The Magpie Trap: A Novel

by AJ Kirby

  Some kind of robotic self-defense mechanism took control of Mark and, as if in a trance, he met the next one of Burr’s wild swings of the baton with the cable cutters, sending a painful jarring shock up his arm. Burr stopped; taken aback.

  Now’s your chance; attack him now. Drive him back; you might still be able to escape. This doesn’t have to end badly.

  Mark lifted the cable cutters above his head. From somewhere he heard a full-throated war-cry. It took him a second to realise that the sound was coming from his own throat. He swung.

  All it required was a short, sharp thrust forward of Mark’s hand; the application of as much force as to push a car door closed. But perhaps the hand of fate was also on the cable cutters, applying the real strength behind the blow. There was no hackneyed slow-motion ‘life-flashing before the eyes’ as the sharp blade of the cable cutters cracked through Burr’s skin and into his skull as though it was an egg-shell. It seemed unreal. But then the scarlet yolk of his blood seeped through the jagged cut; a trickle also bubbled from his open mouth.

  Burr tried to speak, but more blood vomited out. He staggered forward, reaching out with a trembling hand. He grasped Mark’s fleece and stared into his eyes, accusing. Then his life started to drain away.

  Mark knew straight away that he had killed him; he watched with cold, inhuman detachment as the light in Callum Burr’s eyes gradually faded and his desperate hands slipped defeated from Mark’s fleece.

  Mark looked down on himself from afar; he saw himself as though from the heights of the panopticon control room. He fiddled with the mechanics inside his head, trying to find the right spark to coax his legs into movement. His body was closing down; he knew this, and he simply had to re-establish the connection; to reassert the network link between his brain and his body.

  Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, he had lost the connection for his soul.

  A short, sharp pulse of electric current woke Mark from stand-by mode; it was Chris, who’d evidently managed to overcome the injury to his head. Chris was shaking him. A swathe of blood had spread across his face like war-paint; a murderous look was in his eyes.

  ‘Come on Mark! There’s another guard coming,’ he bellowed. ‘Head for the Precisioner Unit, I’ve just tried the door and it is open.’

  He pulled Mark after him towards the open doorway, pausing only to grab the sports bag. The cable cutters were still in Mark’s vice-like grip; their cold touch his only connection with reality.

  ‘We can still get away with this,’ he roared as they started their descent into the Precisioner’s underground lair. ‘We can still win.’

  Mark followed without knowing what he was doing. He didn’t know how the door had come to be opened; he didn’t know how he was even walking. All he knew was that he had to get away from the sight of Callum Burr’s prone body and the threat of another security guard on their tail.

  You’ve killed someone. You’ve taken the life of another person.

  He screwed up his eyes and allowed himself to be dragged down. When he opened them again, he realised that they were within the treasure trove. He saw the piles of money on the crates. It was like Monopoly money now. He saw the CCTV cameras perched in the ceiling, no more than toys. He saw the devastation that his life would become, now that it would be defined by the one act of taking another person’s life. His own life had ended when he had swung the cable cutters at Callum Burr; somehow they had cut the cable to his own soul too.

  Chris, meanwhile, was laughing maniacally as he swept armfuls of cash into the sports bag. Mark heard one word over and over: ‘Todd!’ Chris was repeating the name as though it was a sacred chant.

  Mark watched on, overwhelmed by shock. Then they heard the shouts of the second security guard.

  Danny reeled back aghast, cracking the back of his head against the van door. He could not believe the evidence of what he had seen with his own eyes. He rubbed at them with the palm of his hand, attempting to wipe away the surreal memory.

  He tried to compose himself; perhaps there had been a problem with the camera feed? Perhaps he’d somehow tuned into a low-grade British gangster flick?

  Yes. That’s more like it. That would be the only way to explain the almost filmic progression of the heist; complete with graphic violence, murder, and the criminals’ escape with the money by the skin of their teeth. The compulsory security guard had been killed too; collateral damage.

