The Hit List

by Holly Seddon

I press the phone into the pocket of his overalls and step back fast. He smells of talc, taking me back to Joe’s toddler bathtimes in a flash. It sharpens my senses and for a moment, I wish I was here to get rid of this nasty little man rather than recruit him.

  ‘What’s this?’ he shoves the glasses back up his nose and goes to take the phone out.

  ‘Not here,’ I say quietly, fingering a tub of screws idly in case anyone were to look. ‘Go to the staff toilets, turn it on and go to the Whispa app. There’s a message waiting for you.’

  ‘What the hell is that? Do I need a password? How do I—’

  ‘Have you used a mobile phone before?’ I hiss, running out of patience with this idiot.

  He shakes his head. ‘Never risked it,’ he says. I don’t need to ask what he means. God, I wish I was here to kill him.

  I snatch the phone out of the pocket again, look around to check no one is looking, and then switch it on. I’m wearing slim leather driving gloves and it’s a brisk temperature in here but I still feel uneasy, noticeable.

  ‘There,’ I say, handing it back. ‘Go to the toilet and read that. You’ll receive the next instructions soon.’

  ‘Instructions?’ he says, shoving his glasses again, wrinkling his nose. But I don’t reply. When I look back, he is reading the screen intently, his face the colour of alabaster emulsion.

  Greg

  Friday, 27 March 2020

  For the last few times, there has been a new man working at the Bluebell. Rosie is openly repulsed by him and the feeling seems to be mutual. He’s an anaesthetist, brought in after the drama with Helen to better prepare the patients and as an extra pair of hands, should something happen. Not that he seems particularly dynamic or helpful.

  David Ross has finally taken off his eye-patch. ‘So fucking pretentious,’ Rosie said when she saw he was still wearing it weeks after the incident. ‘He needed it for two or three days, tops. What a wanker.’ Greg wishes he’d put it back on, the glossy scar turning his stomach.

  Rosie sits on the end of the double bed in Greg’s ‘waiting room’, tipping the last crumbs of crisps into her mouth.

  ‘Really getting in there,’ Greg says. ‘Look at her feast.’

  She smiles. A slash across her grey face, her exhausted, lined eyes coming to life.

  ‘Does your pal not want to join us?’ he says, biting his sandwich.

  ‘My pal?’ She runs her tongue over her teeth to dislodge the wet crumbs and takes a swig of Diet Coke.

  ‘That anaesthetist guy, Andrew,’ Greg prompts.

  ‘He’s no pal of mine,’ she says.

  ‘So what’s the deal?’

  ‘You don’t want to know.’

  ‘I—’

  ‘Mate,’ she says, her voice brittle, ‘you do not want to know.’ Greg stares back, takes another bite of his sandwich and another. Holding out on conversation until Rosie tells him all about Andrew anyway. Then he wishes he’d paid heed to her warning.

  *

  She didn’t work directly with him, they were at different hospitals, with different procedures. But she’d heard of him, even before the inquiry. Other colleagues had worked at the same children’s hospital where his reputation preceded him and outlasted him. ‘Wasn’t he sentenced?’

  ‘What, by the police?’ she asks, shaking her head. ‘Kangaroo court. Fucking shameful.’

  ‘So he’s doing this for money, then?’

  ‘You make it sound like any of this is a choice,’ Rosie laughs. ‘Whatever he’s here for, someone – the big bad you-know-who – has made it so this is the best of a bad set of options.’

  ‘Is that what happened to you?’

  She stares at him, weighing him up. Finally, she nods.

  ‘Stupid really. The whole fucking thing.’ She laughs but there’s no warmth to it. He follows her as she walks to the window and opens it. ‘Mind if I …?’ She is already making a thin roll-up with a pinch of tobacco from a pouch of Amber Leaf. He shakes his head, considers asking for one but she’s nearly out. They lean outside and she taps the little curls of ash onto the windowsill. She’s burnt halfway down the cigarette before she speaks again.

