by Tim Roux
“Yes, he does,” the receptionist informed me, “but he is not in today. Are you a friend of his?” She managed to keep her face deadpan.
“More of a close acquaintance,” I replied. “No matter, I’ll try him another day.”
“Can I say who called?”
“Yes, tell him Harry Walker called in to see him, if you don’t mind.”
“Do you have a card I could give him?” I was sure that she expected me to be carrying nothing of the sort, but her face betrayed no other emotion than the desire to help me.
I patted my pockets. “Sorry,” I declared. “Fresh out.”
“I’ll tell him you called. Goodbye, Mr. Walker.”
I had all day to kill, or rather to savour being back in London, so I roamed the streets for hours, walking past all my favourite places – restaurants, shops, art galleries. I thought of going to see a film, but I decided that it would waste valuable time I could spend outside. At four in the evening, I headed up to King’s Cross to catch the train to Hull, arriving there just after eight.
Fran seemed surprised to see me, and even pleased. Tommy was already in bed.
“So you came back, then,” she said.
“I said I would.”
“I didn’t really believe you.”
“You can, you know. I’m not Harry, for better or for worse.”
“Yes, that is what I am trying to discover. You have gone from not having a penny to your name, and even having to borrow from me, to being flush with the stuff. I can’t say as I mind, but I do wonder where it will all end.”
“Happily, I hope.”
“That takes a lot of believing. Do you want a coffee?”
“I could kill for a coffee.”
“What else could you kill for, Harry?”
The sharpness of the rejoinder threw me for a second. “Well you and Tommy, for starters,” I replied. “I have already proved that.”
Fran made the coffee, and we moved into the sitting room where we sat side-by-side on the sofa.
“So what were you doing in London?”
I assumed that she was clairvoyant for a second as I had said that I was going to Wokingham not London, then I remembered that everyone in Hull called anywhere down South ‘London’, wherever it was.
“I went to see Chrissie.”
“How was she?”
“Sympathetic.”
She waited for me to elaborate, and when I didn’t she added “And?”
“We made progress, but there is a long way to go.”
“Did you see your kids?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“They told me to go away.”
Fran winced. “Really?”
“I also met Keith, and that was a total disaster. I nearly killed him. I nearly killed myself.”
“Why?”
“We gave each other heart attacks, well almost. It seems that we cannot confront each other without setting off a fatal reaction.”
“So you came home?”
“So I wandered around London for a day, and came home to you and Tommy.”
“What are your plans now?”
“To stay here for a while, and to plan what to do next - how I can make us all happy.”
“That would be nice.”
I scowled. “Yes, but at this precise moment, I would settle for making anyone happy, anyone at all.”
“I am happy to see you, Harry,” Fran assured me, “and Tommy will be really happy that you are back when he sees you in the morning. He may even get up to check in the middle of the night. He did last night. He likes his new dad. He is proud of you. He was always desperate to find something to make him proud of you, and now he has, so he definitely doesn’t want to lose you again.”
“Why is he proud of me – because I have brought some money home for a change?”
“That might be part of it, but I think that it is mostly that you have wanted to spend some time with him. That is really important to him. Harry hardly bothered with him at all. He left him entirely up to me.”
I took Fran’s hand. She did not resist, although she did not react with any warmth either, only with acquiescence. “I will always be there for Tommy, Fran, as long as I possibly can, and for you too. I may be a crook; I may be a lot worse than a crook, in fact I am; but I am no longer a cheat. I am very fond of both of you. I am committed to both of you. I am also, of course, deeply in love with Chrissie, Ella and Mark as well, so there is a lot to work out, but I will give it my very best shot, I promise you.”
“We’ll see.” She got up. “I must go to bed now. I’m tired. You can come too, if you like, or you can sleep in Kathy’s old room.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“Come on, then. If you turn the lights out here, I’ll deal with the kitchen.”
* * *
In bed, Fran confessed to receiving some attention from a new admirer.
“He started chatting to me in Monsoon. I haven’t had that happen to me in years. There again, I haven’t been in Monsoon for years either. Couldn’t afford it. I was holding up a skirt against me in front of the mirror, and he said “That will look really pretty on you.” I turned to see who the guy was, and actually he looked really nice, not the smooth-talking git I was expecting.
“What was he doing in Monsoon?”
“Buying his wife a present for her birthday. Apparently I reminded him of her, so he wanted to use me as a model for her.”
“And did you?”
“Yes, I tried a few things on for him. Do you mind?”
“I mind that he was chatting you up.”
“Are you jealous?”
“Maybe a bit, but I am more concerned that he was chatting you up.”
“Why?”
“Because I am asking myself why he was chatting you up.”
“Perhaps he fancied me, or perhaps I really do look like his wife.”
“It’s possible.”
“You don’t think that an attractive, educated man like that would go for a woman like me?”
“I am sure he could. That is not the point.”
“What is the point?”
“It feels contrived – as if he wanted to get to know you for other reasons.”
“Why would he want to do that?”
