How To Kill Friends And Implicate People (5 page)

TWELVE

FERGUS

17:20

Back home, I change into a T-shirt and comfortable blue jeans. I never plan on dressing to
look
like a hit man when I’m on the job, but somehow it always ends up that way.

I keep staring at my phone, waiting for Joe Pepper’s number to come up. The job didn’t go according to plan, and he’s got to be pissed off about that. Technically I’ve done what he paid me for, so I’m not going to go chasing after his approval, but I also did way more, and he won’t be happy about it. In the meantime, I’ll get on with something more important.

Women.

I’ve tried so many different ways of meeting the right person. I assumed for years that the first step was to pretend I’m not a hit man. It’s funny. As a kid, it was always about trying to seem more grown up and edgy than I really was. I was a working-class kid, of raging lefty parents, with a comfortable home and no horror stories. Just about anything else is more interesting than that. But then I joined the military, and became a spook for a while, and I don’t need to pretend to have any extra darkness. I’d rather make people laugh, so it became about pretending to be anything other than edgy. I’d claim just about anything else, as long as I could do it in a way that got a laugh.

I’m an insurance salesman. Not a very good one.

You know the plastic bits on the ends of shoelaces? That’s me.

I’m professionally interested in Sweden.

There’s no greater drug than making a woman laugh. See, getting a smile, that’s fun. Raising it to a chuckle, or a snicker, that’s great. Getting a lassie to actually belly laugh? Getting her to struggle for breath, slap her knees, or lean back to belt out the kind of laugh that she usually keeps hidden? That’s the fucking boner, right there.

Guys get jealous of a lot of things. We get insecure about our dick size. We get worried being around men who are more attractive than us (we always know). We
hate
seeing men who are sexier than us (and we
definitely
know about that one). But the number one thing that men get jealous about?

Seeing a fella who makes a woman laugh more than we can.

We will
hate
that guy.

But it’s also a trap. If I try really hard, if I bring my A game, I can get a real laugh. But then, that’s expected all the time. I’ve got maybe three good jokes a year in me. So it works, but I have to pretend to be someone else to pull it off, and it’s exhausting.

I tried something new when I was living in New York. Telling the truth. What the hell, right? Might as well give it a go. I’d be in a bar, I’d be chatting to a woman who looked like fun, and I’d just come clean:

I’m a hit man.

This gun’s for hire.

I’ll kill anyone, for enough money.

Well, not anyone, I do have a few rules.

They loved it. I was getting so much sex. But I was still pretending to be something else, even though I was being honest, because it wasn’t really me they were fucking. It was some myth, some movie that they had in their heads. It wasn’t a route to building any kind of lasting relationship.

Truth is, I just want to be myself.

And I’m not a bad guy, if we overlook the fact that I
am
a bad guy.

But I’ve never figured out how to be myself and meet women. Or how to go to places where being myself would let me meet women. It seems like that would be a very niche place to find.

So I’ve turned to the internet. The home of niches.

Trouble is, it’s full of liars. People on there are experts in cheating the camera. Shooting from the best angle (I’m going to resist the chance to make an obvious joke here) and in black and white. Or pulling just the right facial expression to make you look both witty and skinny at the same time. Raised eyebrows, cocked mouths, jaunty glasses, whatever.

And then there are the people who have no intention of meeting you. They want to have the whole relationship online, telling me they love me without ever actually knowing if we’d get on.

They scare me. And I’m not someone who scares easily.

I’d given up, but my sister, Zoe, found a new site and signed me up. vLove.co.uk. I said it sounded vaginal, but Zoe insisted. Most people use it through a phone app, but I have to be careful about what I load onto my phone. I use the full website version from my computer.

Nice and easy. We all load up videos. As many videos as we want, and on any subject, as long as there’s no nudity or porn. Then we can scroll through. See if there’s anybody we like.

I load up the newest set of videos and press play on the first one. The picture forms digitally on the screen in front of me, taking a second to focus, probably from a cheap camera phone.

Title card. Name.

Jane.

Strong features, make up, styled hair. No twinkle in the eyes.

‘Hi, I’m Jane, I’m 30
. . .
’

I click a red button on the left of the screen. Another video pops up.

Title card. Name.

Sam.

Cute looking girl. Embarrassed smile. Her eyes flit between the camera and whoever is holding it, and the subtext is easy:
she’s been put up to this.
I know the feeling.

‘Hi. My name’s
. . .
Okay, I’m Sam.’

I’m not listening. I’m watching. She speaks for a second, then stops, and smiles. She’s uncomfortable on the camera, but looks comfortable in her own skin. She’s not posing. Not afraid of looking like herself.

In that second, while she’s not even trying to be anything special on camera, I see exactly what I’m looking for.

Hello, Sam.

This could work.

PART TWO

June 6th

‘Jeezo, a girl uncovers one massive conspiracy, and suddenly she’s Jim Rockford.’

—Phil

THIRTEEN

ALEX

17:00

Alex had always known he was working for criminals. McGoran, Hornor & Wendig clearly handled dirty money. He just didn’t know whose money it was.

