Rob Johnson - Lifting the Lid

by Rob Johnson

  Harry paused at this point in his story and laughed. ‘Dozy twat must’ve thought I was born yesterday.’

  A beaming grin continued to illuminate his face as he told Delia and MacFarland how he’d never had the slightest intention of doing a deal with Bracewell. On the contrary, his only motivation for agreeing to the meeting in the first place was because he’d seen it as the perfect opportunity to ‘get the little bastard out from under my feet for good an’ all.’

  It turned out that, unlike Harry, Bracewell liked to go on a job himself every now and then, partly because he missed the heart-pumping buzz of frontline action and partly because he believed it was good for the morale of his men. Harry made some crack about Napoleon fucking Bonaparte and then went on to relate how the first target of the newly formed joint venture was a smalltown bank near Croydon. Maybe he’d seen it as some kind of historic and defining moment in his criminal career, but Bracewell had made it crystal clear from the outset that he wasn’t going to be left sitting in some bar on the day of the heist.

  ‘Cops were all over ‘em the minute they stepped through the fucking door,’ said Harry and sat back in his seat with a look of smug self-satisfaction.

  ‘Ye shopped him?’ MacFarland couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

  Harry seemed to have little difficulty in reading the expression on his face. ‘And don’t give me that honour amongst thieves bollocks. That bastard ‘ad been crossin’ me for years. A bullet through the brain would’ve been far too quick.’

  ‘But wasnae that what happened?’

  Before Harry could reply, a steward rattled her trolley to a halt in the aisle next to them and offered a choice of “complimentary hot and cold drinks”. Each of them ordered a coffee and then watched in silence as she poured the steaming black liquid into three cardboard beakers. She deposited half a dozen plastic pots of cream and milk on the table with a handful of sugar sachets and set off with her trolley to the next set of occupied seats.

  ‘I dunno ‘ow he managed it, but he got bail,’ said Harry as soon as she was out of earshot, ‘and while he was out, he topped ‘imself. Blew his own ‘ead off with a sawnoff apparently. Word was, not even his own mum could’ve identified ‘im. Dental records weren’t much use either, so they say. Daft prat didn’t open his gob properly and blasted the crap out of most of his teeth as well as his brains.’

  ‘Jeez,’ said MacFarland and produced a low soft whistle through his own relatively sound teeth. ‘Ye reckon he did the same as ye then? Faked his ain death, I mean.’

  Harry slowly clapped his hands together in mock applause. ‘You ‘ear that, Delia? MacEinstein ‘ere thinks Bracewell might’ve faked it.’

  Delia, who had continued to stare out of the carriage window throughout Harry’s story, now turned to him and gave him the grin of amusement he seemed to be expecting. ‘Could be,’ he said. ‘Could well be.’

  ‘Still, it seems like we’ve given him the slip for now,’ said MacFarland, ignoring Harry’s snide remark. ‘Anyways, him turning up like that might be just a… coincidence. Mebbe he’s nae after ye at all.’

  The beaker of coffee was within a couple of inches of Harry’s mouth. He paused it and lowered it gradually back down onto the table, fixing MacFarland with an icy glare. ‘You know, ‘Aggis, if you ‘ad shit for brains, it’d be a major fuckin’ improvement.’

  Perhaps he had been too busy laying into MacFarland to notice the steady increase in the volume of the train’s engines, but Harry chose exactly the wrong moment to raise the beaker to his mouth again. He was about to take a sip when the train suddenly lurched forward, jolting the carriage to one side and then the other.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ he said as hot coffee spilt down his chin and over the back of his hand. He slammed the cup down on the table, spilling even more over his hand, and snatched a handkerchief from his trouser pocket.

  MacFarland smiled to himself as he watched Harry start to clean himself up.

  * * *

  Julian Bracewell studied his face in the mirror for a few seconds before taking hold of one side of his beard where it began next to his right ear. Grasping it firmly between forefinger and thumb, his features contorted as he carefully peeled it from his skin, the glue setting up a stubborn and somewhat painful resistance.

