The best way to avoid things being tough is for you to keep secret the thing you wish to achieve. You need the advantage of surprise.
Arrogant adversaries are good adversaries to have. As good to have as the advantage of surprise.
Prouse was an arrogant man. We knew that. It was his Achilles heel. We knew that. We saw it the last time. The time he thought we wouldn’t win, because we couldn’t win. The time he thought he couldn’t lose. Thought he couldn’t lose, and then lost.
He was an arrogant man. That was good to know. Knowing he was an arrogant man gave us heart.
In literature, solipsistic, arrogant and evil men never triumph, not in the end, but that’s ‘literary fiction’, not the real, cold, uncaring and vicious world I suspect we live in, however much we wish we didn’t.
Could we take him down again? We thought we could. We didn’t know how we could. I knew we could. I hoped we would. I just didn’t know how. I didn’t know what damage we might take in bringing him down.
We had the time and all the resolve, money and access to expertise we needed. The luck was not ours to know. For luck, as everybody knows, is a fickle, serendipitous and unpredictable thing. Luck would be as much on our side as on his. Luck could be an unreliable friend, an unexpected enemy, a sudden and cherished sweetheart. Which would she be for us?
Luck is a woman. We all know that. She can be sweet. She can be sour. We wanted her sweet. How do you sweeten Lady Luck? I didn’t know. The others thought they might.
Access to expertise? We had that. Iain had that. We had it in spades. It was our long suit.
We met at the Office.
People visited us. They intrigued me. They were people I never saw before. People I never knew existed. People with skills I never knew existed. Where did Iain find these people? How did Iain find these people? But this was what his world was made of. For every security there’s insecurity. For every safety there’s danger. For every policeman, a thief. The hunter and the hunted. The Aegis guard, the A. J. Raffles. The world of Munroe & Sons.
Munroe & Sons were our policemen, they filled the Office with thieves.
These people could do things. Things I thought couldn’t be. Things with electrons you couldn’t feel. Things with light you couldn’t see. Things with sound you couldn’t hear. These people could turn things off, then turn things on, from anywhere they liked. These people could bypass things, and cancel things, anything they wanted to, any time they wanted to, from anywhere they liked. These people understood things. Understood how things worked. How to stop things working, then make things work again.
These people could look at things. See things behind brick walls. People who could see other people as they moved around behind brick walls. People who could hear people moving around behind brick walls. And hear them from a mile away. It was new to me. It was clever.
I began to understand how these clever people might help. How these clever people, with all of the clever things they could do, might help us get the things we wanted. So that after we got the things we wanted, we could swap them for the people we wanted. All three of the people we wanted. My understanding of that got bigger. That was a good thing.
To protect things, from people who wanted them not to be protected, you had to know what the people, who wanted things not to be protected, did to unprotect them. What they did, why they did them, and how they did them. Munroe & Sons were good at protecting things, and that was because they knew about the people who wanted to unprotect things, and about the things they did, and about why they did them, and about how they did them. I read Sun Tzu as a boy. I knew my enemy. Munroe & Sons knew theirs too.
Munroe & Sons were going to use their enemies to defeat my enemy. It was all good.
Twenty
It wasn’t very nice where we were, but there were some good things. We had chocolate and that was good. Mummy didn’t like us to eat too much chocolate, but the lady in the white suit said it didn’t matter anymore what Mummy thought. That made us sad, because it sounded as though what Mummy thought wasn’t going to be important anymore. We both knew that, what Mummy thought we should do, was because she thought it was the best thing for us to do. So when the lady in the white suit gave us chocolate, we only tried to eat as much as Mummy would have given us to eat, but, sometimes, we ate a bit more than that. Sometimes, that made us sad. Sometimes, that made us cry, because, from the way the lady in the white suit said things, Mummy didn’t care about us anymore, but we knew she did and we decided not to believe any of the things the lady in the white suit told us. We knew Mummy would always love us and care about us, and we knew Daddy would too, even though we hadn’t seen him for such a long time. We knew Daddy was the best and strongest man in the whole wide world and whatever it was that had happened to make Mummy so sad, and Daddy not see us anymore, were all the things he was going to sort out. We knew Daddy would sort it all out. We cried sometimes, when we thought he mightn’t.
Sometimes, when we talked about Mummy and Daddy and Mummy Brosie, we were sad, and when we were sad, we cried. Catherine cried more than me. That’s because I’m older and more grown up. They said I was twenty minutes older than Catherine and that doesn’t seem a lot, but when you are younger it seems like more. When Catherine was twenty minutes old I was twice as old as her. Now it’s less than twice, but I’m still older. I have to look after Catherine sometimes, when she’s sad, and when she cries.
Just before Mummy got out of the car and we drove away with the lady in the white suit, Mummy told me to look after Catherine and she told Catherine to look after me too, but I’m older so I don’t need so much looking after. Not so much. Sometimes I feel like I need a lot of looking after, Catherine does too. Sometimes I wish we had Mummy and Daddy and Mummy Brosie looking after us again. Sometimes when I’m in bed at night, and I know Catherine is asleep, I cry about how much I want them to be looking after us again. I wish things could all go back to being the way they were when we were all happy and the dogs were happy too.
