Chris Ryan - Killing for the Company

An imposing slate-roofed building sited where two main roads met, the Crown and Sceptre was unwelcoming from the outside and dingy on the inside. No money had been spent on it for years. The windows were frosted over; the walls and ceiling were still nicotine yellow years after the smoking ban; the bar and tables were covered with a sticky patina that no amount of cleaning would remove — not that anyone had tried.

The woman behind the bar was used to this place, and to places like it. They were her natural habitat, and she sought them out in the same way that an insect seeks out the underside of a stone. She had worked in so many down-at-heel pubs she’d almost lost count of them. She never stayed long, moving from one to the next every few months before the punters got too familiar with her.

Because familiarity was the thing Suze McArthur wanted to avoid.

Her ‘interview’ for this job had followed the same pattern as all the other ones. She’d walked into the pub at a quarter past eleven on a Monday two weeks ago, a holdall containing her few belongings in one hand, a ten-year-old boy tightly clutching the other.

Her little boy. The only reason she’d kept going this long.

‘No kids.’

Suze had ignored the bored edict from the barman and walked straight up to him. He was well into his sixties, with bloodshot eyes and body odour that she could smell from a couple of metres away. ‘I’m

… I’m looking for work,’ she said.

He had eyed her up and down, his gaze lingering around the cleavage she was displaying for the benefit of men like him.

‘Oh aye? You local?’

She’d shaken her head.

‘Pikey? ’Cos if you’re a fuckin’ pikey you can…’

‘I’m not a pikey.’

‘Too many of them round these parts.’

‘I’m just looking for a bit of casual…’

‘Where you staying then? You can’t stay here, you know.’ He paused and his eyes flickered to her breasts for a second time. ‘Not unless I ask you.’

‘I’ve got somewhere to stay,’ Suze lied hastily. ‘I just need a job, all right?’ And then, because she’d realised she was hardly going the right way about it, she’d added a bit feebly: ‘I’ve, um… I’ve got experience.’

‘Aye, I’ll bet you have, love,’ the barman leered. ‘What about the nipper, eh?’

Suze had pulled the little boy protectively towards her. ‘He’ll be no trouble, will you, Harry?’ she said, her voice suddenly a little hoarse. Harry, bless him, had remained mute — he seldom spoke — but had shaken his head at his mum. ‘He’ll sit quietly. I promise.’

She could see him doing the maths: a lone woman with a young child, clearly desperate. Perhaps she was on the run from an abusive husband, or a pimp, or the bailiffs. Either way, it meant cheap labour, and if she was really down on her luck, something else.

‘Three pound an hour, cash in hand,’ he’d said. Suze had started to protest, but he raised a palm to silence her. ‘Take it or leave it, love. What’s your name, anyhow?’

‘Linda.’ The name changed every time.

‘Oh aye, Linda Lovelace, eh? Well, I won’t ask why the boy’s not in school, Linda Lovelace. Mum’s the word, eh? But he stays out the back and he doesn’t bother the punters.’

And so the deal had been struck. It wasn’t like she was in a strong negotiating position.

Suze had lived this way for so long she’d almost forgotten how strange her life had become. Almost, but not quite. Fear was her constant companion. She woke up with it, and it lulled her to sleep at night. There were times when, exhausted or depressed, she daydreamed about giving up. Because surely enough time had passed now for her to have been forgotten about?

But then there was the website. She had only stumbled on it by accident one day when she was working in a pub near Bournemouth. There were no customers; Harry, just a baby at the time, was asleep; and so she did what she had often done — hit the internet, trying to find a picture of her attacker. She was a murderer, after all. Perhaps she’d been brought to justice. Perhaps she was safely behind bars… It was this line of enquiry that had led her to the website of the Metropolitan Police, and the page listing the force’s most wanted individuals.

Suze’s photograph wasn’t the first on that list. She was nestled between a rapist and a man wanted for possession of an offensive weapon. Her supposed crime: arson. She’d felt all the strength drain from her body when she saw that, and had quickly shut down the computer, grabbed Harry and walked out of her workplace, never to return — as if the computer would grass her up. Now and then, over the years, she had checked the page. The rapists came and went, but her photo was always there. Always staring out at her, looking younger and younger as the years wore on.

She knew she wouldn’t be staying in this new job for long, but while she was here, she worked hard: twelve hours a day, six days a week. For the first few nights she booked into a Travelodge on the outskirts of town — luxury compared to what they were used to — but that ate up her daily wage completely, leaving nothing for food. She managed to sneak a curled-at-the-edges ham sandwich into Harry’s hungry little hands at lunchtime, but she knew she had to find somewhere else to stay. Somewhere that didn’t require ID, and was free. So on the third day she and her son had left the hotel early and started walking the streets.

Suze had known what she was looking for: a derelict building, but still sound. The clue would be a closed curtain in front of a broken window. But over the years she’d developed an instinctive ability to recognise a squat when she saw one. Now she found a red-brick building on the edge of town with large, high windows with small panes, many of them smashed. It looked like some old Victorian factory and it was definitely disused. As she passed it, however, she noticed several black bin liners full of rubbish, and that told her somebody was living inside.

She and her son had become two of their number. Part of the faceless community of junkies and losers that always found their way to these places.

Their nights were spent in the squat, their days in Suze’s new workplace. The squat was anonymous; so too, in its own way, was the Crown and Sceptre. The customers were never there for a convivial atmosphere or cosy surroundings. They were there to drink. All the pubs Suze had ever worked in had regulars, who would arrive at opening time and drink their way very slowly but steadily through the day, staring at the blinking lights of the fruit machine or the flickering images of the wall-mounted TV. And though they spoke to Suze — or whatever name she had chosen to give them — several times a day, it was only to order drinks and they never looked at her with anything approaching recognition. They were too far gone for that.

The regulars were in now, about six of them, all old men, dotted around the pub, nobody speaking to anybody else. Harry was in the back room, good as gold. He had black rings under his eyes, and his face was even paler than usual. Both he and his mother had very short hair, inexpertly and crookedly cut by Suze. The short hair was easier to keep clean — important when most of your sanitary activities took place in the washrooms of the nearest McDonald’s, just about the only place you could use the facilities without some spotty jobsworth telling you to buy something or get out — and it changed Suze’s features quite considerably. Even now, whenever she caught sight of herself in a mirror, she was slightly startled by the way she looked. Which was a good thing, because if she was startled, it meant she looked very different to the young woman who had gone into hiding.