He reeled it off, and I pulled out the paperback from my bag, the paperback with the number of the private key written in it. My fingers shook as I typed in the digits, and I had to concentrate, making sure I didn’t mess up the long, complicated number—and then there it was, Gabe’s Bitcoin wallet—a wallet which represented every remaining penny I had in the world.
For a moment, I wasn’t sure if I could press the button to confirm the transfer, my hands were trembling so hard—and it wasn’t only the aftermath of that shocking wave of pain that was making me shake. It was the realization that this was it. This was my last roll of the dice—every penny I had, my last remaining bargaining chip. But I knew that in reality, I had played my last card the moment Gabe’s number was swapped to the phone in Madrox’s hand. That phone was now a homing beacon, leading the police straight to whoever held it. Nothing else mattered now—not the Bitcoin, not Madrox. Nothing but that phone.
I gritted my teeth. I forced every muscle in my hand to stop trembling. I pressed send.
Madrox looked down at his own phone, tapping his foot. Then an alert sounded and he opened up the burner phone, frowning at the screen. I had been expecting him to hand it straight over, but he didn’t. Instead he seemed to have changed tabs and to be typing something into another window.
When he looked up his expression was annoyed.
“You’ve not transferred enough.”
My stomach seemed to drop, followed by a furious jolt of adrenaline. Was he stitching me up?
“What the fuck do you mean?” The words came out shriller and more angrily than I’d intended, and as soon as I’d said them I wanted to bite them back. I heard, as clear as if he were whispering into the Bluetooth earpiece, Gabe’s voice in my ear. Don’t piss him off, babe.
Too late. He looked pissed off. Very pissed off.
“Twenty grand,” he said, and in spite of my own panicked alarm, part of me—the professional, social engineer part—could see he was as tense and upset as I was, as ready to believe he’d been conned. “That was the agreement. You’ve only transferred me eighteen.”
“What do you mean?” I was baffled. “I agreed to twenty because I had twenty. I checked the exchange rate when we spoke.”
“We spoke yesterday,” he said, irritable now, as if talking to someone fairly thick. The words you dumb bint hovered unspoken. “Yeah, this probably was worth twenty then, but the exchange rate’s gone down since then.”
“Gone down?” I looked at him blankly. “By—what—ten percent? How can that be?”
“It’s Bitcoin, innit,” he said, even more tetchily. “It changes every day. If you wanted to fix a price in Bitcoin you should have said—but we agreed pounds.”
“But—how is that my fault if the rate has changed?”
“Well, it’s not fucking mine, is it?” he said, and even through my fury, a small part of me was whispering that he had a point. “If it had gone the other way—ten percent up—you’d be in profit. Not my fault it’s gone south. You need to transfer the other two grand.”
“But I can’t.” I spoke blankly. “I told you—I agreed to pay twenty grand because I had twenty grand. But that’s it. I’ve got…” I looked down at the screen, calculating the tiny fraction of a Bitcoin left in the account. “I don’t know, like fifty pounds in my wallet? No more.”
“Well shit,” Madrox said, plainly annoyed. “What are you gonna do, then? Got a credit card? There’s an ATM in the service station.”
I ran my fingers through my hair, feeling desperate. Yes was the answer to his question, and at this point I had very little to lose by using it, but I was absolutely certain that my accounts would have been frozen by now, as Jeff had pointed out. All I would be doing would be giving the police a nice clear ATM picture of the state I was currently in.
“No,” I said at last. “No, I have absolutely no other money. I can give you…” I rummaged in the rucksack and pulled out the last few coins, counting them. “Four… five quid. That’s literally my last pennies. And I can transfer you the rest of the Bitcoin, but there’s absolutely no way I can get you two grand. Please.” I put everything I’d ever learned into the words, my voice shaking with a desperation I was no longer trying to hide. I had no options left now apart from appealing to his sympathy. “Madrox, please, please, I honored what I thought was our agreement. I did my best. I swear it. If I had anything else—a watch—anything—I’d give it to you.” I held up my wrists, showing him their bareness, and as I did, our eyes both fell on something—and the hollow at the center of my chest seemed to expand to engulf my entire body.
