Alternative outcome

by Peter Rowlands

  I made up my mind. I would press on by myself. It seemed simpler somehow. I said, “I’m due to join Rick Ashton’s party. I’m a bit late.”

  He gave a slightly sceptical look at my ageing car, then glanced down at a board he was holding. “Name?”

  “It’s Stanhope, but you won’t find me on your list. This was all a bit unplanned.” I tried a confident smile, but wasn’t sure it worked. Chancing my arm, I said, “I think Rick probably arrived a little while ago. I was following him, but I lost him in traffic.”

  The man looked dubious, but then a colleague leaned over his shoulder. “He’s right, Mr Ashton got here about fifteen minutes ago.”

  Thank god for that. At least I was on the right track.

  The man gave me a final look, then checked his watch, wrote something on his board and held it out to me. “Sign here.”

  I scribbled my name and put the car in gear, but he said, “Hang on a minute. There’s no one in reception to give you a visitor’s badge. You’d better have this.” He reached round, pulled a plastic name badge from somewhere and painstakingly wrote down its serial number on his chart. “There you go. Park over there, then go to the main entrance across there.” He pointed at the glass office block built on to the front of the premises.

  I drove over to the virtually empty visitors’ car park, left the car and trotted across an expanse of concrete acreage to the office, ignoring an indirect walking path marked in yellow paint. To either side, rows of big red and white Vantage trailers were backed up against loading bays, and one of them was just in the process of being pulled out by a Vantage truck. Beyond it another trailer was about to be hauled out by a blue and white vehicle bearing the logo of Ray Noble Rental.

  Chapter 56

  There was no one in the palatial reception area. Distantly I now remembered that a large contingent of the company’s head-office staff was due to move in here, but not until later in the year. However, I vaguely remembered the geography of the place from my previous visit. I hurried across to a curving marbled staircase and bounded up two steps at a time, then along a corridor, through an empty open-plan office and into a smaller corridor at the far end.

  By this time I’d slowed to a cautious walk. I didn’t want to barge blindly into Rick and his assailant. I still had no idea what to do if I found them. I wasn’t even sure I’d come the right way. I moved as silently as I could, listening for any sound of conversation.

  Then not far away I heard Rick’s voice raised in protest. “Don’t ask me, mate, I thought I had the key on this key ring.”

  “That’s the biggest load of crap I’ve ever heard. Look again.”

  They were in an office at the end of the corridor, beyond a half-closed door. I tiptoed up to it and hovered outside.

  And then my mobile phone rang.

  The door was snatched open and I was facing a man in his fifties, neatly dressed in a tan casual jacket, blue shirt and cream trousers. He had receding curly hair and a permanently bronzed look.

  “Why don’t you join us?” He was holding an automatic pistol loosely by his side, and he moved it into plain view without raising it.

  I stepped into the room. It was a typical modern office, but the whole of the opposite wall was made up of a picture window overlooking the main sortation hall. There was a glass door in the centre, giving on to a small balcony, and below it the high-level sorting conveyor stretched away into the far distance.

  “Michael!” Rick said. “What a surprise.”

  Swallowing, I said, “There’ll be a bigger surprise when the police get here. That’s them on the phone.” On cue, the phone stopped ringing.

  The man waved me over to where Rick stood. “One of you please open that fucking door NOW!”

  I’d been imagining a safe, but actually the object of their attention was just a grey pressed-metal office cupboard. The man indicated a steel letter opener on the desk. “Use that.”

  Rick glanced at him, then picked it up, thrust the end into the cupboard at the edge of the door and jerked it vigorously sideways. The door swung open. He reached inside and pulled out a padded envelope from a shelf. “Will this make you happy?”

  The man stepped forward to take it, but at that moment my phone started ringing again. The man glanced over to me, and while he was distracted Rick turned abruptly, snatched the glass door open and stepped out on to the balcony. He leaned over the rail, held up the envelope tauntingly, then lobbed it out towards the main carousel.

