Blaggers

by Echo Freer

  Zak paced up and down the pavement in St James’s Square. It was almost five to nine and he’d been there since just turned eight o’clock. Surely he couldn’t have missed her. Sukhvinder Chadha rounded the corner, so he dodged behind one of the skips from the building site next door to avoid being seen.

  ‘I’m neither blind nor stupid, Zaki. You have five minutes to be at your workstation. Do not be late.’ She didn’t even pause as she strode up the steps into the bank.

  Bummer! He would just have to wait until lunchtime and hope that he could catch Mercedes then. The sense of frustration that had been brewing all weekend overflowed and he kicked the side of the skip, then hopped backwards as an agonising pain seared from his big toe, along his foot and up his shin bone.

  ‘Oi!’ a voice shouted from the scaffolding above. ‘Go kick your own bleedin’ skip.’

  ‘Sorr-’ As Zak shouted his apology, the man’s hard hat crashed on to the pavement, narrowly missing Zak’s head. He let out a low whistle of relief at this near miss. Bending down to pick up the hat he heard a chorus of catcalls and wolf whistles from the workmen above. He looked up and saw the focus of the men’s attention; a pair of legs was coming towards him, long and tanned with a gold, two-tier ankle bracelet he would recognise anywhere. His heart missed a beat. He straightened up and beamed as Mercedes approached. She was wearing the Burberry suit she’d told him she’d bought and she looked gorgeous.

  ‘Hi. I’m so glad I’ve caught y-’ His voice trailed away as Mercedes walked past with no hint of recognition. ‘Mercedes, wait! Let me explain, please.’ He hurriedly hobbled after her, inadvertently clutching the workman’s helmet in his hand.

  She stopped on the stone steps up to the bank and faced him full on. ‘Explain or excuse?’

  Zak looked her in the eye. God, she was fantastic! The way her eyes sparkled and the way her hair shimmered in the sunlight. He felt his stomach tense and he swallowed, trying to control his voice. ‘I had my phone nicked and I’d put your number straight into it.’

  ‘Yeah, right!’

  She turned away but he caught her arm. ‘It’s true. After we’d dropped you off on Friday, we went to fill up with petrol and we got done over at the garage. A gang of kids took both mine and Donovan’s.’ She made no reaction. Maybe he shouldn’t have told her they were kids - now she might think he was a total wimp. ‘They had knives and everything,’ he added, hoping for the sympathy vote if nothing else.

  He watched her hesitate as though weighing up the odds on what he’d said being true.

  ‘And you couldn’t find the time to come over and explain?’

  ‘I was at my cousin’s wedding in Brighton - I told you about it.’

  ‘All weekend?’

  ‘Yes - all weekend.’ He held his breath - waiting. She had to believe him. He really liked her. Really, really liked her. ‘Weddings are pretty big in my family.’ Still no response. ‘The Glastonbury Festival takes less organisation than a Khan family wedding.’ He smiled, hoping that he could win her over with a joke.

  ‘Oi! You!’ A man’s voice interrupted the interaction. ‘Give us back my hat!’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ Zak held out the hard hat as the workman jumped down the final few rungs of the ladder from the scaffolding and snatched it off him.

  ‘Vandalising other people’s bleedin’ skips and then nicking my hat. I could ’ave you for this.’

  Zak bit back the reply he would’ve liked to have made but settled for a simple, ‘Look, I’ve said I’m sorry - OK?’

  But when he turned round, Mercedes had gone. A weight like a skipful of concrete descended on his shoulders. And, once inside the bank a notice on the door of the lift advising of essential maintenance work did little to improve his mood and he limped his way up to fourth floor. He would have to wait until lunchtime now and hope that he could catch her then. But as he rounded the corner into his office, the formidable figure of Sukhvinder Chadha awaited him.

  ‘We do not operate a policy of flexitime, Zaki. You are well aware of the hours of your employment. Therefore you will make up the time you’ve lost at lunchtime.’

  Brilliant! His day had just gone from totally crap to universally crappier!

