The Magpie Trap: A Novel (33 page)

Mark watched on,
overwhelmed by shock. Then they heard the shouts of the second security guard.

Danny reeled back aghast, cracking the back of his
head against the van door. He could not believe the evidence of what he had
seen with his own eyes. He rubbed at them with the palm of his hand, attempting
to wipe away the surreal memory.

He tried to compose
himself; perhaps there had been a problem with the camera feed? Perhaps he’d
somehow tuned into a low-grade British gangster flick?

Yes. That’s more like it. That would be the only
way to explain the almost filmic progression of the heist; complete with
graphic violence, murder, and the criminals’ escape with the money by the skin
of their teeth. The compulsory security guard had been killed too; collateral
damage.

But Danny kept
returning to the executioner’s eyes; they were identical to Mark’s; perhaps it
wasn’t a film. Perhaps there wasn’t anything wrong with the camera feed.
Perhaps his friend had really swung that heavy implement toward a man’s head
and broken it in two.

He slumped into the
makeshift seat in the back of the van and watched as Chris and Mark suddenly
appeared in the Precisioner Unit; he watched Chris ramming as much cash into
the sports bag as he possibly could. Chris then unplugged the Precisioner
printer itself, and shoved it into the top of the bag, displacing a wad of
notes which scattered over the floor. To Danny, the whole scene seemed
too
sick,
too
anarchic; it had become extreme; a snuff movie. The taking of
the money was like a vulgar embellishment of the plot; a needless extra. Surely
the money was no longer the point?

Danny watched as Chris
and Mark slunk away into the night, narrowly avoiding the next security guard
who arrived on the scene. Then they were over the fence, and away. Danny curled
into a
foetal
comma in the back of
the van, and waited for either the police or the executioners to arrive…

Mark ran and he kept on running. He ran up and out
of the Precisioner unit, somehow managing to evade the attentions of the second
security guard. The guard was crouched over Callum Burr’s broken body and
didn’t look up as they passed. Mark didn’t even know if they’d been spotted. In
fact, he hardly knew anything any more. The guard hadn’t chased them, and that
must have meant that Burr was dead, or at death’s door.

As shrill alarms sounded
across the site Mark ran. As more and more of the security lights flicked on he
ran. He ran down the scarred pathways of the printworks, hardly caring whether
he was going in the right direction, hardly caring if the cameras were working
again and could see his uncovered face. He reckoned that they’d be able to see
his face anyway. Even if he’d been wearing a mask the mark of a murderer was on
him now.

 
He climbed the security fence as though it was
not there. He felt no pain from his leg. All he remembered was the fact that he
had to run. He had to run as if the ghost of Callum Burr was behind him;
fountains of accusatory blood splurging from his mouth.

He streaked ahead of
Chris, who was struggling with the sports bag and its heavy, blood-stained
contents.

‘Leave the bag!’ he
yelled. But Chris wouldn’t listen. He was drunk on adrenaline now and high from
the violence he’d observed.

Over the fence, Mark
hardly cared as he slid most of the way down the bank again, once more falling
over onto his ankle. He heard Chris cursing and shouting as he followed, but he
did not stop to offer a helping hand. If Chris let the money go,
then
he’d help.

In the van, Danny heard the approach of the two
thieves; the two executioners; the two bad men. For a moment, he thought about
jumping into the front seat and driving away, leaving them to face whatever
fate had in store for them, but Mark was there too quickly, banging on the
passenger door window, his face smeared with filth and fear.

‘Let me in, Danny,’
said Mark, in this strange monotone voice. Danny complied; he saw the cable
cutters still in Mark’s hand.

Then Chris was back,
still clutching the heavy sports bag. The zip couldn’t close properly and a
couple of notes looked as though they were going to spill out.

‘Fire up the engine,’
yelled Chris, throwing the bag through the open door and into the back of the
van.

Danny did as he was
told again. He keyed the ignition and slammed his foot onto the accelerator.
The van’s wheels whined and spun in the mud but the van would not move.

‘Give it some more
gas!’ yelled Chris.

Danny slammed his foot
onto the accelerator again. Through the back window, he saw the wave of mud
that was being thrown up by the wheels, but the van still would not move.

‘Someone’s going to have
to get out and push,’ he breathed.

Without warning, Mark
jumped out of the van door and raced to the back doors. With a strength that
none of them had believed he possessed – until they’d seen him swing at Callum
Burr at least – he launched the van out of its boggy grave. As soon as Mark was
back on board, Danny raced away through the trees, not even slowing down when
he clipped the side of the van against an unseen wall or the trunk of a tree.

