by Graham Marks
Looking at these people all he could see were six individuals, not really a team. Kind of organised, but not an organisation. Rob? Rob was just your basic thieving sod, who also got a kick out of destroying things. And it was pretty clear that Omega Place was self-financing mainly through his skills and efforts. Assisted by Tommy, who was one of those techy guys who could fix anything, mobiles were unlocked and cars were kept on the road.
And after nearly two weeks he was no nearer figuring out Izzy.
Isabel Morley. That was her full name, but he’d never heard anyone ever call her Isabel. The best way Paul could think of describing her, if anyone had asked him, was small and angry – she seemed to be permanently hormonal and always looking at you with her steely blue eyes like she suspected you of being up to something. Quite pretty, though, in a tomboyish sort of way, but not fanciable in any way. Entirely not. Tommy’d told him that he was the one who’d introduced Izzy to Orlando. He’d first met her in some squat where he’d been staying when he’d arrived from Birmingham. She’d been in what he’d called ‘a bad spiral’ since after she’d left home – and was still travelling down when he bumped into her some time later.
Tommy didn’t say why he’d brought Izzy along or why he put up with her bitching, but all Paul could think was that he must have a soft spot for her. No accounting for taste, right? They were tight, those two, but then they were street partners, and although she seemed to give him as hard a time as she gave everyone else, Paul had never seen how it was when they were working together. He’d wanted to ask how Tommy could hack spending all that time on his own with her, but didn’t know what his reaction would be – and also, as long as he didn’t have to do it, was he really bothered?
Before he had time to answer his own question a figure moved across his line of vision and slid into the chair opposite him.
‘Man, you were so into your own thing there, you didn’t even see me come in, did you?’
Paul focused on Sky, smiling quizzically back at him. ‘I was thinking.’
‘I could tell. What about – anything interesting?’
‘Not particularly…’
Sky moved the glass ashtray nearer to him, took a sip of what by now had to be lukewarm tea and started constructing a roll-up.
‘You want anything to eat before we get going?’
‘Do you?’
‘I could tackle a bacon sandwich and win – ask them to make the bacon real crispy, OK?’
‘Your wish is my command.’ Paul got up; he didn’t mind doing stuff for Sky because, with his gentlemanly drawl, whatever he said always sounded polite. ‘D’you want another tea?’
‘Yeah, why not.’
In London the rule seemed to be that they travelled by public transport. You couldn’t get clamped on a bus or a tube and, since they mostly used stolen Oyster cards, it was free as well. Tonight they were going into town, all three teams, all travelling separately, on the one big job. Paul and Sky were on the tube and en route to the Docklands area.
At today’s meeting, right after breakfast, Orlando had been like a different person. Paul didn’t quite know what it was, except that he was more… connected? That was as close as he could get. And there was an energy about him that Paul hadn’t seen before, a mixture of anger and enthusiasm that was incredibly infectious and made him feel really fired up. Orlando had said it was time to make a very public statement, time to take the message to the front line. He smiled to himself when he remembered that bit, like they were at war or something.
Friday night, late, when the West End was crowded with tourists and weekenders, was the best time to do it, Orlando had said. A lot of people to hide behind, a lot of distracting activity so anyone looking at live feeds – or, later, at tapes – wouldn’t be able to pick out specific faces. Plus they were all carrying baseball caps, wearing hoodies and had with them the kind of loose neck tubes that bikers used, which could be pulled up over the lower half of your face if necessary.
The idea was to mark the whole of Oxford Street with Omega Place material – stickers and a new edition of the Manifesto – like it was their territory. They were, Orlando had said, going to own the place, and they were going to get noticed, get the message to the media and be heard. And Oxford Street was the place to do it. Probably more cameras per square foot there than anywhere else in the Disunited Kingdom, Orlando had said.
That’s what Tommy, Izzy, Rob and Terri were doing. He and Sky were doing a similar kind of thing outside the offices of various newspapers and were now on their way to their first stop, Canary Wharf. Back at the squat, Orlando was going to be using some drone computers Tommy had hijacked to send emails out as well. An information blitzkrieg was how he’d put it.
