The Regret

by Dan Malakin

  He loomed over her, blocking the light, his head becoming a hard silhouette. ‘Why Pete? Why my best mate?’

  ‘Konrad, listen to me, please. I didn’t send that photo. My phone–’

  ‘Fuck – fuuuuuckkk!’ He grabbed his forehead like he was trying to rip it off. ‘Don’t fucking lie to me, okay? I saw it.’

  ‘I called you! I told you what–’

  ‘Stop lying to my face, all right? Everyone saw what you did.’ Up close he smelled of vomit and vodka and mud. ‘You sent Pete that Snap, then you bent over and shook your ass–’

  ‘I dropped my phone!’

  ‘All the guys were there, so you can keep your fucking nice-girl butter-wouldn’t-fucking-melt act, because I’m done. I don’t need this psycho bitch bullshit in my life right now.’

  Enough! Whatever had happened to him, it didn’t excuse him pushing her over, or refusing to hear her side. ‘I’m not the one showing up with burns on my arm. Or like I’ve – I’ve just lost a fight with a fucking power shower.’

  ‘Oh, so that’s it. Some kind of revenge. Not paying you enough attention, eh? So you thought you’d humiliate–’

  ‘Don’t talk to me about humiliation! Your best mate did something horrible to me, and you don’t care. You’re not even interested in listening–’

  ‘So everyone else is lying and–’

  Spence’s feet pounded down the stairs. He skirted round Rachel and pushed Konrad two-handed in the chest. ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘You’re done for the night.’

  Konrad righted himself and stepped back towards him. ‘You want to get involved, eh?’

  ‘I told you, you’re done.’ Spence folded his arms. ‘Now go home and sleep it off, or I’m calling the police.’

  Rachel saw Konrad’s neck tense, his mouth go hard. For an awful moment she thought he was going to hit Spence, or at least push him back – he was almost twice his size. Thankfully, his fire seemed to fade. His shoulders dropped and his breath became fast and broken. He pushed his fingers to his eyes as tears slipped down his cheeks.

  He couldn’t treat her like that, no matter what he thought she had done – and it made her sick to think that she was seeing a violent side to his personality that he’d kept hidden – but he looked so distraught that even through her anger, she felt the urge to hold him, to make it better.

  ‘Konrad,’ she said, reaching for him. ‘Come inside. Let’s sit. We–’

  He flinched from her touch. ‘Just piss off, okay? Pete told me not to get involved with you. He told me you were trouble, but I didn’t listen to him.’

  Spence turned Konrad towards the door. ‘I think you’d better go.’

  Konrad shrugged him off. ‘Fuck you,’ he said. Then to Rachel, ‘And fuck you.’

  He shoved the front door as he left. It bounced off the wall and came to a shuddering stop.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Spence said, closing it gently.

  ‘Oh god,’ Rachel moaned, and let go a sob that emptied the breath from her lungs. ‘Why is this happening?’

  Chapter Eleven

  Bank

  The woman’s voice is helpful. People usually are.

  ‘Hello, switchboard,’ she says. ‘Camden and Islington NHS Trust.’

  ‘Ah yes, hi, hello. I wonder if you could help me. I work at the Chalkhill Clinic in Highbury, and there’s some problem with my wages. Can you put me through to the payroll department, please?’

  The spiel isn’t necessary, but it makes you harder to refuse.

  ‘No problem,’ she says. ‘I can put you through now.’

  ‘It’s not the helpline, is it? I’ve been on the phone with them for ages. Can you put me through to a person? Please?’

  You can hear the uncertainty in her pause.

  ‘Look,’ you say. ‘It’s my anniversary on the weekend and I want to do something nice for the missus. If I don’t speak to them in the next ten minutes, I’m not going to get paid until Monday. You understand, right?’

  ‘Sure,’ she says, and maybe she does. Maybe she too would like the dull flame of her life caressed for once, by the man she’s lumped with at home. It’s being able to pull that dumb empathy lever that makes this so easy. ‘Let me look.’

