The Magpie Trap: A Novel Read online

  Then the view of the extravagantly mustachioed man wrapped like a mummy in sheets which were almost as white as his face began to blur even more: it was as if he was watching through a goldfish bowl. Ripples of liquid swept across the view: Mark unconsciously reached across to adjust the settings of the monitor, before suddenly realising that it was not the monitor which was affected; it was his own eyes, which were swimming with tears.

  A hand reached over him and passed him a tissue. It was one of the doctors. The doctor adopted a hushed tone, ‘I’m so sorry, Mr. Birch, it seems like your father has passed.’

  ‘I’m sorry, what?’ Mark was caught unawares.

  ‘I’m afraid your father passed away about five minutes ago. Your mother is saying a prayer for him. She didn’t want you to see him like that and asked whether you could be put in here while she said goodbye.’

  ‘What… he’s in a coma? Unconscious - what?’

  ‘Mr. Birch, there’s no other way of saying this: your father is dead. I’m sorry.’

  Mark’s whole being slumped forward. The bones in his face crumpled into one soggy mess, and his stomach gave way: he cracked his head on the desk as he slipped into a dead faint in front of the monitors.

  The Lair

  To Danny’s barely-awake, embittered mind, the EyeSpy Security office that Saturday morning resembled a lair inside which predatory, malevolent creatures scuttled, their vampire teeth ready to puncture the neck of the unsuspecting victim. Danny had slept in the car, just around the corner from the office, and his negative outlook was shaped by an uncomfortable night. It had been a choice borne of necessity and must; he had lost his house keys and Cheryl was at her sister’s and therefore hadn’t been there to let him in. He nursed a scalding coffee from a nearby all-night café, and steeled himself just to get through the inevitable bollocking that would soon come to pass.

  Not that he was worried. No, Danny saw his job as a permanent contingency plan; plan B if you will. It was in contingency for his not achieving all of those dreams that he had, and which he did nothing about. His plan A’s were pipe-dreams like being a writer or an actor, and yet his only attempts to get anywhere near such professions was spending a lot of time in pubs and betting shops listening to the hushed conversations there. Perhaps Danny was taking part in a prolonged Method Acting study for his one true acting role: that of a tired and washed-up drunk.

  As morning crept in, the denizens of the shadowy world of EyeSpy Security came home to roost; the unnatural-sounding bleeps of locking cars in the car park heralding their arrival at their place of work. Unbelievable, he thought, most of his colleagues were going into work on a Saturday! Did they not have lives?

  There was some muted conversation, but in general an eerie silence cloaked the car park. There were four of them: sharply suited, slickly oiled hair, small steely eyes. They come with warnings of imminent disaster, of impending crises, of unavoidable lootings. They are the security salesmen.

  The salesmen were well versed in playing upon the unconscious fears of their potential prey, hinting at the stench of a heist around every corner and veiled threats of abject poverty if security measures are not taken out.

  Those warped, grim-reaper sales techniques meant that the sales team never stayed together for a sustained time; they worked at the company fleetingly and were well rewarded for every drop of blood they commissioned from their quarry. It took a special type of character to be able to set aside misgivings about such work; Danny was not one of them. Danny had always tried to blunt the sharp-edged moral questions which nagged at him by drinking, by putting it down to ‘just having to pay the bills’, but as he sat in the morning half-light, frustration dripped off him like a tap which would not turn off.

  Acid rain-clouds of irritation spread out from Danny’s furrowed brow as he sat moulded into his beaded car seat cover. Indignant beads of sweat trickled in cantankerous rivulets to form an angry confluence on his reddened cheeks.

  This cannot go on; there is more to life than this. We have to do the heist on Edison’s Printers. We have to.

  Danny had met this particular revelation before; on an hourly basis during the uncomfortable night. It was driving him round the bend. And not just round the bend but round and round in an endless centrifugal tailspin of suppressed rage from which he seemed to be unable to free himself. And yet, he sat in his car, preparing to go into work to face his boss’s rage.

