The Dance of the Pheasodile

by Tim Roux

  As it happened, everything went perfectly, so we had been right not to get ourselves worked up about it, but I started to have retrospective panic attacks at Mike’s house when I fully realised for the first time what enormous risks we had been taking. What would we really have done if the Inbies had burst into the house in Pocklington? What if the neighbours had started nosing around, or the police? What if we had been intercepted transferring the boy into Planty’s house in Bransholme? What if we had been seen leaving it? Our plan could have gone wrong anywhere and, if it had, we could have got ourselves tortured to death or locked up in prison for twenty years. What if the boy had died? I had spent much of that week in Pocklington staring into his face and secretly apologising silently for the inconvenience and physical danger we were subjecting him to. Viewed from an objective standpoint, what we were doing was unconscionable, but I tried to stay away from that level of clear-sightedness - it freaked me – much as, later, it did me no good to appreciate just how incredibly lucky we had been both holing up with him in Pocklington and insinuating him into Planty’s home. I was tempted to believe that God had been on our side, but why exactly would he be backing us? There was nothing remotely good about what we had been doing. We were destroying an innocent life at random before it had even had the opportunity to flourish.

  Stuff it! We were lucky, he was not, that’s the world for all of us. I had played it by the rules too long, and ended up as Harry Walker for my pains. Now Harry Walker, pathetic sucker that he was, deserved an even break.

  * * *

  Chapter 12

  The other thing that Mike told me on the way home was that Fran and another woman had been around several times looking for me over the weekend.

  “Who was the other woman?” I asked.

  “Never seen ‘er before. Not from around ‘ere, I wouldn’t think.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “She was dressed like a Southerner. She behaved like one too. Very attractive though, if a bit posh, like.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Can’t remember.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “I don’t know really. Blonde. Pretty. Good natured.”

  So Chrissie had changed her mind after all, as I predicted, and had decided to come looking for me.

  I rushed straight round to Fran’s house in Pease Street, even though it was getting late. Fran opened the door and momentarily seemed pleased to see me before she slammed the mask of indifference back over her face. “Where the heck have you been?” she demanded. “I have been looking all over for you.”

  “I went off to try to find work?”

  “Where did you go?”

  “Leeds, Bradford, Wakefield, Doncaster, Rotherham, Sheffield.”

  “And what did you find?”

  “I think I may have started a few balls rolling.”

  “Where did you stay?”

  “B&Bs.”

  “Where did you get the money for that?”

  “Mike lent me some.”

  “Let’s hope that he is a patient man. I can’t remember the last time I got any money from you, other than your social security.”

  “Mike’s okay. He is willing to take a bit of a punt on me. He’s noticed that I have changed.”

  “I haven’t.”

  “Then you haven’t been looking properly.”

  “Are we in for another argument then?”

  “Seems so.”

  “Well come back when you can behave yourself.”

  “Is Chrissie around?”

  “So that’s why you have come round is it? You’ve heard that Chrissie was here.”

  “Frankly, yes.”

  “She went back to London on Sunday.”

  “Oh, in that case I will call her.”

  “Not from here you won’t.”

  “No, I’ll call her from Mike’s.” I turned away. “Give my love to Tommy, won’t you?”

  “What’s he to you?”

  “I am very fond of him.”

  “And what am I to you?”

  “I like you too.”

  “Is that the best you can do?”

  “I’ve only known you a few days, and you kicked me out the last time I saw you.”

  “For fucking your own sister.”

  “She’s not my sister. I’ve only known her a few days too.”

  “I think you should go back and see your hypnotist, Harry. Maybe she can unconfuse you.”

  “I shall. Night then.”

  She closed the door.

  * * *

  The publicity surrounding the arrest of Planty and his Inbies was terrific. I cannot remember any plan of mine delivering such instant gratification. The whole thing had worked like a dream, which was exactly the way my life felt at that time. The coverage was rabid. Planty was depicted as a mafia-style hoodlum whose appetites for violence and perversity were insatiable and legendary. He had been terrorising Hull for years, and no-one had ever dared stand up to him except the intrepid DI Richard Martin, whose finest hour had arrived.

  According to the reports, Planty and two of his gang had brutally seized the boy, Jeremy Wilkinson, from the garden of his home where he was playing, and packed him off to Planty’s three bedroom bunker in Bransholme where he was kept bound and gagged and drugged up to the eyeballs so that there was a severe risk of his being addicted to hard drugs for the rest of his life. Reports were not clear as to whether he had been assaulted, but several hinted that he might well have been used for sexual purposes. He was now safe in the relieved bosom of his family and receiving around the clock psychological support to help him deal with his acute Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He was unlikely ever to fully recover and to live a normal life again. Everyone was agreed that in the absence of the death penalty, Planty and his evil accomplices should be locked up for at least twenty-five years.

  Mike, Kathy and I had a party to celebrate the runaway success of our plan. That would teach Trevor Plant to cross us, although at that moment he might well be seething with a renewed psychotic desire to revenge himself on whoever stitched him up. Luckily, he was very unlikely to believe that it was us given his contemptuous dismissal of our abilities. In the limelight of the way that DI Martin was lapping up the adulation, he probably thought that it was the police themselves who had planted the boy in his house and then immediately discovered him there.