  All three of us watched its progress, which seemed to take much longer than it actually did. Then the man was jolted into action. He lunged through the glass doorway, pausing briefly to check where the envelope had landed, then turned to his right and launched himself on to a short metal staircase that led down to the carousel system. As I joined Rick on the balcony I saw the man stumbling on to an elevated walkway that led off beside the conveyor.

  I glanced along the conveyor to see what had become of the envelope. Numerous other much larger parcels were being trundled away from us, and I could see the envelope among them, leaning against a much bigger cardboard box.

  The man could see it too, and he hurried along the walkway until he was adjacent to it. He glanced around, obviously trying to gauge how he could retrieve it. The walkway was separated from the conveyor by a waist-high railing and by the deep metal rim of the conveyor itself. As he looked, the envelope moved further on. He followed it.

  At regular intervals, chutes led off the main conveyor and down to the load assembly area to our left. Individual parcels were being diverted off the conveyor and on to these chutes by swinging arms that shot out from the side in response to some unseen command, then swung back again. This was how consignments were allocated to their various destinations.

  The man started clambering over the railing. As he did so his gun slipped from his hand and clattered on to the metal walkway. He glanced uncertainly back at it, then seemed to come to a decision. He turned and completed his manoeuvre without recovering it. He jumped over the rim of the conveyor and landed awkwardly on the moving surface. The envelope was a few yards ahead of him.

  Abruptly I felt the need to do something. Rick Ashton might now be out of immediate danger, but he was about to lose a tape that he clearly considered valuable. However, he was simply staring after the man with a look of shock on his face. I hesitated for a moment, then turned and lunged down the steps towards the walkway.

  Later I wondered what had possessed me to chase someone with a plainly violent disposition. At the time I was simply thinking to myself that the man no longer had the gun, so he couldn’t be a threat: a somewhat narrow view.

  It wasn’t hard to catch up with him. I was able to run along the walkway while he was still wobbling precariously on the conveyor, trying to reach the envelope. Within a few seconds I was parallel with him. He glanced over at me and called, “Fuck off, mate! Stay out of things that don’t concern you.”

  I ignored him, clambered over the railing and jumped on to the conveyor, landing in a crouch. By now it had moved on, leaving me a few yards behind him. I rose to my feet and stepped cautiously after him.

  His eyes darted between me and the envelope, now just a few feet ahead of him. He looked poised to lunge for it, but was hesitating, presumably uncertain what I would do while he was looking away. He shouted, “I warned you, mate. There’s no call to make this your fight.” He bunched his fists in preparation to take a jab at me.

  At that moment a swinging arm shot out and deflected the envelope on to a side chute, along with the larger parcel it was leaning on. The man saw my eyes widen as I looked past him at it, and he swivelled round, watching with new alarm as the envelope slithered away down the metal chute.

  He hesitated a moment, glancing back at me, then clambered on to the chute after it. He slid down, arriving awkwardly at the end of it like someone reaching the bottom of a helter-skelter. His arms flailed as he staggered to his feet, gathering up the envelope as he did so. />
  I couldn’t slide down after him until he moved away; I would be a literally sitting target for his fists when I reached the bottom. It appeared that he’d achieved his objective, but then the carousel abruptly stopped moving, and in the sudden silence an urgent voice rang out. “Armed police! Stay where you are!”

  I raised my eyes and quickly identified the speaker, crouched behind a trolley stacked high with boxes. He was holding an automatic weapon with both hands. Further away I now saw another, and a third.

  The man looked around wildly, then straightened in defeat. He could see that the game was up.

  Chapter 57

  A long period of explanations followed. Rick and I were interviewed separately and at length by detectives in two meeting rooms at the sortation centre. I told them a more or less straight story, but held back when it came to describing the conversation I’d overheard at Rick’s house. I told them about the tape, but didn’t mention the implication of some sort of sexual content. They would find out soon enough if they examined it, but I thought that was up to them.

