The Dance of the Pheasodile

by Tim Roux

  “No,” I replied steadily. “No to all of those accusations.”

  “You’re not quite right in the head, that’s your problem, Harry,” Fran spat dismissively at me. “I suppose you don’t know who this is either, now, do you?”

  I examined the raving beauty. “Actually, I haven’t a clue.”

  Miss Divinity hissed almost like a cat.

  “Debbie, Harry. This is Debbie. Remember?”

  Debbie Harry – that name rang a bell somewhere.

  Fran turned to Debbie. “Ever since he went to see that hypnotist, he’s turned soft. He’s hopeless, even more hopeless than usual.”

  Debbie shot me a judgment of unappealable contempt. Then she opened her mouth to ooze out pure nectar in sound, if not in content. “Well, Harry, if you have forgotten me, I have certainly not forgotten you, not as long as I live.”

  Now what had I done, I asked myself, although my intuition was hinting at the answer. Had it been harassment, assault or rape? Some residual devil in my mind hoped that it had been rape.

  “After we broke up,” she continued, “I certainly intended to try to forget all about you, but it never crossed my mind that you would actually succeed in erasing me from your memory, especially after I took that steam iron to you.”

  My eyes involuntarily slipped to my wrist where I had noticed a burn mark.

  “So you haven’t forgotten,” she added, “nor, I hope that I found you in naked conversation with my best friend Fran here.”

  “Naked?” enquired Tommy.

  “Sorry, Tommy,” Debbie apologised. “We shouldn’t be discussing this in front of you, especially after the shock you have just had, poor thing.”

  “It was nothing. I have forgotten all about it.”

  Debbie raised her ravishing eyes slowly and sumptuously to the ceiling, where they fixed on a grease spot. “Not you too, Tommy. What a family. Must be going.”

  Debbie kissed Fran on the cheek alongside a “See you soon,” then bent right down to hug and kiss Tommy at his own level. Needless to say, I didn’t merit a backward glance, not even a spiteful drop dead one.

  When she had left, Fran fussed over Tommy and ignored me too.

  When we went up to bed that night, she turned to me and suggested curtly that I sleep with Kathy again, and that we both pack our bags and leave in the morning.

  * * *

  Kathy went to lodge with Fingers Murphy and Mike the Hammer graciously invited me to put up with him.

  Tommy was touchingly distraught and wouldn’t let go of me until Fran grabbed him, pushed me out of the door and declared to Tommy “You are very much better off without him, believe me.”

  This new arrangement served to speed up the planning process considerably. Mike bought a van that had been used by a nationwide electrical goods company, and had it restored to its former glory. We progressively ironed out the creases and then the wrinkles in our plan by applying the adversarial principle. Mike attacked the plan from as many angles as he could think of. We built it back up again. Then it was my turn. After two days, and several heavy drinking sessions, we reckoned we were ready to present it to Kathy.

  “What you got boys?”

  “Now you are asking,” Mike joked.

  “You couldn’t afford me.”

  “You have got to be bloody kidding,” Mike retorted. “I’m the one who actually pays you, remember?”

  “So you do. Okay, I can give you a quickie if you like, while Harry makes the coffee.”

  “Good old ‘arry,” Mike declared, adjusting himself and slapping me across the back at the same time. We’ll be back before you ‘ave time to add the milk and sugars.”

  For some reason Mike considered this to be a proud boast. For some other reason, he was nearly right. He couldn’t even have removed his clothes.

  “Okay,” Kathy said. “Tell me about it.”

  “We are going to Dewsbury,” Mike started.

  “Why Dewsbury?” Kathy asked.

  “Because their League team get on my tits, smug bastards.”

  “Is that a reason?” Kathy challenged him in wonderment.

  “Dunno, but it’s my reason,” Mike asserted.

  “Then what?”

  “We are looking for a kid out on ‘is own somewhere around ten, twelve years old.”

  “Why?”

  “Easy to grab and not strong enough to put up much resistance. Old enough for ‘is mum and dad not to panic if ‘e goes missing for a few hours, to give us time to get away.”

