Conman (25 page)

“Your idea?” I said anxiously.

“To get your money back,” Andrew said. “From this guy, this Christopher. I want to be involved. I
need
to be involved,” and he began to clear a space on the desk, brushing fluff and pen lids to the side. “First, it’s not going to be easy. I mean, we’re smart, you and I. Successful. I’m at Keatings, you’ve got this place. We might have two good brains between us, sure. But compared to this
Christopher
? We’re kindergarten level.”

He was talking quickly, eyes bright.

“Now I tried to sketch out some thoughts,” and he riffled his book feebly. “Last night, in my hotel. But I was a bit drunk and … well, I think we have to face it. You and I aren’t cut out for this stuff. Swindles and switcheroos? We wouldn’t know where to begin.”

“Agreed.”

“If we’re going to come up with some scheme by which we can get back your fifty grand without getting ourselves killed, we’re going to need help. Someone with this sort of experience. And if not exactly this con-trick stuff, then at least someone built
that way.
Someone who thinks the way these guys think. Who’s lived in the shadows. Who can give us an insight into how these people work. How they
think
.”

“Okay,” I said, rather dragged along by all this.

The shop went quiet. Andrew looked at me expectantly like a Labrador with a lead in its mouth.

“What?” I said.

Andrew raised his eyebrows hopefully, nodding at me like a simpleton.

I blinked. I looked about the office. Over my shoulder. Nope, neither Nick Leeson nor Ronnie Biggs had snuck in behind me. I looked back at Andrew and shrugged.

He widened his eyes and nodded a little.

And then the realisation leaked cold into my gut.

“It’s perfect. He’s still alive, right?”

“No,” I said. “I mean, yes yes. He might be still alive but
no
.

Not in a million … No. Just no.”

Undeterred, Andrew scuttled up to the chair next to me, spun it around and mounted it backwards in the New York style,
flapping
his hands enthusiastically.

At least I think he did. I had my eyes shut in exhausted quiet despair at the time.

“Listen, listen it’s perfect,” his voice said in my ear, eagerly. “You talked about him all the time at college.”

“No. No I didn’t.”

“You
did
. You said he’d never done a day’s work in his life.”

“He still hasn’t.”

“How he would use the system. Benefit fraud, all the
loopholes
.

How old is he now?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to think about it. This isn’t going to –”

“How old is he? Fifty-five?”

“Now?” I sighed, eyes still shut, counting slowly in the
darkness
. “He’d be fifty-eight.”

“Fifty-eight. Bloody hell, you can’t just blag your way through fifty-eight years without having this stuff in your blood. So I think you should call him. You don’t have to tell him specifics. Talk … talk hypothetically. Just asking his advice. He might –”

“No.”

“
C’mon
Neil. Think about it. If we’re going to do this – and I don’t see what choice we have –”

“We can go to the police,” I said, opening my eyes and squinting in the flat shop-light. “Like normal people do. We can go to the police –”

“Yeah? With
what
?” Andrew said.

“I’ll tell them …”

“Go on? What’s the big clue? Where’s the big lead?”

I looked around the peeling walls in chilly silence. Fifty years of tatty, comic book crap peered back at me.

“
And why you, sir?
” Andrew said in a pompous,
Dixon of Dock Green tone. “Where are they now sir? Any witnesses sir? Anything they might have touched, sir?
I’ve been there, mate. This is what happens. What can you tell the police?”

My throat closed slowly, tight and panicky.

“We
have
to do this,” Andrew said, “and we have to do this
ourselves
. Or we have to try.”

“But I won’t involve … We’ll try it. You and I. Okay. But I’m not going crawling to –”

“We
need
his help.”

“I
don’t.
I don’t need
anything
from him.”

“Neil, listen to me,” and Andrew got up, sliding his chair away with a clatter. He tugged up his trousers like a grown-up and squatted down on his haunches. He had black, grown-man’s socks. Spider-Man nowhere to be seen. “We need every advantage we can get going up against this man. Did you see this
Christopher
back off from a trick? Go easy on you?”

I grunted.

“Neil? Did you?”

“
No
,” I said, hands now over my face. “No but …”

“Then what’s
your
idea? Try and come up with something ourselves? Some clever double-triple-quadruple cross that Christopher won’t spot in the first three seconds? This is what this man
does
, Neil. Neil? What are you saying, take your hands away from your –”

“I said, we discussed it.”

“You – ?”

“We discussed it. A long time ago. After he … That was
it
for us. I write to him. Once a year. Keep him up to date with things. A lifeline, I suppose. Births, deaths and marriages. To let him know the world goes on. But … but that’s it. He’s my father. I owe him that. But that’s all. I don’t want any part of that life. That was
his
way,
not
mine. Not me.”

