by Janet Tanner
Sometimes he lay awake at nights plotting what he would like to do to the Fords to gain his revenge. He thought about pushing petrol-soaked rags through the letter box of their prissy Cape Cod-style house and setting light to them and the visions he conjured up of them standing in the garden sobbing as all their possessions went up in flames gave him a kick of sharp excitement and a glow of satisfaction. Once he went so far as to bring a can of petrol home with him from the garage, and one night when there was no moon he walked over to the house and stood at the gate, fingering the box of matches in his pocket and enjoying the feeling of power that came from knowing that he could destroy not only the house, which would probably go up like a torch, but also Lisa-Marie and her family too. But for some reason he did not do it. It wasn’t that he cared if the old man burned to death, trapped in his blazing home; that, he thought carelessly, did not really bother him at all. But even hating her as he now did he found he did not want to endanger Lisa-Marie.
And there was something else. If the Fords died now it would be over, there would be no more plotting of sweet revenge – and Steve did not want it to be over. He wanted to savour it again and again. One day, his chance would come. He would get the old man for sure and through him hurt Lisa-Marie. It was a much more satisfactory solution.
But Old Man Ford’s treatment of him engendered more than hatred and the desire for revenge. It also fuelled Steve’s determination to break out from the strait-jacket of poverty into which he had been born. One day soon, he promised himself, he would get away from this place where he was known as the son of a mill-hand from the poorest part of town, one day soon he would have a big car and wear silk shirts and suede shoes, one day soon he would have money in his pocket, eat in the best restaurants, date the classiest women. And none of them would look down on him, no father would tell him ever again to ‘ keep away from my daughter’ – at least, not for the reason old Ford had done it.
The day Steve left high school he went home and packed his belongings together in a battered hold-all. It did not take long; his belongings were so few. The next day he set out to hitchhike south. He had only a vague idea where he was going but to him the South meant prosperity as well as endless summers. He headed for Florida, taking jobs along the way to earn money to buy food and, sometimes, a room for the night.
When he hit Florida he made for the Keys, getting casual work in the holiday trade, and for a while he forgot all about his ambitions in the pursuit of pleasure. As long as he had a few bucks to jingle in the pocket of his cut-off denims money was of no importance. Living was all that mattered – and living, here in Florida, meant sun, sea and sex. Steve was tall, strongly built and handsome, he was an excellent swimmer and he had the fierce pride that made him stand so tall he was head and shoulders above the rest. The girls who came to the Keys on vacation fell over themselves for his favours and he found he had only to wink and throw out a casual invitation to obtain almost instant gratification. These were the golden eighties, President Reagan was in the White House, promising an end to the crippling conditions of the last years, the future was there for the taking and Steve grabbed his pleasure with both hands. Here it did not matter who he was, no one knew his background, or cared less. Here he could be anything, or anyone, he wanted to be.
Steve worked a little – if you could call it work. He swam and sunbathed and when darkness fell he ate and drank and fooled and made love with the latest in a line of golden girls, all leggy and suntanned in their brief bikinis, all crazy for him.
At first he was ham-fisted, lacking in finesse, but he learned fast and soon his technique matched his promise. Practice makes perfect, they say, and here in Florida he had plenty of practice.
It was not only sexual niceties that Steve learned. Most of the girls he met were from well-to-do families and Steve made sure that the ones he selected for his adventures came from that stratum of society. The girls he consorted with had fathers who owned boats and condominiums, they were businessmen and politicians who had made their money from real estate and textiles, munitions and publishing, and cut their political teeth working for state governors and congressmen. Some of them were state governors and congressmen! Knowing this made Steve feel good because by comparison with them old Ford was nothing but a small-town bumpkin puffed up with his own importance.
