The Magpie Trap: A Novel (38 page)

Was he hallucinating? Was this sun-stroke? Was he on drugs? Mark had to
run away, but the energy had drained out of his legs. He tried to stand up, to
block out this fearful sight… and then he was falling down, his head hitting
the plastic chair as he fell.

He heard the echoes of a distant cruel laughter, and then he blanked
out.

Mark awoke to
the dull throb of pain from his head, and from his ankle. He could feel cold
tile on his back. He had had hang-overs before; this was not one. It felt
different, like he had an out-of-body experience which he could no longer
comprehend. He struggled to move to a half-sitting position, moving his head
was agonising.

Was this karma? Was the pain he had inflicted upon Callum Burr being
revisited on himself? He unscrewed his eyes and saw that he was shrouded in
darkness. But where was he? He couldn’t recollect anything.

           
It was the constant chirping of the
crickets and something intangible about the thickness of the air which alerted
him to the fact that he was in a foreign country. Gradually he remembered; he
was in
Mauritius
. He saw,
through the gloom, numerous empty bottles of champagne littering the balcony,
and the upended plastic furniture.

Had he done that? Had he really drunk all of that? Pulling himself up by
gripping onto the table leg, he staggered back through the French windows and
into the suite, looking for the bathroom for water to soothe his shredded
throat.

           
He passed the beautifully carved
wooden table and then stopped. Right in the middle of the table was the packet
which had contained the rest of the sleeping tablets which he’d not taken on
the flight.

A terrible realisation started to dawn on him; he thumbed open the
packet and saw straight away that it was empty. There must have been at least
ten left….

And then the shock of his second realisation hit him. The room was
completely deserted; neither Chris nor Danny’s bags were there. Mark had left
the bag full of his money under the mahogany table. Knowing already what he
would see, he crouched down to confirm his suspicions. There was nothing there.

Steve Elton

Jim Hunter
easily found out where Steve Elton resided; he was known to just about
everybody as the man who could get hold of anything. The problem was, the
things he got hold of were generally cheap, poor quality and tended to break
down after one or two uses, be it a plasma screen TV or a transit van. A lot of
people had grievances against the chancer, and were therefore only too happy to
pass on the information to Jim.

Steve lived and worked from a house in the small former industrial town
of
Morley
, which was
close enough to the centre of
Leeds
to provide him
with his entertainment needs, but also far enough away that he could afford to
buy a large sandstone townhouse -
Yorkshire
stone, no less
- which was set close to the town’s splendid Victorian park. The house was set
back from the quiet roadway, in a leafy, sculpted garden. A speedy two-seater
sports car of some description was sparkling in the drive.

Jim pulled up in his on-its-last-legs Volvo and considered that crime
had certainly paid this young man; with dividends. His car shook to a halt, as
though taking its last, whimpering breath - Don had offered to take a look at
it for him, but Jim had been too busy - and he carefully applied the crook lock
to the steering wheel. The locks on the doors had long since stopped working
effectively and Jim had often considered buying a new car, but simply could not
be bothered. Why should you have to buy a whole new car simply because the
locks were knackered or it breathed a bit funny? Besides, cars simply bored
him; they were modes of transport, and that was it. He could not understand the
psychological significance which some people attached to their vehicles.

Hunter creaked open the front gate and stepped down the front path,
picking his way through an invasion of slugs which had appeared to bask in the
morning’s damp from the previous night’s rainfall. He doubted whether Steve
Elton had even got out of bed yet; it was still very early and there were no
signs of life from within the shut-eye windows of the house. He fished his old
ID badge from his trouser pocket and briskly rapped on the door’s lion-head
door knocker, once, twice, three times. He stepped back from the front
doorstep, arms folded, waiting.

Steve Elton’s bed-head
hair gradually slunk out of a small gap which opened in the front door. His
hair was covered in a slimily thick, white residue, almost like one of the slug
trails on his front path. It was probably leftover hair gel, hardened
overnight. Hunter seized the initiative and pushed the door inwards.

‘What is this?’ cried
Steve, alarmed quivers creeping into his voice, despite the fact that he tried
to pitch it somewhere between hard-man and gangster. ‘Surely no door-to-door
sales-jockey would be rude enough to do that. What the fuck do you want?’

‘I want you, Mr.
Elton,’ Hunter replied, ominously.

Suddenly, another voice
cut into the conversation. Hunter turned to see one of Steve’s neighbours leaning
over the garden wall, his face a picture of concern.

‘You alright Steve?
Who’s that? Want me to call the police?’

Hunter realised that his shoulder was still
pressed up against the front door, as though he was trying to force his way in.

‘We can either do this
here, on your doorstep, or I can come inside, Steve. Which is it to be?’ he
snarled, managing to flash his ID badge in front of Steve’s face.

Steve stepped forward
onto his doorstep; he was wearing some kind of old-style smoking jacket for a
dressing gown. He shouted over to his
neighbour
that everything was okay, and then whispered to Jim: ‘You’d better
come in then…’

           
Steve
led Hunter through a spartan hallway and into his living room. Again, there was
virtually no furniture, just a low-slung white leather sofa and a tiger-skin
rug. Hunter chose to keep standing, while Steve slumped down onto the sofa, the
leather creaking and cracking painfully against his bare legs.

‘So, what’s this all
about? Dawn raids? I’ve got nothing here, you can see that…’

Despite his bravado
exterior, Hunter spied a telltale tremble in the young man’s hands. He was
shitting himself.

‘Trying to do a runner?
Are you moving away, Mr. Elton?’

Hunter didn’t want to
give anything away about the reasons for his visit. He also didn’t want to be
forced to lie any more than he had to about his still being in the police
force.

