‘Sure. I mean, legal action, I suppose. What else?’
‘Get real, for God’s sake. You saw the places the projects were in. Our costs rocketed the moment they downed tools. The people who let us down got canned or dumped… or worse.’
‘Worse?’
He didn’t say anything to that and, for a second, he looked as if he could have bitten through his bottom lip. I realised that ‘worse’ meant some people found themselves handed a brown paper envelope by a messenger who’d promptly disappeared as instructed, leaving them to be picked up by the police – most likely following a careful tip-off. Worse still would have been punishment meted out by those further up the local food chain who’d felt cheated out of their share of the contract payments. Some of the local politicians I’d met were no more than warlords in cheap suits and branded trainers, whose idea of man-management might well have come out of the barrel of a gun.
‘I didn’t know any of that.’
‘Rubbish. You chose not to see it.’
He was right, of course. I’d been kidding myself. I thought everything I did was above board and legal, resolving problems where I could, advising others where it seemed intractable. Hands clean at the end of the day.
He waited for the penny to drop, then nodded. ‘Good man. Now we know where we stand. Just keep your mouth shut and you’ll be fine.’
Where the hell was this going? He was coming across like a third-rate mafia don. But I, of course, had to push it. After all, to make an effective threat you have to have something to hold over someone. ‘And if I don’t?’
He sighed and studied his fingernails. ‘I didn’t want to do this, but let me enlighten you.’ He spoke slowly, like he would to someone who was mentally defective. ‘During the last eighteen months you’ve been a party to breaking the laws of at least seven different countries by delivering illicit disbursements to a number of government and other officials. You’ve also delivered unauthorized bonds, bank documents and other financial papers on at least ten occasions.’ He held up a hand to stop me saying anything. Not that I was going to; I was dumbstruck. ‘Not all of those papers reached their intended destinations, and not all of them were meant to.’
The guys who’d been picked up. I already got that; they’d been set up for a fall. Payback for failure.
‘That wasn’t my fault. How was I to know what was in the packages?’
‘Ignorance is no defence.’
‘What does that mean? What’s going to happen?’
‘Nothing.’
‘So why are you telling me this?’
‘For your own good. We have no ill intentions towards you, Jake. You did a good job for us, which is why you’re being paid to go. But circumstances can change.’
‘Like how?’
‘I’m not prepared to say. You keep quiet and you’ll be fine. You talk about any of it, and you’ll find yourself in all kinds of trouble.’
Now we were getting somewhere. What he meant was, if I started talking, who knew what it might unearth. The last thing HP&P wanted was a whistleblower opening a can of worms. The pay-off was seen as the better option. But better than what?
‘But I don’t know anything,’ I protested. ‘How can I talk about stuff I don’t know?’
‘Makes no odds. You’ll be the first to go down.’
‘Down?’
‘Prison.’ His eyes went dull. ‘That’s if they don’t come after you.’
‘They?’
‘There are people above me who don’t share my confidence in your ability to stay silent, Jake. Powerful people, they play by different rules and want to do things their own way. They’re ready, on my say-so, to give you the benefit of the doubt. However…’
God, I hate howevers. They rate even lower on the scale of scary clauses than buts. ‘Go on.’
‘They’ll be watching you. Never forget that.’
I turned and walked out, clutching an envelope containing my severance details and with his words ringing in my ears. He was kidding me, surely. But no, Dunckley didn’t know how to kid; he’d never been taught.
The office downstairs, where I had been assigned a desk and terminal which I rarely used on account of always being on a plane to somewhere, was empty and silent, the computers all switched off except for one with a rainbow-coloured screensaver telling everyone to stay the hell away from the keyboard. I guessed the rest of the staff were at a separate meeting being informed of the changes, one of which was that the weird guy in the corner – the one they used to look at and wonder what he did all the time, jetting off overseas – had received a higher calling, work-wise.
As I was clearing out my desk, a security guard in the starched purple uniform and big boots marched into the room. He had tattoos down each arm and a haircut a Royal Marine recruiting sergeant would have been proud of. He stood by the door and watched unemotionally as I filled a box with my meagre belongings: some travel wipes, a spare shirt and socks, a broken iPod, a flight bag, travel kit, miniatures of scotch and gin, a travel mug… and sundry other examples of how life has a habit of spilling over from home to the office until sometimes one becomes a carbon-copy of the other.
The guard was yet another cog in the machine, oiled to ease my passage from the now into the future – whatever that might be – with the minimum of fuss. I had no doubts that if I’d kicked off, he’d have had me pinned to the wall within seconds before carrying me outside like an old suitcase and dumping me in the gutter.
I surrendered my company phone and credit cards, along with my electronic entry-card. He bent this between fingers like bananas and tore it into confetti, never taking his eyes off me. Then he escorted me to the front entrance and watched as I drove out of the car park for the last time.
Three years. Three years of my life devoted to my tiny corner of HP&P, otherwise builders of roads, dams and sewage-treatment plants, among other things less explainable and clearly not entirely legitimate. Three years of foreign airports, trains, buses and indifferent food; of waiting hours for contacts to come out of meetings with other wily, slush-funded competitors; of days spent wandering through fly-infested, roach-ridden corners of the globe where not even satellite phones could be arsed to work properly; of regular turbulence, occasional dysentery and tracking down lost laundry in backwater fleapit hotels.
