‘We didn’t figure we’d need them,’ says Peter. ‘There were five of us and one of him.’

  ‘What about gloves?’ you ask.

  Maggie frowns. ‘Gloves?’

  ‘Were we wearing gloves?’

  Her frown deepens and then she smiles. ‘You’re worried about the gunshot residue, aren't you?’

  ‘Well there wouldn't be any if I was wearing gloves, would there?’

  ‘We were but you took them off when you were using his keyboard.’

  ‘Why was I on his keyboard?’

  ‘You were checking on what he was doing. I don’t know exactly but while you were on his computer he pulled a gun. You grabbed it and there was a struggle and the gun went off.’

  ‘So it was self defence?’

  She grins. ‘We were there to rob him. But yes, you could claim self defence.’

  ‘We’d done this before?’

  ‘We’re professionals,’ she says. ‘But this is the first time anyone has died.’

  ‘How well do you know me, Maggie?’

  She chuckles. ‘Well we’re not besties, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘Do you know where I live?’ you ask.

  ‘St John’s Wood I think you said,’ says Maggie. ‘But I don’t know where exactly.’

  ‘Do I have a car?’

  ‘I’ve seen you driving a BMW, yeah,’ says Peter. ‘An X5. Nice motor.’

  ‘So you think my phone and car and my wallet are at my home?’ you say and they both nod. ‘We need to go there,’ you say.

  ‘We can do that, if you give us the address,’ says Maggie.

  You shrug. ‘I’ve got nothing,’ you say. ‘I don’t know where I live, I don’t know who I live with. You say St John’s Wood and I know where that is, but it doesn’t ring a bell.’

  ‘This is some crazy shit,’ says Peter.

  ‘Tell me about it,’ you say.

  ‘You’re among friends now,’ says Maggie. ‘You can stop pretending. I know you needed to play the amnesia card when the cops had you, but you’re free now. You can drop the act.’

  You frown. ‘You think I’m faking it?’

  ‘Give me a break. No one has amnesia like this. You know the difference between burglary and breaking and entering, you couldn’t do that if you’d lost your memory. I get it, they caught you with Johnston’s body in the boot, they had you bang to rights, you had to think of something. But the cops aren’t an issue now, you’re out. What we need to do now is to get your passport and get you out of the country until it all blows over. Spain, maybe. Marbella is nice this time of the year.’

  You chuckle, trying to work out if she’s serious or not.

  She looks over at Peter and he leans forward, his eyes burning into yours. ‘Come on, Fish. Drop the act. We need to get you out of the country, now. You’ve got cash stashed away, and krugerrands you said. You need to get that money and get on a plane.’

  ‘Why are you so keen to get me out of the country?’ you ask.

  ‘Because if they catch you, it puts them a step closer to us,’ says Peter.

  You look over at Maggie. ‘You saw my chart, right? I’m not faking it.’

  ‘The doctors don’t know that,’ says Maggie. ‘They only know what you tell them, and you did a great job of faking it.’

  You shake your head. ‘I’m not faking it, I’m really not. I wish I could remember, but I can’t. I don’t have a single memory of the time before the accident.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ says Peter.

  ‘I’m just telling you the way it is,’ you say.

  He looks across at Maggie. ‘I don’t believe him.’

  ‘What do I have to gain by lying?’ you say. ‘At the very least I want to know who the guy was and why I shot him.’

  ‘I told you,’ says Maggie. ‘We were stealing from him. He produced a gun and you grabbed it and shot him.’

  ‘But in the photograph, you had the gun,’ you say.

  ‘What photograph?’ she says.

  You grimace. You hadn’t told her about the photographs the police had shown you. You curse under your breath, wishing you had kept your mouth shut.

  ‘What photograph?’ she says again.

  ‘The cops had pictures of the car taken from speed cameras. Two pictures. You can see me driving and you can see you in the front passenger seat, holding a gun.’

  She swears out loud. ‘And you didn’t think to tell me this?’ she says.

  ‘It happened after you came to my room. This is the first chance I’ve had to mention it.’

  ‘What’s he talking about, Maggie?’ asks Peter.

