Chapter 3: Forty-One Tabs
Simon put one finger up to the mouth of the skull. Quiet. Then he pointed at the bed, at the floor beside it, at you.
You got down. The cabin floor was cold varnished wood and smelled of polish. You lay flat between the bed and the hull with the case files pressed against your chest like a shield, which was stupid, because they were paper, but you'd spent six years of your life believing paper could stop people and you weren't going to stop now.
Simon moved down the length of the boat without a sound. You hadn't known a man that size could be silent on a floating floor. He paused at the galley, listened, and then did something with the burner phone, thumb moving fast, and slid it into his pocket.
"Lieutenant?" Moss's voice again, closer to the stern door. "It's Declan. Laswell sent me. She said you'd be moving tonight and you'd need a hand with the kit."
Laswell had not sent anyone. Laswell hadn't rung at all.
"Door's open," Simon called back. His voice was perfectly ordinary. Bored, even. "Mind the step."
You stared at him. He wasn't looking at you. He'd taken up position beside the stern doors, flat against the wall where anyone coming down the steps would have to come past him, and he'd left the rifle propped by the bed. He had a pistol in his hand, held low against his thigh.
The doors opened. A pair of brown brogues came down the steps, and then Declan Moss, in his anorak, with a carrier bag from the Co-op in one hand. He had his other hand in his pocket.
"Bloody hell," he said, ducking. "How do you live in these things?"
Then he saw you on the floor at the far end, and his face changed, and his hand came out of his pocket with something black in it, and Simon hit him.
It was over so quickly you almost missed it. One second Moss was there and the next he was face down on the galley floor with his arm twisted up behind his back at an angle that made you wince, the Co-op bag split open, a tin of tomato soup rolling slowly along the varnish towards you like it had somewhere to be. The black thing in his hand had turned out to be a gun. Simon had it now. He'd taken it off him the way you'd take a pen off someone who was about to sign the wrong document.
"Don't," Moss gasped. "Don't, I've got a family."
"So does she," Simon said.
Outside, on the towpath, an engine turned over.
Simon's head came up. "How many with you?"
"Nobody. I came alone, I swear to God."
"How many."
"Two." Moss was crying now. "Two, they're in the car, they said if I just got her outside they'd do the rest, they said nobody'd get hurt, I've got a mortgage, you don't know what they're like..."
A car door slammed. Footsteps on gravel, two sets, quick.
Simon looked at you down the length of the boat, and you understood the problem without him saying a word. He had one hand pinning Moss and the other holding a pistol, and he was at the wrong end of the boat. The men outside would come through the bow doors, your end, before he could get there.
"Bed," he said. "Under it. Now."
You didn't go under the bed.
You didn't know you weren't going to until you'd done it. You stood up, which was the opposite of every rule, and you went to the bow doors with your hands where they could be seen, and you opened them onto the dusk.
There were two men on the towpath, ten feet away. One was tall and one was stocky and both of them had their hands inside their jackets. In the last of the light, the canal behind them shone like a sheet of tin.
"Oh, thank God," you said. "Are you with Declan? He's having some sort of fit. I think it's his heart. He just went down."
They stopped. People always did, when you talked. It was the one thing you'd learned in six years of telling powerful men things they didn't want to hear: start speaking in a reasonable voice and they'll wait for the end of the sentence, because they're sure it's going to be about them.
"Where's the soldier?" said the tall one. Not a British accent.
"Gone to get the car. He left me with Declan. I don't know CPR, I mean I did a course, but our casualty was eighty and very frail and you don't press hard on an eighty-year-old, do you, so I don't think I'm doing it properly. Is one of you any good with chests? You look like you'd be good with chests."
The stocky one glanced at the tall one. His hand moved in his jacket.
"And look, while you're here," you said, faster, brighter, "you should know that the drive's not on me. I'm not stupid. It's with a solicitor in Holborn with instructions to release the whole ledger to the Financial Times if I miss a check-in, so if you're thinking that I'm the only copy, I'm not, I'm just the one who can explain it, which honestly is the boring part. It's mostly Excel. Do you know how many tabs Valencia has? Forty-one. Forty-one tabs, and someone colour-coded them in a way I would describe as a cry for help..."
The stocky one opened his mouth to say something, and a shape came over the roof of the narrowboat out of the dark behind you, huge and silent, and landed on the towpath between you and them.
You'd forgotten the boat had a roof. Simon hadn't.
You did go down then. You got down flat on the deck of the bow with your hands over your head while the world went loud for about four seconds, and when you looked up, the tall man was in the canal, the stocky man was on the gravel being knelt on, and Simon was standing over him with his breath steaming out of the mouth of the mask, looking at you.
He didn't say anything. He didn't need to. He looked like he was going to have a great deal to say, afterwards.
Then the headlights came, a lot of them, blue and white and strobing over the water, and Captain Price got out of the first car in a boonie hat with a cigar in his teeth, surveyed the scene, and said, "Well. You've been busy."
Kate Laswell had got Simon's text at 18:52. It had said: MOSS. MARJORIE ANN. NOW. That was why they'd come so fast. It was also, you found out later, the longest text message anyone in the task force had ever received from him.
