The Magpie Trap: A Novel

by AJ Kirby

Danny was scattering blood everywhere. He now looked as though he’d conducted some kind of ritual sacrifice to the altar of some craven god. The blood was flowing from two huge holes in Chris’s stomach; entrails crept out, slinking like snakes. There was no way, thought Hunter, that Chris was still alive.

  Hunter watched, aghast, as the Dodo quietly opened the metal mouth of the hut. Gun drawn, he marched Danny outside. He barked an order at Jim.

  ‘Drag that body into the sea; we’re nearly ready for the next show, and we can’t have anything like a dead body spoiling it.’

  Jim stood there dumbfounded, but was stirred into action by the Dodo lowering his gun to the side of the whimpering Danny’s head. He entered the hut, half-thinking that the metal bars would slam shut behind him, and clamped his eyes shut as he gripped the ankles of Chris Parker.

  He then dragged the dead weight of the body out of the hut, straining against the pressure of the sand. Pausing to wipe the sweat off his brow, he noticed that Danny was now being marched into the sea and being ordered to wash away the blood-red paint job which had been applied to the whole top half of his body. Jim almost resolved to run away, but then realised that he still had to see this through to the end. One way or another, he knew that the choices that he’d made had led him to this point; there was no way he could turn his back now.

  The Dodo is the puppet-master; the man pulling all of the strings, thought Hunter. It is as though he is putting on a show for a watching audience.

  And the Dodo had rehearsed well; he knew every stage entrance, every movement which his characters had to make. The only mistake, miscue, had been the failure of Danny to finish Chris off.

  This had clearly annoyed the Dodo, and there was an added vehemence to his instructions now. Jim saw that the man could barely hold himself back from whipping the pistol around Danny’s head; he was struggling to restrain himself. He ordered Danny to strip, and then selected a white suit and black shirt combination from Chris’s canvas bag for Danny to wear.

  Danny could barely dress himself he was that scared. He tried to thread his foot into the trouser-leg on three or four separate occasions but each time found that he was shaking too much. In the end, Hunter moved over to help him. The Dodo raised his gun again, but not before Hunter could whisper something into Danny’s ear.

  ‘Callum Burr is not dead. The security guard survived; you can still be saved.’

  Then the Dodo was upon them, and pushing Hunter away.

  ‘Do not speak to the accused,’ he said.

  Hunter backed away and watched as the Dodo began to set up his elaborate stage again for the next performance. There was an additional prop this time around; Danny’s mobile telephone.

  Staring over the precipice

  Danny Morris knew he had a choice to make. It was a similar choice to the ones that he made on an almost daily basis; he could continue to look out for himself and simply obey the Dodo’s barked commands or he could do something which would help somebody else. At the end, he could go some way towards redeeming his sorry excuse for a life. While he was pulling on another man’s trousers, an idea began to form in his mind. Casting a quick glance into the beach hut and finding the Dodo occupied with preparing the trap, Danny forced his foot into the sand and then dragged it backwards. He made his choice.

  Mark Birch performed his penance for his actions on a daily basis. Early each morning, he hiked across the beach to the small coastal village which had been devastated by the previous year’s storms. For a year, they’d not had electricity or running water. Mark set about trying to rectify the situation.

  He didn’t care if anyone was watching him; adding some to the tally of his ‘actions for good’ to balance the weighty column of his ‘actions for bad’, he simply believed that it was his duty. He worked tirelessly until lunch-time, when Mauritia would bring him some smoked fish, and then he would work again until the sun set. Then he would walk back home and begin the healing process in her tender arms.

  Mauritia’s medicine was the fruits from her fishing trips, and also her persistent probing at Mark’s character. She made him come out from the hiding place in which he’d been for most of his life. She made him talk about his thoughts, his feelings; she tried to assuage his guilt. She allowed no anaesthetic relief of forgetting what he’d done, but instead carefully drew out his poison. She knew that at first he’d be frightened of his lack of cover, the lack of his security blanket, but that eventually, this was the only way he’d be able to heal.