‘Danny; calm down mate;
you don’t want to crash the fucking thing,’ said Chris.

Danny stared off into
the darkness but did not speak. Mark started to cry; quietly at first, but
eventually his sobbing filled the van. Chris and Danny ignored him, Danny
navigating a tight right-hand turn which edged them closer to the road.

‘It’s over, mate. Now
stop behaving like a dickhead and get us out of here in one piece,’ said Chris.

Danny tightened his
grip on the wheel but did not decrease their pace. They flew round the bend.
‘Don’t ever talk to me that way again, not after what you’ve both done,’ he
growled, never once taking his eyes off the road. ‘Mark; stop that bloody
snivelling
.’

Mark’s sobbing only increased in volume, an
uncontrollable torrent of grief; he was a murderer. As they escaped
Edison
’s Printers, this thought reverberated through his mind like the
ripples from a tombstone being dropped into a pond. He ran away from his
thoughts; he didn’t want to see that lifeless corpse ever again.

At first Danny and
Chris’s conversation in the van had remained on the periphery of his hearing,
like echoes from a faraway place, but gradually he began to understand that
they were there with him. He was amazed that he still had the capacity to hear,
to feel, after what he had done, but with the return of his senses came the stabbing,
visceral pain of reality.

 
‘Sorry,’ breathed Chris. ‘It didn’t go to
plan, but that doesn’t mean that we throw away all of the plans for the
getaway. We’ve got this far without flashing blue-lights on our tail; just
drive Danny.’

‘But you killed him,’
said Danny, softly. ‘You killed him.’

‘We talk about this
later,’ said Chris, reasserting his control. ‘The flight is in three hours, and
we can make it to your house in twenty minutes; a quick change and then we’ll
dump the van and scarper to the airport. Understand?’

‘I understand,’ said
Danny, edging the van out onto

Chris
recognised
the
minute easing of the tension: ‘We’ve nearly made it. Still no sign of the
police; I was worried that they’d pass us on this road. Hell, I never thought
we’d make it when the wheels got stuck back in the wood. ‘Mark; you have
superhuman strength, man.’

           
Mark
thought Chris was referring to how hard he’d hit Burr and buried his face in
his gloved hands. He felt as though he had been in a car crash; his whole being
ached. His ankle in particular was
agonising
; it hung at an awkward angle over the edge of the makeshift seat in
the back of the van, no doubt broken. He reached out to touch the ankle with
his hand but realised that his arm was numb, probably from the effort of
pushing the van out of the mud. But then he saw the reason why his arm was so
numb, and the sobs began to rise in his throat yet again.

Circulation to his hand
had stopped; his white knuckles still squeezed the life out of the rubber grip
of the cable cutters.

Fallout

Jim Hunter hung his head in shock. There was embarrassment
and grief in there too. He could barely bring himself to explain to a third
detective the events of that night; he could see the condescension in their
eyes. They thought him just another washed-out ex-policeman who had failed in
his final mission.
 

‘I told you. When I
finally got to the crime scene, the intruders were already escaping. There was
no way I could catch them. Callum Burr was dying. My priority is human life; I
tried to resuscitate Mr. Burr, however there was no pulse. Mouth to mouth did
not work; he had swallowed his tongue in the shock of the impact to his head.’

The young detective
regarded Hunter with an almost amused look. He looked so young, the detective;
his upper lip was covered with a furry, bum-fluff moustache that was faintly
ridiculous. It looked like one of those milk-moustaches that children get.
Hunter wanted to reach out his hand and wipe it away.

‘Mr. Hunter,’ he said,
stressing the
mister
part, prolonging
the first vowel, ‘I’m afraid that it is no longer your job to work out how
people died. And by the way, we don’t know that he
is
dead yet.
We
will
decide that for ourselves. What I need to determine from you is whether Callum
Burr was involved in this; whether it was an
inside job
.’

‘He’s not dead?’ asked
Hunter, incredulous.

‘The medical team are
with him now, working their magic. He’s badly hurt, yes, but you helped him a
lot by acting the way you did.’ The young detective paused for a moment and
cocked his head, regarding Hunter through narrowed eyes.

‘Not many people would
have reacted the way you did,’ he continued finally. ‘But I reckon you made the
right choice. Not that you’ll hear many of my men saying that.’

Hunter grimaced. The
young detective was trying to make him feel better. The recriminations would
follow, but not yet.

‘Have your officers
combed the perimeter for clues? A getaway van maybe?’ he asked in desperation;
Mr. Wade was on his way, and he wanted to at least soften the blow for a man
who he considered to be more than his boss; a friend maybe.

The young detective
frowned. There were too many people milling about for him to be able to talk
openly.