Paul looked over at Sky, plugged into the iPod Rob had got for him earlier in the week. He nodded and smiled. Paul nodded back. They’d just changed at Stratford, on to the DLR line, and, looking at the map, they had six more stops to go. This would be the first time he was going to work with Sky on a proper job. He did not want to screw anything up.
The only downside of the mission was that, because the areas where the papers had their offices weren’t what you’d call big on entertainment, there weren’t many people around to see the effect and pick up the Manifestos. But there would be quite a few cameras. Big business liked to keep an eye on things.
Sky had said they’d do a proper recce first, see what they were up against, CCTV-wise, then do what they could as near as possible to the Telegraph and Independent offices. After that they’d drop stuff around the area, in the pubs and bars.
Exiting the train, Paul could feel the butterflies in his stomach. This was going to be OK. Nothing like the first time with Rob and Terri, no heart-in-mouth climb up a post or anything.
‘You been here before, Sky?’
‘Nope, never had a reason to.’
Standing on the escalator, Paul looked up and around at the station, which made anything on the Metro line back home look almost antique. As they came to the top and walked up the stairs you could see the sky had turned a deep, beautiful velvety blue, fringed on the horizon by the glow from the lights of the city. As they came out, he stopped and turned, staring at the buildings pushing up into the night sky all around them.
‘Doesn’t look like London at all, man. Looks like New York or something.’
‘Too clean for that.’ Sky frowned. ‘Leastways from what I can recall… it’s been some time since I took a stroll down Broadway.’
‘How long?’
‘Thirty years, and then some.’
‘You miss it?’
‘New York?’
Paul shifted the backpack he was carrying, loaded with stickers and copies of the Manifesto, to the other shoulder. ‘Yeah.’
‘Not specifically. It was just somewhere I visited.’
‘Where did you live, then?’
‘Milwaukee.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘It’s in the middle. About as far from either coast as you can get. Not far from the Canadian border, though, which was handy when I decided to make the one-way trip.’
‘You got family there?’
‘Some.’
‘They ever come and see you?’
‘My mother’s dead, and my pa kinda disowned me when I took off.’ Sky wound the earphone cord round his iPod and put it in his jacket pocket. ‘The man was a World War Two vet, had four Purple Hearts, you know, wounded in action? He just thought I was an unpatriotic coward… still does, for all I know.’
‘You don’t talk?’
‘Not since the day I left.’
‘You ever gonna go back?’
‘Life tends not to work that way. Can’t ever go back, Pauly, cos everything changes.’ Sky shrugged and looked around. ‘Come on, we got work to do.’
They’d done Canary Wharf, as best they could. Paul thought they’d be lucky if the right people got the message, but, if Orlando had done his part of the job, maybe the right people
would come out looking for the evidence that they’d been there. For some reason Orlando hadn’t explained – and Sky claimed not to know why – the whole process of producing the new stickers and Manifestos had been done with everyone involved wearing surgical gloves. They were even wearing thin cotton gloves for working on the street, which, on a summer night, he had to say, felt weird.
From Canary Wharf they’d made their way up to Farringdon and done the same kind of job around the offices of the Guardian and the Observer, and they were now down in High Street Kensington. Sky had given him a pocket map of the Underground and made him find out the quickest way to get to their destinations. Paul had felt like he was on a trip with his dad, but could see the point. He needed to know how this city worked.
Friday night in Kensington was a whole different matter to Friday night in the Farringdon Road. Even the tube station exit had an arcade of flash-looking shops. This was the last place they were going to do, one building quite near the tube station where Sky said the Daily Mail and the Evening Standard had their offices.
Paul stayed close to Sky as they came out on to the street, both now wearing their baseball caps and thin cotton gloves. This was unlike anything he’d seen since he’d arrived in London. This was where the money was, and about as far as you could get from the Kingsland Road.