  Once he had completely removed the beard, he reached towards the moustache, but the movement was abruptly interrupted. He threw out his arm and slapped his palm against the wall of the toilet compartment to steady himself as the train lurched forward with a shuddering jolt to one side and then the other.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  ‘Bingo,’ said Maggie Swann as she breezed into the tiny office that had been allocated to them at the local police station.

  DS Logan was half lying, half sitting on the thinnest of cord carpets, his shoulders against the peeling cream paint of the wall and his jacket rolled into a makeshift pillow behind his head. The servings of steak and kidney pie at the pub had been generous in the extreme, and he should probably have stuck to two pints of Pheasant Plucker, but they had slipped down so easily he hadn’t been able to resist a third. Besides, he’d only been halfway through the second pint when they’d heard that Hawkins had disappeared into the police surveillance equivalent of a black hole. Until they could pick up his trail again, there wasn’t much they could do except wait, so staying sober and alert had suddenly become less of a priority.

  If the soporific effects of the food and the beer hadn’t been enough, the stuffy heat of their temporary office back at the station had made him even more desperate for sleep, although the hardness of the floor had rendered anything more than a fitful doze utterly out of the question. But he had no intention of letting Swann know that she hadn’t woken him from the deepest of slumbers.

  ‘This had better be good,’ he said, his tone of voice laced with irritability as he slid open the lid of one eye and slowly focused on the sheet of paper that DC Swann was waving in front of his face.

  ‘Like all your Christmases come at once.’

  Logan peeled open his other eyelid. ‘Don’t tell me I’ve been retired early on a Chief Constable’s pension?’

  ‘In your dreams.’

  ‘Dreams, constable, are commonly held to be the preserve of those who are fortunate enough to be allowed to sleep. As your highly developed sleuthing abilities will no doubt inform you, that happy state can no longer be applied to myself.’

  ‘Didn’t wake you, did I, sarge?’

  The sarcasm was undisguised, but he was too tired and jaded to think up a wittily scathing response. Instead, he simply grunted and waited for the inevitable explanation.

  ‘APB,’ she said after less than a moment’s pause and brandished the piece of paper again. ‘Seems we might have caught up with our Mr Hawkins at last.’

  Logan sat forward, groaning as the stiffness in his joints reminded him of just how hard the floor had been. He remained in this position for several seconds before hauling himself to his feet and listened attentively while Swann fed him the details. She told him how a patrol car had pulled a Peugeot 206 for having a defective brake light but had let the driver off with a warning.

  ‘Anyway,’ she went on, ‘it turns out that one of the plods thought the passenger was behaving a bit suspiciously and checked out the APB notices in the patrol car. And like I said, bingo.’

  ‘Hawkins?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Thank God for a uniform with a brain,’ said Logan. ‘So if Hawkins was the passenger, who was driving? The dog?’

  Swann glanced at the paper. ‘Er… woman called Sandra Gray. I checked her out, and she’s listed as a private investigator.’

  ‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ said Logan, raising a bemused eyebrow.

  ‘Maybe he’s taken her on to try and prove his innocence.’

  Logan looked doubtful. ‘He was bloody quick off the mark then. Where were they when the plods pulled them over?’

  ‘Just outside Derby, heading sou
th,’ said Swann. ‘But better than that, the uniforms asked them where they were making for. – Bristol.’

  ‘They might have been lying of course.’

  ‘True, but it doesn’t much matter now we’ve got the details of the car. We have the technology, as they say.’

  ‘And so do the spooks,’ said Logan, hurriedly packing his briefcase.

  * * *

  The particular spooks that DS Logan had in mind were, at that precise moment, doing about a hundred and ten miles per hour in the southbound fast lane of the M6 motorway. Patterson checked his safety belt was securely fastened for the umpteenth time and tried to convince himself that gripping the edges of his seat so that his knuckles showed white might help save him in the event of an accident. He wasn’t exactly a nervous passenger, but he became distinctly nauseous at anything over seventy miles an hour. Driving at high speeds was sometimes a necessity in this job though, so he just had to grit his teeth and put up with it whenever the occasion arose. This was one such occasion, and he was grateful it was Statham behind the wheel and not some hothead rookie who fancied himself as the next Sebastian Vettel. He had consistently excelled at every driving course the Service had sent him on and had never once been involved in anything more than a minor bump.

