The Magpie Trap: A Novel (2 page)

Stocky plays with the
cross around his neck once more, but as soon as Peak-cap moves out of shot, he
leaps into action; no trace of the concrete he wallowed through earlier now. He
attaches his laptop to the camera once more, and again the picture turns into a
snow-storm. After just
a moment though, the
images return.

Except the images look
familiar, like déjà vu; these are not new, or ‘live’ images. Instead, they
describe action which has already taken place; a recording. A loop.

A peak-capped man is standing, back-arched as
though forcing himself to replicate a ‘D’ shape with his belly. His hands are
gripping his belt as though grasping to hold on to dear life against this
monstrous belly. His mouth is moving though. Then suddenly, his posture
collapses as he starts laughing madly. In the background, you can see a stocky,
shaven-headed man standing on what looks like a massive pile of paper.

Static again; and then
Stocky appears in front of the camera, live once more. He detaches the cable
between the camera and his laptop. He is alone in the room; peak-cap is nowhere
to be seen.

Stocky is so close to
the lens that his breath is steaming it
up, but
even through this fog, it is possible to make out the trails of sweat which are
flowing from his forehead. Behind his glasses, there is a steely resolve in his
eyes, but also something else… He gives the lens a quick wipe with his sleeve
and allows himself a small smile.

‘Job done?’

Peak-cap is back. His
voice is gruffer than earlier; he’s maybe had some disappointing news.

‘Yes,’ replies Stocky.
‘I’ve done everything I needed to do.’

He fishes a crumpled
job docket from his tool box and indicates that Peak-cap should sign as witness
to the fact that a routine maintenance visit has taken place. Without a
second’s thought, the big man scrawls his name and hands the paper back to
Stocky.

Stocky signs his own
name now; Mark Birch. His is a simple, no-nonsense signature; one which
indicates that he hasn’t got time for the elaborate loops and curls of
self-promotion.

Quick-Fix

The road to the bookies was over-stocked with the
kind of billboards that drove Danny Morris into one of his perpetual bouts of
sneering. They must have been placed there on purpose in order to persuade the
hopeless gambler not to squander their family’s last remaining few quid on a
quick flutter.

           
Start a Child Trust Fund,
blared one
such advertisement.
By putting away only
three pounds a week, you could ensure that your child can have a brighter
future.

           
The
advert showed a sun-streaked university campus. In the foreground, a
spiky-haired young girl – probably a lesbian – was throwing her mortar board in
the air. In the background, a pathetic mother and father looked on through
teary eyes, thanking god that their miserable three quid a week had enabled
their daughter to buy her degree.

           
Danny
walked on. He had a long, measured stride but one which was punctuated, every
few paces, by a bizarre little skip. Like a child, he seemed to be trying to
avoid cracks in the pavement.

           
A
second poster; this time Danny couldn’t work out what the advertisers were
trying to sell him. This one showed another rosy-cheeked family unit, and this
time they were gathered around a computer screen. Two of the children were
laughing and pointing at something they’d seen, while the parents looked on,
looking pleased as punch that their hapless offspring even had the ability to
point and laugh.

Was the advertisement
trying to sell him children? Was it being run by an adoption agency or
something? Evidently not, because written underneath the image in much too
small font read the caption, ‘The Intertel Shift; Helping your family into the
Digital Age.’

Danny walked on and
shook his head, but couldn’t help himself grinning a little. As a security
systems salesman, the Intertel Shift was something that he knew all about. The
telecoms companies had swamped the media with their PR newspeak about all of
the benefits which would be felt from the switch from traditional analogue to
digital means of communication. Their loud voices had drowned out the almost
silent minority of doubters; those people that believed that the Shift would
not be as smooth and hassle-free as had been advertised. But after the
Millennium Bug fiasco, nobody wanted to hear about technological disasters
waiting to happen, did they? They didn’t want to hear about how the changeover
in communication methods for their televisions, computers and phones would also
affect the signalling of their burglar alarm systems.

People were much
happier in the knowledge that they’d be able to get seven hundred extra
television stations on their plasma screens than questioning whether said
screen could now be stolen from them without the police or the security company
even being alerted. People were much happier that their children could laugh
and point and everyone could live happily ever after in a state of blissful
ignorance. But then, that was the way that Danny wanted it. The more that the
problems with the Intertel Shift got brushed under the carpet, the more his
chances of succeeding in his plan increased.

