Escape and Evasion

by Christopher Wakling

  ‘Occupation?’

  ‘Student.’

  ‘I see. Whereabouts?’

  ‘Cambridge.’ The word sounded ridiculous, as if he’d laid a truffle on the desk. ‘Studying what?’

  ‘English literature.’

  The police-boy filled out another section, his handwriting comically neat and slow, and looked up from under his fringe.

  ‘So, English literature,’ he said eventually. ‘I suppose that will be good for telling stories and suchlike.’

  The colour rose in Joseph’s cheeks. ‘I suppose,’ he said.

  ‘Well, this is all good material,’ the policeman said, looking round the room. Joseph looked too, saw posters of syringes and crashed cars, plastic chairs bolted to the lino-covered floor, and a door with safety-mesh glass.

  ‘Promise me one thing,’ the policeman said.

  Joseph waited.

  ‘That if you ever choose to write about this, you leave me out of it!’ He grinned.

  ‘I promise,’ Joseph said.

  Promises, eh. He’d kept that one. Not that it mattered. Where might the policeman be now? Had he risen through the ranks, become the head of something or other police-wise? Possibly. Could he even be the man for the job? Track that thieving bastard Ashcroft down! He’s got form. The light bulb, et cetera. No. Not with handwriting like that. They don’t put you in charge of anything serious if you can’t join up your ‘w’s, ‘v’s, ‘m’s, and ‘n’s. Police, detectives and so forth: not Joseph’s biggest worry anyway. Swim forward hammerhead Lancaster. Sharks can smell blood half an ocean away. When he picks up the scent he won’t let go.

  With that cheery thought Joseph takes off his suit, selects a hanger from the wardrobe, ___s it up.

  ___s?

  What’s the word?

  Damn, these tiny holes, gaps, blanks. He’s sure they’re getting worse. The same happened to Dad, an early symptom of the bastard disease, but that’s just a coincidence, because it has to be.

  Hangs.

  That’s what hangers are for. His suit looks lonely in the wardrobe, though, doomed. Joseph sticks it on the back of the door instead. There’s a hook for the job. Naked, the smell of himself rises up. Best take a shower. Why not a bath, in fact? Look at all the little bottles of conditioner and whatnot. Always used to stash such miniatures in his washbag to take home for the kids after work trips abroad. Another pang. Lara loves having her own bubble bath. Joseph pauses, then tips it beneath the hot tap. Cue froth. The little bathroom fills up with steam. Baths are a homely thing: at boarding school and in the army it was always showers. Run the thing hot, just bearable to step into, sit down in, and lean back. A moment or two passes. It’s quiet in here, but not quiet enough. Slide beneath the surface. The water zips itself shut over Joseph’s face. He opens his eyes, sees nothing but the blankness of bubbles on the surface. It’s like lying in a snowdrift except that it’s not. Why not? Because it’s hot.

  Up next: bed.

  You’d think it would be hard to sleep, with the world about to hunt him down, et cetera, but as Joseph climbs in he enjoys a long, lion-on-the-savannah-style yawn. That has nothing to do with the Egyptian cotton sheets, either. He closes his eyes and sees numbers.

  Very soothing.

  It’s not night everywhere.

  Some people are just getting up. Complete strangers, buttering their toast, pouring out cereal, or eating whatever they eat for breakfast in St Petersburg, Cape Town, Kolkata, wherever it is in fact morning just now: in for a pleasant surprise.

  No, the right word isn’t pleasant; it’s transformative.

  Some of them may try to give the money back, but he’s generated too much electronic mist for that. Him and the bedroom-based boy-genius in Milton Keynes. They bounced the takings through enough offshore shell company accounts – it took some doing – from the Bahamas to the Caymans to Beijing to Switzerland and back again, to make sure they forgot where they came from.

  Wondrous technology.

  Joseph: masterful un-maker of universe.

  The sheets smell so clean.

  Let them come.

  Lancaster too, why not?

  Let him.

  Come.

  5

  He opens one eye.

  It’s six fourteen.

  He feels: less gung-ho.

  He checks the news channels but the story hasn’t broken. They’ll be putting two and two together to make $1.34 billion at the bank, but nobody’s after him yet.

