The Cutting Crew (31 page)

'When you spiral, things start repeating. You see? Maybe you don't recognise it at the time, but that's all it is.'

'Maybe I just had a dodgy burger,' I said.

Without warning, I felt a pressure on the back of my neck that made me wince. Kama shot a glance over my head. A second later, the pain vanished.

'Your friend believed in us,' he said. 'You've seen his library.'

I rubbed the back of my neck.

'And you killed him because of it.'

Kama shook his head. 'I didn't kill your friend. Not directly anyway.'

'Bullshit.'

He leaned back and the leather creaked behind him.

'Your friend lived across the road for a while. He was watching us, I think, but I never had the pleasure of meeting him directly. It was amusing to see him hiding away, coming to the same conclusions as you have. He acknowledged it more quickly than you, but I suppose he was a little more unhinged and didn't have quite so many barriers remaining. On the surface, he was obsessed by that irrelevant dead girl. But really, deep down, he was just drawn to us. He could smell my brother all over her.'

'You killed him,' I said again.

He shook his head more slowly than before.

'No. I understand why you might think that, but in fact I haven't killed anyone recently.'

'Are you going to kill me?' I said.

He paused, considering this. I couldn't see or hear his bodyguard behind me, but I felt slight pressure again. I got the impression the man knew that if there was going to be killing done then he'd be the one for the job, and that he was running the various possibilities through his head right now.

'I haven't decided yet,' Kama said finally.

Perhaps I should have been relieved, but I wasn't.

'Why am I here then?'

He ignored the question. 'I've actually been following your careers with interest. Tell me, Mister Weaver - why did you go around killing people?'

He looked at me with genuine curiosity. Despite myself, I felt small and stupid.

'They were men who were above the law,' I said.

He frowned. 'Above the law?'

Even to me, it seemed inadequate. I didn't know why I felt the need to justify myself to this man, who I had no doubt was a criminal and a killer of a much higher magnitude than me. But I did.

'They were men we couldn't put away,' I told him. 'They could either buy their way out, or have it bought for them.'

'That's very interesting,' Kama said. He sounded like he meant it. 'So, it implies there's something other than the law that you presume you know best?'

He appeared to think about this for a second, while I said nothing, and then he waved his hand and dismissed his own thoughts.

'You're right on a practical level, though - they could buy themselves out. And sometimes it was me that did the buying. After all, I power crime here in the city.'

'Right.'

'And as I bought these men out, I watched with a certain amount of amusement as you then took them away from me. To begin with, anyway. After a while, it became annoying. But I tolerated you, because I knew that you would be useful to me at some point.'

'Useful,' I said.

'Not a word that you associate with yourself very often.'

'What did you want us to do?' I said, although I was remembering what Rosh had told me about Toby Yeung's body being dragged out of the canal, and I thought I knew what Kama was going to tell me.

He leaned forwards again to tap away more ash.

'You see, just like I can buy people out I can also buy them in.

Carl Halloran, for example.' He made it sound like he was plucking a name from thin air. 'Very minor league. Hardly ever hurt a fly. But to a small extent he was in my way, and so I bought him in. A few words in the right ears, and then he was in your way too. And then he was dead.'

'Yeah.' I felt that lurch of inevitability. Whatever else might be bullshit here, I knew that this much was true. 'We killed Carl Halloran. Because you wanted us to, right?'

He nodded.

'I set him up, yes. Well, one of my employees, but it amounts to the same thing. Terrible thing, that post-office murder, and I can assure you that it was nothing to do with me. Opportune, though. I sent the fake information to your friend through one of your usual channels. And you went and killed Halloran for me. It was all very successful.'

He wasn't an innocent man^ I reminded myself. Except that I had no idea now what he was. All of the emotions inside me had been so stamped down and muddled up that the only thing I could think of was one single question:

'Why?'

And Kama just shrugged.

'Perhaps boredom?' he said. 'But also, Halloran worked for my brother, Eli.'

'Eli. Who powers law and order, right?'

'That's right, yes. But underneath it all we're quite similar. He understands about balance, and he's a practical man. He doesn't always run things the way someone as idealistic as you might want, but we exist in a kind of uneasy harmony, and our methods aren't all that different. Halloran was doing some work for him - moving money, basically. This and that, here and there. He didn't know it, but that's what he did. And I suppose I had him killed just to annoy my brother.'

'Right.'

'And perhaps to take care of you, as well, but that wasn't so important. You were running around, messing things up for me in minor ways. Eli wasn't letting you get away with it, exactly, but I was still annoyed at him for not running a tighter ship.'

'Right,' I said again. 'So this is some kind of family feud, or something?'

Kama shook his head and smiled.

'Nothing as grand as that. My brother and I need each other; and we both know it. But we don't invent our natures and we can't help what we're driven to do. So we dig at each other a bit, here and there, and we always have. We can't hurt each other directly, but little punches behind the ears that don't leave any bruises they're fine. You know what brothers are like. Cat and dog sometimes.'

'Okay.'

