Smart Moves

by Adrian Magson

  ‘Ingrate,’ said Hugo vaguely, opening his car door. It was a shiny, new executive Lexus and after old dog-breath back in the nick, the aroma of leather and plastic was like nectar. ‘I’m amazed at you, Jake. Why on earth pick a fight with the police? It stands to reason you were going to lose.’

  Hugo can be boringly logical at times. Also employed – still employed, furthermore – at one of the more legitimate divisions of HP&P, who were unashamedly in awe of his old school tie and city connections. We’d been friends for years, by some odd mixture of chemistry, and he was the first person I’d thought of when the desk sergeant had listened to my tale of woe and suggested I get someone to come and collect me before they decided to transport me in chains to a penal colony on the Isle of Wight.

  ‘It sounds like you’ve had enough dumped on you for one day,’ he’d added sympathetically, and handed me a phone. ‘Why not call a friend and get out of here?’

  I’d called Hugo at the office, where he worked in international finance. He’d immediately dropped what he was doing to come and take me home.

  Now he was trying to talk reason?

  ‘At the time,’ I reminded him tersely, ‘I’d just found out my wife had done a bunk with all the furniture, locked me out of the house and set the burglar alarm just to piss me off. And all on top of being made redundant. So tell me where bloody reason comes into it.’

  He said nothing and I sensed it wasn’t because he lacked a quick retort. Snappy comebacks were Hugo’s stock-in-trade, as useful for sealing deals as putting uppity employees in their place or breaking the ice at boring corporate gatherings.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said after we’d covered a few hundred yards in silence. ‘It caught me on the hop.’

  He nodded. ‘No problem, old chap. Perfectly understandable under the circs. I um…’

  ‘What?’ I asked, as he hesitated.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘You were going to say something.’

  ‘Was I?’ He feigned surprise and scowled through the windscreen in furious concentration. It was enough to set my alarm bells ringing. He didn’t normally concentrate on the road – he had the reactions and spatial awareness of a slug and drove so slowly everyone else gave him plenty of room. He was also a terrible liar.

  ‘You know something, don’t you?’ I muttered, and poked him in the arm. There was a blast of a horn as he veered off course and narrowly missed demolishing a traffic island.

  ‘Hey – cut that out!’ he said reproachfully, rubbing his arm. ‘There’s no need for violence, otherwise I’ll take you back to your cell and leave you there to rot with that vagrant fellow.’

  There was no fighting that, so we sat in silence until we arrived back at the house. My car was where I had left it. I climbed out and retrieved the keys, then led Hugo across to the front door under the gaze of Mrs Tree and three of her old cronies from along the road who’d gathered to watch the fun. All it needed was a hot sun and the flapping of wings and we could have been in the Serengeti.

  ‘Friends of yours?’ asked Hugo.

  ‘Ignore them. They’re waiting for an injured wildebeest to limp into view so they can have their daily feed.’

  ‘Looks like they’ve already got it,’ he pointed out, and gave them a friendly wave.

  I pushed open the ruins of the front door and stepped inside, crunching through broken glass and splintered wood. I stopped. I could hear music playing.

  Susan?

  I ran upstairs and into the main bedroom… and found two complete strangers in combat trousers and tie-died T-shirts going through my wardrobe as if they were at a jumble sale. On the windowsill a plastic ghetto-blaster was giving out a thump-thump beat of something vaguely African in style. There was already a sizeable pile of my clothes on the floor around the two intruders and, by the sour expressions on their faces, none of it was fit to die in.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I demanded incredulously. Christ, what else could the day throw at me – part of the MIR space station landing on the roof?

  The male half of the duo didn’t even bother looking round, but waved a dismissive hand. ‘Get lost, mate – we were here first.’ He was built like a brick outhouse and had several silver studs through one ear and purple-streaked blond hair hanging down to his shoulders. Huge Doc Martens were planted on my tweed sports jacket, while my favourite tie was around his waist holding his trousers in place.