I wish I could play with Henry and Maggie again. I liked living where they lived. I sometimes wonder if they miss us too. I think they would. I know they were always excited to see us when we were away for the afternoon. I don’t know how long we’ve been away now. It seems like such a long time. Sometimes it seems like forever. I want to go home so much and I know Catherine does too. I want to go home with Mummy and Daddy and Mummy Brosie and I want to see my dogs.
I like chocolate, but not as much as I used to. Catherine feels the same. She told me.
Twenty-One
There’s lots of stuff under London’s streets. Not many people know that. That’s a good thing. Some things are good not to know. And if they are known, not thought about.
Eight million people in London. A thousand tons of crap every day. It has to go somewhere. That’s not a problem, not now. There are pumps, pipes and sewage farms. In the nineteenth century there weren’t. It was a problem. There were more people in the City then. It all went into the Thames. That wasn’t good. It was more ‘not good’ when it didn’t rain. When the Thames ran low.
‘Cometh the hour, cometh the man.’ The man was Joseph Bazalgette. Twelve hundred miles of sewers. London smelt better. No one died of cholera. It was all good.
A Bazalgette tunnel ran under Eaton Square. It was seven feet wide. It wasn’t used for years.
I learned about ‘jamming’. Not Memphis blues jamming. The other sort. I learned what things you could jam, and how you could jam them. It was clever.
I learned things about seeing and hearing. I learned about things you could see in funny ways and about things you could hear in funny ways. They were clever things.
I met men I knew, men from Beaconsfield, Castiglione del Lago, the Siena and home. I met men from the time we visited Mr Beale. Men I trusted. Men I was happy to have on my side. On my side, by my side, whatever.
I met
other men too. Men I didn’t know. Men I’d never met before. Men who belonged in the dark.
So, it was going to happen. It was going to happen soon. These were not men who stood idle. These were not men to let anything grow under their feet. They were men made for doing things, for planning things, for doing the things they planned. There was the strength of the ‘forwards’, the finesse of the ‘backs’.
There would be men moving below the ground, men moving on the ground and men moving above the ground. There would be men looking from far away, men looking with light eyes couldn’t see, men listening, with sounds ears couldn’t hear. It was clever. And then it went wrong.
Well, it didn’t go wrong. It just didn’t go. It didn’t go, because there was no point in it going. Not here anyway. Not in England, not in London, not in Belgravia and not in Eaton Square.
Suddenly they left. All of them left. Prouse and everyone left, left London, left England. Armoured trucks arrived, stretch limos arrived, cargo planes arrived. So, London was no more. No more to this story. Not until the end of the whole story.
Did they know about the men moving below the ground, on the ground and above the ground? Did they know about the men seeing and hearing things that couldn’t be seen or heard? I thought they must.
Coincidences happen sometimes. We all know that. We all have stories about that. Was this coincidence? Was this kismet, happenstance, fortuity, a chance event? Or was it none of those? Was it a move to unsettle us? Was it a move to unbalance us? Was it a withdrawal to safer ground?
It had to be one of those. We didn’t know which one. We suspected it was ‘all of the above’. I knew Prouse better that the rest of them. I had no experience in the world of these men. But I did know Prouse. I knew he knew some of what we were doing. He wouldn’t know all of it. But I knew he would know some of it. Knowing some of what we were doing, was why he did what he did.
Then he made his mistake.
Twenty-Two
Munroe & Sons didn’t know anything more than anybody else. Not at the start of things. But they knew how to find out the things they didn’t know. They knew how to find out those things, in ways the rest of us didn’t know how to find out things. So, by the end of things, they knew everything. That’s why they were who they were, I suppose. That’s why Father employed them, I suppose. That’s why I did too, for sure.
I wanted Mr Munroe to protect me. Like my father should have protected me. Like my father never protected me. Father hated me. The same way Prouse hated me. The same way I hated them back. So, Mr Munroe protected me. That was good. But now he was dead. That wasn’t good.
My father hated me. All my life he hated me. Right from the start he hated me. Right to the end he still hated me. He never stopped hating me. He hated me because I was better at everything than his beloved Bob. He hated me because he knew Mother loved me more than she ever loved him.
Then Mother killed him, killed them, and killed herself to do it.
Father’s will made Prouse my guardian. It gave him control over me. Over the things that would, one day, be mine. It was Father’s final act of spite. His final spite from the grave. Prouse hated me too. Father knew Prouse hated me too. That’s why Prouse was made my guardian.
So, Mr Munroe protected me from Prouse. Prouse was the ‘father’ whose body Father frequented. It wasn’t a great time for me.
I hated my father. I loved the man who should have been my father. I loved the man I thought of as my father. The father I hated was dead. Now the ‘father’ I loved was dead. The only one still living was Prouse.
So, Munroe & Sons could find out things. Things other people couldn’t. That was a good thing for me. They found out about planes, cargo and non-.They found out about planes, private and non-.
