The Cutting Crew (23 page)

Lucy put two bullets in the back of his head as he lay whimpering on the floor of the main room. Silenced, of course: two soft whumps, and he was gone. He'd known it had been coming.

Sometimes, I think that it's only the tension before death that makes a body look so relaxed and calm afterwards. It's contrast.

We checked out the suite, and we found the black briefcase on Halloran's bed. It was me that carefully lifted the lid and so I saw it first. Inside - piled and tiled neatly - was the money.

My hands hovered there, not quite daring to touch. What we needed to do was this: take the back way out of the hotel, the fire escape, the alleyway behind. A good, sensible plan. So I didn't touch the money - not at first. But I didn't need to count it to know that there was a lot. Far more than Halloran should have had in his possession if any of us had been thinking straight.

There were issues, of course we didn't discuss them. Perhaps we should have left it, but what was the harm? If anybody had known we'd been there, we would have been fucked regardless, so what did the money matter? And, strange as it sounds, we never thought about the possibility that someone might catch us. I closed the briefcase, and Lucy carried it out. We totalled it up later. That night, it transpired, we'd earned just less than fifty grand apiece.

On the surface I was thinking this: if I'm cautious - if I don't attract too much attention - then that's enough money to keep me and Rachel safe and secure for a long time. Halloran didn't deserve it, and if someone else had taken it then they probably wouldn't have done much good with it either. There were worse people than me who could end up with fifty grand.

If I needed justification then it was there, and if you asked me at the time that's what I would have told you.

So that's what we did. Halloran was dead. What did the money matter, wherever it had come from? I could tell myself that, but even then things felt different and I knew that something had gone wrong.

I'd lost my way. Halloran wasn't the last man I'd be involved in killing, but he was the last man we'd take out as a group, and by that point it wasn't easy but it wasn't exactly hard either. But because of the money, I went home that night and I felt like a stranger to myself, and I had bad dreams that I couldn't remember.

Sitting with Jamie, that feeling returned to me, and I realised that it hadn't been just a bad dream. Because when you do something wrong - no matter how bad - you can forgive yourself. Even if it's only on the surface. When nobody comes knocking demanding penance from you or pointing fingers, the days pass and you allow yourself to forget. You're only human. You might be afraid that you're tainted, but you don't feel that way all the time, and gradually you get on with your life. I'd woken up from the bad dream and done just that, only now I had the feeling that I'd been kidding myself ever since. The bad dream had still been going on, gathering force, and now Jamie's story was sending me back to sleep and I could feel that dream again, coalescing around me, so much stronger than before. I was afraid. And I was right to be.

'Alison went on her own that night?' I said.

He shook his head. 'No. Damian went with her.'

'The other guy in the art group.'

'Right.'

'And where's Damian now?'

'Dead,' Jamie said, not looking up from the table.

He didn't seem immediately inclined to say anything more, but now Lucy was more interested in having this conversation. After all, she'd been the one to pull the trigger on Halloran. She leaned forward.

'What happened to them?'

'The next day. They didn't show up.'

'Show up for what?'

'A meeting. The four of us had already met that day, but we were going to meet again the next evening. Harris was going to be there.'

Rosh and I glanced at each other, but Harris's name had lost a little of its power. Nothing would change the fact that he'd turned Sean in and that he was very probably going to die for that, but everything seemed different now. I couldn't stop thinking about the briefcase and the money. The rest of Jamie's story had a terrible inevitability to it.

Lucy said, 'And so they didn't show for the meeting?'

'No. It was me and Kel and Harris, round at mine. We waited for the others but they never came. Someone else did instead.'

'Someone else who?'

He shook his head.

'I don't know who they were, or where they came from. They came out of the walls.'

'What the fuck is that supposed to mean?' Lucy asked.

Jamie looked up at her and he spoke slowly.

'It means that the flat was locked and bolted,' he said, 'and there was nobody in there but us. But then suddenly, these guys were all around us. There was no way they could have got in.'

'Right,' Lucy said. 'And what did they look like?'

'I can't remember.' He looked back down at the table and shrugged to himself. 'There were five of them. Big guys. Black suits.

Guns. That's all.'

'That's all"

'I was scared,' he said. 'Is that all right?'

'That's fine,' I told him. 'Lucy--'

But it clearly wasn't fine with her. She stood up in disgust and walked off down the alleyway, rubbing her face. Jamie glared after her, and I didn't blame him. She was tired, fucked off and probably very scared - but we all were, and what we needed to do right now was keep calm and take things slowly. That was what I kept telling myself anyway, as I remembered walking out of a hotel six months ago with a briefcase full of someone else's money.

Rosh said, 'Ignore her. She didn't get much sleep.'

'Yeah,' Jamie said. 'Right.'

'Seriously, forget about her. What did these guys say they wanted?'

'They searched the flat. Pulled out all the drawers - went through everything. They said they were looking for something that had been left with us, but they didn't say what.'

I glanced at Rosh again, but this time he didn't acknowledge it.

He was playing it cooler than me and - even though we knew the answer - he asked Jamie the obvious question anyway.

'They find it, whatever it was?'

Jamie shook his head.

