The Magpie Trap: A Novel (20 page)

Mal was left abandoned
at the table, his head cradled in his hands, sobs racking through his body. He
was a broken man.
 

Sela Bar

Danny had chosen Sela Bar
to discuss a potentially record-breaking heist. Simple, subtle, snug Sela Bar
was ideally placed for a relaxing evening’s drinking and illicit conversation away
from prying eyes. Danny loved the way he could drift in from the bustling
street, and descend into Sela’s relative haven of calm. Sela was down a flight
of stairs from street level; hence the name Sela Bar, as in Cellar; and
therefore there obviously were no windows through which he could be caught
unawares. He also loved it because, unlike some of the other preening peacock
bars in Leeds City Centre, Sela placed a higher value on the quality of drinks
than on any unnecessary interior design detail in the bar itself.

That
evening, Danny was perched on a rescued pew from a local church, which didn’t
fit properly on the stone floor and therefore rocked back and forth with his
every reach for his beer.

He
was forced to wait, again. It seemed as though he spent half of his life
waiting; for a race to start, for a friend to turn up, for somebody to sign an
order to rubber-stamp a sale. Danny had to remind himself that this was a
different kind of waiting; this was like the calm before the storm. It had an anticipatory
feel to it. He was excited about something, other than betting, for the first
time in a long time. It felt as though he had turned a corner in his life and
was about to see the world of opportunity opened up to him. He had been so
desperate, so out-of-ideas, that it seemed like the solution was there all
along, just waiting for him to say yes; all he had to do was step over that
threshold and into the world of criminality.

At
that moment however, something else stepped over the threshold, or rather
someone
. It was Chris. He was wearing
what looked like a new suit; pin-striped this time and with a waist-coat to
boot. A goddamn
waistcoat;
who did he
think he was?

‘Oh
Danny-boy, what’ve you been up to?’ he said. ‘What happened?’

‘What
do you mean “what happened”?’

‘Today:
what happened? Where the fuck did you go? The whole world’s been looking for
you today after you walked out of that presentation.’

After
everything that had happened, and helped by the lubricant of the afternoon
whiskies, Danny had forgotten all about the events of the morning. They seemed
to belong to a different reality now and barely even measured as a ripple on
his own personal Richter scale.

‘Oh
that,’
he said, making a dismissive
gesture with his hand. ‘I had some other business to take care of, that’s all.’

Chris
sank down onto the seat next to Danny and spoke in a menacingly calm voice:
‘That’s it? That’s your explanation? Did you know that your mate Mark has been
combing virtually every bar in town looking for you? I think your receptionist
Paula took all the bookies. And they ain’t the only ones; your boss has been on
the warpath… Is this the explanation you’re going to offer them? That you had
other business
?’

Danny
studied Chris’s face and noted that there was something new in his usually
sparkling eyes; some disappointment perhaps, maybe laced with a measure of
fear.

‘Nice
waistcoat,’ said Danny, smirking.

‘Shut
the fuck up, Danny,’ said Chris, fiddling with the material of the waistcoat
with something bordering on embarrassment. If it was embarrassment, it was soon
replaced by anger. ‘This loose-cannonball run that you seem to be on has to
stop. I’m not going to tell you that it’s because you’re hurting so many people
– hell, you’re hurting yourself – but what I will tell you for free is that it
can’t go on much longer.’

‘Oh,
you’re telling me for free, are you? Not a loan or an investment then, cock?’

‘Stop
it with the goddamn ‘cockers’ and the ‘cocks’ and the ‘chiefs’ and the
‘squires’. You are not a goddamn tramp. Nor are you a Yorkshireman.’

The
two men fumed for a moment. Danny resolutely refused to offer to go up to the
bar to shout up the next round; Chris seemed in a state of shock. In the
background mood music played and a couple of student-types messed around with one
of the board games which Sela Bar stocked behind the bar.

