The Magpie Trap: A Novel

by AJ Kirby

  ‘Just keep your head down; we’ve nearly made it. All we have to do is get through those gates…’

  My legs are shaking uncontrollably as I queue for boarding. Danny helpfully tells the concerned air hostess that I have never been on a plane before and am simply scared. I have managed to get hold of some sleeping tablets, and as soon as I sit down, oblivion sweeps over me.

  As long as I don’t wake up screaming, everything will be okay…

  The Investigation

  Jim Hunter arranged to meet his old superior, Chief Superintendent Dave Merton, at a small café called Sheila’s, which was just outside Wakefield. Merton was based at the West Yorkshire Police headquarters in Wakefield, but had always preferred his case review meetings to be held on neutral ground where they would not be interrupted. He also liked his staff to buy him his lunch and coffee; there were so few perks in the police force that one had to take them where he could. Even though Jim was off the force, he suspected that the reason Merton had agreed to meet him was so that he could tally one up for his favour-bank in case anything ever went wrong in his career. Most of the high-ranking policemen he knew worked on this system of giving and calling-in favours; the only other group Jim knew which was as rife with such behaviour was organized crime.

  Merton arrived late, bumbling into the café with all of the poise of a mole; Hunter could see that his old boss had still not had corrective surgery on his eyes, nor had he reverted to contact lenses. He still wore milk-bottle glasses which highlighted the meanness lingering in his small, rodent eyes. He wore a long black coat, which he clearly thought lent him an air of authority, but which instead made him look rather like he had bought the wrong size. But Hunter knew that Merton’s appearance belied an aggressive sense of purpose; he over-compensated for his poor eyesight and lack of height with a terrier-like resolve.

  Merton shuffled towards Jim’s table, pretending not to see him until the last minute. He ordered a coffee and one of the café’s special Big Breakfasts with the attentive waitress, and then finally sat down opposite Hunter.

  ‘Long time no see; although I believe that you’ve seen a few of my new detectives recently,’ said Merton. He was leaning forward over the table; eyes boring into Hunter.

  They shared some small talk, but the long, awkward silences were a real problem for Jim. He kept trying to fill them with pointless talk about the weather, football, anything but that terrible quietness. Merton didn’t seem the least bit bothered by the silences. Instead he seemed to relish them; in fact, he probably used such techniques in the interview room as a way of inducing the criminal to talk just to fill the gaps.

  Over the course of their lunch, Merton made Jim wait for the information he so desperately required; perhaps he wanted Hunter on his knees, begging. The two of them had a chequered history while they were colleagues at West Yorkshire Police, which had culminated in a rather unseemly fight in the car park at Millgarth Station in Leeds. The reason behind the fight could have been picked from a whole deck of grievances, but most likely was the fact that Merton had somehow squirmed his way to a promotion which was by all accounts nailed on for Hunter. Hunter supposed that Merton had only got the job through his contacts in the Masons. And Merton knew that this was what Hunter suspected; as though he thought Merton not deserving enough of a promotion for any other reason. This had, of course led to bitterness on both sides. Now, Merton was enjoying his position of real power. Finishing his second coffee, he carefully dabbed at the sides of his mouth with his napkin, drawing out the tension for as long as he possibly could.

  Finally Jim snapped: ‘Okay, you’ve had your fun. Now, are you going to tell me what I need to know?’

  Merton was now playing with the salt shaker, pouring small quantities onto the red and white table cloth, and then blowing it distractedly away and onto the floor. They were the only people in the café, and the waitress was watching him with mild annoyance.

  Eventually, he deigned to speak: ‘I don’t know how much I can tell you. You’re off the force, and you’re on suspension from Edison’s. You’re no longer involved…’

  Hunter’s anger took over. ‘Whatever fun you’re getting from this in your twisted mind, just forget it. I know I’m in your debt, now get on with it. The real punishment comes from knowing that man is in hospital with a machine doing his breathing for him…’

  ‘Careful now Jim,’ Merton warned, eyes narrowing still further. ‘You forget who you are talking to.’

