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Chapter 28

They pushed open the saloon door of the pub, which was empty apart from a few young blokes in football shirts, and a couple of old men restlessly toying with their cigarette packets at the bar, looking as if they couldn’t wait to get outside to smoke the next one. A middle-aged barmaid leaned on the bar and showed off a crêpey tanned cleavage as she pulled Paul’s pint.

They sat opposite one another at a wobbly table next to the cigarette machine. Kate, who had been calling Miranda whilst Paul was at the bar, put down Paul’s mobile and took a huge gulp of her vodka tonic.

‘How is he?’

‘He’s fine. It took Miranda a while to drag him away from the PlayStation to talk to me. He seems to be having a great time. Not missing his mum as much as she misses him.’

She watched Paul sip his bitter, and sensed that he was struggling with the urge to down the whole pint in one.

‘Go on then,’ Kate said. ‘Tell me why you threw my mobile out of the window rather than letting me call the police.’

It was a few moments before Paul could summon up the courage to speak.

‘Don’t you ever wonder why you never knew Stephen had a twin brother? Because I bet he never mentioned me, did he?’

Kate shook her head. She had often wondered.

‘I’ll tell you why he didn’t talk about me when you were both at the CRU.’

She waited.

‘Because I was in prison. That’s where I was when he sent me that letter.’

Kate pushed herself back in her seat, almost toppling over backwards. ‘Prison? What . . . what for?’

Paul leaned forward and tried to touch her knee but she pulled away. ‘I didn’t murder anyone, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m not a rapist or a mugger.’

‘What then?’

‘Hacking.’

‘Computer crime?’ She relaxed a little. She was still shocked, but there was something about computer crime that didn’t seem as harmful as other crimes. As long as you weren’t selling child pornography or creating viruses that destroyed people’s computers or stole their personal details . . . although, she thought, perhaps that was exactly what he had done.

‘What did you do?’

‘I robbed a bank.’

‘Oh.’ She refused his outstretched hand.

‘I was twenty. Stephen was already working at the CRU. I was living in a bedsit in London and had an incredibly dull job, working in the IT department of a sixth-form college in Southwark. But during the evenings I had a whole different identity. I was a hacker called Shadowfax – I know, it’s embarrassing, but I was a Lord of the Rings fan. I was obsessed with the challenge of getting into places where I wasn’t supposed to go. There was a small group of us – we used to chat on Usenet, which was a kind of precursor to the internet. There was a guy called Dark Fox – I know, I know – who was renowned as the top hacker in the UK. Actually, he was a cracker, which is what the true hackers, who weren’t criminals, call people who use their hacking skills maliciously.’

‘And you weren’t a cracker?’

‘No. Just a hacker.’

They both laughed at the ridiculousness of what they were saying. But then Kate stopped laughing. ‘Except you robbed a bank.’

Paul sighed. ‘It was a dare, another challenge. Dark Fox had been boasting about how he’d got into Midland Bank’s system and wiped out his overdraft. Everyone was hugely impressed by this. It took an enormous amount of skill to get into a bank’s system. Except I wasn’t that impressed. Why just wipe out your overdraft? Why not make yourself rich?’

‘Because if your bank balance suddenly shoots up, the bank might notice?’

‘Yes. Well, of course, I thought of that, so I came up with a scheme. I would invent a new identity, a fake account under a made-up name. I used the hints and information that Dark Fox had revealed and used my own skills – and I was bloody good – to get into the bank’s system, set up this bogus account and credit it with £10,000. Not an enormous amount, but I thought I’d start low.’

‘And I expect £10,000 was a lot to you back then.’

‘Yeah. It’s a lot now.’

‘Let me get you another pint,’ Kate said, noticing the forlorn way he was staring at the now-empty glass. She returned a minute later with refills of their drinks.

‘Thanks. Okay, so, the first part of the plan worked. I got in, set up the account, credited ten grand. The next bit was the genius bit, I thought. I got the system to send me a cash card along with a pin number assigned to this bogus account. I set up a PO Box and collected the card from there, strolled down to the local Midland and took out my first grand.’ He grinned. ‘It was so exciting. I could hardly believe it had worked. That evening I went online and started telling all my hacker buddies about what I’d done. Suddenly I was their hero. Even Dark Fox said he was impressed.’

‘But you got caught.’

‘Yeah.’

‘What happened?’

‘It turned out Dark Fox was an undercover cop. It must have been one of the first cases of computer entrapment. They traced me to the PO Box and that was it. I was arrested and charged for theft. Sent to prison for five years, though I was out in three.’

