“Out of character?”
I shut up, suddenly realising why none of the confusion or fear I’d seen before was there. Becky’s face now told a different story.
Oh my God. Emma must have…
“She told me everything,” Becky went on, sun-squinting again. “She said she thought I had a right to know why she… did what she did with Sajjan. Why the two of you do the things you do. She said she needed me to know that she did it for a reason. Not sure if that makes it better or worse, but anyway, she wanted me to know the whole story. About what her and you do.
“Relationship assassin,” she said, rolling the syllables around her tongue as if practising a new language. Hearing the words in her voice felt not just wrong, but somehow final. Like she’d worked out an answer to a riddle. Or like Clark Kent taking off his glasses in front of Lois Lane. Can’t go back. Game over.
“Sounds kind of cool when you call it that,” she smiled. “I suppose that’s the point. Helps make you think you’re doing something cool.”
I hung my head. Yes. That was precisely the point.
“It’s pretty hard to believe. That all that time, when you and me were together, I was going out with an actor.”
“It wasn’t an act,” I said quickly. “Not all of it. I mean, at the beginning it was just, you know, a job, but… it wasn’t all an act, I swear. Not once I got to know you and – ”
“I know.”
“I mean it, honestly, it wasn’t – ”
“I know, John.”
We stood there for a while, just looking at each other.
“Did you enjoy it?” she asked. “Being John?”
“Loved it.” I added: “Still do.”
She bit her lip, scanning my face, and again my pulse jumped. If there was even the slightest chance…
“Such a weird life.” She shook her head. “I can’t imagine how you can do all that stuff. I mean, I can see how you might enjoy getting to sleep with all those women… although it can’t be much fun if you don’t fancy them.” She looked at me. “Unless you just don’t care and you can do it with anyone.”
This was the last thing I wanted to admit. “It’s pretty rare I do fancy them, actually. But when I do…” I grinned John’s dirty, cheeky grin.
“Three times a night?”
“Four if it’s a Friday.”
She got that reference to our first night together, blushing slightly and turning her smile away. Message received: she hadn’t been just another target. You can’t fake that much passion.
Suddenly I wanted that back. All of it.
“Becky look, I… I want to apologise as well. For what I did, and for breaking up you and Sajjan. I thought Sajjan was the one paying me to date you, so he’d have a reason to dump you. If I’d known that you and him were still okay, I’d never have got involved, I swear, I’ve got Rules that I follow, I don’t do this just for the sake of it…”
Becky nodded, counting off on her fingers: “Never kill a relationship that isn’t already dead. Never work for a third party. Don’t disrupt the target’s life unnecessarily. Walk away the instant the job’s done… were there any more?”
Whatever was written all over my face at that moment made Becky burst out laughing. “It’s all right, I’m not a mind-reader, Emma explained them all to me.”
I was stunned. Emma really had told her everything!
“She said she used to think your Rules were bloody stupid, you know. That it was ridiculous, trying to be all nicey-nicey when the whole point of your job is to split couples up. But then she said what happened last week made her change her mind. That maybe you knew what you were doing after all.”
“She said that? Really?”
“Yeah. Said she was thinking of adopting your Rules for herself.”
“She did?”
“Some super-cool assassins you two are,” Becky smirked. “You’re not meant to care, you know, you’re just meant to take the money! You freaks!”
And I laughed, hard, making her join in. She was dead right. What a pair of freaks!
This hadn’t turned out the way I’d expected at all. I thought I’d have to keep the helmet on, to protect my face against her devastating right hook. But Emma had done me the biggest favour ever, by going to see her first. She’d taken the brunt of Becky’s anger and dealt with it, allowing us to stand there face to face and just talk. No tears, no abuse, no asking how I could live my whole life as a lie, pretending to be people I wasn’t, you lying, cheating, Judas bastard… none of the things I’d been terrified to hear. The alchemy of woman-to-woman honesty had transformed all that into something else. Acceptance. And, perhaps, a chance.
I swallowed. “So, er, now that you know what happened… d’you think you and Sajjan might…?”
“No.”
“No?” I tried not to make it sound like Good!
“I don’t blame him any more. I can’t see how any guy could resist Emma, to be honest, not once she’s got her sights set on him. She’d have had him sooner or later, I suspect. But you know, I kind of got over him really quickly, which surprised me.” She looked up at John. “I fell for you bloody fast, didn’t I? It was ridiculous, really, I rebounded like a… whassname… what were those things kids used to have, in the Seventies, those rubber things you bounced around on, two handles like this…?”
“Space Hoppers.”
“I rebounded like a Space Hopper.”
“They’re fun to bounce on.”
“Aren’t they just. So, no, I’m not going back to Sajjan. I did love him but… I’m not ready to tie the knot yet. I kind of know myself a bit better now. You know what I mean? When you kind of figure out who you are?”
“Yes,” I said with feeling.
“I know the kind of guy I like now.”
John and Becky looked at each other again, a few feet apart. Goosebumps.
Bzzt. Crackle.
“Um, while I remember…” I unzipped a pocket on my leather jacket, pulled out her mobile phone. Although I’d had it for days, only then did it occur to me that it was full of pictures of the two of us. Of John opening the front door, standing in the shower, walking in wearing a towel, asleep in bed with his gob open. Of Becky perched on my kitchen worksurface, trying to hide under the bedsheets, shoving a teaspoon up her nose, her bum as she bent down for the remote control. Of our heads side by side, pulling stupid faces into the camera. Our little affair, captured inside the Ericsson like a bubble in amber. “For you.”
“Special delivery?” smiled Becky, as if she was still on reception and I’d just come clumping in like a regular courier.
“Yeah. You don’t have to sign for this one.”
I felt her fingers through my biker gloves as she took it off me, then switched it on. There was a lopsided smirk on her face. I knew that look. She was up to something.
“I’ve got a present for you as well,” she said. And she handed the phone right back to me.
“Open it. Go to the pictures folder.”
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.
&
nbsp; 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.
Chapter 23
Mister Ex
“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?”
Bang: Memoirs of a Relationship Assassin Page 29