Chapter 2: The Marjorie Ann
You did not press the button.
You meant to. You sat on the bottom step of the cellar with the thing clutched in both hands and your thumb resting on it, and you counted, because counting was what you did when the world stopped making sense. You got to four hundred and twelve. Somewhere around one hundred and eighty there was a sound upstairs like someone dropping a sack of flour, and at two hundred and six there were two flat cracks that you felt in your back teeth, and after that there was nothing but your own breathing and a mouse, or something you decided was a mouse, moving behind the potato sacks.
At four hundred and thirteen, someone knocked on the hatch.
"Hello?" A man's voice, cheerful, Scottish. "You alright down there, hen?"
You did not answer.
"Name's MacTavish. Sergeant. I work with your fella. He's asked me to fetch you."
You looked at the button. You looked at the hatch. Your thumb hovered.
"Say his name," you said.
A pause. "Ghost."
"That's not good enough."
"Christ, he said you'd be like this." The voice sounded delighted rather than annoyed. "Alright. He said if you gave me grief I was to tell you, and I'm quoting here, so don't shoot the messenger: the tea's wrong."
You laughed. It came out of you wet and loud and slightly unhinged, and you put your free hand over your mouth, and then you climbed the steps and pushed the hatch open.
The man on the other side had a mohawk, a grin, and blood on his sleeve that you hoped wasn't his. Behind him the pantry door stood open on a kitchen that had been rearranged by force. The table was on its side. The window you weren't allowed near had a neat round hole in it. On the floor by the Aga lay a man you had never seen before, face down, cable-tied at the wrists and ankles and very much breathing, which you found you were relieved about. Another one sat propped against the dresser, with his head hanging and a bruise rising on his forehead the shape of a rifle stock.
Simon stood in the middle of it, talking low into a radio. He turned when you came up, and his eyes went over you, top to toe, quick and thorough, like a man checking a car for dents.
"You didn't press it," he said.
"I was counting."
"You were meant to press it."
"I didn't need to press it. You came back." You looked at his left arm. The grey sleeve of his hoodie was dark from the shoulder to the elbow. "Simon. You're bleeding."
"It's nothing."
"That's not nothing, that's a stain. I know stains. My mum ran a dry cleaner's."
"Course she did," muttered MacTavish.
"Johnny," Simon said, without looking at him. "Car."
"Aye, LT." The Sergeant gave you a wink on his way past, which seemed to be his way of being reassuring, and went out the back door into the dark.
The third man, the one you hadn't seen, had got away. Three cars, three men. The NCA's tactical team were twenty minutes out. Simon was not waiting for them.
"Why not? Isn't that the point of them?"
"Somebody gave them this address."
He said it in the car, in the back seat, while MacTavish drove like the M62 was a personal insult. You were wedged against the door with your knees up. Simon sat in the middle, pressing a wad of gauze against his arm with his other hand, and he was looking straight ahead.
"Only six people had this address," he said. "Me. Laswell. Price. Three at the NCA."
"You think it was someone at the NCA."
"I don't think anything. Not till Laswell's looked." He turned his head. "Until then, nobody knows where you are but me and him."
"And me," said MacTavish, cheerfully. "Hi. I'm him."
"Where are we going?"
The two soldiers exchanged a look in the rear-view mirror.
"You're going to hate it," said MacTavish.
It was a narrowboat.
It was called the Marjorie Ann, it was moored on a quiet stretch of the Leeds and Liverpool canal outside Skipton, and it was fifty-seven feet long and six feet ten inches wide. You knew this because Simon told you, standing on the towpath at five in the morning with dawn coming up pink behind the moorland, in the tone of a man reading out a death sentence.
"Six foot ten," you said. "How tall are you?"
He didn't answer.
"Simon. How tall are you?"
"Six four."
"So you can lie down. Diagonally. If you're careful."
"I don't lie down."
"You're going to lie down on this boat. You've been shot. I'm not having you fall asleep in a chair and topple into the canal. I'm a protected witness. I need you alive. That's a rule. Rule one of my rules."
"You don't have rules."
"I do now."
MacTavish dropped your bag on the roof of the boat, clapped Simon on his good shoulder (Simon swayed very slightly; you saw it), and said, "Laswell'll ring. Don't kill each other," and drove away. The canal was the colour of strong tea and perfectly still, and a heron stood on the far bank looking at the two of you as if you'd interrupted something.
Inside, the Marjorie Ann was all varnished pine and brass fittings and crocheted cushions, with a tiny galley, a wood burner the size of a bread bin, and a bed at the far end that had been made up with a quilt covered in ducks.
Simon had to duck under every beam. He did it without complaint and without looking, as if he'd spent half his life in spaces that weren't built for him. You sat him on the bench seat by the burner, found the first aid kit under the sink, and knelt in front of him.
