Conman

by Richard Asplin

  Andrew stared at the floor.

  “I wanted you as best man at the wedding, y’know? Tried to track you down? Did the card never arrive, or did you get the invite and not want to, or … ?”

  He looked up at me.

  “What happened? What’s this about, why are you so … ?”

  “Because look at me,” Andrew spat. Something was simmering deep within my friend, beneath his appalling paisley neckwear. “I used to have … Bloody hell, I did have an acoustic guitar. I did have Billy Bragg badges on my blazer at school. You’re right, okay? I had the lot. A donkey jacket with a Red Wedge patch. Kinnock. Amnesty benefits. All that. That was me. That.”

  “I know. I remember. Poetry too,” I said. “Power to the people.”

  “Right. And now?” he shrugged sadly, picking at his suit.

  I blinked. He had a point. If I hadn’t been there those years ago, witnessed it, the three of us baking the carrot cake and signing the petitions together, I would never have believed the Hackett poster-boy now propped up in front of me – Jermyn Street cufflinks at his wrists and a multi-million pound city property-deal in his attaché-case – was familiar with any poetry that wasn’t the sort to be sung boisterously at a rugby-club night out by thick-necked public-school bankers with beer glasses on their heads.

  “So, what happened?” I said.

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “What happened?” I pushed. “When I last saw you, you were bloody President of Greenpeace. Andrew? It’s me. Chess in the halls, hanging my posters. All those talks. All that. What aren’t you telling me?”

  Andrew sighed. He checked his watch and then looked at me, seemingly searching my face for traces of the young man he once knew. He shook his head with a dry, sad chuckle.

  “You got anything to drink? A bit stronger?”

  “Another teabag?” I suggested.

  “Forget it,” Andrew said. He furrowed his head, scratching his thick public-school thatch crossly. If a smile had been present a moment ago, it had now made excuses and got the fuck out of the way of things. “I had …” He moved around the shop slowly. “Everything was set. Planned, y’know?” he said. “I had it all sorted. You remember? Degree in geography, then it was a masters in oceanography.”

  “Living on a trawler or something? Wasn’t that the plan?”

  “Right,” Andrew nodded. “The big enviro-liberal. Helping. Doing my bit. Because that was what life was about. Cooperation. Socialism. Communal … I don’t know. Responsibility.”

  “Right on,” I said, waving the obligatory ironic two fingers.

  “I honestly believed then that the country, the world, would be a better place if we could all be a bit nicer to each other. Lend a helping hand. A few less rich p’raps, a few less poor – more of us all mucking in together somewhere in the middle. Everyone’s basically good. And up until it … it happened, I believed it. Truly. In here,” and he prodded his chest.

  “Happened?”

  “I was … I don’t know what you call it. Robbed. Burgled. Turned over.”

  “You were? When was this?”

  “One Christmas. Years ago. It was clever. I didn’t see it coming. They talked their way in. They talked like I knew them. There were doubts but … I let them in. I don’t know what I was thinking. Seeing the good in people I suppose. Didn’t think for a minute they’d …”

  “God. And they took – ?”

  “Oh everything. Everything that mattered. Without a second thought. No remorse. No hesitation. Turned, just like that. I pleaded but …”

  I looked at him as the memory barged about his head. The anger curling his face. Breathing slow and loud.

  “Did they … ?” I eased carefully. “I mean were you hurt? Did they – ?”

  “They pretty much left me for dead.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “Eventually, that is. While it was going on, they …” and he swallowed, tasting the memory. “It was violent. Childlike violence. That thoughtless, toddler, battering.”

  “God, Andrew …”

  “And prolonged. So they told me, anyway. I don’t know how long it actually took but it felt like months. I was just a wreck. Physically. Mentally. Psychiatrists tried …” but he didn’t finish, trailing into thought.

  “But you’re okay now?”

  Andrew took a silent moment. I saw a bitter, hateful smile dance across his face and then he looked at me. And he laughed.

  “Now?”

  It was nearing midday and Andrew and I were on a second cuppa, camped out in the chilly back office. The portable heater clanked and groaned noisily like a petulant teenager on a family holiday.

