The Dance of the Pheasodile

by Tim Roux

  “A fiver,” replied Mike.

  “And how much do we make out of it?” asked the friend.

  “Whatever you can score over the fiver.”

  “What’s their condition?”

  Roger moved to open the Grand Theft Auto cover. Mike moved it away from him. “’oly shit,” he exclaimed with genuine panic in his voice. “Coppers!”

  I was impressed by his acting skills until I realised that two uniformed police were indeed approaching us.

  “Thanks, guys,” said Mike. “Thanks for the advice. Being seeing you,” then, in a whisper, “walk away slowly and casually.”

  Fortunately, they did exactly as Mike asked and we had time to slam the doors shut, climb into the van and drive off as the coppers watched us go.

  “’oly shit,” Mike spluttered again. “That was a close one.”

  We got some way down the Bradford Road before we stopped and consulted with Kathy. We decided that we would try again the next day, in Leeds this time, then we returned to Hull conducting our individual post-mortems.

  * * *

  Actually, there was another hole in our plan. After we had kidnapped the boy, after there had been a gratifyingly intense onslaught of media frenzy, after the boy had been returned by the police to his distraught parents, after old Planty and his gang had been arrested and vilified, in short when the moneyed gentry of the West Riding had reached the peak of their sensitivity to the threat of their children disappearing without trace, how exactly did we threaten them, practically, I mean?

  We would pick up the phone. Then what would we do? What would we say? Would we rather contact them first by post, perhaps jazzed up with the classic cut-out letters, some of them becoming detached from the page, making the deciphering of the threat that much more stressful.

  Obviously, we needed to approach people who had access to £20,000 who could be made to fear for their children’s lives. How would we know whether they had children or not and what those children were called? How would we learn an intimate detail about the child sufficient to suggest we were lurking close enough by to do them some real damage, and that we weren’t just a bunch of hoaxers from Nigeria firing out random communications?

  We could start drawing names out of the phone book, with some geographic targeting. "Hello, Mrs. Brown,” we would say. “Do you have children?"

  "Why are you asking?" she would reply.

  “We are the Britman Heinz insurance company and we have very special policies to benefit children currently aged between eight and sixteen. What they save now will be a nest egg that will allow them in the future to invest in their dreams, for instance to provide the capital to start up a business.” Make it hard. Dreams alone sound a bit dreamy. Which middle class parents invest in dreams? Investing in a good solid career or business idea, that sounds more worthy of consideration.

  If they hesitate, we will know that they do indeed have children in the target zone.

  “I will talk to my husband and see what his reaction is.”

  “What do you think his reaction might be?”

  “He would want to meet you first.”

  We don’t want to show our faces. “Could I ask some profiling questions, to make sure that we are not wasting either your or our time? How many children do you have?”

  “Two.”

  “Are they boys or girls?”

  “One of each.”

  “Lucky you. How old are they?”

  “Samantha is twelve and Jason is nine.”

  Perfect! “I suppose that it is too early for them to have any career ambitions yet.”

  “Well, yes, although Samantha thinks she wants to become a glamour model, and Jason is planning to be anyone with a laser sword.”

  “That’s wonderful. They sound like fabulous children.”

  “They are.”

  “In that case, I will call you in a couple of days to ask if your husband is agreeable to an appointment. Thank you so much for your time.”

  “Can we phone you?”

  “Yes, that would be most helpful although, if we don’t hear from you, we will call you in a couple of days anyway, if that is okay with you.” I would give her a false number.

  Or …..

  "Hello, Mrs. Brown, it is the school here."

  "What school?"

  Click.

  Or ….

  "Hello, Mrs. Brown, it is the school here?"

  "Oh hello. Nice to hear from you,” said in a voice seeping at the edges with anxiety. “There isn't a problem with little Johnny is there?"

  “Well, you know what boys are like. They do get themselves into scrapes.”