'And what do you think they were looking for?'

'I don't know,' he said. 'Something to do with Carl, I guess. But we didn't have it.'

'Okay. So then what happened?'

But my mind wasn't on what happened after the men finished searching; I was putting together what had already taken place.

We'd killed Halloran and taken his money, and if we'd wondered at the time why he'd had so much in his possession then we knew now. The men had come to pick it up, found him dead and the money gone, and so worked their way through his acquaintances.

First, his girlfriend. And when she'd been unable to help, they'd moved on to her friends instead. I figured that by then they weren't holding out much hope: just dotting the 'i's and crossing the 't's.

Jamie was lucky to be alive.

'They told us to keep our mouths shut,' he said. 'They said we wouldn't be seeing our friends again, but that we shouldn't report it to anyone. And they warned us that they'd be watching. If anyone got in contact with us, they said they'd know about it and they'd kill us.'

'And then they left?'

'They didn't really leave.' Jamie shook his head. 'It was like when they arrived. There was just a point when they weren't there anymore.'

I looked at Rosh and this time he looked back. Invisible henchmen, apparently, on top of everything else. But it was far more likely that Jamie had simply blanked out a lot of what had happened to him. Unlike Lucy, I thought that was fine.

'Would you look at some pictures?' I suggested. I was willing to bet that if we could find a picture of the police officer we'd just killed, Michael Kemp, then Jamie would mark him out as being one of the disappearing men.

But he shook his head.

'I'm kind of planning for this to be our last conversation.'

'Well, I'm curious,' Rosh said. 'If all this is true, why are you even talking to us now? And why the Missing Persons Report in the first place? That must have been kind of dangerous.'

'That wasn't us,' Jamie said. 'That was the computer guy. Rob Hedge. When people started asking questions, we just covered it up as best we could.'

'You lied?'

From the tone of his voice, I got the impression that Rosh was about to go and join Lucy. In a way, I couldn't blame him: the opportunity had been there for Jamie or Keleigh to tell this story almost six months ago, and if they had then maybe Sean would still be alive. But at the same time, they were just kids.

'I was scared,' Jamie repeated. 'Not just for me, but for Keleigh.

So, yeah. I lied. I'm telling the truth now, though.'

'And our friend, Sean?' I said.

'I didn't lie to him either. Can I have another cigarette?'

'You'll have to go ask her.' I nodded down the alleyway to where Lucy was leaning against the wall. She was busy smoking and pretending that the three of us didn't exist. Jamie looked back at me, deciding to pass.

'He turned up a week ago. I don't know how he found us, but he wasn't like the others. He wouldn't take no for an answer, and he knew a lot of it anyway. So we ended up telling him everything.'

'Where did you meet him?'

'Public places, but always secret. If you see what I mean. He wouldn't give us any contact for him. Said it wasn't safe.'

'Okay,' I said. 'When was the last time you saw him?'

'A few nights ago,' Jamie told us. 'He left me an envelope. Said he was going to meet someone, and that if we didn't hear back from him the next day I should deliver it to an address in Horse.'

'Did he say who he was going to meet?' I said, although the email in Harris's flat had told us everything we needed to know about that.

'No,' Jamie said. 'But the next day he didn't get in touch, so I delivered the letter.'

'Have you seen the men who broke into your flat at all?' Rosh said.

Jamie shook his head.

'And I don't want to. Ever since your friend turned up, Keleigh and I have been moving around, staying away from our usual places.'

'That's probably a good idea,' I said.

For the moment, I didn't know what other advice to give him. In effect, we'd found Keleigh, and now we needed to get our hands on Harris. He'd be able to tell us whether we'd killed all the men and, if not, who the remaining ones were and where we could find them.

That was how it would end.

Jamie had been quiet for a second, but now he said: 'I guess I see why you were asking about Harris. You think he told these people about your friend, right?'

I wasn't quite sure how much to tell him, and I was glad when Rosh took over. He'd clearly made a silent decision to be as honest as possible.

'Yes,' he said. 'We think that Harris got scared and turned our friend in to save himself. And it's likely he's after Keleigh now, too.

Whoever these guys are, they're using him to cover their tracks and clean up.'

'Fuck.'

Jamie shook his head. He looked sad and disappointed as much as anything else.

Rosh seemed to be about to say something else, but then his mobile started ringing.

'Shit,' he said, standing up. 'One minute.'

He wandered off down the alleyway, over to where Lucy was waiting.

'We're going to protect you,' I told Jamie. Bullshit, of course, but I was responsible for what had happened to them and I wanted to say something. 'Nothing's going to happen to you or Keleigh.'

Jamie smiled at that, and there was something in his expression that I couldn't quite read. It wasn't as simple as disbelief or thinking I was naive, but there were elements of those things in there. Perhaps something a little like pity, as well.

'I'm going to get some cigarettes,' he said. 'There's a machine inside.'

'Okay.'

He stood up and went back in the pub. I sat for a moment, trying to absorb everything I'd been told. Understanding the situation - as uncertain as it remained - should have brought some degree of comfort along with it. At least now we knew why. But there was no comfort; I might as well have been a kid alone in bed at midnight.