by Jay Stringer
‘Nope,’ I said. ‘Told you, not interested. Swedish car.’
‘Personally, I thought it sounded a little vaginal.’ She gave me a knowing smile. ‘Why I liked it.’
‘I don’t need any help,’ I said.
Hanya fixed me with a look. The same one my brother had been giving me lately. ‘Hon, when was the last time you had a guy between your legs who doesn’t wear cargo shorts and spend all day on a bike? Someone who knows what a utility bill looks like?’
Crap. She had a point. Okay. Change the subject. I nodded at the victim. ‘What’s her name?’
That caught Hanya off guard. She was one of the best people I knew, but she’d been at the job long enough to develop a detachment to death and victims.
She looked again at the purse. Pulled out a driver’s licence. ‘Paula Lucas.’
Then her expression changed. That mixture of suspicion and curiosity that I saw in her whenever she knew I was up to something. I’d achieved three things. I’d changed the conversation away from my love life, and I’d put a name to the victim. But I’d also got Hanya wondering just why I was at the scene.
Hanya’s attention was taken away again when the paramedics stopped working. They were climbing to their feet and packing away their equipment. The motionless body at their feet was now officially a corpse. One of the paramedics nodded at Hanya, and she returned the gesture with a heavy sigh.
We both stood in silence for a long few seconds. There’s a difference between seeing a dead body, and witnessing someone die. A body is just a thing, it’s an empty vessel. It can be creepy to find one, and deeply upsetting if you knew the person, but ultimately there’s a numbness to it, an emptiness. But seeing someone die is different. It’s a moment in time, and it brings a sense of responsibility with it to pay respect to what has just slipped by.
‘Well,’ Hanya turned back to me, ‘I’m on the clock now. I’m going to be sending uniforms out canvassing for witnesses. I get the feeling someone might mention seeing a woman on a bike?’
I was already pushing my way back toward the crowd, getting out of the way so they could all get to work. ‘Bikes are getting more common in the city,’ I said.
The sensible thing to do was to just come clean and hand over the package there and then. I’d done nothing wrong, and a quick statement to the police would let me walk away from it. But I’m the queen of stupid decisions. I blame my father. Jim Ireland had been both a cop and a private eye in this city, and he had a way of needling authority, a trait he’d passed on to me. The other thing we had in common was that we both hated a mystery, and needed to solve it.
Paula Lucas had trusted me with something. She’d known who I was, and sought me out. It was the last thing she ever did. That didn’t sit right with me.
I wanted to know what she’d died for.
I cycled down Argyle Street for a few blocks, putting distance between me and the cops, and pulled into an alleyway called New Wynd.
Great name, right?
I pulled the package out of my bag and used my keys to cut through the tape holding the flap closed at the end. I pulled it open, and looked at the contents.
What the hell?
ELEVEN
FERGUS
16:00
‘So, you want me to kill you?’
‘No, I want you to pretend to kill me.’
I’ve spoken to a lot of idiots in my time. Comes with the territory. When you kill people for money, one way or another you end up talking to bampots.
There tend to be two main groups:
People who haven’t thought it through, and will back out.
Guys who’ve seen too many movies and think it’s cool to meet a hit man.
But I’ve never heard anything quite like this. I take a look around the bar, trying to spot if any of my mates are here. This could be a wind-up, with any one of them waiting to jump out and laugh. Except that would entail me having friends.
This isn’t a very sociable profession.
I lean in over my pint glass. ‘Is this a joke?’
‘No.’ The guy looks hurt. The only thing worse than an idiot trying to trick you is an idiot telling the truth. ‘No, I’m serious. I want to hire you to kill me, but I don’t want you to actually kill me. I want to fake my death.’
His name is Alex Pennan. I’ve done my research. He works for MHW, a financial firm, managing investments and savings for a whole bunch of famous people. They also launder money for some pretty serious criminal organisations.
How do I know this?
Who do you think these organisations hire to deal with their enemies?
But I’ve never dealt with Pennan directly, and I don’t know how he got my details. Until I do, I’m playing it dumb.
‘If you don’t want anybody to die,’ I say, ‘why hire a hit man?’
Alex looks around, laughs nervously, makes eye contact with a few people at nearby tables, and then turns back to me. ‘Must you say that so loud?’
‘What? Hit man? We’re in a bar, nobody cares.’
It’s true.
I do all of my meetings in pubs and bars. The busier the better. People in bars talk all manner of rubbish, and nobody ever pays any attention.
If you’re going to have conversations about killing people, whether it’s professionally or if you’re preserving your amateur status for the Olympics, the best place to do it is in a crowded drinking establishment. And this place is one of the finest in Glasgow. A microbrewery on the edge of Glasgow Green, all dark wood and lots of beers.
Alex gives me an odd look. ‘But you’re okay talking about . . .’
Holy shit.
I get it. He’s not worrying about secrecy. He’s asking if I’m ashamed to talk about what I do for a living.
What a dick.
‘Look,’ I say. ‘Some people take pride in unblocking drains. You’ve made a career out of whatever it is you do. I work for a living, and I’m not ashamed of it.’ I stand up to leave. Forget this rubbish. Take it from me, the first time you kill someone, you realise you don’t need to suffer fools gladly. ‘Thanks for the drink.’