  Hunter had to raise his voice; the waitress had increased the volume on the radio behind the counter to excruciating proportions, probably trying to get rid of them so she could have a break. ‘I’m not going to interfere with anything! I need to know for…’

  Suddenly the waitress turned off the radio, and Jim was still shouting. He continued, more quietly, ‘I need to know for my own peace of mind, and that only. It’s the police’s job now, and I wish you luck with it. I just need to know whether Burr was a part of it or not…’

  Suddenly tired of his game, Merton tutted and began to take things more seriously. Hunter watched him run his fingers through his fine, thin black hair. It almost looked like fur; he was becoming more and more like a mole through the years.

  ‘I will tell you this because no matter what people say, you were an excellent copper. You had an eye for detail, a nose for trouble, and a memory for faces which made you a natural at the job. I had to work, and work at doing it even half as well as you did, and it fucking frustrated me to see you pissing all that talent up the wall. I deserved that promotion; I know it riles you, but I did, I worked for it; I stayed in control. It had nothing to do with the Masons, no matter how much you thought it did…

  Anyway, I had to get that off my chest; I want you to know that I am not telling you any of this through any malicious thoughts of revenge… You lost it Jim; Burr planned it right under your nose. He even used your access card. I know you’ll deny it ‘til the cows come home, but were you drinking again?’

  Hunter weighed his old adversary up across the table, feeling as though he was in a scene from the De Niro and Pacino film, Heat.

  ‘You used to think of me as something like a nemesis, but I never thought of you that way. I just couldn’t believe how naïve you were sometimes,’ Hunter paused. ‘But I know that the shoe is on the other foot now. I simply do not know what happened. I have my inklings; that sixth sense has never left me, the problem is, I just don’t listen enough to it any more.’

  Merton chased a stray baked bean around his plate with his fork. He looked like the word ‘nemesis’ had really got to him. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Enough of the bullshit; I have things to do this afternoon. This is where we are; we are about to make an arrest. What we’ve found from our initial investigations is that Burr was part of an inside job to rob the printers. He is assumed to have pinched your card and gone to open up the Precisioner Unit, using both cards; you always need two to get in, don’t you?’

  ‘So, who are you arresting?’

  Merton stopped playing with his food and looked at Jim carefully, as if weighing up how much to tell him, but then ploughed on regardless.

  ‘Now, this is all a bit short-hand, but what we’ve had teams working round the clock on this for the past few days. Edison’s are a key business in West Yorkshire and it is in everyone’s interest to make sure an arrest is made and quickly.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And there are only two or three gangs in the country that could have pulled off something like this. Two or three that aren’t in prison anyway. We’ve had tabs on two of the prime suspects for the past couple of days. As it happens, we’ve managed to find a link between one of these men and Burr. We’ll be bringing the whole gang down to the station for questioning later.’

  ‘Who is it? You going after the Wardle crew again?’ asked Hunter, narrowing his eyes. Merton always went for the Wardle crew; it was his one final ambition for his remaining years on the force to pin something on them.


  ‘I can’t tell you,’ said Merton, in a voice that told Hunter everything that he needed to know.

  ‘You can’t drag them in for every crime that’s committed in West Yorkshire. And do you not think their M.O is a bit different from this?’

  ‘The guys that did this were professionals, Hunter; they ignored the majority of the cash - a lot of it worthless - and went straight for the printer itself. They now have a licence to print money and it’ll be pretty hard to trace where it came from…’

  ‘But that still doesn’t mean that it was the Wardle crew. Look; the way I see it is this job could have been done by anyone. It didn’t have to be one of your notorious gangs. Technology’s moved on; these old-school guys don’t have the understanding any more. It could have been anyone that has knowledge of the new security systems and this Intertel Shift thing…’

  Hunter paused, noticing the smirk on Merton’s face.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing; it’s just funny hearing you talk about technology like that. Like you know what you’re talking about. I remember back in the Millgarth days when they had to hire a whole typing pool to write up your reports for you.’

