Chapter 63
There weren’t any messages between Mala Choudhary and her bosses on her phone.
There weren’t any messages between Mala and Seph Atkins either.
There were a couple of photos of Mala’s cat. A lot of her children. Theo was surprised. He hadn’t imagined she had kids or could spend so much time pressing them to her glowing cheeks, bursting with pride and excitement as she hugged them close. He hadn’t imagined Mala Choudhary was capable of feeling much of anything in particular.
There was an online banking app on Mala’s phone.
Corn flicked through its transaction history, a photo of Mala’s credit cards in his other hand. At last he said, “This will be enough. I can get a guy.”
“No,” replied Theo. “It has to be Seph Atkins.”
“That’s not gonna be easy.”
“It needs to be her.”
“Why?” When Theo didn’t answer, Corn half-turned from where he’d sprawled, feet up on the kitchen table, chair rocking back on the edge of tipping, to examine the auditor’s face. “I don’t need your shit. First sign of shit, her maj said, do him. Protect the patties, that’s what she said. Just do him.”
“Atkins killed my friend.”
A half-shrug. Corn has lost plenty of friends, and it hasn’t got to him. He’s just fine.
“Atkins killed the mother of my child.”
A slightly less emphatic half-shrug. Okay, so Corn’s never had that shit go down, that’s heavy yeah, but still, all the more reason not to bring your personal crap into this.
Theo’s shoulders rolled forward, head down. “If… if it’s possible. It would be… it would be better that way. I would like to try.”
Corn stared into the distance for a moment, face empty, then nodded at nothing much and muttered, “We’ll see.”
Three days later Seph Atkins’ phone rang.
This was unexpected and unwelcome.
She hadn’t given this number to more than a couple of people, and they should know that she was in Cornwall, having a little me-time. She peeled slices of cucumber off her eyes, wriggled her fingers, wriggled her toes, marvelled at how, after barely an hour of luxurious nothing, they felt like different limbs, someone else’s body. She was putting on weight, she knew it. Could feel things pressing against her belly which hadn’t pressed before. She should eat less, but she really liked flavours. She didn’t like her bum. She felt it was pear-shaped, but that wasn’t a lifestyle thing, it was just…
Her phone stopped ringing.
Seph Atkins stared up at the cream-coloured ceiling as wooden flutes trilled earthy calm from the speakers behind her head, and waited for it to ring again.
It did.
She let it ring out.
On the third attempt she answered, having worked through the worst of her annoyance on call two.
“Yeah?”
“Ms. Atkins?”
“Yeah?”
“Ms. Atkins, I wish to hire your services.”
“I’m on holiday.”
“I’ve been reading your file.”
“I don’t have a file.”
“A colleague at Faircloud Associates was kind enough to help me,” the voice replied politely, an old voice, female, someone rich perhaps, a woman who knew what she wanted and wasn’t used to hearing no. “You come highly recommended.”
“I don’t work with people I don’t know. Bye.”
She hung up, lay back and put some fresh cucumber over her now exasperated, weary eyes.
Twenty minutes later her phone beeped.
She ignored it, until at last thirst and an empty flask of icy water by her side provoked reluctant action. She grunted as nose flutes snuffled their way to a tuneless conclusion, white towels tumbled around her body, and checked her phone.
A bank transfer had been made in her favour, to the tune of ten thousand pounds.
She phoned her guy, the guy who was good at this shit, the guy who’d got into the databases for fun, not even for cash, and had him back-trace the transfer just to check what she already knew.
The funds had come from Mala Choudhary.
Her phone rang again. “Ms. Atkins,” said the same wealthy, old voice. “Is now a convenient time to talk?”
Chapter 64
Later, Seph Atkins would admit that she was driven by greed.
She’d not got into the killing business because she liked committing murder. Indeed, she found the actual homicide part of her job frequently boring and often disappointingly mundane. The tears, gurgling, wheedling, begging, the endless litany of bargains and pathetic offers made by the dying and the soon-to-be-dead as they failed to expire neatly with a single bullet, all of it dispelled any real sense that humanity was special, or more than just a fleshy, crawling animal.
And the parochial motives given for her contracts—“They looked at me funny” or “I just know he’s gonna do me” or money—always money—left Seph Atkins feeling fairly convinced that the vast majority of mankind was either stupid, cowardly or self-obsessed to the point of myopia.
Seph loved money, of course. But too many of her clients thought of nothing else. They wanted money not because they had a good idea for what to do with it—a thrilling investment or the adventure of a lifetime—but because it, itself, was their goal, rather than a means to something more exciting. She liked money because the lifestyle it purchased her was indeed according to her desires and expectations. If the glossy mags and glitzy journos hadn’t bridled at the thought of celebrating an assassin, she would have been all across the spreads and the mid-afternoon lifestyle programmes. From her weeks at the spa to her love of ska and Mozart, her polished skin and extensive holidays through the best of Renaissance Italy or the finest ski slopes of the Alps, she was indeed a woman to envy.
She spent a lot of time dealing with the law, of course. But it was so much cheaper and easier to confess at once and have an indemnity taken out against her crimes than it was to go on the run that she regarded the process of arrest and bail as merely part of her professional labours. Sometimes she was hired to be the invisible bullet, the killer who could never be found, but in cases such as the Cumali job, where the indemnity was never going to be more than £90K for the patty slut, it was simplest to just phone the cops and save everyone a lot of bother.
She should not have taken the job.
She didn’t know her contact, but the transfer of funds directly from Mala Choudhary’s account was enough to pay for next month’s scuba diving, and the details when they came through seemed plausible.
So it was that Seph Atkins went to the races.
Chapter 65
Helen sits alone as the sun goes down, and reads the names of the dead.
The ones who’d died on the patty line
the ones who’d died waiting for a lawyer who never came
the ones who died in the hospitals, their corpses returned to their homes so the doctors could say they died in their beds, not under the Company’s care
the names of the children
the parents
the ones gunned down for running away
And no one listened.
And no one cared.
And it was shut down before it could cause a scandal.
And she kept reading anyway, because her son had done this thing. He hadn’t fired the gun or dug the pit, but he had done enough.
He had played his part, and she had made him and so
She read the names of the dead.
And there were so many, the names running one into another, that she didn’t realise she’d said Dani’s name until at least six or seven names later. For a moment it seems to her, as she stumbles, that time is…