‘Wait. Wait. I didn’t mean anything by that.’ Alex stands after me. His chair scrapes across the wooden floor.
I didn’t mean anything by that. That’s as close as these people come to saying ‘sorry’. They can’t actually do apologies, because that makes them sound humble, takes them down a peg.
Now people are paying attention. The bouncer by the door, the other one at the back of the room who was doing a slow circuit of the room. The staff. They’re all seeing two men stood up, one apologising. That puts us on a watch list. We’re on borrowed time.
I wave the guy back down, in a way that shows I’m going to give him a second chance. It’s rubbish, of course. But there’s no point creating a scene. I can give him another couple of minutes.
I nod at him. Like, Humour me. ‘Go on?’
Pennan’s nervous. There’s sweat on his forehead, and he keeps rubbing at his hands, like they’re damp. There’s laughter in his words, and I reckon this is the first time he’s talked about his master plan out loud.
‘See,’ he says. ‘I need everyone to think I’m dead, and I need it to look real. I don’t want any doubts. In fact, I want it so that a medical examiner could look into the matter and declare me legally dead. Case closed.’
His plan was possible up until that last part.
‘Can’t be done,’ I say. ‘Doctors tend to know what they’re doing. You know that, right? You’d need a body, and they’re expensive. Really expensive. You’re competing with the black market for organs, and each one is worth thousands.’
‘Well, I figured you’d probably have a way of getting a fresh body. Being a—’ He pauses, leans in, and whispers the words, ‘hit man’.
Right, okay. He’s not just wanting me to fake his death, he’s wanting me to kill someone else to replace him. It’s a bad idea. In fact, it’s such a bad idea that I’m almost
interested.
I start to turn my empty glass around on the table, but stop. I don’t want to risk him buying me another drink. ‘Okay, but over and above that, any decent medical exam would show up that it’s not you on the slab. Even if we figured out a way to fool people’s eyes, get someone identical to you, we can’t cheat dental records, DNA, fingerprints.’
Shit. I’m putting too much thought into this.
‘No.’ His words are stronger. Now that he’s got over the initial nerves, he’s confident, and wants to sell his idea. ‘You’d figure it out, do it right, because you’re a pro. But don’t tell me the details, I don’t want to know it’s coming.’
‘Is this meeting here not a bit of a tip off?’
‘What I’m meaning is I don’t want to know the specifics. If I do it myself, or if I’m too heavily involved, there would be a trail. A cop or the, ah, anybody else, might notice. They could figure it out.’ The anybody else is interesting. It’s not the cops he wants to kid. There’s a scam he’s playing. ‘If you do it, and you don’t tell me when or where or how, then it looks real. There’s no trail leading back to me.’
‘Alex, have you stolen from the mob?’
He shoots back in the chair, almost taking it off the floor. His act is good. When his mouth says, ‘No, what are you talking about?’ I almost believe him. Almost. But I’ve killed too many scammers to fall for lies and bullshit.
If there’s one thing I can do well, it’s read people.
He almost had me. This job sounds like a fun challenge. But my career is in a bad spot, and the last thing I need right now is to get mixed up in a con job between Alex Pennan and all of the scariest people in town.
That’s a fight he can take on for himself.
I stand up to leave. ‘Thanks for your time.’
On the way out the door, I feel a phone buzzing in my pocket. I pull it out. It’s the one I picked up back at Martin Mitchell’s place. I forgot to dump it, and now it has my prints all over it.
I stare at the number.
Same one Dominic Porter dialled.
Shit.
TWELVE
FERGUS
17:20
Back home, I change into a T-shirt and comfortable blue jeans. I never plan on dressing to look like a hit man when I’m on the job, but somehow it always ends up that way.
I keep staring at my phone, waiting for Joe Pepper’s number to come up. The job didn’t go according to plan, and he’s got to be pissed off about that. Technically I’ve done what he paid me for, so I’m not going to go chasing after his approval, but I also did way more, and he won’t be happy about it. In the meantime, I’ll get on with something more important.
Women.
I’ve tried so many different ways of meeting the right person. I assumed for years that the first step was to pretend I’m not a hit man. It’s funny. As a kid, it was always about trying to seem more grown up and edgy than I really was. I was a working-class kid, of raging lefty parents, with a comfortable home and no horror stories. Just about anything else is more interesting than that. But then I joined the military, and became a spook for a while, and I don’t need to pretend to have any extra darkness. I’d rather make people laugh, so it became about pretending to be anything other than edgy. I’d claim just about anything else, as long as I could do it in a way that got a laugh.
I’m an insurance salesman. Not a very good one.
You know the plastic bits on the ends of shoelaces? That’s me.
I’m professionally interested in Sweden.
There’s no greater drug than making a woman laugh. See, getting a smile, that’s fun. Raising it to a chuckle, or a snicker, that’s great. Getting a lassie to actually belly laugh? Getting her to struggle for breath, slap her knees, or lean back to belt out the kind of laugh that she usually keeps hidden? That’s the fucking boner, right there.