  The girl with him was a smaller, thinner copy, with orange hair and a large silver stud in her lower lip. She blinked when she peered round him and saw that I wasn’t another khaki-clad eco-warrior looking for somewhere to doss, and nudged the man until he turned and looked at me.

  ‘This is my house,’ I said indignantly. ‘Who said you could come in here?’

  ‘Fuck off,’ he said pleasantly, and tossed a pair of my slacks on the floor with a sniff of derision. ‘Wouldn’t give this shit to a refugee.’ He looked around at the bare room, then peered through the window into the back garden. ‘Still, not a bad gaff. Do us okay for a couple of weeks. What d’you say, Dot?’

  Dot giggled excitedly and put her arms round him, completely ignoring my presence. She had a tattoo of a dragon on her shoulder and a thick collection of bangles on her arms. ‘You mean it, Dash?’ she said in a kittenish voice, as if he’d given her the keys to the Savoy. ‘You mean we can stay here?’

  There was a strong southern-hemisphere twang to their words with an upward lilt at the end of each sentence. It was like stepping onto the set of Neighbours.

  Dash looked down at her and smiled, showing a row of surprisingly white, even teeth. ‘Course we can,’ he said magnanimously. ‘No worries.’

  ‘Can you buggery!’ I yelled. ‘This is my house!’

  Dash stared at me as if it had finally sunk in that I was serious. ‘Jeez, mate, no way. Where’s all the stuff, then – the furniture and that? You a bit strapped for cash?’

  ‘My – no! If you must know my wife took it and… left.’ I wondered why I was telling this travelling moron my private woes. ‘That doesn’t mean it’s open house for a bunch of drop-outs from Alice Springs.’

  ‘Watch your fuckin’ mouth, mate,’ Dash said mildly, and stuck a muscular finger under my nose. ‘We come from Wellington, ya Pommie twat.’

  Just then Hugo appeared, puffing up the stairs behind me. He was followed by a cloud of cigarette smoke.

  ‘Friends, Jake?’ he grunted.

  For all his soft-looking, middle-class executive appearance, Hugo exudes a certain presence. He has pale skin, puppy-dog eyes and a heavy lock of blond hair falling across his forehead. On a bad day he gets mistaken for Boris Johnson, which he hates. But he still manages to impress by aura alone. Something in his genes, probably. Whatever it was, it wasn’t lost on the Morse Code twins, who stared at him as if he’d metamorphosed from under the floorboards. I doubt they came across too many Hugos in Wellington.

  ‘They’re squatters,’ I said, glaring at the intruders. ‘Have you got your phone on you, Hugo?’

  ‘Sure. Why?’

  ‘Call the police.’

  Hugo looked at me and shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t bother, old chap. They won’t come unless there’s a threat to life and limb.’

  We both stared at the giant Kiwi, entrenched in our own thoughts. He looked as if threatening life and limb was something he did when he got bored with tearing the legs of spiders. Our faces must have been easy to read.

  ‘Hey, we wouldn’t do that,’ he protested with a friendly grin. It transformed him instantly into someone marginally less threatening than a big kid. ‘Me and Dot are peaceful, man. Mind, I can’t say the same for the rest of them toe-rags, know what I mean?’

  A noise came from downstairs, and when I glanced at Hugo, he turned and studied the ceiling with deliberate concentration.

  ‘There are more of you?’

  I walked through to the front bedroom with a faint feeling of unreality, and stared down into the drive. An ancient Red Rover bus ha
d spluttered to a halt across my flower border and was disgorging people like day-trippers at Stonehenge. Mrs Tree was staring from her upstairs window, her jaw hanging open like a bear-trap. It was almost enough to cheer me up.

  ‘It’s the rest of the commune,’ explained Dash helpfully, whipping out a smartphone. ‘We travel together, see. One finds a place to crash and the rest pile in. It works a treat.’ He came across and slapped me on the shoulder with enough force to make my teeth rattle. ‘So, mate, whereabouts d’ya keep the fusebox?’

