Stolen

by Paul Finch

  ‘No!’ he snarled.

  This gig was his creation, his game. He hadn’t gone to all this trouble teaching the law-abiding world that it had been a grave mistake kicking him out, just to see it immediately absorbed into some vast, shapeless underworld conglomerate.

  He glanced at his watch, which jerked him back to the present and to his feet.

  It was almost ten, and there was a job to do this morning; in the angst of the last twenty-four hours he’d almost forgotten.

  A short side-passage led off the office, connecting with a toilet and a small tea-making area. O’Grady hurried down there, grabbed a plastic bag from the draining board, and took several items of clothing out of it: a sweatshirt, a pair of jeans, a baseball cap and some trainers. Hurriedly, he put it all on, taking care to hang his suit in its correct creases. There were four other items in the bag: a notebook and pen, a Tupperware lunchbox and a camera with a neck strap and extendable lens. O’Grady checked they were all present and correct and took the bag with him as he headed out of the office, stopping to pull a knee-length waterproof over his casuals and to take two mobile phones from his desk, his own and a throwaway device that he’d purchased the previous day.

  A shabby green Volkswagen Golf awaited him on the other side of Long Acre, the decade-old rust-bucket registered to a fantasy owner, that he used for tootling around in when he was actually on the job. As he drove, he glanced at his watch again, the clock on the dash having ceased to work some time ago. It was 10.10am. Time was running out, but if he kept his foot down, he’d be okay.

  As he hit Pearlman Road, he dug his mobile out and made a call.

  ‘Yeah?’ Roper said.

  ‘Where are you?’ O’Grady asked.

  ‘Where I’m supposed to be. On the 10.05 to Southport.’

  ‘Any problems?’

  ‘Nope. Chesham got on at Salford Central, as instructed.’

  ‘Any sign he’s got a tail?’

  ‘None whatsoever.’

  That was reassuring, because if there was one thing Jon Roper was good at, it was sniffing out undercover cops.

  ‘He’s not seen you?’ O’Grady asked.

  ‘He’s in the carriage in front of me. And he’s not looked round once.’

  ‘Anything with him?’

  ‘Yeah. He’s got a sports bag.’

  ‘Good. Where are you now … what’s your next stop?’

  ‘Swinton.’

  ‘Right.’ O’Grady was pleased. He’d been a little behind his time, but that meant the train still had four stops to make before the handover. ‘I’m on Manchester Road, heading west. We’ll make the switch, as planned, at Hag Fold. Call me when you leave Atherton.’

  ‘No problem.’

  It was mid-morning, so the traffic was minimal. And quite soon, ahead of schedule, O’Grady had parked on a side-street near Hag Fold railway station. As he applied the handbrake, the phone buzzed in his pocket.

  ‘We’re leaving Atherton,’ Roper said.

  ‘Okay,’ O’Grady replied. ‘Sit tight.’

  Ordinarily, when they were working a target, precautions like these wouldn’t be necessary. But it was Dean Chesham’s first payment, which made him a potential risk. You hadn’t learned how to read them at this early stage, and you couldn’t afford to take chances. Not that half-arsed countermeasures like these would be effective against a full-scale police obbo, but O’Grady didn’t anticipate that. Chesham had too much to lose. He put on a pair of sunglasses, grabbed his camera and his lunchbox, and, as he strolled towards the station entrance, took out the throwaway mobile. There was only one number listed on it.

  ‘Yeah?’ came the footballer’s nervous voice.

  O’Grady descended the steps, tugging the baseball cap down, so that it hid his face from any security cameras, and idled along the flimsy wooden platform, which, as he’d hoped at this time of day, was deserted.

