Underlife by Robert Finn (different e readers txt) 📕

The problem was that he was by himself now and that messed everything up. For a start it meant he was having to make all his own plans, and that required concentration. Which was a problem. Whatever he tried, he just couldn’t seem to motivate himself properly. His concentration slipped away from him the whole time and he found himself drifting, wasting time. And that was dangerous. It meant it was only a matter of time before he screwed up and got caught.

It was more than that too. When Gary disappeared, it didn’t just leave a gap that needed to be filled, it changed things. Maybe for good.

If Clipper had had another way of earning a living he’d have been giving it some careful consideration at this point.

Today he was hanging round the Jubilee line, sort of goofing off despite his best intentions. Riding from Bond Street − where the best-looking shop assistants in the world worked — out to Canary Wharf − where you’d get these career girls in their suits, with their amazing hair that looked so natural because they’d spent a mint getting it that way. Great looking and they were all brokers or traders or bankers — if you could have girl bankers.

Brainy and in charge. He always liked that. And he always wished he’d been able to get somewhere with one of them. It was probably as much to see what their lives looked like as anything. He imagined they all lived in loft apartments — wood floors and little twinkly halogen lights — with gyms in the basement. And their boyfriends were Swiss ski instructors or else they were really old blokes with big, big amounts of cash — like from owning oil tankers or some copper mines. And it didn’t matter that the blokes were like sixty or something because that was exactly the point about having stacks of cash.

Those thoughts had been vaguely in the back of his mind as he’d been eyeing up this one girl, trying not to let her notice he was paying attention. He was glancing at her, and letting his imagination wander, when really he knew he should have been working on the next grab.

They were outside, above ground, in what the signs called a ‘plaza’ by the entrance to Canary Wharf tube. A needling wind was skipping round Clipper’s ankles, making him wish he’d brought that big old gangsta puffa jacket of his. Nearby the girl was talking on the phone, oblivious to him, tucking hair the colour of maple syrup behind her delicate ear and cutting up rough in what he thought was probably German. And yet she wasn’t German because every now and then she’d swear or say ‘get used to it’ in English, only with an American accent. How hot was that? She was tearing a strip off some bloke in German and then dissing him in English, like rubbing his nose in how it wasn’t even her first language that she was clobbering him in.

He reckoned she might be Californian. As he liked to remind people, he’d lived there for a few years himself — though he tended not to get very specific, because the truth was he’d been at high-school there for a few years and that probably didn’t sound as impressive as whatever story people might come up with for themselves if he kept fairly quiet about the details. Relocating out there to be with his dad and then pulling up roots and coming back again had badly messed with his half-hearted attempts to get an education — not to mention how it had mongrelised the slang he used — but it had also left him with just enough of an accent, and maybe a bit of added mystery, so he wasn’t complaining.

The girl had finished her first call and was dialling another. She took a deep breath before putting the phone to her ear and he could tell it wasn’t a conversation she was looking forward to.

He really should get going, but there was something about this girl, besides her looks — and he found himself unable to look away. He watched her getting her nerve up before speaking and he couldn’t help feel a bit sorry for whatever she was going through.

For a moment he thought about nicking her phone, a Blackberry (natch), but he couldn’t get very excited about the idea, even if there’d been an easy way to make it happen.

Without thinking, he stepped in a little closer to her, careful to keep his eyes up ahead like he didn’t see her. He was sort of hoping to catch a hint of whatever perfume she was wearing. He wasn’t, you know, a pervert or anything — it was just that these girls always smelled amazing.

Afterwards, if he was looking back on that day and trying to choose a particular moment, he’d have to say that right then, as he stepped forwards, was probably when things started to unravel. It was about the last thing to happen that day that really made any sort of sense. Everything after that point was like a really unpleasant episode from someone else’s life spliced into his, not to mention that most of it took place in fast-forward. Even the bits that weren’t a speeded-up nightmare were still like something out of a dream, though at least it was one of his own.

The girl had made her difficult call. Clipper had stuck around, trying not to look conspicuous, but still watching her face, somehow captivated. Then she’d hung up, and so softly you’d hardly notice, she’d begun to cry. From then on, that whole day just rocketed past him, one insane event after another, all seemingly unstoppable.

