I kept going, hugging the wall, dragging myself up inch by inch. At least nobody could see me toying with death. I’d made sure the building was deserted, all the black-iron printing machines on the ground floor still silent, the upper windows all dark. And that part of Hackney’s radioactive wasteland hardly got any visitors during the day, let alone that time of night.
Still, I made the numbnuts mistake of glancing down to check.
“Oh God…” The street span beneath me. You know those vertigo nightmares? The ones where you yank yourself out of sleep just as your dream-self goes tumbling over the edge? Felt just like that. The pavement was miles below. Nothing but a massive amount of open, empty air between me and the ground.
I closed my eyes for a minute, feeling sick.
“Come on you dickhead, just do it!”
Funny. I hadn’t realised how much I talk to myself when I’m doing something stupid.
I crawled upwards, slow and awkward. My fingers closed on a second-floor window ledge. At the window’s centre was a large jagged gap, cardboarded up from inside. I couldn’t remember how big the hole in Barry’s window was, the one that I’d made when I chucked the Samantha Fox ashtray at him. Big enough to climb through? Not quite, I now saw for myself. But there was no going back now.
Queasy moment when I took one hand off the drainpipe to punch the cardboard aside. But then the adrenalin really kicked in and I was dragging myself up to the ledge and cracking glass off with my elbow. Just enough to reach through, grab the inside of the window frame and heave myself in. Cut my hands, arms and shoulders to ribbons doing it, but there was no stopping me by that point. I rolled through and collapsed onto the worn carpet of Barry’s office. Gasping like a fish on the boat deck.
I lay in the dark for a minute, then brushed off all the glass splinters, got up and switched the lights on. My t-shirt was smeared with dirt, ripped and bloody in several places. I examined my bleeding hands and arms. Great. More scars.
Shouldn’t complain. Scars were nothing. By that point in the day, I’d expected to be residing in the ‘Shit, Kicked Out Of’ ward.
Jake had been waiting for me.
Yesterday morning, I rode like a demon from Asquith and Bream’s offices to his council estate. Should have seen his face – eyes like saucers, staring at the gleaming new Honda. Before the bike had come to a stop, I opened my mouth and puked the story at him:
“…it was the sound of the engine that woke me up, I came running down and saw the two of them, they had bolt cutters, got through the chain and were making off with it, I pulled one bloke off it and started sorting him out, reckon I broke a few teeth but the other hit me with the bolt cutters, that’s why my face looks like this, then they just kicked the crap out of me while I was on the ground, tried to get up and stop ‘em but just nothing I could do, last I saw they made off with the bike and that was that, couldn’t even move let alone chase after them, anyway no excuse, I promised to look after it so that’s what I’ve done, I mean your bike’s gone but I’ve got this one instead, same make, this year’s model, all bought and paid for, the gear and helmet as well, it’s all yours mate, least I could do, just wish I could have got my hands on those bastards but there were two of them and they caught me by surprise, anyway, this one’s all yours so um… well that’s about it really, I’m sorry about what happened but…”
Cool as a cucumber, me.
You’d have been bricking it too, if you’d seen Jake’s mad eyes, drinking in the bike. How could I ever have gone down the pub with this guy and not realised how scary he was? The dragon tattoo on the side of his neck seemed alive, jumping as his pulse throbbed.
He stared at the bike. Then at my face (still bruised and scarred on one side, thanks Emma). Back at the bike. Face. Bike. Face.
Then he waded into me and started beating me up.
It was a good five seconds before I realised that the pounding blow to my spine was actually nothing more than Jake slapping my back. And he wasn’t baring his teeth. That was a grin. Absolutely hideous, but still a grin.
“Mate!” he said. “Darren was right about you! Fuck me, he said you was a top geezer and he was right! You fucker, mate!” he added – again, took a second to realise this was Jake’s highest accolade. “You absolute fucker!”
Phew.
I had to stand there and smile (God my back hurt) while Jake went on and on about what an amazing bloke I was for actually buying him a new bike. I could tell, though, that what really impressed him was my story about taking on two men with my bare fists. The scars across my face were worth a thousand words, as I’d hoped. Nothing Jake valued more than a man dishing out GBH on his behalf.