  ‘Knackered,’ she sniffs. ‘I was always knackered. After a shift I’d try to sleep but I’d just lay there. Hours and hours. The nightshifts were worse, trying to fall asleep in the day while the little kids upstairs shrieked and banged their toys on the floor.’ She smiles and shrugs. ‘It wasn’t their fault.’

  He says nothing. David Ross had told him she had a drug problem but somehow he thinks it would be worse for her if he cut to the chase.

  ‘I’m a fucking cliché.’ She waves her hand in the air and flecks of ash fall onto the carpet. She crushes them with her trainer. ‘I started using something to help me sleep. And then something to help wake me up. And it snowballed as it always does. Started buying it from a lad in the pharmacy, but I couldn’t afford too many from him. So I started skimming pills as well, just one at a time. From …’ She exhales and flicks her butt out of the window, closing it with a slam.

  ‘From patients?’

  She nods.

  ‘Fuck knows how they knew any of this. They had photos of me buying. I had this funny feeling someone was following me and I ignored it. Stupidly. Then this woman collared me at work, told me they’d send them to my boss if I didn’t turn up for “training”.’

  ‘You believed her?’

  ‘I believed that my bosses would have had to take it seriously if they did. And I’d have been fucked with a blood test. Some of the stuff … it can only come from a few places. Anyway, I was summoned for training. Told I could do this once a month and they’d get me the drugs and keep my secrets. “Win–win,” they said.’

  ‘Sounds familiar. So who was the woman? Is she the one in charge of this?’ He’s embarrassed to admit he assumed it was all men at the top. For all his modern-man attempts, he still sees doctors as men, nurses as women. Dogs are boys and cats are girls. Jesus, he’s tired.

  ‘I don’t know who she was.’ Rosie shrugs. ‘She seemed nervous. She was like, cagey, I guess. I don’t know. She had me bang to rights, and I was right there in my work canteen, I just had to listen.’

  ‘So who do you think is in charge of all this?’ Greg asks, keeping his voice low.

  ‘I don’t know. There’s a bloke that comes sometimes, never gets involved with the operations but checks everything is in order. Tall guy, good-looking but knows it.’

  ‘He’s the boss?’

  ‘One of them. He always says “we” so he’s not the only one.’ She yawns and stretches, rubs her eyes and flashes a big fake smile. ‘Anyway, best get back to it! You can tell me your sob story next time.’

  *

  Greg gets in after Marianne but she doesn’t question why he’s late. She’s at the table, staring intensely at her laptop, a glass of wine by her side.

  ‘Working hard, hen?’ he says, kissing her on the forehead as he dumps down his bag, flicking his eyes to the screen. She angles it to show him that she’s looking at flights.

  ‘If we don’t book something soon, we won’t be able to afford much more than a week in Weymouth.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with the Great British Seaside,’ he says. Panic starts to chew at him – what the hell would a scheduling conflict mean for either his marriage or, well, still his marriage, but also his personal safety and freedom and everything he holds dear?

  ‘I grew up by the Great British Seaside, remember, and it’s a pile of wank.’

  He’s always liked her acerbity when it’s not pointed at him. ‘My prickly little pear,’ he says, trying to focus on the present and quell the panic. He runs his hand over her shoulder and down to her T-shirt, softened by years of washing. ‘My braless prickly pear,’ he says and she laughs, twisting her chest away from him.

  ‘How long did it take for that bad boy to come off?’

  ‘I was literally walking up the stairs,’ she says. ‘I had my work blouse over my head before I
hit the bedroom.’

  These moments of shorthand in their scruffy sanctum. Why can’t it always be like this? Just the two of them, no operations, no postcards, no baby chat.

  ‘Let’s have some dinner and book a holiday, then,’ he says, as cheerily as he can muster.

  She sighs and closes her eyes. ‘Two weeks in the sunshine with my favourite.’

  He basks in the warmth of her smile and hopes against hope that he’s given himself enough time to pre-warn ‘them’.