  “And what, you’re saying that was what changed you? Your direction?”

  “Changed everything,” Andrew said, sipping his mug with a slurp and stretching his back. “How could it not? That was that. When I eventually recovered, was able to think. Sit up. Feed myself. It was still there. The …” Andrew searched for the word for his pain. “Anger. I couldn’t focus. For weeks. The shock of it. For ages I found myself collapsing. Just sitting down on the floor, wherever I was. On pavements. In roads. Shaking. Rage. That people could be so … so …”

  “Bad?” I said.

  “Bad, right. Just so blatantly, cold-heartedly … It opened my eyes, I tell you. Made me grow up. I must have aged a decade. Everything I believed, everything I thought. About human nature, about my so called fellow man. It just fell away. Leaving a … a dark hole. A dark hole where liberal, friendly trust used to be.”

  “Because of your attackers.”

  “Who took my plans to care about the world and beat them to death. Beat everything good in me to death,” Andrew said, lip curled, chin on his chest. A face shadowed and haunted by these ghosts. He plucked at his shirt sleeves spitefully. “All this? Cufflinks and … Madison bloody Avenue? This is them. This is what they left me with. Business. Dog-eat-dog. The big deal. Sixty hours a week screwing the other guy because you know he’d be screwing you. It was the only thing that made sense after that. Jesus,” he spat suddenly, grabbing at his ugly tie, yanking it, pulling it, the knot tightening. Over his face, over his head, hard, caught, before throwing it to the dusty floor. I watched him sit, chest heaving for a moment, eyes hard and glassy.

  “I’ve never forgotten,” Andrew said. “They’ve never let me forget. And I’ll never stop hating them either. Because they turned me into this. They –” and the words caught in his throat for a moment. He let out a long slow breath, picking up his mug and staring into it. “Because they took everything. Everything. My trust, my soul. Tore them right out of my chest and replaced them with fucking hate.”

  “But …” I began. Andrew looked up. I got the impression from his face that if there were ‘buts’ to be considered he’d already given them a thorough drubbing and seen them off with smarting backsides. But hell, years ago? It needed saying.

  “This was years ago?” I said, shrugging a bit, palms aloft, trying to suggest forgiving-forgetting-and-moving-on with my eyebrows. Andrew blinked at me and smiled a small smile.

  “I know,” he said. “I know. A long time, right? Time’s the great healer, isn’t that what they say? But one day Neil. One day. Not soon. But give it a while,” and he pointed a finger at me, narrowing his eyes. “You’ll discover what I’ve come to learn about our old friend Father Time.” He spat the words, dribbling a little onto his shirt. “The great healer? Ha. Time is the greatest get-out clause for any bastard in the fucking world.”

  “Get out – ?”

  “You’ll see. Yooou’ll see. You add enough time to any wrong-doing – a con, an affair, a robbery – and you’ll find while you sleep, all blame just jumps the fence. Just like that,” and he clicked his fingers three times. “Jumps. The. Fence. You wake up one day and suddenly now it’s you. You who’s in the wrong. You who’s the bad guy. All pity vanishes. Suddenly you’re labelled childish. Immature. Obsessive. Hung-up. Move on, man. What’s the ma
tter with you? It was a long-time-ago man. Lighten up, get over it,” Andrew said. “The bad guys? The actual crooks? Hell, no one can remember their names. They’re off. Scot free, screwing some other poor blighter. Leaving you to sit alone being pitied by your few remaining friends.” Andrew glugged the dregs of his cold tea and slammed down the cup, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “Which is why I won’t let it happen to you.”

  I looked across at my old friend as he got up, tugging his red book from his back pocket and giving it a waggle.

  “Your idea?” I said anxiously.

  “To get your money back,” Andrew said. “From this guy, this Christopher. I want to be involved. I need to be involved,” and he began to clear a space on the desk, brushing fluff and pen lids to the side. “First, it’s not going to be easy. I mean, we’re smart, you and I. Successful. I’m at Keatings, you’ve got this place. We might have two good brains between us, sure. But compared to this Christopher? We’re kindergarten level.”

  He was talking quickly, eyes bright.