  Fingers tap the keys.

  ‘I can try Zoe Roundstead,’ she says. ‘Her calendar says she’s free.’

  ‘Thank you so much, you’re amazing.’

  Click, click, connect.

  ‘Hello, Zoe speaking.’

  ‘Hi, Zoe! It’s Ollie Cedar from HR.’

  Be sure to have called the HR department beforehand to get that name, and to find out what accountancy software they use. Only the unprepared get caught.

  ‘Hey, Ollie,’ Zoe says. ‘What’s up?’

  You’ve come through on an internal line, not the general help desk number, so her guard will be down.

  ‘Got a nurse desperate to be paid. She’s got a new bank account. I need to see if it’s on the system. I’d check myself, but bloody Sage has locked up again. If I read her details, can you confirm what you’ve got?’

  ‘I’m not sure…’

  ‘If it doesn’t go through in the next five minutes, she’s going to miss the cut off. I’d get her to call you herself but she’s gone to pick up her kids. I promise, it’ll take two minutes.’

  This is the tricky bit. The moment it stands or falls. But if you’ve chosen the time wisely, if you’ve found out on a previous call when exactly payroll is run – and know it is five minutes from now – then the odds are good. No-one wants to think they’re responsible for someone being broke on the weekend, especially when kids might go without.

  ‘Go on,’ she says. ‘You got a name?’

  ‘Rachel Stone.’

  ‘ID?’

  ‘CIT42815. She said she…’ Break from the phone, pretend to check something. ‘Works in St Pancras.’

  Clack, clack, keyboard.

  ‘Found her,’ Zoe says.

  ‘Great. Sort code, I’ve got 33-44-55.’

  ‘Not what I’ve got.’

  Let out a long groan, like this really matters to you. ‘Dammit. What you got?’

  ‘23-76-12.’

  ‘I guess that means you don’t have account 23695434.’

  ‘Nope. 74937482.’

  ‘That’s probably her old account. Looks like I’d better give the bad news. You’ve been a great help, Zoe.’

  Use a sort code checker to find out she banks at Lloyds. You should already have an account with all the banks, and know their security questions. Have the answers ready.

  Get a high-quality headset and software like Morphvox Pro to make your voice sound female. Call the bank repeatedly until you get a young girl who sounds like being bored would be too much effort. Give Rachel’s sort code and account number and say you want to transfer some money. When the girl asks for your SecureID, explain you had it on a file, but your computer crashed, and you need to pay–

  ‘Okay, okay,’ the girl says, in all her eye-rolling I-don’t-give-a-shit glory.

  ‘So how…’

  ‘I can text you a new SecureID. Name?’

  ‘Rachel Stone.’

  After the preliminaries, date of birth, home address, the girl expels a sigh and says, ‘I’ve got a couple of security questions. That okay?’

  ‘No problem at all.’

  ‘Mother’s maiden name?’

  ‘Dougdale.’

  ‘Memorable date?’

  Give her the date, then say, ‘My daughter’s birthday.’

  She says hold, and a few seconds pass. ‘Your code’s gone out. It’ll be with you in the next hour, but most people say they get it straight away. Anythin–’

  Get a smartphone. A crappy ten quid Motorola Droid from eBay will do. Update the firmware to make it into a radio; it has the hardware for it. Think of firmware as instructions that tell the hardware how to behave.

  Tune it into the network provider’s channel, in this case O2, and stand within range of the
same cell tower as Rachel to receive the text message with the SecureID sent by the bank. This could be tricky as in London you can cross a corridor and be closer to a different mast. But you know the old saying about fortune favouring the brave?

  Well, there’s something fortune favours more.

  The planner. The one who attends to detail.

  St Pancras Hospital is in the range of a single mast.

  Choose a time when she will be there, and be too busy to check her phone when a text comes in. Like the start of her shift, when she’s doing her ward round, the conscientious little nursey nurse.

  When the code comes in, call the bank again, ask for a money transfer, and give the requested two digits from the SecureID. Within minutes, her wages are gone.

