Once the
stragglers have taken their leave, I make an inspection of the door
controls on the wall next to the entrance. I haven’t been able to
rehearse this part of the job, and I’m not particularly happy about
having to work them out with the hostages leering at me. If they
catch on to the fact that we’re amateurs - or, more precisely, that
we haven’t got a fucking clue what we’re doing - it might stir
insurrection in their ranks. That’s not even the most pressing
danger; every second that the doors stay open is another second in
which a SWAT team could come barrelling through them. I take a deep
breath and close my eyes. When I open them, the directions are
still gibberish. I jab what I think is the automatic door button,
the one with the two rectangles and a padlock stamped next to it,
then amble over to the door. Obediently, it swooshes open before
me. I start to panic.
The world
behind the swooshing doors is no longer oblivious. There’s a yellow
and blue car parked on the other side of the road, by the same
lamppost that Phoebe was waiting at four minutes and fifty-three
seconds ago. Even through my gunpowder-deafened ears, I can make
out the sound of sirens. More must be coming. The pit drops out of
my stomach. The panic redoubles. The time for worrying about my
accent is over.
‘We got
company!’ I yell in the most booming yell I can muster. ‘Get those
cunts upstairs, now!’
‘MUSH!’ I hear
one of the other two shout, in an excited kind of a voice. The
hostages begin to shuffle down the aisle, towards the staircase. A
few of them make desperate glances towards the exit, but by this
point the fear has got them all in step and no-one makes a dash for
it.
‘Cuntmonkey!’
I boom. One of the balaclavaed creatures reappears from behind the
first row of shelves. ‘Forgetting something?’ I hoist the backpack
from my shoulders and toss it to him. He catches it, and slides his
own, much larger, one across the slick floor towards me. He’ll pass
the moneybag on to Freddy, who should be waiting in the cash
office, ready to add the contents of the safe to what I plundered
from the tills. Inside the bag Sid gave me are the tools necessary
for our escape, key among them being the thermite.
‘When you get
up there, check the woman in the cash office for keys. We need them
to work the door controls.’
‘We could’ve
used that information before we kicked all the other employees
out…’
I feel my
cheeks flush pink beneath the mask.
‘My fault -
didn’t notice it before,’ I mutter. Sid pulls a grimace.
‘Fuck’s sake,’
he spits, at an intentionally audible volume. ‘Do your fuckin’
job.’ I can tell that he’s already dreaming up ways to throw me
under the bus in order to save himself. I suppose that’s natural,
what with him being the biggest unknown quantity in the group; it
bodes well for him to look after number one.
‘Just get the
fucking keys,’ I tell him as he jogs off after Phoebe. The eerie
silence left behind by the departed customers, the disparaging
glint in Sid’s eye, the ever-increasing number of police officers
waiting outside, ready to subject us all to a bludgeon-heavy
arrest; recent events have served to put me in an irritable mood.
I’m losing my focus; I nearly set off to plant the thermite without
first posting the ransom notice. I curse under my breath and slap
my palm dully against my wool-clad face.
Get your head back in
the game
.
I remove the
blu-tac from the front pocket of my new backpack. It’s still
sealed, to prevent any stray hairs or other DNA-related bits and
bobs from getting caught up in it. I pull off a few pieces and roll
them up between my gloved fingers. Also in the front of the bag is
an A2 sheet of paper with a message scrawled on it in marker pen,
all-caps like a YouTube racist:
WE HAVE TWENTY
HOSTAGES. ONE OF THEM HAS BEEN SHOT IN THE STOMACH AND NEEDS
MEDICAL ATTENTION. IF YOU DO WHAT WE SAY SHE WILL LIVE. IF YOU DONT
SHE WONT BE THE ONLY ONE WHO DIES. YOU WILL DELIVER £2MILLION IN
UNMARKED BILLS WITHIN THE NEXT 2 HOURS. THIS WILL BE DELIVERED BY
THE MANAGER OF M&S FOR THE NORTH EAST. WE ALSO DEMAND A CLEAR
PASSAGE TO THE AIRPORT. IF THE 2 HOUR DEADLINE PASSES PEOPLE WILL
DIE. IF ANY MEMBER OF THE POLICE OR THE PUBLIC COMES WITHIN 100
METRES OF THE BUILDING IN ANY DIRECTION PEOPLE WILL DIE. YOU HAVE
TWO HOURS.