  “Now I tried to sketch out some thoughts,” and he riffled his book feebly. “Last night, in my hotel. But I was a bit drunk and … well, I think we have to face it. You and I aren’t cut out for this stuff. Swindles and switcheroos? We wouldn’t know where to begin.”

  “Agreed.”

  “If we’re going to come up with some scheme by which we can get back your fifty grand without getting ourselves killed, we’re going to need help. Someone with this sort of experience. And if not exactly this con-trick stuff, then at least someone built that way. Someone who thinks the way these guys think. Who’s lived in the shadows. Who can give us an insight into how these people work. How they think.”

  “Okay,” I said, rather dragged along by all this.

  The shop went quiet. Andrew looked at me expectantly like a Labrador with a lead in its mouth.

  “What?” I said.

  Andrew raised his eyebrows hopefully, nodding at me like a simpleton.

  I blinked. I looked about the office. Over my shoulder. Nope, neither Nick Leeson nor Ronnie Biggs had snuck in behind me. I looked back at Andrew and shrugged.

  He widened his eyes and nodded a little.

  And then the realisation leaked cold into my gut.

  “It’s perfect. He’s still alive, right?”

  “No,” I said. “I mean, yes yes. He might be still alive but no.

  Not in a million … No. Just no.”

  Undeterred, Andrew scuttled up to the chair next to me, spun it around and mounted it backwards in the New York style, flapping his hands enthusiastically.

  At least I think he did. I had my eyes shut in exhausted quiet despair at the time.

  “Listen, listen it’s perfect,” his voice said in my ear, eagerly. “You talked about him all the time at college.”

  “No. No I didn’t.”

  “You did. You said he’d never done a day’s work in his life.”

  “He still hasn’t.”

  “How he would use the system. Benefit fraud, all the loopholes.

  How old is he now?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t want to think about it. This isn’t going to –”

  “How old is he? Fifty-five?”

  “Now?” I sighed, eyes still shut, counting slowly in the darkness. “He’d be fifty-eight.”

  “Fifty-eight. Bloody hell, you can’t just blag your way through fifty-eight years without having this stuff in your blood. So I think you should call him. You don’t have to tell him specifics. Talk … talk hypothetically. Just asking his advice. He might –”

  “No.”

  “C’mon Neil. Think about it. If we’re going to do this – and I don’t see what choice we have –”

  “We can go to the police,” I said, opening my eyes and squinting in the flat shop-light. “Like normal people do. We can go to the police –”

  “Yeah? With what?” Andrew said.

  “I’ll tell them …”

  “Go on? What’s the big clue? Where’s the big lead?”

  I looked around the peeling walls in chilly silence. Fifty years of tatty, comic book crap peered back at me.

  “And why you, sir?” Andrew said in a pompous, Dixon of Dock Green tone. “Where are they now sir? Any witnesses sir? Anything they might have touched, sir? I’ve been there, mate. This is what happens. What can you tell the police?”

  My throat closed slowly, tight and panicky.

  “We have to do this,” Andrew said, “and we have to do this ourselves. Or we have to try.”

  “But I won’t involve … We’ll try it. You and I. Okay. But I’m not going crawling to –”

  “We need his help.”

  “I don’t. I don’t need anything from him.”

  “Neil, listen to me,” and Andrew got up, sliding his chair away with a clatter. He tugged up his trousers like a grown-up and squatted down on his haunches. He had black, grown-man’s socks. Spider-Man nowhere to be seen. “We need every advantage we can get going up against this man. Did you see this Christopher back off from a trick? Go easy on you?”

  I grunted.

  “Neil? Did you?”

  “No,” I said, hands now over my face. “No but …”

  “Then what’s your idea? Try and come up with something ourselves? Some clever double-triple-quadruple cross that Christopher won’t spot in the first three seconds? This is what this man does, Neil. Neil? What are you saying, take your hands away from your –”

  “I said, we discussed it.”

  “You – ?”

  “We discussed it. A long time ago. After he … That was it for us. I write to him. Once a year. Keep him up to date with things. A lifeline, I suppose. Births, deaths and marriages. To let him know the world goes on. But … but that’s it. He’s my father. I owe him that. But that’s all. I don’t want any part of that life. That was his way, not mine. Not me.”

