“Say… three thirty? It might be a few minutes after if the girls are tired, but I’ll do my best.”
“Okay,” I said again. I glanced up and down the street. “Hel, I’m going to have to dump this phone, do you mind?”
“I expect the girls will be crushed at losing their progress on Pretty Pawz,” Hel said, with a kind of grim humor. “But they’ll live. Now, go. And don’t get caught.”
It was almost two hours later that I arrived at the shopping center Hel had described, hot and extremely footsore. I had walked from Lancaster Lane rather than take a taxi or a bus—painfully conscious that I had used the best part of Hel’s thirty pounds already, and that if she didn’t manage to make contact with me this afternoon, that might be all my resources for the foreseeable future. I had Gabe’s Bitcoin, of course, but I was fairly sure that no reputable exchange would start handing out cash—not without showing ID, anyway. A bus would have been cheaper, but London buses no longer took cash as payment, only contactless, and I didn’t want to risk that. I had no idea whether the police were already monitoring my cards.
Along the way I had stopped at one of the omnipresent little stands selling tourist tat and I London Tshirts and bought a plain black baseball cap with the Tube logo on the front. With my collar pulled up and the baseball cap pulled down, my face was effectively hidden from cameras and prying eyes, but I still felt painfully conscious of my pillar box red hair. Why, why, why had I gone for such a ridiculous color?
A memory came to me, sharp and painful: Gabe burying his face in it, his lips against my temple, his voice in my ear, It’s the exact color of Virginia creeper on the turn… I love it so much…
I had laughed. Okay, Wordsworth.
Now his words, the memory of them whispered in his deep, soft voice, made my heart hurt.
But I couldn’t think about him now or I would lose it, here in the street in front of the shoppers and tourists. I had to keep putting one foot in front of the other, keep trying to figure out what to do about this unholy mess I’d got myself into.
For I’d had plenty of time to think about my decision on the long walk from Lancaster Lane and to wonder whether I had done something unutterably, unforgivably stupid in bolting out of the police station. I had no illusions about what I’d accomplished—in that one split second, I’d changed myself from a person of key interest to the police into suspect number one, a fugitive with a giant red target painted on their back. Because why would someone run unless they were guilty? That would be the police logic—and I couldn’t fault it. There was only one problem with it. I wasn’t guilty.
I could have stayed. I could have shown the police that email and said, Look, I didn’t set this up, something is wrong, someone is framing me for Gabe’s death. Because surely there would have been some way of tracing that email back to the source? Someone had filled out that form, had sent it off, had processed the payment. And that someone had to be the person who had killed Gabe—didn’t they?
Why had I done it? Why had I taken such an insane risk?
I knew the answer. Because with Gabe dead, I didn’t really care what happened to me—but the thought of sitting in a cell, unable to so much as make a phone call, while the police pursued false lead after false lead in the hope of convicting me, was unendurable. Not because of what it meant for me, but because every moment they spent pursuing me, the real killer would be disappearing into the shadows—and I wouldn’t be able to do a thing to stop them.
If the police weren’t going to find Gabe’s killer, I would. And if I had to put a target on my back to do it, so be it.
It had felt like impulse, that decision to run, even to me. But I had spent years acquiring the bone-deep knowledge that had informed my choice to trip the security door back at Arden Alliance instead of waiting for Gabe to fix the problem for me. It was like I’d always said: sometimes, often, to do nothing was to run a risk in itself. Yes, this decision had stakes a million times higher than Arden Alliance. And yes, I could have waited. Hel would probably have said I should have waited. I could have shown Malik the email and waited to see what she made of it.
But waiting would have been a risk. And a big one—because that was the thing, the stakes were a million times higher than some routine pen test. There were two giant what-ifs hanging on a decision to wait, questions that my freedom depended on.
First—what if the person who’d set up that insurance hadn’t made any mistakes? What if they’d used a secure browser and a VPN—something Gabe used fairly routinely himself, enough that it wouldn’t necessarily come over as suspicious—and spoofed the payment back to Gabe’s own account? It wasn’t impossible they’d ticked every single logistical box, swept up every single bread crumb. In that scenario, there might be nothing but my word for it that this wasn’t a fresh, steaming motive right there on a plate—and Malik had already shown me that my word wasn’t worth very much to her. The police had failed me once; there was no reason they wouldn’t fail me again. The thought of what that failure might look like—me locked in a cell, unable to escape, while Jeff Leadbetter poured poison into Malik’s ear about what a psycho I was and Gabe’s killer laughed up his sleeve—that image made me feel like throwing up. It was that what-if, processed in a split second in the interview room, that had made me run.
But the second what-if had occurred to me only on the walk back from Lancaster Lane. And in some ways it was more frightening. It was this: What if the person who’d set up that insurance was… Gabe?
I had no evidence that he had. We’d never even discussed it. But something, someone had caused Gabe’s death. I had no idea what or who, but now, looking back over the last few weeks and months, I had begun to wonder whether maybe Gabe had seen this coming on some level.
I don’t mean that he had known he was going to die—that was absurd. Gabe wouldn’t have sat there and waited for a hit man to come and get him. He would have warned me, called the police, done something to protect the both of us. But there were a handful of things that, looking back, made me wonder. A certain jumpiness that wasn’t completely in character. A few times I’d spoken to him and he’d been zoned out, staring at his device long enough that I’d had to physically tap him on the shoulder to get his attention. He’d shaken his head and said, Sorry, babe, work stress, but none of that was normal. Gabe loved his work. Of course, he didn’t like grappling with taxes or dealing with invoicing headaches, no one did, but the furrow lines between his brows and his deliberate vagueness… those had been new.
The more I thought about it, the more I was sure that something had been bothering him in the week or so before his death. Something minor enough that it hadn’t rung any alarm bells for me at the time, but there had been something—something more serious than I had realized, and maybe something more serious than even Gabe himself had realized. And if he had been mixed up in some kind of trouble, some encounter that had made him feel just paranoid enough to want to make sure I was protected if anything happened to him, then… yes. In that case I could just about see him doing this. And maybe even doing it without saying anything to me—telling himself that this was totally ridiculous, of course it was, no point in worrying me with his paranoia, but you know, no harm in setting up some kind of nest egg, just in case he fell under a bus.
And if that was the case, if Gabe really had set up that insurance himself, I had absolutely no way of proving that I hadn’t known about it. And far from protecting me after his death, Gabe might just have condemned me to rot in prison for his murder.
The thought made me want to cry—the idea of Gabe carefully looking out for my interests, and in the process being the one to inadvertently snare me in a trap of his own good intentions.
Don’t think about it, I told myself as I walked. I wouldn’t—couldn’t—cry. Nothing draws attention like a weeping woman weaving her way along a busy high street, even one with her head down under a baseball cap. I had to stay inconspicuous.
I was getting close to the shopping center’s main entrance when something caught my eye, and I stopped. It was a phone box, but the phone inside had been vandalized, and a laminated notice was taped to the glass. Out of order, it read.
Glancing up and down the road, I slipped inside the box, recoiling momentarily from the stench of piss, and then, carefully, I peeled off the sign.
The tape crumpled, sticking to itself, but the notice itself was fine, and I slipped it inside my jacket and then let myself out of the phone box, mentally apologizing to the next person who tried to make a call.
* * *