  But Danny kept returning to the executioner’s eyes; they were identical to Mark’s; perhaps it wasn’t a film. Perhaps there wasn’t anything wrong with the camera feed. Perhaps his friend had really swung that heavy implement toward a man’s head and broken it in two.

  He slumped into the makeshift seat in the back of the van and watched as Chris and Mark suddenly appeared in the Precisioner Unit; he watched Chris ramming as much cash into the sports bag as he possibly could. Chris then unplugged the Precisioner printer itself, and shoved it into the top of the bag, displacing a wad of notes which scattered over the floor. To Danny, the whole scene seemed too sick, too anarchic; it had become extreme; a snuff movie. The taking of the money was like a vulgar embellishment of the plot; a needless extra. Surely the money was no longer the point?

  Danny watched as Chris and Mark slunk away into the night, narrowly avoiding the next security guard who arrived on the scene. Then they were over the fence, and away. Danny curled into a foetal comma in the back of the van, and waited for either the police or the executioners to arrive…

  Mark ran and he kept on running. He ran up and out of the Precisioner unit, somehow managing to evade the attentions of the second security guard. The guard was crouched over Callum Burr’s broken body and didn’t look up as they passed. Mark didn’t even know if they’d been spotted. In fact, he hardly knew anything any more. The guard hadn’t chased them, and that must have meant that Burr was dead, or at death’s door.

  As shrill alarms sounded across the site Mark ran. As more and more of the security lights flicked on he ran. He ran down the scarred pathways of the printworks, hardly caring whether he was going in the right direction, hardly caring if the cameras were working again and could see his uncovered face. He reckoned that they’d be able to see his face anyway. Even if he’d been wearing a mask the mark of a murderer was on him now.

  He climbed the security fence as though it was not there. He felt no pain from his leg. All he remembered was the fact that he had to run. He had to run as if the ghost of Callum Burr was behind him; fountains of accusatory blood splurging from his mouth.

  He streaked ahead of Chris, who was struggling with the sports bag and its heavy, blood-stained contents.

  ‘Leave the bag!’ he yelled. But Chris wouldn’t listen. He was drunk on adrenaline now and high from the violence he’d observed.

  Over the fence, Mark hardly cared as he slid most of the way down the bank again, once more falling over onto his ankle. He heard Chris cursing and shouting as he followed, but he did not stop to offer a helping hand. If Chris let the money go, then he’d help.

  In the van, Danny heard the approach of the two thieves; the two executioners; the two bad men. For a moment, he thought about jumping into the front seat and driving away, leaving them to face whatever fate had in store for them, but Mark was there too quickly, banging on the passenger door window, his face smeared with filth and fear.

  ‘Let me in, Danny,’ said Mark, in this strange monotone voice. Danny complied; he saw the cable cutters still in Mark’s hand.

  Then Chris was back, still clutching the heavy sports bag. The zip couldn’t close properly and a couple of notes looked as though they were going to spill out.

  ‘Fire up the engine,’ yelled Chris, throwing the bag through the open door and into the back of the van.

  Danny did as he was told again. He keyed the ignition and slammed his foot onto the accelerator. The van’s wheels whined and spun in the mud but the van would not move.

  ‘Give it some more gas!’ yelled Chris
.

  Danny slammed his foot onto the accelerator again. Through the back window, he saw the wave of mud that was being thrown up by the wheels, but the van still would not move.

  ‘Someone’s going to have to get out and push,’ he breathed.

  Without warning, Mark jumped out of the van door and raced to the back doors. With a strength that none of them had believed he possessed – until they’d seen him swing at Callum Burr at least – he launched the van out of its boggy grave. As soon as Mark was back on board, Danny raced away through the trees, not even slowing down when he clipped the side of the van against an unseen wall or the trunk of a tree.

  ‘Danny; calm down mate; you don’t want to crash the fucking thing,’ said Chris.

  Danny stared off into the darkness but did not speak. Mark started to cry; quietly at first, but eventually his sobbing filled the van. Chris and Danny ignored him, Danny navigating a tight right-hand turn which edged them closer to the road.

