Her voice tensed up at one point. It was such a tiny thing that he was not even sure, at the time, that it had happened. First, she lost the thread of what they were saying. He had just said something, and she did not seem to hear it. There was a silence on the line. Then she said, ‘What? Sorry?’ This was immediately after he had heard the door slam, and then the voices, Summer’s voice and the wordless rumble of the man’s voice. It seemed obvious that she had been distracted. That in itself was not surprising or suspicious. They then talked for several more minutes.
It is those minutes he is thinking of now. There was something tense about her voice, as if she was talking with someone else there, someone standing there, standing over her, waiting for her to finish.
4
The next afternoon, Monday, he meets Freddy. James and Freddy were at school together, twenty years ago, at a famous school on the fringes of London. On Monday they meet in Earls Court—one of those streets of trucks stampeding past exhaust-fouled terraces, of youth hostels, and veiled, slummy houses full of subletting Australians, and other houses with tarnished nameplates in Arabic on the doors and the paint falling off in stiff pieces. There, under a two-star package-tour hotel, they meet. Freddy is piquey and jaundiced. In one of his down moods. His hair looks like it has slipped off his head—there is none on top, where the skin has the look of a low-quality waxwork, or the prosthetic scalp of a stage Fagin, but plenty further down, where it trails like the fringe of a filthy rug over his collar—the old collar, white-edged with age, of an otherwise blue Jermyn Street shirt stolen from his landlord.
They are meeting today to talk about the horse they part-own, and the ‘touch’ that is planned for next Monday. It is Freddy’s fault, all the horse stuff. It was he who introduced James to Michael—the tipster, the ‘pro’ James mentioned at Sunday lunch. Freddy was ‘seeing’ Michael’s sister, who was still at school at the time—this was nearly two years ago—and he quite often went to the house in Shooter’s Hill when her parents weren’t there. Sometimes, while Melissa was having a shower and Freddy was in the kitchen pilfering food from the fridge, Michael would emerge to pour himself some Coke, and Freddy would talk to him. He asked him, for instance, what he did all day. Michael was in his late twenties, still lived with his parents, and did not seem to have a job.
His answer was—‘Systems testing.’
‘What sort of systems?’ Freddy said.
When he heard what sort of systems, Freddy started to take more interest in Michael. He pressed him for more information about his systems—monosyllabic Michael was not very forthcoming—and finally managed to persuade him to send him their selections by email every morning. For a week, Freddy just monitored these selections. Michael himself had said he did not put money on them, in spite of the fact that he kept a tally of their performance, which showed them to have made a profit over several years. And they made a small profit in the first week that Freddy monitored them. In the second week they made a large profit and Freddy plunged in. Soon he was making several hundred pounds a week. It was then—very full of himself and his several hundred pounds a week—that he told James. It had obviously never occurred to Freddy, as it quickly occurred to James, that there was the potential here to make much more than that by selling the tips on the Internet or through a premium-rate phone line.
One afternoon, they took the train down to Shooter’s Hill to see Michael. He was a large man, putty-pale. There was something odd about him. James explained that he wanted to pay him for his horse-racing tips. He had had in mind to pay Michael a percentage of subscription fees, or winnings, or something like that. However, it was obvious that Michael would prefer a flat fee, so James offered him £200 a week. James also wanted him to work in an office—he wanted the tips, the spreadsheets, whatever there was, on a hard drive he owned, in a space he paid for. Though this Michael was initially less keen on, he was soon spending an enormous amount of time in the office. Most of the time, in fact. The following scene was fairly typical.
Michael is sitting at his desk, working. The door opens. Michael does not look up or say a word. James shuts the door. ‘Morning,’ he says. ‘How’s it going?’ Still Michael says nothing. ‘How’s it going?’ James says again. This time Michael says, ‘Have you got my Coke?’ With a thud James puts the two-litre plastic flagon of Coke on Michael’s desk. Michael does not thank him. Without taking his eyes off the monitor in front of him, he opens the Coke and pours some into a plastic cup. ‘So how’s it going?’ James says again, sitting down at his own desk. When Michael still does not answer, James tries a more specific question. ‘Lots of selections today?’ Purposefully mousing, Michael does not seem to hear.
Michael’s systems, of which there were many, were purely quantitative—for all James knew, Michael had never seen a horse in his life. He seemed to have no idea that horse racing is something that actually happens, that the names of the tracks are the names of actual places, that people and horses and money and mud are involved; to him it seemed to be nothing more than an endless supply of new numbers on a screen—numbers in which to search for patterns, a puzzle that was never finished. For the first two months these numbers—marketed by James under the name of Professional Equine Investments—showed a nice profit, and the service soon had a few dozen subscribers. Unfortunately the first few months turned out to be unusual. More typical was a situation in which one week’s profit was offset by the next week’s loss, and the service just scraped along. Then started a monstrous sequence of losers, and James would sit at his desk while the rain fell outside, waiting for some antediluvian version of Windows to appear on the smouldering monitor and staring with something like hatred at Michael’s slack face, his sensuous mouth hanging open as he worked mechanically through the fiddly statistical analysis of his systems. He did not seem to notice that he was on a monster losing spree. That the subscribers were losing money while he still picked up his £200 a week. At such times, his wanting a flat fee seemed sly and even dishonest to James, who was unable to help feeling that this strange man, this hulking idiot in his nylon jacket and milk-white trainers, had somehow swindled him out of thousands of pounds.
Michael was spending less time in the office too. He was in later—sometimes quite late, and looking like he had not slept—and he left earlier. Indeed, he seemed to have something on his mind. For instance, he had started to stare out the window. That was not something he had ever done in the past, and now he would sit there for minutes at a time, while the Coke hissed in his cup, staring out the window at the East End sky.
‘Michael,’ James would say.
And Michael would not seem to hear.
‘Michael!’
And finally he would turn his oversized, unkempt head—exactly the way that Hugo did—unhurriedly and with a vacant expression in his docile chocolate eyes.
None of this prepared James for the phone call he received one Monday morning in early November.
He was out with Hugo when Freddy phoned. This was surprising in itself—it was not even eight.
‘I thought you might want to know,’ Freddy said, with a smile in his voice, ‘that Michael is in police custody.’
‘What?’
‘I thought you might want to know,’ Freddy said, even more slowly than the first time, ‘that Michael is in police custody. I’m not joking.’ He started to laugh. ‘He’s in a cell in Thamesmead Police Station.’
‘What are you talking about? Why?’
‘You’ll love this. Some sort of sexual assault.’