‘You must have to be minted to live in this place, man.’ Paul checked out the cars as he followed Sky.
‘You won’t find many pound shops round this part of town, that’s for sure.’ Sky stopped at a side street. ‘This is it.’
Paul stood beside him and looked at the building opposite. ‘Doesn’t look like much.’
‘Ain’t what it looks like, man. It’s the opinions that come out of it that count.’
Fifteen, twenty minutes later they’d finished the night’s work off by putting Manifestos under the windscreen wipers of all the cars parked in the square behind the newspapers’ building. They made their way back up to the main road, taking off their gloves, but leaving the baseball caps on; turning left on to a surprisingly crowded pavement, they began walking back to the tube station to start the journey home.
‘What’s with all the people, Sky?’
Sky looked at his watch. ‘Quarter of midnight, coming up to the last train. All God’s chillun wanna get home.’
‘How long will it take us?’
‘If we get the right connections, we could be back at the house in less than an hour.’ Sky unwound the earphones, plugged them in and fired up his iPod again as he walked. ‘You figured out the best way to get there yet?’
‘Yeah.’ Paul felt in his pockets for the tube map. ‘Wait a sec…’
He only stopped for a moment, seconds, but when he looked up Sky was nowhere to be seen in the flow of people all around him. It was like someone had hit the pause button – he couldn’t move, didn’t know what to do, where to look.
The spell broke.
‘SKY!’
Some people looked around at him, but none of them was the man from Milwaukee. Paul started to run, pushing his way through the crowds, towards the tube station, cursing himself for panicking like a lost kid. There was only one place Sky was going and all he had to do was catch him up.
As the homeward bound were funnelled past the shops and into the station concourse, Paul found it harder to thread his way through the crush without really pushing, but he had to find Sky. He went for a gap and shouldered his way forward, half aware that someone was yelling at him for pushing. Paul, though, was only concerned with where Sky was, and he sped up, searching for the tall man with straggly grey hair. Which was why he didn’t see the two guys, one in uniform, one not, who came at him from his right, stopped him in his tracks and started to manoeuvre him to the side.
It was one of those ‘Does Not Compute’ moments when the brain can’t make sense of the input it’s getting. Paul had one, totally single-minded aim – to find Sky – but he had to go forward, not sideways, to do it. And when he tried to shake off these two strangers who wanted him to stay with them, he couldn’t work out why they didn’t like it and had forced him to stop. And that hurt. Because your arm doesn’t like being bent in ways it isn’t designed to go. Paul grimaced, and gave up resisting.
‘What the…?’ He looked properly at the two men. ‘What are you doing? I’m gonna lose my friend, man… miss my train!’
‘It’s not what we are doing, sunshine.’ The man standing in front of Paul, the one in plain clothes, smiled. For some reason, Paul noticed his teeth needed cleaning. ‘It’s what we think you were doing.’
‘Me?’
‘Yes, you.’
‘What d’you think I was doing, man?’
‘Thieving.’
Paul was stunned. Thieving? He frantically looked over the man’s shoulder, hoping he’d see Sky coming towards him to sort everything out. Surely he would, the moment he saw Paul was in trouble. There was no reason to abandon him, like Orlando said you had to if things went really bad. Like had happened to Jez. But as the crowds momentarily thinned out and he saw the ticket gates, Sky wasn’t there.
The room was small and low-ceilinged and harshly lit. Paul sat at the table and waited. After escorting him off the concourse they’d searched him, taken his wallet, mobile and backpack, and then put him in here – he checked his watch for the umpteenth time… sixteen minutes ago. And since then time had slowed to a halt. There was just him and the scattered thoughts in his head. Like why hadn’t Sky waited? Had he waited and tried to call his mobile, but gone on when he didn’t get an answer? And what were these people going to do to him? He hadn’t done anything!
