The Magpie Trap: A Novel (3 page)

And welcome to sunny
Exeter
for the
3.15 flat-race. Conditions look good to firm and we have a strong turn-out for
this, the biggest race of the meet. On your screens now, you should be seeing
the majestic figure of the favourite, Do the Right Thing, the horse from the
same Irish stable as…

The rest of the
commentator’s speech was drowned out by loud booing in the shop. Danny had
never seen it so animated; he felt the slight twitch of doubt at the back of
his mind. What if Terry Martell, the little bastard, had been wrong about Quick
Fix? He drew deeply on his cigarette and tried to recover his former good mood.

And we’re off! A good start from Magnetic Fish
Pond on the left, followed by Do the Right Thing and stable-mate Chocky. Coming
up just behind them is the grey mare Bobby’s Girl and chasing fast is Quick
Fix…

This time, the
commentator’s high-pitched delirium disappeared behind a wall of yelling from
the Killingbeck punters. On screen, Quick Fix was starting to look good; he
barely even looked to have broken sweat yet. Danny chanced a surreptitious
glance to his left where he saw Jackie leaning forward in excitement. The old
man was mock-whipping his own thigh; his eyes for once, were sparkling. He was
sucking on his false teeth; this awful slurping and clicking sound emerged,
like the sound a horse’s hooves make in wet mud.

‘Come on cocker!’
screamed Danny. ‘Ride hard, Quick Fix.’

And as we approach the long bend which marks the
mid-way point of this race, we have Magnetic Fish Pond neck and neck with Do
the Right Thing. Closing fast is Quick Fix, followed by Bobby’s Girl and Mr.
Happy. Towards the back of the field, Chocky is fading fast. He looks tired,
the old boy.

Danny couldn’t help but
smile. Old Terry had come through for him. He knew that putting all of those
orders his way would pay off some time, even when the engineers complained
about the quality of Terry’s equipment. Good old Terry; he’d have to phone him
and thank him once the race was over and he’d escaped the mob of well-wishers.

Underscoring his
glorious moment were the sickening sounds of Jackie’s own excitement: click –
suck – slurp – click.

Chocky has pulled up now! The ten-to-one third
favourite is out of the race. Bad news for the Irish stable that were hoping
for a one-two in this race in the build-up to the big one at
Ascot
. Up at
the front, there’s not a lot of grass between the leader Magnetic Fish Pond and
the chasing pack, but Do the Right Thing is not walking this race as some
commentators thought he would.

The smart money’s now on a good finisher like Mr.
Happy or Quick Fix…

Another roar from the
crowd in the Killingbeck Turf Accountants greeted the mention of Quick Fix’s
name; Eileen, who had come out from behind the counter started to nudge Danny
in the ribs with a sharp elbow. Sheepishly, he returned her smile.

A quick look to his
left; Jackie’s teeth were now half way out of his mouth. It gave him a
hollow-cheeked look, like he was undead or something.

Twenty furlongs to go now and the race is hotting
up. The front three of Magnetic Fish Pond, Quick Fix and Do the Right Thing are
riding hard. They see the end in sight. Now who has that final burst in their
legs?

Danny could see that
Quick Fix still had reserves of energy. The jockey still hadn’t applied the
whip and yet he was keeping easy pace with the other leaders. Steam was pouring
out from the horse’s flanks like an old train that was about to embark on a
sprint. He was a beautiful horse; so elegantly poised, so magnificently tuned.

Click – pop – wheeze –
gurgle, from Jackie.

Magnetic Fish Pond seems to be tiring now. He’s
lagging behind the front two by a furlong and the gap is growing bigger by the
second. And now as we enter the home straight it all comes down to a
sprint-finish between the favourite, Do the Right Thing, and the well-backed
outsider, Quick Fix.