I should have been relieved and happy, as I got the bus home. (Slow, hot, crowded, lurching about like a tractor… damn, I was missing the bike already.) But I just felt bitter about the whole thing. And talk about expense! The new bike, helmet and leathers had come to well over seven grand. Good thing I’d had the money, sitting there in my account for all of five minutes. Credited to me that day by Londonwide Associates.
Every single penny of my fee for the Hargreaves case… gone. I hadn’t earned a thing. Nothing to show for it but scars.
And now some nice new ones. Sucking my cut fingers, I sat in Barry’s swivel chair (which felt weird – not just because the seat was indented by the slabs of his buttocks, but because it felt like trespassing, more so than breaking in through his window) and opened the desk drawer. Quick rummage through papers and pens and Scotch eggs. There it was, the manila envelope he’d chucked in there last time I saw him.
Just like the one on Becky’s reception desk.
I tipped out the photographs. About two dozen 8 x 6 glossies. They were the last things in the world I wanted to look at. But I had to make sure.
There she was. Talking to Sajjan in a corridor, clutching books like a student.
There she was. In a coffee bar with him, smiling, hands gesturing.
There she was. Sitting opposite Sajjan in the Glasshouse restaurant, holding her spoon across the table to his mouth.
There she was. On tiptoe outside Sajjan’s flat, kissing him. And then again, through the living room windows, astride Sajjan on his sofa, both completely naked.
There she was. The female me.
“Christ…” I couldn’t believe those last few pictures. Wasn’t sure whether to throw up or get a hard on. The glimpses of Emma’s nude body were incredible, as were the things she was doing to Sajjan, who from the look on his face couldn’t believe it was really happening to him… but I felt dirty. Seeing two people have sex via telephoto lens made me feel like a right perv.
Or maybe it was watching another relationship assassin at work that really turned my stomach. Look at her, doing the business on Sajjan. Flirting, laughing, eye contact. She played him along like a puppy. He never stood a chance.
Oh and top marks, Emma, shagging the target in the living room with the lights on and the curtains open. Making sure the detective got a clear view of you at work. Yes, that’s a nice touch, throwing your head back as you ride him, hair flying loose like a shampoo advert. Well planned, Emma. Very professional.
“She did a damn good job,” Barry had said. “Er, for a beginner.”
Beginner, my arse.
I stuffed the photos back into the envelope, careful not to get bloody fingerprints on them. They’d be with Becky first thing tomorrow morning. Hand-delivered by courier. A courier on a shiny new motorbike. Jake had already said he’d be happy to do it for a top bloke like me.
I knew the effect these pictures would have on Becky. I knew they’d make her cry. I knew that she’d feel like throwing up even more than I did right then. I knew the whole thing was seedy and dirty and wrong. I knew all that. But I didn’t have a clue what else to do. I’d wracked my brains for the past day and half, trying to come up with some way of making it better for Becky… this was the only idea I’d had.
Hopefully, she’d realise that these pictures were her way
of levelling the playing field. Knock Sajjan down off the moral high ground. While she was having a fling with a courier, her fiancé was getting his rocks off with a ‘psychology student’. He was just as much a cheating scumbag as…
Well, as she was.
Might help. Might make things worse. I didn’t know. But I had to do something. And a quick shimmy up the drainpipe to break into my agent’s office was a small price to pay. It was my goodbye present to her.
And yes, I do remember my Rules, thanks very much! I know I’d sworn never to do this again. Rule Four was there for a reason. But I couldn’t just walk away like that, leaving Becky crying.
Even though she’d said she was sick of the sight of me… I just couldn’t leave it.
I stood up to go. But those images of Emma at work, Emma on the job, set my mind ticking. Barry had told me a little about how he’d hired her, what his plans were. But only after I’d discovered the truth for myself, when he had no choice, otherwise I probably still wouldn’t know.
What else hadn’t he told me? How much more was there to Emma?
I looked around his office. Were the answers here?