Sure, the company had legitimate clients. Footballers from both Old Firm teams, a few from the English Premier League. There were actors, musicians, even a couple members of the royal family.

For clients like these, his job was simple.

Investments.

Hedge funds
.

Future planning.

Whichever way it was written down, and whatever adjustments were made to his job description, Alex knew he was there to help people cheat on their taxes. And he was fine with that. He paid an accountant a lot of money to do exactly the same for him. Alex hadn’t paid more than five per cent tax in a decade.

But when he moved to Glasgow, he found something else going on. Money that didn’t appear on the books. Companies that shouldn’t have been profitable. Investments that didn’t make sense. Clients would put money into companies that were doomed to fail, and take money out of ones that were just taking off. These decisions seemed so bloody random, until he stepped back and saw the pattern. Alex had always been in the business of making money vanish, of using loopholes and paperwork to let people hide assets away. Once he started working for MHW, he was in the business of making money reappear. Money that shouldn’t have been there. In his first year with the firm, they supplied money to help prop up a Greek bank, and none of it had existed on paper before the bailout.

What Alex did next was the most sensible thing in the world.

He started to steal from the mob.

Or maybe not the mob. From whoever. Drug lords, the Russians, terrorists. Does it matter who you steal from, when the money doesn’t exist?

It was his own little act of revenge. Something to get one over on the bosses. He hadn’t wanted this job, or this life, or this shitty city. He didn’t like Glasgow. He didn’t like the people, and they didn’t like him. He didn’t understand the football, or the accents. He didn’t like the drivers. They only had two speeds: road rage and stop.

And he didn’t like the rain. It rained for 360 days a year. On the other five? Baking sunshine. Every skinny Ned in town takes his top off and worships the strange ball of fire in the sky.

The Merchant City bars were okay. They were overpriced and fashionable. But the private clubs were better. He’d take clients there for meetings, show them the town. He liked to play the part, show off his cash, even though it was always somebody else’s money he was spending.

He liked walking round the club, pointing at people, waving, being acknowledged. He liked to look, and feel, connected. And in London, he had been. He knew people, and they knew him. Rolling Stones tracks would play in his head whenever he crossed a room.

The move north had come packaged with a corporate reshuffle, a slap in the face disguised as a promotion. He’d been working as an investment manager for Paterson & Hood, one of London’s smaller hedge fund companies. He’d been the best thing to ever happen to them. That’s what he told his friends, and what he imagined people said behind his back. Alex was the best in the business at making money legally disappear. He was a wizard with numbers, spreadsheets and tax returns.

He learned the hard way: don’t be too successful in the big city. You don’t want people to notice you, not really. You want to look important, you want to be able to look rich out on the town and impress your mates. But you don’t want the big fish to notice you. They don’t look at you and decide to offer you a job; they buy your company because it’s getting big enough to get noticed.

A lesson learned when, on a Monday evening, he was taken out for a meal by Ozzy Paterson and Noel Hood, the two retired owners, and told that the company he’d taken so high was being sold to a bank from the Middle East.

‘Well done, Alex,’ they had assured him. ‘It’s all down to you.’

Which he’d already known.

‘Your job will be safe,’ they had said. ‘One of the promises we’ve had is that you will be kept on. They don’t want to lose you.’

It was a half-truth. They didn’t want to lose him. They wanted to mail him up to run the Glasgow office of another company in their portfolio. MHW. He’d be the boss. The top person in the company, in charge of the most important clients.

He nodded. Took the promotion. Maybe this would be his big break. It would be easier to feel like a big player in Glasgow. It’s smaller than London, but still one of the biggest cities in the UK.

Nope. No dice.

He was a nobody up here.

A nobody who handled
a lot
of money.

Alex ran MHW in name only. He answered to a woman named Asma Khan, the euphemistically titled Asset Manager for the people behind the scenes. And he also found out that the official story – MHW being owned by a Middle Eastern bank – was only part of the tale. MHW was a cartel, one that had already moved on Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester.

Glasgow was just the next step.

They wanted Alex for his skills with numbers, but MHW wasn’t really under his control.

Still, he’d been sticking it out for his wife, Kara.

Kara had given up a good job to move with him. She’d been working as the media manager for a Premier League team in London. Alex knew it had been a tough choice for her to walk away. She was the sort of person who could make friends everywhere. Kara had built up a new community around her in Glasgow, and taken a job running the marketing and corporate hospitality for a local team. In three years she’d managed to make herself the centre of a whole social scene, one which Alex didn’t understand at all. It involved art exhibitions and shopping, and drinking cocktails made up of funny colours.

Alex didn’t understand funny colours.

He really only understood status and money.

And once he realised the status of the people whose money he was handling, the plan began to form. Now he had ten million pounds in an offshore account, and a further five million in cash stored away in an apartment in the Merchant City, a place even his wife didn’t know about. Fifteen million, all in.

And who was going to notice? These idiots came to Alex to manage things, he was the one they left in charge of noticing irregularities, and he certainly wasn’t going to report on himself.