  “I’ll be there at St. John’s straightaway, or is he in hospital?”

  “No, he is in bed, resting up, at the school. I think it would be best if you dropped by. What time should we expect you?”

  “It will take about an hour and a half.”

  “Good, we will expect you then.”

  We would have to be prepared to go into more medical detail, but with the last conversation we would know that little Johnny was a border at a school called St. John’s some 90 minutes away from home. That would certainly be enough information to enable us to rock their foundations. The image I had was of well-to-do burghers and their wives, perched up trees, with their pockets full of cash. Our job was to march up to the trees, bold as brass, and give them such a shaking that all their money fell out of their pockets and fluttered to the ground where we would collect it as easily as sweeping up autumn leaves.

  We would have to work on our accents if we used the school sting, though. Nobody would believe that respectable schools employ administrators with Hull accents.

  So that was one possible angle, to simply phone up and find out what information we could suck out of them through a process of inspired improvisation and, if we managed to get enough, we were up for the jackpot. It would beat hanging around half-empty pubs cloaked in hoods, chatting up the locals in the hope of bumping into a lonely chatterbox who happened to know all about the private lives of the nobs in the area. That was far too risky, would take far too long, and prove far too boring.

  The ideal would be to get hold of a school's central mailing list, the sort of thing some schools distribute to parents to facilitate social networking among the parents and the children, as Ella and Mark's school did, in fact. Come to think of it now, it was an incredibly irresponsible thing to do. It put the whole school at risk of abduction or blackmail. The thought had never occurred to me before, or to Chrissie. I needed to tip them off immediately. They would probably laugh at me and accuse me of letting my fears run away with me.

  You must have had the experience of having what seems to you to be a brilliant idea, before challenging yourself with the quibble that if it is such a good idea, why has nobody else thought of it? That happens to me often. Then the follow-up question is: is it because anyone with any intelligence has already spotted the fatal flaw, or is it that I have had the wit and insight to spot an opportunity overlooked by millions? Why hadn't there been a steady stream of twisted ne'erdo-wells contacting Chrissie and me to demand payoffs to have Ella and Mark protected round the clock?

  It was a question I couldn't ask now, but it reminded me of the Woody Allen dictum that 80% of success is about actually turning up. Contrary to everything you hear and read, crime is extremely rare outside run down housing estates and grimy city centres. Out in the wealthy suburbs, finding a burglar climbing through your window is so remarkably rare that you would immediately phone up all of your friends who would reply "Thank God that has never happened to me. You must have been terrified!", or "I was burgled fifteen years ago, I know what it's like. Poor you!"

  Mike, Kathy and I were operating in a virtually green field site. If we got it right, we could generate some serious shock value with very little effort. Watching your back all the time is not only scary, it is exhausting. Exhaustion catalyses the fear. Watching your children's back is worse because you a
re necessarily separated from them most of the time. Bystanders may be apathetic about the fates of strangers, but they are paranoid about what might happen to their own children. They have invested so much of their love into these younger selves, and then they are gone forever. It would not matter how much they had invested, how careful they had been, what precautions they had taken, everything would suddenly be different.

  That is the point on which we would keep them spinning, the realisation that the most reliable solution was to pay a fraction of the value of their house to keep their children safe. It was only a question of our being convincingly menacing in our attitude and our preparation. I was not sure of all the detailed steps yet, but I was positive we would get there without getting ourselves caught. Ours would be an invisible, sneaky, perturbing crime.

  * * *

  So next day it was Leeds - same procedure, no rush.

  We hit Alwoodley at a quarter to five in the evening when any twelve year old boy out on the street would probably not be expected back home for a while.

  Driving down the main Harrogate Road, we saw a gawky-looking kid kick a can with some aggression. He was too obviously angry to fit naturally into our target profile, but somehow he felt right.