  But Mark was still undergoing his unique type of therapy when the telephone in the shack rang early that morning. Despite Mauritia’s cleansing of the wound of painful knowledge, it remained sore; an itch which had to be scratched. That’s why, without a word to her, he slipped out of their bed and trudged up the beach on the eastern coast of the island towards his appointment with destiny. It was the implied threat in his friend’s voice; the threat that Mark’s new reality could be shattered, which drove him onwards to the gates of hell.

  The sea had thrown up its nightly intake of flotsam and jetsam onto the shoreline like the remnants of a mad Friday night in Leeds. Pressed against Jim’s forehead, the gun felt cold, but had eventually warmed to the touch, moulding itself into his crumpled brow. From their vantage point, they had an ideal view of the beach hut, the jetty and the long stretch of sandy shore. They’d be able to see someone coming from miles off, shadowed against the perfect white sand as they’d be. And so the Dodo and Jim Hunter waited, crouching uncomfortably, pressed against the broken-tiled walls in the abandoned shower block.

  The Dodo was becoming impatient; the gun’s angry mouth was starting to bite into Jim’s head. The Dodo was muttering to himself, constantly shifting position in order to attain the perfect view of the hut.

  ‘This will look better on screen,’ Jim heard him say. “Television is the best moderator of images. This will be my prize-winning snuff movie…’

  Jim’s head was all over the place though; he couldn’t discern the relevance of the madman’s snarling soliloquy. It was almost as though the Dodo was practicing his lines.

  ‘I have placed the magpie in the cage. I have tied him to the chair; behind him is the money. The magpie is easy for all to see on approach, as the front wall of the hut is missing. What the audience and the approaching criminal will not see is the mechanical contraption which will snap shut onto the criminal as soon as he enters the hut.’

  Jim finally spoke, ‘What the hell are you talking about, the audience?’

  The Dodo laughed, ‘What did you think I was doing this for, you fool? Do you think I’m doing all of this for the fun of it? I am filming this; it’s a moral story. Your part is yet to come. You are the final act. What are you here for, if not to take the money?’

  Quick as a flash, Hunter realised the depraved nature of the Dodo’s plan. He was staging a gruesome show in order to broadcast it to the world. His intention was to show corruption of people when confronted with that dirty thing – money - and it was clear that the Dodo thought that Jim’s motivation for coming to Mauritius in the first place had been to run off with the money at the end.

  Had it been? Jim wasn’t convinced that somewhere deep down, there hadn’t been a part of him that had secretly desired that conclusion.

  ‘Hunter - you are my grand finale,’ continued the Dodo. ‘You are a man who seemingly wrestles with his conscience. And yet, your terrible fall will illustrate far better than any of the others that money can taint anybody. You are a former policeman. You know that once they are all dead, and I let you go, that you will take the money. You will see it as the key to a new life, so you no longer have to drink.’

  The Dodo pushed the whisky bottle towards Jim’s mouth at this point, forcing the burning liquid down his throat.

  ‘The overall effect of my composition will be to highlight to the world that changes have to be made in order that we can escape this den of iniquity in which we find ourselves. The story has shown that if there is
temptation, people will take it. People are always searching for an easy route to happiness; a quick fix. My story will show them that money is not on this path to enlightenment.’

  This man is almost definitely mad, thought Hunter. He decided that, as he was probably going to die anyway, there was no reason why he shouldn’t argue against him. Perhaps it could achieve something.

  ‘But all your audience will see is the act of a madman. Another tale of blood and guts to achieve some crazed political ideal. Can you not see that all you’ve achieved is a classic case of entrapment? You have staged all this; the temptation, the dangled carrot of a new life.’