  ‘It’s over, mate. Now stop behaving like a dickhead and get us out of here in one piece,’ said Chris.

  Danny tightened his grip on the wheel but did not decrease their pace. They flew round the bend. ‘Don’t ever talk to me that way again, not after what you’ve both done,’ he growled, never once taking his eyes off the road. ‘Mark; stop that bloody snivelling.’

  Mark’s sobbing only increased in volume, an uncontrollable torrent of grief; he was a murderer. As they escaped Edison’s Printers, this thought reverberated through his mind like the ripples from a tombstone being dropped into a pond. He ran away from his thoughts; he didn’t want to see that lifeless corpse ever again.

  At first Danny and Chris’s conversation in the van had remained on the periphery of his hearing, like echoes from a faraway place, but gradually he began to understand that they were there with him. He was amazed that he still had the capacity to hear, to feel, after what he had done, but with the return of his senses came the stabbing, visceral pain of reality.

  ‘Sorry,’ breathed Chris. ‘It didn’t go to plan, but that doesn’t mean that we throw away all of the plans for the getaway. We’ve got this far without flashing blue-lights on our tail; just drive Danny.’

  ‘But you killed him,’ said Danny, softly. ‘You killed him.’

  ‘We talk about this later,’ said Chris, reasserting his control. ‘The flight is in three hours, and we can make it to your house in twenty minutes; a quick change and then we’ll dump the van and scarper to the airport. Understand?’

  ‘I understand,’ said Danny, edging the van out onto

  Harrogate Road. He gunned the engine again and raced away from the site towards freedom. They could talk about what had happened later. Chris recognised the minute easing of the tension: ‘We’ve nearly made it. Still no sign of the police; I was worried that they’d pass us on this road. Hell, I never thought we’d make it when the wheels got stuck back in the wood. ‘Mark; you have superhuman strength, man.’

  Mark thought Chris was referring to how hard he’d hit Burr and buried his face in his gloved hands. He felt as though he had been in a car crash; his whole being ached. His ankle in particular was agonising; it hung at an awkward angle over the edge of the makeshift seat in the back of the van, no doubt broken. He reached out to touch the ankle with his hand but realised that his arm was numb, probably from the effort of pushing the van out of the mud. But then he saw the reason why his arm was so numb, and the sobs began to rise in his throat yet again.

  Circulation to his hand had stopped; his white knuckles still squeezed the life out of the rubber grip of the cable cutters.

  Fallout

  Jim Hunter hung his head in shock. There was embarrassment and grief in there too. He could barely bring himself to explain to a third detective the events of that night; he could see the condescension in their eyes. They thought him just another washed-out ex-policeman who had failed in his final mission.

  ‘I told you. When I finally got to the crime scene, the intruders were already escaping. There was no way I could catch them. Callum Burr was dying. My priority is human life; I tried to resuscitate Mr. Burr, however there was no pulse. Mouth to mouth did not work; he had swallowed his tongue in the shock of the impact to his head.’

  The young detective regarded Hunter with an almost amused look. He looked so young, the detective; his upper lip was covered with a furry, bum-fluff moustache that was faintly ridiculous. It looked like one of those milk-moustaches that children get. Hunter wanted to reach out his hand and wipe it away.

  ‘Mr. Hunter,’ he said, stressing the mister part, prolonging the first vowel, ‘I’m afraid that it is no longer your job to work out how people died. And by the way, we don’t know that he is dead yet. We will decide that for ourselves. What I need to determine from you is whether Callum Burr was involved in this; whether it was an inside job.’

  ‘He’s not dead?’ asked Hunter, incredulous.

  ‘The medical team are with him now, working their magic. He’s badly hurt, yes, but you helped him a lot by acting the way you did.’ The young detective paused for a moment and cocked his head, regarding Hunter through narrowed eyes.

  ‘Not many people would have reacted the way you did,’ he continued finally. ‘But I reckon you made the right choice. Not that you’ll hear many of my men saying that.’

  Hunter grimaced. The young detective was trying to make him feel better. The recriminations would follow, but not yet.

