For Richer, For Poorer

by Kerry Wilkinson

  He smiled. ‘Aah, chapter seventeen. One of my favourites.’

  Jessica hadn’t read a word of it.

  ‘Why did you do that?’

  Froggatt took another small sip of the tea, making a loud slurping noise. ‘I’ve seen the stories in the news these past few days about someone doing the same in Manchester. Very interesting.’

  ‘What’s interesting?’

  ‘I’d love to know what their motivation is.’

  ‘If we catch whoever it is, I’ll see if I can stick in a prison visit for you.’

  Slurrrrrrrrrrrrrrp and a thin smile.

  ‘Do you know the truth about Robin Hood?’

  ‘Is there one?’

  He nodded, grinning. ‘A very perceptive question – he was known as Robin of Loxley, of course. Loxley is a place near Sheffield, then there are all sorts of references to a “Robin” being in Yorkshire, not Nottingham. There are rhymes, poems, stories, all dating back to that period – but the truth is, no one can say for absolute certain whether he actually existed. There was most likely someone named Robin, perhaps many people. He might have even been a thief – but none of that means that the Robin Hood as people think of him is real. All of the stuff about King Richard is a twentieth-century invention.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  Slurrrrrrrrrrrrrrp.

  ‘Sometimes the myth is enough. If television programmes and movies keep telling you over and over that Robin Hood robbed from the rich and gave to the poor then suddenly he’s a hero in everyone’s mind.’

  ‘Is that what you were trying to be?’

  Slurrrrrrrrrrrrrrp.

  He shook his head. ‘You’ve missed my point. It’s not about being a hero; it’s about looking like one.’

  Jessica had a drink of her own tea, wondering if Archie had got the point quicker than she had. She hoped not.

  ‘Look at it this way,’ Froggatt continued. ‘We got away with a quarter of a million in cash. We gave away a tenth of that and everyone thought we were the good guys. What do you think we were doing with the rest of it?’ Suddenly Jessica got it – so did Froggatt, seeing in her eyes that the penny had dropped. He grinned widely and she could see how conniving he was. ‘Exactly. I was trying to buy something from a garage and only had fifty-pound notes on me. The attendant asked where it came from. I gave him a nod and a wink and that was it – he assumed I’d been one of the lucky few who’d been given money on the street. It was a badge of honour. He was turning it over in his hands.’

  ‘How did you get caught?’

  Froggatt’s face fell slightly. ‘That’s the problem with working with amateurs. I knew what I was doing and everything was going well, then one of the others got caught drink-driving. The police had no idea who he was or what he’d done but he had a bag of notes in the back and couldn’t think of a cover story quickly enough. If he’d had any sense, he would’ve said that someone in a mask had given the money to him in a pub. There’s always one, eh?’

  He shrugged at Jessica but she could hardly disagree – the truth was most of their cases were solved by someone being careless.

  Froggatt didn’t have a lot else to say and with Archie fidgeting endlessly, there wasn’t much of a reason to stay. After finishing their tea, they made their way back to the train station, with Archie thankfully quiet. Considering how anti-London he’d been not long before, he seemed particularly taken by the small Euston Tap pub just outside the station. Aside from a row of barrels and taps behind the barman and a list of ales and prices written on a blackboard, there wasn’t much to the place but it was still marvellously unique, though she doubted Archie would admit as much.

  He ordered something cloudy for the pair of them and then spent five minutes whinging about ‘London prices’ as Jessica ummed and ahhed in the right places, thinking things through.

  ‘. . . imagine if you were down here for a day out? Three hundred nicker on the train, then eight quid a pint – what’s the world come to? I mean—’

  Jessica cut across him. ‘Stop moaning for a moment. Froggatt had a good point about the money but it’s not quite the same with our case, is it? Our guys stole a lot less cash and they’ve given plenty of it away, so it still comes down to the jewellery. He’s right about the smoke and mirrors. Look at all the journalists outside the station yesterday: they weren’t talking about the jewellery, they were asking about the cash – and that’s only a small proportion of what’s been taken.’