They took you to Hereford. Price put you in a room in the officers' quarters that had a real bed and a kettle and no ducks, and told you the hearing had been brought forward to Friday, because the people who'd sent Moss would try again and the Crown Prosecution Service would rather they didn't get the chance. Then he patted your shoulder like a man who wasn't used to doing it and said, "Talked them to a standstill, I heard. Good effort," and went away, chuckling, trailing smoke.
Simon didn't come.
You sat on the bed for an hour. You made two cups of tea, out of habit, and drank both of them. You thought about the look he'd given you on the towpath, and decided it was fury, and decided you'd deserved it, and decided you didn't care, because you'd do it again.
At half past eleven there was a knock.
He was in the corridor, freshly dressed, the dressing on his arm changed, the balaclava straight. He'd washed off the eye black. Without it his eyes looked older and more tired and more ordinary, and somehow that was worse.
"Roof," he said.
The roof of the officers' block had a low wall, a view of the Black Mountains in the dark, and a single plastic chair that someone had dragged up there to smoke on. Simon didn't sit on it. He stood at the wall with his forearms on the brick, and you stood next to him, and for a long time neither of you said anything, which you suspected was a personal record.
"You opened the door," he said eventually.
"I know."
"I told you to get under the bed."
"I know. I was going to argue afterwards. It's afterwards."
He turned his head. "You could've died."
"So could you. You were at the wrong end of the boat."
"That's my job."
"And talking's mine." You made yourself look at him. "You said do what I say and argue afterwards. Fine. Here's the argument. I've spent a month watching you put yourself between me and every window in Yorkshire. I'm not a parcel, Simon. I'm not going to lie on the floor while someone shoots you because you were carrying me. I've got one thing I'm good at, and it's talking until people forget what they came in for. I used it. I'd use it again."
The wind came off the hills, cold and smelling of rain. He was quiet so long that you started to think about going back down.
"Forty-one tabs," he said.
You stared at him. "What?"
"Valencia. You said it had forty-one tabs."
"It does."
"Did you make that up?"
"No. Why would I make it up? It's true. Someone colour-coded them in puce."
He made the sound again, the one from the farmhouse kitchen, a breath through the nose. Only it went on longer this time, and his shoulders moved, and you realised with something close to panic that Simon Riley was laughing. Properly laughing, quietly, into the dark, his head bowed over the wall.
"I was stood on the roof," he said, "with a pistol, listening to you, and I thought, she's going to talk them to death. She's going to bore them into the canal."
"I wasn't boring. That was riveting. That was premium forensic accounting."
"Puce," he said, and shook his head.
Then he stopped laughing, and turned to face you properly, and put his gloved hand against the side of your face.
You held very still.
"Rule five," he said, low. "Don't ask about the mask."
"I haven't."
"I know." His thumb moved along your cheekbone, once. "Close your eyes."
You closed them.
You heard the rasp of fabric, felt the night air shift as he bent his head. Then his mouth was on yours: warm, a bit chapped, unexpectedly careful. The edge of the rolled balaclava brushed the tip of your nose. There was stubble along his jaw and a ridge of scar at the corner of his lip that you felt and didn't flinch from. He kissed you slow, as if he'd been thinking about it for a long time and had made a plan, and when you made a small sound against his mouth and caught a fistful of his hoodie he made one back, rough and quiet, and his other hand came to the small of your back and pulled you in against him like he'd been waiting the whole month for permission.
When he lifted his head, you kept your eyes shut. You heard the fabric again, rolled down.
"You can look," he said.
You looked. The skull was back in place. His eyes, above it, were not hiding anything at all.
"Was that a rule?" you asked, when you could. "Should I write it down? Rule seven?"
"Rule seven," he said, "is that when this is over, you stop being my witness."
Your heart dropped. "Oh."
"And you let me take you somewhere with windows."
It took a second. Then you laughed, helplessly, and pressed your forehead against his chest, and felt his hand come up to cradle the back of your head.
"Somewhere with windows," you said into his hoodie. "And tea."
"You make it wrong."
"You drink all of it."
"Yeah," Simon said, and you felt the word rumble through him. "I do."
On Friday you sat behind a screen in Court Two at the Old Bailey and talked for six hours.
You walked the jury through Rotterdam and Valencia and Baja California and Lagos. You explained the forty-one tabs, and the puce, and one juror laughed and turned it into a cough. You named the partner who'd invited you to his daughter's wedding, and you named Declan Moss, and you named the port. You didn't look at the dock. You looked at the man standing against the wall beside the witness box, in a borrowed suit that strained at the shoulders and a plain black balaclava, because the judge had drawn the line at the skull.
When it was over, and you came out of the side entrance into a grey London afternoon, he was waiting by the car with the door open.
"Well?" you said. "How was I?"
Simon looked down at you. You could tell, now, when he was smiling under it. It was in the eyes, and you'd had a month to learn them.
"Talked too much," he said, and held out his hand. This time, he was the one who offered it.