‘Hey, Al! Jasmine again. Just to let you know, thought you ought to be aware, this one ishuge. The guy owns some estate in Scotland and he’s offering up to ten grand for you to head up and spend a couple of days snapping. Sounds good, right? Anyway, give me a bell today and we’ll see if we can get you in the same room together.’
And this afternoon:
‘Hey, Al! Jasmine here. Can you ring when you get this? You’ve probably seen my other messages but I really don’t want you to miss out on this one. Between you and me, this one is as good as yours. Apparently he saw your portfolio and just thinks it’s got to be you. But he still wants a face-to-face, so I need to set it up. OK, bye, give me a ring!’
Now. Jasmine and I could have been great friends. We’re the same age, the same class, the same background (not that she knows anything about my background). But we fumbled it, and our relationship is now best described as ‘mutual lifelong enmity’. We took against each other on day one, whenwe had a disagreement about Ed Sheeran as I was waiting by her desk before my interview, and it only got worse from there. She’s declined to acknowledge me at office get-togethers, she’s given me cold stares throughout business Zooms, she once cut me dead for an entire Christmas lunch when we were sitting next to each other.
So there is no way, no way in hell, Jasmine would sound that nice when offering me a lucrative job for an eccentric millionaire. She’d do her best to sabotage me getting the gig, and if she did have to notify me about the offer, she’d put it in small print at the bottom of an eighteen-paragraph email about a new JPEG protocol.
All of which means that my workplace are on to me.
And that, in turn, means the police know my real name.
22
‘Are you certain?’ says Elle. ‘You know, it’s possible people can just wake up one morning and turn over a new leaf. Maybe Jasmine’s finally seeing you for who you really are.’
I give this comment the reception it deserves.
‘Yeah, I think that’s not quite right, hun,’ Em chips in. ‘I think the problem was she always could see Al and his personality clearly, which is why she’s disliked him for years.’ Elle’s brow wrinkles.
‘In that case,’ says Jonny, ‘you’re completely compromised.’
They don’t know the half of it. Here’s the truth: I’m a fraud even at being an interloper.
I have a name, a real one, I mean. I don’t ever use it. Nobody knows it. Not the agency, certainly not my interlope contacts, nor my new friends either. But to go fully off grid is harderthan ever these days, unless you’re buying a mobile home in north Norfolk for a cash deposit and living on baked beans. So I half-arsed it, like I have done everything else.
My bank account is in my real name, although I told the agency my fake name and they’ve never queried the disparity. I also have somewhere for my post to go, an old mate’s house from which I pick it up sporadically. I dropped off the census last time they conducted one, which made me very happy – I was staying in a beautiful shepherd’s hut in a famous writer’s garden (he had no idea I was there). But that’s as far as I’ve gone. I’m not Robin Hood. It’s much easier to slip between the cracks than to build yourself a brand-new identity.
All of that means there’s a little thread for the police to pull. If they are in touch with my agency, they’ll be all over my bank account, and from that they’ll find my real name. Not only that, thanks to the Terminator cop from the restaurant and his stupid phone, they have my face too.
I’m starting to feel like a fox, halfway through a bracing and easy escape from some dumb dogs and red-coated poshos, who has just smelled a second set of dogs coming from the direction he was headed in, and has realised:Ah. This might get a bit complicated before the day is out.
I realise I haven’t replied to Jonny’s comment.
‘Yeah. “Completely compromised” is a good way of putting it. Thanks, Jonny.’
‘Oh, leave him alone,’ says Em. ‘We’ll work out what to do in the morning.’
‘Sure.’ I turn off my work phone – was it on long enoughthat the police could work out which mast the messages were delivered to? Probably. Either way, for all the good it will do me, I take the SIM card out, disassemble it, and chuck the lot in the kitchen bin.
‘OK, guys, I think I’ve had enough excitement for one day. I’m going to turn in.’
As I stand, my pocket buzzes. My main phone – thankfully bought off the shelf and with no link to me whatsoever – has received a new text message.
Time is running short, Al.
Tremendous.
Not the best night’s sleep I’ve ever had.
I can’t swear, but I think someone faintly tapped on my door around midnight. The tap seemed much more ‘Elle coming to say how sorry she is that you’re probably going to prison’ than ‘Em coming to ravish you’. Even if it had been the latter, I wasn’t quite in the ravishee’s mindset, so I just waited, patiently, until whoever was on the landing gave up and left.
At breakfast the next morning, we work out what we’re going to do next.
The reasoning goes as follows: there is clearly something going on at Davy’s firm. These addresses he kept – all with dates and sizeable sums of money next to them – must have meant something to him. And several are within an hour’s walk of here. So we may as well start asking questions there.
Elle says she doesn’t fancy coming along, although she’s a bit vague about why. Not like her – she has strong ‘joiner-in’energy. Maybe Em’s told her to give us some alone time. Dream on, Al.