  He goes down for breakfast at seven thirty. Checks out the other guests as he takes his seat. There’s a Japanese couple at the next table, each wearing a set of headphones. Across from them sits a man in a golfing sweater and yellow corduroy trousers. The only other people in the room are three suits intent upon an open laptop.

  Nobody pays any attention to Joseph.

  He orders smoked haddock and poached eggs on toast, follows it up with a bowl of porridge, plus orange juice and black coffee. Always had an appetite on him before an exercise, operation, or the close of a deal. Unnerved everyone else, the amount he could put away when they were puking with nerves. No reason to doubt he’ll find lunch later, but this morning feels like the run-up to time in the field.

  A driver and car could well be waiting beneath the plane trees in Cleveland Square, but he’s not there, he’s here. Thankfully, nobody is waiting outside the hotel. He needs to sort out some new kit, so heads towards Oxford Street and John Lewis. Office workers with their heads down, late for work; a cyclist mounting the kerb to skirt a rubbish truck; fogged-up bus windows; a queue in a coffee shop: normality is stunning.

  And here he is, amongst the department store’s first customers.

  What does he need? He doesn’t exactly know, but sets off to find it. Naomi used to help him clothes-wise. She stopped offering after he came home with his first made-to-measure suit. She rolled her eyes when he explained, but deep down she must have known he was right.

  For everything off-the-peg, there’s the internet. Underwear, gym kit, condoms, ski helmets: all delivered straight to the office. So it’s strange to pick up packs of boxer shorts, socks and T-shirts in an actual shop. He needs some jeans. A couple of shirts. This hoodie. That coat. Another shirt. He doesn’t want to be doing much laundry, so a couple of these other ones can’t hurt. And a pair of boots, too. Takes the lot towards the changing room to be told there’s a six-item limit. This flummoxes him for a moment. The shop assistant, homely, fissures in her makeup, offers to hold the extra items for him.

  The confusion must show in his face.

  ‘Just shout and I’ll hand them in.’

  So there he is, undressed in the mirror, curtain drawn, suit on the chair. Flecks of grey show in his chest hair and he’s thickened around the middle, no doubt about it. He sucks in and tenses up to see muscles shift beneath. The lighting in this cubicle makes his hair look thin.

  ‘Okay in there?’

  ‘Yes, thank you. If you could …’

  He hands the shirts through the curtain. Fingers with plum-coloured nails offer him jeans in return. It’s oddly intimate. He catches sight of the shop assistant’s watch. Ten fifteen. Here he is in his underwear in the cubicle of a department store off Oxford Street, bathed in mood music, trying on clothes offered up by a manicured hand, and meanwhile, just a couple of miles away, within Airdeen Clore’s fortress walls, proper end-is-nigh wailing. Yes, by now it will be rippling through all of the bank’s fourteen floors. The crisis team will try to contain things but they’ll fail. Everyone – the board, traders, analysts, deal teams, secretaries, caterers, cleaners – will know by lunchtime.

  Excellent.

  He gathers his soon-to-be new clothes into a pile, thinking about the number 1.34 billion. It’s a big, handsome number. Still, 1.5 trillion dwarfs it, and that’s how many dollars the richest 0.001 per cent will shift offshore this year. Roughly 5 per cent of annual global output. Meanwhile, some 25 per cent of the world’s population will live on less
in the same period. Joseph knows these stats because knowing them is slash was part of his job. Whereas giving a shit about them wasn’t, because such shit-giving was definitely up to somebody else. He wished them well, but his job was to help make the money in the first place. He’d told Naomi this many times. Normally she put her fingers in her ears before he finished.

  Well, she’d surely listen now, right?

  Because now, having done something pretty massive, he definitely cares, poor people-wise.

  Doesn’t he?

  6

  Joseph picks out a leather holdall in the luggage concession and convinces the younger, prettier shop assistant on the till to pack his new things directly into it. No point in putting a bag in a bag. He pays cash for the lot because he has to, doesn’t he, but a man kitting himself out so thoroughly and paying for it all in used notes is a bit suspicious, isn’t it? Joseph hears himself explaining that he’s visiting London, that the airline has lost his luggage, all the while thinking: just shut up. She tells him that the same thing happened to her on her trip to Lanzarote last spring, how annoying it was, she totally sympathises, what with her having to borrow her friend’s bikini for the first two days.

