Bang: Memoirs of a Relationship Assassin (37 page)

I had to pull off my gloves to work the phone’s tiny buttons. “Open the ones dated last Friday,” she said. A picture flashed up on the mobile’s high-resolution screen. Two figures standing in a street.

Megan MacLeod and a tall, dark stranger in leather overcoat.

Jason King.
Me
.

I barely heard Becky’s voice through the sudden bloodrush in my ears, as she told me how she’d been on her way to my flat, turned into my street and suddenly there was EastEnders’s biggest name getting out of a flash red car alongside some bloke with a goatee in sunglasses, mucking around and chasing each other and then… Scroll back a few pictures, she said, and there I found the other half-dozen snaps she’d taken while hiding behind a car (I could imagine it perfectly, her hunched down on the pavement aiming the Ericsson across a car bonnet like a hitman taking a shot, KER-CHICK!), of Megan laughing with Jason, of being enfolded in his big leather coat, of him leaning down and – quite clearly – kissing her.

A crystal clear picture of my lips pressed against the Face of Scotland.

“Never occurred to me that was you,” she went on, “not with that beard and the shades and everything. But I recognised her straight off. I thought the bloke was her bodyguard or something, and then they go and start pashing like that…”

“And you caught it,” I breathed.

Becky grinned. “That’s what I was dying to tell you about, when I got to yours. I had to talk to you properly first but then I wanted to show you what I’d seen. Couldn’t bloody believe my eyes! Megan MacLeod, right there in your street! It just didn’t seem real. Until she walked in your kitchen,” she added with a raised eyebrow.

I looked at her, down at the phone, back up again. “Becky… these pictures…”

“Yeah, I know. I realised once Emma told me about your mission. They’re what you were after in the first place, right? Evidence.” Big smile. “Merry Christmas!”

Evidence: of Megan MacLeod having an affair behind Declan Shea’s back. The evidence that Larry’s clients required. The evidence that would ruin the TV star’s reputation forever.

“You know these will…?”

Becky shrugged. “Never liked that slag much anyway.”

We both exploded with laughter, and I did a spinning dance of joy with the Ericsson. “You saved me!” I shouted. “I don’t believe it, you’ve saved me
again!”

Saved the mission. Saved my job. Saved my whole life, with this one small thing. Becky you superstar, I thought, God I
love
this girl! I spun round, intending to pick her up and hug the daylights out of her, the best girl in the world!

She stepped back, out of arm’s reach.

“You can keep the phone.”

“What? No, it’s yours, I’ll… I’ll copy the images off it and then I can give it back to you, it won’t take – ”

“Keep it. It’s yours.”

“Becky…”

“I don’t want it back, John.”

The catch in her voice made my blood run cold. “But I can give it back to you,” I said quietly. “Next time…”

She shook her head and whispered “Can’t go back.”

It hit my chest like a hollow-point bullet. Can’t go back.

Not now that Becky knew so much. And not now that I knew myself. Like she said, I’d figured out who I was. I could be John for a while, but not for the rest of our lives, regardless of how much I loved being him.

I’d made my choice already. Job done. Bang.

We ran out of words. The two of us just ran out of things to say.

My throat tightened as I looked at Becky, seeing the tears in her eyes. Both suddenly realising we’d never see each other after today.

And just as suddenly, she was in my arms and I was holding her tighter than I’d ever held anyone, soaking up the comfortable weight of her body and the autumn smell of her hair and the smooth feel of her skin, pulling tight, trying to remember everything, burn these few seconds into my memory.

I barely heard her, against my neck:

“…John.”

Her hand snaked down into my trouser pocket – a sudden familiar sensation. She pulled my bike keys out and pushed them into my hand.

Then she tore away from me and walked off down the street.

Just as quickly, I jumped back onto the Honda. I pulled the helmet on. Key in the ignition, roar of engine. I twisted the motorbike a hundred and eighty degrees and gunned it, roaring back down the street in the opposite direction of where Becky was heading.

The road blurred ahead of me, the wind blowing grit into my streaming eyes. Should be more careful. I snapped down the helmet visor. I needed protection. Needed to save my face.

“Hello, Mrs Buchanan.”

She whirled round behind her desk, telephone to her ear, and gave me a look that could have put out forest fires.

“Who on earth are you! Just a second, Roger – excuse me, what’s going on? You can’t just walk in here!”