Plans; Danny didn’t
exactly look like a man who made plans and he knew it. He was too fresh-faced
and innocent-looking to scheme, wasn’t he? He looked as though he could have
been a member of a boyband.
Sure
he’d
be the one that always lurked somewhere in the background and never sang, but
those dreamy-types were always the ones that got the most fan-mail, weren’t
they?

He wore his hair
slightly slicked-back, like Johnny Depp in
Donnie
Brasco
or more fittingly, given his slightly bigger frame, like Alec
Baldwin in his early middle-ages, before he let himself go. Danny looked at
least a couple of months away from any such descent. Instead, his appearance
was carefully manicured but starting to fray at the edges a little, just as
fashion dictated.

But fashion had very
little to do with the bookies that Danny was approaching. It was a place that
had completely let itself go and didn’t care who knew it. Like most of the sad
row of shops in which it sat, it exuded a kind of hopelessness. Most of the
paintwork was starting to peel away and the gutter was still hanging off the
wall from a few weeks back when Danny had seen a fellow punter repeatedly
head-butt it after a particularly severe loss on the dogs. In the front window
display, there were images of footballers from the days before there were even
shirt sponsors, rugger-buggers chasing the egg on a pitch which resembled a
scene from a war film and two female black athletes from the 1980s, both of
whom had abusive graffiti daubed over their faces. A lonely, hand-written sign
read: ‘We downt give Credit. So downt even ask. Cash ownly.’

Sighing, Danny pushed
his way through the plastic beading which covered the doorway - it was like the
stuff he could remember from his nan’s kitchen back in the day - and into the
inner sanctum.

The smell hit him first
and it hit him like a runaway train, just as it always did. It was a heady
concoction of stale cigarettes and raw desperation; the scent of men whose
lives were no longer governed by things like councils or governments, but
rather by the sharp blast of a starter pistol or the shrill rasp of a final
whistle. Alcohol was in there too, but Danny didn’t notice that as much; he’d
sunk a couple himself before coming down to the shop.

Despite the constant
buzz of noise of the race commentary from the many screens, the bookies seemed
shrouded in unhealthy silence. It was a place in which any outward show of
emotion – even talking – was frowned upon. Everything was geared toward the
main purpose; gambling.

He’d once seen three
student-types come in – probably they were lost on some excursion into the nether
regions of
Leeds
– and try to place a bet on the National. They’d
struggled over the whole concept of gambling; having to ask Eileen behind the
counter to explain the meaning of the odds at least three times as though they
were some ungraspable scientific theory or something. When they’d finally
placed their bets – probably a quid each way on the favourite or something
equally pointless – they’d sat in the island of plastic seating in the middle
of the shop and settled down to watch the race.

Unfortunately,
‘settling down’ for students generally meant lapsing into their mockney accents
and shouting loudly in order to show the locals just how intelligent they were.
When one of them had actually won, old Jackie had given the lad a clip round
the ear for celebrating, and another for having the gall to have won when
Jackie himself had lost big.

Jackie was in the shop
now, staring misty-eyed at the running order for the 3.15. Danny gave him a
brief nod of acknowledgement as he walked to the counter. He saw other men that
he
recognised
too; Fish-Eye, Key-Ring
and Do-Nowt. He loved the nicknames that these
wizened
old men went by; how they gave mysterious clues
as to the men’s former lives, before they were rotted by the betting. Danny had
tried to introduce such nicknames into his own circle of friends, but no matter
how hard he tried, none of the others seemed to have got the hang of it yet.
People still called Chris Parker by his name rather than Danny’s invented name,
‘Spider.’ Mark Birch was still Mark Birch and not ‘Sparky’; a nickname that
Danny was particularly proud of, considering the fact that Mark was both a
qualified electrician and security engineer (a ‘sparky’) and the fact that
there was a little rhyming slang in there too.

Adjacent to the
counter, Danny reached for one of the ubiquitous stubby blue biros and scrawled
a name on a piece of paper. He tucked the biro behind his ear and got into the
queue for the counter behind a bearded relic of a man that he thought was
called Accy. Quietly, he waited.