  It had not been Mercedes’ intention to avoid Zak for the entire day; circumstances had just conspired that it should happen that way. She’d been at the point of accepting his explanation as to why he hadn’t phoned her when she’d been shocked to see Gary, the man whom she and Jenny had seen in the café, doing a passable impersonation of Spiderman on the scaffolding. She thought it was a pretty safe bet that he wouldn’t recognise her but she wasn’t going to risk it. And anyway, she didn’t want to be late on her first day. Darting into the bank before Gary could see her, she decided to catch up with Zak at lunch.

  Her morning though had dragged by like a wet bank holiday. All she had done had been to sit behind a woman called Dilys who looked as though she’d stepped through a timewarp from the 1970s. Mercedes’ morning had included such riveting activities as watching Dilys as she counted money, watching her as she’d stamped receipts and watching her as she’d added up columns of figures. By the time Dilys took her lunch break, Mercedes had been verging on a coma.

  ‘Mrs Chadha told me I’d have a young girl shadowing me this week,’ her mentor told Mercedes, gleefully unaware of the wince of irritation from Mercedes at being referred to as a ‘young girl,’ ‘so I made extra sandwiches especially. I thought, as it’s a nice day, we could go over to Green Park.’

  Even if the lunch extravaganza of peanut butter and gherkin sandwiches had been a taste sensation that really appealed to Mercedes, the promised ‘fizzy pop’ accompaniment was not something that she was prepared to inflict on her digestive tract.

  ‘Thanks, Dilys, but I’ve made other plans. I’ll see you back at two thirty.’

  But, just as any plans Mercedes might have made about finding Zak at lunchtime had been scuppered by Sukhvinder Chadha and her work- place detention, so any plans she might have had to try to catch him as he left work were scuppered by the fact that she was babysitting Alfie and Paige that night and had to leave on the dot of five.

  As she left the bank she stood on the steps and took the sort of deep inhalation that comes with freedom. Never in her darkest moments of doubt about her placement had she envisaged tedium as mindnumbing as her first day. Then, before stepping out of the building, she did a quick recce of the scaffolding next door, checking for lurking work mates of her brother. She knew Chubby’s firm were working on a site up West, but was it her unbelievable bad luck that it was bang next door to where she was working, or what?

  She walked towards the Tube station, her eyes constantly on the look out for any sign of Zak. But to no avail.

  What she did see, however, was much more irritating. A clamped Range Rover was being winched on to a low-loader ready to take it away to the pound. And there was something horribly familiar about the vehicle. It wasn’t just the mud splattered sludge colour that reminded her of Chubby’s car, or the rubber Homer Simpson figure that clung on to the windscreen with suction cups - but the registration plate was unmistakable: CHU 33 Y.

  It was bad enough that half her family had unwittingly turned up to her first date and placed their spies on the building site next to her work placement, but now her brother was putting in an appearance on her first day at work as well! What the hell was going on in her life? Logically, she knew it must just be coincidence - no one had even asked where her work experience was - but she was still annoyed. And, irrational as it was, there was part of her that thought it served him right that he was getting towed away. She pushed her bowling bag high on to her shoulder and stamped angrily towards the Tube, abandoning her search for Zak. After all, if he’d really wanted to meet her, he’d have made the effort to come and find her, wouldn’t he?

  ‘Here you
go, Merce. We’re going over to Tone and Kelly’s at Tilbury. This is their number, just in case.’ Cheryl handed Mercedes a piece of paper. ‘You know where everything is, help yourself.’ She paused, cocking an ear towards the mahogany staircase and the heart-rending sobbing that was filtering through the mahogany panelled nursery door. ‘Paige’ll calm down after a bit. It’s just that Frankie don’t want her to have her security blanket and she’s fretting. She’ll be all right in a little while though.’ It seemed that Cheryl was trying to convince herself more than Mercedes. ‘And Alfie’s to go to bed at half seven. D’you hear that Alfie?’ she said, pointedly.

  ‘Aw! Can’t I stay up till eight?’

  ‘Half seven!’ Frankie entered the room, his face contorted with irritation.

  ‘OK, Dad.’ The five-year-old tucked his thumbs into the waistband of his pyjamas and left the kitchen with a gait worthy of a Wild West gunslinger.

  ‘You OK, babes?’ Cheryl asked her husband.