  ‘We were on the M25, there’s speed cameras everywhere.’

  ‘So they have our picture?’ he says.

  ‘So you were in the car, too?’ you say to Peter.

  ‘Am I in the pictures?’ he asks.

  You shake your head. ‘Just me and Maggie. They didn’t show the back seat.’

  ‘That's something,’ he says. ‘But you should have told us about this.’

  ‘Can you see it’s me?’ asks Maggie, clearly concerned.

  ‘I recognised you because I’d seen you in my room. I don’t think the cops will be able to identify you from the photographs. But you can clearly see that you’re holding a gun.’

  She curses again and glares at you like you’re the problem. ‘You should have told me before.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘When I came to get you.’

  ‘What are you saying, if I’d told you about the speed cameras you’d have left me in hospital?’

  ‘Of course not. But this changes everything.’

  ‘Changes everything how?’

  ‘If they can identify me...’ She leaves the sentence unfinished.

  ‘I’m the one who has the problem, Maggie,’ you say. ‘They have my fingerprints and my DNA. And they have GSR on my hands if I did fire the gun. All they have of you is a blurry photograph.’ You look over at Peter. ‘So you were in the back of the car?’

  He nods. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So why weren’t you hurt in the crash?’

  ‘I had my seatbelt on. Seatbelts save lives, remember? Oh, of course, you don’t remember anything, do you?’

  ‘What happened when we crashed?’ you ask, ignoring his sarcasm.

  ‘I didn’t see anything. Just heard a bang and then we were off the road and upside down.’

  ‘And you weren’t hurt?’

  ‘I was shaken up. And I’ve got bruises from where the seatbelt bit into me. But, yeah, I was okay.’

  You look at Maggie. ‘And you weren’t hurt either?’

  ‘I had my seatbelt on and the airbag did its job.’

  ‘What caused the crash?’

  ‘You did. You were shouting at me and you didn’t have your eyes on the road. A truck cut you off and you didn’t brake. The truck clipped your wing and up we went.’

  ‘And I didn’t have my seatbelt on?’

  ‘Apparently not.’

  ‘Why did you leave me? You both ran off and left me for dead.’

  ‘We knew you weren’t dead. You were still breathing. But there was a body in the boot and the emergency services were on their way. We could hear the sirens. It’s not as if we could carry you, is it? And if they’d caught us then they’d have the gun. At least if we left and took the gun with us, you stood a chance of not getting arrested. Your best chance.’

  ‘You abandoned me.’

  ‘Get a grip. You were unconscious. The cops were on their way. We had to get out of there.’

  ‘And the car belonged to this Robert Johnston? The guy we were robbing?’

  She nods. ‘We needed to get rid of his body.’

  ‘But why were we using his car? What about the car we used to get to the job?’

  She frowns. ‘You remember the car we used to drive there?’

  ‘No, I keep telling you, I don’t remember anything. But I assume we didn’t walk to Johnston’s house. So what happened to that car? You didn’t leave it there, did you?’

  Maggie and Peter exchange a look. You realise that there is something they’re not telling you. ‘There’s another car, right?’

  ‘We went to Johnston’s house in a Honda SUV. But we didn’t want to be ferrying the body around in it because then we’d have left trace that the cops could’ve found. Billy drove the Honda while we were going to dispose of the body.’

  ‘Billy?’

  ‘Our alarms guy,’ says Maggie. ‘He’s a tech wizard.’

  ‘Was he following us when we had the crash?’ you ask, and you can see from the look on her face that the answer is yes. ‘Why didn’t he pick us all up?’ you ask. ‘Why did you leave me there?’

  ‘There wasn’t time to get you out,’ says Maggie.

  ‘And where’s this Billy now?’

  ‘He’s around,’ says Peter.

  ‘So this Johnston’s house was alarmed, but Billy got us in?’ you say.

  ‘Exactly,’ says Maggie.

  ‘So what did this Johnston guy have in his house that was so valuable?’ you ask.

  ‘Cash, jewellery, watches, works of art,’ she says. ‘But what we were really after was his online deposits,’

  ‘Online deposits?’ you repeat.