LOOK ON THE BRIGHT
SIDE. £100000 PER HOSTAGE IS A BARGAIN COMPARED TO WHAT SOMALIAN
PIRATES CHARGE.
Reading it
over again, I breathe a sigh of relief that the lie about a girl
being shot in the stomach didn’t become a hideously ironic
truth.
Having affixed
our message for the police to the inside of the automatic door -
albeit on the second attempt, since the automatic doors still
aren’t behaving themselves - I head towards the stock area. The
place in my brain where all my nagging doubts live tries to make me
go and wait at the bottom of the stairs for Sid to come back with
the keys, but the budding psychopath assures me that, if he knows
the plan well enough, he’ll know where to find me when he’s
finished locking the door. Time’s a-ticking, after all; we’re six
minutes and twenty-two seconds in and we don’t yet have an escape
route. I can’t worry about what the others are doing. My
responsibility is the thermite.
From my
experiments I ascertained that a small amount of thermite would
burn a noticeable dent in the paving slab outside our back door.
Extrapolating from this, I calculated that a massive amount of the
stuff would, in turn, bore a person-sized hole through the
foot-and-a half of concrete between the stock room and the car park
below. By ‘massive’, I mean a ninety-litre traveller’s backpack
full. It took a lot of scrap metal. It probably took a few years
out of Sid’s spine to carry it all the way here.
One cannot
simply throw a WMD-sized pile of thermite onto the floor, light it
and hope for the best. Without a concentration mechanism of some
sort the heat would dissipate, and the thermite would lose that
glorious ability to eat through any substance short of a nuclear
bunker which makes it the morally upstanding chemist’s best friend.
Ceramics should keep the 8000°C fireball in place for enough time
for it to do its dirty work. Not if gravity’s pushing the fire
against it, but the sides of a ceramic container should survive the
ordeal even if the bottom gives out in less than ten seconds.
The
above-stated facts mean that a plant pot is the ideal complement
for the heavy bag of thermite that I’m now lugging towards the
stock room. Of course, a pot with a base wide enough for Freddy to
fit through is not exactly a practical item to lug across
Newcastle, which is why I had to make sure that we pulled our heist
before they took the Christmas tree down.
After throwing
the bag in the stock room, I return to the shop floor. The big fir
tree, draped in tinsel and baubles, reminds me of the one my mum
will probably have waiting for me if I make it home for the
holidays. Mum always placed her wood-carved baby Jesus figurine
beneath the branches. There are only fake presents underneath this
one. I kick them out of the way and grab the base of the trunk in a
bear hug.
Lift with
the legs, not with the back
. As I brace myself, spread my knees
and heave, I let out an involuntary, none-too-masculine little
squeak, and the decade I spent being picked last in PE lessons
suddenly comes parading back through my memory. After an
embarrassingly short time I give in, panting. The pent-up sweat
that all the adrenaline has been threatening to unleash for the
last - I check my watch - eight minutes bursts out, soaking the
inside of my balaclava. The thermite is still in the backpack,
unignited. The hostages are still upstairs in the staffroom.
According to the script, we should be out of the shop and stuffing
some unlucky bastards into the diversionary getaway car by now. The
outrush of sweat intensifies. My lower jaw juts out. My eyebrows
narrow. I charge forward and thump into the tree trunk again. My
calves squeeze, and my thighs, and my arms, and my neck and my arse
and my back, but the fucking thing still doesn’t budge. It would be
a very ‘me’ thing to do, I suppose, getting us all imprisoned
because I was too weak to pull a plant out of its pot.
You could always ask
Freddy for help…
I press my
face as hard as I can against the bark, and wrench my spine to the
side. The time for health and safety measures is past. I sweat some
more; I scrape my exposed neck against the tree trunk; the tendons
at the back of my knees threaten to snap; my teeth seem to be
trying to crack, but I can feel the wood starting to budge…the
roots trying to work themselves free of the soil…the trunk is
getting wobbly, like a stubborn baby tooth still clinging-on to the
gums, waiting for the final-
BAKKHOOM!!
In a shower of
soil the trunk comes free, and its centre of gravity suddenly
shifts from the bottom of the pot to my spinal column. I topple
backwards, my back arching involuntarily as I attempt to avoid
being crushed by the timbering tree.
CRASH!!