And now I was out on my feet without so much as a by-your-leave.
A troubleshooter with troubles of my own.
While I drove, I used my teeth to rip open the envelope. It contained a cheque for £30,000, a letter of regret confirming my release from the portals of HP&P and a careful reminder of the considerable legal penalties that would fall my way if I ever disclosed details of the company’s business.
What it didn’t contain was any hints on how to break the news to Susan.
Or any kind of warning that my bad hair day had only just begun.
THREE
It felt wrong arriving home in the middle of a weekday. That was for kids playing hooky or reps working from home. No doubt the neighbours would notice, in which case the jungle drums would put two and two together and build a rumour which would circulate the area within the hour. Something new to discuss alongside who had just bought a new Range Rover Evoque or a cottage in Normandy.
I didn’t trouble with keys at the front door, remembering that Susan had said she’d be working at home all day. It didn’t often happen, but it should be a nice surprise… until I told her my bad news, anyway. She didn’t like bad news, especially if she figured I was to blame, in which case the sky would cloud over and crows would gather on the roof to pick my bones.
‘Bugger and damn!’ I reeled back, clutching my right hand under my arm and dropping my briefcase on the gravel. The door was locked.
‘Susan!’ I yelled testily, as the upstairs curtain at number 40 next door twitched in the late morning sun. Mrs Tree was in her observation tower again. Not a bird parped in the neighbourhood without Mrs Tree being aware, and strangers were
catalogued and surveyed as if she were a one-woman Neighbourhood Watch. I often wondered if she’d been a member of the Stasi, the East German secret police. No way the Berlin Wall would have come down on her watch.
I went to the back door and looked under the grating where we kept a spare key. Not there. Sod and damnation. I returned to the front and looked in the kitchen window.
Bare as a badger’s eyeball. No kettle, no microwave, no crockery, no gin bottle on the side, no fridge magnets, no fridge.
No fridge?
We’d been burgled. I ran to the garage. Susan’s GTi was gone.
It took a tour of the outside of the house to see that, other than the moth-eaten La-Z-Boy armchair I’d inherited from my father and a pile of books tossed into a heap in the hallway, the lower floor of the house had been cleaned out.
Lock, stock and bin liners.
Bastards! Was this part of the redundancy package, too? Take my job and leave me without a stick of furniture just to rub it in?
Susan. She had to be somewhere. Maybe the police station. Yes, of course. Filling in endless forms for the insurance claim. God – what if she’d been attacked and was even now lying battered and broken in casualty? It didn’t bear thinking about.
‘Mr Foreman?’ It was Mrs Tree, leaning over the fence with a fixed smile on her grizzled face, an ancient cardigan pulled around her shoulders. Seeing her reminded me of driving across a patch of the Namib desert and spotting vultures circling over the remains of a dead zebra. I knew how the zebra must have felt.
‘Have you seen Susan?’ It was a stupid question. If it moved, had a pulse or made a sound, Mrs Tree would have it logged and timed. Among her many accomplishments was a regular stream of letters to the local council, complaining of everything from the speed of traffic bouncing wilfully over the speed bumps in the street to the amount of water used by neighbours each Sunday washing their cars. Even the vicar had been reported for wearing a leather jacket off duty.
‘Yes, I have,’ she said, and jumped back smartly as if I was going to assault her. God, I’d have to be desperate or mad. She was ninety if she was a day and reeked of mothballs. The last time she’d have been fanciable would have been when Crippen was a boy. ‘She’s gone.’
‘Gone where?’
She pointed a bony finger at my feet, as if the answer lay in the soil. I looked down and saw a deep rut in the gravel of the drive. It was normally raked smooth. Tyre tracks. Big ones – the sort a truck would make.
Poirot, eat your heart out. So there had been thieves!
‘In a big removal lorry,’ Mrs Tree confirmed cheerfully. ‘About ten minutes after you left this morning.’ She sniffed disapprovingly. ‘Great big thing belching filthy blue smoke all over my washing. Four men, there were.’
A gang? My God, the callous bastards. What had they done to Susan? Then I remembered: there had been a removal lorry parked along the road when I drove out this morning. Not that it was unusual; people came and went regularly in this neck of the woods, driven in by ambition and out by debt and failure. I hadn’t given it a thought, too intent on switching into work mode.
‘They were very efficient. Your wife seemed pleased, anyway.’ This was delivered with a slight toss of the head, as if being pleased with anything was a sign of a deviant nature. ‘She was having a jolly good laugh with them, I can tell you that.’ This was followed by an arch look that no doubt spoke volumes among her equally aged mates about what a jolly good laugh really meant.
‘Did she say anything?’ I asked faintly. This was surreal. Any minute now and this ancient pony express would be telling me what they’d been wearing and how many sugars they’d had in their tea.