Kate took Paul’s hand again. He hadn’t hurt anyone. The money was a drop in the ocean of the bank’s vast profits – it wasn’t like he’d taken it from some little old lady’s account.

‘I still don’t get it, though,’ she said. ‘You were convicted of a computer crime. You did your time, as they say. Why did that stop you from wanting to call the police about Mrs Bainbridge?’

‘I haven’t finished yet. It gets . . . a lot worse. I feel scared to tell you, Kate. I’m worried that it will make you hate me.’

‘I need to know, Paul.’

‘I don’t know . . .’

She stood up. ‘If you don’t tell me I’m going to walk up to the bar, ask to use their phone, and call the police right now. I mean it.’

The men at the bar were watching Kate, their hands momentarily stilling their cigarette packets as they witnessed the rising tension. Paul gestured for her to sit. ‘Okay, I’ll tell you.’

He hesitated. ‘They put me in a cell with a bloke called Tony Plumber. He was a bit older than me and a lot harder. This was his second time inside.’

‘What was he in for?’

‘Tony was a traditionalist. He’d robbed a bank the old fashioned way, with a stocking on his head, and a sawn-off shotgun. He thought it was hilarious that he’d been stuck in a cell with some nancy who’d tried to rob a bank with a computer. “What you should have done,” he said, “was take the computer into the bank and whack the cashier over the head with it. You want to try robbing the proper way.’’’

It was then that Kate realised where this story was going. ‘Oh, Paul . . . You didn’t.’

He nodded, shamefaced. ‘I was angry. With the system, the world. I felt like I hadn’t done anything that bad, not compared to someone like Tony, who walked into a bank with a gun and terrified a load of people – yet he’d got the same sentence as me. Also, I was furious about the entrapment. And then the final straw – I heard about Stephen’s death . . . I was fucking furious with the whole world. Bitter. And Tony could sense that. He said that when he got out he was planning another job, one that was foolproof, and that if I wanted I could be part of it. He liked me, he said. He wanted to show me how to rob a bank the proper way.

‘He got out a couple of months before me, and when I was released, he was waiting for me. To be honest, I’d had second thoughts since he’d left, without having him there winding me up every day, but then I went through all the predictable shit that so many ex-cons go through: my old friends had all moved on and I couldn’t get another job, especially in IT, not with my record. My family were in trauma after Stephen’s death and that, added to their shame over what I’d done, meant they didn’t want to know me. The girl I’d been seeing when I went inside had stopped visiting almost immediately. I was alone. Apart from my old cellmate, Tony Plumber.’

Paul ploughed on. ‘I had a habit of falling in with bad influences, didn’t I? First my old school mates, then Tony. He took me under his wing. Me and him, we were going to be rich, he said. One job, then off to the Costa del Sol.’ He laughed. ‘It all seems so clichéd, but that was the world Tony existed in. And I went for it.

‘There were the two of us plus a driver, some bloke called Colin. Tony told me to meet him at his garage one Thursday morning. We were going to hit the NatWest in Bromley. It was raining, I remember. When I turned up, Tony handed me a pistol. I think it was then it struck me, that this was actually real. I tried to back out, but Tony got angry and told me that it was too late. He pointed his gun at me. I was shitting myself. We drove to the bank – I felt so sick, Kate. My legs were wobbling when we got out of the car. Tony hissed at me that I’d better pull myself together because we were going in now.’

Paul’s face had gone white.

‘We pulled stockings over our heads and ran into the bank, me a couple of paces behind him. It was nearly empty – just three people in the queue and two cashiers, a bald bloke and a young girl. It’s as clear now as if it had happened yesterday. Tony started shouting, pulled out his gun and the customers automatically hit the deck. Tony pointed his gun at the female cashier and was screaming at her to put the money in bags. I was pointing my gun at the other cashier, though my hand was shaking so much I nearly dropped it several times. I could see cameras filming us, and I was so desperate to get out of there. But Tony was getting angrier and angrier. The cashier was being too slow. She was stuffing the money into a bag and then she dropped it on the floor. When she bent down to pick it up, Tony started screaming, You bitch. You fucking bitch. She just pressed the panic button. I could see his finger tensing on the trigger. He was going to shoot her.’

He looked into Kate’s eyes. ‘So I shot him.’

‘You . . .?’

‘I shot him. In the side, here.’ He touched his right side, just beneath his ribcage. ‘It was a fluke shot – I was lucky I didn’t shoot the cashier by mistake. He fell on the floor, thrashing about in his own blood. The rest of it is a blur. I dropped my own gun and waited for the police to arrive.’