We just walked in there. Behind us came a girl from the office outside, bustling into the smaller room. “Bianca, I’m sorry, they just wouldn’t stop, I tried to get them to wait but… they just…”

She tailed off, seeing her boss’s jaw hang open. Mrs Buchanan stared at me, lowering the telephone slowly like it was getting heavier. She looked me up and down, then across my face. I was three years older, in a dark suit instead of a Hawaiian shirt, and with short hair instead of that wild Bohemian tangle, but it didn’t matter. She wasn’t going to forget me.

“…Mark.”

“Good to see you again, Mrs Buchanan,” I said.

Distractedly, she waved her secretary out. “Go away now,” she said into the phone, putting it down. I smiled slightly, remembering how Mrs Buchanan’s telephone manner took some getting used to. No time for niceties in her busy life. She never said goodbye.

She looked older. I suppose she must have been about forty-five by then, but looked early fifties. Maybe she’d just stopped trying to hide the wispy grey in her hair, or cover up those bags under her eyes, but I didn’t remember them being there. She was thinner, without that contented plump glow. Creative juices dried up a little, perhaps.

But she still looked like she could batter you to a pulp, frankly. Tough as boots, with toecap-steel in her voice. She didn’t get where she was today by not having toecap-steel in her voice. And where she was today was running her own small publishing company, slap bang in the middle of Soho. From what I’d seen, Buchanan Publishers Ltd was doing well. It filled the entire floor to bursting, loud and hectic, people and computers and boxes and towers of books. They’d obviously outgrown that place and looked ready to move into their own building.

I stood in front of her desk and we sized each other up like gunslingers.

She wasn’t sure how to react. Anger, sadness, confusion, all there on her face. Both of us remembering the day we were caught by her husband.

And then she leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms. “Mark Harris,” she said slowly. Like other people might have said
“Well well well, if it isn’t Satan, Prince of Lies!”

“I’m not Mark Harris,” I said gently. “I’m sure you’ve known that for a long while.”

She nodded. “I spent ages trying to find you. Private detectives and everything. Not a trace. Turns out you didn’t exist.” A tiny laugh. “Even those magazines you had your short stories published in didn’t exist. All faked. I started wondering if maybe I’d just imagined you.”

I spread my hands. “Here I am. I’m just not Mark.”

“You’re a bag of shit.”

You never expect to hear that from someone with her mummy-bought-me-a-pony voice. I’d forgotten a lot about Mrs Buchanan. Including how violent she could be. Without warning, she picked up a stapler from her desk and threw it at me as hard as she could. I couldn’t dodge – it whacked into my arm, bursting tiny staples across the office carpet. Man, it hurt!

I tensed, ready to duck or move or something, but she just leaned back calmly. Like it never happened.

“You completely ruined my entire life, and then you just vanished into thin air like the fucking Martians came down and took you. I had to go on the dole after leaving Matthews-Wilson Books, I actually had to sign on. Three years it’s been. Three years of working like a dog, and now that I’ve finally managed to get my own company up and running, in you bloody waltz like you own the place and you stand right there in front of me and say… what? What are you saying, I’m-not-Mark-Harris, what are you here for!”

“To say sorry.”

For a second I thought she was going to lob the hole-punch at me. “And to do business,” I quickly added.

“Business?”
she spat. “What in Jesus H Christ’s name are you talking about?”

“Mrs Buchanan, I am an assassin.”

She glanced down, perhaps expecting to see a pistol with a silencer in my hand, then scowled suspiciously, like I might be having her on. “What?”

“I’m an assassin, a relationship assassin. I don’t kill people, I kill people’s relationships.”

“You… kill relationships?”

“I split up couples. It’s my job. I’m not your enemy, Mrs Buchanan. I’m a professional, the same as you, but my job is to set myself up as an illicit lover and then get caught. Just like I did with you. I pretended to be Mark Harris to get you involved with me. Because someone paid me to do it.”

I went on, explaining the whole thing to her. It was important to make her grasp the concept. I talked about honeytrap organisations like VenusVisions, how they ensnared unsuspecting would-be cheaters, and that I took it a stage further, researching my target and turning myself into someone they would fall for. It was important to make her get it. And as I talked, her rage subsided, replaced by confusion and curiosity.

“That’s who Mark Harris was,” I said, “someone who I thought might appeal to you. All I really needed was for us to be seen together, provide some evidence. I hadn’t expected to be so… successful.”