  In the kitchen, getting the dinner stuff ready, it hits him. He stands with the fridge door open, his frozen face illuminated like studio lights. He hadn’t thought. Fuck, he just hadn’t thought! Too fixed on the now to consider any thens. But he’s been using his annual leave to accompany girls to the Bluebell, so will he have enough left to take the two weeks they’ve been dreaming about? He doesn’t get a lot to begin with, and he’s been taking a day off once a month, at least. How the hell can he explain to Marianne where it’s gone?

  The fridge alarm cuts into his thoughts and he slams it shut, trying to think carefully.

  How many have there been? He counts them on his fingers, each one fading from a story and a complexity to just a name and then, ultimately, just a number …

  So this is how it happens.

  Samantha

  Thursday, 4 June 2020

  The company director I’ve been investigating works out of a ‘shared space’ in South West London. The outside of the building still has old signage from when it was a bus garage, the swirling letters and old four-digit phone number faded into the tight red bricks. The inside of the building, from what I have seen, is a riot of primary colours and oversized spongy furniture. Like a children’s day-care centre.

  There’s no security as such, no guards or key entry system but there’s a clutch of CCTV cameras all around, shiny little pimples on every building. But it’s OK, I don’t need to go in.

  It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these and I’m more adept at it than when I first studiously followed that nurse, months back. This time, I learn to anticipate the movements so I’m in the juice bar before he is; I’m on the bus that he’s waiting to join.

  He’s not rigid but his movements form the same loose pattern each day. Two cigarette breaks in the morning, pacing under the old-fashioned bus shelter that is now a smokers’ huddle. Mid-morning, one of his co-workers will join him in a ‘break-out room’ off the main workspace. It’s on the third floor so they close the door but think nothing of the window.

  He uses the on-site gym while his employees work through lunch. A meal is generally brought to him on the back of a Deliveroo bike. Another two cigarette breaks, then home, still clutching his promotional headpiece.

  I’ve also seen his employees file out, staring at their phones and following them zombie-fashion as they make their ways to the allocated scooters they’ve reserved. Presumably it’s a perk of the job, free credit, but you wouldn’t get me on one of those, not in London traffic. I see he feels the same.

  He lives in a new-build, three-bedroom house in Streatham with his partner and two children. The small cul-de-sac sits on the Wandsworth border, its back turned away from the solid little council houses that pepper the rest of his road. Most days, he would be walking into tea time. But on Thursdays, the older child has gymnastics and the house will be empty for another hour.

  Inside, their home is brilliant white. His partner must be in a state of constant anxiety over dirt. I wonder whose choice the colour scheme was but I have an idea.

  ‘Rachel didn’t tell you I was coming, did she?’ I say, conspiratorially. He smiles then too and shakes his head in a coy and practised way. He’s a handsome man and arrogant with it. ‘No, sorry. To be honest, I have no idea who you are.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ I laugh. So handy, the British allergy to rudeness. As soon as he’d opened the door to me and I’d smiled, ‘Hi!’ and shaken his hand and stepped inside, he was sunk.

  ‘It’s no problem, she was wrestling Annie when we spoke and I bet she just forgot to put it in her diary or something. Shall I come back another time?’

  He frowns, unsure what to do.

  ‘I know you’re having a really hard time with Polly’s sleep and I’ve got quite a lot of people waiting for appointments, but—’

  ‘No, it’s fine. Let’s do this first meeting together and she’ll be here next time. I’ll make sure of it.’

  ‘Would it be worth calling her, perhaps? It was Rachel who arranged the sleep training after all.’

  He shakes his head. ‘They have to put their phones in the locker at gymnastics, I can never get hold of her.’

  I know.

  Rachel told me all about it when I befriended her in the café. She’d looked exhausted, struggling to strap the youngest into a highchair. I bought her a flat white and a slice of cake and that was all it took. She spilt everything in one whoosh, like a split bag of sugar. So desperate for someone to finally listen. He doesn’t deserve her. But I’m not in a position to judge.

  We walk through the house as he talks through the toddler’s bedtime routine. ‘It all just clicked into place with Annie but Polly …’ He throws his hands up in the air.

  ‘They’re all so different,’ I say. ‘And I bet you love how spirited she is.’