It was my ring. The ring Gabe had given to me when he proposed.
“How much is that worth?” Madrox said matter-of-factly, at the same time that I said, “No.”
“What is it, diamond?”
“Yes. But I can’t. Please. I can’t.”
“Your choice,” Madrox said with a shrug. “You wanna call it off, I’ll transfer you back the Bitcoin and we’ll dump the phone.”
Fuck. The unshed tears had swollen in my throat into a hard lump, so painful I could barely breathe, let alone speak. Fuck.
“How much is it worth?” Madrox said again.
“Please,” I whispered. My voice was so hoarse and cracked I wasn’t sure he could understand the words. I swallowed hard. “Please, I’ll send you the money. I swear.”
“Oh, fuck this,” Madrox said now, irritably. “My contact’s already gonna be pissed off I came back with some piece-of-shit engagement ring. I’m not dicking about here while you make up your mind. You want this deal, or you don’t?”
I shut my eyes. Pictures flitted through my mind. Gabe, kneeling on the sand on a beach in Norfolk, holding out the ring. It’s an antique, he’d told me. Seventeenth century. The diamond, it’s not very big. And you can see how hard they tried to shape it, no proper cutting tools. But I thought… I thought you’d prefer it. It’s a bit wonky, a bit unique.
And I had picked it up and cradled it, and then slid it onto my finger, where it had rested like it had always belonged.
“No,” I whispered, shaking my head, but even as I did so, I was twisting the ring, testing whether I could get it off. Twisting. Twisting it up my finger, hard against the bone. “Please, no.”
It came out like a sob, but the ring was already scraping against the edges of my knuckle.
I put my finger in my mouth, ring and all, feeling its hardness against my tongue, remembering Gabe’s lips against mine, his body, his touch, the feel of him in my mouth.
I shut my eyes. I tasted blood. It hurt. Oh God, how could such a small thing hurt so much?
And then I was holding out the ring, my knuckle bruised and bloodied, one more loss, one more wound to add to everything that I had taken already.
“It’s worth three grand,” I said, my voice husky. I couldn’t cry now. I couldn’t. “Keep the fucking change.”
Madrox gave a broad grin as the ring fell into his palm, a grin that might have been triumph but which I thought, more likely, was relief.
“Received. Thanks for the custom, ReddyBrek. Here’s your phone.” He held it out.
My fingers closed around it, and for a second I thought my knees might give way. I had done it. I had done it. But at what cost? The blood was singing in my ears, my legs felt like wet bread, and everything hurt.
“You need any more swapped, just let us know, yeah?” Madrox was saying, though his voice sounded as though it was coming from very far away. “My contact’s good for most networks.”
“Thanks,” I said, but the truth was, one way or another I was never coming back here, and we both knew it.
I watched Madrox as he disappeared across the rainy car park and then, finally, I let my legs give way, and I sank to my knees in the muddy grass, the rain pouring down my face like tears.
I knew in my heart that it was probably stupid to go inside the service station. It was full of cameras and CCTV, and if Bill the lorry driver had recognized me, there was a strong chance he wouldn’t be the only member of the public to do so.
But I was soaking wet, chilled to the bone, and a growing part of me no longer cared. I needed a bathroom, and a plate of hot food, and, more importantly, I was now holding a phone linked to Gabe’s number, which meant that CCTV was the least of my worries. Every time that phone pinged a cell tower, it was leading the police right to me.
Inside the service station I went first to the bathroom. It was empty, and I locked myself into a stall, peed, and then sat in the cubicle, pressing my hand to my side and wondering if I should check what was beneath the dressing. In spite of my shivery-cold flesh, the wound itself felt hot, even through my clothes, the dressing swollen and mushy with what could have been seeping blood or something worse.
In the end I stood, stripped off my anorak, pulled up my T-shirt, and peeled back the dressing.