Guys get jealous of a lot of things. We get insecure about our dick size. We get worried being around men who are more attractive than us (we always know). We hate seeing men who are sexier than us (and we definitely know about that one). But the number one thing that men get jealous about?
Seeing a fella who makes a woman laugh more than we can.
We will hate that guy.
But it’s also a trap. If I try really hard, if I bring my A game, I can get a real laugh. But then, that’s expected all the time. I’ve got maybe three good jokes a year in me. So it works, but I have to pretend to be someone else to pull it off, and it’s exhausting.
I tried something new when I was living in New York. Telling the truth. What the hell, right? Might as well give it a go. I’d be in a bar, I’d be chatting to a woman who looked like fun, and I’d just come clean:
I’m a hit man.
This gun’s for hire.
I’ll kill anyone, for enough money.
Well, not anyone, I do have a few rules.
They loved it. I was getting so much sex. But I was still pretending to be something else, even though I was being honest, because it wasn’t really me they were fucking. It was some myth, some movie that they had in their heads. It wasn’t a route to building any kind of lasting relationship.
Truth is, I just want to be myself.
And I’m not a bad guy, if we overlook the fact that I am a bad guy.
But I’ve never figured out how to be myself and meet women. Or how to go to places where being myself would let me meet women. It seems like that would be a very niche place to find.
So I’ve turned to the internet. The home of niches.
Trouble is, it’s full of liars. People on there are experts in cheating the camera. Shooting from the best angle (I’m going to resist the chance to make an obvious joke here) and in black and white. Or pulling just the right facial expression to make you look both witty and skinny at the same time. Raised eyebrows, cocked mouths, jaunty glasses, whatever.
And then there are the people who have no intention of meeting you. They want to have the whole relationship online, telling me they love me without ever actually knowing if we’d get on.
They scare me. And I’m not someone who scares easily.
I’d given up, but my sister, Zoe, found a new site and signed me up. vLove.co.uk. I said it sounded vaginal, but Zoe insisted. Most people use it through a phone app, but I have to be careful about what I load onto my phone. I use the full website version from my computer.
Nice and easy. We all load up videos. As many videos as we want, and on any subject, as long as there’s no nudity or porn. Then we can scroll through. See if there’s anybody we like.
I load up the newest set of videos and press play on the first one. The picture forms digitally on the screen in front of me, taking a second to focus, probably from a cheap camera phone.
Title card. Name.
Jane.
Strong features, make up, styled hair. No twinkle in the eyes.
‘Hi, I’m Jane, I’m 30 . . .’
I click a red button on the left of the screen. Another video pops up.
Title card. Name.
Sam.
Cute looking girl. Embarrassed smile. Her eyes flit between the camera and whoever is holding it, and the subtext is easy: she’s been put up to this. I know the feeling.
‘Hi. My name’s . . . Okay, I’m Sam.’
I’m not listening. I’m watching. She speaks for a second, then stops, and smiles. She’s uncomfortable on the camera, but looks comfortable in her own skin. She’s not posing. Not afraid of looking like herself.
In that second, while she’s not even trying to be anything special on camera, I see exactly what I’m looking for.
Hello, Sam.
This could work.
PART TWO
June 6th
‘Jeezo, a girl uncovers one massive conspiracy, and suddenly she’s Jim Rockford.’
—Phil
THIRTEEN
ALEX
17:00
Alex had always known he was working for
criminals. McGoran, Hornor & Wendig clearly handled dirty money. He just didn’t know whose money it was.
Sure, the company had legitimate clients. Footballers from both Old Firm teams, a few from the English Premier League. There were actors, musicians, even a couple members of the royal family.
For clients like these, his job was simple.
Investments.
Hedge funds.
Future planning.
Whichever way it was written down, and whatever adjustments were made to his job description, Alex knew he was there to help people cheat on their taxes. And he was fine with that. He paid an accountant a lot of money to do exactly the same for him. Alex hadn’t paid more than five per cent tax in a decade.
But when he moved to Glasgow, he found something else going on. Money that didn’t appear on the books. Companies that shouldn’t have been profitable. Investments that didn’t make sense. Clients would put money into companies that were doomed to fail, and take money out of ones that were just taking off. These decisions seemed so bloody random, until he stepped back and saw the pattern. Alex had always been in the business of making money vanish, of using loopholes and paperwork to let people hide assets away. Once he started working for MHW, he was in the business of making money reappear. Money that shouldn’t have been there. In his first year with the firm, they supplied money to help prop up a Greek bank, and none of it had existed on paper before the bailout.
What Alex did next was the most sensible thing in the world.
He started to steal from the mob.
Or maybe not the mob. From whoever. Drug lords, the Russians, terrorists. Does it matter who you steal from, when the money doesn’t exist?
It was his own little act of revenge. Something to get one over on the bosses. He hadn’t wanted this job, or this life, or this shitty city. He didn’t like Glasgow. He didn’t like the people, and they didn’t like him. He didn’t understand the football, or the accents. He didn’t like the drivers. They only had two speeds: road rage and stop.