  Archie seemed slightly taken aback at being cut off mid-flow. ‘I thought you said the robbers weren’t very clever?’

  ‘I don’t know – maybe they are. We’ve still not got a clue who they are, so they’re smarter than me. Do me a favour and call the station, will you? I can’t bring myself to go through Pat.’

  Archie held up his phone. ‘No battery.’

  ‘Sod it, I’ll call Iz instead. She always knows what’s going on.’

  Jessica pressed Izzy’s name and waited for the reply.

  ‘How’s London?’ Izzy asked by means of a hello.

  ‘Archie hates it. I think he might start a second civil war if we stay down here past tonight. What’s going on up there?’

  ‘Didn’t anyone call you?’

  ‘Should they have?’

  ‘We got Pavel’s criminal record through from Serbia.’

  Jessica could tell from Izzy’s tone that this wasn’t a straightforward revelation. ‘What’s in it?’

  ‘Are you sitting down?’

  ‘No, Archie wanted to stand. I think he thinks it makes him look harder.’ She glanced across at him, smiling. ‘It certainly doesn’t make him look taller.’

  ‘Right – well, back in Serbia, Pavel did three years for breaking into houses as part of a gang. There were five of them; all wearing black, one of them with a gun. They tied the owners up, took everything valuable and made a break for it.’ Jessica started to reply but Izzy cut her off: ‘There’s one other thing – it’s what they were known for. They hardly ever got away with cash: it was mainly jewellery.’

  19

  Jessica sat in the Euston Station Burger King staring at the departures board, determined not to order anything unhealthy. Across the table, Archie munched his way through a Whopper, talking with his mouth full. ‘It’s bloody London, that’s what it is. The trains are running late, the food tastes shite—’

  ‘Is that why you’ve eaten two burgers?’

  ‘I’ve been Hank Marvin all day – a man’s got to eat.’

  ‘You’ve been what?’

  ‘Hank Marvin – starving. Haven’t you picked any of this up living in Manchester?’

  ‘No, I have this strange habit of using the actual words. Anyway – tell me what you think about Pavel.’

  Mayonnaise was stuck to Archie’s bottom lip and a soggy flap of lettuce dropped to the floor. ‘I told you before. The victims pretty much all agree that our guy with the gun is a northerner but it could be Pavel’s plan and he’s one of the ones under the balaclavas. It would explain why none of them speak – the minute they open their mouths and that accent comes out, the householders would know it was someone foreign.’

  ‘But he was a big guy – he towered over me and he had hair coming out of everywhere. Wouldn’t one of the people robbed have mentioned that one of the people who broke in was a giant?’

  Archie screwed three fries into his mouth. ‘How long did you see him for?’

  ‘A few seconds.’

  ‘Perhaps he just seemed bigger because, well, you’re not.’

  ‘You’re one to talk.’

  ‘Aye, well, good things come in small packages.’

  ‘Pavel’s height is listed in his file, so it’s not just me.’

  Archie nodded and took a slurp of his drink. Jessica wondered if everyone was this annoying when they were eating fast food. ‘I don’t know – if he wasn’t the one robbing those houses then it’s quite a coincidence that it’s on his record. People react in funny ways when
they’ve got a gun stuffed in their face. Who knows if their memories are reliable?’

  It was a reasonable point but Jessica didn’t believe any of the victims would forget the huge bloke she’d seen – unless Archie was right about that too and he’d seemed more intimidating to her than he actually was.

  On her phone, Jessica re-read the email Izzy had sent. The Serbian authorities had never tracked down what had happened to the items Pavel and his gang had stolen, nor recovered the money. He’d been sentenced to fifteen years in prison for the robberies, which were far more violent than the ones in the UK. After a little over three years, he’d had the conviction overturned for a reason that hadn’t been detailed. The next thing anyone knew, he was in a British court for driving without a licence.

