The Magpie Trap: A Novel (22 page)

The Lair

To Danny’s barely-awake, embittered mind, the EyeSpy Security office
that Saturday morning resembled a lair inside which predatory, malevolent creatures
scuttled, their vampire teeth ready to puncture the neck of the unsuspecting
victim. Danny had slept in the car, just around the corner from the office, and
his negative outlook was shaped by an uncomfortable night. It had been a choice
borne of necessity and must; he had lost his house keys and Cheryl was at her
sister’s and therefore hadn’t been there to let him in. He nursed a scalding
coffee from a nearby all-night café, and steeled himself just to get through
the inevitable bollocking that would soon come to pass.

Not that he was worried. No, Danny saw his job as
a permanent contingency plan; plan B if you will. It was in contingency for his
not achieving all of those dreams that he had, and which he did nothing about.
His plan A’s were pipe-dreams like being a writer or an actor, and yet his only
attempts to get anywhere near such professions was spending a lot of time in
pubs and betting shops listening to the hushed conversations there. Perhaps
Danny was taking part in a prolonged Method Acting study for his one true
acting role: that of a tired and washed-up drunk.

As morning crept in, the denizens of the shadowy
world of EyeSpy Security came home to roost; the unnatural-sounding bleeps of
locking cars in the car park heralding their arrival at their place of work.
Unbelievable, he thought, most of his colleagues were going into work on a
Saturday! Did they not have lives?

There was some muted conversation, but in general
an eerie silence cloaked the car park. There were four of them: sharply suited,
slickly oiled hair, small steely eyes. They come with warnings of imminent
disaster, of impending crises, of unavoidable lootings. They are the security
salesmen.

The salesmen were well versed in playing upon the
unconscious fears of their potential prey, hinting at the stench of a heist
around every corner and veiled threats of abject poverty if security measures
are not taken out.

Those warped, grim-reaper sales techniques meant
that the sales team never stayed together for a sustained time; they worked at
the company fleetingly and were well rewarded for every drop of blood they
commissioned from their quarry. It took a special type of character to be able
to set aside misgivings about such work; Danny was not one of them. Danny had
always tried to blunt the sharp-edged moral questions which nagged at him by
drinking, by putting it down to ‘just having to pay the bills’, but as he sat
in the morning half-light, frustration dripped off him like a tap which would
not turn off.

Acid rain-clouds of irritation spread out from
Danny’s furrowed brow as he sat moulded into his beaded car seat cover.
Indignant beads of sweat trickled in cantankerous rivulets to form an angry
confluence on his reddened cheeks.

This
cannot go on; there is more to life than this. We have to do the heist on
Edison
’s
Printers. We have to.

Danny had met this particular revelation before;
on an hourly basis during the uncomfortable night. It was driving him round the
bend. And not just round the bend but round and round in an endless centrifugal
tailspin of suppressed rage from which he seemed to be unable to free himself.
And yet, he sat in his car, preparing to go into work to face his boss’s rage.

It was only the sight of the showy teutonic
engineering of his boss Martin Thomas’s car cruising into the EyeSpy car park
which shakes Danny from his inertia; nobody was allowed to arrive at the office
after
Martin Thomas. And especially
not on a day like this; even if it was a Saturday.

His heart still
beating fast from his impromptu run to the office, Danny slipped behind his
workstation as inconspicuously as possible, not trading even the most cursory
glance with any of his fellow employees who were probably questioning why he
was even there at all on this most unlikely day of the week. Or maybe they
already knew. Surely they already knew; news of his walkout at the meeting
would have spread like wildfire around a place like EyeSpy. Perhaps that was
the reason why all of the rest of the sales team were in. Perhaps they wanted to
see his final fall from grace.

Danny powered up his laptop and proceeded to tap on the keys as though
deep in the midst of an important document, pausing only to pick up the
telephone handset and tuck it between his shoulder and tilted head. In spite of
the whooping sounds which began to emanate from the dead line, Danny persevered
with it; looking for the entire world as though he was busy working, and had
been for the past hour…

Danny could finally bear it no longer and he replaced the handset with a
sigh and raised his head. Immediately he realised that Martin Thomas has not
been fooled by his pathetic show. Martin lurked, glaring through his open
blinds at Danny, daring him to meet his gaze. Danny looked back at his computer
screen, and was greeted by the deceptively cheery ping of the received email
message which promptly popped up in the corner.

The message was only three words long, but it chilled Danny to the
heart: ‘My Office Now’ it read, and the sender was one M.H Thomas.

Danny looked back up from the screen and saw Martin Thomas leaning
against the frame of his office door, the traces of a menacing grin appearing
in the corners of his mouth, the whiskers of his beard all a-quiver.

‘What part of
now
do you not
understand, Morris?’ Thomas bellowed across the room. ‘Get in here, you
work-shy get.’

Suddenly, Danny was aware that all eyes were on him as he undertook the
walk of shame across the office floor towards the torture chamber: Thomas’s
office. He heard the excited buzz of conversation of his colleagues as the
anticipation of his being thrown to the lions grew.

           
Martin Thomas liked to luxuriate in the spacious surroundings of his
own office; to bask in the glory of the fact that he no longer had to be the one
knocking on the doors like his sales team. Much of the space in his office,
however, was taken up by a felled-tree of a desk, which was populated sparingly
by a telephone, laptop and a commemorative golf trophy. These were the only
tools he needed in order to undertake his work. The focus of the office was the
huge window which comprised the entire west-facing wall and which looked out
onto the sales floor. Closing the door behind him, Danny slunk towards the
small chair and was dwarfed by the desk in front of him: he felt like a naughty
schoolchild in his headmaster’s office; exactly the effect that Thomas was
looking for.