“That is what I am asking myself. I am just hoping that he really did fancy you, but I would bet that there was more to it than that. Did he get your phone number?”
“He never asked. I told you that he wasn’t the pushy type.”
“So he already knows where you live.”
“Do you think so?”
“I am guessing so. Did he tell you anything about himself?”
“He said that he was a test pilot for British Airways in Brough. He was going to fly his wife by helicopter to Harrogate for dinner for her birthday. I thought that sounded really romantic. Would you do that?”
“I don’t even know when your birthday is,” I admitted.
“On the 23rd of June, in five weeks’ time.”
“I don’t think people who live in Pease Street hire helicopters.”
“You could probably afford it, from the look of things.”
“Yes, but I don’t want that look of things to reach DI Martin, which means that I cannot do it around here, and we cannot involve Tommy because he will tell all his school friends.”
“We could go away for the weekend. Debbie will be prepared to look after Tommy, I’m sure, and you could show me the heights of wherever in England you think it would be safe to hire a helicopter.”
“I’ll see.”
She began to unbutton my pyjamas. “And I’ll give you some encouragement,” she said.
* * *
Kathy just kept turning up at Mike’s house with money, £10,000 at a time. The scam was working wonderfully. We were up to £50,000 a week, the equivalent of £10,000 for every working day, and we could have doubled it if we had wanted to, as we nearly did. The amount of m
oney we earned was merely a factor of how many phone calls we made. We had unlimited numbers of victims. We were never going to run out. It was a really simple system we had devised. I considered myself to be a criminal genius.
Our biggest issue was how to cut the rest of the gang in. We absolutely did not want them to know what we were doing, otherwise Fingers, among others, would tell Planty and the Inbies for sure, and who knew what they would do. They may already have guessed that we had fitted them up, so sooner or later they would be after us, but so long as they didn’t realise what the scam was, there wasn’t much they could do to interfere. Humberside Police weren’t going to care about things that were not even happening on their patch, and that they didn’t know we were mixed up in. So, it was a question of watching our backs against hired hit men or vengeful stray Inbies. One of the things we did was to hire the rest of the gang as our bodyguards, claiming that we feared reprisals as we were progressively mopping up all the dodgy business in town. We also recruited some fictitious operatives who specialised in Internet fraud, claiming that we were earning money that way.
It seemed to be working. Fingers, Cut-Throat, Knitting Needles, ‘ull Bitter, Rackets, Welton Willy and Bobblehead were really not that bright, so we reckoned that should they ever catch on, we would know about it. Sherbert Friscali was admittedly a great deal sharper, but he seemed to be too out there following his own agenda smashing windows and crushing limbs to worry about what we were doing. Which left Kenny Bender who knew exactly what was going on, and who might decide to branch out on his own. Given his propensity for violence and his aversion to subtlety, he could drive the whole thing out into the open in no time, queering the pitch for all of us.
DI Martin called around regularly to remind us that he was watching us, and the fact that he had to talk his way past some rather thick bodyguards must have reassured him, as it was intended to. Clearly we were tightening our grip on the Hull underworld, but we weren’t causing any noticeable trouble and we were too boneheaded to be considered a threat to the peace, or the police, in the longer term either. Everything was strumming along as it should – we were subversive folk-rock bashed out by scruffy hippies, not screeching lead guitar to annoy the neighbours.
That is until Cut-Throat was found bobbing in the Humber, tied on a leash to the suspension bridge. That made us all sit up. What was that about? It had echoes of mafia or Masonic killings, or whatever. Cut-Throat’s wife was around in five denouncing every suspect she could think of and demanding blood-curdling revenge on all of them simply because their names had entered her mind. Cut-Throat had a whole KC Stadium load of enemies, it seemed, assiduously nurtured over a provocative career lasting more than twenty years. Cut-Throat had not managed to cut many throats, which might have been his mistake, but he had managed to slash a few cheeks and noses and to screw a lot of angry men’s wives.
DI Martin summoned Mike and me to Queen’s Gardens for a meeting. The message was dogmatic and unequivocal. We had to find out who did it and to serve the culprit(s) up on a plate, in one piece, to DI Martin himself, recipient of all glory. We didn’t have to find the right villain, but we did have to finger a plausible one who could be sent down for life, thereby cleaning up the official crime ledger.
The problem was that there were no obvious leads at all, and that the whole process was distracting us from what we should have been doing (threatening the middle-class burghers of Sheffield and Rotherham). We were getting bogged down in administration when we should have been going flat out for short-term sales.
Nonetheless, it was another excuse to keep the rest of the gang busy doing what entertained them, hobbling bow-legged about town pulling threatening faces. They were soon unearthing even more suspects, each of whom at least one of the gang was absolutely convinced had been either the perpetrator of Cut-Throat’s murder, or the master-mind behind it. For a while, the odds-on favourite was his brother-in-law, a haulage contractor who had a whole team of people who were handy with knots and ropes, and who had the easy means of carting Cut-Throat’s body to where it had been discovered. Police forensics assured us that he had been long dead before he ever hit the river – he had no water in his lungs. Unfortunately, his brother-in-law was a good mate of DI Martin and even kept him on the payroll as an informal ‘security advisor’, whatever that might mean, so we had to search elsewhere.
