The Magpie Trap: A Novel Read online

  You now see our man from a side-angle. Discern the sinewy musculature of his left-arm as he extends it up towards this new object, stretching his uniform taut. He has his back to the money and the printer now, but never once stops to give them that appreciative ‘second glance’; that rubber-necking, open-mouthed look over the shoulder which it so deserves. For all the world, he is just getting on with his job; he shows admirable self-restraint. If this man really is a security engineer, he has a seen-it-all quality to him which comes from extreme competence in one’s profession, be it as engineer or thief.

  He has, perhaps, a long history of averting his eyes from military tattoos of gold bullion which parade their regimented arrogance in the safety of bank vaults. Maybe he’s adept at adopting the tunnel-vision approach to blocking out the view of the voluptuous painted goddesses in the priceless artworks they contain, whilst he gets on with the real job. Here, he is treating the money as a part of the furniture; standing on it as though that is its primary function. But then, perhaps that is what money is? A way of lifting a person higher, allowing them to attain their goals? This man’s goal is to access the cameras, and the money has facilitated that action.

  But he is not alone in the inner sanctum. For the first time, a second man steps into the picture; a big bear of a man. He is wearing a black hat with a shiny peak and extravagant epaulettes adorn his shoulders. A military man? His protruding paunch, which asks pertinent questions of the strength of his shirt’s material, suggests otherwise. His booming, belly-enhanced, bellicose voice shatters the silence.

  ‘How’s it coming along?’

  Our man’s head flicks round in shock, as though he’d forgotten he wasn’t alone, or maybe as if he’d been caught doing something he shouldn’t.

  Peak-cap continues, tucking his thumbs into the loops of his belt as though he is trying to support their weight somehow: ‘It’s those particular cameras we’ve been having problems with. Got a new boss starting soon; everything’s got to be perfect for his arrival.’

  ‘I’m just performing some routine tests at the moment; cleaning, re-focusing and adjusting the lens, checking the contrast, the brightness,’ says our man.

  ‘The amount you guys charge, and all you’re doing is fiddling with the lens? I could do that myself!’ And then Peak-cap roars with laughter. His belly shakes with mirth, exerting almost unbearable pressure on the buttons on his shirt.

  A flash of anger on the part of our stocky man: ‘There’s a bit more to it than that…’

  ‘Calm down son. I’m only playing with you. You could be fiddling the system for all I know about those things.’

  Stocky shoots Peak-cap a look which says - guilty?

  ‘You’re not still worried about standing on that pile of money are you? I told you, don’t worry about it; we’re always doing it here. Main Monitoring Centre won’t bat an eyelid when they see you on camera. Anyway, it’s only Mauritian rupees the Precisioner’s making - they’re not going to mind the odd muddy footprint on a note are they?’

  Stocky moves one of his steel toe-capped size tens across the crisp new notes, still clearly unsure of his footing.

  ‘Look, I think the problem here is fairly obvious. Somebody has physically altered the angle of the camera.’

  Almost too quickly, Peak-cap shoots back: ‘Must have been knocked by one of the fork-lifts. Still, good job we called you in…’

  The walkie-talkie handset strapped to peak-cap’s belt suddenly fizzes into action. He taps it a couple of times, shakes it…walks out of the picture once more in order to speak; moving to higher ground to get a better reception.

  Stocky plays with the cross around his neck once more, but as soon as Peak-cap moves out of shot, he leaps into action; no trace of the concrete he wallowed through earlier now. He attaches his laptop to the camera once more, and again the picture turns into a snow-storm. After just a moment though, the images return.

  Except the images look familiar, like déjà vu; these are not new, or ‘live’ images. Instead, they describe action which has already taken place; a recording. A loop.

  A peak-capped man is standing, back-arched as though forcing himself to replicate a ‘D’ shape with his belly. His hands are gripping his belt as though grasping to hold on to dear life against this monstrous belly. His mouth is moving though. Then suddenly, his posture collapses as he starts laughing madly. In the background, you can see a stocky, shaven-headed man standing on what looks like a massive pile of paper.

