by Daniel Hurst
‘I’ve always hated bankers,’ he replies. ‘Greedy bastards.’
The irony of what he has just said is not lost on me, and I let him know it with my glare.
‘So you never saw Johnny again?’ he asks me, and I shake my head.
‘I have no idea what happened to him. But I bet he pissed my money away in some bookie’s somewhere along the way.’
‘Well, thank you for the cautionary tale,’ he says, shrugging his broad shoulders. ‘But that doesn’t do you much good right now. I still want that code.’
I guess sympathy and pity aren’t emotions that he gives much time to.
‘You’re no better than him, you know,’ I say, shaking my head. ‘He was a thief, and so are you. You should be ashamed of yourself. I worked hard for that money. Why can’t you do the same?’
‘You don’t think this is hard work? You think I want to be here sitting on this train listening to your sob story? I want to be miles away from this place, sitting in the sun with a cold drink in my hand, looking out at the ocean while pretty ladies walk by. Yet here I am stuck with you.’
‘That’s what you’re going to do with my money, is it? Sit in the sun and drink beer. How admirable. At least I have a proper dream.’
He scoffs. ‘You think you would spend it more wisely? You’d just waste it while you were trying to get your book published. No joy would ever come from it, and you’d just end up back where you started in a year’s time. The only difference is at least I would have some fun along the way.’
‘It’s my business what I do with it. It’s my money!’
The volume of my voice is raised again, but nobody bothers looking over at us this time. Nearly everybody has their headphones in, and their faces are buried in their personal devices. Either they can’t hear us, or they are ignoring us. I don’t blame them either way. I always hated noisy passengers too.
‘You’re all the same, you people,’ he says, flattening out his tie against his chest. ‘Working hard day after day, saving up, and for what? Retirement? Something better down the line? You never stop and actually enjoy yourselves in the here and now.’
‘That’s how the world works,’ I fire straight back. ‘It’s not all just short-term success. Some things take longer to achieve, and you have to work for them. You can’t just take them from other people.’
‘That’s where you’re wrong. I can just take them, and I will. You see, while you and the rest of the people on this train have been busy working hard in your offices, I’ve been watching you all, and you know what I see? Hesitation. Desperation. Fear. I pity you, and I pity everybody else you work with. You’re lacking in confidence to do what you really want.’
‘No. I’m not.’
‘How old are you?’
I’m surprised by the question. ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
‘It has everything to do with it,’ he says. ‘Thirty-five? Forty? Whatever. Why has it taken you this long to go after what you really want in life?’
‘Because life isn’t that simple!’
‘Yes, it is. If you want something, you go and you get it. If you wanted to be a writer, you should have done it twenty years ago. Don’t give me excuses, I’ve been in prison, and I’ve heard them all before. If only it wasn’t for bad luck. If only this. If only that. But now it’s too late, and you are being punished for your hesitancy. You’re being punished by somebody younger than you who knows exactly what he wants and how to get it.’
After hearing his little speech, I feel like reaching across the table and wrapping my hands around this man’s throat, but I resist and not just because I know he would easily be able to fend me off. I resist because there is some truth in what he is saying. It should never have taken me this long to go after what I wanted to do. Yes, life has thrown some curveballs at me, like my unexpected pregnancy and my thief of an ex-boyfriend, but I also know that there was something else holding me back too, and it was something completely in my control.
My own self-belief.
But now that I’m older and wiser, I have that belief. I know what I am capable of, and I know how strong I am in any situation. Yet here is life again, throwing me another curveball. If it were just up to me, then I would fight my way out of this situation and not give in. But it’s not about me now. It’s about Louise too. I have to do what’s best for her, and my tormentor is only too happy to remind me of that as he looks down at his phone and smiles.
‘Your daughter is becoming a problem,’ he tells me. ‘My partner is growing impatient with her.’
‘What has he done?’ I ask, the fear rising in my throat.
‘Nothing yet. But he will do unless you give us that code.’
‘I want to speak to Louise again,’ I say, holding out my hand towards him to take his phone. ‘I want to know she is all right.’
But he simply laughs and turns his device around so I can see the photo on the screen.
‘I’m afraid Louise is a little tied up right now,’ he says, and my eyes widen in horror as I see the image of my daughter on the bed with her hands fastened to the bedpost behind her.
18
LOUISE
I’ve promised James I’m not going to scream again, and in turn, he has promised not to gag me again. But I haven’t been able to convince him to untie me from the bedpost, so I’m stuck here as I watch him pacing around the room in front of me while he checks his mobile phone.
I honestly didn’t know what was going to happen when he locked the front door and dragged me towards the bedroom with his hand over my mouth, but I feared the worst when he told me that my mum would die unless I stopped trying to get away from him.
With that ominous warning rattling around in my head, I resisted only slightly as James tied me to my mum’s bed with the cable tie that he took out of his rucksack and wrapped around my wrists.