The girl had begun to cry and it had hurt him — it had physically hurt him — watching her face. A pain just under his ribs, like something sharp was pressing into a soft part of him, had forced him into motion. One minute he was detached, keeping out of her eye line, just a spectator; the next he was moving quickly forwards, asking gently, “Are you OK?” He could hear the compassion in his voice and knew that he meant it — though he had no explanation for it. But then it didn’t seem to need explaining. She was upset; he wanted to help. It didn’t require any more thought than if she’d stumbled and he’d caught her.

He was confused at his own behaviour and it seemed to have caught her off guard too. She should have glared at him, because he was a stranger intruding on a private moment, or at least she should have lied like normal people do and said, “I’m fine.” But instead she told him exactly why she was crying.

And then they’d just talked.

It had been unlike any conversation he’d ever had. She said her name and he told her his: his real name. And it was… perfect.

Really, it was just about too good to be true. Of course as soon as he thought that, the world slid back into focus around him and he realised what he’d just told her — said right out, to a total stranger — and he felt panic. A panic that took on a different dimension when, out of the corner of his eye, he clocked a black shape moving towards him. Something about it held his attention. He looked round and was instantly annoyed with himself. This was what happened when you let your mind wander away from the business in hand.

The shape he’d seen was a black car, some sort of expensive 4x4, and it had stopped at the top of the steps behind him. It was probably the way the car had pulled up that had caught his eye. You couldn’t park there — not even for a minute. He didn’t know what it meant, but it sparked a little flash of adrenaline inside him.

The car — which was maybe an X5, that slick BMW SUV — spat out a couple of fast-moving geezers in black, who were dressed like coppers, but sort of tougher. Some sort of tactical group maybe.

His rising sense of anxiety over the arrival of a police car was starting to push away the acute shame he felt after his chat with the girl. He’d told her… well, he’d blurted out all sorts of things and he felt embarrassed and kind of exposed now. He’d made an idiot of himself and he just wanted to get away from her before she could point that fact out. The sense that the cops were bearing down on him magnified his agitation until he could hardly hold still. He needed to move. “Gotta go,” he said to her, even as he skipped away.

He did what he called his ‘fade’. He matched speed with a couple of secretaries who were click-clacking past, and shifted from his usual walk, which was kind of a chin-forwards swagger, to more of a rapid shuffle — what he thought of as his office-boy walk. Hassled and downtrodden. And today he was in the right clothes to pull it off. A month back he’d got a dark blue suit from Moss Bros — forty quid because it had glue or something on one of the trouser legs and a snag on the right lapel. He’d added a white shirt and a silver tie he’d stolen from Next: so freaked to be in there that he’d pocketed it on instinct. Looking at the other shoppers, he’d had a sudden glimpse of what his life could be like if he was a trainee estate agent or, you know, maybe working in credit control for a car leasing firm or something, and he’d bolted, forgetting his original plan to actually pay for the thing. Black shoes, which were bashed to bits, and his hair like he usually had it. Short all round with a sort of teased mop on top. It wasn’t an office haircut, but then he was always seeing these junior types dressed just like that: creased-up office clothes and mad club hairstyles. Suits that looked like they slept in them. Maybe when you had a crap job on crap pay you got to have your hair how you wanted it.

Clipper felt better for being on the move. He was now angling towards the archway at the top of the escalator, the one that led down into the tube station, and thinking it was time to get out of the cold. The girl was forgotten — or at any rate he was working on it — and there was no denying that it was, as his granddad used to say, perishin’ outside. He’d leave the coppers to their business.

But he risked a glance in their direction anyway, because he had a thing for any sort of cool-sounding elite police stuff, ever since he was a kid. They seemed to be heading in the same direction he was. So he began to turn away, so as not to put himself in their sights.

Speaking of which, he was hoping they’d be carrying guns. But they weren’t. They’d got everything else though. The whole outfit screamed weapons training. Altberg Defender boots, ballistic flak tunics, lots of webbing and everything in black. The bulky flak tunics sort of ended at the shoulder, like a cap-sleeve t-shirt. If you happened to have ripped deltoids — which these guys did, you could see them bunching under their tight nylon sleeves — then you weren’t going to have any problems looking serious in that get-up. He’d hoped for SWAT-style helmets, but they had on tight knitted caps instead. Very SAS. He took in as many of these details as he could, thinking how he’d google it all later. Both men were white