  She nods. ‘Yeah. More than a hundred million pounds, give or take.’

  CHAPTER 15

  You don’t say anything for a few seconds as you struggle to get your head around the enormity of the figure she has given you. A hundred million pounds? A HUNDRED MILLION POUNDS? When Maggie had said you were a thief you had assumed you were stealing a few high-end watches or an expensive painting. Who steals a hundred million pounds?

  ‘Who is he, this Robert Johnston?’ you say eventually.

  ‘It doesn’t matter who he is, what matters is that he had a lot of money in his bank accounts,’ says Peter.

  ‘And we went to his house to steal it?’ you say.

  ‘Not physically, we were supposed to do it online,’ says Maggie. ‘We needed his codes to access the accounts.’

  ‘And he handed them over?’

  ‘He told you the details and you were accessing the accounts,’ says Maggie. ‘That’s why you were there. You know your way around computers and databases and are a bit of a hacker. You were supposed to make sure that he transferred the money to our account but then he pulled a gun from somewhere and it all went tits up. We were worried that someone might have heard the shot so we had to get out.’

  ‘Why did we take the body?’

  ‘Without a body there’s no way of anyone knowing there’d been a murder. There wasn’t much blood and that was mainly on a rug so we rolled him up in the rug and put him in the boot of the car. The plan was to bury him somewhere. No body, no murder investigation. But the crash put paid to that.’

  ‘And what about the money, where’s the money now?’ you ask.

  ‘That’s the problem, Fish,’ she says. ‘You said you’d moved the money. You said we were all good. So we’re assuming that you emptied his accounts and put it into our account before he produced the gun.’

  Realisation dawns and your heart sinks as you take in the implications of what she’s saying. ‘You don’t know the account number? The new account number?’

  ‘No. But you do.’

  You curse under your breath. It’s clear now why they broke you out of the hospital. Only you know the location of a hundred million pounds. Except you don’t. Along with the rest of your pre-crash memories, it’s gone.

  ‘That’s why we think you might be faking it,’ Peter says quietly.

  ‘Faking it?’

  ‘Let’s say we believe you,’ he says. ‘Let’s say we think that you have got amnesia and that you can’t remember anything before the crash. Well, we can’t force you to remember, can we? There’s nothing we can do. But what’s to say that after we leave to go our separate ways, that some time in the future your memory doesn’t miraculously return? You can sit down at a keyboard and bish-bash-bosh suddenly you’re the owner of a hundred million pounds.’

  ‘Peter, mate, I am not faking this,’ you say but he just shrugs and doesn’t reply.

  You look over at Maggie hoping for her support but there’s none forthcoming. ‘You could fake it for a year and it’d be worth it,’ she says. ‘Five years. Ten years. You could wait until we’re all dead and you’d still be quids in.’

  ‘Maggie, I swear, I am not making this up. A hundred million, you say? That’s more than thirty million quid each split among the three of us.’

  ‘There are four of us,’ she says. ‘You, me, Peter and Billy. And there’s the guy who planned the heist. He has a share.’

  ‘What guy?’ you say.

  ‘The guy who told us about Johnston and the money. He planned it all so he gets a share.’

  ‘Who is he?’ you ask.

  ‘That’s need to know,’ says Maggie.

  ‘And you don’t need to know,’ adds Peter.

  ‘Do you know who it is?’ you ask him.

  He smiles thinly. ‘I don’t need to know. He only deals with Billy. It’s safer that way.’

  You force a smile. ‘Okay, fine, so it’s split five ways. That’s still twenty million quid each. That’s more than enough for me. For anybody.’

  ‘A hundred million is a lot more,’ says Peter. ‘Five times more.’

  ‘So you think I deliberately crashed the car so that I could fake amnesia? And the only reason we crashed was because we’d taken Johnston’s car. Did I plan that? Because that would mean that I had planned to shoot Johnston, wouldn’t it? What am I, some criminal mastermind?’

  ‘I’m not saying you planned any of it,’ says Maggie quietly. ‘What happened, happened. But once you realised the situation you were in, who’s to say you didn’t decide to take advantage of it?’