The office went silent. I looked up at Andrew. He sighed.

“But you don’t get to make that choice now. Whether it’s what you wanted or not, part of that life is now your life. Nothing you
can do to change that. So you can either become a victim. Become me. Spend the rest of your life with gritted teeth and a hardened heart. Or you can look at him as a gift. Use this one life-line. Get him round.”

The office fell into another silence for what felt like an age. Andrew’s purple paisley tie drifted back into fashion at one point and then just as quickly back out again. Finally I spoke.

“I can’t.”

“Oh come on Neil, aren’t you
listening
? We –”

“No, I mean even if … I mean I can’t just call him. I can’t
get him round.
”

“You don’t know where he is?”

“I know exactly where he is. That’s the problem.”

One of the worst aspects of a job in retail management is that one is never at home. Early starts, late closings, stock-takes. It’s a twelve- sometimes fourteen-hour day, resulting in a sleepy, blurred home life of reheated dinners and broken promises.

Of course one of the
best
aspects, similarly, is that one is never at home. The early starts, late closings and what-not mean that not one matrimonial eyelid is batted should one, say, disappear out of the house for an entire Saturday. It is just presumed one is slaving over a hot till.

Even when one is actually taking the Nissan Micra for an anxious and fretful drive down the M2, out to the quaint little village of Selmeade in Kent.

“Straight through, follow the yellow line. Sit at the allocated seat. The number is on your card. Keep moving, follow the yellow line.”

My card had D12 stamped inkily on it. I wove nervously through the five rows of empty chairs and small tables in the draughty hall until I found my spot. The floor echoed and squeaked like a school gym, the air stale and wet with bleach. Along the fat bricked walls, hospital green with a greasy shine, broad men with clip-on frowns paced, beady eyes darting, watching other pale
visitors
– mostly tired-looking women – unload carrier bags of fizzy drinks and biscuits. Above us, on iron walkways, more shiny-capped men measured out the hour in plodding, purposeful steps while blank-eyed CCTV cameras whirred and prowled.

Bottom hot and itchy in the plastic seat, I watched as five or six dozen men in tracksuits began to file in past a desk on a raised dais at the front, their names checked, their numbers given. It took a few stomach-tumbling moments before I realised that the grey man in the raspberry tracksuit squeaking towards me was him.

HMP Selmeade’s prisoner FF9191.

Or Dad, as I call him.

He eased himself down, waving off my awkward bobbing
hand-shake- backslap
fumble.

“S’all right son. Probably best we ain’t on friendly terms,” he said, motioning at the inmate/out-mate couples either side of us who were hugging, groping and kissing noisily. “Best way to getcha’self a strip search is that.” He placed a dented tobacco tin on the table between us with a loud
clack
, tapping his hollow cheeks. “Drugs. In the mouth. S’how they get ’em in. Bring me doo-dahs did you?”

I looked at him for a moment. It appeared pleasantries were over. With a sigh I emptied out the canteen carrier bag onto the table. The tobacco, bottles of Coke and the red tub of Brylcreem he’d asked for on the phone. Dad smiled with a
good lad,
hugging the items to his thin chest, rheumy eyes shining.

A longer look. A closer look. He wasn’t well, not that the
tracksuit
did him any favours. It was cheap, thin, prison issue. The other men sat around us filled theirs out with gym-buffed shoulders and thick, lifter’s necks, but Dad’s hung on his frame like a dust-sheet on a xylophone.

“If this is a tickin’ off,” he began, sliding the cigarettes into his tracksuit shiftily and popping open his tobacco tin with twitchy yellow fingers. “Some
closure
cobblers your therapist is makin’ you do then we’ll keep it short son. I got a Kaluki game I’m missin’ ’ere.”

“I’m not …” I said. My voice was loud, flat against the
swimming-pool
echo of the cold hall. I took a deep breath, heart heavy. “No-one’s ticking anyone off. That’s not … I just thought I should … How are you doing?”

“Whadda you care?” he said.

“I’m your son.”

“You been my son for
t
wenty-five years –
”

“Thirty-one, Dad.”

“Thirty – ?” and he stopped. I watched his thin mouth twitch and chew a little.

“I’m not here to tick you off,” I said. “I’m well past that. Haven’t you been getting my
letters
?”

“Got the first few,” he said. He coughed, a wet, old man’s cough, shoulders shaking within the thin polyester. “Your
opinion
of me seemed pretty plain. Didn’t see much point in puttin’ m’self through that every year.”