  He says nothing. Polly is a raging handful, I saw that for myself. Joe was never that way, always compliant. I know from my mother that I was not. There was a reason I was an only child. I was more like Polly, spoiling for a fight. It was my father who channelled that into something useful. Something essential.

  ‘Can I see her bedroom? Do they share or …’

  ‘They have their own rooms. She’s got the littlest one as she’s—’

  ‘The littlest one,’ I say, smiling.

  We’re inside the small room when I pat my pocket and then rifle in my bag as if remembering something. The room is small but tidy, with POLLY stencilled on the wall, and what looks like a home-knitted blanket on the back of a rocking chair. I think of Joe’s, knitted by his grandmother just before she died. He sees me admiring and says, ‘Cath Kidston, I think.’

  I tug out the envelope and hand it over, smiling. He takes it, assuming it’s an agreement for services or some more information.

  ‘I … I don’t understand.’ He’s holding the contents without properly looking at it. He doesn’t need to, he knows what’s in the photographs. He was there.

  My voice hardens, my scalp prickling under the heavy wig.

  ‘Tomorrow, you’re going to receive an offer for your majority share in Buzz.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’ll be a fair offer, considering.’ I wait for the realisation to sweep his face. ‘And you’ll accept it. Won’t you?’

  I tease one particularly incriminating photograph from the set that flops in his hand. I study it and shake my head. ‘You’d risk all this?’ I say, looking around. ‘For a fling.’

  ‘You don’t understand, it’s been – I mean – we’ve not been getting on. Polly won’t ever fucking sleep, Rach is always angry, I’m—’

  ‘I don’t need your excuses,’ I say, cutting him off. I know how differently Rachel would tell this story. ‘You will receive an offer …’

  ‘What offer?’ he says, incredulous.

  ‘An offer from an agent working on behalf of a private buyer. You will accept. You will be allowed to stay on and run the company, provided you hit certain targets. Understand?’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I said, do you understand?’

  He stares, looks at his daughter’s cot and the mobile hanging over it – little white rabbits, twirling slightly in the air’s movement. Then he nods, just once.

  ‘Because it should be quite clear what will happen if you don’t accept.’

  *

  I get home and kick off my shoes. My hair is mussed from the wig and no amount of brushing will fix it. I need a bath and hair wash. Good for nothing besides
that hot flannel on my face, the door locked, my body swallowed by bubbles.

  ‘You look tired,’ Steve says as I walk into the kitchen.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say.

  I hang up my coat and hover in the kitchen doorway as he pours me a gin and tonic. He’s not asked if I want one. I roll my shoulders back; tension has clamped them up high. Steve has given me a tall measure. Ice, sprig of rosemary, slice of lemon, not much tonic. The glass is slick with condensation and it slips from my grasp. I catch it just before it falls.

  ‘That was close,’ I say, as I follow him into the lounge and sit in the armchair.

  ‘Nervous about something, love?’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘No, I’m not.’ I haven’t been nervous in months. Exhilarated, yes. Propelled with adrenaline, definitely. Disgusted with myself, frequently.

  It was always there, the ability to do this work. My father saw it and sharpened it into an arrow. I think he knew long before the others that he and many other men from our region would be taken. That it would fall to the strongest of those left behind to defend the other women and children when the soldiers came.

  And he and the other men were taken and it was left to the rest of us to defend ourselves. And afterwards, after I came here and created this new life out of the dust and dirt of the old one, that invisible arrow was still held in my hand, still razor sharp but with nowhere to shoot it.

  I didn’t ask for this work. I didn’t want this work. But I’m very good at it. So no, I’m not nervous.

  ‘I don’t believe you.’ He sits down on the sofa opposite me and takes a long sip from his own glass. When he looks up, he has tears in his eyes.

  ‘You’re still lying to me, aren’t you?’

  Greg

  Wednesday, 3 June 2020

  The mice are back. Greg hears them at night when sleep eludes him, Marianne lying open-mouthed beside him, oblivious. They’ve fallen out about them already, their fast-breeding innocence allegories for things the husband and wife can’t handle. They seem to be falling out more, the usual harmony they’ve had for the last however many years has become a slippery thing.