Raymond had stopped eating. He must have been staring at Sheila because she looked annoyed and said, ‘It’s true, Raymond. Every last word.’
Raymond didn’t know what to say. It was everything he dreaded about the world all at once.
Back in the caravan, distressed, Raymond’s mood plummeted further when he realised he’d walked past the house on the Sunday night. He remembered the lights being on late, and then he remembered the two cars, parked bumper to bumper, the red and the white car, hidden under the trees. He’d thought they were the cars of lovers but the cars must have belonged to the men. He became agitated. The cars and the light. Shouldn’t he have worked it out? The caravan couldn’t contain Raymond and his agonising and soon he was out, striding up the road. He didn’t bother with the fields or the forest, he didn’t care about being spotted, he could walk harder and faster on the tarmac, and he needed to walk quickly. Half an hour later he was approaching the house and even from a distance he could see changes. There was an alarm box fitted above the door, a camera on the front corner of the house, pointing to the road. Raymond believed Sheila then, or at least believed some trouble had occurred. Sheila liked a story, she was known for her wild tales, her exaggerations, and until Raymond saw the evidence at the house he was clinging to the hope that she’d outdone herself with her latest gossiping. He paused at the door, unsure if he was going to knock, he’d never called at the house before, but he was knocking at the door before he’d realised he’d made a decision. Understanding the house would be on high alert Raymond stood back from the door, where he could easily be seen. He looked up and saw Thomas at an upstairs window, peering down. Raymond lifted a hand to wave and Thomas waved back and disappeared, but the front door remained closed.
Three
They met the day of the job, Keith and John, in the Victoria. They agreed to be there at three, after catching up on sleep, but neither man found sleep easy to come by. Keith turned up at two and John was not far behind. When he returned home that morning Keith had hidden the money, more money than he’d ever possessed, in the corner of the attic, underneath junk that hadn’t been moved for years, junk that had been left by previous tenants. Then he’d eaten and gone to bed, where sleep evaded him. Walking through town Keith was frustrated – he should have been happy but he felt angry and dislocated. It was lack of sleep, he told himself, as he entered the pub, the comedown after a big night.
It was a quiet afternoon at the pub and he found a table in the corner of an empty room and huddled down with his drink. John arrived shortly and they drank for a while, discussing the likelihood of getting caught, of getting away with it. And then Keith asked the question he’d been desperate to ask, the question he’d been wondering about since he’d counted his money.
‘How much did you get?’
John paused and then said, ‘Twenty. You?’
Keith relaxed and nodded. ‘Same, twenty.’
He was concerned he would receive less because he was the last one to join the group, the last one to be involved, and he knew the leader had never liked him.
‘How much do you think they took?’ he asked John.
‘More. But they earned it.’
‘Just because they went to the bank? It doesn’t seem fair.’
John sighed. ‘You know why they took more, Keith, I’ve told you. They spent months on this. They watched banks all over the place, followed people home, checked out the security arrangements. And when they’d chosen the bank and the worker, they watched the house. Stood in that forest for hours, made sure they knew the family’s routine, so there would be no surprises. And there weren’t any surprises, were there.’
Keith nodded. ‘Still, I wonder how much they took if they gave us that much.’
‘Just be pleased you got what you did and it all went well.’
Keith didn’t like the tone of John’s voice. He put it down to tiredness.
‘You really don’t know who they are?’ he asked.
‘I met them a few weeks ago. Someone recommended me to them. They never told me their names and told me not to ask. I know they aren’t from round here, that’s all. The price for me being involved was that I had to find one other person for the job, and I found you.’
‘And they didn’t pay you for finding me?’
‘No. And you were lucky, you didn’t have to do anything other than turn up.’
‘It was about time. I was owed some luck.’