 
         
‘So, Morris, what happened yesterday?’

          
Danny thought on his
feet. ‘An urgent call from another customer;
Edison
’s.’

          
‘Okaaaaaaayyy,’
droned Fartin. ‘And this call was so urgent that you upped and left an
important meeting without even a word to them about where you were going and
why you were going. Without even coming up here and
asking
me whether you could go. Without even asking whether any of
the rest of the members of your team could help.’

‘I’m fully aware that I handled things badly,
Martin,’ Danny began, already sweating profusely: Thomas liked to keep the
heating on, in order to either sweat sales out of potential customers, or make
life unbearable for his employees. ‘But you can rest assured that it will never
happen again. It was an emergency. I panicked a little.’

Cocksure Thomas slouched nonchalantly forward, his
arrogant beer gut protruding almost aggressively over his desk. He had the
self-assured, almost violent attitude and appearance of a male sea lion, king
of his pack. Danny, cowering across the desk, was still readying himself for
the verbal battery all those who enter this office traditionally faced, and
knew which buttons to press in order to waylay the man.

‘Tell me more about this
emergency,’
he said, disbelief written all over his face.

‘Well, there should be a lot of extra work coming
our way out of it,’ said Danny, hoping to replace the flashes of anger in Thomas’s
eyes with pound signs.

‘Really?’

‘If I work hard enough at it, yes; it’s like you
said, it’s all about keeping throwing your ball up towards that basketball
hoop. The more I throw, the more points I’ll get.’

Suddenly looking directly at Danny, Thomas almost shouted, ‘Yes, I did make
that analogy, didn’t I? I rather like it, actually. Hmmm, basketball.’

‘I do try to listen to your advice, boss,’ said Danny, increasing the pitch
of his whining ingratiation about twenty-fold.

Martin Thomas looked perplexed. ‘Don’t give me that stuff and nonsense.
You’ve always been a lucky boy, Danny. And you’ve always simply chanced your
way to making lucky sales. Yes, that’s you; lucky. Lucky Danny.’

‘I don’t know what I can say to that. I don’t think I’m particularly lucky.
I work hard, that’s the reason I make sales. I make sure that I do the proper
research and know what buttons to press; it’s just this time we need to go back
and press those buttons some more…’

Danny was incredulous. There was simply no way of predicting his boss’s
behaviour.

‘You know, Danny-boy, sales is like a game of tennis. You have to know how
to keep the ball in motion, to get it over into their court. Sales is a game
and it’s just about whether they sell you the ace, or you sell them the ace.
They want to sell you the fact that they don’t want to buy. You want to sell
them the product… you want to tie them up in knots until they lob up an easy
ball which you then smash down into their court. They can’t respond to that
Danny. You’ve won then.’

To Danny, Martin Thomas cut a faintly ridiculous figure by using a sporting
analogy. The big guy looked as though he had never run in his life. Even now,
wearing his ‘Saturday casuals’ he looked as though he would look out of place
anywhere near any kind of field of human endeavour save perhaps crown green
bowls. Looking at him more closely, Danny realised why the man was behaving so
strangely. It was a Saturday morning after all; the man was most likely still
drunk from the night before. Danny felt renewed confidence flowing through his
veins.

‘Martin, I will make this big deal that we need. I’m going to pull a big
one off, the likes of which the company has never seen before…’

Thomas interrupted: ‘I admire your confidence: I always have, but you seem
all over the place at the moment.’

Struggling to heave his great bulk from behind the desk, he waddled to the
office door, and stared through it to check whether any of the rest of the
sales team were listening. As he panted his way back to his seat, he began to
speak, this time in a more conspiratorial tone. ‘Danny, the main reason I
wanted to speak to you this morning is your current psychological state. Is
there something wrong at home again? You walk out on presentations and roll in
late to your disciplinary looking as though you slept in the car. Danny, you
need to tell me…’

Danny blanched: had he been seen?

‘Look Martin, my sales figures are still above target. I’m seeing lots of
new customers; I don’t see what you’re driving at?’

‘I couldn’t care less about your personal life, but when it starts to
affect work, it becomes my business. I know you think that you’re better than
this place, but why don’t you look at it from my point of view; I can’t be seen
to be advocating you getting away with everything that you do. Salesmen are
ten-a-penny, and most of them do not turn up to work looking like you do this
morning, and yesterday come to think of it. I saw you screech into the car park
yesterday morning. Making a show of yourself; I won’t stand for it. I can’t
have you coming into the office, meeting customers looking as though you’ve
been dragged through a hedge backwards. I’m going to have to give you a written
warning.’

Ah, there’s the rub
, thought Danny. He
knew that Martin Thomas loved to think of himself as some kind of great
motivational speaker: a latter-day Bill Shankly, and after all, Danny was
inspired by this motivational speech. But Danny wasn’t inspired to go out and
make the sales which would secure his company’s future; he was inspired to
commit the crime which would ensure that they would never be taken seriously
within the security industry again.

           
Almost allowing himself a laugh,
Danny tried some Method Acting:
grovelling
straight out of the handbook. ‘I can assure you
that it will never happen again boss. I will pull myself out of this rut.’

Danny decided to risk his next play as well: ‘I’ve got some ideas: I think
I can get some more work out of Edison’s Printers. Do you still have the site
layout drawings in the safe from the last time we tendered for work there?’

Acquiring the drawings would allow them to plan the heist in greater
detail: it would be a major coup for his bid to be the leader of the trio; the
main man.