Kingfisher

Money for Old Rope

Train travel was expensive and so, therefore, was theatrical political murder. Whilst his original plan had been to kill Claire at any of Ainsworth's speeches, his sense of his own limited budget had quickly limited him to the south-east, and his sense of his own importance had further limited him to London. After all, he was supposed to be saving Britain from succuming to a dystopian fate. It would have felt rather wrong to do that in Reading or St Albans.

In the end, he settled on trying to have her die at the minister's speech on the occasion of the post-conference return of Parliament. He knew Ainsworth would be trying to steal the spotlight from Jonathan Martin and Conference would have empowered him to announce policies—so such a wave-making speech from the dispatch box seemed as dramatic an event as any to interrupt with the symbolic sacrifice of his daughter to his Puritan ideals.

Thus, armed with the knowledge of where he would be bringing Claire to die, Michael sat in front of his laptop with a reporter's notebook and took notes from the British Rail and Transport for London websites. He would need two adult returns, and two Day Travelcards. It crossed his mind that he only technically needed one adult return and one adult single, but turning up with those would undoubtedly arouse unhelpful suspicions in his date.

All in all, then, he was looking at a cost of about £55.00 for the trains, and given the risk that something would go wrong, Michael mentally revised this figure up to a budget of £65.00. Where would he get that kind of money? Unlike most of their Aceltonian peers, the Krassens were not rich, and Michael had not been brought up with "pocket money" or hundred-pound windfalls in birthday cards. In general, he was lucky to squeeze a tenner out of his parents even when he had an exceptionally good excuse. Sixty quid was significantly beyond the pale. If the Plan was going to go ahead, he would have to pull some strings to secure the funding he needed.

Of course, being the elusive Michael Krassen, he always had a connect up his sleeve.

Oi, Toby

Michael

My g

How may I help you on this fine morning

Can we meet up?

Idk bro

Lemme check

Alright, I have something I want to talk to you about'

Right I can come out

About time you came out...'

I have been proudly heteroflexible for as long as you've known me'

I thought you were an "hamster in a microwave"?

That's my gender, not my orientation. Do you even woke

Where are we meeting, Tobemister

Station? I kinda feel like going London

I dont really have any money

Always happy to pay for u my g

See you at maybe 1, I need to actually get awake and dressed and shit'

It's 11 and you're not out of bed?

Ttyl bro

Michael hoped that, once confronted with the irony of the situation, Toby would be more amused than insulted that he was buying his friend a train ticket to London so that his friend could ask him to buy him a train ticket to London.

Luckily, Toby tended to believe Michael's shit about being some kind of teenage Iago on the fringes of the Westminster bubble, so his ego would probably be unable to resist bankrolling some mysterious plan of Michael's. Of course, that wasn't to say that Michael didn't believe that shit himself. The fedora'd figure at which he had gazed solipsistically in so many conference-centre bathroom mirrors really did seem "not-yet-infamous, rather elusive and perennially self-aggrandising."