Read Online Conman by Richard Asplin - Free Book Online Page B

probably expected me to anyway, eh? I’ve seen how your eyes prowl over this house. Now finish your drink and get out.
    So for the past month, well you can imagine can’t you? The fear of Jane’s dearest daddy finding out? It would have proved, in his whisky-addled mind at least, that he was right all along. And he would have been thrilled to hear about my fuck up. Not in front of Jane of course. No no, in front of Jane it would have been hand holding and chin-upping and there-there-ing. But afterwards ? He’d have dined out on it for the rest of his life. Golf club, functions, board meetings. My idiot son-in-law, fwahh fwahh fwahh.
    But hell, that was the past. That afternoon, I was grinning. Heart light, bursting, floating like the last day of term. Because I knew I wasn’t going to have to hear it. I was going to return to the table, coffee and mints, sign a contract for twenty per cent commission , hang whatever this eccentric guy wanted hung in the window and be in the clear.
    In the clear.
    The only thing that did worry me slightly, as I zipped up and rinsed my hands in the bath-sized basin, was that my new business partner had yet to get around to giving me his real name.
     
    “Whittington? Oh, I see. No, no poppet, we must start as we mean to go on,” my host said, plucking a white card from his breast pocket and sliding it across the linen.
    “ This is you?” I picked the card up. “J Peckard Scott? Motivational speaker ?”
    “Less or more,” he said. “My vating is that of the motor-driven variety, yes. Geeing up, confidence boosts. I slap backs. Tell people what they want to hear. What’s interesting about the whole procedure of course,” he said, glugging my wine glass up another inch, “what your Watchdogs and your Daily Mails don’t realise is that innocent parties are never involved. Oh they like to suggest those we catch out are poor victims . Guilty only of being in the wrong place at the right time. But it’s drivel, of course. Imagine the logistics of picking marks at random. Poppycock. We’d spend all of our time laying out the game, telling the tale, putting him on the send, setting up the whole damned store, only to find he didn’t have any money, or he was too savvy, or too stupid. Nonsense, nonsense,” and he shook his head sadly. “It’s a myth. The likelihood of a hopscotching grifter just pouncing on a hapless innocent and fleecing him for his life savings are zero.”
    “Did you say grifter ?” I didn’t much like the sound of where this monologue was going. Principally because it didn’t appear to be going anywhere we’d agreed on. In fact the whole lunch so far had something of the unlicensed minicab about it.
    I tried to get a handbrake on this conversation before he veered us both into a lamp post.
    “You said you have something you want me to sell …”
    “I need your help, Neil, that much is certain. This memorabilia lark isn’t what you’d call my field. Not my crop, not my farm. I’m on very muddy ground in fact and these aren’t even my wellies.”
    “You being a motivational speaker,” I said, to which Scott made a disconcerting nyeeahhh noise.
    “Let’s say I level the playing field Neil. I even things out. Assist the intelligent, the hardworking. Give them a step up. Which means, thanks to Newton, the lazy and stupid take a step down. But that’s fair isn’t it? I mean isn’t that what we all really want?” “Well I s’pose,” I said.
    “Anyhap, enough of that. We still on, what do you say? Still like to earn yourself an easy hundred grand or so?” and he picked up the envelope once again. “Of course you would. Because you deserve it, correct? You’re a hard workin’ man, tired of just getting by , I expect. Getting by while crooks and scroungers get to swank about in Essex mansions bedecked with sovereign rings. Hardly fair now is it? Which is why it’s only right, what you and I do. Evening out the score. Rewarding the