  ‘That’s what I mean,’ said Hunter, slapping the table. ‘Me, you, the Wardle crew; we’re all like cave-men. The guys that did this are like a new breed. They know things that we couldn’t possibly hope to…’

  Merton interrupted, leaning in close and whispering. ‘We have our crew. We don’t know ho they got away, but we have them. Don’t bring your techno-phobia to me as an excuse to try to wangle your way back onto the force.’

  ‘You just want it brushed under the carpet and put to bed so the business interests are happy,’ accused Hunter. He was alarmed at the number of ifs and buts in the story he’d just heard. ‘There’s so much that you don’t know… What about the hackers who destroyed the CCTV images? Are there no other leads? It just doesn’t seem right.’

  ‘Look; this is what used to piss me off about you,’ Merton sighed in frustration. ‘You just won’t let things go… We have evidence, which checks out, by the way, that links a known gang of armed robbers based in Leeds to a vehicle that we found burned out in Armley… I have a team working on that vehicle now. We have the links to Burr…’

  ‘What links?’

  ‘He’s on the ex-forces rugger team with one of the men if you must know,’ breathed Merton. Then he started counting down the fingers on his hand; ‘We have motive, opportunity, the inside man, a getaway vehicle. All we need now is them to lead us to where they have hidden the printer. And we are watching them like hawks.’

  ‘I know that you’re doing me a favour telling me all this, Merton, I really do, but something’s not right in all of this. It all seems too obvious. Are you sure that you have the right gang?’

  Merton splurted out a half-laugh, half-cough, ‘What are you suggesting? The Wardle crew is our target; one of their men has been seen staking out the Edison’s site in the past. They’ve got form. We’ve got a dossier on them that’s thicker than my dick.’

  Hunter doubted whether moles like Merton had thick dicks but thought better of raising the query. Instead, he tried to press home his doubts about the technological expertise of the Wardle crew. ‘But have they got form for manipulating CCTV images?’ he asked. ‘Or for hacking into site security networks? Sounds like your armed robbers have upped their game from relying on guns to get them the access to the sites…’

  Merton put his hand across the table and gripped Hunter’s arm tightly, ‘Jim, just promise me you won’t continue for your own investigations… no, don’t look at me like that, I know that you’ve been back to Edison’s, rooting around the perimeter fencing, searching for something. You’ve been seen. Promise me you won’t go back… I don’t want any more cock-ups in this case. We missed the getaway van, but can recover on that one. All we need now, as I said, is them to lead us to the loot and then we’ll have them bang to rights. They’re still in the country, Jim, biding their time.’

  Hunter doubted that. He shook his head wearily.

  ‘They can’t spend anything at the moment anyway,’ continued Merton. ‘Not unless they learn how to change the settings on that printer. The only notes it’ll print out are bloody Mauritian rupees. Apparently there was a problem with the printer even before the heist.’

  With that, Merton stood up to his full height and heartily shook his former colleague’s hand, parting on what he thought were good terms. For Hunter, though, those antennae on his head were twitching again, he sensed trouble.

  Were the police looking in the wrong direction?

  Despite being warned off, Hunter still made it his mission to drive up to Edison’s Printers to conduct his on investigation. He knew something was not right, that the police were allowing themselves to believe a too-simple story. They wanted to compartmentalise, shut down, to reach a conclusion; they just weren’t being careful enough in their route to this deduction.

  He had always worked on hunches, and he had a strong one now; he just didn’t believe that the Wardle crew could have been as technologically-skilled as to set up a dummy network on the night. Someone was involved who knew about the Intertel Network Shift, but who?

  Hunter avoided the Security Lodge - he was still on suspension after all - and instead concentrated on the perimeter. He wanted to cover every blade of grass on the boundary. He knew that there would be some evidence waiting for him if he just looked hard enough.