From these girls Steve learned all about social behaviour. Occasionally he made a bloomer, always quickly forgiven, but on the whole he learned quickly and easily, soaking up like a sponge the way of talking, the way of behaving, the names of drinks and exotic dishes, the way to dress when the necessity arose – and when he could afford to do it. But at the same time he retained the hard edge that came from living on the wrong side of town and an inbred streak of callousness. The combination was a lethal one – and he knew it.
The time came when Steve began to tire of his easy-going and aimless life, unbelievable though it had once seemed. One day an ocean-going yacht owned by an international tycoon berthed nearby and word went around that the master was looking to take on extra crew. Steve, having seen, and taken a fancy to, the tycoon’s twenty-year-old daughter, decided to apply, and a week later when the yacht sailed Steve sailed with her.
His job was in the engine room. It was hot, sweaty work, totally lacking in glamour, but there was compensation in the shape of the tycoon’s daughter, Mary Jane. She was beautiful, amusing and bored out of her mind with the clean-cut but wimpish college boys she met socially. Soon Steve was visiting her in the luxurious stateroom she referred to, rather incongruously as her ‘cabin’, and if her father knew what was going on he chose to turn a blind eye.
After two months’ cruising Mary Jane left the yacht to return to her studies and Steve’s interest in a life at sea went with her. Perhaps it was time, he thought, to begin making some money of his own, though he did not know, as yet, how he was going to do it. He headed for New York, took a job as a bouncer, found himself an apartment, kept his ear to the ground and began making plans. He was beginning to doubt that he could make his fortune legitimately since he had no qualifications beyond his charm and his sharp wits and no money to back him, and his thoughts were turning to the rich pickings that were there to be had from a life of crime. It was then that fate took a hand.
Though he had not been back to Vermont since the day he had packed his bags and left, Steve had kept in touch with his family, and one day he received news that his mother was sick and not expected to live more than a few months. Steve went home to see her, and the squalor of his former home and the sight of his mother, worn to a pathetic shadow of skin and bone by years of hardship and neglect, reinforced his determination to make some real money and ensure that never again would he be caught in the jaws of grinding poverty.
Talking with his sister late into the night he found himself asking about the Fords. They had moved, she told him – the old man had taken promotion and was now manager of a small town branch of the bank some forty miles south. Lisa-Marie had gone with them but, she thought, had since married.
‘Imagine that old fool a bank manager!’ Steve’s sister said. ‘They promoted him to get rid of him, I shouldn’t wonder. But he’s had nothing but trouble. There’ve been two armed hold-ups, or so I heard. I guess any bank he’s in charge of would be an easy touch.’
Steve said nothing but his mind had begun working overtime. To rob a bank was almost a cliché but there could be a lot of profit in it – enough to set him up in a nice little racket like drug-dealing – and the idea of robbing Old Man Ford was an appealing one. Steve discovered all the details he could and on his way back to New York made a detour to the small town where Ford was bank manager to check things out. He was a little wary of being seen and recognised by one of the Fords but it was a risk he was prepared to take. In the event he did not run into any of them, though he checked out not only the bank itself but also the Fords’ home, for he had begun to devise a plan that amused him and went some way to satisfying his desire for reveng
e.
The Fords lived in a small pretty house on the edge of town which was situated conveniently distant from its nearest neighbours. Clearly neither of the girls was now at home for as he watched the house Steve saw no one but old Ford and his wife, Joan, coming and going. Jodie must be away at college, he decided, and Lisa-Marie obviously had a place of her own with her husband. It surprised him how his gut could still tighten at the thought of her with someone else, but it only strengthened his desire for revenge. Steve returned to New York to make his plans.
A month later he was back. Very early in the morning he went to the Fords’ house and knocked on the door. Joan Ford answered it, wearing a dressing gown over her nightdress and with no makeup to disguise the ageing of the features which had once probably been very like Lisa-Marie’s. Steve, who was wearing a full-face crash helmet as an effective form of disguise, stuck a gun in her ribs and ordered her into the house. Old Ford was eating breakfast; when he realised what was happening he started shaking and blubbering and Steve experienced a surge of adrenaline and triumph.
