The Magpie Trap: A Novel Page 18

  Chris chipped in: ‘You’re forgetting one very simple thing; the FSA and West Yorkshire Police visited the factory that January and found no evidence of condemned meat. There was no evidence of trimming, treating or bleaching. In fact, the bleach in that young boy’s blood was traced back to his hiding in the school’s cleaning cupboard earlier that day. And Todd? How dare you insinuate that he was somehow involved in this?’

  ‘I can see the fear in your eyes. The condemned meat that condemned your son will finally condemn your business.’

  ‘Is that the journalistic slant you’re putting on this?’ asked Mal, frowning in disgust. ‘Miss Foster, you are not the first vulture to go picking at my son’s bones. Todd was a troubled young man; he was almost of another world. He wasn’t slow, but he was a day-dreamer. Chris used to be like that as well…

  Life was always too big for Todd; in his short time here, he never found that right fit. I don’t know why he killed himself, but it wasn’t because of my factory. He may have worked there, but he paid so little attention to what was going on around him that it could have been a toy factory for all he cared.’

  Mal slumped back into his seat; the effort he’d taken to make the speech had exhausted him.

  ‘I’m not trying to rake up the past out of spite. Other journalists might have sniffed around your factory - looked at your flaunting of working practices - but I have meticulously built up this story, even when my editor tried to persuade me otherwise. I think you’re seriously under-estimating your son and what I think he knew.’

  ‘What gives you the right to talk about Todd?’ Chris raged, the veins in his neck protruding aggressively. ‘What gives either of you the right? Neither of you knew him; not really. People thought he was slow but he wasn’t; he was always thinking, weighing up the world. I was there when he died. You didn’t know that, did you?’

  Dawn Foster simply stared; such a revelation had been completely out of the blue.

  Mal had sunk even deeper into his seat, and gasped, ‘Did he tell you why?’

  ‘He may have done, but I’m not going to tell you, am I?’ Chris suddenly felt he had said too much.

  ‘The story will come out tomorrow; Todd will be in it. If we build up a picture of him being racked with guilt at the child’s death, then at least one member of your family will emerge with some credit,’ said the journalist, provocatively inviting further comment.

  ‘He will not be in the story!’ shouted Chris. He slammed his fist onto the mahogany table, scattering knives and forks. He waved away the concerned looks of the waitress.

  Dawn Foster shook her head wearily. ‘Once and for all, I’m not going to pussyfoot around Todd. Do you know why? Do you know why I can’t let go of the story? Do you know why I’ve spent the past three years digging up these facts? That boy who died at the school; he had a name. I bet you don’t remember it though, do you?’

  Suddenly Mal let out an agonized wheeze. ‘David Foster… he was… your son?’

  ‘We both lost our sons because of your greed. That I can’t forgive. It’s unfortunate for you that the first person you murdered was the son of a journalist though; a journalist that will be like a bloody rottweiler that won’t let go. It doesn’t matter that you play golf with the local councilors, all of whom are in your pocket.’

  ‘Are you accusing me of bribery?’ bristled Mal.

  ‘I’m simply stating facts. Even three years ago, it was obvious that it wasn’t in their interest to go rooting around your business; after all, everyone gets a cut of the money saved by you selling them dodgy meat for the schools.’

  ‘I’m sorry you lost your son, Miss Foster, but I believe that grief is making you concoct this story,’ muttered Mal, hopelessly.

  ‘Don’t interrupt me,’ Dawn Foster continued, relentlessly ploughing on. ‘One of those schools you supplied the condemned meat to was St. Pats’, and that’s where David went. He was in Year Six; he was eleven years old. He was good at football, maths and geography.’

  The chirp of the mobile phone broke up the staring match. Chris snapped open the cover of his sleek black gadget, listened to what was being said and then replied with a simple: ‘Good.’ He then returned his phone to his pocket and explained: ‘I am really sorry for what happened to your son, but I have to tell you; that call was from our lawyers. They have put a halt on your story. It won’t be going to press tomorrow. I want nothing more to do with this business.’