  ‘But you’ve got some lovely new stuff here.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I know it’s not the same, though. Your own things are important.’

  ‘No. I mean yes.’

  ‘They’ll catch up with you eventually,’ she says. ‘Mine did anyway.’

  He nods and thanks her, thinking: they?

  If he’s going to keep himself hidden – that being the plan, if you can call it a plan – he’s got to avoid drawing unnecessary attention to himself.

  He did in fact consider dashing straight from the office to the Eurotunnel with his real passport, but they’d check it, and even if he had made it through before the bank alerted the authorities he would have left electronic breadcrumbs for whoever to follow.

  Whoever: Lancaster.

  So the plan is to hide close. In the city, for as long as possible. Thenceforth to the countryside. Last long enough in the field and they’ll slacken the search, won’t they? Possibly. And, in the meantime, news-speaking, in terms of what he’s done sinking in, well, Naomi will have a chance to see he tried.

  Tried what?

  To redress things, balance-wise.

  There may even be an opportunity to see the kids – his beautiful kids – before.

  Before what?

  The end.

  Don’t be melodramatic.

  We all wind up there sooner or later. The trick, he’s long thought, is to be the one who gets to say when.

  7

  Joseph walks back to the hotel. Surely he should take a circuitous route? He does. Finds a phone shop on the way and buys a pay-as-you-go smartphone from a teenager with a beard. Spots a chemist as well, and ducks inside to buy the basics. Arm & Hammer toothpaste, always. A new razor, shaving gel rather than foam, because that’s what Naomi got for him. He also buys a set of hair clippers and a crepe bandage.

  The concierge is out from behind the reception desk in the foyer, positioning a massive vase of flowers. They look like lilies. Yes, those ones with the orange bits in the middle. Careful, it’s a bugger to get that pollen off cloth. Remember at the wedding? And yes, the concierge has got some on his shirt, poor bloke. Joseph watches him set the vase down and stand back. Presumably he gets to use the hotel laundry? Still, it probably won’t come out. The lilies smell a bit cloying. They are open-mouthed, predatory. Joseph doesn’t point out the stain. He offers the concierge a stick of chewing gum instead, then takes the stairs two at a time. Got to shift that midriff somehow.

  He hangs the little ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on his door, locks it from within, and drags the chest of drawers a couple of feet to the left, so that it sits nicely under the door handle. Overkill, no doubt, but better safe than worry. Sorry. Time to check the television. There’s a lightness in his stomach as he turns it on and scrolls through to the news channels. But the story still hasn’t broken: there’s no mention of the bank, either there or – once he’s struggled with the wifi code – online. Share price intact. Nobody declaring any windfalls.

  Hmm: that’s almost a let-down.

  No, no, no, give it time.

  He can’t undo what he’s done. Nobody can.

  That thought hits home and he’s suddenly very tired. It’s an odd – and old – reaction. Ever since school, nervous dread has made him fall asleep. For most people it does the opposite. Makes them alert. But maybe for him the sleep impulse is some kind of defence mechanism.

  Anyway, the dread-sleep first hit him when he was about twelve, with a three-month stretch of boarding school looming ahead like three years, and the hype and aggravation of twenty other boys not yet asleep in the same big room, that first-day-of-term nervous buzz, the panic rising, the false bonhomie, nobody able to settle, nobody except him, because his response was to shut his eyes and switch himself off, completely, just like that.

  Wake up, Joe!

  Impossible: Joe’s not home.

  He’s done it time and again since, too. Lying in that ditch on the Derry milk farm. As soon as it was his turn to get some kip: wham, lights out. Ditto in that breakout room in Houston, waiting to negotiate the refinancing of a drilling company worth tens of millions, with the terms already horribly set against them. Job on the line. Funny to think of that now. Still, then, he’d simply lowered his head to the cool tabletop and … slept. Now he does the same. Mutes the television, lies back on the queen-sized bed, lets the mattress take his weight, and within seconds he’s in a half-state, free-falling.