  No one seemed to know how he’d got into the country, let alone how he’d managed to hang around without being deported – but therein lay the unique relationship between the police, the border authorities and the government. The border agency didn’t want to admit they’d somehow let him in; the police wouldn’t say they’d arrested him and taken him to court, where he’d been allowed to walk away again; while the government didn’t want to know about any mistakes that could linked to the phrase ‘funding cuts’. No one said a word to anyone else unless it somehow found its way into the media – and then all the talking was done through press officers with pithy soundbites and clever language to deflect the blame onto anyone who wasn’t in their particular department. Jessica had seen it play out far too many times before to bother worrying about whose fault it was that Pavel was now apparently on the streets of Manchester. Regardless of whose responsibility it was, he was their problem now.

  Archie continued to eat as Jessica read the email with Pavel’s details another time. On the table next to them, a man was having an irate mobile phone conversation, apparently oblivious he was in a public place. ‘. . . you tell him I’ll fly to Paris and do it myself then . . . What? I couldn’t give a flying, er, hyena . . . if he’s just got in from Melbourne . . . That’s a complete load of bollocks. I told him not to make that payment . . . Geoff, Geoff, Geoff – will you listen to me, Geoff? All I’m saying is that I own forty-nine per cent of this company and . . . Geoff?’

  Jessica rolled her eyes at Archie, who mouthed the words: ‘London type’.

  She peered up at the long row of orange and red on the departures board. Delayed, cancelled, cancelled, delayed, delayed . . . How hard was it to run a train on time? She didn’t bother to mention it because she’d only get Archie’s three hundred quid rant again – although those ostriches seemed like an even better idea now.

  Archie continued eating and talking, mainly listing the ways Manchester was better than London. Jessica made a few vague half-hearted noises that sounded like they might be in agreement.

  ‘The air’s cleaner up there, innit?’ (No.)

  ‘Manchester’s got this feel to it; a sort of buzz.’ (No it hasn’t.)

  ‘It’s all about the characters. What’s a city without people? No one wants to say hello to you down here.’ (Or up there.)

  ‘Look at all the coffee shops – it’s mocha-this and cappa-that. Round my way, you can still go into the local caff and ask for a white coffee and get one out of a polystyrene cup. That’s what Britain was built on; none of this airy-fairy nonsense.’ (There’s plenty of that in Manchester too.)

  ‘Where can I go and get black pudding in a barm around here? It’s like another world.’ (That did sound good right about now.)

  ‘What’s with the accents? Every other person’s a bloody Aussie down here.’ (He did have a point about that.)

  ‘. . . And why’s it all so expensive? If I was going to spend half-a-mil on a house, I’d want a mansion with a hot tub – not some poky shoebox.’ (He also had a point there.)

  ‘. . . Then you have all the football lot mouthing off. I mean, I hate the dippers but at least they’ve won a few European Cups—’

  ‘Arch.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Give it a rest. If you really want to go through all of this, put it in an email and send it to me. I promise I’ll print it out, give it the briefest of glances, and then throw it in the bin.’

  ‘All right. I was just saying . . .’ He paused, eating his final chip. ‘So what’s going on with you?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  He shrugged. ‘We’ve got two hours to kill and nothing to do – and that’s before we get on the train. If you don’t want to hear me talking then we’ve got to do something. My phone’s out of battery and there’s sod all to do around here.’

  Jessica realised the biggest reason she was confused was that in all the time she’d been going out drinking with him, she couldn’t ever remember him asking about her life.

  ‘Do you really want to know?’ she asked.

  ‘Aye, why not?’

  ‘All right, well, I have two teenage girls living in my house at the moment and—’

  Archie’s mouth flopped open. ‘Two?’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake . . .’

  He closed it again, suppressing a smirk. ‘Sorry, go on.’

  ‘You do realise that there’s nothing at all sexual about three women living in a house together. One of them is seventeen and I’m looking after her; the other’s nineteen and she’s staying over temporarily because we’re using her flat to stake out Ana’s in case Pavel comes around.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  His lop-sided grin was so ridiculous that Jessica couldn’t stop herself from giggling too.

  And she continued laughing.