  Isn’t this a lot of work for money? Wouldn’t it be easier to put a scanner on an ATM, set-up a camera on the building next to it, gather PIN numbers, spin up fake cards?

  That would be true if it were just about the money.

  But it’s much more ambitious than that.

  Chapter Twelve

  List

  When the progress bar on Rachel’s phone hit a hundred, the tiny green android stopped pulsing and the screen went black. She held her breath, half expecting that to be it, the phone dead, but a moment later the Samsung logo swirled in and swirled out, and she was presented with a registration screen. She checked the time. Quarter past two. It wouldn’t take long to register her phone, set the alarm, and then she could go to bed. But she knew there was no way she’d sleep.

  Between the mud-thick coffee she’d made to clear her mind, the adrenaline still sparking through her limbs, and the hunger gnawing at her guts, she’d be lucky to get any shut eye tonight. Whatever. She’d get through it. Lily had been colicky as a baby, always refluxing her milk so bad it burned her throat; for the first six months, almost every night had been an endless sleepless trauma. If she could survive that, she’d make it through tomorrow. Hopefully she’d get a few hours before her dad dropped Lily back in the morning, enough to push through the day at work.

  Rachel finished her coffee, getting a glob of vanilla sludge at the bottom that almost made her gag, then found her attention drifting back to her laptop. After Spence finally left – he offered to stay the night, but no way was she going to be responsible for him being tired when he flew to Greece in the morning – she’d set up in the kitchen and tried to get her thoughts in order by pouring them into a Word document.

  What do I know for sure?

  1. Someone is hurting Konrad. It’s happened three times in the last week.

  2. Someone hacked into my Snap account and sent that photo of me.

  3. Konrad’s shithead mate Pete replied with a picture of his dick.

  4. Alan Griffin is out of prison.

  Okay. So what was sending that photo designed to do? To humiliate her? To make her feel ashamed? If she was being d0xed again, that would make sense, but only a few people got it, and of those Becca and Spence hardly constituted a receptive audience.

  Did that mean the photo was sent for Pete?

  And if that were the case, did it mean he was the one who sent it?

  What if he’d googled her, stumbled across that photo, and realised he could use it to break them up? She’d been right enough about him not liking her, Konrad pretty much said as much. He told me you were trouble. What better way for Pete to prove that than to show Konrad evidence of her coming onto him?

  As much as that sounded possible, and the fact that the photo was sent while they were both at the gym made the case even stronger, it just didn’t feel right.

  What felt right was Alan Griffin.

  This was torn from his playbook. Same with the disappearing e-mail. He’d been out of prison for two weeks and this was happening. Could that really be a coincidence?

  Except… if it was Griffin, why hadn’t he locked her out of her accounts? Or do more than send a single photo. That same niggle as before. It didn’t make sense.

  She pushed off the chair and paced the kitchen. Maybe he was taking his time, getting Konrad out of the picture before he came after her. But what was his game? What did he want? To ruin her life again? To send her back to the psych ward? Get her committed once and for all? Or was it something even more devious? Like for her to go to the police, to implicate herself in his going to prison? She’d always wondered if he knew it was her who got him sent down – at the very least, she’d be high on the list of suspects – so maybe that photo was his way of telling her she was number one.

  But what about Konrad’s injuries? Was Griffin involved in those too? That made more sense than Pete being behind them. But even though Griffin had threatened violence in the past, he’d never actually done anything – then again, that was before he spent eight years in a maximum-security prison. And as for Konrad being so much bigger than Griffin, perhaps he had met some thugs inside. Perhaps he’d done some favours for them and this was their way of paying him back.

  But if it happened that way, why hadn’t Konrad gone to the police?

  Unless they’d told him to keep his mouth shut.

  Could that be what the bruises and burns were about? Him trying to protect her? That would make sense, wouldn’t it? They beat him up and told him not to say anything, or else they’d come after her.