"I'll do it," he said.
"You can't do it, it's your left arm and you're bleeding on a duck quilt. Hoodie off."
He looked at you for a long moment. Then he pulled the hoodie over his head, carefully, and the balaclava stayed exactly where it was, and that told you something about how long he'd been doing this. Underneath he wore a black T-shirt, and under that he was all hard planes and old scars, pale and freckled on the forearms, and there was a tattoo on his right forearm you didn't let yourself look at for longer than a second.
The wound was a long shallow gouge across the outside of his upper arm. Not a hole. A graze, he called it. It looked like someone had tried to open him like a letter.
"You've done this before," he said, watching you irrigate it.
"I did a first aid course for work. Mandatory. Leonard played the casualty. He's eighty, he was very convincing." You picked up the steri-strips. "This might hurt."
"It won't."
It did. You saw it in his jaw under the balaclava and the way his free hand closed on his own knee. You talked through it, because talking was the only thing you knew how to do with your hands busy: about Leonard's allotment and his war with the slugs, about your mum and her shop and the woman who'd brought in a wedding dress with a fish in the pocket. You talked about the farmhouse sheep and the names you'd given them. You did not talk about the man on the kitchen floor, or the hole in the window that would have been in your head if he'd let you stand there.
When you'd finished and taped a dressing over the top, you sat back on your heels, and you found that your hands, which had been perfectly steady, had started to shake.
He noticed. Of course he did. He noticed everything. He reached out with his good hand and put it over both of yours where they lay on your knees, and he didn't say anything. His palm was warm and rough through the fingerless glove, and his thumb rested on the inside of your wrist, against your pulse, like he was checking it was still going.
"Sorry," you said. "Delayed reaction. I'm normally very calm. I once told a hedge fund manager his entire portfolio was fraudulent while he was eating soup."
"I know."
"How do you know that?"
"Read your file."
"There's soup in my file?"
"Laswell's thorough."
You laughed, wobbly. He didn't move his hand.
"City," you said.
"What?"
"You support City. On day five I said something nice about Old Trafford, just to see, and you put the kettle down too hard."
He was silent. Then, with real reluctance: "Blue since birth."
"I knew it. I knew it." You felt absurdly, disproportionately pleased. "That's two true things. I'm on a roll."
"Don't push it."
"I've been shot at. I've earned a third."
He looked at you through the eyeholes. This close, in the morning light coming through the porthole, you could see that his eyes were brown, warm and dark like peat water, and that there were lines at the corners of them that only came from squinting into sun or laughing, and you very much doubted it was the laughing.
"I had a brother," he said. "Tommy."
Had. You heard it, the past tense, and the size of what was behind it, and you didn't ask. You turned your hand over under his, so that your palm met his palm, and you held on.
You slept for most of that day, in a duck-patterned bed in a boat that smelled of diesel and woodsmoke, and when you woke up it was dusk and Simon was sitting in the doorway to the cabin, filling it, on the floor with his back against the frame and his head tipped back. Asleep. Actually asleep, with his rifle across his knees and his wounded arm held close.
You lay still and looked at him for a long time, which felt like trespassing.
Then, because you couldn't help it and because you hadn't worked in weeks and it was making you itch, you took the case bundle out of your bag. The NCA had given you a copy so you could prepare your evidence: two lever-arch files of transfers, summaries, witness lists and the handling log, every officer who'd touched the case and when. You'd read it all twice already. You read it again by the light of your phone screen, which you were allowed to use as a torch, as long as it was in flight mode and you didn't argue.
Page two hundred and four. The handling log. Officer D. Moss, NCA liaison, who'd brought the soup and the lilies up the lane every Tuesday. You'd liked him. He told bad jokes about the A1.
Page three hundred and eighty, the ledgers, which you'd last seen on a screen in Mayfair at eleven at night. A consultancy fee, forty thousand pounds, paid by a Valencia property developer to a company called Mossway Advisory Ltd. Registered address: a flat in Leeds. Director: D. A. Moss.
You'd skimmed it the first time. Forty thousand was a rounding error next to a Mexican port. You hadn't connected it to a man with a box of soup.
You put the file down very carefully. Your heart was going like it had in the cellar.
"Simon," you whispered.
He was awake instantly, eyes open, hand already on the rifle.
"Moss," you said. "The liaison. He's on the payroll. He's been on it since before I went to the NCA."
Simon looked at you for one long second. Then he reached for the burner phone in his vest.
Outside, on the towpath, gravel crunched. Someone knocked three times on the steel of the hull, friendly, the way you'd knock on a neighbour's door.
"Evening," called a voice you knew. "NCA. Brought you some supplies."