‘Go to the bank and empty the safe,’ he ordered. ‘Bring the money back here and give it to me. If you do, nothing will happen. If you don’t – your wife gets it. And no tricks – right?’
‘What – now?’
‘No, you asshole – the usual time. Just make everything look normal. Do it, and your wife will be all right. But just remember I’m here with the gun looking right at her. Try any tricks and I’ll blow her away.’
‘All right! All right! I’ll do it!’ Ford was gibbering. Steve felt nothing but contempt for him. He was certain Ford had not recognised him – the crash helmet concealed his face effectively and since Ford had seen him only the once, so long ago now, he knew it would never occur to him to connect the man now threatening him with the boy he had humiliated.
At the usual time Ford left for the bank, and Steve’s only worry was that someone would notice something was wrong.
‘If anyone asks, say you have to come home again because your wife isn’t well,’ he instructed him. I’ll be watching to make sure you are alone.’ He saw Ford’s eyes grow small and shifty in the sweaty face that was so reminiscent of the way he had looked that other, long-ago day.
‘You’ll go away then – leave us alone?’
‘I’ll take your wife with me and drop her off on the outskirts of town,’ Steve said. ‘Just to make sure you haven’t got the police waiting for me around the corner.’
When Ford had gone Steve prowled around the room, looking at the photographs, of Lisa-Marie and her sister as children, just the way he remembered them, but he made sure the gun he had brought with him was levelled at Mrs Ford in case she should try to get away.
‘Make us some coffee,’ he said after a while. Mrs Ford went into the kitchen and he went with her, glancing at his watch. He had timed Ford’s journey to the bank and back; he knew exactly how long it would take.
There was still a good ten minutes to go and he was drinking coffee in the kitchen, holding the mug carefully with his gloved hands and manoeuvring it beneath his helmet, when he heard the front door open. Instantly he was alert. He slipped back the safety catch on the gun, ordered Mrs Ford to stay where she was, and looked through the door into the hall. A young woman was unwrapping a scarf from around her neck; fair hair fell around her shoulders.
‘Hey, Mom!’ she called. ‘It’s only me!’
It was Lisa-Marie. Sweat broke out on Steve’s face beneath the concealing crash helmet. What the hell was she doing here? This was something he hadn’t reckoned on.
At that precise moment she looked up and saw him standing there – and she knew him instantly, crash helmet or no crash helmet.
‘Steve?’ she said in a puzzled voice. Then her eyes fastened on the gun and widened with confusion and horror. ‘What are you doing?’
He knew then that he was cornered and there was only one thing to do if he did not want to wind up in prison. He would have to shoot Lisa-Marie and her mother, kill them both, because Mrs Ford was right there behind him and she had heard what Lisa-Marie had said.
‘Get in there, both of you!’ he ordered, waving the gun at them.
Mrs Ford ran to Lisa-Marie, clinging to her arm and sobbing. With her dressing gown and nightdress flapping around her legs she looked pathetic and ridiculous. It would almost be a pleasure to put a bullet into her. But Lisa-Marie glared at him, her head held high.
‘You’ve gone mad!’ she said. Her voice sounded just the same as it always had. Suddenly he was remembering the way her body had felt beneath his on the shingle all those years ago, and he knew he could not do it any more than he had been able to set the house on fire with her asleep inside. Funny how a girl could do this to him, make him hate her so much and yet, with a part of him over which he had no control, love her still.
‘Stay there and don’t move!’ he ordered. He backed along the hall, still pointing the gun at them. There was nothing for it but to get away now. The hell with the money. Then, just as he reached the door, he heard a car outside. Old Ford, back again. Perhaps he could still salvage something from this bloody fiasco! He drew back into the well of the hall and as Ford opened the door he was ready. Ford was carrying a black Gladstone bag; Steve guessed it held the contents of the safe. In one quick movement he snatched the bag from Ford and backed out through the door.