  FIVE

  ‘You knew, didn’t you?’ I said, staring into one of Hugo’s crystal whisky glasses. ‘You knew Susan was going to leave me.’

  We’d left my former home, now a Kiwi-laden squat, and driven to Hugo’s elegant Kensington house to assess the situation. I’d decided to leave my car in the garage and collect it later, when I felt less of a liability to other road users.

  ‘I knew she wasn’t happy,’ Hugo countered judicially. ‘But not that she was actually going to up sticks.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Yes, it was unreasonable, but that’s how I was feeling. When life kicks me unfairly in the scrotum, I tend to look for someone to blame. It was far easier than thinking any of it might have been my fault.

  ‘Because you should have noticed, you dimwit,’ he responded testily. ‘Honestly, Jake, you must be the only man I know who didn’t realise his wife was chea–’ He stopped dead and stared at me, his face draining of colour. Then he bounded up to refill his glass from a crystal decanter on the walnut and rosewood-veneered sideboard which he’d once told me was inherited from a titled uncle.

  ‘What?’ I said stupidly. ‘She was what?’

  Whatever he was about to say was cut short by a noise from the front door and the faint blare of passing traffic. Like a drowning man seeing a lifebelt bobbing towards him, Hugo turned and fairly sprinted from the room to greet his wife, Juliette.

  Cheap? Was that what he’d been about to say – my wife was cheap? Or cheesy? Christ, he might be a friend, but that was a bit much, even now.

  Judging by the furious whispering in the hallway, Juliette wasn’t impressed by finding me there. She was a friend of Susan’s and we normally got on reasonably well, providing our meetings were brief. Truthfully, given a choice of having me or Hannibal Lecter in the house, I always suspected Juliette would have plumped for the psychopath.

  She finally peered round the living-room door, waving a Prada bag. She wasn’t showing off – merely acting in character. Shopping was a major part of her day, so why not ensure everyone knew it?

  ‘Jake.’ Her impossibly cultured voice usually trailed my name out like a mild cuss-word. But not this time. There was no peck on the cheek, no witty exchange about the state of the country’s economy. In fact, no sharing the same breathable airspace. But that was normal. Yet something about her looked almost… sympathetic.

  Odder and odder.

  ‘Hello, Juliette,’ I replied, and wondered what was going on. She was tall and willowy, and habitually wore sunglasses on top of her head, indoors and out. A genuine Sloane with years of practice behind her, she carried a permanent air of disdain for anyone not ‘in the circle’ of approved friends and acquaintances. Shop assistants, traffic wardens and utility people – gas men and the like – were to be seen and not heard. Even Susan had once wondered aloud whether Hugo would have been acceptable if he hadn’t had a private income and shares in half of Gloucestershire.

  Susan. Juliette must have spoken to Susan. It was the only explanation, since they were usually joined by hip or smartphone. But before I could ask her, she disappeared at speed. Hugo followed, reacting to a look which had the same effect as a whistle to a sheepdog.

  When he finally trailed back into the room he looked a little subdued. I guessed he’d been given some kind of ultimatum: me out or he could bed down in the spare room.

  ‘Jake,’ he said uncomfortably, and waved a hand in the air like someone about to impart bad news.

  ‘No need,’ I said, heading for the door. I knew the signs of marital thumbscrews having been applied. ‘It’s time I was going, anyway.’

  ‘What are you going to do? I mean, where will you go?’ He looked genuinely pained, if a little relieved, and I felt guilty for having dragged him into my mess. On the other hand, the more I thought about it, the more I realised Hugo was one of my few options. It was a sobering thought. I’d spent so much time out of the country over the years, I knew the security teams at Heathrow airport better than my neighbours.

  Even so, I’d been thinking about it on the way over. Instinct had warned me I might not be able to count on bunking down with Hugo, and the idea of sharing my own empty house with a bunch of squatters was definitely out. That left a hotel or finding somebody else to lean on. Now I’d finished trawling my mental address book for lean-able friends and come up with a disappointing and fairly scary zero, it was another sad pointer to the fact that I was screwed.