  Rachel slumped against the counter. Her brain felt like it was being stirred. One thing was sure though: whoever was behind all this had resorted to violence. Not against her, at least not yet, but it was there, it was part of this, and she needed to be ready. She pulled open the cutlery drawer, found the super-sharp ceramic vegetable knife she’d bought from Seven Sisters market, and pressed the white blade to her fingertip, hard enough to pierce the skin.

  A droplet of blood ran down and she brought the cut into her mouth, the rusty coin taste pungent on her tongue. She wasn’t a frail five-stone victim anymore, with a tube in her stomach and arms so thin the nurses needed to use a child’s cuffs to take her blood pressure. She went to the gym, she did weights. Over the years she’d built up to nine stone of lean muscle. Yes, she had relapses, episodes, whatever you had to call them, during her final nursing exams, or when her gran passed away – it was only natural to slip every now and again – but she’d never gone into the abyss, not since she was a teenager.

  And she wouldn’t go now.

  She looked around the kitchen, at the life she’d built with her daughter. The collage of photos on the pinboard by the fridge, the peacock feathers they’d found on a day trip to Richmond Park, the tiny espresso cups with cool art deco designs they used for tea parties. Bits of tinsel from Lily’s third birthday were still stuck to the wall, and old streamers, drooping with age, hung off the lights.

  Whoever was doing this to her, Rachel wouldn’t let them win. She held the knife out, blade pointed at the laptop. This was her house. Her home.

  And she’d be damned if Alan Griffin or anyone else was going to drive her out of it.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Clothes

  The closing of her front door woke Rachel. She’d fallen asleep in the kitchen, lying across the laptop lid. Lifting her head, her neck felt rigid as a steel beam, her skull radioactive, her mouth like it may have been used as a building-site toilet.

  Had she taken something? She stumbled through her memories from before she passed out. No, she hadn’t. She’d been tempted to raid her stash, but had held off, thank God. That was one slope she didn’t want to slip down.

  Lily ran into the kitchen and grinned at her mum. ‘Can we have popcorn for breakfast?’

  ‘Do you ever have popcorn for breakfast?’ Rachel replied groggily.

  Her dad came wheezing in, bringing with him an aroma of stale cigarettes and sausage rolls that made her stomach lurch. ‘Hiya, love.’

  ‘I understand you two had popcorn last night,’ Rachel said, gathering Lily into a hug.

  ‘Just a little. I had most of it.’

  It was meant to be a jokey com
ment, but she could see from her father’s crestfallen face that he’d not taken it that way. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ she said, waving a conciliatory hand. ‘And thanks again. I really appreciate you taking Lil.’

  She expected her dad to go then – the final thanks was usually his cue to leave – but this time he loitered by the fridge. He cleared his throat and shifted his weight to the other foot. ‘Listen, love. About last night…’

  Oh God, not again. A full day at work on almost no sleep was bad enough, but having to start it with her dad’s glum-bucket sincerity was too much. ‘You’d better get on,’ she said, nodding at the door. ‘Don’t want to be late, eh?’

  ‘You don’t remember this,’ he said. ‘But when you were Lily’s age, I’d come home and you’d run over going, Daddy, Daddy!’

  ‘You’re right, I don’t remember it.’

  ‘I’m just saying you’ve got a great kid there, so don’t make the same mistake as–’

  ‘Okay, Dad.’

  ‘You can talk to me, love,’ he said, absently fingering the underside of his gut. ‘You’re… you’re my daughter. I want to be here for you.’

  She squeezed her forehead, hoping he’d see how bad he was making her head ache. ‘You’re standing right here.’

  ‘I just–’

  ‘Go to work, Dad. Okay?’

  Rachel waited for him to shuffle out, for the front door to quietly click closed, then turned Lily on her lap until they were nose to nose. ‘So, my little angel. How about I make us both some breakfast?’

  ‘Ummm… can I have popcorn?’

  She slid her daughter onto her chair. This was why she said no junk food. It was hard enough getting Lily to eat sometimes, let alone when her head had been turned by the lure of tasty snacks.