‘Don’t do anything!’ he warned. ‘The first one that moves, I’ll kill you!’
But he knew he wouldn’t – not if the one who moved was Lisa-Marie.
He ran down the path to where he had left his getaway car with the keys in the ignition, leapt in and brought the engine roaring to life. He was sweating all over now. He had the money, but they knew who he was. His only chance was to make his escape and disappear back into the teeming city. What a foul-up! He should have killed her – he should have! If it had been anyone but Lisa-Marie he would have. Now his plan was in ruins, his revenge soured, and he was on the run.
Steve did not get far. The Fords must have been on the telephone to the police almost before his car roared away, for he had gone only a few miles when he heard the sirens. He ducked and dived, he drove like a madman, the adrenaline honing all his natural and acquired skills, but when he saw the roadblock ahead he knew it was all over. Pointless to drive into them and probably kill himself doing it. Steve screamed to a halt, and when the patrolman came alongside he opened the door, took off his crash helmet and said, with great panache: ‘Yes, Officer? Can I help you?’
He was sent for a spell to New York State Penitentiary and it proved to be the turning point in his life. There were schemes for the retraining and rehabilitation of criminals and Steve was chosen to take part in one of them. Because he had always been a good swimmer and had all the physical and mental attributes considered necessary, he was selected to train as a deep-sea diver. The training was, he found, both absorbing and challenging, covering not only the techniques of diving but also underwater engineering, and the rewards promised to be high. This, perhaps, was a way he could make enough money legitimately to put his foot on the first rung of the ladder of success, and he could do it in some far-off isolated spot, where his record would not be known. Steve was not greatly ashamed of having tried to rob the bank; it was the failure to carry it off successfully that made him cringe.
On his release, because he had always fancied seeing Europe, he took up a contract with an international oil company, Excel Oil, who had massive operations in the North Sea. The bleak conditions there shocked him but the excitement of diving was still fresh and powerful and the promise of a great deal of money to be made was compensation for the biting cold, the long exhausting hours, and the absence of the three Bs – booze, broads and ballads. Ambition had resurrected itself within Steve during his time in the penitentiary – it burned now more fiercely than ever and he spent a good deal of time scheming.
Had he but known it, every one of those plans was superfluous. For in decreeing that he
should find himself working on the Excel rig fate had dealt Steve a hand with a wild card in it.
That wild card’s name was Mac MacIlroy.
Mac MacIlroy was one of the divers in Steve’s team.
Steve’s contract with Excel was for what was known in the trade as ‘ saturation-diving’, which meant working two weeks on, two weeks off, in a team of three – two divers and a bell man. During the two weeks on the hours of work were long and arduous – twelve-hour stints of diving interspersed with living in the close confines of the recompression chamber; the two weeks off were spent ashore, sleeping, partying and often generally making up for the privations of life on the rig. In these claustrophobic conditions friendships were forged and enemies made. It was rare for the divers who worked as a team on the rig to see much of one another ashore, but Steve and Mac were an exception to this rule, though to all intents and purposes they were so different that their friendship was an unlikely one.
Mac had been brought up in Gloucestershire where his father was a much-respected solicitor. He had been educated at a private day school for boys but he had opted to leave at the age of eighteen and take an HNC in engineering rather than going to university.
After a few years working for an engineering company Mac had begun to be restless. He could see little future in his present job and since he had always been a keen sport diver he had decided to try to use his aptitude professionally. He had applied, and been accepted for, a training course at Fort William, and there, in the icy, pitch-black waters of Loch Linnhe he had learned to use underwater all the engineering skills that were his on land, and more. He learned how to use a thermic lance to cut steel under water and change massive bronze valves and how to check rig equipment and repair or replace it as necessary. He trained in the use of underwater explosives and there, in the deep hole in the floor of the lake, 450 feet below the surface, he discovered the kicks that came from doing a job that was both demanding and dangerous as well as skilful.