Keith looked over to the bar and the landlord, a fat man in his sixties reading the paper, smoking a roll-up, drinking a pint, his face red and shiny, a chip butty on a plate next to him. Can’t be much time left for him, Keith thought. He hoped the pub wouldn’t change when he was gone; he liked the place with its old carpet, small cramped rooms and cheap beer. Maybe he could be a landlord, he thought, with all the money he owned now, an investment. Keith drank some of his pint and laughed at himself, dismissing the idea. Why would he want to work after he’d seen how easy it was to get his hands on £20,000? He looked at John.
‘But now we know where to go in the future. What’s to stop us doing something similar when we need more money? It didn’t need four of us. We could do it, me and you.’
John swirled the beer at the bottom of his glass. ‘You shouldn’t have hit her,’ he said.
Keith shrugged. He’d been waiting for that. And he’d been wondering if hitting the woman so brutally was the reason he felt flat, out of focus, but he didn’t think it could be. He’d hit women before without feeling like this. Women he liked, women he regretted having to hit. And this one deserved it. The man, he’d been shitting himself, but after the woman had pulled herself together, after the original shock, she’d been almost dismissive of them. Demanding things for the children, saying what she would and wouldn’t allow to happen. ‘Don’t you fucking touch her,’ she’d said to Keith when he’d been nice to the little girl. When he’d been nice to her! And she didn’t say it as if she was worried about him being a kiddy fiddler. It was more like she believed a man like him wasn’t suited to deal with a child like hers. Regardless of the fact that she was a prisoner in her own home, that the family were at their mercy, she acted above it all. As if the men were an irritant. Keith had wished he did have a gun on him. He would have loved to have pulled it out, pointed it, waved it at the children, and seen how superior she was then. Seen how much of an irritant he was then.
Keith picked up his pint and said, ‘I didn’t like her, that was all.’
John shook his head. ‘You still shouldn’t have hit her. Not like that.’
Keith suppressed the anger he felt. He didn’t want to fall out with John, not today.
‘Forget it,’ he said, taking a drink from his pint. ‘It all worked out, didn’t it.’ He pushed his glass forward and John met it, and they quietly toasted their success.
It was the first of many drinks. John left the pub at six craving food and sleep, but Keith carried on celebrating. After a few pints his mood settled and he couldn’t stop thinking about the money in the attic, the money in his pocket. He started to smile. He filled the jukebox with coins, he took requests. He wanted to drag every second of enjoyment out of the day and pull it towards him. Keith finally left the pub after last orders had been called and the towels draped over the pumps. It was only a twenty-minute walk back to his house, but it took him nearly an hour. Lamppost to lamppost. Sometimes falling over, nearly always singing or shouting. As he finally reached the front door of 13 Granville Road he punched the air twice and fumbled for his key. Who said Keith Sullivan would never come to any good? Who fucking said that?
Four
‘There was nothing you could have done.’
Thomas pulled his hand away from his coffee cup. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Exactly that. There was nothing you could have done.’
Ann tried to take Thomas’s hand but he pulled away from her too. Anger scattered across the inside of his head.
‘Did you want me to
wrestle them?’ he asked. ‘Did you want me to take them on one by one?’
‘Thomas, don’t,’ Ann said. ‘All we could do was sit there and do nothing.’
‘Nothing? Is that what you thought I was doing?’
How could she look at him through her battered eye and say that? Could she not see what he had been doing? The position he’d been put in? How every possible action had been taken away from him until he was a man locked in a cell, chained to a wall. But still, even in those circumstances, he’d done everything within his power to keep his family safe. She had to see that. Thomas looked across the table at Ann. At the hideous purple and blue eye settled like a crater in the white pale of the rest of her skin. Did she really think he’d done nothing? Could she not see a lesser man would have argued, grandstanded? Thomas had lost every inch of pride and honour sat in that chair in front of his family, every course of action disabled to him. But he’d done all he could. He’d put on a fucking tie! The only thought in his head for twelve hours was to protect his family, and his wife thought he’d done nothing. How he wished he’d come home to a burglar climbing through the window, a man he could have challenged, a man he could have fought. Or if he’d seen a man on the street, threatening a woman. A drunk husband, shaved head, fat arms, pulling the woman’s hair, taking a kick at her. Thomas wouldn’t walk away from that. But to put a man in the position where the safest thing he can do for his family is to sit in a chair and wait and hope is cruel. To have his children wide-eyed and shaking, wetting themselves . . .