I could swear
that was a gunshot. Surely the hostages can’t need any more
intimidation? The theory was sound; split them into pairs and avoid
insurrection. Once again, and with greater force than ever, I hurl
these extraneous thoughts to the back of my skull and make myself
concentrate on the plan. I clamber to my feet, and plant both hands
on the edge of the ceramic pot. Using my own weight as a kind of a
lever I manage to roll it onto its side and then upside-down to
empty out the soil inside, then rock it forward onto its base. I
grip the lip of it between my thumbs and my fingers, and start
dragging it towards the staff area. Every couple of shuffling steps
I have to wince as it bangs into one of my kneecaps, but slowly and
hastily I keep pressing on. The entire time I’m lugging it, the
alarm clock in my head is ringing:
Eight minutes and
thirty seconds…
Eight minutes and
thirty-five seconds…
Eight minutes and
forty seconds…
Where the fuck is
Freddy?
Eight minutes and
forty-five seconds…
Eight minutes and
fifty seconds…
As long as he plucks
out three hostages and brings them down here by the time the escape
route is done…
Nine minutes…
The
scrape
of the pot against the floor ceases. It occurs to me,
far too late, that I could’ve rolled it in here in half the time if
I’d just left the pot on its side. The heavy metal door of the
stock room clanks shut behind me. I’m enveloped by silence and
darkness. My hand reflexively goes to my pocket as I think to use
the torch on my phone, but then I remember that my phone isn’t in
there. I fumble around blindly for the zip on the backpack. I don’t
want to tear the plastic bag and risk squandering any of the
thermite, so instead of pulling it out I tease the mouth of the
backpack downwards around it. As a further timesaving measure, I
dump the plastic bag directly into the plant pot.
One hand
rummages in my jeans for the lighter and the other rummages in the
side pocket of the backpack for the fuses. I try to compact the bag
of thermite, pushing it as far down into the pot as I can, then I
tear a small hole in the plastic with my teeth. The bitter,
unnatural taste of the rust and silver languishes at the back of my
tongue. It doesn’t compare to the sensation which lurks in the pit
of my stomach, as I wonder whether the fuses - even the thermite
itself - will ignite.
With the
lighter clamped between my teeth, I paw for the incision I made in
the plastic and plant the fuse. The quiet in the stock room has
allowed my adrenaline levels to fall back down, and I suddenly
notice that I’m shivering. My eyes are starting to adjust to the
darkness. I squint around. That looks like a whole leg of lamb,
over there. All of the shelves, actually, are stacked high with
meat. Fuck – this is the walk-in freezer. I briefly consider
dragging the pot back outside and taking it to the right place, but
then I recall that thermite burns at the same temperature as the
surface of the sun, so a few refrigerators aren’t going to make any
difference to the overall outcome.
I check my
watch. Nearly ten minutes gone. Fuck.
I click the
lighter. Sparks. I click it again. Still only sparks. I’m on the
brink of screaming.
Click. Click. Click. Click. Click.
Click.
Nothing. Nothing. Fuck-all. Nothing. My thumb stings
from the friction. I’m beginning to wonder if the cold is affecting
it, or whether Charlie gave me a dud lighter. Despite the fact that
I’m inside a freezer, the inside of my gloves are becoming
clammy.
Then the flame
erupts into life. The fuse sparks, wriggling towards the thermite.
The thermite ignites. I stand there for a moment feeling like
Prometheus, basking in the glorious light and heat I’ve created,
but it’s not long until I realise that I’ve created a monster.
Eight thousand degrees. Enough light to burn my retinas free of my
eyeballs. Enough smoke to make my lungs forget what oxygen tasted
like.
Coughing,
holding my arms over my face, I flail backwards, praying
desperately that this is the way to the door. My chest tears up the
lining of my lungs and throat in the attempt to purge me of smoke.
I blindly grope for the door handle. I can feel the searing heat of
the fire clawing at my back. Where the fuck is the door handle?
It’s fucking massive! It’s not even a handle; it’s a bar, for
fuck’s sake! So where the fuck is it!
A
World’s
Dumbest Criminals
segment, with my charred remains as its star,
suddenly pops into my head.
Fuck!
By a huge
force of will, I open my eyes. As it turns out, I was grasping thin
air about three feet to the right of the door. I correct my
shoulder angle and let my eyes slam shut again. With a clank and a
screech, the twenty-one degree air hits me, and I immediately know
that the exposed skin over my tailbone is blistering.