  ‘Hunter,’ said the Dodo, suddenly angry, ‘Can you not see that these men have already committed their crime? They have made their choices; I did not induce them to steal from your Edison’s Printers. They threw themselves into it with hardly a whisper of persuasion from me. All I did was show them that it could be done. What they did with the information was their own choice. I have the tapes of them dirtying their hands with the money that night which you can’t bring yourself to think of.’

  ‘They have made one choice. We do not know the reasons why they made this choice. Your story omits any chance of redemption.’

  ‘It is the world which will be redeemed,’ the Dodo interrupted. ‘Think about it, Hunter. Why is money always described as dirty? You know, as in filthy lucre… It is only paper. And it is clean. You’ve seen the crisp pile of notes in the hut. Above all, they are clean. It is people that are filthy, dirty, that cannot keep their mucky paws off money. Same with your colleague Callum Burr.’

  ‘Burr?’

  ‘He was the first act; his death at the site was the very definition of a man driven wholly by his own greed. He had even spent his money before it was rightfully his.’

  Hunter chose not to tell the Dodo about Burr’s survival. It might be his only bargaining chip. Instead, he twisted the bottle of whisky in his large hands, its rusty contents dancing provocatively before his eyes. He felt the unquenchable thirst come on him now like never before. It was as though he had an itch in the back of his throat which he could only scratch by soaking it in whisky. The Dodo laughed as he watched Jim struggle against his inner demons.

  ‘You cannot win this argument, Hunter. Just give in and drink away your problems… like you always do.’

  Summoning all of his inner-strength, he suddenly wheeled round, smashing the bottle into the little demon’s face. Shocked at the crimson blood clouding his eyes, the Dodo dropped his gun.

  Hunter dived across the tiled floor to grab at it, feeling the Dodo’s claws ripping into the flesh on his neck. And then he rolled onto his back, the gun now safely in his grasp. The Dodo was thrown back against the w

  ‘Do not kill me Hunter,’ pleaded the Dodo. ‘You know I’m right…’

  As he pulled the trigger, Jim Hunter whispered a silent prayer.

  Three Wishes

  There generally comes a point in a man’s life when he realizes that he will not be granted his three wishes of fame, fortune and genius. That he must work; make his own luck. That he has not been born to be king, but is like everybody else, a drone in the hive.

  Jim Hunter had reached this conclusion earlier than most, and had been driven into a spiral of self-destruction by the power of this realization, the centrifugal force of his desire to escape his cynicism driving him deeper and deeper into that yawning plug-hole known as reality. But because he had plumbed these depths, had been discarded along with the dirty bathwater of the lowest common denominator of humanity, it had allowed him to become an adept detective in the police force. He could see through people, to their rotten inner-cores, and this helped him come to terms with foreign concepts such as motivation, anger and worthlessness. The Dodo had been some kind of evil reminder of what Hunter could have been.

  Gradually, he saw the slow-moving man – Mark Birch - appear on the horizon. He knew that he was going to do the right thing; he was going to take the man in. Call the relevant authorities. He just had to make sure that this was the right man. Therefore he kept the Magpie Trap set up exactly as the Dodo had left it. If the man proved to be Mark Birch, then surely he’d approach the beach hut, and then Hunter would know that he had the right man. Just like the Dodo, Hunter had to dangle a carrot to catch his man.

  It’s amazing sometimes to look back on those moments that change your life; the cross-roads. It can be something small; it can be a random, coincidental comment which opens up a whole world of possibility. But you never recognise their significance at the time. Having said that hindsight is a handy gadget we could all make good use of. By utilising hindsight’s handy playback facility, we can translate a series of unconnected events into a coherent story with a beginning, middle and end; a narrative structure which is as relentless as destiny.

  The spark by which Mark knew that his life was finally going to change for the better was the sight of something – a few words only – written into the sand. He’d never know who had written them, nor did he really care. In a way, he hoped it had been Danny, in a last-minute attempt to do something good in his life. But it could just as well have been that strange, foreign-voiced man that had always promised to help him.