  Dawn Foster’s eyes betrayed a deep anger and she jabbed an accusatory finger towards Mal. ‘Do you know, whilst I’ve been researching this story, I’ve found out a lot about the meat trade. There are so many scandals, so many cover-ups. Did you know that in many cases that actually go to court, the ring leaders have been discovered to have come into the meat trade directly from the drug trade. The punishments are so low, the risks lower and the profits are greater…’

  ‘Now you’re calling me a common criminal,’ Mal growled.

  ‘I’m simply telling you the facts. Your lawyers may have put the brakes on this story now, but it will air, and very soon. Your empire is going to crash down around you. Todd knew, didn’t he? And he couldn’t handle that truth. You killed him as well.’

  With that, she stormed out, leaving Chris and Mal to pay the bill.

  Mal reached across for his son’s hand across the table. Chris had forgotten the strength in those hands; it was the first time his father had touched him in years.

  ‘Thank you Chris. Thank you for defending us. But why did you not tell me about Todd? I never knew that you were with him.’

  Chris seethed: ‘He knew, Dad, he knew, and he couldn’t survive that knowledge. He made me promise something that day; he made me promise that I would get away. He saw me being dragged down by you. He wanted me to escape; get out of Leeds, leave the country.

  He loved geography, just like young David Foster. He was forever looking at maps and globes. We used to spin the globe around and put our fingers on it to stop it; where our finger ended up was where we would go. Do you know what? If I ever ended up pointing to England, he’d let me have another go. That’s how much he wanted away from you. He just didn’t know how to get away… I think he was waiting for me. He didn’t want to leave me on my own with you. When David Foster died though, Todd just gave up. It was him that made the anonymous calls Dad; it was him.’

  Mal was left abandoned at the table, his head cradled in his hands, sobs racking through his body. He was a broken man.

  Sela Bar

  Danny had chosen Sela Bar to discuss a potentially record-breaking heist. Simple, subtle, snug Sela Bar was ideally placed for a relaxing evening’s drinking and illicit conversation away from prying eyes. Danny loved the way he could drift in from the bustling street, and descend into Sela’s relative haven of calm. Sela was down a flight of stairs from street level; hence the name Sela Bar, as in Cellar; and therefore there obviously were no windows through which he could be caught unawares. He also loved it because, unlike some of the other preening peacock bars in Leeds City Centre, Sela placed a higher value on the quality of drinks than on any unnecessary interior design detail in the bar itself.

  That evening, Danny was perched on a rescued pew from a local church, which didn’t fit properly on the stone floor and therefore rocked back and forth with his every reach for his beer.

  He was forced to wait, again. It seemed as though he spent half of his life waiting; for a race to start, for a friend to turn up, for somebody to sign an order to rubber-stamp a sale. Danny had to remind himself that this was a different kind of waiting; this was like the calm before the storm. It had an anticipatory feel to it. He was excited about something, other than betting, for the first time in a long time. It felt as though he had turned a corner in his life and was about to see the world of opportunity opened up to him. He had been so desperate, so out-of-ideas, that it seemed like the solution was there all along, just waiting for him to say yes; all he had to do was step over that threshold and
into the world of criminality.

  At that moment however, something else stepped over the threshold, or rather someone. It was Chris. He was wearing what looked like a new suit; pin-striped this time and with a waist-coat to boot. A goddamn waistcoat; who did he think he was?

  ‘Oh Danny-boy, what’ve you been up to?’ he said. ‘What happened?’

  ‘What do you mean “what happened”?’

  ‘Today: what happened? Where the fuck did you go? The whole world’s been looking for you today after you walked out of that presentation.’

  After everything that had happened, and helped by the lubricant of the afternoon whiskies, Danny had forgotten all about the events of the morning. They seemed to belong to a different reality now and barely even measured as a ripple on his own personal Richter scale.

  ‘Oh that,’ he said, making a dismissive gesture with his hand. ‘I had some other business to take care of, that’s all.’

  Chris sank down onto the seat next to Danny and spoke in a menacingly calm voice: ‘That’s it? That’s your explanation? Did you know that your mate Mark has been combing virtually every bar in town looking for you? I think your receptionist Paula took all the bookies. And they ain’t the only ones; your boss has been on the warpath… Is this the explanation you’re going to offer them? That you had other business?’