  ‘Get off at the next stop,’ he said. ‘Sit on the bench at the farthest end of the platform from the station steps. There’ll be another train coming in from the other direction in a few minutes. Get on it, and it’ll take you back into Manchester. Obviously, leave the bag on the bench.’ He could have cut the call there, but his mood got the better of him. ‘Let me tell you something, my lad … today is the very last day to fuck me around. Any sign of the police, any sign at all, you’ll be all over the internet by tea-time. In fact, it might be fucking worse, okay? I know a certain disturbed character who’s very good at video editing. I only need to click my fingers, and you’re not just shagging trannies, you’re doing goats and pigs as well, and you’re the star turn at kiddie-porn parties. You get my fucking drift, Lightning?’

  It went like clockwork.

  The Southport train pulled in on time, O’Grady awaiting it at the farthest end of the platform, but now seated on the floor next to the ‘No Members of the Public Past this Point’ signpost, with his lunchbox alongside him, his camera on his chest, and his notebook in hand, every inch the convincing trainspotter. Dean Chesham wasn’t the only person who got out, but the other two who did walked immediately to the stairway. The footballer was also in disguise, though somewhat more ridiculously than O’Grady, wearing an afro wig and shades, and a big fur-collared parka.

  He was also carrying a zip-up sports bag, which bulged at the seams.

  As instructed, he dumped it on the bench at the farthest end of the platform, paying no attention to the trainspotter only thirty yards away. A train bound in the opposite direction immediately came rumbling in. Chesham dashed over to it, climbed aboard and headed back into the city. No one had got off this train, so the platform was empty again.

  As nonchalantly as he was able, O’Grady stood up, ambled to the bench, sat down alongside the abandoned sports bag and took sandwiches and a bottle of orange juice from the lunchbox. For five minutes he consumed his early lunch, all the time watching the stairs and the fences around the station’s perimeter. He’d specifically chosen Hag Fold for the handover because it was only staffed on a part-time basis.

  Half an hour passed while he munched contentedly, occasionally showing interest whenever a train passed, scribbling down its details. At the end of half an hour, still in casual mode, he gathered everything together, including Chesham’s bag, strolled to the stairs, ascended and left the station.

  Their rendezvous point that day was a derelict boatshed on wasteland just off the River Irwell, on the border between Salford and Bolton.

  Roper arrived with O’Grady, having got off the train at the next stop after Hag Fold, which was Daisy Hill, catching the next service the other way, and being collected by O’Grady at Swinton. Bernie Stone, meanwhile – ‘that fat bastard with the beard,’ as McCracken had called him – who’d been working that morning on another target, had arrived five minutes earlier, and was waiting for them in nondescript, paint-stained overalls.

  O’Grady said nothing, but unzipped the bag in stern, humourless fashion, one by one laying the elastic-banded blocks of twenties on the bonnet of his Golf. It was all there, two hundred Gs, as agreed for a first payment. He divided the take three ways, but still didn’t speak.

  ‘Something wrong?’ Roper asked. ‘You didn’t say a dicky-bird all the way over here. You seemed a bit off yesterday as well, at the meeting.’

  O’Grady gave him a look that could have cut glass. ‘Nothing’s fucking wrong, okay?’

  ‘Okay.’ Roper shrugged. ‘But you can smile, you know. This is looking good.’

  ‘Hey!’ O’Grady pointed at his face. ‘I choose when and where I’m happy, okay? If I decide the world’s a fucked-up place, with fucked-up idiots on every side of me, I reserve the right to reflect it, yeah?’

  After he was done with Roper and Stone, O’Grady drove back to Long Acre. It was now mid-afternoon, so the working day wasn’t officially done, but he still found it hard to concentrate. He went back into the office, changed into his suit and tie, and then sat there and stewed for another two hours. His shar
e of the cash, £66,000, sat on the desk in front of him in Dean Chesham’s sports bag. He didn’t bother putting it into the company’s hidden safe or entering the details into the encrypted ledger on his laptop. He didn’t even bother counting it again, which was his usual habit.

  At around five o’clock, he left the office with money in hand, crossed the Acre, unlocked the side-door and went down the steps into the garage below. Ordinarily tonight they’d celebrate. Megan, adopting her usual ‘ask no questions and I’ll be told no lies’ approach, would repay him three times over when they got back from the slap-up meal at whichever expensive restaurant he took her to. But this evening everything was inverted. That money might as well have been burning a hole in the bag and spilling out. Because it wasn’t his any more. At least, half of it wasn’t … maybe considerably more than half.

