Escape and Evasion Read online

  Praise for Christopher Wakling’s previous novels:

  On Cape Three Points

  ‘It sucks you in like a dream and holds you like a nightmare.’ Lee Child

  The Devil’s Mask

  ‘The Devil’s Mask is that rare thing: a story that is not only page-turning but also beautifully crafted.’ Jane Harris, author of The Observations and Sugar Money

  ‘A fascinating, morally complex tale of greed and murder.’ Sunday Times Books of the Year

  What I Did

  ‘The novel that should have won the Booker prize.’ Daily Mail

  Escape and Evasion

  CHRISTOPHER WAKLING

  For Gita, Lucas and Zoë

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  62

  63

  64

  65

  66

  67

  68

  69

  70

  71

  72

  73

  74

  75

  76

  77

  78

  79

  80

  81

  82

  83

  84

  85

  86

  87

  88

  89

  90

  91

  92

  93

  94

  95

  96

  97

  98

  99

  100

  101

  102

  103

  104

  105

  106

  107

  108

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by the Author

  Copyright

  1

  So, decision time.

  Press the button.

  Just press it.

  Joseph Ashcroft, Big Beast at Airdeen Clore, digs his fingernails into the leather inlay of his Square Mile desk. He feels lightheaded, giddy. No hurry. It’s a big step, after all.

  He takes a breath. Looks away from the screen. Looks instead at the photographs on his filing cabinet. There’s Lara, his beautiful daughter, upside down in the little silver frame, dangling from a swing, hair scraping the wood chips. Remember that park? The one with the coffee stand and the squirrel. It stole Zac’s ice-cream cone while he, Joseph Ashcroft, fielded a call from Boston. Cheeky bastard squirrel! And in the next picture there’s his wonderful son, Zac, very young and bright orange in his little NASA suit. He loved that outfit so much when he was small. Naomi didn’t, though. ‘A bit Guantanamo,’ she said. Possibly she was right. It wouldn’t be the first time, would it? Naomi. Naomi and Lara and Zac …

  Jesus, he’s overheating. The little red dot up by the ceiling reckons it controls the temperature in the room, but … Joseph runs a finger round the rim of his Jermyn Street collar and blinks at the ‘Enter’ key.

  Press it.

  One keystroke and we’re done here.

  The screen is indifferent, backlit, daring him not to do it.

  Bar a fortune, he has nothing much to lose.

  The kids – his excellent kids! – are already ring-fenced by their mother. He could insist, but she has a way of insisting harder. And anyway, despite all her cod-psychological ultimatums – post-traumatic stress disorder, please – he still loves Naomi. Her straight black oil-slick hair. The concentrating face she has when choosing gifts. And the way she walks, as if off to build a wall. These thoughts of Naomi send a deep regret-pang, painful as chilblains, right through him.

  His finger is hovering over the bent arrow key.

  Press the bastard.

  Get it done.

  But he can’t.

  Not yet.

  Because a shape has appeared in the doorway.

  It’s Rafiq, one of the senior juniors. At what, eleven twenty on a Tuesday evening, still here. Of course he is. Because here, at revered investment bank Airdeen Clore, it’s up – meaning here the whole time, beavering away money-wise – or out.

  ‘Joseph.’

  ‘Rafiq.’

  ‘Anything need doing for tomorrow that you can think of?’

  ‘No. I’d just touch base with Zuckerman and Hong Kong early doors. Hold hands. Dot stuff, et cetera.’

  ‘Sure. We’re sorted with all that.’

  So competent.

  ‘Night.’

  ‘Night.’

  ‘Night, then.’

  ‘You take care, Joseph.’

  The way Rafiq does a mock salute, then pushes his hand through his hair. He’s what, twenty-nine? The team’s star player. A star folding into a black hole tomorrow if … no, when. Regret-pang number two: imagine the effort poor Rafiq put into getting here. All those exams, the revision at his parents’ kitchen table in Solihull, dinner plates cleared to one side, a television on a sideboard showing the regional news or some such. Joseph bets Rafiq’s mum makes good food. Pakora, possibly. He imagines Rafiq’s mother rolling the little balls of vegetable and spice full of love while her thirteen-year-old son rivets the maths into his top-set book. All for …

  Just press it.

  What’s the worst that can happen?

  Well, other than the inevitable police manhunt, there’s …

  Lancaster.

  Head of Airdeen Clore’s security team on the one hand, old friend on the other.

  Joseph thinks of a shark’s fin slicing through the water. In Zanzibar he and Naomi swam with turtles. They sort of fly underwater, pulsing kindness. Lancaster, by comparison, is uncompromising as a hammerhead. Still, Joseph is prepared for him, pretty much, has a plan, of sorts.

