The first answer was the obvious one. Money. There were good rewards on offer for information on criminals and Tomboy needed the cash. He wanted to retire from the game with his freedom intact because he believed that with the onset of technology, and its availability to the police for fighting crime, the writing was on the wall for middle-ranking career criminals such as himself. So it was a case of making hay while the sun shone, building up a nice little nest egg (he’d set a target limit of £50,000), and then getting the fuck out.
The second answer was that if he didn’t dob them in, someone else would do it anyway. Criminals are usually notorious braggarts. Since they can’t tell the whole world what they’ve done for fear of retribution, they like to boast about their exploits to one another. And since by definition they’re a dishonest lot – as Tomboy once said, ‘Whoever heard of such a thing as honour among thieves?’ – sooner or later someone’s going to inform on them if the money’s right. All he did, if you believed his rationale, was get in there first.
So that was Tomboy’s philosophy. There’s no point in not doing the deed because one way or another it’s going to get done, and if you’re going to get paid to do it, all the better. I thought about that as I drove home through the rain that night. If I hadn’t killed those men, someone else would have shot them. Either way they ended up dead. If you’re in the line of business where you make enemies of people who’ll pay to have you killed, you’ve got to be prepared to accept the consequences. That was how I justified it to myself, and that was how Tomboy had always justified it to me, and it had never done him any harm. In fact, it appeared to have done him a lot of good. The last I’d heard he was living out in the Philippines. He’d made his fifty grand, probably a lot more knowing him, and had invested it in a beach bar and guesthouse on one of the more far-flung islands. He’d sent me a postcard from there a couple of years back in which he’d extolled the virtues of the laid-back tropical lifestyle. It had ended with him saying that if ever I fancied a job working at his place, I should let him know.
More than once I’d felt like taking him up on the offer.
It was getting close to eleven o’clock when I got home that night, home being a rented one bedroom flat at the southern end of Islington, not too far from City Road. The first thing I did was take a long hot shower to wash the cold out of my bones, before pouring myself a decent-sized glass of red wine and settling down on the lounge sofa.
I turned on the TV and lit a cigarette relaxing properly for the first time that day. I took a long slow drag, enjoying the fact that a potentially hazardous job had been completed successfully, and flicked through the channels until I found a report on the killings. It didn’t take long. Murder’s a numbers game. Kill one person and you barely make the inside pages. Kill three, especially in a public place, and it’s big news. It adds a bit of excitement to the mundane grind of people’s lives, even more so when it bears all the hallmarks of a so-called gangland shooting. Shootings are entertaining because they’re not too personal. They make good conversation points.
Understandably, details were still very sketchy. The programme I was watching had a young female reporter on the scene. She looked cold but excited to be involved in what was potentially a meaty, career-enhancing story. It was still raining, only now it had turned into that light stuff that always seems to soak you more. She’d positioned herself in the rear car park and you could make out the Cherokee in the background about twenty yards away, behind reams of brightly coloured scene-of-crime tape. There were a lot of police and forensic staff in lab coats swarming all over it.
The report didn’t last long. The girl confirmed that three people had been murdered – no idea as to identities – and speculated that they’d been shot. She then wheeled over the hotel’s deputy manager, a tall, spotty young man who looked like he’d just got out of school, for his comments. They weren’t, it has to be said, very enlightening. Squinting through his spectacles, he explained that he’d been working in the reception area when he’d heard a number of faint popping sounds (they all say that) coming from the rear car park. He’d thought nothing more of it but then one of the kitchen workers had come running in screaming and shouting that there’d been a murder. He, the deputy manager, had bravely gone out to investigate and had immediately discovered my handiwork, which was when he’d called the police. ‘It was very shocking for all of us,’ he told the reporter. ‘You don’t expect this sort of thing in a quiet area like this.’ They all seem to say that as well.
The reporter thanked him before turning back to the camera and breathlessly promising further information as and when she received it. She then signed off, and it was back to the studio. It seemed I’d made her night anyway.
I took a drink of wine, taking my time swallowing it, and switched over. There was a programme about great white sharks on the Discovery Channel, and I sat watching that for a while, not really paying too much attention. Although I tried to empty my mind of the day’s events, it was
