‘I was around.’
‘I never believed that phoney story about you drowning.’
‘Yet you married Gwen.’
‘Why not? She’s a lovely woman; she could have still been your wife if you hadn’t had one of your psychotic episodes.’
‘They were not psychotic, they were real.’
‘Malcolm, real enough to you, but none of it happened. Arbuthnot may have been a bastard dealing in military weapons, but he was a government employee, and he did not deserve to die.’
Big Greg realised there was some truth in what Barrow said. He had had the occasional episodes of madness, enough to have been confined to a mental institution for short periods where they had sedated him and fed him pills, and subjected him to lengthy discussions with psychoanalysts. But that had been before, and during his homeless period, he had not felt the need to talk to anyone, and the dreams that had plagued him had been strangely absent.
‘You talk well, Ed, but I can’t trust you. Once I’m up there in your office, you’ll have me locked up in a padded cell.’
‘Not me, Malcolm. Think about it, remember the past.’
‘I saw you with Hutton.’
‘The old man?’ Ed enquired, jumping up from his seat to look out of the window, trying to catch sight of a man who had once been his friend.
‘You’ll not see me. I see you’re still wearing a suit to work.’
Ed Barrow reacted with alarm; he pressed another button on his desk. A woman came running in, Barrow told her to be quiet. ‘Malcolm Woolston,’ he mouthed, pointing to the phone in his hand.
‘Tell Sue Christie not to bother. You’ll not find me.’
‘Where the hell are you?’ Barrow asked.
‘I’m not far. I can see you well enough. Are you still screwing Sue?’
Barrow moved to the window of his office, looked out at the buildings nearby. The sun was reflecting off their windows. It was impossible to distinguish who was looking back.
‘I’m smarter than that, you should know that.’
‘What is it? A camera?’
‘Nothing complicated. Just an internet connection and Skype. I could be outside your door, or a hundred miles away, and you’ll never know.’
‘Malcolm, this is ridiculous. You need professional help,’ Barrow said. He had closed the blinds in his office. Sue Christie was sitting across from him, listening in on the conversation. She was worried.
‘I have a list,’ Big Greg said. ‘If any harm comes to my family, then I will kill you, Ed.’
‘No harm will come to them. You have my word.’
‘The word of a liar. What use is that? Tell Sue not to take out any life insurance. She has no protection.’ The phone line went dead.
‘You should have killed him when you had the chance,’ Sue Christie said.
‘How was I to know that he was going to come back from the dead?’ Barrow replied.
‘You always knew he was alive. You could have found him.’
‘How? The man’s been watching this office, and we’ve no idea where he is. Find that camera he’s using.’
‘Look at your laptop,’ Sue said.
‘Hell, the camera’s on.’
‘The man was always smarter than any of us, you know that. He’s probably accessed your files as well.’
Barrow looked down at his laptop, a cartoon face looked back at him. It spoke. ‘Remember what I told you. Any harm to my family and you’re the first.’
Barrow slammed shut the lid of his laptop. ‘We’ve got the best hacking protection. How did he do that?’
‘The same way he’ll kill any of us if we touch his family, your family.’
***
Big Greg, after his conversation with Ed Barrow, sat in the park opposite his daughter’s place. He knew that at two-thirty in the afternoon she would enter the park by the far gate. His daughter, he knew, was a methodical person, the same as him. It had been how he had dealt with eleven years on the street: one day at a time, the same place for a meal, the same repartee, the same place to bed down.
He knew that Barrow had been correct. He could have just given them what they wanted and gone home to his family. They had intended to use his work for evil, to sell it to the highest bidder, good or bad. He had researched the subject, read up on the wars in the Middle East. Where did they get the weapons that were fired at the English, the Americans, the Russians sometimes? They all came from those countries, sold in some arms deal only to be used against the seller in return.
He was not going to be a party to that, whatever the cost. Hadn’t his parents died on holiday in Egypt when visiting the Middle East twenty years previously, and what had it been: an English-made missile launched at a police station that hit them as they were catching the bus to the pyramids. He had vowed then that he would do everything in his power to prevent such an occurrence happening again, and now his family was threatened. He knew Ed Barrow, he knew Sue Christie, and he certainly knew the old man, Harold Hutton. He’d been there, standing in the shadows with Ed Barrow, when he was being tortured by Arbuthnot and the other man, the man he had killed in his escape.
He would deal with Hutton to reinforce what he had said to Barrow.
Across the park, Big Greg could see his daughter. She was playing with her child. Little did she know that a man who was plainly in her vision if she only looked his way was protecting her.
Big Greg stood up from the bench he had been sitting on, quickly read the plaque attached to it: Dedicated to Mary, by her loving husband Michael. He felt sad on