‘How many times do I
need to tell you?’ he asked. ‘The investigation of this crime is a police
matter, and therefore cannot be discussed with members of the public.’

Then the young
detective leaned closer and whispered: ‘Look, sir, this could have happened to
anyone… There is something you could do. Go and see my colleague, D.I Webster,
and start sorting out the CCTV recordings. The quicker we do that, the quicker
we’ll know who we are looking for.’

Hunter smiled
unhappily. The young detective obviously knew him from somewhere; hence the
‘sir’. Perhaps he’d worked under him in some long forgotten investigation. In
that instant, he knew that the young man felt sorry for him and was probably
promising himself that he’d never end up in a situation like Jim had. ‘Thanks
lad,’ he said. ‘That’s all I needed to know. They managed to get away didn’t
they?’

And with that, Hunter
walked away to give up the clothes he was wearing for analysis, and to check on
the CCTV recordings.

Danny, Chris and Mark followed their plan to the
letter, despite their destroyed morale. Keeping to the strict schedule meant that
they didn’t have to spend time thinking about what had happened.

In the quiet early
morning hours, they stopped at Danny’s
North Leeds
house and picked up his car. They took a few
minutes to clean themselves up a bit; after all, they were going on a flight.
They reckoned that by making the time sacrifice earlier, they could save
drawing unnecessary attention to themselves when they were at the airport which
would be literally crawling with police.

While Mark sat in
Danny’s front room in ashen-faced gloom, occasionally drooping the wet towel
which Danny had provided over his head like a beaten boxer, Chris luxuriated in
the shower, and then disguised his head-wound with a baseball cap, pulled down
low over his eyes. Danny, meanwhile, stood by the window, twitching the
curtains, expecting every set of headlights turning into his street to be the
police, coming to make their arrests. They were now armed robbers
and
accessories to murder.

As morning light broke,
they drove in convoy through
North
Leeds
and into
Harehills, a place whose reputation dictated that it would be the ideal place
to leave an unlocked van which was full of security equipment.

Sure enough, almost as
soon as Chris and Mark joined Danny in his car, parked a little further down
the street, they saw a gang of youths approach the vehicle interestedly. It
seemed that even so early in the morning, the promise of rich pickings had
lured them out of their beds. Some laughing and cajoling was clearly going on
amongst the group of youths, and then one of them playfully tried the catch on
the back of the van; jumping backwards when the door swung open.

‘Just burn it out, you
little fucker,’ whispered Chris.

But the young boy
simply closed the door carefully and reached into his pocket to pull out his
mobile phone.

In Danny’s car, the
tension was again heightened.

‘Think he’s calling the
police?’ Danny asked, sounding worried.

‘Don’t be stupid; he’s
probably calling his older brother to help him carry all the equipment in the
back…’

As if on cue, a second
van then screeched round the corner and came to a halt adjacent to their blue
van. The gang of youths started to pass the security equipment from one van to
the other with a practiced ease.

‘Come on, let’s go,’
said Chris. ‘They’ll make a killing selling that gear on. We don’t have to
worry about it any more.’

‘Stop saying things
like that,’ said Mark, coldly. ‘Stop saying things like “killing”.’

‘I didn’t mean it like
that,’ said Chris. ‘Just shut up and forget about…’

‘How am I supposed to
forget about it?’ shouted Mark. ‘I’ll never forget what I’ve done… But
remember; you are both complicit in my crime.’

‘I wasn’t even inside
the printers,’ said Danny. ‘You can’t blame me.’

‘I wasn’t the one
holding those goddamn cable cutters,’ said Chris, menacingly.

‘Oh, just let me out of
the car. Let me out, now. I can’t be a part of this.’ Mark sighed. ‘I
knew
that you two would shrug off the
blame for this. I just knew it. Let me out.’

‘Okay; get out of the
car if you want to go and hold your hands up to your crime,’ said Chris,
leaning over the front seat and grabbing Mark by the scruff of the neck. ‘
But if you do,
I will fucking crush your head under the tyres.
We can still get away; over an hour and a half after the heist and
we’re still completely on our own; no sign of our pig friends.’

Danny leaned round from
the driver’s seat to separate them. An uneasy silence reigned throughout the
car. Then he turned and revved the engine.

Jim Hunter was still shivering from a mixture of
shock and the piercing cold of the evening which cut through the spare clothes
he had been forced to put on when his were taken by the forensics team for
examination. Despite what the law said about innocence, Hunter knew that until
it was proved beyond reasonable doubt, he would be assumed to be one of the
prime suspects in the heist. He could still recite the staggering statistics
about raids at sites such as
Edison
’s Printers, how so many of the culprits ended up
being ‘Inside Men’. An unlocked gate here, a blocked CCTV camera there and the
rest of the gang would be let in, invited guests; then the ‘Inside Man’ would
be given a blow to the head - to complete his cover story - and be assumed
collateral damage in the heist.