Danny tuned out the
noise of the commentary and the crowd. He concentrated on the images; the two
horses were straining with every sinew now; foam sprayed from their mouths. The
jockeys were secondary but still threw everything they had into the final
portion of the race. The camera showed a brief close-up of Quick Fix’s jockey
in his harlequin-style shirt; he was virtually rising up above the horse’s head
now as though believing that if it came down to a photo-finish, he’d be the one
to secure the win.

‘Come on Quick Fix!’ he
tried to yell, but felt his vocal chords constrict. Must have been the
cigarette he’d just smoked. He felt the burn in his throat and reminded himself
that he really needed to give up. Smoking was no good at all for him. But then,
looking down, Danny realised that he was somehow already smoking another
cigarette. He couldn’t even remember being offered one.

As his eyes re-focused
on the screen, Danny realised that something had gone horribly wrong in the
brief moment he’d looked away. Now there was only one horse in the picture and
it wasn’t Quick Fix. He felt Eileen’s sharp elbow connect with his ribs. This
time the connection was harder, more meaningful.

He tried to concentrate
on the screen; tried to work out what had happened. He realised that the room
had now gone quiet again and that every eye was trained on him.

Now the sounds coming
from Jackie were reminiscent of choking.

And Do the Right Thing romps home to win the 3.15,
screeched the commentator.
It was a close thing for him, but after that
late, painful-looking trip from Quick Fix, there was never any doubt.

Another commentator
joined in:
Very sad when a horse has an
accident like that. I may be wrong, but that looks like the kind of fall that a
horse doesn’t recover from.

Eileen clicked a button
on the remote control and suddenly the commentary was gone. It was eerily
quiet. Hands on hips, the old scouse battle-axe turned to Danny.

‘So what happened to
your tip, Danny-Boy? I had fifty quid of me own money on that…’

Then the rest of the
dissenting voices started; Jackie, Fish-Eye, Key-Ring and Do-Nowt. Naked
aggression filled the air. Danny started to edge toward the door, keeping his
back against the wall so as to negate the chance of any surprise attack. The
gnarled old men were starting to close on him now; moaning their reedy-voiced
moans like that, they seemed like a herd of zombies or something.

Out of the corner of
his eye he saw Eileen reach over the counter and pull out a meaty-looking
baseball bat. She handed it over to Key-Ring, who looked as though he might
have a good swing on him. Danny had heard that Key-Ring used to be a bouncer
down
Bradford
way. He didn’t want to find out whether the man
had retained his strength. As it was, he’d always looked on the man as a
cuddly-bear type; so lacking
upstairs
that
he didn’t register on the radar as dangerous. But now, Stone Age club in hand,
he seemed to bristle with menace.

Danny started to move
more quickly now, feeling his way along the wall with his hands. He dreaded the
sound of another punter stepping into the shop and blocking the doorway.

‘Seventy quid!’ roared
Accy. ‘That’s almost me whole pension you little fucker.’

‘I won’t be able to pay
me gas,’ groaned Jackie, whose eyes had returned to their natural, milky
nothingness now that hope had been extinguished.

The crowd parted to
allow Key-Ring through their ranks. He made one loping swing which whizzed past
Danny’s ear before connecting with one of the plastic chairs. A loud crack
reverberated around the room and for a moment everybody was still. This was the
moment of no return; the calm before the storm.

Suddenly, Danny darted
toward the door. He felt someone catch part of his jacket and start to yank him
back. For a moment, he feared that he was about to be pulled back into the fray,
but then he heard the rip of his expensive coat and the
agonised
roar of the crowd as they realised that their
prey was about to escape.

He made the door and
paused for a moment, about to offer some words of apology. But Key-Ring made a
final, desperate lunge with the bat. It rippled through the plastic beading but
did not connect. Danny plunged out of the shop and into the garish sunlight of
the street.

Before he could think
about it, he was running; leaping over the tartan shopping trolleys of old women
and cracked kerbs; hurdling mobility assistance handrails and overflowing
rubbish bins. In the distance, he saw a bus pulling into a stop and he made for
it as though his life depended on it.

