not a girl, is it?’ asked Gemma, sounding disappointed. ‘I can’t imagine a girl would want to ignore your calls unless you’ve been a very bad man.’

  Oh fuck right off with your ‘very bad mans’ and your ability to make me say things like ‘teeny-weeny’, thought Chris. Instead, he said: ‘You know you’re the only one for me, Gem-Gem. No, this number’s for a friend that’s done a bit of a disappearing-act. I’m trying to find him so I can help him.’

  ‘Oh, I bet you’re such a good friend,’ she gushed. ‘So nice of you to help look for him; what’s the number? I’ll do everything I can.’

  Chris read out Danny’s number from his computer screen. He usually knew his friends’ numbers off by heart but Danny had lost so many phones on his drinking sessions that by now, Chris knew that there was no point even trying to learn the number of his new one.

  Feeling pleased with himself, he started to get on with his design work again, but then realised that he should call Mark to let him know that he had already started his sideline as a private detective. He wanted Mark to know just how generous he was with his time, despite being such a busy man.