  ‘No, I’m not flamin’ OK!’ he snapped. ‘We’ll have to take the Shogun tonight ’cos we’re picking Chubby up on the way. Jeez!’ He slammed his fist down on the marble effect kitchen counter. ‘That brother of mine ain’t got the brains ’e was bleedin’ born with!’

  Mercedes knew the cause of her brother’s anger but she had decided that discretion was definitely her best policy.

  ‘I don’t mind taking the Shogun,’ Cheryl appeased.

  ‘Well I do!’ He ran his fingers through his hair. ‘I

  wanted to take the Porsche tonight.’

  Cheryl raised her eyes skyward as she picked up her car keys. ‘Later, Merce!’ she called as she and Frankie left the house. ‘And don’t worry about Paige. She will settle - eventually.’

  No way! Mercedes closed the door and went straight up to her niece’s room. She’d had a bad enough day as it was, she wasn’t going to have her evening disrupted too! And anyway, she couldn’t bear to hear the toddler in such distress.

  ‘Come on, darling.’ Mercedes picked up the two year old and attempted to comfort her but Paige would have none of it. The little girl thrashed and kicked until there were the beginnings of a sizeable bruise on Mercedes’ shoulder. When it was obvious that a simple cuddle was not working, Mercedes tried to soothe her with a drink of milk but the plastic bottle ricocheted off her head and bounced its way through the array of soft toys on top of the chest of drawers, knocking them over like skittles. Next she tried a lullaby, pacing the nursery floor singing anything she could recall from her own playgroup days. Sadly that only succeeded in cranking up Paige’s howls until they reached a crescendo that could have split the atom. In desperation Mercedes took her downstairs and offered her a biscuit which went the way of all her other attempts to placate the child - straight in Mercedes’ face.

  By eight o’clock, Mercedes was splattered with a cocktail of milk, apple juice and soggy chocolate chip cookie with a hint of banana, whilst Paige had developed the decibel level of a foghorn and the complexion of an aubergine. Against Frankie’s wishes, Alfie was still glued to his Playstation 2 - but, tough! If Frankie had wanted him in bed at seven thirty he should have made sure that Paige would settle first. And anyway, any grief from her brother and Mercedes could always play the Honey Coombes card - although she had been hoping to keep that up her sleeve for a little longer.

  ‘Alfie, what does your mum do when Paige is like this?’ she asked her nephew.

  Without taking his eyes from the screen he replied, ‘She gives her her blanket.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, trying to remain as patient as she could. ‘But your dad’s thrown it away.’

  ‘No he ain’t. It’s in his office.’

  Mercedes could hardly believe her ears. ‘So you’ve let your sister scream the place down for over an hour and you didn’t tell me that the means of stopping her was only in another room?’

  ‘No point,’ he said, his thumbs moving across the buttons of the console like lightning. ‘It’s locked.’

  Mercedes tried to put Paige on the floor but the child’s screams reached new heights and she picked her up again. If Mercedes remembered correctly the lock on Frankie’s office was a numbered security device and without the combination she had about as much chance of cracking the code as she did of winning the lottery.

  ‘Alfie,’ she called through to the lounge, ‘do you know what numbers your dad presses to get in here?’

  Alfie left his game and stood between Mercedes and the door from the hall to the office. ‘Daddy don’t let no one in his special room without him.’

  ‘I know that, but Daddy doesn’t let you stay up till eight o’clock either, does he?’ she said, glaring at her nephew.

  Alfie looked her straight in the eye, weighing up the situation, then pressed out a sequence of five dots on the wall next to his father’s study.

  ‘So, it’s a five digit combination?’ Mercedes looked at the ten number pads on the door. ‘Well that lowers the odds a bit. I don’t suppose you can remember any of the numbers, can you?’

  Alfie shook his head. Mercedes jiggled the now hysterical Paige on her hip and sighed. She could be there all night trying to work out the combination.

  ‘I only know the first and the last,’ Alfie added. OK - so now she only needed the middle three digits - that wasn’t so bad. She was down to only about a million possibilities. ‘So what are they?’ she asked the five-year-old.

  ‘The first one is a eight,’ he said, pointing to the number eight. ‘And the last one is a two.’

  Mercedes gave a chuckle. ‘And your daddy says Uncle Chubby doesn’t have the brains he was born with!’