  “What sort of kid?”

  “Doesn’t matter. Any kid we can drive off with. Of course, if ‘e ‘appens to ‘ave folks who love bawling their eyes out in front of TV cameras, so much the better.”

  “Then what?”

  “We drug ‘im – that’s your first task, Kathy, to get some drugs that will keep ‘im occupied and silent for a few hours ….”

  “I’ll ask my friend ……”

  “And then we drive him to Pocklington.”

  “Why Pocklington?”

  “It’s a little known fact that Planty’s aunt ‘ad an ‘ouse there. She died last year, and left it to Planty who uses it as his country retreat, but not too often. Everyone thereabouts knows it is ‘is, and keeps well clear. If they see anything suspicious, they’ll keep their traps shut until after ‘e gets arrested, then they’ll sing like nightingales, ‘elping us to stitch ‘im up good and proper.”

  “What happens if he suddenly turns up there?”

  “We scarper and tip the police off. ‘e then gets caught red-‘anded.”

  “So you are going to keep the boy there for a week?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How do you stop him escaping?”

  “We tie ‘im up and gag ‘im, unless you think that drugs would do the trick better.”

  “And then?”

  “And then you tell Fingers. It’s a bleeding miracle that you have shacked up with ‘im.”

  Kathy scowled. “Why Fingers?”

  “’cos Fingers tells Planty everything. Always ‘as.”

  “So Planty goes to check things out at his house in Pocklington and you tip off the police.”

  “Nah, better than that. While ‘e is going to Pocklington, we transfer the boy to Planty’s place in Bransholme. Then, when Planty returns to Bransholme, we phone the coppers, and ‘e’s caught four-square.”

  “How are you going to ensure that you get the boy into Planty’s house without any of his gang noticing?”

  “Yeah, that is the trickiest bit, but we ‘ave a way, and a week to practise it.”

  “What is that?”

  Mike tapped his nose exaggeratedly, not to mention irritatingly and condescendingly. “That, my girl, is for us to know and you to guess, but you don’t tell a word of this to Fingers until we give you the word, otherwise we’ll all be found strapped by our bollocks swinging from a lamp post.”

  “Speak for yourself, Mike.”

  Mike squinted. “I’m sure that they will find somewhere suitable to stick an ‘ook in you, Kathy. They’re not short of imagination when it comes to that sort of thing.”

  “They’re going to do that to us anyway once Planty has been nicked and they work out what has happened.”

  “That’s your brother’s job, isn’t it, ‘arry? ‘arry has to persuade Mr. Plod that if the whole gang isn’t picked up, there’ll be reprisals. That will at least give us a few days to get out of ‘ere. We can do the rest from anywhere.”

  “Won’t it be a bit obvious when you start kidnapping people and the Inbies are behind bars already?”

  “That’s the beauty of ‘arry’s plan, isn’t it? We don’t touch nobody after that. We just threaten to kidnap their children and demand our twenty grand to leave them alone. No bugger’s going to sing to the coppers, so no bugger will know it’s ‘appening, and we can run the operation from anywhere. Neat eh?”

  Mike leant forward at Kathy. “If anybody finds out about this, we’ll know who
squealed, and that will be very bad news for you, I promise you. Right, ‘arry?”

  “Right,” I said.

  “I’m not bloody telling anybody,” Kathy spluttered indignantly.

  “Then everything will go to plan, won’t it?” Mike replied. “’ang on a mo.” He got up and disappeared upstairs for five minutes while we heard furniture being noisily shifted around. When he retuned he handed fifty pounds to Kathy. “There you are. That’s to prove that I’m as good as my word. Now off you trot back to Fingers, and be very, very nice to ‘im. ‘e mustn’t suspect a thing.”

  “I don’t believe you two.”

  “We’re your passport out of ‘ere, girl. That’s all you ‘ave to believe. That ‘n’ that your brother ‘ere loves you, don’t you, ‘arry.”

  I nodded.