  Static again; and then Stocky appears in front of the camera, live once more. He detaches the cable between the camera and his laptop. He is alone in the room; peak-cap is nowhere to be seen.

  Stocky is so close to the lens that his breath is steaming it up, but even through this fog, it is possible to make out the trails of sweat which are flowing from his forehead. Behind his glasses, there is a steely resolve in his eyes, but also something else… He gives the lens a quick wipe with his sleeve and allows himself a small smile.

  ‘Job done?’

  Peak-cap is back. His voice is gruffer than earlier; he’s maybe had some disappointing news.

  ‘Yes,’ replies Stocky. ‘I’ve done everything I needed to do.’

  He fishes a crumpled job docket from his tool box and indicates that Peak-cap should sign as witness to the fact that a routine maintenance visit has taken place. Without a second’s thought, the big man scrawls his name and hands the paper back to Stocky.

  Stocky signs his own name now; Mark Birch. His is a simple, no-nonsense signature; one which indicates that he hasn’t got time for the elaborate loops and curls of self-promotion.

  Quick-Fix

  The road to the bookies was over-stocked with the kind of billboards that drove Danny Morris into one of his perpetual bouts of sneering. They must have been placed there on purpose in order to persuade the hopeless gambler not to squander their family’s last remaining few quid on a quick flutter.

  Start a Child Trust Fund, blared one such advertisement. By putting away only three pounds a week, you could ensure that your child can have a brighter future.

  The advert showed a sun-streaked university campus. In the foreground, a spiky-haired young girl – probably a lesbian – was throwing her mortar board in the air. In the background, a pathetic mother and father looked on through teary eyes, thanking god that their miserable three quid a week had enabled their daughter to buy her degree.

  Danny walked on. He had a long, measured stride but one which was punctuated, every few paces, by a bizarre little skip. Like a child, he seemed to be trying to avoid cracks in the pavement.

  A second poster; this time Danny couldn’t work out what the advertisers were trying to sell him. This one showed another rosy-cheeked family unit, and this time they were gathered around a computer screen. Two of the children were laughing and pointing at something they’d seen, while the parents looked on, looking pleased as punch that their hapless offspring even had the ability to point and laugh.

  Was the advertisement trying to sell him children? Was it being run by an adoption agency or something? Evidently not, because written underneath the image in much too small font read the caption, ‘The Intertel Shift; Helping your family into the Digital Age.’

  Danny walked on and shook his head, but couldn’t help himself grinning a little. As a security systems salesman, the Intertel Shift was something that he knew all about. The telecoms companies had swamped the media with their PR newspeak about all of the benefits which would be felt from the switch from traditional analogue to digital means of communication. Their loud voices had drowned out the almost silent minority of doubters; those people that believed that the Shift would not be as smooth and hassle-free as had been advertised. But after the Millennium Bug fiasco, nobody wanted to hear about technological disasters waiting to happen, did they? They didn’t want to hear about how the changeover in communication methods for their televisions, computers and phones would also affect the signalling of their burg
lar alarm systems.

  People were much happier in the knowledge that they’d be able to get seven hundred extra television stations on their plasma screens than questioning whether said screen could now be stolen from them without the police or the security company even being alerted. People were much happier that their children could laugh and point and everyone could live happily ever after in a state of blissful ignorance. But then, that was the way that Danny wanted it. The more that the problems with the Intertel Shift got brushed under the carpet, the more his chances of succeeding in his plan increased.

  Plans; Danny didn’t exactly look like a man who made plans and he knew it. He was too fresh-faced and innocent-looking to scheme, wasn’t he? He looked as though he could have been a member of a boyband. Sure he’d be the one that always lurked somewhere in the background and never sang, but those dreamy-types were always the ones that got the most fan-mail, weren’t they?

  He wore his hair slightly slicked-back, like Johnny Depp in Donnie Brasco or more fittingly, given his slightly bigger frame, like Alec Baldwin in his early middle-ages, before he let himself go. Danny looked at least a couple of months away from any such descent. Instead, his appearance was carefully manicured but starting to fray at the edges a little, just as fashion dictated.

  But fashion had very little to do with the bookies that Danny was approaching. It was a place that had completely let itself go and didn’t care who knew it. Like most of the sad row of shops in which it sat, it exuded a kind of hopelessness. Most of the paintwork was starting to peel away and the gutter was still hanging off the wall from a few weeks back when Danny had seen a fellow punter repeatedly head-butt it after a particularly severe loss on the dogs. In the front window display, there were images of footballers from the days before there were even shirt sponsors, rugger-buggers chasing the egg on a pitch which resembled a scene from a war film and two female black athletes from the 1980s, both of whom had abusive graffiti daubed over their faces. A lonely, hand-written sign read: ‘We downt give Credit. So downt even ask. Cash ownly.’

  Sighing, Danny pushed his way through the plastic beading which covered the doorway - it was like the stuff he could remember from his nan’s kitchen back in the day - and into the inner sanctum.

  The smell hit him first and it hit him like a runaway train, just as it always did. It was a heady concoction of stale cigarettes and raw desperation; the scent of men whose lives were no longer governed by things like councils or governments, but rather by the sharp blast of a starter pistol or the shrill rasp of a final whistle. Alcohol was in there too, but Danny didn’t notice that as much; he’d sunk a couple himself before coming down to the shop.

  Despite the constant buzz of noise of the race commentary from the many screens, the bookies seemed shrouded in unhealthy silence. It was a place in which any outward show of emotion – even talking – was frowned upon. Everything was geared toward the main purpose; gambling.

  He’d once seen three student-types come in – probably they were lost on some excursion into the nether regions of Leeds – and try to place a bet on the National. They’d struggled over the whole concept of gambling; having to ask Eileen behind the counter to explain the meaning of the odds at least three times as though they were some ungraspable scientific theory or something. When they’d finally placed their bets – probably a quid each way on the favourite or something equally pointless – they’d sat in the island of plastic seating in the middle of the shop and settled down to watch the race.

  Unfortunately, ‘settling down’ for students generally meant lapsing into their mockney accents and shouting loudly in order to show the locals just how intelligent they were. When one of them had actually won, old Jackie had given the lad a clip round the ear for celebrating, and another for having the gall to have won when Jackie himself had lost big.

  Jackie was in the shop now, staring misty-eyed at the running order for the 3.15. Danny gave him a brief nod of acknowledgement as he walked to the counter. He saw other men that he recognised too; Fish-Eye, Key-Ring and Do-Nowt. He loved the nicknames that these wizened old men went by; how they gave mysterious clues as to the men’s former lives, before they were rotted by the betting. Danny had tried to introduce such nicknames into his own circle of friends, but no matter how hard he tried, none of the others seemed to have got the hang of it yet. People still called Chris Parker by his name rather than Danny’s invented name, ‘Spider.’ Mark Birch was still Mark Birch and not ‘Sparky’; a nickname that Danny was particularly proud of, considering the fact that Mark was both a qualified electrician and security engineer (a ‘sparky’) and the fact that there was a little rhyming slang in there too.

  Adjacent to the counter, Danny reached for one of the ubiquitous stubby blue biros and scrawled a name on a piece of paper. He tucked the biro behind his ear and got into the queue for the counter behind a bearded relic of a man that he thought was called Accy. Quietly, he waited.

  After a while, he removed the biro from behind his ear and placed it in his jacket pocket. He was always forgetting to remove the biros and going home with them still there, advertising where he’d been as blatantly as the bloody billboards on the streets outside tried to sell their wares. And if Cheryl found out that he’d been to the bookies again after everything that had happened, well… Well let’s just say that there’d be no hope of any goddamn teary-eyed scene at a university campus in the future, no matter how many measly three- quid-a-weeks he managed to deposit into a trust fund.

  ‘What you on today, Danny-Boy?’ chirped Eileen when he reached the counter.

  She was a tiny woman with little horn-rimmed spectacles and a pronounced under-bite, but despite her outward appearance, she gave off an air of menace which meant that all of the men knew that she was boss. Perhaps it was the still rough-edged Liverpool accent.

  Danny lowered his head in order to speak through the small holes which had been cut into the thick reinforced glass. ‘Three hundred on Quick Fix in the 3.15 at Exeter,’ he said.

  Eileen raised a questioning eyebrow. Danny pushed a wad of notes onto the tray and gave her a wink.

  ‘You know something we don’t know?’ she asked absently as she thumbed through the notes with a practiced ease. Occasionally she would pause and lick the end of her thumb before resuming the flicking. It reminded Danny of a librarian he’d known at university, only Eileen was far more skilled. Hell, she’d probably leafed through a whole Edison’s Printers-worth of notes in her time.

  ‘Not really,’ he said.

  ‘Aw, come on lad; tell your Auntie Eileen,’ she replied, fixing him with a hard stare.

  In most establishments, letting the bookmaker know that you had some inside information would be tantamount to suicide; they wouldn’t let you put a bet on if they thought you were going to clean them out. But in that particular shop, Danny knew he was on safe ground. Eileen liked a nice side-bet herself if the going was good.

  ‘Just a nod from a trainer I know,’ whispered Danny. It was close to the truth. The tip had come from one of his favoured suppliers, Terry Martell; a man so small that Danny was convinced he was once a jockey before developing CCTV systems in his retirement. Hell, the name Terry Martell sounded like a jockey’s name, didn’t it?

  According to Terry, Quick Fix was absolutely definitely going to win the race. Two of the more heavily-backed runners, horses which had come over from an Irish stable, had been taken ill on the ferry overnight, he said. Quick Fix was a dead cert.

  Danny heard a couple of the men in the queue behind him begin to mutter. Evidently he hadn’t been as quiet as he thought he’d been with Eileen; they’d heard his inside information and were now most likely going to act upon it. In a place like Killingbeck Turf Accountants – and Danny loved the way that they called themselves ‘accountants’ – such things spread like wildfire. As he moved away from the counter, he heard the man next in line stick fifty notes on Quick Fix too.

  By the time of the race, a late run of
bets had driven down the odds on Quick Fix to tens. Danny had fourteens though, so didn’t really care. He stood at the back of the shop and leaned against one of the plastic chairs, watching the clock and trying not to start to worry about the amount of money the rest of the room had staked on a horse he knew virtually nothing about.

  Unusually, Jackie came to join him and even made the effort to offer him a cigarette; a Dorchester and Grey, one of those lamp-post cigarettes which are only smoked by people above the retirement age. Perhaps they thought that one, extra-long ciggie would last them all the way until they finally popped their ill-fitting clogs.

  Danny accepted gratefully.

  ‘Not got any on me; trying to give up, cocker’ he said, easily slipping into the kind of language that the residents of the bookies used. In fact, Danny discovered that more and more, he was starting to talk like that in real life. He’d once done it as a joke, but now it was becoming his language too. He was always calling people ‘cocker’ or ‘squire’ or ‘chief’ these days.

  ‘You should give up giving up,’ said Jackie sagely, as though imparting the wisdom of the ages. His arm creaked as he reached over to light Danny’s cigarette for him. Jackie had clearly given up giving up about fifty years ago, judging by the mottled yellow stains on his teeth, lips and fingers. When he spoke the top set of his false teeth nearly slipped out of his mouth.

  Danny sucked in the acrid smoke and immediately felt more relaxed. When Quick Fix stormed home, he’d be a hero in the bookies. It would be a taster of the success that would come when his plan started to pay-off. Life was good and going to get better, and if he helped pathetic no-marks like Jackie and Eileen to have a better week along the way; well that would be all the better, wouldn’t it?

  Suddenly, Eileen turned the commentary up.

  And welcome to sunny Exeter for the 3.15 flat-race. Conditions look good to firm and we have a strong turn-out for this, the biggest race of the meet. On your screens now, you should be seeing the majestic figure of the favourite, Do the Right Thing, the horse from the same Irish stable as…