The husband of the woman Cut-Throat had last been balling stepped up to the plate next. He was a nine stone asthmatic, so he must have had help if he had any involvement in the first place. Luckily he had a brother with a notoriously vicious temper who made no secret of the fact that he was as close to being in love with his sister-in-law as he was ever likely to be capable of. Even better, he boasted openly of taking a crow bar to Cut-Throat’s limbs, biting out his tongue and roasting him alive over his B&Q Super Deluxe barbecue set, a claim that was totally without foundation as none of these things had been visited upon Cut-Throat in his final hours, but he bragged about his adventures so persistently and so publicly that he served himself up to DI Martin who was delighted and told us to go about our business, as we duly did.
* * *
Chapter 15
…. and the next thing I know, I am swinging all over London at the end of a rope, hurtling towards my own oblivion, or so I suspect.
What am I doing here? What happened between my being up in Hull and my flying naked across London, pursued by helicopters, planes and curious and gasping onlookers?
I cannot see them gasping, but I can see them straining to see me against the sun. This is the worst fairground trip I have ever been on, the worst fun park roller-coaster, and certainly the worst flight of which I haven’t had that many. At least in all of those alternatives, you are assured that the management team intends, to a degree of absolute certainty, that you survive and thrive, and that there is a bearable end point.
Where will this end? When will this end? When the helicopter runs out of aviation fuel? When it is shot down? When I am dropped into the Thames? Over Essex? Over Kent? Over the North Sea? In the North Sea? Over Belgium? Over Holland? Over France? In the Seine? In the Maas? Shredded to pieces somewhere?
And, in the meantime, my insides are being churned around up, down and sideways. I am feeling sick; I am being sick. I am screaming my head off. I am cold. I am very, very frightened. I am panicking. I am defecating. I am doing everything except the one thing I most want to do – to escape.
We are heading ever more East, over the docklands, in front of the sky scrapers of Canary Wharf, out towards Greenwich, down the Thames.
I cannot bear it a moment longer, and I cannot get away.
* * *
Chapter 16
Ella is saying to me “Dad, can you help me with my homework?”
I look at her blankly.
“Dad, can you help me with my homework? I need your help on the next set of maths questions. Why didn’t I inherit your maths skills?”
“Dad is always helping you,” Mark comments. “That is why he is always so tired nowadays.”
Ella steps away from me and begins to wrestle playfully with Mark. “He’ll help you one day too, Mark, so don’t complain. Wise up. I am paving the way for your future homework bliss.”
“I don’t need Dad’s help with my maths homework. I am good at maths. I am better than Dad at maths. I should be helping him with his buildings.”
“You wish!”
“I’m learning to be an architect too, aren’t I, Dad?”
“Come on you two. Leave your father alone for a while. He needs his rest. Let him have some peace.” Agnes has entered the room and is shooing them off. She closes the door behind them, and quickly turns to me in determined earnestness. “Chrissie phoned a few minutes ago. There has been a crisis at work. She is going to be back late tonight. She said that you shouldn’t wait up for her. Would you like me to put the children to bed?”
I am staring at her. My mouth is open so wide that I am dribbling. I know that
I should connect with my body and come back down to earth, but I can’t. I am still in a blanket state of shock. I think that I have just died, and that I am not fully here yet. “Mr. McGuire? Keith?”
Agnes is really concerned. She is leaning over me as if I am an accident casualty, as indeed I probably am, except that it was almost certainly no accident. I shake my head. “Can I have a couple of minutes to gather my thoughts, Agnes?” I plead. I am slurring my words like a drunk, and dribbling. She must be wondering whether I have had a stroke. I am wondering that self-same thing.
“Certainly, Mr. McGuire,” she replies before turning away from me and closing the door behind her.
What does this all mean? I am Keith again. Harry is gone. Is he dead? Who had him (and me) dangling from a rope? Who knew that there was a connection between Harry and Chrissie? Am I still in danger? Is Chrissie in danger? Are the children in danger? Why did I immediately assume that it was Fran who had arranged for me to be swung in front of Chrissie’s office window, except that she is the only person who knows who I claimed to be, so it must have been her, mustn’t it? What about her recently-met pilot admirer? Was he flying the helicopter and, if so, was he doing so at Fran’s insistence or for some reason of his own? Could Kathy have told on me? She knew about Chrissie, come to think of it. Was this the work of the Inbies despite their all being locked up awaiting trial? Was it all simply a dream? Have I been in a long coma? Have I been hallucinating? Have I been fevered? Was my visit to Sian yesterday or even today? Was Harry a figment of my imagination? And, if so, was everyone else a figment of my imagination too?
I hope so. I don’t want the responsibility of what I did up there. I want the slate to be wiped clean.
But Agnes’s message does sound ominous. Or maybe it doesn’t. Chrissie is always having crises at work. It is what top lawyers believe justifies their salaries according to their overblown work ethic.