“You haven’t – ? You haven’t been reading them?”

My father shrugged a weak shrug, popping the lid from his buckled Golden Virginia tobacco tin with skeletal fingers.

“Missed some
big news,
’ave I? That what’s dragged you in ’ere? Get kicked out of University or something, is it? Good thing too. Getcha’self in the
real
world, boy.”

“I can’t believe you haven’t been reading …” I trailed off, dizzily. “I … I finished University
ten years ago,
Dad. And the real world and I get along fine. Thank you.”

“I bet,” he said dryly. “You always were a workin’ man. Even as a boy. Runnin’ errands for fifty pee.”

“Not that I ever
got
the fifty pee.”

“I was teachin’ you a lesson son,” he smiled the neat, ordered smile of cheap dentures.

“I’m
married
now,” I said.

“Yeah?” Dad said, barely looking up.

“You … you have a grand-daughter.”

Dad stayed watching the table for a moment. The plastic grain, the peeling edges. He took a deep, quiet breath and then met my look.

“Lana,” I said, tugging my unfinished letter from my jacket, opening it up and sliding out a couple of photographs. I slid the lot across the warped formica. “She’s just six weeks.”

Dad sat in silence, peering at the pictures, while he fussed and dribbled over a fresh roll-up.

“That’s Jane there with her. And her father. Edward, the Earl of Somewhere or other Shire.”

“A nob, eh?”

“You’d like him,” I said. “He hasn’t done an honest day’s work in his life either.”

“Married up. Good lad. Bet he’s worth a bob or two, eh?” and he winked, shaky tongue wetting his cigarette paper. “Should’a thought o’that m’self. That would’a suited me. Not that your mum didn’t look after me, o’course. But she never got ‘the life’.”

“No,” I said. I gathered the photographs.

“Old fashioned, she was. Up to the end. Day’s work for a day’s pay, all that. You got that mug’s game streak from her.”

“Us teacups, eh?” I said.

“The lot of you.”

It was extraordinary. Even here.
Here
, among freezing gantries and heavy guards where you’d think reality would finally sink in, he clung to it. Locked behind steel doors behind high concrete walls, nothing had changed. It was still all
us-and-them
. Even though his self-proclaimed savvy friends, with their schemes and know-how were sat around him in thin tracksuits, eking out roll-ups and shuffling in concrete shadows for twenty-three hours a day, years reaching ahead of them, they were still all above us ‘mugs’ who could up and leave, walk free, taste the air, feel the grass on our feet and the wind in our faces whenever we wished.

“Well?” Dad said, placing his hair-thin cigarette on the table neatly.

“Well,” I stumbled, looking down, trying to say everything that needed saying through the usual ineffectual manly gruffness. “I thought I’d come and see you. Just to … well. To see you. See how you’re keeping.”

Dad said nothing, just watched me wriggle.

“The thing
is
though …” I said, lowering my voice a little. “See, the thing is I’m in need of … This is rather embarrassing …”

“It’s a bit late for the birds an’ bees son.”

“I-I suppose you’d say I’m in need of your
expertise
.”

The table went quiet. Around us, the couples’ chatter continued in a low murmur. Chair scrapes. Muffled tears.

Dad blinked. Then blinked again, before sitting back with a crooked smirk in exactly the way I’d hoped he wouldn’t.

“Well well. My
son
. Realised the error of your ways ’ave you? Finally cottoned on that the old man isn’t as green as ’e’s cabbage looking, eh?”

“No, I’m not –”

“Got it into your college-boy head that you might ’ave
something
left to learn at last? Bet you wished you’d paid a bit more attention at home now, don’tcha. Breakfast time? ’Stead of ’avin’
your nose in a comic? Listened to your old dad? Well, well. I never thought I’d see the –”

“
Dad!
” I hissed, startling him a little. “It’s not like that. I’m not … Look, what I said in those letters. The
first
letters, I mean. After it happened. That still stands. Your life, your way – it isn’t mine. Our values, our … look, nothing’s changed. That’s not what
this
is … I didn’t want to follow you as a boy and I don’t want to follow you as a man, you understand me? Sitting around at
breakfast
, listening to your little
lessons
? Your
tricks
? Whatever you called them –”

“I was just teachin’ you to play the system, lad. System’s like a piano. Even in ’ere. Built for –”

“Built for playing, I remember. Well I never understood it and neither did Mum. She would have rather you put
her
first, instead of your petty victories. Let the system
win
once or twice and put some food on the –”

“System
win
?!” Dad coughed. “I’ll let you mugs bend over and grab your ankles for the system son. Your dad’s smarter than that.”