  Even so, Patterson’s intense anxiety meant that he couldn’t help offering unwelcome and unnecessary words of advice at annoyingly frequent intervals. He seemed particularly fond of shouting ‘Careful!’ or ‘Watch out!’ whenever a slower vehicle was blocking their path and Statham raced up to within three feet of its rear bumper, flashing his headlights until it got out of their way.

  ‘Do you have to get quite so close?’ he said when Statham’s latest victim – a silver BMW convertible – gradually eased over into the middle lane. The driver’s obvious reluctance to give way had perhaps been compounded by Statham having added several blasts of the horn to his repertoire of intimidation techniques.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, taking his hand from the steering wheel just long enough to return the BMW driver’s single finger salute as he accelerated past. ‘I thought we were in a hurry.’

  ‘All I’m saying is that…’ Patterson lost the will to finish the sentence. ‘Oh never mind.’

  They drove on in silence for several minutes, and both men stared straight ahead through the insect spattered windscreen.

  ‘You’re not still being cranky about that bacon sandwich this morning, are you?’ Statham said eventually.

  ‘Oh for goodness’ sake,’ said Patterson with more than a hint of petulance. ‘It may have escaped your notice, Colin, but this whole operation has been an unmitigated bloody disaster right from the start. We’ve shelled out a hundred and fifty thousand quid of taxpayers’ money for an address we still don’t have. I’ve spent the last God knows how many hours twiddling my thumbs because two of the most incompetent agents in the Service managed to lose the pillock who actually took the money – and probably also knows what the address is. And, to cap it all, I’ve got the top brass all over me, wanting to know what the hell is going on, and some jumped-up Al Capone wannabe telling me he hasn’t got the money and the whole deal’s off until he has. And you think I’m being “cranky” because of some bloody undercooked bacon sandwich?’

  Statham did his best to placate him by pointing out that they’d finally got a result from the APB and at least they were back on track again, so things could be a lot worse. But Patterson barely heard him. He was far too preoccupied with the rear end of a dark green Range Rover which loomed ever larger as they hurtled towards it.

  ‘Watch out!’ shouted Patterson, his knuckles glowing whiter than ever on the edges of his seat.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Quarter-pounders, half-pounders, cheeseburgers, chilliburgers, veggieburgers, nuggety things in batter – the pictures themselves looked almost good enough to eat. Trevor wiped his mouth with the back of one hand and steadied himself against the counter with the other.

  ‘Hello, sir. And what can I get you today?’

  Trevor’s gaze drifted downwards from the photograph of an apple pie that was topped with a small tower of what looked like shaving foam, past the cherry red baseball cap and the enormous zit on the lad’s forehead to the slab-lensed glasses and the eager piggy eyes beyond them.

  He shook his head and tried to focus. ‘Uh?’

  ‘What can I get you, sir?’

  ‘Erm, do you take Swiss francs?’

  ‘Pardon me?’

  ‘Like this,’ said Trevor and painstakingly smoothed out a thousand franc note on the counter. ‘Sorry, I haven’t got anything smaller.’

  Piggy Eyes’s laugh was more like a whinny. ‘It’s not that, sir. It’s just that we don’t—’

  ‘How much for a piggy sandwich?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Bacon. – Bacon sandwich. Oink oink?’

  It was as if his tongue had been taken over by some alien being. He could hear the words that came out of his mouth, but he seemed to have no control at all over what those words might be. The only drugs he’d ever taken were the sort you bought at Boots, but he would hazard a guess that this must be what it felt like when you were stoned. Not just the verbal thing but the slow motion wave machine inside your head and the feeling that someone else was operating all your limbs with lengths of floppy elastic.

  Concentrate, Trevor. You need to get a grip before someone calls the manager – or the police even. He grabbed at the overhanging lip of the counter to stop himself from falling.