  The office went silent. I looked up at Andrew. He sighed.

  “But you don’t get to make that choice now. Whether it’s what you wanted or not, part of that life is now your life. Nothing you can do to change that. So you can either become a victim. Become me. Spend the rest of your life with gritted teeth and a hardened heart. Or you can look at him as a gift. Use this one life-line. Get him round.”

  The office fell into another silence for what felt like an age. Andrew’s purple paisley tie drifted back into fashion at one point and then just as quickly back out again. Finally I spoke.

  “I can’t.”

  “Oh come on Neil, aren’t you listening? We –”

  “No, I mean even if … I mean I can’t just call him. I can’t get him round.”

  “You don’t know where he is?”

  “I know exactly where he is. That’s the problem.”

  sixteen

  One of the worst aspects of a job in retail management is that one is never at home. Early starts, late closings, stock-takes. It’s a twelve- sometimes fourteen-hour day, resulting in a sleepy, blurred home life of reheated dinners and broken promises.

  Of course one of the best aspects, similarly, is that one is never at home. The early starts, late closings and what-not mean that not one matrimonial eyelid is batted should one, say, disappear out of the house for an entire Saturday. It is just presumed one is slaving over a hot till.

  Even when one is actually taking the Nissan Micra for an anxious and fretful drive down the M2, out to the quaint little village of Selmeade in Kent.

  “Straight through, follow the yellow line. Sit at the allocated seat. The number is on your card. Keep moving, follow the yellow line.”

  My card had D12 stamped inkily on it. I wove nervously through the five rows of empty chairs and small tables in the draughty hall until I found my spot. The floor echoed and squeaked like a school gym, the air stale and wet with bleach. Along the fat bricked walls, hospital green with a greasy shine, broad men with clip-on frowns paced, beady eyes darting, watching other pale visi
tors – mostly tired-looking women – unload carrier bags of fizzy drinks and biscuits. Above us, on iron walkways, more shiny-capped men measured out the hour in plodding, purposeful steps while blank-eyed CCTV cameras whirred and prowled.

  Bottom hot and itchy in the plastic seat, I watched as five or six dozen men in tracksuits began to file in past a desk on a raised dais at the front, their names checked, their numbers given. It took a few stomach-tumbling moments before I realised that the grey man in the raspberry tracksuit squeaking towards me was him.

  HMP Selmeade’s prisoner FF9191.

  Or Dad, as I call him.

  He eased himself down, waving off my awkward bobbing hand-shake- backslap fumble.

  “S’all right son. Probably best we ain’t on friendly terms,” he said, motioning at the inmate/out-mate couples either side of us who were hugging, groping and kissing noisily. “Best way to getcha’self a strip search is that.” He placed a dented tobacco tin on the table between us with a loud clack, tapping his hollow cheeks. “Drugs. In the mouth. S’how they get ’em in. Bring me doo-dahs did you?”

  I looked at him for a moment. It appeared pleasantries were over. With a sigh I emptied out the canteen carrier bag onto the table. The tobacco, bottles of Coke and the red tub of Brylcreem he’d asked for on the phone. Dad smiled with a good lad, hugging the items to his thin chest, rheumy eyes shining.

  A longer look. A closer look. He wasn’t well, not that the tracksuit did him any favours. It was cheap, thin, prison issue. The other men sat around us filled theirs out with gym-buffed shoulders and thick, lifter’s necks, but Dad’s hung on his frame like a dust-sheet on a xylophone.

  “If this is a tickin’ off,” he began, sliding the cigarettes into his tracksuit shiftily and popping open his tobacco tin with twitchy yellow fingers. “Some closure cobblers your therapist is makin’ you do then we’ll keep it short son. I got a Kaluki game I’m missin’ ’ere.”

  “I’m not …” I said. My voice was loud, flat against the swimming-pool echo of the cold hall. I took a deep breath, heart heavy. “No-one’s ticking anyone off. That’s not … I just thought I should … How are you doing?”