There was no point firing up Barry’s computer. I knew that he’d asked Q to install special security programs onto it. Try to hack in? Don’t make me laugh. Instead I ripped open each of the desk drawers, rummaged through them, sprang up and went round the office, looking for something… I wasn’t sure what. I was on a mission, a different kind of mission. Call it reconnaissance. Call it industrial espionage. I needed to find out more about Emma. I had to get rid of her. I had to eliminate the Mark II before Barry decided he didn’t need the Mark I anymore. And to do that, I needed information. I needed to find out as much about that blonde bitch as I could.
Know your enemy.
I got to the dented old filing cabinet, yanked open the top drawer and went through the folders. I snatched quick looks at everything, looking for something with Emma’s name on it. Or maybe something from her old agency, VenusVisions, giving me some dirt about her past. But all I found were official documents, invoices, bank statements, Barry’s usual… hang on.
Infidelity Ltd Business Plan 2010 – 2012.
I stopped. Read it again. A three year business plan? Was Barry for real? I didn’t know what I was doing three days from now, let alone three years! I opened the spiral-bound document, skimming through it. All properly printed and laid out, very professional.
It was all about me.
“The core component of our service menu is centred around Personal Relationship Intervention (PRI). PRI activity has a wide variety of configurations but is typically focused on the direct interaction with a client’s extant personal relationship, without the foreknowledge of the secondary component of said relationship … what the hell!”
I laughed. This was me! This was what I did! I flipped through the pages, spotting my own name.
“…Scott Rowley, as a primary exemplar of the PRI-based strategy. This period can be considered something of a pilot scheme in the sense that the central tenets of PRI have already been implemented and tested by the exemplar…”
This was crazy! Barry was writing about me, but it might have been about an international corporation or something. So I’m an exemplar, am I, Barry? What’s that when it’s at home!
Turning the page, I found a large table of data. Names. Dates. Man-hours. Gross earnings. It was a selection of my past cases over five years. The footnotes made it clear this wasn’t all of them, just the fifty highest-earning cases.
Jesus, fifty! I hadn’t realised there’d even been that many. Reading down the column of names was a bit of a shock. I’d forgotten most of them. Each one leapt off the page, dragging memories behind them.
Mrs Judd. Frizzy perm, bad skin, Dame Edna glasses, married to a lottery winner.
Mrs O’Neill, the vicar’s wife. Grazing our elbows in the confession booth.
Mrs Trussler. Breath like eggy farts.
Ms Chilcote. Sweet girl, but desperate for her goody-goody boyfriend to dump her. Paraded me in front of the poor sod for weeks till the penny dropped.
Ms Green. All piercings and tattoos. So many rings and studs in her that it felt like Christmas every time we shagged. Jingle all the way!
Mrs Buchanan. Editor at a publishing company. I’d had fun with that one, pretending to be a flamboyant young writer, exciting her with my energetic ideas. Let’s get those creative juices flowing, she used to say.
Too many memories.
The table was pretty up to date. The bottom row had all the details for the Bentley-Foster case, which was only a couple of weeks ago. No mention of the Hargreaves case, though. Too recent. Or maybe not worth including. Small beer.
I was leaving grimy fingerprints on the pages, and specks of blood from the cuts on my hands. But I kept going, shaking my head and muttering to myself. To read about my life like it was some kind of project… I noticed that phrase in the text again, ‘pilot scheme’. What the hell did that mean? Pilot scheme for what?
And ‘shareholders’! I started to realise this wasn’t just a fantasy business case by a washed-up old ex-detective who couldn’t cut it. It was a proposal document. Barry was trying to get other businesses to invest in his poxy little one-man company!
If you could have heard me, though, you might have noticed my laughter getting a bit strained. Because the more I read, the more uneasy I got. I flipped on and found myself reading about the projected market for PRI activity.
“How much?!”
Barry had estimated the total annual value of what he called the ‘separation market’. It was an insane number. In the millions. He then justified it with a list of statistics. The divorce rate for married couples in the UK over the past twenty years, a graph like the north face of Everest. Infidelity stats, compiled from anonymous questionnaires, that made us look like a country of cheating scumbags. Data from detective agencies – including Global Investigations and Londonwide Associates – on cases that involved marriages or partners. He even mentioned the Japanese market, based on the success of my fellow breaker-uppers on the other side of the world, the wakaresaseya. This was fascinating stuff. I could imagine Barry drawing this together from his network of old colleagues.
