Chapter 1: Rules
The safe house was a farmhouse at the end of a single-track lane in the Yorkshire Dales, and the man waiting in its kitchen was the size of the doorway.
You had been told his name was Lieutenant Riley. You had been told he was the best close-protection asset the Ministry of Defence could lend to the National Crime Agency on short notice, that he had done this sort of thing in places with far worse weather and far more guns, and that you would be perfectly safe with him. Nobody had told you about the skull.
It was printed on a black balaclava, a grinning lower jaw stretched over where his mouth should be, and above it his eyes were smudged with black paint like he'd just stepped out of a hedge. He wore a plate carrier over a grey hoodie, gloves with the knuckles cut out, and the expression of a man who had been asked to babysit a stranger's cat.
"You're the accountant," he said. Manchester, flattened by years somewhere else.
"Forensic accountant," you said. "The forensic is doing a lot of work. Without it I'm just a woman with a calculator, and nobody sends a soldier to a farmhouse for that." You held out your hand. "Hello. I've been in the back of a van for four hours with a man from the NCA who thinks the A1 is a personality. Is there tea?"
He looked at your hand. He looked at you. He did not take the hand.
"Rules," he said.
"Oh, good, there are rules. I love rules. I've built a whole career on people not following them."
"One. You don't go near the windows."
"Fine."
"Two. You don't go outside without me."
"Reasonable."
"Three. You don't use a phone. Not yours, not mine, not the landline. There's no landline."
"Then why mention it?"
"Four," he said, as if you hadn't spoken, "you do what I say, when I say it, and you argue afterwards."
"So I can argue."
"Afterwards."
"How long afterwards? Is there a window? Am I allowed near it?"
The eyes in the skull narrowed by a millimetre. You decided that was a laugh, privately, and that you would make it a bigger one before the month was out.
"Five," he said. "Don't ask about the mask."
You had not been going to ask about the mask. You had been raised by a woman who thought it was rude to ask anyone about anything, which was why you had grown up to ask everyone about everything. Now you badly wanted to ask about the mask.
"Is there a six?"
"Six is don't talk to me unless you need something."
"I need tea," you said. "Constantly. Forever. You're going to hear that sentence a lot."
He went to the kettle. That was the first thing you learned about him: he said no with his mouth and yes with his hands.
Here is what you knew, and what the cartel knew you knew.
For six years you had worked at Halloran Whitcombe, a private bank in Mayfair with oak panelling, a doorman named Leonard, and a client list that could have bought Wales. You were the person they called when the numbers didn't add up, because you were very good at making them add up, and for six years every number you touched had been clean.
Then, last spring, one hadn't been. A shipping firm in Rotterdam paid a property developer in Valencia who paid a vineyard in Baja California who paid a charity in Lagos, and the money went round and round like water in a drain and came out the other side as a stake in a Mexican port. Las Almas. You knew the name from the news. You had sat at your desk with a cold coffee and the realisation that your employer had been laundering for a cartel for at least three years, and that the partner who signed off on every transfer had invited you to his daughter's wedding.
You copied the ledgers onto an encrypted drive. You took it to the National Crime Agency. You had not, in hindsight, thought it all the way through.
Three weeks later someone had broken into your flat in Bermondsey and done nothing at all except leave the gas on and a photograph of your mother on your pillow. That was when the NCA started using the word witness instead of source, and then a woman called Laswell had rung from a number that didn't exist and said that she'd found you someone.
The hearing was in thirty-one days. You would give evidence from behind a screen. Until then you were the most valuable spreadsheet in Europe, and you were living in a farmhouse with a man who answered questions like each word cost him a quid.
"Did you grow up in Manchester?"
Day two. He was cleaning a rifle at the kitchen table, which seemed rude, like knitting during a conversation.
"Rule six."
"I need to know. For safety."
"How's that for safety?"
"If someone breaks in and they're from Manchester, I need to know if you'll go easy on them."
Nothing. The rifle came apart in his hands in pieces you had no names for, and went back together again in the same order, and you watched the precise unhurried way he did it and thought he would have been very good at audits.
"I'll take that as a yes," you said. "City or United? Don't answer. I'll work it out."
"You won't."
"I found three hundred million pounds in a charity that sends textbooks to Lagos. I'll work out your football team."