‘Goodbye, I think.’ She gave it some thought, then nodded. ‘Yes, definitely goodbye. She stuck two fingers in the air at the house and went off in her little car. It was all done very quickly, I must say. You must have been packing for days… although I suppose those men do it for you now, don’t they? Not like in my day, when you had to find your own tea-chests and collect papers to wrap your china. I didn’t realise you were moving, Mr Foreman.’
Fuck me sideways. I know I’m forgetful, but neither did I. I marched across the drive, leaving Mrs Tree wittering away, and stooped to pick up a brick from the flower border. It made enough noise going through the front door panel to wake the dead. Glass and wood showered everywhere, and the brick bounced around in the hallway with that uniquely hollow sound made by deserted buildings.
That was when I discovered Susan had switched on the burglar alarm before she left. The same burglar alarm which we’d deliberately stopped using because it kept going off for no reason and annoying the neighbours. Neat touch.
I tore through the house, ignoring the clanging bell, until the message finally sank home. I’d been left with the empty shell of a house, a wardrobe full of my clothes, a stack of overdue bills, a few books, a mortgage the size of the Senegalese national debt and a lumpy old armchair.
I sat down on the stairs and stared around in confusion. This couldn’t be happening.
Five minutes later there was the crunch of tyres on the front drive and a flash of blue and yellow. The cops.
Footsteps pounded up to the front door egged on by an excited Mrs Tree, who broke off from giving a commentary to one of her friends by mobile long enough to tell the officer there was a lunatic on the loose inside. She must have phoned the local nick before patching into half of southern England on a conference call.
‘He arrived home in a right strop, I can tell you…’
The first one inside was a young, pencil-thin PC. He looked about sixteen and as nervous as a kitten, as if he thought I was about to start foaming at the mouth and barking like a sea lion.
‘Are you the owner of this property?’
‘Yes,’ I snarled. ‘What about it?’ I was feeling less amiable by the second. If junior Robocop here was paying any attention to my duplicitous neighbour, he’d already have built up a lurid picture of a homicidal maniac looking for blood. I was surprised he hadn’t already got out his pepper spray and telescopic baton.
A small box under his chin emitted a squawk of static, and he lifted a black-gloved hand to flick a switch. He was dressed more like a trooper than a constable, with an array of sinister-looking pouches and holsters attached to his person. I wondered how he managed to stand upright weighed down by that lot. God help him if he ever fell over; he’d lie there like an inverted turtle until someone flipped him upright again.
‘For a second, there, Doris, I thought he was going to attack me… that my time on this earth had finally come.’ Mrs Tree again, her shrill voice rising above the sound of the alarm bell.
‘Oh, if only!’ I snapped, before junior cop waved a warning hand.
‘There’s no need for that, sir. Did you know your alarm was going off?’
I cocked an ear towards the bell-casing on the front of the house, which was doing its level best to jump off the wall. ‘Of course I do – I’m not bloody deaf.’
‘You don’t have to take that tone.’ The constable gave me a stern look, straight out of the police training book, guaranteed to intimidate violent thugs into making instant apologies for being boisterous. Right at that moment it had all the impact of being hit with a cottonbud, even if he had dropped the ‘sir’.
‘Bollocks,’ I told him, and went to the wall and hit the kill switch. The silence was almost as deafening, but a vast improvement.
‘He picked up a brick and heaved it right through the front door. I think he’s deranged, I really do. His wife left him – and can you blame her with that sort of carry-on?’
The constable took a look at the empty rooms; at the layer of dust and debris, the holes left by the carpet nails and the bare patches on the walls where the sun hadn’t shone for years. The noise of his boots on the floorboards and the static from his radio was suddenly far too loud in the silence. He tactfully didn’t comment on the broken glass from the front door or the large scar made
by the brick down the wallpaper.
‘You moving in, sir – or out?’ I think he was being genuinely tactful, but in my fragile state of mind, his serving-the-community smile merely came across as taking the piss.
‘Actually, you young arse,’ I told him, finally losing the thread, ‘I’ve just finished robbing the place of all the furniture and fixings, which I’ve packed into the tiny boot of my car. I’m now going to get a box of matches and a can of petrol and firebomb the bloody lot!’
There then followed what is commonly called a heated exchange of words, which I lost on account of the constable having called up two larger colleagues who must have been loitering nearby. I was then invited to visit their nice police station for a chat.
As I was escorted to the police car, I heard Mrs Tree describing in cheerful detail to her friend Doris what an arm lock looked like.
FOUR
‘You’re a twerp, Jake,’ said Hugo Palmerston in his plummy, public school voice as he escorted me from the police station six depressing hours later. Just what I needed after being ticked off by the desk sergeant.
‘Thanks a lot,’ I muttered. ‘What it is to have the support of a friend.’
As if being arrested for breaking into my own house wasn’t enough, I’d been further stressed by being locked for the best part of the day in a small, airless room in the company of a toothless, grubby, religious vagrant. For some reason he’d insisted on reciting obscure psalms at me as if I was in need of salvation and succour. He’d smelled worse than an old, wet cocker spaniel and his halitosis had reached out across the space between us like a guided missile, making me gag each time I breathed in.
Smart Moves Page 2