“You think it’s smarter to go without? Sit around –”

“I’m
smarter
than that!” Dad yelled, slamming a thin fist on the table, tobacco tin jumping. His eyes were wet, flashing like neon in oily puddles. At the far wall, a warder lifted his chin from his starchy collar and peered across at us. We hunkered down a little among the plastic bottles.

“She didn’t
care
, Dad,” I whispered. “’Cause, y’know, sitting around hungry while you marched about in your vest, talking about how
smart
you were? Lording it about like you were Ronnie Biggs just because you’d wrung another eight quid out of the Social? It might surprise you Dad, but she didn’t care. I didn’t care. Nobody was impressed.”

“Nobody was – ? Listen to ’im. I could’a walked into any pub in that town, any pub, and had a dozen fellahs –”

“Oh well done
you
. No stair carpet. No shoes. Same school blazer for five years, but the darts team all thought you were
the man.
Great.”

“So.
This
is what this is about?” Dad said. He looked tired, bony shoulders round and heavy. “What happened to needing my
expertise
? I can get a parenting sermon off Father Pollack at Chapel. I don’t
need to waste precious association time hearin’ it from you. I could be a hundred points up at Kaluki b’now, ’stead of getting’ an
ear-bashin
’ from an ungrateful son.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, breathing deep. My hands were wet and warm. “I just wanted you to know … y’know, what was what. But I do need your help. I’ve got involved …” The words were fat in my throat. “Shit, this isn’t easy to …”

I looked up. Dad had sat back, arms folded, polyester sleeves crackling. The galvanised rubber chair gave a groan. He had his crooked smile wrapped about his roll-up, Bic lighter halfway to his mouth. He chuckled, cigarette bobbing, lit it and let out a stream of smoke from his nostrils.

“What ’ave you done?”

“Done?”

“Sitting there all Mr Straight-and-narrow? Givin’ it all the
high-and- mighty
? Sounds like what the shrink we got in ’ere calls
transference
. You ain’t pissed at me. You’re pissed at
you
. Look at’cha. Wringing your hands, fidgeting, bags under your eyes. What you got yourself into? Drugs?”

“Drugs? No.” I sighed, heart thumping. “Look, Dad, it’s a long shot. You’re the only person I know who might be able to –”

“Cut to the chase, lad, we’re on the clock ’ere,” and he motioned to the wall. Behind a rusty grille, hanging on the polished green brick, a large institutional face counted down the hour. Beneath, a wide warder paced, chin up, rolling his shoulders, moving between the mutters, the hand-holding and pain.

“Okay. Right. Well.” I focused back on my father. “In short, I need … What do you know … what do you know about confidence tricks?”

I took the next ten minutes outlining my situation in a hushed voice, us both leaning in over the table like two grandmasters. The warder who’d directed me in wandered past a couple of times, causing us to break apart rather clumsily and remark about the food in loud theatrical voices but he promptly left with a stern, forceful look on his face, humming what sounded suspiciously like a Shania Twain medley.

Dad
I-gotcha-ed
with a nod throughout my story, head cocked
to one side slightly like a bird, staring at the table top, taking it all in, until finally he looked up at me.

“That it?” he said.

“That’s it,” I sighed, chest light, temporarily relieved of its burden.

“
Jesus
,” he sighed. “Jesus
Christ
, boy. I can hardly … This is a son of
mine
talkin’. At no point did it
dawn
on you …”

“Dad,
we
haven’t
time
for –”

“At no point during this farce, did you think, ’
ang on, it’s all a bit convenient. This American just happens to be short –
”

“
Dad
!”

“A son of mine. A son of
mine
!” and he rolled his rheumy eyes, staring up at the iron lights and the high netting above us. “Did you learn
nuffin
’ growin’ up? Of
course
the dame’s in on it. The dame’s always
in
on it! Dear God …”

“
Please
Dad. The
time
? I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry. But this is your grand-daughter’s future in the balance here.”

Dad shook a sad, slow head for a moment and popped his
cigarette
tin open once again.

“Not so full of yourself
now
, are we, Mr
Straight-and-narrow-workin’-man
? Mr
System
?”

“Dad, look, I’ve come here for help. I don’t know what else to do. If you’re just going to –”

“’Awright ’awright. ’Ow long you got?”

“What? Well that’s the thing,” I whispered. “Jane’s dad is back in three days. I’m meant to be picking him up from outside Victoria Station on Tuesday. He’s going to talk to his accountant and that’ll be that.”