  It was only the sight of the showy teutonic engineering of his boss Martin Thomas’s car cruising into the EyeSpy car park which shakes Danny from his inertia; nobody was allowed to arrive at the office after Martin Thomas. And especially not on a day like this; even if it was a Saturday.

  His heart still beating fast from his impromptu run to the office, Danny slipped behind his workstation as inconspicuously as possible, not trading even the most cursory glance with any of his fellow employees who were probably questioning why he was even there at all on this most unlikely day of the week. Or maybe they already knew. Surely they already knew; news of his walkout at the meeting would have spread like wildfire around a place like EyeSpy. Perhaps that was the reason why all of the rest of the sales team were in. Perhaps they wanted to see his final fall from grace.

  Danny powered up his laptop and proceeded to tap on the keys as though deep in the midst of an important document, pausing only to pick up the telephone handset and tuck it between his shoulder and tilted head. In spite of the whooping sounds which began to emanate from the dead line, Danny persevered with it; looking for the entire world as though he was busy working, and had been for the past hour…

  Danny could finally bear it no longer and he replaced the handset with a sigh and raised his head. Immediately he realised that Martin Thomas has not been fooled by his pathetic show. Martin lurked, glaring through his open blinds at Danny, daring him to meet his gaze. Danny looked back at his computer screen, and was greeted by the deceptively cheery ping of the received email message which promptly popped up in the corner.

  The message was only three words long, but it chilled Danny to the heart: ‘My Office Now’ it read, and the sender was one M.H Thomas.

  Danny looked back up from the screen and saw Martin Thomas leaning against the frame of his office door, the traces of a menacing grin appearing in the corners of his mouth, the whiskers of his beard all a-quiver.

  ‘What part of now do you not understand, Morris?’ Thomas bellowed across the room. ‘Get in here, you work-shy get.’

  Suddenly, Danny was aware that all eyes were on him as he undertook the walk of shame across the office floor towards the torture chamber: Thomas’s office. He heard the excited buzz of conversation of his colleagues as the anticipation of his being thrown to the lions grew.

  Martin Thomas liked to luxuriate in the spacious surroundings of his own office; to bask in the glory of the fact that he no longer had to be the one knocking on the doors like his sales team. Much of the space in his office, however, was taken up by a felled-tree of a desk, which was populated sparingly by a telephone, laptop and a commemorative golf trophy. These were the only tools he needed in order to undertake his work. The focus of the office was the huge window which comprised the entire west-facing wall and which looked out onto the sales floor. Closing the door behind him, Danny slunk towards the small chair and was dwarfed by the desk in front of him: he felt like a naughty schoolchild in his headmaster’s office; exactly the effect that Thomas was looking for.

  ‘So, Morris, what happened yesterday?’

  Danny thought on his feet. ‘An urgent call from another customer; Edison’s.’

  ‘Okaaaaaaayyy,’ droned Fartin. ‘And this call was so urgent that you upped and left an important meeting without even a word to them about where you were going and why you were going. Without even coming up here and asking me whether you could go. Without even asking whether any of the rest of the members of your team could help.’

  ‘I’m fully aware that I handled things badly, Martin,�
� Danny began, already sweating profusely: Thomas liked to keep the heating on, in order to either sweat sales out of potential customers, or make life unbearable for his employees. ‘But you can rest assured that it will never happen again. It was an emergency. I panicked a little.’

  Cocksure Thomas slouched nonchalantly forward, his arrogant beer gut protruding almost aggressively over his desk. He had the self-assured, almost violent attitude and appearance of a male sea lion, king of his pack. Danny, cowering across the desk, was still readying himself for the verbal battery all those who enter this office traditionally faced, and knew which buttons to press in order to waylay the man.

  ‘Tell me more about this emergency,’ he said, disbelief written all over his face.

  ‘Well, there should be a lot of extra work coming our way out of it,’ said Danny, hoping to replace the flashes of anger in Thomas’s eyes with pound signs.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘If I work hard enough at it, yes; it’s like you said, it’s all about keeping throwing your ball up towards that basketball hoop. The more I throw, the more points I’ll get.’