After a while, he
removed the biro from behind his ear and placed it in his jacket pocket. He was
always forgetting to remove the biros and going home with them still there,
advertising where he’d been as blatantly as the bloody billboards on the
streets outside tried to sell their wares. And if Cheryl found out that he’d
been to the bookies again after everything that had happened, well… Well let’s
just say that there’d be no hope of any goddamn teary-eyed scene at a
university campus in the future, no matter how many measly three- quid-a-weeks
he managed to deposit into a trust fund.

‘What you on today,
Danny-Boy?’ chirped Eileen when he reached the counter.

She was a tiny woman
with little horn-rimmed spectacles and a pronounced under-bite, but despite her
outward appearance, she gave off an air of menace which meant that
all
of the men knew that she was boss.
Perhaps it was the still rough-edged
Liverpool
accent.

Danny lowered his head
in order to speak through the small holes which had been cut into the thick
reinforced glass. ‘Three hundred on Quick Fix in the 3.15 at
Exeter
,’ he said.

Eileen raised a
questioning eyebrow. Danny pushed a wad of notes onto the tray and gave her a
wink.

‘You know something we
don’t know?’ she asked absently as she thumbed through the notes with a
practiced ease. Occasionally she would pause and lick the end of her thumb
before resuming the flicking. It reminded Danny of a librarian he’d known at
university, only Eileen was far more skilled. Hell, she’d probably leafed through
a whole
Edison
’s Printers-worth of notes in her time.

‘Not really,’ he said.

‘Aw, come on lad; tell
your Auntie Eileen,’ she replied, fixing him with a hard stare.

In most establishments,
letting the bookmaker know that you had some inside information would be
tantamount to suicide; they wouldn’t let you put a bet on if they thought you
were going to clean them out. But in that particular shop, Danny knew he was on
safe ground. Eileen liked a nice side-bet herself if the going was good.

‘Just a nod from a
trainer I know,’ whispered Danny. It was
close
to the truth. The tip had come from one of his
favoured
suppliers, Terry Martell; a man so small that
Danny was convinced he was once a jockey before developing CCTV systems in his
retirement. Hell, the name Terry Martell
sounded
like a jockey’s name, didn’t it?

According to Terry,
Quick Fix was absolutely definitely going to win the race. Two of the more
heavily-backed runners, horses which had come over from an Irish stable, had
been taken ill on the ferry overnight, he said. Quick Fix was a dead cert.

Danny heard a couple of
the men in the queue behind him begin to mutter. Evidently he hadn’t been as
quiet as he thought he’d been with Eileen; they’d heard his inside information and
were now most likely going to act upon it. In a place like Killingbeck Turf
Accountants – and Danny loved the way that they called themselves ‘accountants’
– such things spread like wildfire. As he moved away from the counter, he heard
the man next in line stick fifty notes on Quick Fix too.

By the time of the
race, a late run of bets had driven down the odds on Quick Fix to tens. Danny
had fourteens though, so didn’t really care. He stood at the back of the shop
and leaned against one of the plastic chairs, watching the clock and trying not
to start to worry about the amount of money the rest of the room had staked on
a horse he knew virtually nothing about.

Unusually, Jackie came
to join him and even made the effort to offer him a cigarette; a
Dorchester
and Grey, one of those lamp-post cigarettes which
are only smoked by people above the retirement age. Perhaps they thought that
one, extra-long ciggie would last them all the way until they finally popped
their ill-fitting clogs.

Danny accepted gratefully.

‘Not got any on me;
trying to give up, cocker’ he said, easily slipping into the kind of language
that the residents of the bookies used. In fact, Danny discovered that more and
more, he was starting to talk like that in real life. He’d once done it as a
joke, but now it was becoming
his
language too. He was always calling people ‘cocker’ or ‘squire’ or ‘chief’
these days.

‘You should give up
giving up,’ said Jackie sagely, as though imparting the wisdom of the ages. His
arm creaked as he reached over to light Danny’s cigarette for him. Jackie had
clearly given up giving up about fifty years ago, judging by the mottled yellow
stains on his teeth, lips and fingers. When he spoke the top set of his false
teeth nearly slipped out of his mouth.

Danny sucked in the
acrid smoke and immediately felt more relaxed. When Quick Fix stormed home,
he’d be a hero in the bookies. It would be a taster of the success that would
come when his plan started to pay-off. Life was good and going to get better,
and if he helped pathetic no-marks like Jackie and Eileen to have a better week
along the way; well that would be all the better, wouldn’t it?

Suddenly, Eileen turned
the commentary up.