‘No, I was just waiting
to decorate the place, that’s why I’ve got nothing here. I’ve only just bought
the house.’

Steve rubbed the sleeve
of his smoking-jacket across his nose, leaving a trail of slime slicked across
it. This young man is a toad, thought Hunter; he immediately knew that he’d be
able to break him.

‘How did you manage to
pay for it?’ Hunter asked, a wry smile crossing his face.

‘I work… I have my own
internet business; old guys like you can’t understand that, can you?’ snapped
Steve Elton. His mean little eyes blinked away what could have been his first
tear.

‘What I can’t
understand,’ Hunter snapped back, ‘is how you get away with selling stolen
goods over your internet site.
That’s
what
this old guy can’t understand.’

Steve Elton looked
shocked, and was silent for a while, perhaps thinking of how he could possibly
slime his way out of this one. Then, that little twitch in his right eye started
up again, and suddenly he was crying, full heavy tears. Globules of snot ran
down his face. Hunter dug out a tissue and flung it at him.

‘Clean yourself up! You
are disgusting; look at yourself! Now, don’t worry Steve; all I need today is
information. You’ll be able to go back to driving about your little
cock-extension sports car later today.
As
long as you tell me what I want to hear,
you
snivelling
piece of shit.’

Hunter had slipped into
auto-pilot interrogation mode, but to Steve Elton, his show was a powerhouse
performance.

‘Yes sir. What do you
want to know?’

‘All I want to know
today, Steve, is about a certain van. It was involved in a robbery. I can’t
tell you any more information than that. What I can tell you is that a man
identifying himself as Steve Elton took it in for a re-spray job at a garage in
Wortley, and at the moment, that’s the only clue the police have. So, what
you’re looking at if you don’t tell me everything you know, is an armed-robbery
charge.’

Steve had started
wailing like a child now, ‘I don’t know anything about no robbery! All I ever
do is sell on the stuff… I promise. Sir, sir?’

‘Shut up, Steve. Now, I
never even told you about the registration number of the van, or any of the
other details the garage kindly provided… Now, to jog your memory, how’s this;
the van was a large transit van with a diesel generator in the back. The
generator was probably once used to power a refrigeration unit.’

Steve suddenly stopped crying
and sat bolt upright. ‘I know that van, sir. But I don’t know what you’re
talking about with paint-jobs or armed robberies. I only had it a couple of
days, before I realised where it’d been stolen from… I just wanted rid, sir.’

‘I don’t know whether
to believe you. Convince me,’ said Hunter. He was now playing the good-cop part
of his schizophrenic routine, and had taken the seat next to Steve, putting his
arm around him.

‘I… I sold it to a man
called Mark. Mark Beech, I think he’s called, or maybe Mark Branch. Something
to do with trees…’

Something in Jim’s head
which had been waiting to click into place, suddenly, almost audibly, snapped
home.

‘Mark Birch?’ he cried,
as though he were shouting ‘
Eureka
!’
He shook Steve Elton and shouted the name again, ‘Mark Birch?’

‘Yeah, that’s him…’
Steve muttered his reply, fear returning to his eyes. ‘Used to work for a
security company believe it or not…’

Jim Hunter finished his
sentence for him, ‘EyeSpy Security. That’s who he worked for isn’t it?’

‘Yeah, but he’s gone
abroad now, the other day, with Chris and Danny…’ Steve clamped his hand over
his mouth, realizing that he had said too much.

‘Keep talking, Mr.
Elton; you are doing very well. Talking yourself out of the nick at this rate.’

Hunter could barely avoid
the excitement in his voice. He was so close, he could almost feel it. This
sounded like a crew which had the audacity, as well as the technological
know-how, to have undertaken the heist at
Edison
’s Printer’s. How had he not worked it out straight away? The fuss
about the Intertel Shift, Martin Thomas’s evasive answers, the precision with
which they had set up the dummy network; it all pointed in only one direction.
Hell, Callum Burr had told him that Mark Birch had been on site the day before
Hunter had started the job. And that had been when they’d discovered that the
Precisioner printer had been tampered with. He racked his brain to try to
remember if he’d seen Mark Birch’s face in the Image Book which held images of
all of the people that attended site. For the moment he couldn’t, but he knew
that it would come to him.

‘They went to
Mauritius
. Set up some charity or something. Only flew out
about a week ago,’ Steve continued. He clearly wasn’t noticeably distraught at
grassing up his friends. ‘I don’t have any contact details, but that’s
definitely where they were going.’

           
Jim
Hunter had felt like this before, when all of the pieces of the puzzle suddenly
click into place. He knew exactly what he had to do now. He had to follow them.
To the ends of the earth if needs be, but certainly to
Mauritius
.

‘Can I just use your
toilet before I go?’ Hunter asked, standing again.

Suddenly the shifty
look returned to Steve’s face. ‘Erm, yes, but remember what you said; there’s
no way I’m going down today, is there?’

Hunter leapt up the
stairs two at a time, thinking that maybe, just maybe, some of the stolen money
from the Edison’s Printers raid was hidden up there, but no, all that was there
was a selection of expensive computer equipment, clearly stolen. Hunter used
the toilet, and returned downstairs to confront the toad for a second time, but
then thought better of it.

‘Just get rid of it,
Mr. Elton, and I can turn a blind eye,’ Jim advised, thinking, that’s why the
little snake was so keen to give up his mates. He was trying to cover his own
back.

‘Thank you, sir,’
grovelled
Steve, ‘Are you sure your mates down the station
will know about our little arrangement?’

‘Arrangement? Mates
down the station?’ Hunter flashed him a vicious smile, his old confidence returning
in spades. ‘Whoever told you I was a policeman? That ID I showed you was a
fucking security guard’s permit you stupid idiot!’