And there was me believing that he just kept his gym clothes in that bag.
Now I’m stuck here at the mercy of a man I thought I not only loved but could trust, and I’m terrified. What is he going to do to me? What is he going to do to Mum?
Why is this happening to us?
‘James, talk to me, please,’ I say after another unnerving moment of silence has passed.
I have asked him several times to explain his plan to me, but the threat of him gagging me made me give it a rest for a moment. I don’t want him to stop me speaking because then I really will be powerless to do anything. As long as I have my voice, then I have an opportunity to talk him out of whatever he thinks he is going to do, and I believe that is my only chance.
I could try screaming again, but it didn’t do me much good last time. Nobody is at home in the neighbouring flats during the day, so there is no one to hear my cries for help. I know that because I’m home all day, and I barely hear a sound inside this building other than the ones I make. Everybody’s at work, and I used to like that I was the only one who wasn’t. But now I’m wishing that I had had somewhere else to be today because then I wouldn’t have been home when James came around and surprised me.
‘Why are you doing this to me?’ I ask him, battling back tears. ‘I thought you loved me.’
I’m laying it on a little thick, but I did genuinely think we had something special together. I was obviously wrong. Maybe the guys my age aren’t so bad after all. I doubt any of them would have tied me to the bed like this.
But James continues to ignore me and still seems preoccupied with his mobile phone.
‘Who are you waiting for?’ I ask him. ‘Why do you keep looking at your phone?’
‘Just shut up,’ he replies coldly.
‘Not until you tell me what this is about,’ I fire back. ‘Is it my mum? Has she done something?’
James finally looks up from his phone. ‘She hasn’t done anything. But you have.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘This,’ James replies, and he turns and opens the wardrobe behind him. Then he kic
ks the door to the safe that sits at the bottom of the storage unit, and I feel a wave of nausea because I know what he is after now. The safe is buried beneath a pile of clothes that Mum thinks will stop anybody from finding it should they break in. But James has clearly found it, and I know why, but he is more than happy to remind me.
‘You told me about this safe, remember,’ James says. ‘That’s why you’re now tied up on that bed, and I’m about to open it and take all your money.’
A wave of dread washes over me as he finally tells me what this is all about. Yes, I told him about my mum’s safe a few weeks ago, but so what? He knows I can’t get into it.
Then I figure it out. I can’t open it. But my mum can.
‘What have you done to her?’ I ask, terrified to hear the answer.
‘We haven’t done anything yet,’ James replies. ‘And we won’t, as long as she gives us the code to open this.’
He kicks the door again, and I can see that he is getting more frustrated by the second. That must mean that the plan isn’t going as well as he had hoped so far.
‘Why would she give you the code?’
James suddenly turns back to me with a venomous look. ’To save you,’ he snarls. ‘Or at least you’d better hope she does.’
This can’t be happening. James is using me to blackmail my mum into opening her safe, the safe he only found out about because I blabbed about it to him.
I feel awful for being so careless with what should have been private information.
Mum is never going to forgive me for this one.
‘Where is she? Who is with her? Have you got her tied up somewhere too?’ I ask, afraid not just for my own safety now but for hers as well. She isn’t as strong as me. She must be so afraid. And I’m the one to blame.
‘Calm down. Your mum is fine,’ James tells me. ‘She’s on the train, and she will be back in Brighton soon, just like she told you she would be. But she has to give us the code before she gets home, or you won’t be here when she arrives.’
‘Who is us? Who are you talking about?’
‘My partner,’ James replies with a sly smile, and the sight of it makes me feel sick. I can’t believe this is the man I let into my bed.
‘Is this all I was to you? Just a way to make some money?’
‘No, of course not,’ James replies. ‘At first, you were just a way for me to blow off some steam after I got out of prison. I wasn’t planning on seeing you again after we slept together the first time. But then you told me about the safe, and that’s when I realised that you weren’t just some stupid teenager. You could actually be valuable to me.’
There are a lot of things James just said that concern me, but one word jumped out the most. ‘You’ve been in prison?’
James finally stops looking at his phone and steps closer to the bed until he is standing right beside me, glaring down at me as I wriggle on the mattress and try to get free of my restraints.
‘That’s right. I was only in for assault, but I was around all sorts of people on the inside who had committed worse crimes than me, including murder,’ James says. ‘And let me tell you something. Once I got to know them, I saw that there wasn’t much difference between me and them. There wasn’t much difference at all.’
19
JAMES
ONE YEAR EARLIER
‘Didn’t your mother tell you it was dangerous to talk to strangers?’
As greetings go, it was an unfriendly one, but then I hadn’t really expected anything less in a place full of criminals, con men and cowards. The words from my cellmate when I met him for the first time didn’t put me off getting to know him, but I still remember them to this day, over two years on. Fortunately, we’re much closer now, which makes sharing a twelve-by-eight-foot room a little less awkward than it was when I first walked in here. I’ve since learnt my cellmate’s real name, but ever since his ominous greeting, I nicknamed him “Stranger”, and he doesn’t seem to mind. He wouldn’t be sitting across this table from me now playing poker if he did.