  All in all, ten members of the Inbies had been arrested and were to be indicted for kidnapping, assault, grievous bodily harm, poisoning, false imprisonment and conspiring to do the same.

  The next morning, there was a sharp wrap on the door which I opened to find myself face-to-face with DI Richard Martin himself. “Good morning, Harry,” he said. “Can I come in?”

  “It’s not my house,” I replied, “and I would prefer you not to be seen talking to me. I don’t want Planty to believe that I had anything to do with your fitting him up.”

  “You think we fitted him up?”

  “Can we discuss this somewhere else, if you have come to see me, that is.”

  “Yes, I have come to see you and, if you let me in, nobody will see me. I came in an unmarked police car.”

  And so it was.

  “Okay then.”

  “Who’s that?” shouted Mike from the kitchen (I still hadn’t set foot in the sitting room).

  “DI Martin.”

  “What’s ‘e doing ‘ere?”

  “Beats me, but he wants to talk to us, and I don’t fancy leaving him on the doorstep to parade himself off to the neighbours. They might get ideas that we are either collaborators or villains.”

  “Bring ‘im in then.” He met DI Martin in the doorway to the kitchen. “Good morning, Inspector. To what do we owe your exalted presence?”

  “Cut the crap, Mike. I wanted a word with you boys.”

  “Okay, we’re listening.”

  “It’s about what you’ll get up to now that most of the Inbies are off the scene.�
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  “What are you expecting us to get up to?” Mike asked him.

  “Mischief, obviously. You’ve got the place to yourselves now, haven’t you?”

  “I don’t really understand what you’re on about, Inspector. What ‘as all this got to do with us?”

  “Don’t get clever with me, Michael Stevenson, I know exactly who you are and what you get up to, and we all know it. What I am saying, and I think you two lads should listen, is that if you start going on the rampage to fill the vacuum, you’ll soon find yourselves sharing a cell with your good mate Trevor Plant and his even nicer friends, and I doubt that they are the ideal cell mates, judging from what they did to that poor Wilkinson boy. You wouldn’t believe the state he was in.”

  I shrugged. “I would believe anything of that lot. So they did abuse the boy, did they? I can’t say that I am surprised.”

  DI Martin smiled (it was a reassuring one), and made ready to leave. “It’s just a friendly warning. I am watching you two, and at the first sign of any trouble, I’m going to pick you up, understood? So keep your noses clean.”

  As I had brought him in, it was my job to usher him back outside. We parted with discrete nods on both sides, before I closed the door, and returned to the kitchen where Mike was punching his right fist into the air, with a finger to his lips.

  “What?” I said.

  Mike mouthed the word “bugs” at me, although it took me a few attempts to interpret his whisper.

  “Where?” I mouthed back.

  Smugly, Mike crouched down in front of the breakfast bar and pointed to a tiny piece of plastic glued in place with a pad.

  Mike stood up. “I think I need to wash my mouth out with coffee after dealing with that monumental prat Martin,” he announced, straight to microphone. “Would you care to join me, ‘arry, then we’ll go for a pint down the Kingfisher.”

  * * *

  Living with a bug is like adlibbing a script twenty-four hours a day. We had to incriminate ourselves sufficiently for Martin to believe that we had not discovered his secret while at the same time never giving away anything that could get us into real trouble. So we spent hours discussing how we could mop up the Inbie’s loan sharking operation and whether we could take over their protection rackets, while making it clear that we hadn’t made a move to do anything yet. If we judged it right, we could send the old bastard round the bend with frustration, although right now he was probably preoccupied with counting his column inches.

  We discussed our next steps with Kathy either out in the street or in secluded corners of pubs we had never visited before outside Hull itself– the Burtons, Hedon, Anlaby, Hessle, Cottingham, Walkington, Beverley, Welton, the Caves. The planning of this next stage was running up some pretty hefty bills in food and drink, for which Mike siphoned off money from the Royals’ kitty.

  We were ready, in fact readier than I had ever expected. Not having been acquainted with Kathy for more than a few weeks, I hadn’t realised that she had taken drama lessons and had even appeared in a couple of Hull Truck productions. She had a particular knack with accents and an excellent telephone manner.

  Mike had tapped the Royals’ stock of nicked mobile phones as well as their petty cash, and he had bought several pay-as-you-go SIM cards, each from a different shop in a different area of Leeds in case the police could track the phone numbers back to the shops that had sold them. The plan was that Kathy would phone the targets from Mike’s car well away from the Anlaby and Hessle roads, and she would switch SIM cards, destroying the old ones, every few hours, as well as keeping herself continuously on the move in case the police tried to track her on GPS after a tip-off. At this stage, it was unlikely that anyone would twig what was happening as Kathy had decided to go with my insurance scam which would come across as a genuine enquiry, nevertheless we decided to get ourselves into a routine and to take no chances whatsoever.