  ‘I’ll camp out with Marcus. He’s got plenty of room.’ Desperationville, Arizona, I thought grimly. Marcus was my kid brother. Well, hardly a kid. Aged thirty-one going on eighteen, he was the co-founder of a start-up dating site and video game production unit in London’s Old Street, where techies gather like flies on a digital jam sandwich. He wore the permanent other-worldly look of someone whose brain was in another dimension, and I’d heard it said he was on target to becoming a millionaire any day now. Not that his appearance supported the notion. He shared a foetid pad with a couple of ex-college roomies he’d known for years, and claimed it kept him on his toes and ‘connected’, whatever that meant. Even though there weren’t more than ten years between us, I’d never pretended to ‘get’ Marcus fully, and he seemed quite happy looking on me in the same fashion. As long as we left politics, drugs, sex and religion out of discussions, we got on pretty well. Silence was usually the safest bet.

  ‘Ah. Good idea, old chap,’ Hugo offered. ‘Of course, you can stay here if pressed. You do know that, don’t you?’ This last would have been better had it not come with a faint whiff of reluctance, like someone inviting the family alcoholic to a Christening.

  I shook my head and stepped out into the street. The haunted look as he said it told me he was being kind but hoping I’d say no. ‘I appreciate that, Hugo. But honestly, not to worry.’

  Hugo’s townhouse was on an elegant street in the northern quarter of Kensington. The kind of street where trees loom overhead to give an impression of verdant splendour and to complement the neat brickwork and classic columns of the buildings. According to Hugo, someone on the local council had once suggested that streets with trees attracted a lower level of crime than those without. He should try telling that to people who get mugged on Clapham Common. Follow that kind of thinking and we could disband every rural police force in the country and stick another tree in the ground.

  Verdant or not, the trees here served to block out the sickly glare of the street lights. They also dumped large areas of shadow every few yards, mysterious dark pockets of impenetrable gloom concealing who knew what.

  I was halfway down the street, sticking as closely as I could to the edge of the pavement – whatever street-savvy instincts I possessed were at work in spite of my brain being in under-drive – when I heard the pad of heavy footsteps coming up behind me. Oh, buggeration. After everything else, I’m about to find out the man on the council was talking bollocks. I stopped and turned, balling my fists and steeling myself. After everything I’d been through today, if this was a mugger he was going to wish he’d never set eyes on me.

  It was Hugo, panting like an old washing machine with a saggy belt, and struggling into a wrinkled green Barbour that had seen better days. Behind him came remnants of Juliette’s voice raised in anger followed by the sound of the front door slamming. Dry rations for Hugo tonight, then.

  ‘Jake,’ he wheezed, and clutched my arm. ‘Please, mate… hold up.’

  I waited while he patted down his
pockets for a cigarette and got his breath back. Being office-bound most of his working days and generally inert the rest of the time, Hugo is about as unfit as a man is capable of being without being on life support. Added to that, while he didn’t smoke indoors as a concession to Juliette and his two children, he rarely let an opportunity go by without lighting up everywhere else. He’d even threatened to resign one day when someone at HP&P had suggested bringing in a smoking ban within fifty yards of the premises. It also explained why he persistently refused to take his children to Disneyland, Florida, where he’d have been locked up within ten minutes of touchdown.

  He puffed away happily in the gloom, then nodded towards the far end of the street where I was hoping to pick up a passing cab. ‘Fancy a drink, old boy?’ he offered companionably. ‘And a chat?’

  ‘Sure. Why not.’ In truth, I was glad he’d come after me. Whatever he knew about Susan’s departure, it was a whole lot more than I did. And he might have some goss on why I’d been selected by HP&P to join the great unwashed. Maybe over a drink or two I’d find out why my life had suddenly gone into freefall.

  We walked along together while I let Hugo marshal his thoughts and inhale more nicotine into his system. I knew him well enough to know he had something on his mind, and in his own good time he’d come out with it. Either that or I’d lose patience and brain him with one of the many ‘no parking’ cones lining the street.