Mrs Buchanan coloured a little, glancing away. Probably recalling how she’d answered her front door in a big fur coat, naked underneath. Creative juices. Can’t stop ‘em when they’re in full flow.

“But I ballsed up. I thought your husband had hired me. That’s normally the way, the husband wants shot of his wife, so as far as I’m concerned the relationship’s dead to begin with. But he had nothing to do with it. I didn’t realise till afterwards – ”

“I know who it was,” she said, startling me.

“You do?”

“Well, I’ve never proved it, but I always suspected he had something to do with it. Never realised you were somebody who could be… hired.” She heaved a deep breath. “George Welch practically runs Matthews-Wilson these days. Once he got us out of the way, there was no stopping him, bringing in all his cronies from the other publishers he’d worked at. He did very well for himself once we were gone. The dried-up old wanker. And neither of us knew it was coming. Took me six months before I was even earning money again.”

“Ah.” I nodded. “And… Mr Buchanan?”

A moment of staring into space. “Haven’t seen Graham since then. We’re not divorced or anything. Just… not together any more.”

Mrs Buchanan’s way. She never said goodbye.

“I’m sorry,” I said softly. “I made Rules for myself after that. So that I wouldn’t do that to anyone again.” But then I cut myself off, shaking my head. Not wanting to think about how I’d managed to break every single one of them and hurt a girl so badly.

“So, ‘assassin’.” She made finger-quotes around the word. “What are you doing here now? Am I your target again, then?”

“I’m here to do you a favour, Mrs Buchanan.”

I unfolded the newspaper I’d been carrying and threw it onto her desk. One of the Sunday tabloids from yesterday.

•   
EastEnders Star Caught Passionately Kissing In Public

•   
Rumours That ‘Mister Ex’ May Be An Old Flame

•   
Pop Star Declan’s Heartbreak At Megan’s Betrayal

To the right were four photographs arranged in a square. Small, grainy, taken over the bonnet of a car, but clear enough to make out the indisputable red-haired features of Megan MacLeod, holding and kissing a young man with a goatee wearing sunglasses and a long leather coat.

Mrs Buchanan glanced down at the paper and back up again. “So what, you’re a paper boy as well as an assassin?”

“Have you read this?”

“Of course I’ve read it, everyone has. It’s been on the news.”

And then some. I’d watched the breakfast news on TV that morning, surrounded by newspapers (I’d bought a copy of everything from my homophobic newsagent, winking at him the whole time). Yesterday it had been this Sunday tabloid’s exclusive story, the pictures provided by an ‘anonymous but trusted source’. Now it was on the front page of every single newspaper in the country, including the Financial Times for some reason. On the TV, a snatch of Megan in dark glasses, the flashes of journalists’ cameras as they crowded outside Meg ‘n’ Dec’s Luxury Love Nest, that familiar black door. Daryl, the lead singer of Flag, sitting at a press conference and telling the world how his mate Declan was broken up, really broken up, he couldn’t face anyone right now, and Daryl shook his head and said Declan had always been too trusting for his own good, such a sweet bloke, he wouldn’t have wanted this to happen to him for the world, but you just can’t be too careful these days.

Monday’s papers were full of Megan’s counter-attack, claiming that the man in the pictures that the journalists were all calling ‘Mister Ex’ wasn’t some old flame from back on the Isle of Lewis, he wasn’t even Scottish, he was called Jason King and he worked for her security company and the pictures had been faked to make it look like they were kissing, when nothing inappropriate like that happened at all. Monday’s papers also featured the counter-counter-attack from Global Investigations UK Ltd, the “highly renowned security company with a cast-iron reputation for honesty and integrity amongst the celebrity community”, whose spokesman said that although Megan was indeed one of their clients, none of their operatives were assigned to her on the evening of Friday 16 July, the date the images were time-stamped. Furthermore, they did not have anyone on their staff with the unlikely name of ‘Jason King’, nor anyone who resembled the man in the photographs. Accompanying this were the inevitable library pictures of Peter Wyngarde as flamboyant 1970s TV detective Jason King, all paisley shirts and neckerchiefs. Alongside the official statements made by Declan Shea’s agent, publicly calling off his relationship with Megan MacLeod and stating that he valued honesty above everything else, were pictures of hundreds of Declan’s teenage fans, promising to kill that cheating slut-bitch-slapper for breaking their idol’s heart, even though they were over the moon that he was single once again.