  “Thanks,” Kathy retorted, “but if it all the same to you, I’ll settle for the passport.”

  “And don’t go talking in your sleep.”

  “Don’t worry yourself, Mike. There is only one person I have actually slept with, and he is on your side.”

  * * *

  Chapter 11

  You must be asking yourself why I was doing this, I of all people, who love children and hate to see them hurt. If anyone were ever to kidnap Ella or Mark, or even Tommy, I would throw everything up and I would kill them, I am convinced I would. I know that it is easy to say, but I am sure that that is what I would do. I would say “Okay, you have returned them to me without visible injury (if they had achieved even that), but you have destroyed their lives. They will never recover from what you did to them. They will be terrorised by your memory all of their lives. They will never forget that there was a moment when they were snatched from the midst of an ordinary life, tortured and abused. They were drugged, they were blindfolded, they were separated from us their parents, they didn’t know what in hell was going to happen to them. They were lonely, they were cowering, they were hopeless. A carousel of fears churned around their minds. They were uncomfortable, trussed into the same position for hours on end. They were cold. They were lonely. They couldn’t breathe through the gag. They feared the physical pain you might inflict. You say that you looked after them well, that not a hair of their body was harmed, that they had enough to eat, that you even gave them treats. I say that you are an unspeakable monster who deserves not only to die, but to be tortured in exactly the same way as you tortured them, before you die. And I would kill you, I swear. I would torture you, and I would execute you, for devastating my son’s or my daughter’s life.

  Yet I am that monster. I chose to inflict exactly this suffering on an unsuspecting innocent boy for no better reason than that I had a plan, and that he was in the wrong place at the right time for us.

  How do I explain this?

  I can’t, however hard I have tried, although I have some partial hypotheses. One is that the original Harry was still there lurking inside his body, alongside me but invisible to me, hidden by my presence, so that the physical Harry now combined my intelligence and self-confidence with his mean, vicious ways. It was he whose anger and whose venom was coaxing me on to achieve whatever we were capable of together, to give ourselves the good life that the world had heretofore (Chrissie’s word) deprived us of.

  That is a cowardly explanation, although quite possibly true. After all, if I, Keith, was still in Keith’s body alongside my family in Wokingham, and also partly in Harry’s body up in Hull, where was Harry? Either he had taken over somebody else as part of an infernal chain reaction, or at least part of him was cohabiting within my space, or his space rather. I was a cuckoo in the nest where the original resident was still trapped, squashed beneath me.

  I have another, more ‘normal’, explanation. I had extreme anger of my own. My parents had died before and during my birth. I had been brought up in this hell-hole of a residential care system, prostituted off to foster families, rejected and returned wounded to the asylum. I had teamed up with Chrissie, and we had resolved to beat the world together. She was snatched from me and prostituted in her turn. She was rejected, and restored to me. Together we worked flat out to elevate our lives, leaning on each other continuously, sighing with relief as we felt the doors of our prison giving way. We made it. Chrissie became a lawyer, I became an architect. We pulled off miracles through our relentless determination and our almost superhuman persistence. We created our family, our fabulous children, Ella and Mark. We designed and realised an environment in which we were all safe, and loved, and deprived of nothing except time. We had defied the world and triumphed.

  And then the world defied us, flouted our courage, proved that it could destroy us at whim. It ambushed me in a moment of weakness, and it cast me down to where I should have been, living the dysfunctional life of a brutalised petty crook in some godforsaken northern city. We had shown hubris, and hubris must be punished. Each to his allotted station, and he who tries to escape that station will be returned to it, broken and humiliated.

  Well, I was not going to accept this bitter fate. I was going to hit back, and drag Fran and Kathy and Tommy out of the mire with me (and maybe Mike too), and be restored to my own cherished family. The world was not going to win. And I was willing to play it very dirty in order to escape back into the light. I was going to give it whatever it took to succeed. This was me against everything that was bad and cruel and evil in the world, and sometimes I would have no choice but to turn its own weapons against it.

  I realise that this is warped thinking, but it is an approximate reflection of what was going through my mind at the time.