  ‘Bastards!’ he said under his breath, so infuriated that he didn’t immediately notice when the motion-sensitive light didn’t come on.

  That only struck him when he was halfway across the open space to his car.

  He halted, skin suddenly prickling.

  With amazing speed, O’Grady’s anger drained away, his back and shoulders stiffening as he turned his head, wondering about the lack of light. There was just enough of a grimy glow filtering down the ramp from the frosted glass panels in the garage door to show him the outline of his Jaguar. But even in that half-glimpsed state, he could tell that something was wrong.

  He stood rigid, his eyes adjusting more and more to the gloom, the damage swimming more and more into view. Within seconds it was plain that the entire front of his beautiful sixty-grand motor had been brutally mangled, the bodywork crumpled as if from a head-on impact, what remained of the number plate hanging loose, the radiator grille bashed in, the nearside and offside light clusters shattered.

  Even to Miles O’Grady’s inexpert eye, there was thousands of pounds’ worth of repair work needed here. When he spied the pool of semi-fluorescent liquid expanding underneath the engine, he realised that it would actually be tens of thousands of pounds.

  At first, he’d thought a sledgehammer, or even a couple of sledgehammers. But surely even that …

  Of course, none of this really mattered.

  All that actually mattered was getting the hell out of this unlit hole in the ground before his car wasn’t the only thing left ripped apart. And he did just that, turning and running for his life, loping back up the steps, three treads at a time.

  It was probably the least dignified thing that Miles O’Grady had done in as long as he could remember, crashing in a sweaty heap through the side-door of the garage out onto Long Acre, slamming it behind him and frantically locking it. He backed away a couple of yards before glancing right, to where the main garage door still stood closed and seemingly locked.

  How in hell had they got in?

  It didn’t matter.

  A skeleton key, or something … they always found a way. He backed away further. The question was, were they still down there? Or were they now out here?

  He looked around, spinning in a frightened circle. But there was no sign of anyone else on the Acre. Around and overhead, the windows looked to be empty. Less than a hundred yards away, beyond the entrance, traffic rumbled past as usual. Normality. That was what he needed right now. Normality was the only sure place to find safety.

  He almost ran that way, slipping and stumbling over the broken, mossy flagstones in his leather lace-up shoes, but at the last second veering across the Acre to his beaten-up Golf. He expected that to be in pieces too, tyres shredded, the guts of its engine hanging out. But no – as far as he could see, this one was intact. They either hadn’t known this car was his – he dug his keys out – or they’d wanted him to get in it and drive.

  O’Grady hovered there, fresh sweat swamping the inside of his shirt. He dropped to a crouch, to check the undercarriage, only to realise that he wouldn’t recognise a car-bomb if he saw one. When he stood up again, he still hesitated, key in hand, trying to work things out logically. What would be the point in wiring up such a device?

  Because this is the car they intend to kill me in. After forcing me to drive it by smashing up the other one.

  But it still seemed unnecessarily elaborate.

  Why not just plant the bomb under the Jag?

  But no, you couldn’t rationalise the actions of maniacs like these. They always had their reasons, even if the average citizen would find them too twisted for words. And dallying wasn’t helping. O’Grady had to get away from here.

  Trapping the breath in his chest, he inserted the key and opened the Golf. Nothing happened. He climbed behind the wheel, dropped his bag of money into the passenger-side footwell, jammed his key into the ignition and turned it. The car came to life. And that was all. He got his foot down; the car rumbled forward – still nothing happened.

  ‘Okay, okay …’ he gasped.