They found out from whence they came. They found to where they went. They found out what they took. They found out who they took. They found out where they were to take the ‘whats’ and the ‘whos’.
They were taking them back to Darwin.
We knew he wouldn’t go without them. They were what gave him his power over Annie, his power over me. We knew he would pick them up, from wherever it was they were hidden. For that, they would come out of hiding. They would have to. We knew that.
So, they came out of hiding. That was how we found them. We had luck to help us find them. Luck happens when the work is done. We did the work. The luck happened.
We knew they would come to his plane. But then we thought again. Then we knew they wouldn’t. We knew the plane would go to them. It was the sensible thing to do.
Prouse kept his plane in the City. We thought we might follow him. Then we decided to do something else, something smarter.
So, the pilot logged his flight-plan. Logged it as late as he could. We read his flight-plan. Read it as soon as we could. Would that be soon enough? He logged it to Somerton Field. That was clever. Somerton is on the Isle of Wight. That’s why it was clever. Somerton Field is near Landguard Field. That was clever too. They could use either of those. They thought that was clever too. ‘We’ thought Landguard more likely. I don’t know why, we just did.
So the girls were on the Isle of Wight. How clever.
Planes are faster than helicopters, mostly. Jet planes are faster than helicopters, always. But jet planes don’t always beat helicopters to where they are going. I learned that. It depends on where they start from.
Munroe & Sons knew that. They knew, when the time came, time would be short. They knew, when the time came, time mustn’t be wasted. So, there were helicopters, a lot of helicopters. There were a lot of men to fill a lot of helicopters. They were in places I never heard of. Places where algorithms said they should be. I didn’t understand algorithms. No algorithm put a helicopter on the Isle of Wight. That’s the trouble with algorithms.
The algorithms didn’t put a helicopter on the Isle of Wight. But they did put one at Southampton. That’s how we got there first. We got to Landguard first. We bet on Landguard. We were right.
So the car arrived. The car with the girls arrived. Then the helicopter arrived. The helicopter with hardened men arrived. Then the plane arrived. Then the helicopter departed. The helicopter with the girls and hardened men departed. Then the plane departed. The plane without the girls departed. Then the car departed. The car without the girls departed. It was all good
So, we had the girls, I had the girls. It was what I wanted, all of what I wanted. All of what I wanted? Of course not. Was there something else I wanted? Yes, of course there was. But was the something else I wanted, still the same thing as the thing I used to have? And if it wasn’t the same thing as the thing I used to have, would I want it now? I thought perhaps it wasn’t, so, I thought perhaps I wouldn’t. I wasn’t sure.
Life can be a repetitious thing. A lot of it can. Perhaps I could learn from repetitious things. But life isn’t always a repetitious thing.
It wasn’t a repetitious thing, not what was happening to me now. So, I was slow to learn the things I should have learned. I knew I wanted the thing I had before. It was the thing I dreamed of having. Having back. But that would have to wait.
We were kidnappers. I was a kidnapper. I kidnapped my own daughters from their mother. From their mother and from Prouse. The man who was their ‘father’. But not their real father. Not really.
So, what to do now?
I cried when they were born. I cried again now. I didn’t usually cry. I did then. More than when they were born. When they were born, they were people I didn’t know. Now they were people I did know. I cried and they cried too. They cried and laughed. I did too. It was a happy time. Absolutely happy. Almost absolutely happy. They missed their mother. I did too.
So, what to do now? They were my daughters, but they weren’t, not really. Not in the way the law would see it. They were his, in the way the law would see it. I could go to jail for the way the law would
see it. So, what to do now?
What to do now was to smuggle them away. Smuggle them away and not get caught. So, how to do that?
To do that, we did a lot of things. We called for the Siena. We borrowed an island. The things we did after that would land me in jail. But only if I got caught.
There was nothing on the news. In or on any of the news. I thought there might be. Then I knew why. Then I knew there wouldn’t be. He didn’t want it in or on the news. He didn’t want people to know. Not to know what happened. That’s why it wasn’t in or on the news. He didn’t want people to know we won. That’s why it wasn’t in or on the news. He didn’t want people to know he lost. That’s why it wasn’t in or on the news.
This wouldn’t be the end of it. I knew that. I knew we weren’t winners, not real winners, not yet. Perhaps we would be winners in the end. There were a lot of things to happen before the winner was declared. I didn’t know what all of them were. Neither did Prouse.
I knew what some of the things would be. Prouse did too. I knew he did. He knew I did.
So the Siena came. We went on board. Stores for the trip came on board. The girls were in a crate marked ‘Fragile – This End Up.’ They were frightened when they climbed in the crate. They were brave and kept quiet. They knew they must. Annabelle wet herself. She said she didn’t mean to. She said it was because she was scared. Catherine said she was scared too. We were all scared too.
The skipper knew who should be on board. The first mate too. The skipper knew who shouldn’t be on board. The first mate too. We knew them from Antigua. They knew what they were part of. They knew what would happen if things went wrong. I liked the skipper. He saw the law in a Douglas Bader sort of way.
A Judgement on a Life Page 18
