And then someone offered me a deal.
We drove through the back streets of north London, passing through Edmonton and then Enfield, and all the time Cecil kept checking his rearview mirror to make sure we weren’t being followed — although I had no idea who might be following us. If it was the cops, they would have arrested us on the spot, seeing that Cecil had just killed a man. But I kept quiet and let him get on with it.
The continuous swathes of clogged-up London suburbs eventually gave way to identikit executive housing communities, golf courses, and the first hints of the green belt, and then when we were only just the other side of the M25, Cecil pulled into a quiet country lane and stopped twenty yards short of an abandoned-looking barn nestling on the edge of a small beech wood.
‘This is a bit of an out-of-the-way place to meet someone, isn’t it?’ I said, looking round.
‘You can never be too careful,’ said Cecil, reaching over and pulling a mobile phone-shaped electronic device with an antenna on the end from the glove compartment. When he switched it on, a red light appeared on the side.
‘What the hell’s that?’ I asked, knowing full well what it was.
‘It’s a bug finder. If you’re wearing a wire, it’ll pick it up.’
‘It might have escaped your notice, Cecil, but we’ve just committed an armed robbery together, so I’m hardly likely to be setting you up.’
‘The man we’re meeting’s paranoid. And orders are orders.’
I let him do the honours, knowing there was no point arguing. The machine didn’t beep.
‘You want to search me as well?’
Credit to Cecil, at least he had the dignity to look embarrassed as he got out of the car after grabbing the holdall with the money from the back seat. ‘Come on.’
I followed him up the track towards the barn. The air was cold and fresh, and the sun was just managing to fight its way through the cloud cover. The constant stream of traffic from the M25 was no longer audible, and the only sound among the trees, and the fields beyond them, was the occasional shriek of a crow. There were no other cars around, which meant that the man we’d come to see hadn’t arrived yet, or he was keeping a very low profile.
It struck me then that this would be an ideal place to kill someone.
We stopped outside the barn. One side of it was open to the elements and it was empty inside bar a cluster of rusty oil drums and some ancient farm machinery.
‘Where’s the guy we’re here to meet?’ I asked, rubbing my hands together against the cold.
‘Here,’ came a voice behind us.
I turned round and saw a figure in a long coat emerge from the outbuilding behind us, from where he’d clearly been watching our approach, and walk over to us. Even though he was dressed casually, he was wearing an expensive-looking pair of leather driving gloves.
‘Sir, this is Jones, the man I was telling you about.’ Although he tried to hide it, Cecil’s tone was deferential.
The man who stopped in front of me was a mass of physical contradictions. On the one hand he was tall, lean and fit-looking, with the classic bearing of an ex-army officer, but on the other, his complexion was pale to the point of illness, and he had a prominent vein running down one side of his face like a worm beneath the skin, which I had difficulty taking my eyes off.
‘Mr Jones, pleased to meet you.’
‘Jones is fine on its own,’ I said. ‘And you are?’
‘My name’s Cain,’ he said, his voice surprisingly deep and sonorous. ‘Cecil’s been telling me about what happened to you. That you were sent down because you doled out some real justice to someone who deserved it. That’s this country all over.’
‘It hasn’t done me any favours.’
‘It hasn’t done any of us any favours.’ He looked at me sharply, and I thought I saw the vein move beneath his skin. ‘You were lucky you only got sent down for a year.’
That was my weak point. The length of sentence. ‘It was long enough,’ I told him. ‘Especially for an ex-cop. I wasn’t the most popular man on the block.’
‘I can believe it.’ He gestured towards the holdall Cecil was holding. ‘How much did we make?’
‘We haven’t counted it yet,’ said Cecil, ‘but it feels like a lot.’ He handed it to Cain who motioned for us to follow him into the barn.
Inside, Cain put the holdall down on one of the oil drums and opened it up, revealing a whole heap of cash. He immediately started to count it out, placing each individual wad on one of the other drums. I’m not a greedy man but I felt a slither of excitement as I stared at it. Apparently, LeShawn always insisted that the money was counted before he arrived to pick it up, and it had been divided into single-denomination five-grand wads.
‘What happened out there?’ asked Cain as he carried on counting. I was counting too and I’d already got to ninety grand.
‘LeShawn didn’t want to play ball,’ said Cecil. ‘He went for Jones’s gun. We had to shoot him.’
‘Who pulled the trigger?’
‘I did.’
‘How come you didn’t shoot him, Jones?’
‘I didn’t get a chance.’
Cain gave me another look. His eyes were a watery grey but there was a fierce intelligence in them.
‘I shot up a cop car,’ I told him.
Cain smiled thinly. He was still counting the money. We were at a hundred and forty now. ‘I apologize for all the secrecy, but you were a cop once, and we have to be very careful who we trust.’
‘Well, thanks to what happened an hour ago I’m now an armed robber,’ I told him. ‘I think that means you can trust me.’
As I said this, I realized almost with a shock that I was now just like the criminals I’d been trying to put away. The only reason I’d agreed to do the armed robbery in the first place was because I’d thought we could get away with it, but now I’d compromised myself badly.
‘You’re not an armed robber, Jones. You’re a soldier raising funds from some bad people for a good cause. There’s a big difference.’
Cain finished counting. Two hundred and twenty-five grand plus change.
‘Cecil told you how the split worked, didn’t he? Fifteen grand each for you two?’
I nodded. ‘Seems like you get a very big cut.’
‘Firstly, I planned it. And second, the money isn’t going to me.’
I stared him down. ‘We could have done with some help out there today. The reason it went wrong was because there were only two of us. If there’d been three of us, the whole thing might have run a lot smoother.’
‘Come on, Jones,’ said Cecil, intervening. ‘You knew the score when you took the job.’
‘But that’s the problem,’ I said, turning back to Cain. ‘I still don’t know what the score is. Because no one’s actually told me. Cecil said there might be an opportunity for me to make some money and get involved in fighting the government, but so far all that’s happened is I’ve risked my neck and taken part in a very public murder, all for the price of a mid-range saloon car.’ I gestured at the wads of money. ‘So, where’s all this going?’
Cain and Cecil exchanged glances. Then Cain turned back to me. ‘Let’s take a walk.’
I followed him outside. Beyond the barn, a fallow field stretched away to some trees in the middle distance, and we started towards it.
‘We’re fighting a war, Jones, and in a war you need weapons. The other side have got weapons. Did you hear about the bombs this morning?’
I shook my head. We hadn’t had the car radio on at all on our way up here. ‘What happened?’
‘A bomb went off near Victoria Station three hours ago. Nine dead already, but the toll keeps rising. And then another two less than an hour back at a block of flats in Bayswater, which looks to have been aimed at the police. Four dead in that one so far. The Islamics have already claimed responsibility.’