  One of the detectives was reproving. “Did it not strike you as foolish in the extreme to set off on your own after an armed man?” It wasn’t a mild enquiry, it was a heavily weighted reprimand.

  “In hindsight, yes. I just acted on instinct, I suppose.”

  “Next time you need to think more carefully first.”

  Gradually I was able to piece together the sequence of events. It appeared that Dave Matthews had picked up my voicemail message, understood the gist of it, and been able to galvanise an armed response unit in double quick time. I had a lot to thank him for.

  His good word was perhaps helping me slightly with these detectives, but they didn’t know him, and didn’t seem inclined to do me any special favours.

  Finally, after what seemed like hours, the detectives had finished with us for the time being, and I was taken to a small office where Rick was already on the phone. He waved me towards a chair and I sat down.

  He disconnected and banged his phone down on the desk. “Christ! What’s the matter with these morons?” He looked at me and smiled briefly. “Michael, I think I owe you a vote of thanks.”

  “An explanation would be good, too.”

  “I don’t know about you, but I could do with a drink.”

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later I pulled in at a pub not far from the sortation centre. Rick ordered two double whiskies.

  We sat in an alcove away from potential eavesdroppers, and he looked at me cautiously, perhaps wondering how much he would have to tell me. Finally he said, “This is in complete confidence, right? I mean not just off the record, but this conversation isn’t happening at all. Are we agreed on that?”

  I nodded, and he looked at me carefully. “All right,” he said finally. “You won’t want to hear this, but I suppose you have a right.” He stared in front of him for a moment. “Do you know who that man was? You should.”

  “You called him Andy. That’s all I know.”

  “That’s right – Andy Davidson.” He downed half his whisky and squinted theatrically. “But his real name is Liam Stone.”

  “What?” I stared at him in amazement. This was the name of the alleged robber who had escaped capture – the one whose whereabouts my captors had been prepared to pummel out of me last week. Somehow, Rick Ashton knew him, and now I’d actually met him. How on earth could this be?

  “I don’t believe you.”

  He shrugged. “Well, it’s true. Coincidence or what?” He spoke dryly. It was plain that the coincidence no longer impressed him.

  I stared at him, almost speechless. The people who’d kidnapped me evidently had some connection to the security van heist, and now, through a completely different chain of events, Rick was telling me he knew someone else who also had a connection to it. To call this a coincidence barely did it justice.

  Eventually I managed to say, “Astounding, that’s what I’d call it.”

  “Just one of those weird things, mate.”

  I looked at him for a moment longer without speaking. Finally I said, “You’d better explain.”

  He ran a hand through his hair. “I don’t know where to start, mate.” He stared into the middle distance for a moment, then shrugged. “You’ve probably gathered that I’m not a very nice person.”

  I shook my head. “You don’t need to make any apologies to me.”

  He shrugged. “I think you’ll change your mind when you’ve heard me out.”

  I said nothing.

  Continuing to stare bleakly into his memory, he began, “Well, I met Andy in Queensland, years ago now. He was calling himself Andy Franklin then. I was still working in Sydney in those days, and my wife and I were having a holiday – the Great Barrier Reef, all that good stuff.

  “She took ill in Brisbane – some kind of stomach bug. She was hospitalised, but she insisted that I go on up to Cairns on my own. That’s where we were due to stay next.

  “I met Andy there. He was running a bar. Believe it or not, he can be a nice guy. We hit it off.” He glanced at me. “I hope I don’t have to spell it out?”

  I shrugged.

  “We had three amazing days, and on the last day we were totally off our heads. Anyway, he can’t keep his mouth shut, and he starts telling me about this ‘big thing’ he’s done in his past. Turns out that he claims he was in on a big jewellery heist in the UK, and he hopped it with half the loot.”