  To prove it he gets up from his seat, unlocks the big filing cabinet, retrieves an envelope containing ten thousand pounds in cash, sits it in the middle of his desk. Not a great deal of money, peanuts in the Big Beast scheme of things, but his money, withdrawn from his current account. It’s enough to get by on. They’ll freeze all his assets as soon as they work out what’s happened, and that will hardly take them long, but this cash will see him through.

  He looks at the door, longing to be out of it. There’s just the small matter of pushing the button first. Beneath the ‘Enter’ key, with its bevelled edges, lies an intricacy of springs. Joseph takes a deep breath. Grips the ___.

  The what?

  He’s gripping it, for God’s sake.

  The ___.

  Desk.

  That does it.

>   That being the word hole.

  So what if he filled it quickly?

  The damn gaps and slips have been getting worse and worse.

  Has to be a sign.

  Is one!

  The screen has gone black, but it comes to life instantly as he pulls the keyboard close.

  There, now, it needs to be done.

  He knows so, because he’s thought of little else for months.

  So get on with it.

  He does.

  With one quick tap he changes everything.

  2

  That’s that, then. One in the eye for the Man. A roundhouse punch, administered by … the Man! – Joseph Ashcroft. He leans back in his chair and spins in it, a full seven hundred and twenty degrees, feeling what? Munificence? No, something more like relief. Plus, admit it, fear. A shivering down below. Well, that’s only natural. It’s a big old dollop of the bank’s assets he’s liberated, after all. Had to be. As Dad always said, if you’re going to do something, do it properly, meaning use the right tool for the job and give it all you’ve got.

  Dad.

  Mum.

  He misses them.

  What would the old boy make of this, then?

  ‘You’re a disappointment to us, son.’

  No, no, no: except yes.

  Joseph hasn’t much time. Still, he allows himself a moment, shoots his cuffs, stares at his watch. The unflustered sweep of its second hand. Brushed steel, diamond glass. Marvellously Swiss. Well, you have to look the part. Or had to, at least.

  Ha.

  He’s done it.

  A hundred thousand lives – give or take – made marginally easier.

  His own … quietly undone.

  On the computer screen it’s just numbers.

  There’s no tidal wave ripping through the palm trees, no shuddering of buildings upon their foundations, no sweeping curtain of fire.

  Numbers don’t make much noise on their own. But what he’s done will be seismic in its own terms. Money is shivering through the system, digits flickering like wind through the forest canopy. The same cleverness Joseph made use of to mask the bank’s position – when necessary – will now compound its problem. The money was already tethered offshore. He’s just unmoored it, sent it swirling into a hundred thousand unsuspecting accounts. $20,120.14 here, $14,306.98 there, $7,449.08 there. A mere $576.77 here. But $209,990.65 there.

  Random strangers.

  These people – or those like them – were not persons for whom the bank generally went in to bat.

  Beached, sidelined, stymied, whatever, they were in need of a helping hand.

  And what did Airdeen Clore do, down the corridor, at its sharp end? What any self-respecting bank would. Took that neediness and forced the punters to buy it back in the shape of unserviceable loans and inflated premiums.

  So what? That’s the system. There to be played. Win, don’t whinge! Re the losers: who cares?

  Him.

  Joseph Ashcroft, that’s who.

  He didn’t, but now he does.

  At least it looks that way.

  3

  Best get going. But before he does Joseph takes the kids’ photographs off the filing cabinet. It feels wrong leaving them marooned here. There’s a problem, though: the silver frames are too bulky. He removes the photos and slips them inside his briefcase. It’s more of a satchel, really, a gift (well chosen, as ever) from Naomi way back when she was still holding out for him to change his mind, bank-wise. ‘You’re what, now, some corporate big shot?’ A bit tattered, but the leather looks good that way. He adds the envelope containing the cash to the satchel as well. It nestles next to another, slimmer one, addressed to him at home.

  St Thomas’ Hospital’s logo in the top corner.

  Joseph’s not quite managed to open that envelope yet, but he will.

  Soon.

  He puts on his coat and strides into the corridor. There’s no light switch to extinguish: sensors do all that. He doesn’t even need to swipe his security card for the lift these days. It just knows he’s him automatically. Look at those cameras, high in the corners. Lancaster will watch all this in black and white tomorrow morning. Wind the footage back a bit. There he is, at a quarter to midnight, leaving the office. Nothing unusual in that. Except there is.

  Goodnight, Joseph.

  The lift door sucks back. It’s empty. In he gets. His heart is revving in his chest. It takes a hell of a time to reach the ground floor, this lift. Almost like it’s toying with him, on an intentional go-slow. Joseph keeps his eyes on the crack between the two doors.

  Icecaps shrink, tectonic plates shift, planets realign.

  Finally the doors part, revealing the lobby.

  Super calmly, as if gliding on a rail, Joseph crosses the marble foyer of the bank. He nods goodnight to the graveyard shift receptionist, even manages a smile for the security guy on the front door. And he keeps on going, out of the building, down the front steps, into the London night.

  Now what?

  Take some steps.

  Ordinarily – or at least sometimes – there’d be a driver waiting, but not today. Joseph strolls down Gresham Street, jinks into a narrow lane and pulls out his Blackberry. Ejects the SIM card, bends it in half.

  Why?

  Because it feels right.

  As does dropping the lot through a drain grate. There’s no splash that he can hear but something oily shifts down below. He straightens and sets off at a brisk pace in the direction of King’s Cross. Not because of the train station there, despite its handy Eurotunnel link, because that’s not the plan.

  What is the plan again?

  He’s headed for a small hotel he knows, having used it once for a meeting with a Cypriot investor back in 2011. So, not well enough to be known there, making it a good place to lie low.

  Lying low.

  That’ll take him back.

  To where?

  Northern Ireland in 1993, or was it ’94? Either way, staking out that farmhouse in the snow was a lot tougher than this will be. His first real soldiering, more or less, snooping around in search of the IRA. No soft sheets, then. Just a ditch full of slush. Remember that robin teetering along the barbed wire? He’d hoped it would perch on his gun barrel but it never did.

  In going to ground like this isn’t he deserting his children, his wife, his family, the very thing he wants back?

  No, because Naomi’s sidelined him already, so it’s not his fault, it’s hers, except that possibly she was justified in suggesting he leave.

  Either which way, this grand act, while an important kick in the teeth for the bank, plus a helping hand for the deserving poor, may in fact help her see who he is again.

  4

  The concierge at the hotel is what, twenty-five? He has a long fringe, and peeps out from under it like a child, at odds with his having to be a grown-up, as the job of concierge requires.

  He reminds Joseph of somebody. Uncanny resemblance to …

  Who?

  He can’t think, not until safely in his suite upstairs. Puts it down to feeling so jumpy, what with the crime of the century and everything.

  Joseph unlaces his handmade shoes (the chap in the shop convinced him they’d last a lifetime, properly looked after) and pairs them at the foot of the bed. Then it comes to him. The policeman, back in 1991, the one the store detective turned him over to down at the station.

  For this theft isn’t Joseph’s first crime.

  He started pretty small: the incident with the books. Very shameful. Good books, though: Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole. He’d stolen them for a dare. Regretted it first, read them second, and buried them in the garden under the conifer hedge third. Out of sight, but not out of mind. His mother’s face, when he confessed. Dad’s, too. Deep creases in his brow.

  ‘Son, we are disappointed in you.’

  They made him tell the bookshop lady, who told the police (‘shop policy, my hands are tied!’), who went thro
ugh the motions. Formal caution. The folks hadn’t banked on that, had they? Wished they hadn’t pressed the point, possibly. After all, he’d turned himself in.

  Well, he vowed, he wouldn’t make that mistake again.

  And he hadn’t. Not with the light bulb when he was a student. Mind you, he hadn’t needed to then. Damn store detective. But at least they – Mum and Dad – never found out about it. He, forty-four-year-old Joseph Ashcroft, Big Beast at revered finance house Airdeen Clore, having just robbed his own bank of $1.34 billion, is still mighty pleased his mother and father never found out a store detective stopped him for pocketing a £1.49 light bulb in 1991.

  There were mitigating circumstances. It was Boxing Day or thereabouts. His parents had people coming round. And his mum needed a light bulb. ‘Don’t forget!’ she’d said, lending him the keys to her Ford Fiesta. Yet the queue in the department store was just so boringly long. It snaked all the way back into the Turkish rugs. So he’d returned the album – Live Rust – his reason for going to town in the first place – to the Y shelf. But somehow the light bulb found its way into his coat pocket en route to the exit.

  Filial duty.

  Not an excuse fit for the store detective.

  He was a small man with strong hands, and he stank of aftershave.

  ‘So you forgot to pay for it, did you?’

  ‘I must have.’

  ‘Well, that’s a shame.’

  ‘I’ll pay for it now.’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s a bit late for that.’

  Sanctimonious prick.

  It was all Neil Young’s fault. Live Rust. He bought the album later in HMV. But that day was all about the light bulb, the one he’d, er, forgotten to pay for. The policeman – that’s who the concierge brought to mind – was only a couple of years older than Joseph, but pretended he was about a hundred and ten. What have we here, then? He made Joseph turn out his pockets. Car keys, beer mat with Tanya’s number on it, plus wallet, in which: £70. Money his dad had given him for Christmas, but he wasn’t about to tell the baby-faced desk sergeant that.

  ‘One light bulb, price one pound forty-nine,’ the policeman said. ‘Yet you had all this money on you?’

  ‘As I say, I forgot.’

  ‘Not very bright, was it?’

  He didn’t intend it as a joke, or realise that it was one, in fact. Not a flicker.