  So what about betraying Chrissie, by sleeping with Fran and then betraying Fran by sleeping with Kathy? How did that work? I cannot say. My only comment is that they were there, they were willing, the flesh is weak, and I wasn’t using my own body for any of it. That was Harry’s doing. I didn’t do anything that he hadn’t done before. He had even got Kathy pregnant at some point in the past, for Christ’s sake. I was enmeshed in Harry’s tangled relationships, and I wasn’t clever enough, or motivated enough to extricate myself. One day I would escape back to my own body, that of Keith McGuire, and Harry could dig himself out of his own hole.

  * * *

  Mike, Kathy and I were patrolling Dewsbury in our Ford Transit looking for a boy to remove cleanly and surgically from his environment.

  We had to be careful not to drive the same road more than twice, or we would look suspicious and attract attention. Equally, we could not stop for long, for the same reason. Kathy had the needle ready to administer a cocktail of knockout drugs. Mike had diabolically come up with the idea of stacking some computer games in the back of the van which we might use as bait. They weren’t real. They were empty cases with photocopied labels, but the idea was that Mike and I would talk about them loudly as our target approached us.

  For Mike and me, we were in the marines, the SAS, the SBS. We were the physically audacious brainy buggers these guys were looking for. It was a one-off, do-or-die mission, deniable, resulting in either ignominy or glory, prison or steady income. Once we had put the fear of God up the prosperous parents of West Yorkshire, all we had to do was to issue some choreographed threats and send in Kathy’s clapped out friend (maybe in more than one sense), Kenny Bender, to deal them the drugs, which they would pass onto us as protection money, and which we would pass back to Kenny at a £7,500 discount on £20,000. We were shooting for £5,000. Kenny countered with £10,000. We said “50%, no way!”, so £7,500 it was, all negotiations being handled with seasoned proficiency by Kathy.

  So, there was only one moment of supreme danger, one step in the plan that had to be executed faultlessly – this one. We had to pick up a boy and get him some 60 miles away before anyone noticed, and without a single clue or witness as to how he had disappeared. One mistake and we would potentially be buggered forever as any subsequent attempt would be cursed by someone’s recollection of the two men, the girl and the van who had attempted a failed snatch in Dewsbury on this d
ay.

  We thought we had him in Howard Street. He was a nice looking boy (we preferred not to court trouble) and he appeared to be walking slowly and reluctantly home at around 5:30. We didn’t know who he was, or where he lived, but his attitude was right, and he was alone with nobody else immediately in sight. We passed him and pulled into the curb. Mike opened the back of the van and we started to discuss the knock-off computer games we would be offering to the neighbourhood at knock-down prices. The boy even slowed down his already meandering pace to listen to us. He was interested. He was approaching. We were pretending not to have noticed him. I moved around Mike so that if the boy joined us he would be cornered between Mike, me and the door which was opened against the pavement. He was right next to us. All I had to do was to pick him up and toss him into the van where Kathy would instantly administer the befuddling party chemicals. I shifted my position, tensed my muscles and …..

  “Hey, Roger. What’s going on there?”

  A mate had spotted him from across the street.

  “Knock-off games,” Roger shouted back.

  “Oh yeah? What have they got?”

  “Dunno yet.”

  “Let’s have a look.”

  Mike smiled at Roger. “Maybe you could ‘elp us,” he suggested. “We need to offload some of this stock, but we know bugger all about it personally. We just bought it from a mate. Would you be interested in flogging them for us?”

  “What is there?” Roger asked while his mate crowded in next to us too.

  “Burnout Dominator,” Roger read out.

  “That’s okay,” commented his friend. “That would sell.”

  “Heavenly Sword.”

  “Don’t rate it.”

  “Burnout Paradise.”

  “Yeah, I like that one.”

  “Tomb Raider Anniversary.”

  “Crap.”

  “Grand Theft Auto City.”

  “Have you got IV? That would sell a bomb.”

  “It’s coming shortly.”

  “How much are you offering them for mate?”