‘What we saw.’
Andy didn’t reply for a few seconds. Dom could hear him breathing lightly, slowly, sounding in control. ‘Really, Dom?’
‘I dunno. It’s just … they shot them, Andy.’
‘You haven’t actually read the news, then.’
‘No. Emma told me. Why?’
‘They made the kid watch while they smashed the woman’s skull with something heavy. Then they glued the girl’s nostrils and lips shut with superglue.’
Dom felt the world spinning, or he was spiralling while everything else was motionless. He felt sick. ‘Jesus fucking Christ.’
‘So you really want to go to the police, and tell them we robbed the post office then saw these other bad guys appear to finish them off?’
‘We didn’t kill them.’
‘I know that, Dom! But we’re the bad guys too.’
‘Not that bad.’
‘They’d never believe there wasn’t a link! We admit it, they don’t find the others, we’re guilty of murder.’
‘No,’ Dom said. ‘Nobody gets hurt. That’s what we said.’
‘Yeah, I know, mate.’
‘That poor girl.’
Andy sighed. The phone line crackled. ‘Hardly bears thinking about,’ Andy said. Dom stared through his windscreen across the car park. There weren’t many cars here this early in the morning, and soon he’d go to the local shop to buy his lunch for the day. But he was suddenly all too aware of the damage to his car’s rear wing. It was superficial, little more than a few scratches. He’d already cleaned the mud from his number plates and disposed of the brightly coloured window blinds. But even though he could see no one else around, he felt eyes on him, sizing up the car and taking notes, ready to connect it to the robbery.
And then the white van hit the red car, Officer, and I’ve just seen it in Usk, I even know the guy who drives it, he’s an electrician and a governor at his daughter’s school and I’d have never expected that of him, not robbery, and definitely not murder.
He always seemed so quiet.
Such a nice family.
Nothing like that happens here.
‘Got to get my car done,’ Dom said. ‘I don’t believe we were stupid enough to use it.’
‘It wasn’t stupid. We weren’t stupid. It was just bad luck.’
‘Bad luck that’ll get us—’
‘I know a guy who’ll do the car, up in Shropshire. I’ve already spoken to him, there and back in a day.’
‘I can’t drive to Shropshire, I have to work!’
‘Which is why I’ll do it.’
Dom frowned, thinking things through. His mind was a fog. He couldn’t get anything straight, and if he tried to concentrate on one problem, all the others started battering at the edges of his consciousness.
‘I just can’t think straight,’ he said.
‘You don’t need to. That’s why I’m here. Get to work, go home tonight and hug Daisy. Have some wine, shag your missus. Everything’s going to be fine.’
‘Andy. Do you think if we hadn’t done it, those others might have left them alive?’
Andy sighed heavily, and fell silent for so long that Dom thought the line had been cut.
‘Andy?’
‘That wasn’t just murder. They enjoyed what they did to that girl. So I doubt it. No, they wouldn’t have been left alive. We had no influence over what happened to them. Understand?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Sure?’
‘Yeah. Andy? What if they come looking for us?’
‘They’ll be long gone by now.’
‘How do you know?’ Dom asked.
‘Because I would be. Now what time can you get here?’
She was Jane Smith, the do-over woman, and upon waking every morning her new life built itself from scratch.
She relished those briefest of moments between sleep and full consciousness, when all she knew was the lonely warmth of the French gîte’s bedroom, the landscape of bare grey stone walls, the roof light affording a view of the clearest blue sky, and the scents of summer drifting through windows left open all night. For that shortest of times she was free and carefree.
But reality always rushed in, as if she would suffocate and die without it. Her life was constructed around her and she pulled it on like a costume. Her name, her history, why she was here and where she had been before. It no longer needed learning and repeating, this new existence, because she knew it so well. She was experienced at living a lie.
Fragments of her old, real life always hung around, like stains from the past. But she did her best to restrict them to dreams, and nightmares.
She stretched beneath the single sheet. Her body was thin, lithe and strong, limbs corded with muscles. She enjoyed the feeling of being fit. There were hurdles to fitness, buffers against which she shoved again and again, but she enjoyed fighting them. She knew that the more years went by, the harder it would be to deny the wounds and injuries. But for now they acted as badges of honour. Scars formed a map of her past, a constant reminder of her old life that made-up names and histories could not erase.
A spider was crawling high across the stone gable wall close to the sloping ceiling. It was big, body the size of her thumbnail, legs an inch long. She’d seen it before, usually on the mornings when she woke earlier than normal. It probably patrolled her room at night, secretive and silent and known only to her. She imagined it exploring familiar ground in search of prey, and perhaps it sometimes crawled across her skin, pausing on her pillow to sense her breath, her dreams.
It scurried, paused, scurried again, eventually disappearing into its hole until the sun went down. She liked the idea of it spending daylight out of sight. Its sole purpose was existence and survival. There was something pure about that.
She sat on the edge of the bed, stretched again, then walked naked down the curving timber staircase and into the bathroom.
She’d been living in the gîte in Brittany for a little over three months, and she knew its nooks and crannies probably better than the French owners.
In a slit in the bed mattress was a Glock 17 pistol. Tucked behind a stone in the stairwell wall was a Leatherneck knife. A loose floorboard in the bathroom hid a sawn-off shotgun and an M67 grenade, and downstairs on the ground floor, beneath a flagstone in the kitchen, was a small weapons cache containing another pistol, a combat shotgun, and several more grenades.
Though aware of everything around her, Jane Smith did not think of these things now. Her life was as quiet and peaceful as she had ever believed possible. But none of this made her feel safe.
There was no such thing as safe.
She used the toilet, then went down the second flight of stairs to the kitchen. Kettle on, coffee ground, she watched from the kitchen window as the new day was birthed from the dregs of