  ‘Are you serious?’ you say. ‘I wake up from a coma and decide to pretend to have amnesia? If I had remembered that there was a body in the boot of the car, wouldn’t I have left the hospital first chance that I got? Why would I have waited for the cops to handcuff me to the bed and swab my hands for gunshot residue? I’d have been up and out of there like a shot. No pun intended.’

  ‘You might have seen it as an opportunity,’ says Peter.

  ‘How is it an opportunity? There’s a body in the boot of the car and I shot him. Why would I hang around trying to pretend I’ve got an amnesia? That makes no sense at all. Last I heard, amnesia isn’t a defence when it comes to murder.’

  ‘He’s right,’ says Maggie. ‘If he’d remembered the shooting he’d have been straight out of there. And if he’s forgotten the shooting, he could have forgotten the bank details.’

  ‘How does someone forget everything?’ says Peter. ‘He says he can’t even remember his name.’

  ‘Peter, mate, I can’t remember a single thing about myself. Nothing. It’s all a bloody blank.’

  ‘Just because the car crashed? I was in the car and sure, I was shook up, but I didn’t forget my name.’

  ‘You were in the back seat. And I didn’t have my seatbelt on.’

  ‘The car had airbags,’ says Peter.

  ‘I don’t know what to tell you, Peter,’ you say. ‘I do know that I was battered and bruised and my spleen was damaged. They were giving me blood. If I hadn’t been hurt, I’d have left with you and Maggie, wouldn’t I?’ You shake your head. ‘I can’t believe this.’

  ‘There’s a hundred million pounds at stake,’ says Peter. ‘I’ve no idea what you’d be prepared to do for that sort of money.’

  ‘This is the first I’ve heard of the money.’

  ‘So you say.’

  You grit your teeth and sigh in exasperation. There’s clearly nothing you can say that will convince him that you’re not faking your amnesia. You look at Maggie. ‘So you didn’t break me out of the hospital to rescue me, did you? You’re only worried about the money.’

  ‘It’s a hundred million pounds, Fish. Do you think we’d just walk away from that. Look, I’m happy enough to believe that your amnesia is real enough, in which case at some point you’ll get your memory back. That’s what the doctors say, right?’

  ‘They did say that, yes. But it’s still all a blank.’

  ‘Did they suggest that your memory would never return?’ she asks.

  ‘They seemed to think it would be temporary,’ you say. ‘But as I said, there’s been no improvement at all. I can’t even remember my own name, never mind a bank account number.’

  ‘We can wait,’ she says. ‘There’s no pressure.’

  ‘Like fuck there’s no pressure,’ says Peter. ‘The longer we wait, the more chance there is that the cops will grab us. They’ve got your photograph, for fuck’s sake. If they ID you and check your phone records that will lead them to me and to Billy.’

  ‘We always use burner phones,’ says Maggie.

  ‘And they can track burners through cell tower pinging. Plus they can run facial recognition through CCTV footage and we’ve met in public loads of times.’

  ‘The pictures weren’t clear, I doubt that facial recognition will ID you,’ you say. ‘I could recognise you but that’s only because you’d been in my room. Anyone else would see a blurry blonde woman and that's all.’

  ‘Let’s hope so,’ she says.

  ‘What about the gun?’ you say. ‘Where is it now?’

  ‘Why do you care about the gun?’ asks Maggie.

  ‘Because it might have my fingerprints on it,’ you say. ‘And if the cops prove that it’s the gun that killed Johnston, I’m in big trouble. It wouldn’t matter if I have amnesia or not, if there’s GSR on my hands and the gun that killed him has my prints on it, then I’m going to prison. And let’s not forget if I’m behind bars they’re not going to let me access any bank websites. If I go down, no one gets the cash.’

  ‘I dumped the gun,’ says Maggie.

  ‘Where?’

  She smiles thinly. ‘Need to know.’

  ‘Maggie, my life depends on that gun never being found.’

  ‘It’s safe.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ you say.

  ‘It means no one is going to find it.’

  ‘Please don’t tell me you threw it in a canal.’

  ‘I didn’t throw it anywhere. I cleaned it thoroughly and buried it. You don’t need to worry.’