Billy Shepherd arrived early, by rowboat from Belsar’s Hill, and lit a fire in the cellar. It was vaulted and arched in the form of a crypt. The smoke looped through the coal chutes which led up into the engine room. The river damp, trapped in the walls, seeped out in moist waves as the fire warmed the room. At one end of the cellar was a lead-black pile of coal sacks – rustled occasionally by the movement of mice and rats. Billy placed the note he had got his grandfather to write on a stool in the light beside the fire. He put two bottles of whisky on the stone-flagged floor and three tin mugs beside it. He poured himself a measure.
He settled down to wait. His appetite, always voracious, nagged. He smoked to kill it. Like Tommy he had been a thin and delicate child– but their resemblance would not last long. Billy was thickening out in a layer of honed muscle which had already obscured the bones beneath his face. It was taking on the beaten look of newly rolled sheet steel – a chassis for life.
Billy timed ten minutes on the Timex he had stolen from Woolworth’s that Christmas. Then he began to whistle. It was their signal; and above, in the engine shed, Tommy edged closer to the coal chute to listen. A bat flitted in and out of the broken windows as dusk fell. The silence creaked and overhead Telstar completed another orbit.
He heard Reg Camm’s Ford Anglia park carefully on the drove road by the river. His tentative steps stopped just outside the cellar door.
‘It’s OK,’ said Billy, knowing it wasn’t.
Reg Camm stood in the shadows. ‘You can see the smoke,’ he said. Even in the half-light he radiated stress – the voice dancing on the edge of panic, his fingers flickering as he massaged his corn-blond hair. Billy pointed to the stool.
Camm read the note and looked around in disbelief, then he read it out loud.
‘I need money and I know who my friends are. I’ll go away with it and not come back. I can’t get away without the money. Give it to Billy. All of it. Tommy.’
He looked at Billy.
The door opened. The light of a torch died in the stairwell. It was Peter. It was always just Peter. Reg knew his real name, not Billy.
They never knew why Peter needed the money. Reg had met him at Newmarket, in Tattersalls, studying form the way the professionals do. Up close. Reg owed the bookies nearly ?10,000 – that’s why he needed the money. Peter owed them nothing. Peter had a plan, a purpose, a secret future. That’s why he needed the money. And he couldn’t wait for it to arrive.
Reg knew why they had to wear the balaclavas – to cover Peter’s face. Amy Ward was right, she did know the leader of the Crossways gang.
Peter came forward to the edge of the firelight and it gave his normally pallid face a rich warmth, something it never enjoyed in life. He carried a holdall, a holdall they recognized now with a mixture of excitement and resignation.
He picked up the note and read it. He wasn’t surprised. ‘All of it?’ he asked.
The Crossways Gang considered each other. Billy was the only pro. For him crime was a way of making a living not an adjunct to it. He’d been involved in petty crime since the age of ten, adept at stealing cars in a school uniform, a primary school uniform. By the time he reached secondary school he was as used to crime as most children are to the Saturday morning cinema. He brought to it the blase attitude of the professional, an attitude which made him the ideal lookout and driver. And he wanted the money for a purpose too, a one-way ticket to America and a new life.
Little brother Tommy had joined in on some of the jobs when they needed an extra pair of eyes. Big brown eyes. They’d asked him to come on the Crossways but he’d other plans: better plans, at the coast. So they made do with the single lookout.
Both the brothers had the gift of the gab; an amiable country-boy talkativeness which was just short of charming, but effective nonetheless. For them crime was just like the pranks they’d always pulled – victimless.
But now Tommy was a victim. They would have to buy Tommy’s freedom. And his silence.
They deserved the money – all of them. All of them except Peter. ‘Attempted murder,’ the papers said. ‘She can’t live,’ they’d said.
Peter had dismissed it: ‘Silly cow, why did she go for me?’
The gun had gone off in the struggle, that was the line, but Reg and Billy knew the unspoken truth. In the weeks since the robbery they’d rewritten many things about that day: imagined it all as it had not been, but that fact could not be dissolved: Peter had maimed Amy Ward with a shotgun cartridge to the face.
‘Bitch.’ He’d spat it out.
An hour after the robbery the gunshot was still ringing in their ears. They’d driven by the droves to Belsar’s Hill. They sat in the car, sweating. Screaming. Reg had circled the car, kicking the bodywork, hugging himself in a fit of desperate grief – grief for the life he knew he’d ruined. His own.
They didn’t want the money then, or the gun, or the car, or the silver. Peter, calmer, had taken them all. Later; they’d meet later. At the engine house – the old place.
Then they’d seen the papers. The police, impossibly, had Tommy’s prints. But Tommy would run.
Then they’d been elated. Each, alone, worked out the sums. The cash and the silver. A life- changing haul.
But Tommy wouldn’t run. Tommy wanted the money. They had to give it to Tommy. All of it.
Peter unzipped the holdall and turned it upside down. The money fell in rubber-banded wads to the straw-covered floor.
‘The silver’s safe.’ His voice, even then, was reedy and whistled slightly in the sinuses. ‘I reckon I’ll