  Burr not dead.

  Three words had the power to change everything. Suddenly Mark knew that he everything was going to be all right; he could make a life. Somewhere, deep down, Mark knew that he’d been on a quest to find his own answers to tricky questions such as fate, free will and selfhood; to find a life worth living. When his father died, it had made him consider all of these questions deeply.

  What was he was missing? Was it money? Was it adventure? Was it sex? Was it a heart, was it a brain, was it a soul? When Mark saw the writing in the sand, he knew that what he’d been missing was the ability to be comfortable with what he already had, and therefore be able to wish for something else. The three words were more than just words; they were a sign.

  Mark realised that Chris, Danny and he had all had their own dreams which were all wrapped up with money. Chris had wanted adventure, and to put distance between him and his father. Danny needed money to facilitate his escape from a life which wasn’t as bad as he’d thought. Mark had thought that he wanted money in order that he could be a hero with it and save his mother. They had all attached the ability to do something to being able to steal the money; they’d all taken an almost cowardly route to achieving these things. They were trying not to work for something but to get it handed to them on a plate.

  Mark understood that if his story had taught him anything, it was that although having money was a key to many doors; lacking money did not have to mean that these doors were locked to him. Mauritia had showed him that there were other ways of opening the doors to happiness. She had also inspired in him a new-found determination to make things happen for himself; to make the most out of life and to grab opportunities as though they were the last he would ever have. She’d also shown him that there is no such thing as fate or destiny; he saw now that luck was just a binary thing; it can be good or bad depending on the situation you are in at that particular moment in time.

  Yes, Mark had made bad choices, but they didn’t mean that this was the end of his story. In fact, Mauritia’s wisdom had shown him that it was his choice whether this was a new beginning or the convoluted ending to his sorry tale.

  Mark quickly turned around. Wordlessly, he said goodbye to his old insecurity, and to Danny in the beach hut. With a spring in his step he bounced back towards Mauritia. There’s nothing as obvious as the sight of a man who knows that he’s about to have the best sex of his life, and that’s just how Mark looked as he walked away unscathed from the magpie trap.

  From the deserted shower block, Jim Hunter saw the figure on the beach turn and walk away with an enthusiastic, happy bounce to his step. Quickly, Hunter discounted this man from his investigations; the Mark Birch he was looking for would be an angry young man on a mission. He’d be a young man who’d
been betrayed in the worst possible way by one of his only friends. He was sure that Mark Birch would spring the magpie trap and bring the whole sorry mess to an end. And so he carried on waiting for Mark Birch to arrive.

  Occasionally, he’d take a swig from a bottle of water he’d found. He felt that it concentrated his mind a hell of a lot better than the whisky he’d been drinking earlier; the whisky which he’d wasted by smashing into the Dodo’s face. But then again, he hadn’t really wasted it, had he? Even booze had its uses.

  THE END

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  The only time AJ Kirby speaks in the third person is in biographies. He's the award-winning author of five published novels (Sharkways, 2012; Paint this Town Red, 2012; Perfect World, 2011; Bully, 2009; The Magpie Trap, 2008), two collections of short stories (The Art of Ventriloquism, a collection of crime shorts, which was released August 2012, and Mix Tape 2010), three novellas (The Haunting of Annie Nicol, 2012; The Black Book, 2011; Call of the Sea, 2010), and over fifty published short stories, which can be found widely in print anthologies, magazines and journals and across the web in zines, writing sites and more.

  Paint this town Red was shortlisted for the Guardian's Not the Booker Prize 2012, and his short fiction has won numerous awards at UK literary festivals, and his novel Bully recently charted as an Amazon genre number 1. He is also a sportswriter for the Professional Footballers' Association and a reviewer for The Short Review and The New York Journal of Books. AJ Kirby lives in Leeds, UK and is currently writing a full-length work about football.