I didn't know what else to say. He was telling me that he was basically some kind of ghost, and that he'd made us kill someone just to piss off his brother. What was I supposed to do with that?

Laugh at it under more normal circumstances, but it didn't feel at all funny right now. And it was bullshit, of course, but I couldn't work out why he was feeding it to me. What was the point? And yet it couldn't be true.

In the absence of reasonable alternatives, I resolved to nod politely until I found out whether I was going to die or not, and then worry about things afterwards.

Kama leaned back and smiled to himself.

'So that was that,' he said. 'A minor annoyance for him in exchange for what I'd felt, and that's where it would have ended. I just didn't plan on you taking his money.'

All that money.

At the time, I'd taken it to secure Rachel and me a safer future.

But when I'd walked out of Hedge's flat earlier that day, I knew there was more to it than that. And now it's time to be honest.

I had always liked to think I was a nice guy, but I knew deep down that I wasn't. I can just do a good impression, that's all. On the surface, I care about other people and try to think about what's best for them. I'm kind and generous. I'm even gentle, on the numerous occasions when I'm not shooting at people. But if you step beyond all that - pull it to one side and look behind it - then you can see it for what it is. Everyone's driven to do what's best for them, and it's just a happy coincidence that a lot of what I do comes from wanting people to like me. The moment my interests change, I drop the nice-guy act and behave as rat-like and shitty as everyone else.

That night, as we took the money and left Halloran dead in his hotel room, I really was thinking to myself: // I'm cautious - if I don't attract too much attention - then that's enough money to keep me and Rachel safe and secure for a long time.

That was the justification I genuinely used. But people invent all kinds of good reasons for the bad things they do. They lie to themselves about their motivations because they have to, and sometimes they don't even know they're doing it. Nobody's a bad guy. There are stupid things we're driven to do simply because it's in our nature, and when those things threaten the image we have of ourselves we just switch bulbs and shine a different coloured light on events. Keep switching. Eventually, you'll find a shade you can live with.

I'd been sleeping with Lucy for a while by then, and regardless of how we really felt about each other I'd found myself falling out of love with Rachel as a result. Seeing Lucy had opened a valve in my ankle, and all of the love and happiness I'd felt for Rachel was slowly leaking out. By the time the four of us were leaving the hotel with that money, I was empty.

Below the surface, that was on my mind. I didn't want to be with Rachel anymore, but I knew that I couldn't just leave. I had no money: nowhere to go; no real savings. There was more to it than that, of course - there was the hurt and upset I was going to cause.

The emotional trauma for both of us. But the money was a real, practical barrier, and that night I knew that the barrier was gone. I didn't let myself think about it in any great detail: I recognised it and immediately put it out of my thoughts and concentrated on nicer ones. But it's not like you can properly take back a realisation. It sat at the back of my mind and I worked on it subconsciously. On the surface, I could convince myself that I was still a good man, but deep down I was building my exit strategy from that moment on. Like everybody else, I'm good at turning a blind eye to myself.

Now, looking back, I could see that there was a terrible sense of justice to everything that had happened. If you take someone's money then there's always a chance you can pay it back and make amends, but because I'd left Rachel that wasn't even an option. I didn't have the money; I'd invested it in the end of my relationship.

It was threaded into the rented walls and floor of my flat, and running through the plugs and cables. Some of it I'd drunk; some I'd eaten. It had been spent on countless things that in my own stupid way I'd thought might make me happy. Things that - right now - I'd have given up in a second.

I'm stupid, but even I'm not that stupid.

'What money?' I said.

Kama smiled, as though he'd expected this and would have been disappointed with anything else. But I figured he couldn't know for sure that we'd taken the money - and it was very possible that it had been his all along, and this elaborate load of shit he'd been feeding me was just a way to get me to admit I'd stolen it. If that was true, I was going to end up like Sean whatever I said, but there was no point in worrying. All I could do was deny it, wait and see.

Kama took a drag on his cigarette and said:

'The money that the four of you took, obviously. And it's okay that you took it. I hadn't known it would still be there, but actually it couldn't have worked out better. You didn't just inconvenience my brother. You really, really annoyed him.'

I shook my head.

'I don't know anything about any money.'

But I wasn't even convincing myself, let alone Kama.

'Well - someone took it.' He tapped away some ash and looked decidedly unconcerned by it all. 'Halloran had it, and then he didn't. Some of my brother's people turned up to collect it, and apparently it wasn't there. So someone took it. They started looking for it that night. With Halloran's girlfriend.'

I closed my eyes, seeing the coincidences. Alison's death had been a bad one, but the city was full of those, and only now did I realise how fitting and logical it was that it had been this investigation that had consumed Sean: the murder that everything else revolved around. We'd been drawn in, not realising that our own actions had created the drag. There were coincidences here, but they felt more like patterns. There was a mad kind of sense to it all.

With my eyes still closed, I said:

'So you're telling me that the police killed her?'

'No,' Kama said. 'My brother powers law and order, and that's not the same thing. But most of the police come under him.'

I opened my eyes and watched Kama stubbing out his cigarette.

He said, 'It has a terrible inevitability to it, doesn't it?'