  Danny studied Chris’s face and noted that there was something new in his usually sparkling eyes; some disappointment perhaps, maybe laced with a measure of fear.

  ‘Nice waistcoat,’ said Danny, smirking.

  ‘Shut the fuck up, Danny,’ said Chris, fiddling with the material of the waistcoat with something bordering on embarrassment. If it was embarrassment, it was soon replaced by anger. ‘This loose-cannonball run that you seem to be on has to stop. I’m not going to tell you that it’s because you’re hurting so many people – hell, you’re hurting yourself – but what I will tell you for free is that it can’t go on much longer.’

  ‘Oh, you’re telling me for free, are you? Not a loan or an investment then, cock?’

  ‘Stop it with the goddamn ‘cockers’ and the ‘cocks’ and the ‘chiefs’ and the ‘squires’. You are not a goddamn tramp. Nor are you a Yorkshireman.’

  The two men fumed for a moment. Danny resolutely refused to offer to go up to the bar to shout up the next round; Chris seemed in a state of shock. In the background mood music played and a couple of student-types messed around with one of the board games which Sela Bar stocked behind the bar.

  Finally, Chris spoke: ‘Anyway, after your text message, I thought I’d better come down and see that you were still alive. Evidently you are. Now I can go home and put my feet up and not worry about whether you’ve been run over by a bus driven by someone that you owe a gambling debt to.’

  ‘Did you not even read the text message?’

  ‘I read it,’ said Chris, climbing to his feet again. ‘Typical you; typical Danny hyperbole. Ah! You like that word, don’t you? I saw how you sneered when I said it. You’re off your head, mate. Is it a normal thing for someone to do to go missing for a whole day and then start sending texts like that out, talking some nonsense thing about a plan to heist Edison’s Printers?’

  Danny roughly pulled Chris down into a seat and hissed: ‘Keep your fuckin’ voice down you idiot!’

  Chris shrugged away Danny’s hands as though he didn’t want them touching the rich material which made up the lapels on his suit. For the first time, Danny realised that if it had actually come down to a fight between the two of them, Chris would have a very decent shout of winning. He’d really bulked up with all this snowboarding and gym-going.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ hissed Chris. ‘Don’t tell me that what you said in your text message was actually the truth; that you do actually have this plan?’

  Danny nodded.

  Then Chris started to laugh; it was the exaggerated golf-club kind of laugh that his father would have emitted upon hearing that one of his pals had lost his ball in the rough at the ninth.

  ‘I’m serious,’ insisted Danny, with fire in his eyes.

  ‘Always knew you’d be the one to cheer me up today,’ said Chris, who’d evidently decided to stay now. ‘I’ll get them in and then you can tell me all about this crazy plan of yours.’

  Continuing his condescending giggling, he got out of his seat and bounced his way to the bar as if he was a boxer on his way to ring-side.

  The big revelation of the plan wasn’t going as well as Danny had hoped. Soon he would have to bring out the big guns; he’d have to tell Chris all about the foreign man and the fact that there wasn’t actually any choice in the matter anyway. This meeting wasn’t about discussing whether they were going to undertake the heist; it was to discuss how they’d undertake the heist. He took a sip from his pint and watched Chris leaning nonchalantly against the bar. Hell, the man was consummate. Nobody else could have pulled off a suit like that with bloody trainers.

  From the opposite direction came the sound of the saloon-style door swinging shut. Danny’s head spun round to see Mark Birch, still in his EyeSpy overalls, but with a more bar-friendly T-Shirt pulled down over the top half of his body. Mark shook his head as soon as he picked Danny out from the other down and outs.

  ‘All right, all right, I did wrong, I’m sorry,’ said Danny, raising his hands in mock-surrender as Mark approached his table. ‘I shouldn’t have walked out of the presentation and left you alone with those berks from the brewery. Chris told me about what happened.’

  ‘Yeah, well he’s been out there looking for you as well this afternoon, like,’ said Mark. He looked as though he was trying to bite back his anger.