  While there were several people in sight, preoccupied with their own thoughts, there were only two within striking distance, and they had just passed him walking in the opposite direction, a middle-aged scrawny dishevelled man stepping out wirily at an even pace, and an old woman who was stumping along talking to herself. Mike and I peeled out of the van and took up precise positions next to the stock of computer games. The boy noticed us and pulled a world-weary face.

  "What have you got there?"

  "Games," I replied.

  "Oh, another lot," he responded. "Knocked off, I suppose."

  Mike and I did our best to look uneasy.

  "Or is it just rubbish pretending to be knocked off?"

  We ignored him. That would goad him.

  "I could call the cops," he threatened us.

  We laughed in a cock-sure way. "It wouldn't do you much good, Sonny," I said.

  "So you are cops, are you?"

  We turned our backs on him as if to continue a private conversation.

  He came across to the van. "What is going on?"

  Mike squatted down and pointed into the back of the van, beyond Kathy. "Do you see that thing there?" he confided.

  "No."

  "That thing there that is gleaming?"

  "No-oo."

  The boy leant into the van trying to identify what Mike was pointing at.

  "It is flashing faintly, very faintly," Mike added. He was so convincing that he even had me looking for it.

  The boy searched Mike's face perplexedly. "What is it?"

  "It's a special camera," explained Mike, "that records people buying what they think are stolen goods. Then we've got them cold. You can't even make it out when you are looking straight at it, it's that good."

  "Oh, so that's how you do it," the boy commented, a skewed grin crossing his face.

  “We ‘ave to ‘ave evidence,” Mike commented.

  “Isn’t that entrapment?” the boy challenged us.

  “Are you studying law?”

  The boy looked pleased. “No.”

  “So ‘ow do you know about entrapment?” Mike pressed him.

  “I just know stuff.”

  “Good on you,” said Mike. “You should be one of us. You could be a copper too one day.”

  “You’re joking,” replied the boy. “Who wants to be a copper?”

  Mike stared at him.

  “Sorry,” recanted the boy immediately. “No offence meant.”

  Mike leant towards him confidentially. “’ere are some lads coming down the road,” he said, pointing towards two youths who were about three hundred yards away. “Do you want to see ‘ow it is done?”

  “Sure,” the boy replied.

  “’op in, then,” Mike encouraged him, “right next to Sergeant Wilson ‘ere, and try to make yourself invisible.”

  The boy climbed in.

  “’ang on a mo,” Mike continued, “there’s a right lively bunch over there. Brian, get the van into position, will you. I’ll get in ‘ere. We don’t want two people up front in the cab, it might tip ‘em off.”

  Mike joined the boy and Kathy in the back of the van, and I slammed the door. I then walked calmly around to the driver’s seat and drove off. I heard a quick clunk in the back as if something had been kicked or banged, but that was it. I headed at a leisurely speed for York, and then took the A1079 Beverley road for Pocklington.

  * * *

  We were there by a quarter to six, and backed into Planty’s aunt’s driveway, which made sense as it was situated on a blind spot in the road. As we had already checked out, the van could be pulled right up alongside a side door which Mike opened up for us. We had already picked the lock when we had reccied the place two days earlier. By opening up the back door of the van so that the door opened to touch the wall, nobody at all could have seen us dragging the boy inside. We hauled him into the dining room and I took a good look at him.

  I eyeballed Mike.

  “’e’ll do,” Mike said. “’e’s taken well to the drugs.”

  “He’s out like a light,” Kathy commented admiringly.

  “Can we get him upstairs?”

  “Yeah, let’s give it a go,” said Mike, “then I’ll be off. We don’t want anyone to notice the van ‘ere.”

  Even twelve year old boys require a fair amount of tugging and manhandling to get them up narrow stairs, especially as dead weights, and we must have given him a few bruises along the way.

  “Wait a minute,” said Kathy. “I thought we wanted him somewhere where there would be a quick getaway. We would be trapped up here.”