  When he hit the road network, it was slow and smooth, O’Grady doing his level best to behave normally. But all the time now, he felt that people were watching him. A fat man waiting at a bus stop with a tan jacket over his left arm seemed inordinately interested as the Golf rumbled by in the slow-moving traffic. When O’Grady got away from the town centre, and the log-jams of cars and lorries began to break up, he slowly tensed as two men in what appeared to be a fishmonger’s van followed him around several corners, left, right, left again, left again, only to branch off at the next set of lights. Even then, there was no relief. He approached a footbridge spanning Halpin Road, in the middle of which a black guy, leaning on the railing, watched the traffic passing by underneath. On the other side, O’Grady craned his neck around to stare through the back window: the black guy was still there, only now speaking on his mobile phone.

  ‘Oh, Christ …’

  He headed for home nevertheless, because he had no option. He was sodden with sweat, and completely unsure what to expect, but quickly managed to concoct some half-arsed plan about cruising slowly up to the end of his drive on Astley Close in Broadgate Green, and if he saw anything untoward, hitting the gas and speeding away again.

  And then what, arsehole?

  What the fuck do you do after that?

  You stupid fuck! This is what happens when you threaten the Crew.

  But when he arrived on their quiet suburban street, there was no one waiting there. Megan, a sales rep in medical supplies, wasn’t even home. The driveway was empty, the street deserted. Even so, he parked on the road in case he’d need a quick getaway.

  As he walked warily up his drive, he was numb, intensely aware how vulnerable he was, how vulnerable he’d always been since that foul-mouthed exchange with Frank McCracken. Nothing happened, though – until he reached the front door, where a tiny square of paper had been fastened across the peephole with a glob of Blu Tack.

  Fresh sweat running down his spine, O’Grady saw that it was a snippet of newspaper. No ordinary, everyday citizen would have touched it of course; they’d have read it once and then immediately called the police. Not Miles O’Grady. He didn’t have the luxury of being an everyday citizen. He took it down, and after he’d read it once, he read it a second time, and a third, and a fourth. Only then did he turn and walk slowly and heavily back down the drive to his Golf, climb in behind the wheel and drive away, taking the long, meandering route back towards Long Acre.

  When he parked, he did so shakily, leaving the vehicle askew against the kerb, fleetingly unconcerned for the first time ever that someone might notice this car and wonder what the heck it was doing here. He crossed the Acre to the garage, opened its side-door and went back down. The light still didn’t come on. But that no longer mattered. And Miles O’Grady was no longer scared of the darkness. If anything, he felt too sick to worry about that.

  He shone his phone-light on the wrecked front end of his Jag. He didn’t need to focus hard to see speckles of what looked like clotted blood dotted across the scrunched bodywork, or the threads of torn material d
angling from the knots of metal.

  ‘Good God,’ he breathed.

  The slip of newspaper fell from his grasp. It was only a small thing, a clipping from the Breaking column of the Manchester Evening News:

  OAP dies in hit and run horror

  Greater Manchester Police are appealing for witnesses regarding a fatal hit-and-run accident in Crowley, which occurred just before lunchtime today. Gerald Ormisher (88), of 13 Riverbank View, was knocked down and killed by a speeding vehicle on Oxley Lane, Crowley, at around 10.55am this morning. The vehicle, which has not yet been identified, failed to stop, but Crowley Traffic officers say they are looking for a large silver-grey car, possibly a Jaguar XJ …

  Chapter 15

  It was indescribably filthy. A one-time boiler room, now with the boilers removed, it was little more than a brick-lined hole under the ground, the rusted, broken piping suspended along its ceiling dangling with cobwebs and stuffed with rats’ nests, the walls caked with a black, greasy clag, a residue of the unimaginably disgusting process now employed there.

  The air was so rank, so thick with fumes that it was toxic, so much so that the two people down there needed to wear full biohazard masks complete with panoramic visors and dual filters on their respirators, plus heavy-duty, plastic-based protective gauntlets and coveralls, just to be able to stand it for a few minutes.

  One of the pair, whose suit was white, was seated on an old school-chair near the door, focusing through the mask’s polycarbonate visor on an iPad, where a game of Bejeweled was in progress.