  We were expecting that Kathy would have to work hard for her money to extract any information from anybody over the phone, but it appears that the great British public still trust insurance companies, God knows why, even when they are cold-called by people they don’t know representing an insurance company they have never heard of. I don’t know how she did it, but Kathy reliably got all the information we needed and more, including their salary brackets. We guessed that some may have exaggerated their earnings, and maybe they all did, but after ten days we had at least twenty perfect hot leads, as the marketing people call them, I believe. These were families with youngish children, good incomes, and who were unmistakably anxious to protect their children’s futures. All we needed was that extra titbit of information that they would know had not been divulged over the phone, to suggest that we were tracking their children so closely that we only had to reach out to touch them. This is where Braine the Brains came in. He was a teacher who had done quite a few assignments for the Royals in the past, and knew his way round computer systems, especially those serving local education authorities. What we wanted was the children’s school assessment results. All twenty families we were targeting had told us where their children went to school, so if we could hack into the computerised records we could drop into the conversation with their parents that it was a shame that little Johnny had slipped up in maths so badly during his last assessment. What would it do to parents to believe that one of their children’s teachers was behind the prospective kidnapping, someone who would have unlimited access to their child during all break times, and at the start and end of the school day? That would make them feel very vulnerable, we hoped.

  Brains sucked out the information for us at record speed, and we were ready for the off, having adapted the payment delivery system. Instead of getting the parents to buy drugs from Kenny that they would give to us, and we would give back to Kenny, we decided to opt for a much simpler scheme. We would order on their behalf £10,000 worth of drugs, for which they would pay £20,000 (most of them would probably not even realise that they were being done), Kenny would have the money collected, and hand £10,000 onto us. So he got his way in the end, claiming that as he was offering us a complete turnkey solution he deserved £2,500 more for his professional services.

  Mike and I were to make the menacing phone calls. The strategy was simple: always talk to the mothers, and never for more than five minutes. It was strictly ‘no conferring’ with their husbands who would be bound to feel obliged to come over all macho. We weren’t going to waste our time in slanging matches. We would punch straight in there with a blow to the heart, and keep them in a mounting state of panic until we clinched the deal and slammed down the phone as the punch line to a final threat about not honouring their commitments.

  Mike and I decided that our opening gambit would be to say “We have your son/daughter.” That should grab their attention before we added “any time we want them.”

  So the gist of the conversation went like this;

  “Hello, Jennifer Brown speaking.”

  “Hello, Mrs. Brown. We have your daughter.”

  Shocked silence, then a hysterical quiver to the voice “Who is this? What do you mean?”

  “We have your daughter. Which word don’t you understand?”

  “You have my daughter how?”

  “By her throat.”

  “What? On no! Please don’t hurt her. Please don’t hurt her. What do you want me to do?”

  “We have your daughter, Lucy, anytime we want her. Pretty little thing, isn’t she? Still. Intelligent too, looking at her maths results. Very impressive.”

  “What do you want?”

  “We want you to buy her some drugs.”

  “Drugs? What would Lucy want with drugs?”

  “She is going to grow up, isn’t she, unless you mess things up? She is going to need a few drugs to get her through life, so we are suggesting that you buy her some now.”

  “And if we don’t?”

  “Then she isn’t going to need them, is she?”

  “Why not?”
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  “That’s for us to know and you to guess, Mrs. Brown.”

  “I must have a word with my husband.”

  “You aren’t talking to anybody, Mrs. Brown. You have five seconds. 5, and 4, and 3 …..”

  “All right, all right. What do I do?”

  “We’ll deliver the drugs through your letter box, then we’ll call round within a few days to collect the £20,000.”

  “We don’t have £20,000.”

  Click.

  Everyone has £20,000 when they live in the suburbs, have an income in excess of £60,000 a year, and their daughter’s (or son’s) life is on the line.

  Needless to say, Kenny never delivered the drugs through the letter box. They were usually to be found in their children’s school bags. We don’t know how Kenny managed that. Kenny would then collect the money with two of his mates. Only once had the parents tipped off the police, and it was obvious to Kenny before they even entered the driveway. Their son had a very nasty accident the next day, and the parents instantly recanted and paid up in a McDonalds bag thrown away in a park rubbish bin.

  One final touch – we used electronic voice modifiers to make the calls, so that our Hull accents were undetectable. Within three weeks we were £200,000 the richer.

  * * *

  Our activities were briefly interrupted by our day in the Coroner’s Court, where the coroner had to deliver a verdict on the cause of Martin Jenson’s death. I had to give evidence for about two hours, answering to some rigorous cross-examination. Fran and Kathy were also called as witnesses. Tommy was spared. DI Martin assured the coroner that I had killed Martin Jenson in self-defence, after running through a huge list of increasingly nasty crimes Martin J had crammed into his itinerary during a relatively brief career, and the coroner agreed without demur, returning a verdict of lawful homicide.

  * * *

  When I started handing serious amounts of money over to Fran and Tommy, Fran’s first reaction was “Where did you get this lot from?”