  8

  They serve a mean club sandwich in the hotel. Joseph orders three over the next day. They come with a sort of mustardy mayonnaise: it sets the thing alight. Must keep fed up. For no particular reason, he collects the little toothpicks they use to stab the sandwiches together. Puts them in his new washbag. Imagine getting one of those things stuck in the roof of your mouth. There’s a trick with toothpicks his father once showed him. Something to do with making a rectangle within a square. Possibly it was matchsticks …

  It’s quite boring, this waiting, but wait is what he does, wait and watch, monitoring the television and the news sites on his phone screen.

  When will they break the story?

  Not yet.

  Frankly that’s pretty impressive. Holding off this long. Well done Cooper, Hemmel, Toole-Jones and the back-room boys. But even they can’t whitewash the thing indefinitely. Sooner or later the numbers will give. They always do.

  Joseph paces his hotel room, which is actually two rooms, substantial en-suite included, knowing how it will play out. There’ll be an unexplained dip in projected profits first, followed by an immediate share price wobble, and then the full crash. As soon as that’s inevitable they’ll give the jackknifing truck of the bank a rogue driver: him!

  Which headshot will they use?

  The most recent one, off the website, probably, taken by that Czech woman with the suspiciously big lips. You’d think trying to make other people look good all day would create some insight. She was all right, though, understood that he wanted to angle his head to the right, so as to hide the neck scar. It’s what, twenty-one years old, good and faded now, though it still goes a bit livid in cold weather. She took a passable photo in the end. It showed him at his authoritative-but-approachable best. Hint of a smile eye-wise, jaw nice and firm. And his hair – well cut, still sandy – looked positively vigorous in that light. He’d visited the barber especially. ‘Your hair is good,’ the photographer had said. Actually, yes, she was a nice woman, bee-stung bits aside.

  And her work will soon be popping up everywhere, Hydra-style!

  Might as well take precautionary measures now, he thinks, and retreats to the bathroom. The clippers are fully charged. He sets them going, leans forward over the sink and eases the blades through his fringe up over the top of his head, but the clean swathe
-stripe he’s hoping for doesn’t quite materialise. It takes two or three passes to clear a fire-track front to back. Bit more chiselling, temple to temple, forward and back, and yes, he’s pulling a convict into the mirror. That or an ageing squaddie. He keeps going until his scalp is all stubble. When he turns the clippers off the vibrating doesn’t stop immediately. It’s somehow worked its way into his skull. Bzzzzz. A head full of ___.

  ___?

  Oh, please.

  Bees.

  Thank you.

  His face looks sort of lopsided now. And wow, his ears. Do they keep growing with age, or is that noses? Two days of unshaven beard runs raggedly into his sideburns.

  He scowls.

  Naomi always hated it when he left stubble in the sink after shaving. Iron filings. Evidence, in fact. He swills water right round the rim to catch all the cuttings. Down the plughole they go. Let the hot water run a while, just to be sure. And now, pack the clippers into the new bag. Ditto old good suit and brogues. He sets aside some of the new clothes while he’s at it. Time to get dressed in civvies. On go the jeans, a plain T-shirt and the charcoal hoodie. Nondescript. In this light the blue of his new jacket looks a bit purple. Oh well. He puts that on, too. Might as well finish the job off, he thinks, and takes the crepe bandage from his washbag. So soft, crepe. Silent. He unspools a length of bandage and carefully wraps it diagonally across his head. Like that. Yes. It covers his left eye and ear. He uses the tiny scissors in the hotel sewing kit to cut off the flappy bit of bandage and tucks the end in under the tightness at the back of his head. Tape would be good, but this will have to do.

  He looks nothing like himself.

  The first thing anyone will notice is this big slice of white. The bits of face either side of the bandage, shorn of hair, bristling with new beard, look nothing much like the Czech woman’s photo of him now.

  Good job.

  He reaches to unwrap himself but his fingers stop short of the bandage. Feels odd: sort of calm and ready and jittery all at the same time. Something’s telling him to go through with it straight away. Waiting equals risk. The bloke downstairs, well, he could in theory see the news when Joseph does. He might put two and two together and make $1.34 billion himself. Why not scoot now? Check in at the next place in disguise. Come to think of it, right this moment downstairs they might well be wondering why he hasn’t left his room in two days. That’s a bit suspicious, isn’t it? What’s he doing up there? Hiding? Let’s go and see.