Millions of pounds to be made, from getting involved in other people’s break-ups.
“Bollocks!” I said to the document. It had to be bollocks. Okay, I hadn’t done badly for myself over the past few years. But Barry was sugar-coating it for his potential investors. If there was really that much money to be made, I’d be rolling in it by now…
My fingers smeared blood across the numbers as I turned the page. Section 5: Expansion Timetable.
“Two operatives by end 3Q10?” Another me working for Barry by September. He was already ahead of schedule. Number two had hit the ground running. But then four in 4Q10… two more by the end of the year! That was crazy, where the hell was Barry going to find two more people like me? I didn’t grow on trees!
Maybe I did. The expansion plans were exponential. By the end of 2012, Infidelity Ltd would be employing no less than twenty-four operatives.
“Bloody hell…”
I leaned against the filing cabinet. Twenty-four relationship assassins. Twenty-four men and women, out there doing what I do. Twenty-four.
There was a paragraph on finances that I very nearly skipped. Glad I didn’t. Barry was projecting a gross income of nearly half a million pounds per annum by the end of 2012. About six per cent of the potential market. The financial model was due to have changed by that point, from a percentage-based approach to a more conventional system. Which meant that Barry’s twenty-four relationship assassins would all be on…
Salary.
Salary with a fucking pension plan.
I gripped the document tight. Blood soaked through the paper. I felt like I’d just been robbed. That hollow nausea when you walk into your home, see the wreckage and realise someone’s broken in. That they’ve been in yo
ur most private places and taken your things. They’ve taken pieces of you.
Scott Rowley the pilot scheme. Prototype. Exemplar. Sucker. Pawn.
“You’ve been using me, Barry.”
I’d been doing a lot of this, lately. Talking to myself. But I was aiming my voice at his empty chair. “How long you been planning this? Huh? Right from the beginning? Does it go back that far?”
Most of the time, my thoughts swerved like a drunk driver to avoid the Old Days. But now those memories came crashing into my head, bang, airbag, cracked glass. The beginning of me and Barry, five years ago.
The Old Days.
Subtitles: The Dodgiest Pub in East London, March 2005.
You could tell, from the second she walked in, that she didn’t belong there. She stank of money.
I watched her from the back of the pub, tucked away beside the cigarette machine. I didn’t belong there either. But I looked like I did. It looked like that smoky, foul-smelling, run-down dive was where I was born.
Who was I? Andy Holloway, twenty-four year old building site brickie. (This was before I started nicking names from the Seventies, so I’d just made him up. Sounded about right though. Names were important even in the Old Days.) You know him. You’ll have seen him on the high street, with a pack of scallies just like him, or a buxom, mini-skirted girl on his arm. Andy Holloway the lad. Pubber. Clubber. Scrapper. Shagger.
I dressed the part. White Adidas tracksuit bottoms with a double blue stripe. Trainers. Tight blue t-shirt. Dark hair cropped evenly to a number two. Earring. Sovereign rings. Blue contact lenses, contrasting sharply against my face. Fake tattoos up one arm and round both biceps. I was designer rough. Common as muck but sexy too – if you were into that sort of thing. If you were Mrs Raine.
I’d kind of based Andy on myself, back when I was a kid. Memories of hanging around the estate with all the other hoodie-wearing, tracksuited teenage boys. I had to really dredge up the memories because frankly I’d done my best to forget those days, from back before I learned how to reinvent myself. But I’d managed to remember the attitude I used to be full of. The cockiness. And most of all, the overwhelming hormonal urge to shag someone, anyone, anywhere, anytime. If I’m honest, there was a lot of Darren mixed in there as well, who hadn’t changed much since we were kids. I never mentioned this mission to him though, not sure whether he’d be offended or honoured by me nicking his swagger, his cheeky grin, his constant horniness.
Bang: Memoirs of a Relationship Assassin Page 13