The door opened and the two men came back in. The plain-clothes one sat down, put Paul’s backpack on the table between them and shoved his wallet and phone across to him. Nobody said anything, and Paul looked from the man sitting across the table to the one standing by the door and back again. So, they’d been through his stuff. What was in there that could get him into trouble? Well, now he came to think of it, a stolen Oyster card for starters…
‘Looks like we got you before you nicked anything.’ The man sat back in his chair. ‘Who’s a lucky boy?’
‘Look, I already told you, I was just trying to get to my mate. I wasn’t out nicking anything, I was going home, that’s all.’
The man smiled. ‘Some mate, never coming back to find you.’ He glanced at the uniformed man behind him. ‘Wouldn’t you say, Bill?’
‘I would, Keith.’
Paul shrugged. When you’re in a hole, like his dad said, stop digging. Don’t say anything.
‘Want to tell me why you’ve got these?’ The man reached into the bag and brought out the cotton gloves. ‘I am very interested why, in an empty bag with just a few bits of paper and stuff, you’ve got a pair of cotton gloves. Almost as if you didn’t want to leave fingerprints somewhere, or something. Wouldn’t you say, Bill?’
‘I would, Keith.’
‘Off on a job, were you, sunshine? With your invisible mate?’
Shit. How could he explain the gloves? And what if this bloke took a closer look at the ‘bits of paper’ and started asking questions about the flyers and stickers? At least they didn’t know they were currently plastered all around a building just down the road. Paul shook his head, hoping his face wasn’t giving anything away.
‘I told you, I was going home.’
‘So you did, but what about the gloves?’
Paul’s mind whirled. He had to keep calm, come up with something plausible that would get him off this hook he was on.
‘Don’t know anything about them… didn’t know they were there.’
The man pushed the backpack with his finger. ‘This not yours, then… steal it, did you?’
‘No… I was… I was, like, borrowing it. From a friend.’ Paul groaned inwardly. What a lame bloody excuse, right up there with ‘Sorry, miss, the dog ate my homework’ in the Lame Excuses Top Ten.
The man opposite him, Keith, raised
his eyebrows in mock surprise and glanced at his colleague, Bill. Such ordinary-looking blokes, with ordinary names, who had the power to crap his life up. Or not. Paul had no idea what these transport police were able to do. He didn’t know where to look, felt he must have guilt written all over his face and could think of nothing to say that would make them change their minds about him.
‘Borrowed, eh? You expect me to believe that, sunshine?’
‘I’m not a bleeding thief, man!’ Paul jerked forward, wanting to grab Plain-clothes Keith by his jacket and shake the truth into him. Wanted to, was angry enough to, but had enough sense not to go there. ‘I’m not!’
‘You take a pop at me, mate, and you really are in trouble.’
‘I’m not… I wasn’t…’ Paul sat back in the chair, feeling the tension cramp its way across his shoulders.
‘I know exactly what was on your little scumbag mind, sunshine.’ Keith nodded, smiling. ‘Seen enough of your type sitting in that chair, and dozens like it. Haven’t I, Bill?’
‘Too many, Keith.’
Keith looked at his watch and stood up, pushing his chair back, the legs squealing on the lino floor. ‘Exactly, and I don’t want to waste any more of my valuable time than I have to doing it.’
Paul watched him, waiting for what was to come next. Nothing did. The two men just stood there in the room, looking at him kind of expectantly.
‘Well, piss off, then.’ Keith jerked a thumb at the door.
‘Me?’
‘No, dipstick, the other bloke we’ve got in this room for questioning.’
Frowning, Paul stood up, picked up his wallet, mobile and backpack and walked over to the door where Uniformed Bill was standing. Were they really letting him go, or was there going to be a sting in the tail?
‘I know you were up to something, sunshine.’
Paul turned round, wondering if this was it.
‘I just don’t know what it was.’ Keith tucked his chair back under the table.
‘I was up to nothing, I told you.’
‘Yeah, right.’ Keith rubbed his heavily stubbled chin. ‘Whatever you’re doing, don’t be stupid enough to ever try it around here again. I know your face now.’