  The twins had been born on the second of October nineteen seventy eight and it didn’t take a genius to see that Frankie had simply reversed his date of birth for the combination. She quickly punched in the numbers eight, seven, zero, one, two and turned the knob. The door opened and Paige’s screams were reduced to a whimper the second she spied her blanket in a heap on her father’s leather- topped desk.

  Mercedes turned to Alfie. ‘OK - here’s the deal. You can have an extra five minutes on your Playstation and I won’t say a word to Daddy if you won’t. Done?’ She held out her hand.

  Alfie slapped it in a low five. ‘Done,’ he said and scurried back to the television to take up where he’d left off.

  Her plan was to wait until Paige was asleep then take the blanket back and replace it. Frankie had an eye for detail that put many a bird of prey to shame, therefore it was crucial that she remember exactly where it was positioned. The bulk of it was crumpled up just to one side of the computer keyboard but one corner was tucked underneath a folder of papers. Still only having the use of one hand, she began to move the folder but the anticipation was too much for Paige who leant forwards and grabbed the piece of rag, knocking the folder on to the floor and scattering its contents.

  ‘Sugar!’ she sighed. Why was nothing simple? She was going to have to make certain that the papers went back in exactly the right order or it would be a dead giveaway.

  Mercedes took the now peaceful two-year-old upstairs and tucked her up in bed. It would only be a matter of minutes before she was sound asleep. Once Alfie was also in bed she returned to the study to put back the blanket and tidy the papers. They’d fallen in a neat fan shape, which meant the order was not disturbed, so at least something was going right.

  But, on opening the folder, she was shocked to see that the top piece of paper was a hand-written note on a memo pad that she recognised instantly. It was one of the pale blue corporate note pads that were on every desk at work and had the Boreham’s Bank logo in one corner and the word ‘Memorandum’ in the bank’s corporate font across the top. The message was written in immature handwriting and had some dates and times which meant nothing to her:

  Sid

  Sun. Mon. Tues. 2 pm - 10 p
m, Wed. day off.

  Thurs. Fri. Sat. - night duty. 10 PM - 6 AM.

  She turned it face down and looked at the piece of paper beneath. The handwriting on this note was more mature and it read:

  Spinks is going to roll the blag. Be careful, Jonnie ‘Schizo’ Sabatini is running the job.

  She stared at it for some minutes trying to make sense of it all. Why should anyone be writing to tell her family that Harry Spinks was going to hijack a robbery? And she’d put money on the fact that, with a nickname like ‘Schizo’ this Sabatini guy wasn’t going to be a social worker. She placed that one face down too, so that she could keep the papers in order and read the next letter. It was a print-out of an email from someone called Nicos Evangelides and said,

  Merchandise arriving Saturday. Don’t want to spoil the old lady’s bash.

  Will sort it with K & T.

  Nicos Evangelides? Of course! The Mediterranean- looking man from the night club. It didn’t take a linguistic genius to work out that Nicos Evangelides was Nick the Bubble whom she’d overheard Gary and the security guard talking about in the café. Bubble and squeak - Greek! And the merchandise must be the ‘hardware’ they’d mentioned. Things were starting to fit into place now. K & T - hadn’t she heard them refer to Canvey Kev and Tilbury Tone? Which is where Frankie and Chubby had gone this evening - to Tone’s in Tilbury. So, whatever it was, they really were all in on it - her entire family, including Cheryl.

  She flicked on to the next paper; a list of phone numbers. The final documents in the folder were the bulkiest of all. There were three large pieces of paper that had been folded to an eighth their original size. Carefully she laid one of them out on the floor of the office and saw that it was an architect’s drawing. The words ‘basement level’ were written in the bottom right-hand corner and ‘Jimmy’s Casino, St James’s Square’ was written at the bottom left-hand corner. These must be the plans to the building next to the bank that Zak had told her was being converted into a gaming club. But why would they be at Frankie’s house when it was Chubby who ran the building side of the business? Trying to make sense of it all was like trying to piece together a jigsaw with no picture to go by. Carefully, she folded it up again and opened out the next drawing. She sat back on her heels and stared at the grey paper and the words that leapt out at her. There, in bold type, in the bottom left-hand corner were the words.