Ann had been angry. Her anger had put them all at risk. Four men in their house with guns and his wife was angry at the violation, making demands, trying to claw back ground. He wasn’t surprised when he came home to be confronted by her claggy black eye. He wasn’t surprised, but he still burst into tears.
‘Not in front of the children,’ Ann had said, ushering him into their bedroom and closing the door, where he’d sat on the bed and sobbed. She told him that the short man, the loose cannon, had simply walked forward and punched her in the face, just as they left. She had no idea why. Thomas didn’t believe her. As much as his legs went weak and his heart broke when he saw his wife’s battered face, he didn’t believe she’d done nothing to provoke the punch that landed with such force on her eye. He’d flinched at the anger she’d shown the men, prayed that she would remain calm and stop the demands and requests. But throughout the night she’d needled and nagged them. How could she not see that they weren’t dealing in rights and wrongs? Men with guns in your house take what they want, and all you can do is hope that they don’t take everything.
‘There was nothing you could have done.’
He’d done everything in his power.
The night after it happened, putting the children to bed, a police car at the front of the house, Harriet voiced the question that clanged like a town-hall bell inside Thomas’s head.
‘What if they come back?’ she asked, clutching her favourite teddy to her chest.
‘They won’t come back, sweetheart,’ Ann said, tucking Harriet in tightly.
‘Really? They won’t come back?’
‘Of course not. They wouldn’t be that stupid.’
Downstairs a pacing and incredulous Thomas said, ‘How can you say that to her? That the men won’t come back. They might come back.’
‘Shall I tell our eight-year-old daughter that, Thomas?’ Ann asked. ‘That she should never fall asleep feeling safe in her own house? They don’t win. We can either decide that now, or drive ourselves mad with it.’
Thomas didn’t know where strength like that came from. He only knew his hands were shaking and he was listening, every second, for the sound of a car, the fall of a footstep, the crack of a twig.
Five
Keith had given Rose £300 and the girls £100 each in the days following the job. The girls had leapt on the money, waved it in the air, kissed the notes and screamed, had even kissed Keith. Rose took the money but her acceptance wasn’t joyful or without question. Despite her questioning all Keith would tell her was that the money was a thank you for putting up with him through the hard times. In the following weeks, whenever money was needed for bills or food, Rose would tell Keith it was time he was back out looking for work and cash would quickly be handed over. Keith showed no sign of looking for a job, was sleeping even later than usual, drinking every night. Rose understood the money hadn’t come to Keith through any honest endeavour, but she took it. It was a fraction of what he owed her, she believed. She bought a dress and a pair of shoes from the £300 and put the rest in an account Keith didn’t know existed. Each time he was generous with cash she paid as much as she could afford into the account and, despite the seemingly never-ending stream of money from Keith, would walk the extra half-mile to the cheaper shops as usual.
