“Just give me a name.”
“Screw you.”
“What instructions did he give you?”
“I told you, I’m saying nothing about the client. Or any client for that matter. It’s between me and them.”
“Listen, you can either have me asking”—I gesture at Dom—“Or him. Your choice.”
“You know what?” Shaun moves a hand to his jacket pocket. “I’m calling the—”
Dom brings his fist down hard on the table, so fast I barely even register it, a flat heavycrackthat rattles the whole booth and makes Shaun jump visibly back in his seat.
“I say we take him out the back,” Dom says in a gravelly monotone. “Have a littlechatin the car park.”
Shaun holds his hand up, shrinking back into the corner of the booth. I remember how he was at my house: potentially threatening but only in a superficial way. It was bluster with nothing behind it.
“OK,” he says. “OK. Jesus. Whatever. It was just some guy, all right?”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. He messaged me on the website, just like you did, said he had a cash job that was short notice and neededsensitive handling. He wanted someone plausible, calm under pressure, good at improv, and I’m like telling him, ‘Yes, yes, I’m good at all those things.’ And so he gave me the address and said he needed it done ASAP. Five hundred quid up front and another five hundred quid if I got the watch and everything else.”
“And what else were you expecting to get?”
Shaun frowns in recollection. “A… wallet, a phone, an old scarf or something? Can’t remember the rest but he reckoned it would all be together in one place. Said he lived abroad and he couldn’t get to the UK, he didn’t want to go through all the formal channels, all the legal stuff. He just wanted to get his grandad’s old watch and a few other bits and bobs. Return them to the old boy before the cancer finally got him. Felt like this would be the quickest way to recover his old stuff.”
“And it didn’t strike you as a bit odd? A bit cloak-and-dagger?”
He shrugs. “It was good money. Things have been a bit tight recently, been doing loads of auditions but still waiting to hear back. I’ve had weirder acting jobs than this, believe me.Muchweirder. But that’s why it’s better than a boring nine-to-five.”
“And the client was a man?”
“I mean… it was all done on the messaging app on the website. I sent a couple of my showreels with some of my acting work. But I never spoke to them or met them face to face, I just—”
Dom interrupts. “You know they’re stolen goods, right?”
Shaun turns to him.
“What?”
“And by involving you he’s made you an accomplice in a criminal activity. Whether you walked away with those stolen goods or not, you’re already complicit under the common law doctrineof joint criminal enterprise—each individual being responsible for the crimes committed by the group.”
Dom is freestyling now, making it up as he goes along, but he sounds almost like a police officer and it seems to be working. Shaun’s eyes widen in alarm.
“What?”
“He used you. Hung you out to dry.”
“Look, I didn’t want to get involved in anything illegal. He said they were family heirlooms but it was never supposed to be—”
“He made you take all the risks, didn’t even pay you all the money. You don’t owe him any loyalty. You don’t owe him anything.”
Shaun’s cheeks are flushed beneath his dark beard, his nostrils flaring. But he’s nodding, as if he’s suddenly seen the truth of his situation.
“The name was Mason,” he says reluctantly. “That’s the name they went by on the website, anyway. Assumed it was a surname but I didn’t actually ask.”
“Good,” Dom says. “That’s good. What else did Mason say? Anything unusual about the instructions they gave you?”