  When Archie wasn’t blathering about why Manchester was the greatest city in the world, he was quite fun to hang around with. He told her stories about the estate he grew up on, including the man who had a pet donkey and the woman who he insisted kept a partially deflated football as a hybrid pet/surrogate child. It turned out that his father had been what some would call ‘a character’ but which others would refer to as ‘a criminal’. It seemed that a lot of delivery drivers had ‘accidents’ close to the Davey residence and that their evenings were punctuated by various locals popping around to see if there were any knock-off electrical items going spare.

  As they finally took their seats on the train, Archie delivered the punchline: ‘I spent years thinking things really were falling off the back of lorries.’

  ‘Give over.’

  ‘No, seriously. It’s all anyone would ever say around my house. I’d come downstairs in the morning and there’d be a dozen video players. I’d ask where they’d come from and my dad or my brother would go, “They fell off the back of a lorry”. I’d be at school with my mates going on about how careless drivers were round our estate. We’d sit on the edge of the main road watching the vans going past in case anything fell off.’

  ‘Are you having me on?’

  ‘Seriously! I really wanted a Scalextric and we’d wait on this low wall when the Woolworths and Argos vans zoomed past. I figured they were the most likely to have something fall off.’

  ‘How old were you when the penny dropped?’

  ‘Thirteen? Fourteen?’

  ‘How stupid were you?’

  Archie’s shoulders twitched. ‘All right – I was only a kid. If your mum and dad told you something every day, you’d go around believing it, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Sorry . . .’

  ‘Nah, you’re probably right. I must’ve been a right thicko. One time we had five tellies in our living room and my dad said they’d come off a lorry. I was asking how they’d fallen off without smashing and he said they fell into a bush.’

  Jessica laughed, just as the woman with the refreshments trolley came past, asking if they wanted anything. Considering the length of the day she’d had, plus the fact Manchester was another two and a half hours away, Jessica only had one thing on her mind: ‘I’ll have two mini-bottles of your rosé and one of white.’

  The woman was wearing a smart dark blue suit. She pulled out a drawer, pee
red inside and shook her head. ‘Sorry, because everything was running late, we didn’t have time to do a full restock.’

  ‘What do you have?’

  ‘Water.’

  Jessica had already taken her purse out but held it in mid-air. ‘Water?’

  ‘Still or sparkling.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  Jessica said she didn’t want anything and began sulking in the corner between her seat and the window.

  Archie bought a bottle of water, suppressing a grin. ‘I’ve got booze in if you want.’

  ‘Yeah but you live out in Stretford and I’ve heard that’s a right dump.’ Jessica couldn’t keep a straight face, bursting into laughter before Archie could be offended. ‘What have you got in?’

  ‘Bit of this, bit of that.’

  ‘Fall off the back of a lorry into a bush, did it?’

  This time it was Archie’s turn to laugh.

  Before Jessica knew what was going on, the evening had flown by and their train had arrived at Piccadilly Station. Jessica was walking out of the front doors with Archie as he smelled the air extravagantly, waving his arms around. In the dim street lights, he didn’t look anywhere near the five foot eight he claimed.

  ‘See, I told you – the air’s cleaner up here.’

  ‘It tastes just the same.’

  ‘Sod off, does it.’

  Ahead of them was a lone black cab on the taxi rank, the driver leaning back in his seat reading the Daily Mail. Archie motioned towards it: ‘I’ll wait for the next one if you’re going home.’

  ‘Have you seen what he’s reading? He’ll probably murder me and dump me in a ditch somewhere.’

  ‘Well, I can’t come back to yours – you said I was banned because there are teenagers there.’

  ‘You’ve definitely got booze in?’

  ‘Duty paid, VAT paid, not off the back of a lorry. All kosher.’

  ‘Fine, let’s go back to yours then.’

  Jessica yawned her way through the journey around the deserted streets of Manchester. The nights were beginning to get warmer as winter finally gave up its grip on the city but she was still shivering on the back seat. Their train should have got in hours ago and by now she would usually be in bed, or under a blanket with Bex, watching rubbish television. She sent the girl a message to say she was running late and then told Archie to stop fussing when he offered her his coat.