  ‘Good excuse for a pub crawl,’ said Danny, chancing a grin.

  ‘It’s not a joke, like,’ said Mark. ‘Martin Thomas is fuming, absolutely fuming. One of the brewery guys called him up in the afternoon to tell him, but to tell you the truth, I think he saw you driving away anyway.’

  ‘What’s the shithouse said?’

  ‘He wants you in his office at nine sharp tomorrow morning.’

  ‘That’s a Saturday. He’ll be at the golf-club, I’ll be in bed. You must mean Monday.’

  ‘Tomorrow, Dan. Can’t you get it through your head? It’s that serious that he’s forgoing the golf and he’s having you in.’

  ‘Oh well,’ said Danny.

  ‘Are you not even worried? You could be for the high-jump, mate.’

  ‘Bigger fish to fry,’ said Danny. ‘Did you get my text message?’

  Mark raised his eyes to the ceiling and then sloped off to the bar to join Chris. He did not offer Danny a drink.

  Mark diligently tended his half-pint (he was driving) whilst listening to Chris and Danny snipe at each other across the table. He knew he shouldn’t have come, these spoilt university boys just loved showing off to each other, as if it was some courting ritual. He felt excluded. It was only when Danny had got up to visit the toilet that Chris had deigned to speak to him.

  ‘What do you reckon to these texts that Danny’s sent us then?’

  ‘I’m a bit worried about him to tell you the truth,’ said Mark. ‘It’s like he’s finally gone over the edge, like.’

  ‘I know. Have you ever heard of a magpie trap? Daddy dear has had one installed in his garden, although I’m not exactly sure whether they are RSPB approved. They are an extreme preventative measure to stop the birds from taking over. It’s a kind of metal cage cum death trap. Now, to get it to work, you put a dummy magpie in one of the compartments of the cage. The resident magpies are driven so mad that they get into this downward spiral where all they can think about is going in and attacking the decoy magpie, whereby the trap is sprung. Danny seems like he’s headed directly for a magpie trap and there’s nothing that could stop him from getting mangled.’

  For a moment, Mark was going to tell Chris all about the terrifying video file he’d received on his email account, but instead he found himself saying: ‘I don’t mind magpi
es meself; there’s one on the Newcastle United badge, like.’

  Chris ignored him: ‘Mark my words; it’s only a matter of time before they start having ‘preventative measures’ like that built into the security systems you tinker about with.’

  Mark looked confused, but was rescued by Danny’s return from the toilet. He looked as though he’d been drinking all afternoon again, just like the previous day. He was wearing a dark frown and looked as though the whiskies he had thrown back were now coming back to haunt him, resurrecting the paranoid inner demon in Danny which always appeared when he was drunk.

  ‘Tell us about the texts,’ said Chris.

  Mark winced. This was not the way to handle a drunk like Danny; they needed to get him help, not humiliate him.

  Danny slapped his palm onto the table, seriously spilling the contents of Mark and Chris’s still full drinks.

  ‘That’s right; the texts,’ he said. ‘Look, there’s a reason I wanted you to come here, and it’s a bit more important than where I went when I left that brewery presentation. Chris, I wasn’t going to let you in on this mate, but as you said, I owe you. This will repay you for everything I’ve ever borrowed from you. This will make us rich.’

  Struggling to keep his voice hushed, Danny stared boggle-eyed across the table at his drinking partners, gauging reactions.

  ‘Edison’s Printers again Dan?’ asked Chris, barely suppressing a smile. Mark hated him in that arrogant moment.

  ‘Wasn’t it this same story yesterday only it had a different twist?’ continued Chris. ‘Now instead of pretending to rob the place, you actually want to rob it? You idiot. What are you thinking? You know that place has every security gadget known to man. You’ll be prime time on that England’s Stupidest Criminals show. Designing the very security system which catches you in the act.’

  Mark meanwhile had slumped forward in his chair in disbelief allied with concern for his colleague’s clearly shaky mental state.

  Laughing manically, Danny continued: ‘Ha-ha, but that’s the exact reason why, my friends. Because I designed the system, because I know its flaws, and because Mark here has already infiltrated the system once.’