By day four you had worked out that he did not sleep in a bed. He slept, if he slept, in the armchair facing the front door with a pistol on the side table and his boots on. You had worked out that he ate with the balaclava rolled up to the bridge of his nose, his back to you, standing at the counter, and that he would wait until you had left the room if he could. You had worked out that he was a light hand with sugar and a heavy hand with milk, because you'd started making the tea, and on day three he'd tried it, put the mug down and said, flatly, "That's wrong," and then drunk all of it.
You had worked out that he listened. You talked to fill the house, because the house was very quiet and the quiet made you think about gas taps, and you'd assumed he'd tuned you out the way your brother did. But on the evening of day four you said, apropos of nothing, that your mum hated the smell of lilies because they reminded her of her own mother's funeral, and on day six the NCA liaison came up the lane with a box of supplies and a bunch of supermarket flowers for the table, and Riley took the lilies out of the bunch without a word and put them in the bin outside.
"Why'd you do that?"
He shrugged. "Smell."
You stood in the kitchen doorway, very still, while he unpacked tins of soup into the cupboard with his broad back to you, and you thought: oh no.
On the evening of the ninth day you broke rule six on purpose.
"Lieutenant."
"What."
"I need something."
He looked up from the window he was not letting you near. Rain was coming sideways across the fells, and the light in the room was the colour of weak tea. In the gloom the skull was just a grey suggestion and his eyes were very dark.
"I need you to tell me one thing about yourself," you said. "One true thing. Doesn't have to be important. You know my mum's name and my blood type and the PIN for my debit card, which, by the way, I'd like to know how."
"It's your birthday."
"That's," you said, "fair. But you know everything, and I know you're a Lieutenant, you're from Manchester, and you have a mask you don't want me to ask about. I'm going a bit mad. I'm used to people. I'm used to Leonard on the door telling me about his allotment. I need one true thing or I'm going to start talking to the sheep."
"You already talk to the sheep."
"Through the window. Which I'm not near. Please."
He was quiet so long you thought that was it. Then he said, "Simon."
You blinked. "What?"
"My name. Simon."
It was such a small thing. You had known it was coming, in a way, because your file on him said S. Riley, and you'd spent an embarrassing amount of the van journey guessing (Stephen, Stuart, Sebastian if his parents had ambitions). But hearing him say it in his own flat voice, into the dark kitchen, felt like being handed something heavy and warm.
"Simon," you repeated.
"Don't wear it out."
"I'll ration it. Once a day. Maybe twice on Sundays." You tucked your feet up on the kitchen chair. "Thank you, Simon."
"That's twice."
"It's nearly Sunday."
He made a noise behind the mask that wasn't quite a laugh, a breath through the nose, short and surprised, as if it had got out without permission. You felt it land somewhere under your ribs and stay there.
"What do the others call you?" you asked. "You have others. You've got the look of a man with others."
"Ghost."
"That's dramatic."
"Wasn't my idea."
"Whose was it?"
"Rule six," he said, but he said it more softly, almost fond, and you let it go.
At ten past two in the morning you woke up because the house had gone silent in a new way.
You couldn't have said what was different. The rain had stopped. The boiler ticked in the airing cupboard. But the silence had a held quality, like a room after someone has dropped a glass, and you lay under the duvet with your heart going and listened to nothing.
Then your door opened, and Simon came in without knocking, low and fast, and crouched by the bed. Without the plate carrier he looked different. Not smaller. Closer.
"Up," he said. "Shoes on. Don't turn on the light."
"What's happening?"
"Afterwards."
You found your trainers by feel. Your hands were shaking. He put the old waxed jacket from the hall hook around your shoulders and zipped it up himself, all the way to your chin, as if you were someone who couldn't be trusted with zips, and then he put his gloved hand flat between your shoulder blades and steered you down the stairs and into the pantry where the cellar hatch was.
Halfway down the steps you heard it: an engine on the lane, no headlights, coming slow.
"That's the NCA," you whispered. "It's the supply run. Tuesday."
"It's Sunday," Simon said.
Below you the cellar was black and smelled of potatoes and old stone. Above you a car door shut, very gently, the way people shut car doors when they don't want anyone to hear. Then another. Then a third.
He pressed something into your hand. It was the size of a deck of cards and had one button on it.
"If I don't come back down," he said, "you press that and you don't stop pressing it, and you don't open this hatch for anyone who doesn't say my name."
"Simon or Ghost?"
He looked at you for a moment in the thin line of light from the pantry. You thought the skull might have shifted, like there was something under it trying to be a smile, or the opposite.
"You'll know," he said, and closed the hatch over your head.