It was the photograph he noticed first. A standard colour print, one corner bent. He’d been expecting a photograph, given the amount of money involved, given the secrecy, but he hadn’t thought about the face, what it might look like. Usually it didn’t matter. You treated it as a guideline. They gave you a name, some kind of visual reference. Parts of the body were mentioned too. Do the right hand, do the knees. Somehow this felt different, though. As he’d known it would. He was holding a picture of a girl who was in her early twenties. She had hazel eyes, the look in them direct but, at the same time, vague. Her bright-blonde hair fell below her shoulders, out of frame. One of her ears stuck out slightly. She didn’t look like anyone he had ever known. He could imagine meeting her on a street-corner. She would be lost. She would ask him for directions. When he had helped her, she would thank him, then turn away. And that would be the last he saw of her. He couldn’t imagine meeting a girl this pretty under any other circumstances. Certainly he would never have imagined circumstances like these. He put the photo down and picked up the money, a stack of twenties and fifties held compactly with a rubber band. He ran his thumb across the notes, but didn’t count them. Three thousand pounds. He turned to the two typed sheets of paper, which had been stapled together for his convenience. He skimmed neat rows of words, looking for a name. He found it halfway down the first page. GLADE SPENCER.
For the next two hours Barker watched TV, only getting up to fetch more beer. From time to time he thought of the barber’s shop — the red leather chairs, the mirrors with their bevelled edges. Propped in the window were pictures of men’s hairstyles from the seventies, at least fifteen years out of date. Above them, a faded notice that said Come In Please — We’re Open. He saw Harold Higgs sweeping the lino floor at closing-time, his shirtsleeves rolled, the skin on the points of his elbows thin and papery. Always gritting his teeth a little on account of the arthritis in his shoulder and his hip. Forty years in the business. Forty years. And still struggling to break even. But wasn’t he the same as Higgs when it came down to it? That afternoon he had seen himself through Lambert’s eyes. The man had recognised him — not personally, but as a type. Someone who’d do what was required. Who wouldn’t shrink from it. That was all he remembered about Lambert now, that moment of recognition. When he would rather have seen doubt. Was that the reason he had agreed to the meeting, even though all his instincts had advised against it? Had he secretly been hoping that he might look unlikely, that he would not be trusted with the job? In that version of events Lambert would never have parted with the envelope. Instead, he would simply have stood up and walked out, leaving Barker in the empty restaurant, humiliated, alone — yet, at the same time, redefined somehow, confirmed in his new identity. It hadn’t happened, though; Lambert hadn’t even hesitated. Barker remembered the strangely wistful smile that Lambert had directed at the tablecloth. Lambert had been waiting for him to realise the truth about himself. Barker’s fists clenched in his lap. Of course he could still say no. He could hand the envelope back. But then, at some point in the future, somebody would come for him with a broken beer glass or a Stanley knife or whatever they were using now, and afterwards, when he was discovered on the floor of a public toilet, or on the pavement outside a pub, or in an alleyway, passers-by would peer down at him, they’d see his face all cut, blood running into his eyes, his teeth in splinters, and they wouldn’t be surprised, no, it wouldn’t surprise them at all, because that was what happened to people like him, that was how they ended up — which meant, of course, that they deserved it. He remembered the night when he got hit across the bridge of the nose with a lemonade bottle. He had been in the chip shop with Leslie. They were waiting at the counter, watching George pour the vinegar, sprinkle on the salt. Leslie would probably have been talking. She used to do a lot of that. Talked her way on to his chest, didn’t she, in letters two inches tall. Talked herself under his skin. At some point the door opened and cold air flooded against his back. He didn’t look round, though. Perhaps he thought it was the wind. That chip-shop door was always opening by itself, the catch no longer worked, and George had never got around to fixing it, the lazy sod. In any case, he didn’t look. The next thing he knew, he was on the floor, his head split into sudden areas of brilliance and gloom, and somebody above him screaming, screaming. They hadn’t even said his name. They just came up behind him, swung the bottle. To this day he didn’t know what it had been about, whether it was something to do with Leslie and another man, or whether it was someone’s way of getting back at Jim, his brother — Jim was always pissing people off. Not that reasons mattered, really. Violence seemed to follow him around regardless; he could feel it snapping at his heels like a dog. The scar above his nose, the puzzled look it gave him, that was a reminder. That was proof.
At ten o’clock he dialled Ray’s mobile number. He could only hear Ray faintly through a cloud of static. Still, he didn’t waste any time in coming to the point.
‘You know what they want me to do, Ray?’
Ray didn’t answer.
‘That job you got me, Ray, you know what they want me to do?’
‘They didn’t tell me.’
‘They want me to kill someone. Did you know that?’
‘I told you. They didn’t tell me.’
‘Well,’ Barker said, ‘now you know.’
An image came to him suddenly, another fragment of the past. He had been standing outside a club a year ago, Ray on the pavement beside him wearing a shiny black jacket with the snarling head of a tiger on the back. ‘I heard you did one of the Scullys,’ Ray had said. Barker asked him where he’d got that from. Ray shrugged. ‘The word’s out.’ Barker pushed Ray up against the wall, knowing Ray could throw him ten feet whenever he felt like it. ‘I’ll tell you what the word is, Ray. The word is bullshit. You got that?’ Ray had nodded — OK, OK — but he obviously hadn’t believed what Barker was saying. Which meant he could be lying now.
Why, though? Why would he lie?
The static cleared and he could hear Ray breathing on the other end. He could hear a TV in the background too. They were both watching the same channel. It gave Barker a peculiar feeling. The feeling, just for a moment, of being everywhere at once. Like God.
‘You see, strange as it may fucking sound,’ he said, ‘I never killed anyone before. Not even by accident.’
Ray began to talk. ‘Jesus, Barker, if I’d known what the job was, do you think I would’ve —’ and so on.
After a while Barker just cut him off. ‘Got any ideas, Ray, for how to kill a girl?’
Barker listened to Ray breathing, the TV in the background and, beyond that, the eerie hollow space inside a phone line.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think so.’ He lit a cigarette and bounced the smoke off the wall above the phone. ‘Tomorrow, Ray,’ he said, ‘tomorrow you should go down the Job Centre and ask them to take you on. They should stick you behind those fucking windows. Because you’ve got a real talent for finding people work, you know that? A real fucking talent. And something everybody knows, Ray, everybody knows, talent should not be fucking wasted. All right?’
Barker slammed the phone down. From the quality of the silence that descended all around him he guessed he must have been shouting. Towards the end of the call, at least.