  Suddenly looking directly at Danny, Thomas almost shouted, ‘Yes, I did make that analogy, didn’t I? I rather like it, actually. Hmmm, basketball.’

  ‘I do try to listen to your advice, boss,’ said Danny, increasing the pitch of his whining ingratiation about twenty-fold.

  Martin Thomas looked perplexed. ‘Don’t give me that stuff and nonsense. You’ve always been a lucky boy, Danny. And you’ve always simply chanced your way to making lucky sales. Yes, that’s you; lucky. Lucky Danny.’

  ‘I don’t know what I can say to that. I don’t think I’m particularly lucky. I work hard, that’s the reason I make sales. I make sure that I do the proper research and know what buttons to press; it’s just this time we need to go back and press those buttons some more…’

  Danny was incredulous. There was simply no way of predicting his boss’s behaviour.

  ‘You know, Danny-boy, sales is like a game of tennis. You have to know how to keep the ball in motion, to get it over into their court. Sales is a game and it’s just about whether they sell you the ace, or you sell them the ace. They want to sell you the fact that they don’t want to buy. You want to sell them the product… you want to tie them up in knots until they lob up an easy ball which you then smash down into their court. They can’t respond to that Danny. You’ve won then.’

  To Danny, Martin Thomas cut a faintly ridiculous figure by using a sporting analogy. The big guy looked as though he had never run in his life. Even now, wearing his ‘Saturday casuals’ he looked as though he would look out of place anywhere near any kind of field of human endeavour save perhaps crown green bowls. Looking at him more closely, Danny realised why the man was behaving so strangely. It was a Saturday morning after all; the man was most likely still drunk from the night before. Danny felt renewed confidence flowing through his veins.

  ‘Martin, I will make this big deal that we need. I’m going to pull a big one off, the likes of which the company has never seen before…’

  Thomas interrupted: ‘I admire your confidence: I always have, but you seem all over the place at the moment.’

  Struggling to heave his great bulk from behind the desk, he waddled to the office door, and stared through it to check whether any of the rest of the sales team were listening. As he panted his way back to his seat, he began to speak, this time in a more conspiratorial tone. ‘Danny, the main reason I wanted to speak to you this morning is your current psychological state. Is there something wrong at home again? You walk out on presentations and roll in late to your disciplinary looking as though you slept in the car. Danny, you need to tell me…’

  Danny blanched: had he been seen?

  ‘Look Martin, my sales figures are still above target. I’m seeing lots of new customers; I don’t see what you’re driving at?’

  ‘I couldn’t care less about your personal life, but when it starts to affect work, it becomes my business. I know you think that you’re better than this place, but why don’t you look at it from my point of view; I can’t be seen to be advocating you getting away with everything that you do. Salesmen are ten-a-penny, and most of them do not turn up to work looking like you do this morning, and yesterday come to think of it. I saw you screech into the car park yesterday morning. Making a show of yourself; I won’t stand for it. I can’t have you coming into the office, meeting customers looking as though you’ve been dragged through a hedge backwards. I’m going to have to give you a written warning.’

  Ah, there’s the rub, thought Danny. He knew that Martin Thomas loved to think of himself as some kind of great motivational speaker: a latter-day Bill Shankly, and after all, Danny was inspired by this motivational speech. But Danny wasn’t inspired to go out and make the sales which would secure his company’s future; he was inspired to commit the crime which would ensure that they would never be taken seriously within the security industry again.

  Almost allowing himself a laugh, Danny tried some Method Acting: grovelling straight out of the handbook. ‘I can assure you that it will never happen again boss. I will pull myself out of this rut.’

  Danny decided to risk his next play as well: ‘I’ve got some ideas: I think I can get some more work out of Edison’s Printers. Do you still have the site layout drawings in the safe from the last time we tendered for work there?’