Keith wasn’t interested in saving money. He bought a new wardrobe of clothes and a woman in town was kept busy raising hems and shortening legs until each new item fitted Keith with the precision he sought. He bought himself a car, a second-hand red Ford Escort, and taxed and insured it. He went out every night. His decision to spend the money freely was a considered one. He realised he could live off the money longer if he lived carefully and soberly, but that approach didn’t appeal to Keith. There was a man who drank in the Victoria a couple of times a week. He ordered half a pint of the cheapest beer and counted out his money to the exact amount from a plastic coin bag. He noticed when the prices went up by a penny and reacted like the barman was holding a gun to his head when he held out his hand for the money. This man knew which supermarkets marked their prices down when, which butcher would sell meat cheaply and would sit at the bar crowing about saving £2 on a nasty cut of meat you wouldn’t feed a dog. Keith despised him. The sight of the man in his ugly shoes and thin coat depressed Keith to his core. The delight he took in saving a few pence on a nearly stale loaf of bread mystified Keith. If that was living, Keith would rather be dead. He’d even tried to buy the man a drink once, just to cheer himself up, so he didn’t have to sit and watch a middle-aged man in market-bought clothes slowly sipping at half a pint, but the miserable sod wouldn’t accept it. ‘Thank you but no,’ he’d said firmly, holding a hand over his glass as if Keith might be about to pour the drink by some form of magic, ‘I drink what I can afford.’ There was a prissy smugness to the man that enraged Keith. It was as if he enjoyed the dismal constraints of his life. Keith’s decision to live life the opposite way to this man was a conscious one. If he wanted it, he had it. Money went on taxis, meals out, the horses and drinking. And, of course, clothes. Walking past Green’s one day he saw Eric Calpin, his boss from the cement works, trying on a jumper, a dumpy woman at his side. Keith’s eyes were immediately drawn to a leather jacket in the window. He sought out the price tag quickly. £150. That was enough. Keith walked into the shop, interrupted the young shop assistant who was handing another jumper to Eric and pointed to the window and said, ‘How much for the jacket?’
The assistant glanced to the window and said, ‘I’d have to check. A hundred and fifty I think.’
‘I’ll take it,’ said Keith, clapping his hands together.
The assistant looked at the small man in front of her. ‘We have different sizes if that one doesn’t fit,’ she said.
‘It’s fine, I’ll take it.’ Keith’s cheeks smarted a little.
The assistant apologised to Keith’s ex-boss, walked over to the window, took the jacket from the mannequin and carried it to the till.
‘Why not try it on?’ she said, holding the large jacket up in the air, a plea in her voice. ‘It’ll only take a second.’
‘Just put it in the bloody bag,’ Keith said quietly, staring at the girl.
The assistant, red-cheeked herself now, carefully folded the jacket and said, as coldly as she could whilst asking for such a large amount of money, ‘A hundred and fifty pounds please.’
Keith looked at the man who’d sacked him, pulled out a roll of notes, slowly c
ounted out the money and handed it over. Keith left the shop with a jacket he didn’t particularly care for, a jacket that certainly didn’t fit, happiness dancing in his legs, joy wriggling in his chest. He crossed the road to the nearest pub, climbed on a bar stool and said, ‘Enjoy your polyester jumper and your fat wife, you fat bastard.’ He grinned broadly at the approaching barman.
Through drink Keith managed to hold melancholy at bay until the end of the night most days. The words that depressed him, the words he dreaded to hear were, ‘Time, ladies and gentlemen. Glasses please.’ It was then the sadness would catch up with him, another day gone, no more excitement or fun to be found, everyone off home to bed. At first, with the pile of cash thick and weighty, Keith managed to smile, even after last orders; he knew he could do it all again the next day and the day after that. For a while Keith was as happy as he’d ever been. Money in his pocket provided all the joy he ever thought it could.
There were three downsides to his new life that caused Keith pain. Firstly, and a daily problem, were the hangovers. His drinking started earlier and finished later as the weeks progressed and he spent most mornings recovering in bed, sweating in the sheets, praying that he would soon feel better, vowing to take it easier that night. Secondly, and a direct result of the drink again, he was gaining weight. The fat seemed to appear from nowhere; for years he’d been drinking and eating at will, with no obvious effect and then, suddenly, a pot belly was heavy at his front. For the first time in his life Keith was forced to buy a bigger trouser size.
‘You need to watch the weight,’ Rose said. ‘A short man like you can easily start to look like a ball.’
Keith was dumbfounded. Rose had never once referred to his height in all their years together.
Into the Trees Page 9