‘Oh Paul. What happened?’

‘Tony survived, though he lost a lot of blood. And I was sent back to jail, although my sentence was a lot shorter than it would have been because my barrister successfully argued that I was an innocent who had acted to save the life of the cashier, blah blah. Tony testified against me but that actually helped because he was so awful, and the jury really took against him. Plus the cashier that I’d saved spoke up for me. It was quite big news at the time, though you would have missed it because you were in America.’

He told her the rest of the story, about how after this spell in prison he was head-hunted by a computer security firm who had realised that taking on ex-hackers was a sensible move, even ones who had dallied with armed robbery. Paul’s brilliance with computers, along with his insight into the way criminal minds worked, made him a perfect employee. And he wasn’t angry any more, he said. He was reformed and grateful for the chance to start again.

‘But I have a record with guns. There were no witnesses to Mrs Bainbridge’s shooting, so what do you think the police would think when they checked my background? They’d assume that I did it.’

‘No, because I’d tell them it was Sampson. I’m a witness.’

‘It wouldn’t be that simple, Kate. We’d both be arrested, probably. And what would you tell them about Sampson? That he was the odd-job man at some place you stayed at sixteen years ago who always seemed a bit creepy and that we’re investigating my brother’s death because we think there was something suspicious going on there, but you’ve lost huge chunks of your memory? Sounds really plausible, doesn’t it? And are you going to tell them that you’re on the run from your husband with your little boy, who you probably shouldn’t have brought out of the States?’

‘What? How did you . . .?’

‘Come off it, Kate. I’m not stupid. For one thing, I overheard a lot of what you told Miranda, and the rest I figured out. You’ve just confirmed it. What do you think will happen to Jack if we go to the police? At the very least they’ll tell your husband where Jack is. Also, there’s the risk that if we get derailed now we’ll never find out what happened to Stephen.’

‘But what about Mrs Bainbridge? She was murdered; we saw him kill her. And she saved your life, Paul. Like you saved that cashier’s.’

‘I know. Don’t you think I feel sick when I think about it? But telling the police about Sampson isn’t going to bring her back. We need to find more evidence about what was going on at the CRU, including more about who Sampson is and where we can find him. Then we can go to the police. But if we go now, we’ll risk screwing up everything.’

Kate didn’t know what to do. Her instincts screamed for her to call the police right now, but what if Paul was right? Vernon would be over on the next flight – if he wasn’t already here – and she’d lose Jack. Paul would be arrested and most likely charged, and she might be seen as an accessory if they really believed Paul was the killer.

In her head, she could see Stephen. He was telling her to trust Paul, to go along with it.

She studied Paul’s worried, earnest expression. Looked at the lips she’d kissed earlier that day. He had made mistakes in the past, there was no doubt about that. But it was a long time ago, and he’d saved a woman’s life.

It was crazy, but she felt closer to this man, whom she’d only known for a few days, than she ever had done to her husband.

‘Okay,’ she said, making up her mind and praying she wasn’t going to regret it. ‘What next?’

‘We should think about finding somewhere to stay.’ He lifted his empty pint glass, the insides streaked with foam. ‘Somewhere nearby because now we’ve both drunk too much to drive with a clear head.’

‘Okay.’ She looked up at him. ‘We’ll get a room.’

‘A room?’

Kate became suddenly aware of the ache that had been growing unnoticed inside her. She didn’t reply to Paul’s question, but didn’t break eye contact either. When he reached across the table, touching the side of her face, running his fingers along her jawbone, she felt the urge to drag him from the table into the toilets and order him to take her, right there and then, and the image made her bite her lip. She could wait. But not for much longer. She felt close to him . . . but she wanted to get a lot closer.

Paul went to the bar to ask if the barmaid could recommend a nearby hotel or bed and breakfast. Beneath the roar of adrenaline that rushed through his veins was a whisper of anxiety: the shotgun in the boot. What was Kate going to say if she found out, especially after he’d just told her about his past? His only defence would be the truth: that despite his past experiences with guns, the promise he’d made to himself years ago to never use one again, when he saw the shotgun he knew it was an opportunity that had to be grasped. He had watched that maniac Sampson shoot an old woman, with a bullet intended for him. He needed the shotgun to protect himself and Kate, a woman with whom, he realised, he was falling in love.

And who knew? If revenge needed to be taken for what happened to Stephen, at least he now had the means with which to take it.