  Acquiring the drawings would allow them to plan the heist in greater detail: it would be a major coup for his bid to be the leader of the trio; the main man.

  ‘Yes Danny, I should think that we do. I’ll get Paula to dig them out for you on Monday.’

  ‘Thank you sir,’ said Danny, almost bowing. ‘And I’m very sorry for stopping you from having your usual game of golf this morning.’

  Thomas looked at him for a moment as though weighing up whether his employee was being serious or not. Then he said: ‘To be honest, I thought those brewery men were complete idiots. After I heard Paula’s version of events, I almost felt like you’d done the right thing by exposing them for the charlatans they are. They’re just big bullies; suit or no suit.’

  Danny smiled. Paula had come through for him; she’d probably made up some awful story about the men just to save his bacon.

  ‘Just get me that big sale you keep promising, Danny. I’ve protected you as long as I can. Just make us all remember what we saw in you in the first place; that spark.’

  The Funeral

  Mark dashed a handful of freezing cold water over his face and stared into the mirror as it dripped down his neck and soaked into his restrictively tight shirt collar. He saw himself through new eyes; eyes which had been opened to the pain and death of the world. He saw a facsimile version of his father staring back at him. There was the same look of discomfort at being confined to a suit and black tie; there was the same rapidly developing paunch, identikit straggly, lank dark hair and that blank, slightly cross–eyed gape.

  St. Andrew’s Church toilets smelled heavily of disinfectant; it was well-known that tramps often crept in there to sleep, knowing full-well that the vicar would not throw them out. Graffiti lined the walls, and most of the toilet doors had their locks smashed off them.

  Mark once again dashed the ice-water over his face, trying to shock himself out of that sick feeling which had lurked in his stomach ever since his father had died. With a quick look at his watch, he realised that time was running out, and he tried to dry his face under the hand-dryer. Unfortunately, the air stream was so weak that he gave up, and simply wiped his face on his jacket sleeve. He pulled the dog-eared slip of paper from his pocket and took a final look before leaving the toilets; his speech. Mark had never spoken in public before, and now his nerves were almost as great as his grief. At least his nerves were keeping him going, though.

  Mark walked past the blur of slightly-known faces of distant relatives, neighbours, and old work-mates of his father outside the church, simply nodding at them to ackn
owledge their attendance. It was a good turn-out; his father had been well-liked, he noted. He didn’t stop to speak to any of them, however; his anger was still too raw.

  He was angry that his mother had not allowed him to say goodbye, he was angry that he had not been in Newcastle to care for his father, he was angry that EyeSpy Security had telephoned him to remind him of the rules with regard to Compassionate Leave. ‘Three days’ they had told him was the allocated amount of time for the death of a parent or child. It was the ultimate on a sliding scale, which allowed two days for the death of an aunt, and one day for the death of a dog. Who had come up with this classification system of grief for the death of a loved one? Who had worked out that within three days, an employee should be able to get over the death of a parent? And what about the death of a child? Mark could not imagine the rage he would feel if his suffering was weighed up and the fruit of his loins equated to three days of work’s precious time: to include the funeral, of course.

  Mark wanted to say goodbye to his father at the funeral, since he wasn’t allowed to at the hospital. His mother had been confined to bed since the death, and therefore, it was easy for him to pencil himself into the running order of the service. His goodbye also resonated through the fine workmanship which had gone into the coffin; it flowed through all of the phone calls in which Mark had to break the news to disbelieving relatives, and it echoed through the vast chamber of St. Andrew’s Church. This current of anguished farewell all stemmed from the bubbling source, which was his aching heart.

  Mark had cried when he had written his little speech. He knew that his mother would have preferred him to read a passage from the Bible, but there were things that had to be said. As he walked up the aisle towards the lectern, his hands and teeth were clenched to stop him from crying again.

  At the pulpit, Mark took a moment to compose himself; looking out to the sea of faces which were looking at him mournfully. He did not look at one face, however. His mother was bent double, her sobbing a permanent backdrop to the entire service. Closing his eyes, Mark began, carefully: