Meaner Things (30 page)

“They came from up the Sunshine Coast somewhere. A mudslide flattened their house when Emma was in kindergarten. They both died. Emma lived with her aunt, her dad’s half-sister, but they weren’t close.”

“Still, the police would have asked questions, right? Or the aunt?”

“The cops assumed the bag was mine. And I think Emma’s aunt thought the wallet got lost in the gutter or something. With Emma dead, there was no need to fuss about it. It never came up. Anyway, I didn’t start using the new identity until I got to Vancouver.”

“Even so, sooner or later someone from Victoria who’d known you both would have bumped into you and blown your cover.”

“I know. But I didn’t intend it to be a permanent identity switch – I could always go back to being Agneta later. All I could think about was that Ricky wouldn’t start searching for a dead person.”

It was a crazy scheme but I could see how, in the desperate state she was in, it must have seemed like a path opening up in front of her. “So you came to UBC and started out fresh?” I said.

“And met you,” she replied.

I expelled a leaden breath. Her story was sad, but believable. But it still didn’t explain her betrayal on the warehouse rooftop.

She reached out and grabbed my hand in hers. “And now I only have one more thing to tell you about,” she said. “The thing you’ve always wanted to know. The thing I’ve never told you or anyone else.”

*

“Things were good in Vancouver,” she began, “I enjoyed my studies and felt freer than I had in my life before.”

“Then I ruined it,” I said.

She laughed lightly. “I had no intention of getting involved with anyone for a long time,” she said. “Then I met you and that quickly changed. You were so different. The first real male friend I’d ever had.”

“So what went wrong?”

Suddenly her expression darkened. “Didn’t you notice, Mike? Didn’t you notice even once?”

“Notice what?” I had no idea what she meant.

“When I got edgy, tense? The times I would suddenly stop in the street and stare into the crowd?”

“I thought that was just nervousness about the heist.”

“It was more than that. I had a hunch even then. Several times I was almost sure, then one night I became certain. Do you remember that Friday night in the Students’ Union bar, a couple of weeks before we did the museum job?”

I thought hard, but couldn’t recall anything in particular.

“It was dead crowded, like it always was at that time of night,” she continued. “We’d found two seats at a small table in the middle of the room and talked about the warehouse, about getting up on the roof. No-one could overhear us among all the noise so we felt safe to discuss it. You said you were working on getting the tools we’d need.”

At last a vague recollection came to me of an evening when she hadn’t been her usual self and had insisted on going home early. I’d ascribed it to . . . well, the usual feminine stuff I suppose.

“After about an hour you went up to the bar for another couple of pints. Someone walked behind me, brushed against the back of my head, heading for the door. I looked around and saw the guy’s back and a little of his profile.”

She shuddered visibly. “It was him, Mike. It was Ricky. It had taken him a while, but he’d found me.”

I stared at her. “You’re sure it was him?”

“Of course I’m sure. Maybe he was drunk and stumbled against me accidentally or maybe that’s how he meant it.”

I frowned. “He must have done some lateral thinking when he was spaced out. Figured out your ruse.”

“I suppose so. Anyway, you can imagine how scared I was after that. I . . .”

“Emma, hold on a minute,” I interrupted, “How come I never noticed something was up with you after that? I’m not that thick.”

“No you’re not, Mike. From then on I made up my mind to hide it from you.”

“Why?”

“Maybe I hoped he’d just go away.” She shrugged. “And think how you’d have reacted if I
had
told you.”

I did. She was absolutely right. I would have been disgusted at her recent past and the type of lowlife she’d got intimately involved with; but I would have tried to protect her by confronting the rat who was stalking her. Neither response would have worked: the first would have damaged, probably ended, our relationship; the second might have ended me. Ricky sounded like the sort of mean bastard who would carry a lethal weapon on him for just that sort of confrontation.

“I kept checking for him everywhere I went, but never let you see me doing it. For the next few days there was no sign of him. I began to think he’d decided I wasn’t worth the trouble and had gone back to Oak Bay.”

“But he didn’t?”

“Deep down, I guess I knew better. Ricky would get off on stalking me. He’d never stop, and you were in his sights now too. That scared me even more. Sure enough, the following week I saw him again. I was writing an essay in the library and someone on the far side of the stacks sat down directly opposite me. I looked up and it was him. He didn’t say anything, just smirked at me.”

“He was enjoying stalking you.”

“That’s right. I was frantic with worry; didn’t know what to do. By now I wanted to tell you but couldn’t think how to. It was only a few more days until we planned on doing the heist. I thought if I could just hang on until then, we’d have money to get away.”

“Run away to some tropical island? We’d have been running forever.”

“I guess so. But I didn’t see him again on campus after that.”

I was confused. “He went away after all?”

She looked directly into my eyes. “No Mike. The next time I saw Ricky was the night of the heist.”

*

“It’s so obvious now with hindsight. He must have known where I lived in halls, and he must have known about you. He would have followed us to find out what we were up to. Let’s face it, we weren’t exactly very professional back then.”

“That’s true.” I was beginning to guess where this was going. If I was right, I could imagine how much she’d tried to forget all this.

She turned to me, her face expressionless, skin drained porcelain white. “He was there, Mike. On the roof.”

I said nothing, decided to just let her talk.

“You were down in the room below, had been for a while. I was dead nervous, couldn’t see what you were doing and wondering what was keeping you so long. Then you came up at last; handed me the bags. I set them down at the edge of the skylight and heard a noise behind me. It was him. Ricky. He shone a flashlight in his face so I would know.”

“You must have been scared to death.”

She folded her arms even tighter around herself. “He was grinning from ear to ear; pumped up on whatever crap he was injecting back then,” she said. “I read the look in his eyes, forgot about the bags, just got up and ran.”

She looked at me, sadness on her face. “I’m sorry I abandoned you.”

“You had good reason.” Finally, I’d said it. I never thought I would, but I meant it. She’d had a very good reason for abandoning me. I felt like an enormous boulder had finally slipped off my shoulders. One that had burdened me for a decade.

“At first I thought he wasn’t coming after me.”

“That’s when he must have been messing with me. Tossing stuff on my head.”

“I got to the plank and ran across it to the church.”

“
Ran
across?” I well remembered being splayed flat out on that plank as I’d inched my way along it. If the Devil himself had been after me I doubt that I could have crossed it standing upright.

“I don’t know how I did it; I remember looking down at my feet flying past each other on the narrow wood, and seeing the ground far below. All of a sudden I was on the other side. I was so afraid that what I’d just done didn’t register until long afterwards.”

She stared into space, obviously reliving the scene. “When I got over I looked behind me and there he was, cocky and laughing. He started walking across the plank as if it was nothing; must have thought:
Anything
she
can
do
. . . I was absolutely panic-stricken by then, Mike. I was hyperventilating. I had to stop him.”

“So you did.”

There was a long silence.

“Go on,” I said quietly.

She opened her mouth, paused then continued. “Yes, I did. I didn’t even think about it. I pushed on the edge of the plank with all the strength I had; broke a bunch of nails but I got it moving. It slipped off the edge of the wall right in front of me.”

She hesitated. “After that, everything seemed to happen in slow motion. Ricky’s expression changed; for the first time ever he looked scared. Then . . .”

“Then?”

“Then he was gone. I looked over the edge and saw him below. There was a spike railing sticking out of his chest. For a few seconds his arms flailed around, then he was still. I turned away and didn’t look back again.”

“Did you think about me?”

She turned towards me, pain all over her face. “Yes, I did, Mike, I swear I did! But what could I do? The plank was gone, I had no way back.”

I didn’t say anything, just watched her wring her fingers nervously.

“I was hoping you wouldn’t get caught, Mike. But even if you did, at most you’d only get a few months in prison or maybe even a suspended sentence for a first offence. Me? I thought I was looking at a murder charge. You can’t imagine the state I was in.”

I tried to put myself in her head that night. The more I succeeded, the less I felt like condemning her. “What did you do next?” I said.

“Somehow I got a late night bus back to my room at UBC. I flung my stuff into cases and fled back home to Oak Bay; got there about midday. My mum put me straight to bed with a sleeping pill and I slept the rest of the day and through the night.” She shuddered. “The postman rang our doorbell the next morning and I started screaming. Couldn’t stop. My mum and dad decided I was on my way to a nervous breakdown. They insisted on involving the medicos and I spent the next few days under sedation.”

“You didn’t see the papers online, watch the local news on TV?”

“Mike, I was sleeping most of each day. As soon as I got a bit better, my dad whisked me off to our cottage in Campbell River. He knew I needed the seclusion.”

“Then you went back to being Agneta?”

“That’s right. When I fully recovered I helped dad out in his office – as you discovered. He was already getting sick with stomach cancer by then and needed me. After he died, mum sold our house, moved to Campbell River and retreated into herself. She was never the same again. It all happened so fast it created another crisis point in my life. In the end I decided to go back to being ‘Emma Virtanen’ again.”

She paused; must have read the puzzled expression on my face.

“It was a strange time in my life, Mike. The death of my best friend, the death of my father; losing both of them and losing you too. Most of that was my own fault. I’d a lot of guilt and shame to deal with. I can’t explain it but it just seemed so much easier to be someone else, this fictional creation. I still had the identity documents I’d got at UBC under my Virtanen name. A year or two later I couldn’t imagine myself being anyone else.”

*

We sat there for a long time, neither of us speaking, until the sun began to set.

“Time to be getting back,” I said.

We stood up and I held her hand.

“What are you thinking, Mike? What about us?”

Sometimes actions are better than words. I pulled her to me, felt the warm softness of her body pressed tightly against mine, and showed her what I had in mind.

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Acknowledgements

My research for this novel came from many diverse sources, including a number of accounts of famous heists. Two books proved particularly valuable:
Gentleman
Thief
:
Recollections
of
a
Cat
Burglar
by my fellow Ulsterman, Peter Scott, and
Flawless
:
Inside
the
Largest
Diamond
Heist
in
History
by Scott Andrew Selby and Greg Campbell. In
Meaner
Things
I adapted and fictionalised the basic strategy of one of Peter’s many daring heists, and did the same with technical elements from the real diamond heist described in
Flawless
.

Needless to say,
Meaner
Things
is entirely a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of my imagination or used in a completely fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

My sincere thanks go to my family, friends and writing colleagues who helped me with this novel.

In particular, I am very grateful to Margaret Hume for beta-reading the entire manuscript, correcting typos and factual errors, and presenting me with a multi-page typewritten summary of her thoughts on plot and characterisation. This went far above and beyond the call of friendship! The novel is considerably better because of Margaret’s insightful commentary.

I am also grateful to Fairview Writers’ Group for faithfully reading the manuscript, chapter by chapter and line by line, during the months of writing it. The group members’ comments and detailed critical feedback led to plot improvements, character refinements and dozens of smaller changes, again resulting in an appreciably better book.

My wife Joanne provided her usual selfless encouragement throughout the long writing process. I am supremely grateful to her and to my son Brendan for their unwavering love and support.

Joanne and Brendan, as always, I dedicate this book to both of you.