  ‘Have your officers combed the perimeter for clues? A getaway van maybe?’ he asked in desperation; Mr. Wade was on his way, and he wanted to at least soften the blow for a man who he considered to be more than his boss; a friend maybe.

  The young detective frowned. There were too many people milling about for him to be able to talk openly.

  ‘How many times do I need to tell you?’ he asked. ‘The investigation of this crime is a police matter, and therefore cannot be discussed with members of the public.’

  Then the young detective leaned closer and whispered: ‘Look, sir, this could have happened to anyone… There is something you could do. Go and see my colleague, D.I Webster, and start sorting out the CCTV recordings. The quicker we do that, the quicker we’ll know who we are looking for.’

  Hunter smiled unhappily. The young detective obviously knew him from somewhere; hence the ‘sir’. Perhaps he’d worked under him in some long forgotten investigation. In that instant, he knew that the young man felt sorry for him and was probably promising himself that he’d never end up in a situation like Jim had. ‘Thanks lad,’ he said. ‘That’s all I needed to know. They managed to get away didn’t they?’

  And with that, Hunter walked away to give up the clothes he was wearing for analysis, and to check on the CCTV recordings.

  Danny, Chris and Mark followed their plan to the letter, despite their destroyed morale. Keeping to the strict schedule meant that they didn’t have to spend time thinking about what had happened.

  In the quiet early morning hours, they stopped at Danny’s North Leeds house and picked up his car. They took a few minutes to clean themselves up a bit; after all, they were going on a flight. They reckoned that by making the time sacrifice earlier, they could save drawing unnecessary attention to themselves when they were at the airport which would be literally crawling with police.

  While Mark sat in Danny’s front room in ashen-faced gloom, occasionally drooping the wet towel which Danny had provided over his head like a beaten boxer, Chris luxuriated in the shower, and then disguised his head-wound with a baseball cap, pulled down low over his eyes. Danny, meanwhile, stood by the window, twitching the curtains, expecting every set of headlights turning into his street to be the police, coming to make their arrests. They were now armed robbers and accessories to murder.

  As morning light broke, they drove in convoy through North Leeds and into Harehills, a place whose reputation dictated that it would be the ideal place to leave an unlocked van which was full of security equipment.


  Sure enough, almost as soon as Chris and Mark joined Danny in his car, parked a little further down the street, they saw a gang of youths approach the vehicle interestedly. It seemed that even so early in the morning, the promise of rich pickings had lured them out of their beds. Some laughing and cajoling was clearly going on amongst the group of youths, and then one of them playfully tried the catch on the back of the van; jumping backwards when the door swung open.

  ‘Just burn it out, you little fucker,’ whispered Chris.

  But the young boy simply closed the door carefully and reached into his pocket to pull out his mobile phone.

  In Danny’s car, the tension was again heightened.

  ‘Think he’s calling the police?’ Danny asked, sounding worried.

  ‘Don’t be stupid; he’s probably calling his older brother to help him carry all the equipment in the back…’

  As if on cue, a second van then screeched round the corner and came to a halt adjacent to their blue van. The gang of youths started to pass the security equipment from one van to the other with a practiced ease.

  ‘Come on, let’s go,’ said Chris. ‘They’ll make a killing selling that gear on. We don’t have to worry about it any more.’

  ‘Stop saying things like that,’ said Mark, coldly. ‘Stop saying things like “killing”.’

  ‘I didn’t mean it like that,’ said Chris. ‘Just shut up and forget about…’

  ‘How am I supposed to forget about it?’ shouted Mark. ‘I’ll never forget what I’ve done… But remember; you are both complicit in my crime.’

  ‘I wasn’t even inside the printers,’ said Danny. ‘You can’t blame me.’

  ‘I wasn’t the one holding those goddamn cable cutters,’ said Chris, menacingly.

  ‘Oh, just let me out of the car. Let me out, now. I can’t be a part of this.’ Mark sighed. ‘I knew that you two would shrug off the blame for this. I just knew it. Let me out.’