He was rich.

He and Kara could be set for life.

The only problem was, they would come looking for him if he ran. They would track the two of them down, and kill them. Alex was trapped. He couldn’t spend the money while he was alive.

He needed to die first.

FOURTEEN

SAM

17:30

Cassette tapes?

Who still used cassette tapes?

That’s what was inside the package. Three tapes.

Each one was labelled.

Cal’s Log.

The Meeting.

Sexy Time Mix Tape 1999.

There was no way I was handing those over without listening to them first. I mean, come on. Aside from all the questions I already had, about Paula Lucas and a delivery to a fake address, now I had this new question to solve:

Who still uses cassette tapes?

I couldn’t get straight to it, though, because I had a paying customer waiting. For all that I wanted answers to the questions, and to find out what this all had to do with Paula Lucas, I had bills to cover. When you’re a freelancer, the gigs that pay always come first.

I had a meeting with a client at 6 p.m. Going back to the crime scene had lost me some time. I’d planned my afternoon around being able to head home and shower before going out to meet my client. I didn’t really have time for that now. I lived out in Parkhead, to the east of the city centre, and my appointment was at Firhill, a football stadium on the opposite side of town.

I keep some work clothes in my bag. A grey pencil skirt and jacket, rolled up tight. They’re creased, and it’s not the most professional look in the world, but it’s better than rocking up to a meeting looking like a sweaty bike messenger.

I’d gone out with a Partick Thistle player for a few months, at the start of the year. Milo Nardini. Despite the Italian name, he was pure Glaswegian, and had grown up in the shadow of Celtic Park. He was the grandson of Italian immigrants, and he combined Mediterranean looks with a real East End laugh. He was young, funny and good in bed. Beneath the laddish image he liked to show to the world, I’d found a shy little geek. He was obsessed with
Star Wars, Star Trek
and
The X Files
. He had a room in his apartment filled with action figures, still sealed in their boxes. I didn’t really like any of those things, but his passion for them gave him a goofy charm.

He’d become Hanya’s latest proof that I was avoiding meaningful relationships. The last man I’d really trusted had turned out to be a crooked cop and, worse, a murderer. Since then, I’d stuck mostly to meeting up with other guys on the messenger circuit, and to short-term fuses like Milo Nardini.

Milo had been the hottest ticket in town for the first half of the season. He’d scored fifteen goals in the first ten games, and was starting to attract the interest of Celtic. Not long after we’d hooked up, his form on the pitch took a dip. The more we messed around in the sack, the more he messed up on the pitch. The fans started getting on his back over his performances, and the journalists were questioning whether he was good enough to play for the club. Celtic’s scouts stopped going to matches.

I learned where I stood in Milo’s priorities when he dumped me to focus on his football. He was worried about losing his big move, and the money that would come with it. He’d played the poverty card, and claimed football was his one shot at making something. Completely oblivious to the fact I grew up in the same part of town, and saw right through his crap.

Milo finished out the season with twenty-five goals, and now a few English teams were rumoured to be after him. I hoped he didn’t sign for Celtic, because I didn’t want to cheer when he scored for my team.

I took it easy on the ride there. The stadium was only twenty minutes away by bike, so I didn’t need to push myself too hard. I chained the bike up in the staff-only car park, and walked into the reception. I knew the kid behind the desk. Chris. He was too sweet and too young, always eager to please anyone he found attractive.

‘Hey Sam,’ he said, standing up straight when he saw me.

‘Hiya, Chrispy. I’ve got an appointment with the evil one in a few minutes, but I need to change, got a room I could use?’

‘Uh, sure, toilets?’ He pointed up the stairs.

‘Kara might see me, and I want to look professional.’ I leaned in and smiled. He met my eyes then looked down. Nervous. Sweet. ‘Anywhere down here?’

He opened a door behind the desk and waved me into the small office. I pushed the door closed behind him, and looked around the small cluttered space. There were a couple of chairs and a desk, and a ton of unopened mail. Someone had put a Celtic calendar on the wall. I assumed none of the club’s directors ever saw this room, because they’d not be happy about the calendar. I got changed into my suit. My hair was a mess from the day’s work, but all I could do was comb it and hope for the best.

I thanked Chris on the way past, and he said, ‘S-sure.’

Isn’t that sweet?

I headed up the stairs to the hospitality suite, where Kara Pennan was already waiting. Kara worked some kind of magic trick. Despite me never wanting to look anything like the kind of person she was, within seconds of greeting her I always wondered what I could do to look more like her. She was tall and statuesque, with dark skin and a smile that never showed any signs of warmth. She was always smoothly turned out, in pressed, spotless clothes, and carried a glacial poise in every movement.

Kara stood up from one of the round tables and offered me her hand, then the double cheek kiss. ‘Sam, darling,’ she said. ‘Thanks for coming.’

‘What can I do for you?’

She lost her poise for a second. She bit her lip, and her face betrayed a youthfulness I’d never seen in her. ‘I think my husband is cheating on me,’ she said.