Reminding myself of something Stranger taught me, which is to stay present in the moment, I stop reminiscing on how we met and instead focus on the task at hand, shuffling the cards so we can play again.
I love this deck of cards. It’s the only thing I have in here that reminds me of my hometown. The back of each card features a photo taken somewhere around Brighton. The Pier. The beach. The high street. The train station. None of the photos are particularly exciting, and they certainly aren’t as explicit as the photos on the back of my fellow prisoner’s packs of cards, but they are a reminder of where I come from. I don’t miss Brighton particularly, but I do miss being free, and these cards are a reminder that there is a world outside these four walls.
‘Are you going to deal or what?’
I look up at Stranger staring at me impatiently for the next game to begin, and because this isn’t the kind of place where you want to irritate someone, I shrug and deal the cards quickly. Two each. Five face down in the middle. We don’t have anything to play for but pride and the tiny amounts of money we earn doing menial tasks every day inside here. So far, I’ve already lost the £1.70 I made working in the laundry room last week.
While I’ve always been used to dealing with pathetic amounts of money in the outside world, the man I’m playing with has not. Stranger has been my cellmate for the past two years, but before that he tells me he was quite the high roller in London. He was a grifter, targeting vulnerable marks and tricking them out of large sums of money, which is what landed him in here alongside me, but not before he had a great time flashing the cash in the capital. But just like me, he got caught, so now it’s all gone, and he’s just as broke as I am.
As I turn over the first three cards in the middle and we begin to play our hands, I study the man sitting opposite me. But it’s not from a poker perspective. It’s from a personal one. I’m only twenty-one, and my cellmate is nine years older than me, and that extra experience he possesses has taught me a lot since we have been in here together. I ended up behind bars because of a crime I committed with my fists, but my cellmate is here because of a crime he committed with his brain. That is something I am very interested in because I want things to be different when I get released back into the outside world.
I don’t want to go around beating people up for insignificant sums of money.
I want to be smarter, and I want to get some serious cash.
We’ve already agreed that we will keep in touch once we are both out of prison. We are both due to be released within the next twelve months, and we have decided to work together when that time comes. We might make an unlikely pair with our age gap and varied experiences, but we are different enough to complement each other, and we share the two same burning desires.
We want to get rich, and we don’t want to end up back inside here again.
As I turn over the fourth card in the middle and see my hopes of winning this hand shrink, I wonder what kind of schemes we will be able to run together when we are free men. I plan to spend a little time in Brighton when I first get released, seeing old friends and hopefully hooking up with a few old girlfriends before I join Stranger in London, where we will run cons together. At first, my prospective partner told me that I lacked the patience to be a grifter and that the key to successfully taking the money from any mark was to take your time. I agreed that was a skill I wasn’t particularly strong on, but I have worked hard on that during my time behind bars. There aren’t many places better to help you learn patience than prison.
I was relieved when he told me that he was willing to work with me, and I am sure we can make some good money together, just as soon as we can get away from these poker hands for pathetic prizes and play in the real world for much bigger stakes. We’ll both still be young men after we have served our sentences, and there will be plenty of time to earn the kinds of fortunes that I know both of us dream about when the lights go out in this prison, and we’re alone on
our beds with nothing but our imagination.
As I turn over the fifth and final card and my hopes of winning this hand dwindle even further, I can hear the noise from outside our cell door where the rest of the inmates on this wing are gathered in the communal area, playing table tennis, watching TV, or sitting around chatting. Murderers. Thieves. Common thugs. All bundled into one place and expected to exist together without any problems. But while I have witnessed plenty of trouble since I have been in here during my stretch, including threats, fights, and even a riot, I have kept myself out of all of them. That isn’t because I lack the necessary tools to thrive in a dangerous place like this. It’s because the only problems I want to cause now are in the outside world with my new partnerand the sooner I get out of here, the sooner I can start doing some damage where it really counts.
As my cellmate turns over his cards and shows that he has beaten me again, I smile, not because I’m happy to lose, but because I know we are both going to win in the long term. As soon as we get out of here, there is nothing that is going to stop us. I want to succeed badly. And I know that he does too.
‘Nice hand,’ I tell him as he collects the cards and prepares to take his turn to shuffle them, but he doesn’t offer anything back. Not that I expected him to. Knowing him as well as I do now, his mind will already be on the next hand because that’s how he likes to think. He’s always planning several steps ahead. I guess that’s the biggest lesson he has taught me in here.
Make a plan. Execute it. But always have another one to implement immediately afterwards. I will bear that in mind when we get out of here. I will also bear in mind his other piece of advice, the one he reminded me of on the day we met.
‘Didn’t your mother tell you it was dangerous to talk to strangers?’
20
STRANGER