Jim was not the ‘Inside
Man’ however, and if there was any collateral damage, it had been done to
Callum Burr. But this was rather more than a flesh wound; Burr was nearly dead,
probably in a coma. He tried to go and see him but the medical team surrounded
him like a stone circle. The enquiring looks he received from each and every
one of the team confirmed his suspicions that he was not only being fingered
for the heist, they maybe even believed that he had attempted to murder Burr.
When he persisted with his questions, all they told him was that Burr was alive
but in ‘critical condition.’ Hunter had seen enough medical dramas on
television to conclude that ‘critical condition’ was a euphemism for ‘fucked up
beyond all recognition.’

He wondered whether the
criminals had double-crossed their ‘Inside Man’ in order to cut off any links
from them to the crime scene. He wondered whether they presumed Burr dead. He’d
certainly believed that to be true until the young detective had let it slip.

           
On
his way back across the site and on shaky legs, he refused offers of a coffee
or a brandy. He had to set about his own investigation of the events of that
evening. Nothing could get in the way of that. He was pulled towards the now
almost blinding light which was emanating from the panopticon watch-tower. His
hands twitching miserably by his side, reaching for the invisible crutch of a
cigarette to keep them occupied.

The two
MMC
operatives were crouched by the front door to the
tower; two young men, one of whom had huge red blotches around his eyes,
overcome with the emotion of the night. He gently slapped his large hand on the
back of the younger of the two operatives, the one who hadn’t been crying, and
gave him a forced smile. Then he saw the large bottle of Scotch that they were
passing between them.

‘Where did you get that
from?’ he asked.

One of the men – Mick
Stephenson, he realised – offered him the bottle, misreading the question.

‘Don’t get caught with
that,’ Hunter warned. ‘Charlie Wade will be down here soon. You don’t want him to
think you’ve been drinking on the job.’

‘We found it in the
Security Lodge,’ said the younger of the two
MMC
operatives. ‘I went down there after… I went to
press the panic button when nobody in the Lodge responded to my calls. The
bottle was lying under your desk. I’m sorry. I just took it… For the shock…’

Hunter suddenly
remembered those hazy moments before Burr had bolted from the Lodge; he
remembered his production of the bottle of whisky from his rucksack. His
antennae started to twitch again; something was not right. But the whisky was
the least of his problems. The CCTV images were of primary importance.

‘We need to retrieve
the CCTV footage,’ he said, calmly. ‘We need to give the police as good a
head-start as possible on this. Come on lads, we need to go up to the
MMC
.’

Neither of them moved.
Mick Stephenson started to cry again.

‘Listen to me,’ said
Hunter, ‘this was not your fault. Do not blame yourself, Mick.’

But young Mick looked
angry, ‘Mr. Hunter, I
know
this was
not my fault. We never saw anything up there… there wasn’t any footage, there
weren’t any alarms. It was too late before we knew anything… Someone hacked in,
I just know it… and now Callum’s dead.’

‘Not dead,’ said
Hunter, glad to be the bearer of good tidings for once on that unhappy night.
‘In a critical condition maybe, but not dead. We have to hope he’ll come
through.’

The other operative,
Jerry, suddenly wailed, ‘He may not be dead but Callum was such a good man... I
saw him after. I saw that cut in his head. Horrible. Who would do such a
thing?’

 
‘Well, that’s what we need to do now; check
the recordings. Come on, you two, look sharp. You need to keep
doing things
to take your mind off it.
You may not have had the live action, but we can play-back exactly what
happened, and then we’ll be one step on the way to catching Burr’s attackers.’

Still neither of them
moved.

 
‘Jerry; come on lad. The whisky won’t be doing
you any good at all now. Put it down lad. The big man’s fate is out of our
hands now.’

Hunter could not bring
himself to mention Burr by name. Even the thought of him brought a bad taste to
his mouth. He may not have been dead, but Hunter intuited that he had been
involved in the bungled crime, and that the two lads would not look so
favourably
on the big man once they knew about this. But
Hunter wanted the lads to see this with their own eyes; he wanted them to make
up their own minds.

           
Jerry
and Mick used their access badges to get back into the panopticon. Hunter
followed them, as usual surprised at the sheer empty space of the place. There
was nothing in there; it was a glorified lift shaft up to the top floor where
the
MMC
was housed.