  He wore his tough, warm walking gear; hiking boots, a brown cagoule and a deerstalker hat; it was a good disguise. If he was discovered walking the perimeter, he could simply say he was out for a walk… although he might have to try hard to explain the evidence bags which he’d brought with him in his rucksack.

  Hunter parked up by a small overgrown farm track to the side of the

  Harrogate Road. He pulled his coat tightly around him against the forceful wind and set off at a steady pace. He usually walked very quickly, as though he was always late for an important meeting, but today he had to slow his pace in order that he could study his surroundings. He had to find something which was out of the ordinary. Because of its close proximity to the nearby eyesore of the print-works, his path was not a well-travelled one, and he knew that if he did find anything, it would more than likely be something left by this mysterious ‘other group’ of techno whizz-kids.

  The track began to descend into a thickly wooded valley, and Hunter had to hold on to a dry stone wall in order to stay on his feet. The ground was still saturated from the heavy rain of earlier and large amounts of muddy water spilled over the top of his boots. He cursed as he lost his footing, and almost fell over, but managed to rectify himself by grabbing an over-hanging tree branch.

  If the whizz kids did come this way, then they surely wouldn’t have managed to stay on their feet either, he thought to himself. A man could easily twist his ankle in these kind of conditions, especially as they would have had to do this in the dark.

  Gradually the track began to straighten out again, and the thick tree cover began to thin. He realised that the track was now actually leading away from the printers, and was instead running almost parallel to

  Harrogate Road; he could hear the whisper of the distant traffic being carried by the wind. Suddenly, as he turned a sharp bend, Jim stopped dead. There, on the dry stone wall, was a long streak of blue paint, and it was fresh. A vehicle had clearly tried to navigate the turn far too quickly and had scraped a huge wound in its side, spilling its blue blood all over the wall.

  Who would have had needed to be driving so fast? Obviously someone was making a getaway. Jim crouched to study the blue scar, measuring its length, height, and the exact colour of the paint.

  He removed one of the smaller stones making up the wall, taking care not to knock the whole thing over, and placed it carefully in one of his evidence bags. Looking up from his task, he noted that despite the rain flushing out much of the depth of the tyre tracks, he could still see t
he route that the vehicle had taken. He decided to follow the track still further.

  The track led once again into a densely wooded area; moisture retained by the trees was now dripping steadily onto the muddy floor, making the area almost impassible. Breathing heavily, Hunter made a beeline for a clearing in the centre of the wood and sat down on the trunk of a gnarled, old fallen tree which had crashed down onto the ground like a drunk at a party. He was not as fit as he used to be, despite the fact that he’d given up the drink.

  Jim loosened the laces on his boots, trying to get rid of some of the dirty water which had collected in them. Just as he had tipped the contents of the boot over the floor, he noticed the second clue. There, under one of the spread-eagled limbs of the inebriated tree, lay a pile of cigarette butts, and judging from their condition, they hadn’t been there for long. He hastily dug out a second evidence bag and placed them carefully inside with tweezers; there might still be traces of DNA on them.

  Hunter could feel himself getting closer; he may have been a day or two behind the criminals, but at least he had picked up the scent.

  He was about to return to his seat on the fallen tree when he spotted the flock of magpies at the edge of the clearing. There must have been seven of them, and instead of being scared of him, they simply regarded him with quizzical looks. They lent the scene a menacing air, hopping about robotically looking for a gleam of something to steal.

  One of their number was pecking at something on the ground, and the others kept barging in, beaks tearing into their rival’s feathers. But this magpie was strong, and didn’t want to lose his place at the feast; he flapped his wings in warning and resumed tearing at the floor. It was a dead animal; a mouse or a vole, and its head was missing. A stream of blood poured from the magpie’s beak as he continued to pull out tasty entrails.

  Hunter felt sick; he picked up a nearby stone and threw it hard amongst the creatures, scattering them all over. They screeched noisily at him, and for a moment, he thought they were going to attack him, but then they just returned to the ominous quietness as they sat in a tree and watched him leave the clearing.