Safely on the bus, Danny couldn’t help but reflect
on what he’d lost. It wasn’t just the money, although that was a large part of
it; no, he’d lost something more. He’d lost that knuckle-headed confidence
which had been flowing through him from the very moment that he’d thought up
the plan. Or rather, since the plan had been thrust upon him.

           
He
traced his fingers across the fake leather of the seat in front and tried not
to give in to melancholy. Or to
the fear
;
every time the bus creaked to a halt at another pointless stop, he was scared
that the next person to climb on board would be Fish-Eye or Eileen or Jackie.
He knew that he was stupid in these fears; none of the regulars had actually
left the confines of the shop for something like eighty years, he reckoned, but
still, there was a first time for everything. Nevertheless, when a burly,
broad-shouldered man got on at a stop just outside Harehills, he could have
sworn that it was Key-Ring. The man clutched a big hold-all bag, and Danny was
convinced that it contained the baseball bat. He sunk lower into his seat and
pulled his collar up. Only when the man had safely taken the last available
seat was Danny assured that it was not Key-Ring.
 

On the seat behind him,
some spindly teenager kept kicking her feet into his back. The boy next to him
had his Ipod on at deafening levels. The heating had been set too high too, so
that the windows fogged up and he couldn’t see where he was going properly.
Danny believed in signs; he had an almost superstitious faith in his ability to
read them and the veracity of what they foretold. The very fact that he was
crammed into the creaking brontosaurus of a bus was a bad sign. Having lost the
money was something far, far worse. It was something that he could barely bring
himself to contemplate.

Whenever he thought
back to that zombie mob-scene in the bookies, he now saw Cheryl’s face instead
of those of the old men. And her many faces burned with that same told-you-so
antagonism that he knew he would face him when he got back home that evening.
He could almost hear her voice, and the endless repetition of that stupid
goddamn question that he could never hope to answer;
why?

 
And so, rather than dwell on what had
happened, Danny settled into anger instead. He dug out his mobile phone and
tapped in Terry Martell’s number. Understandably, it took some time for Terry
to answer, but Danny persisted, showing a willpower that generally deserted him
in more pressing situations.

‘Awwright Dan,’ sighed
Terry in his sickening cockney drawl. ‘Before you start in on me, can I just
say that I’m sorry about the…’

Danny didn’t give Terry
the opportunity to finish his sentence: ‘Sorry’s not worth three hundred ding,
cocker,’ he snarled.

‘We’ll find some way…’

‘Find some way of
what?’ roared Danny. Some of the passengers started to turn round, casting their
inquisitive eyes over this strange, well-dressed stranger in their midst.

Let them stare,
thought Danny.
Let them
disapprove. Let them be all high-and-mighty about someone shouting on the bus
before they go home to their own shouting match suppers and braying the kids
before bedtime.

‘I’m trying to tell
you, mate…’

‘No; I’m telling you.
Don’t expect me to stand up for your shitty cameras next time there’s a fault.
In fact, don’t expect me to ever do anything to help you out ever again.’

Danny clicked off the
phone,
realising
that there weren’t
really any other threats that he could justifiably make. He couldn’t threaten
him with a baseball bat over the phone; he couldn’t threaten to take back the money
that he was down. All the ‘fuck offs’ in the world were still only words. And
Terry was a work contact after all; if Danny had have really let the man have
it, then word would surely have got back to Fartin Thomas, the head honcho at
EyeSpy Security. And Danny’s position at the firm was already looking pretty
shaky.

Danny caught a glimpse
of his reflection in the window as the bus passed into shadows. He saw how
bedraggled he now looked; how his slick-back hair had started to go astray.
Soon, he reflected, he would be like the old boys in the bookies. If he’d have
been able to look closer at the image of himself, he’d have been able to see
that his piercing blue eyes now looked a little jaded and bloodshot around the
edges and his cheeks were getting more hollow by the day. He was becoming one
of them already.