  So we dragged him back downstairs again to the dining room, adding a few more injuries.

  “I’ll fetch a mattress,” Mike offered. After a couple of trips he had a sheet, a duvet and two pillows too. “Luxury,” he observed. “’e’ll be living like a king.”

  “Like The King, more like,” Kathy added.

  “What king is that then?”

  “The King. Elvis.”

  “I didn’t know you were an Elvis fan, Sergeant Wilson. You look far too young for that.”

  “The King never dies, Bob,” Kathy replied.

  “Well let’s ‘ope to God ‘e doesn’t,” Mike retorted.

  “He won’t. He’s just in for a few days of gentle R&R.”

  “Is that Rest & Recreation or Rock ‘n’ Roll?”

  Kathy giggled. “A bit of both, I’d say.”

  “Right,” concluded Mike. “I’ll be off. If Planty interrupts you, call the police sharpish on this mobile I nicked a couple of weeks back, phone me, trash the SIM card, and I’ll meet you by the doctors’ surgery. Okay?”

  “Trust us,” I said.

  “Right, I’ll be seeing you later.”

  * * *

  It was a harrowing week. We had to keep sufficiently awake that we could jump out of the window at any moment if Planty and his gang paid us a surprise visit, which meant that we were both on watch most of the time. We allowed ourselves a couple of hours’ sleep a night, plus the doses we couldn’t avoid, but they were never deep sleeps. We also had to be conscious for when the boy started to stir in order to feed him sugared milk and mushed fruit before sending him on his way again. I was really concerned about him overdosing, we both were, but he seemed peaceful enough and his breathing remained strong. He must have spent quite a week on his continuous high. I wonder what he was thinking all that time.

  We managed to persuade him to go to the toilet on a serving dish when he was semi-conscious. I held him while Kathy stood by with the next shot should he come round quicker than expected.

  All-in-all, he behaved perfectly. What else could he do?

  Kathy found some games to play, including a pack of cards, and we read our way thr
ough Planty’s aunt’s library of Agatha Christies.

  Mike came back with the van on the Tuesday to transport him to Planty’s house in Bransholme. We dropped Kathy off at Fingers’ place, then hid out near Swine while Kathy told Fingers that a client had let slip that he was involved in the kidnapping of Jeremy Wilkinson, the missing Leeds lad, and that he was being held somewhere in Pocklington. A few minutes later, she overheard Fingers relaying something urgent down the phone, and we risked driving onto the North Bransholme Estate, past Planty’s front door to see what was happening.

  Luck was on our side, because on the first pass we saw Planty, the thug from Hull Market Place and one other man jumping into a car and driving off. We wouldn’t have wanted to hang around in that area for long. We took the risk, pulled up to his house and knocked on the door. There was no answer. Mike slipped round the back and within a minute had opened the front door, marvelling at how poor the security was. It had probably never occurred to Planty that someone would try to burgle him, and it probably hadn’t occurred to anyone else either, on pain of a slow, anguished death.

  We had put the boy in a trunk, so we got him into the house really quickly and efficiently, and sat him in a chair in the sitting room injected with a fresh cocktail of pharmaceuticals that Kathy had taught me to administer. We then poked our heads outside, saw that the road was momentarily clear of pedestrians, slid the trunk back into the van, and drove off. We parked in Clough Road and phoned 999 to tip the police off as to where to find the missing boy. We left the van in Brough, switched the trunk over to Mike’s car that was waiting there (he had gone there and back by train the previous day), and returned home to Mike’s.

  As we headed up the A63, Mike said “Blimey we were lucky,” and it suddenly struck me that getting the boy into Planty’s house was virtually unplanned. We had all assumed that Planty would dash off to Pocklington when he heard the news from Fingers, as indeed he had, so there had been no Plan B whatsoever except to return the boy to Pocklington overnight and to phone the police in the morning, which would have been far less incriminating of Planty and his gang, and extremely dangerous.