Finally,
Chris spoke: ‘Anyway, after your text message, I thought I’d better come down
and see that you were still alive. Evidently you are. Now I can go home and put
my feet up and not worry about whether you’ve been run over by a bus driven by
someone that you owe a gambling debt to.’

‘Did
you not even read the text message?’

‘I
read it,’ said Chris, climbing to his feet again. ‘Typical you; typical Danny
hyperbole. Ah! You like that word, don’t you? I saw how you sneered when I said
it. You’re off your head, mate. Is it a
normal
 
thing for someone to do to go
missing for a whole day and then start sending texts like that out, talking
some nonsense thing about a plan to heist Edison’s Printers?’

Danny
roughly pulled Chris down into a seat and hissed: ‘Keep your fuckin’ voice down
you idiot!’

Chris
shrugged away Danny’s hands as though he didn’t want them touching the rich
material which made up the lapels on his suit. For the first time, Danny realised
that if it had actually come down to a fight between the two of them, Chris
would have a very decent shout of winning. He’d really bulked up with all this
snowboarding and gym-going.

‘What’s
wrong with you?’ hissed Chris. ‘Don’t tell me that what you said in your text
message was actually the truth; that you do actually have this plan?’

Danny
nodded.

Then
Chris started to laugh; it was the exaggerated golf-club kind of laugh that his
father would have emitted upon hearing that one of his pals had lost his ball
in the rough at the ninth.

‘I’m
serious,’ insisted Danny, with fire in his eyes.

‘Always
knew you’d be the one to cheer me up today,’ said Chris, who’d evidently
decided to stay now. ‘I’ll get them in and then you can tell me all about this
crazy plan of yours.’

Continuing
his condescending giggling, he got out of his seat and bounced his way to the
bar as if he was a boxer on his way to ring-side.

The
big revelation of the plan wasn’t going as well as Danny had hoped. Soon he
would have to bring out the big guns; he’d have to tell Chris all about the
foreign man and the fact that there wasn’t actually any choice in the matter
anyway. This meeting wasn’t about discussing whether they were going to
undertake the heist; it was to discuss
how
they’d undertake the heist. He took a sip from his pint and watched Chris
leaning nonchalantly against the bar. Hell, the man was consummate. Nobody else
could have pulled off a suit like that with bloody trainers.

From
the opposite direction came the sound of the saloon-style door swinging shut.
Danny’s head spun round to see Mark Birch, still in his EyeSpy overalls, but
with a more bar-friendly T-Shirt pulled down over the top half of his body.
Mark shook his head as soon as he picked Danny out from the other down and
outs.

‘All
right, all right, I did wrong, I’m sorry,’ said Danny, raising his hands in
mock-surrender as Mark approached his table. ‘I shouldn’t have walked out of
the presentation and left you alone with those berks from the brewery. Chris
told me about what happened.’

‘Yeah,
well he’s been out there looking for you as well this afternoon, like,’ said
Mark. He looked as though he was trying to bite back his anger.

‘Good
excuse for a pub crawl,’ said Danny, chancing a grin.

‘It’s
not a joke, like,’ said Mark. ‘Martin Thomas is fuming, absolutely fuming. One
of the brewery guys called him up in the afternoon to tell him, but to tell you
the truth, I think he saw you driving away anyway.’

‘What’s
the shithouse said?’

‘He
wants you in his office at nine sharp tomorrow morning.’

‘That’s
a Saturday. He’ll be at the golf-club, I’ll be in bed. You must mean Monday.’

‘Tomorrow,
Dan. Can’t you get it through your head? It’s that serious that he’s forgoing
the golf and he’s having you in.’

‘Oh
well,’ said Danny.

‘Are
you not even worried? You could be for the high-jump, mate.’

‘Bigger
fish to fry,’ said Danny. ‘Did you get my text message?’

Mark
raised his eyes to the ceiling and then sloped off to the bar to join Chris. He
did not offer Danny a drink.
 

