‘Sorry?’
‘Jonny readNineteen Eighty-Fourlast year,’ says Em. ‘He hasn’t really got over it yet.’
‘Was Marco on duty?’
‘He was. That’s the only good news.’
‘So?’
‘I told him I wanted footage of us arriving and leaving.’
The main positive was that Em’s young barman was not only on site, he was in charge today. He listened with a bit of sympathy to their pretext (some cobblers about a regional tech survey, with an on-the-spot cash inducement of £100 for anyone participating). He trousered Em’s fifties, then sneaked Jonny into the office. The bad news was that the chain of pubs, Webb and Mayde, uses the same CCTV system everywhere: an advanced one that uploads the last ten days of footage to a server and then deletes it on a rolling basis. There was no way of deleting it remotely, according to Jonny – he could look at it, even download it, but he couldn’t tamper with it.
‘So, our options are: firstly we find out which of the world’s million servers the data is being held on, then fly to western California or wherever, physically break into the server building, hack the databanks, wipe the data, and come back, all while avoiding detection, which will be hard, because the footage will have been circulated before we even board our flight.’
‘Yeah. Was there a “secondly”?’
‘Oh. Sorry, no. I was just trying to say what the first and only option was really, which is obviously impossible.’
Clearly Elle’s rubbed off on me, because I try to present the positive side. ‘Right. So we’re on the server. Fine. But there’s a good chance the cops won’t look, or won’t tie it to us even if they do. This place was full last night.’
‘Yeah. And there’s one other bit of good news, too: from where the camera is, you really only see the entrance and exit to the road. The internal camera’s been on the fritz for a year, but nobody’s come out from the management firm to fix it.’
‘Thank God for lazy landlords.’
‘There is more bad news, though.’ Jonny and Em give each other a worried look.
‘Go on.’
‘Someone came here this morning asking for exactly the same thing we were looking for.’
This is how it went, in Marco’s telling: a very tall, shaven-headed man, who looked ‘a bit like Mark Strong’, was waiting at the Ram’s Head before opening time. He flashed some ID, told Marco there was a wanted fraudster in the pub’s recentclientele, bossed his way into the office, and downloaded the last twenty-four hours of camera footage to a stick. Now that Marco thought about it, he didn’t say which law-enforcement agency in particular he’d come from, and he seemed like ‘the sort of guy you don’t want to piss around with’, hence Marco caving immediately and letting him in. The Strong-alike then got back into his car, a low-to-the-ground number clearly beyond the budget of any local police force, and left.
After Em and Jonny have finished relating that, we sit and think.
‘He was probably after someone else, I reckon.’
Nobody is quite willing to take the baton off Elle in the optimism relay, and we sit in silence as we drive through the village to drop me off near the house. At least I’ve dressed for what comes next.
Remember earlier, when I played the vicar before getting into this whole disaster? As I said then, you want someone who’s unpopular locally, and the proportion of people in central London genuinely keen to talk to their local clergyman is somewhere between 0 and 1 per cent.
In the countryside, though, you’ll get a much better hearing if you’re a man of the cloth, which is why I never do it out here. Out here, it’s time for the old red rosette. That’s right. The one person guaranteed to be unwelcome in the deep Cotswolds: a local Labour candidate.
There is, of course, a risk that if people see a Labourcouncillor coming up the drive, they’ll pretend not to be in, lulling you into a false sense of security, so I wait to pin the rosette on until I’m safely on the porch and unobserved.
All of this, incidentally, is only made possible by the core principle of what I do, which is this: I fill the gaps in people’s minds.
I don’t mean to sound mystical about it, but whenever I have to do a bit of this character work, I just make sure I’m as similar as possible to what people expect. That’s the real principle: act the part, and people will meet you more than halfway, because they’re already expecting something similar from you. All you have to do is anticipate the kind of behaviourthey’reanticipating, then stick to that. If I stood in the middle of the street with a tabard and a big smile, I wouldn’t have to do anything else to convince people I was a charity mugger. I tried it once as an experiment in Chelsea, and people started to swerve as though I had an exclusion zone around me, without any further effort on my part.
So now I’m wearing the most Labour-y clothes I had on me – a cheap shirt and dark jeans. I’m also wearing an earnest look and holding the Clipboard of Officialdom. Easy.
As I get to the dead man’s gates and press 0 to gain access – smearing the keypad as I go to kill Jonny’s fingerprints – I see I’m about to encounter the most naturally conservative people on the planet: the British police. There are three cars on the drive that weren’t there last night. Two chequered, the third a Jag fitted with one of the discreet blue lights used by the high-ups. There’s noBake Off-style marquee for forensics but I’msure it won’t be long. I wonder fleetingly whether the police and theBake Offcrew get their marquees from the same firm.
At this point, a good chunk of me thinks:Well, Al, you did your best to score that camera. But look at the place. No dice. Get out now, and start that new life in Andalucia you’ve always joked about.
And does the rest of me listen? No. My stupid body overrules my mind and carries me up the driveway, pulling my rosette from my pocket as I go. As I push the bell button, I realise – maybe I can get into the house. Maybe they haven’t found the camera yet, and I’ll be able to …
‘Yes?’