  He turned to me. “I thought it was a load of crap, to be honest. I got it that he had some kind of past he was escaping from, but I thought the stuff about the heist was just a load of horseshit to impress me. The next day he didn’t even remember anything about it.”

  He stared around the bar, perhaps realising he was on a roll now, and wondering how to rein it in. If so, he quickly seemed to give up on the idea, and turned to me with an air of renewed complicity.

  “So the years pass, and here I am in GB, and then one day I meet him out of the blue. I didn’t even think it was him at first. He’s not a beach bum any more – he’s Andy Davidson, a man of substance with a Cotswold stone cottage at Chipping Norton. Pillar of the community.

  “So after a while we started … seeing each other again. And that’s when I ran into problems at the company. We lost a big chunk of business overnight, and suddenly we were cash-strapped. Our parent company made it clear they weren’t going to help, and other investors were worried about market competition, so I asked Andy if he would be willing to stump up a loan, or even put in some investment himself – just to encourage the others. He seemed to be rolling in it, so I thought he might help, and to begin with he was fine with it. But then he started to get cold feet.”

  “So …?”

  “Well, your book.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, I read it, and I started putting two and two together. I did a load of web research, and realised the time frame fitted. It was him, Stone. No question.”

  Once again I felt nonplussed. Just as my book had apparently deceived my kidnappers into believing it, it had apparently also deceived Rick Ashton. And in this case it seemed to have pointed him towards the truth.

  I couldn’t think of anything to say. There was no point in explaining that the book was mostly conjecture; that wasn’t the point.

  He shifted his glass around on the table, staring pensively at it. “It didn’t bother me that he was Liam Stone. What difference did it make? Water under the bridge. As far as I was concerned he was Andy, not Stone.” He left a meaningful pause. “But I thought I could help persuade him about the loan if I mentioned the tape.”

  “The tape?”

  “I made a video of us back in Cairns. In secret. I rigged the camera.” He paused, then continued awkwardly, “I’ve done it once or twice, actually.” He looked up sheepishly. “I said you wouldn’t want to hear this.”

  Again I just shrugged.

  “Well, it was while the tape was running that h
e came up with all this stuff about the heist. Mate, I recorded this man making his confession.”

  “It would probably never stand up in a court of law.”

  “But do you think he’s going to risk that? At the very least, it opens up a trail. He doesn’t want any of it.”

  “So today was the last straw.”

  “Apparently. I didn’t have him pegged as a violent man, but it seems I read him wrong all these years. I should never have pushed him.”

  I stared at him. “But it was OK to blackmail this man just because he was a thief? It’s a strange kind of logic.”

  “It wasn’t blackmail, for Christ’s sake! We were mates. He was baling on me when I really needed his help, that’s all. And it was a loan – seed money. I wasn’t trying to take it from him permanently.”

  “But it was stolen money in the first place. You would have been funding your business out of a robbery.”

  He shook his head vigorously. “No no no. I didn’t know that when I asked for it. I only guessed later, and I might have been wrong. The robbery was years ago. His present wealth might be perfectly legit for all I know. I don’t know the ins and outs of his investment portfolio.”

  “I suppose that’s one way of looking at it.”

  Rick went to the bar to buy himself another round, and I sat in silence, running all this information round in my head. He amazed me. He seemed to occupy a world I could only imagine. His resourcefulness apparently knew no bounds, but it seemed to give him leave to swipe aside the moral flaws in his philosophy. But who was I to judge? In a sense I was his friend too, though I wouldn’t have cared to put that to the test.

  As for the coincidence of his knowing Liam Stone in the first place, that seemed to defy belief, and it was taking me a while to come to terms with it. I still found the discovery astonishing, but at least I was beginning to understand it. The more you learn about the circumstances of a coincidence, the less extraordinary it can seem.

  When he came back I said, “I wasn’t sure what to do today, after the two of you drove off. Maybe I did the wrong thing.”