  ‘You feeling all right, sir?’

  Again, Trevor shook his head in an attempt to clear his hunger-addled brain but immediately realised he’d failed when his mouth began to move and he heard the words: ‘I’ll give you a thousand Swiss francs for one BLT and a piece of apple pie. You can even skip the cream if you want. Frank won’t mind. He’s Swiss anyway. He’s got all the cream he can handle.’

  Oh hell, that wasn’t really him with the braying cackle, was it?

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, but I’m going to have to ask you to—’

  Before Piggy Eyes could finish the sentence, Trevor leaned towards him across the counter and, with a conspiratorial wink, whispered, ‘We’ve got a gun, you know.’

  ‘Ah, so this is where you’ve been hiding, is it?’

  The woman’s voice was familiar and so too was the firm grip on his arm. He turned to face her.

  ‘Come along now,’ said Sandra. ‘The coach is waiting, and everyone wants to get back for their tea.’

  Coach? What coach? What was she on about? And why was she talking to him like he was a three-year-old?

  ‘I do hope he hasn’t caused you any bother.’

  Trevor followed the direction of her sickly grin, which appeared to be targeted on Piggy Eyes’s Vesuvius of a pimple.

  ‘Well, er, no. I suppose, er…’

  Even from where he stood in his own not-quite-so-parallel universe, Trevor could tell that the lad was struggling to come up with the appropriate corporate-approved response, and he was struck with a sudden and largely genuine pity for the poor kid. But the ‘Have a nice day?’ Piggy Eyes eventually opted for lost him every one of the sympathy votes he’d just notched up, especially as he made it sound more like a question than an imperative. And as for the accompanying stab at a mission statement smile, well…

  ‘Chop chop then, Mr McMurphy. Shake a leg,’ said Sandra, snatching up the thousand franc note from the counter.

  Her grasp tightened around his arm, and he felt himself being half dragged towards the exit.

  ‘Shouldn’t be allowed out if you ask me,’ he heard somebody in the queue say as they passed.

  Outside in the car park, Sandra let go of his arm and rounded on him with an expression that was entirely unsuited to her carer’s act of a few short moments ago.

  ‘Are you completely bloody insane?’ she said. ‘“We’ve got a gun, you know”.’

  Trevor could remember saying it, but he was sure he hadn’
t used such a whiney voice.

  ‘I couldn’t help it,’ he said. ‘I’m delirious from lack of food. It’s like I was having some kind of mini breakdown. Like someone else was saying the words and there was nothing I could do about it.’

  ‘Oh gimme a break.’

  ‘It’s true. And if you hadn’t left your purse back at the hotel—’

  ‘I didn’t leave it. It was taken from me if you recall.’

  ‘Whatever,’ said Trevor, warming to his theme and suddenly aware that the fresh air seemed to have brought him back down to Planet Earth – for now at least. ‘And if I hadn’t had to spend a small fortune on van repairs and extortionate hotel rooms, I would’ve had more than enough cash on me to buy eight zillion whopper-cheesy-chilli-veggie-nugget-burgers and still have had enough left for three quarters of a ton of apple pie with or without squirty-foamy-cream.’

  ‘Finished?’

  ‘No. How much of my tenner did you spend on petrol?’

  ‘All of it.’

  ‘All of it?’ Trevor felt decidedly faint.

  ‘We need to get to Bristol, don’t we?’

  ‘You do. At this rate, I’ll have died of starvation long before we—’

  ‘Oh don’t be such a baby,’ said Sandra, reaching into her jacket pocket. ‘Here.’

  Trevor caught his breath and stared down at the King Size Mars bar in her hand. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘What’s it look like?’

  The juices began to flow inside Trevor’s mouth, and he gulped them back. ‘But I thought you said—’

  ‘Found a few coppers down the back of the seat in the car and a bit more under the mats.’

  Trevor wanted to kiss her, but he wouldn’t have been able to take his eyes off the Mars bar long enough to aim straight. Besides, it was a pretty safe bet that she’d slap him.