Mark diligently tended
his half-pint (he was driving) whilst listening to Chris and Danny snipe at
each other across the table. He knew he shouldn’t have come, these spoilt
university boys just loved showing off to each other, as if it was some
courting ritual. He felt excluded. It was only when Danny had got up to visit
the toilet that Chris had deigned to speak to him.

‘What do you reckon to
these texts that Danny’s sent us then?’

‘I’m a bit worried
about him to tell you the truth,’ said Mark. ‘It’s like he’s finally gone over
the edge, like.’

‘I know. Have you ever
heard of a magpie trap? Daddy dear has had one installed in his garden,
although I’m not exactly sure whether they are RSPB approved. They are an
extreme preventative measure to stop the birds from taking over. It’s a kind of
metal cage cum death trap. Now, to get it to work, you put a dummy magpie in
one of the compartments of the cage. The resident magpies are driven so mad
that they get into this downward spiral where all they can think about is going
in and attacking the decoy magpie, whereby the trap is sprung. Danny seems like
he’s headed directly for a magpie trap and there’s nothing that could stop him
from getting mangled.’

For a moment, Mark was
going to tell Chris all about the terrifying video file he’d received on his
email account, but instead he found himself saying: ‘I don’t mind magpies
meself; there’s one on the Newcastle United badge, like.’

Chris ignored him:
‘Mark my words; it’s only a matter of time before they start having
‘preventative measures’ like that built into the security systems you tinker
about with.’

Mark looked confused,
but was rescued by Danny’s return from the toilet. He looked as though he’d
been drinking all afternoon again, just like the previous day. He was wearing a
dark frown and looked as though the whiskies he had thrown back were now coming
back to haunt him, resurrecting the paranoid inner demon in Danny which always
appeared when he was drunk.

‘Tell us about the
texts,’ said Chris.

Mark winced. This was
not the way to handle a drunk like Danny; they needed to get him help, not
humiliate him.

Danny slapped his palm onto
the table, seriously spilling the contents of Mark and Chris’s still full
drinks.

‘That’s right; the
texts,’ he said. ‘Look, there’s a reason I wanted you to come here, and it’s a
bit more important than where I went when I left that brewery presentation.
Chris, I wasn’t going to let you in on this mate, but as you said, I owe you.
This will repay you for everything I’ve ever borrowed from you. This will make
us rich.’

Struggling to keep his
voice hushed, Danny stared boggle-eyed across the table at his drinking
partners, gauging reactions.

‘
Edison
’s Printers again Dan?’ asked Chris, barely suppressing a smile. Mark
hated him in that arrogant moment.

‘Wasn’t it this same
story yesterday only it had a different twist?’ continued Chris. ‘Now instead of
pretending
to rob the place, you
actually want to rob it? You idiot. What are you thinking? You know that place
has every security gadget known to man. You’ll be prime time on that
England’s Stupidest Criminals
show.
Designing the very security system which catches you in the act.’

Mark meanwhile had
slumped forward in his chair in disbelief allied with concern for his
colleague’s clearly shaky mental state.

Laughing manically,
Danny continued: ‘Ha-ha, but that’s the exact reason why, my friends. Because I
designed the system, because I know its flaws, and because Mark here has
already infiltrated the system once.’

Mark looked
embarrassed.

Chris looked a little
less amused.

Danny ploughed on
relentlessly.

‘Gentlemen, we are
about to make history. Mark, explain about the whole
Intertel Shift thing if
you will? Because thanks to that loop-hole, we’ll be able to walk in and out of
that place without even needing to worry about setting the alarms off.’

But Mark was already on his feet, was already turning on his heels and
marching out of the bar, patience drained, unlike his half-pint, which remained
untouched.

‘I think you’ve
scared him mate. Man-to-man, is this a joke or what? To be honest, you’ve
ruffled my feathers as well,’ asked Chris.

Danny struggled to turn the jumble of excitement and impending
drunkenness into coherent sentences in his head. He could have handled things a
hell of a lot better. He could have structured an argument as if it was a sales
speech, and he could have won them over much more easily. Gathering what was
left of his thoughts, Danny decided to try a new tack.