Chapter 30
THURSDAY
Shaun Rutherford is only too keen to meet.
I create a profile under the name Anthony Smith on the website’s messaging service and we exchange messages over the course of the morning while I sit in a pub by the marina.
He waxes lyrical about his professional background while I tell him I have at least three days’ work modeling for a clothing retailer and I think he’d be perfect for the job.
Dom has already agreed, without needing any persuasion, to be my wingman and joins me at the Canalboat Inn half an hour early so we can talk tactics.
He’s on nightshifts but has gone home to change into a hoodie, jeans, a puffer jacket that accentuates his already large frame.
With his close-cropped hair and beard, the overall effect would be quite intimidating if you didn’t know Dom was an absolute sweetheart.
At ten minutes to one o’clock, I move across the half-empty saloon bar of the pub and sit in a separate booth.
With my back to the door and wearing my old blue baseball cap, I’m hoping Shaun won’t recognize me when he walks in.
He’s punctual, I’ll give him that. He turns up on the dot of one p.m. and I recognize him immediately—he’s even wearing the same dark bomber jacket he had on when he came to my house.
Dom raises a hand to the visitor, gesturing to Shaun to join him in a booth at the back of the pub and introducing himself as Anthony.
I sit across from them, half hidden behind a copy of the Racing Post, listening in as the two men exchange pleasantries.
After a minute of small talk, Dom gets up saying he’ll go to the bar—our pre-arranged signal—and I stand up at the same moment.
But instead of buying the younger man a drink, Dom sits down next to him, trapping him in the booth’s window seat and blocking his way out.
I slide into the bench seat opposite that my brother-in-law has just vacated.
“What…?” Shaun looks from me to Dom, and back again. “What’s going on? Who are you?”
I take off the baseball cap and look him straight in the eyes.
“Hello, Shaun,” I say. “We met a couple of days ago, remember?”
His expression hardens in recognition, his dark eyes narrowing.
He shifts his weight and for a split second I think he’s going to turn violent, but then Dom turns toward him in his seat, squares his shoulders, puts a large right fist on the table.
He gives a single shake of his head. He’s spent years working in security, years before that as a bouncer—dealing with every kind of idiot, every drunk full of bravado, and every wannabe tough guy—and he knows the best outcome in any confrontation is to not have to fight.
To convince the other bloke that throwing the first punch would be a very bad idea.
Shaun Rutherford is quick to catch on. He’s a big guy but I’m guessing it’s muscle built for the gym, for the selfies, for the ladies, rather than for brawling in the back room of a sticky-floored pub.
“We’re just going to have a quiet chat,” Dom says softly. “Just the three of us. No drama.”
“This is bullshit,” Shaun says, moving as if to stand up and climb out over the table. “I didn’t come here for this.”
“Sit.” Dom puts a heavy hand on his shoulder. “Down.”
Shaun’s eyes flick toward the bar. But most of the customers—and the only member of staff—are around the front of the pub in the lounge bar.
I put my phone on the table between us.
“Who hired you?” I say. “To come to my house?”
“I’m telling you nothing. That’s confidential information.”
“Just give me a name.”
“Screw you.”
“What instructions did he give you?”
“I told you, I’m saying nothing about the client. Or any client for that matter. It’s between me and them.”
“Listen, you can either have me asking”—I gesture at Dom—“Or him. Your choice.”
“You know what?” Shaun moves a hand to his jacket pocket. “I’m calling the—”
Dom brings his fist down hard on the table, so fast I barely even register it, a flat heavy crack that rattles the whole booth and makes Shaun jump visibly back in his seat.
“I say we take him out the back,” Dom says in a gravelly monotone. “Have a little chat in the car park.”
Shaun holds his hand up, shrinking back into the corner of the booth. I remember how he was at my house: potentially threatening but only in a superficial way. It was bluster with nothing behind it.
“OK,” he says. “OK. Jesus. Whatever. It was just some guy, all right?”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. He messaged me on the website, just like you did, said he had a cash job that was short notice and needed sensitive handling.
He wanted someone plausible, calm under pressure, good at improv, and I’m like telling him, ‘Yes, yes, I’m good at all those things.
’ And so he gave me the address and said he needed it done ASAP.
Five hundred quid up front and another five hundred quid if I got the watch and everything else. ”
“And what else were you expecting to get?”
Shaun frowns in recollection. “A… wallet, a phone, an old scarf or something? Can’t remember the rest but he reckoned it would all be together in one place.
Said he lived abroad and he couldn’t get to the UK, he didn’t want to go through all the formal channels, all the legal stuff.
He just wanted to get his grandad’s old watch and a few other bits and bobs.
Return them to the old boy before the cancer finally got him.
Felt like this would be the quickest way to recover his old stuff. ”
“And it didn’t strike you as a bit odd? A bit cloak-and-dagger?”
He shrugs. “It was good money. Things have been a bit tight recently, been doing loads of auditions but still waiting to hear back. I’ve had weirder acting jobs than this, believe me. Much weirder. But that’s why it’s better than a boring nine-to-five.”
“And the client was a man?”
“I mean… it was all done on the messaging app on the website. I sent a couple of my showreels with some of my acting work. But I never spoke to them or met them face to face, I just—”
Dom interrupts. “You know they’re stolen goods, right?”
Shaun turns to him.
“What?”
“And by involving you he’s made you an accomplice in a criminal activity. Whether you walked away with those stolen goods or not, you’re already complicit under the common law doctrine of joint criminal enterprise—each individual being responsible for the crimes committed by the group.”
Dom is freestyling now, making it up as he goes along, but he sounds almost like a police officer and it seems to be working. Shaun’s eyes widen in alarm.
“What?”
“He used you. Hung you out to dry.”
“Look, I didn’t want to get involved in anything illegal. He said they were family heirlooms but it was never supposed to be—”
“He made you take all the risks, didn’t even pay you all the money. You don’t owe him any loyalty. You don’t owe him anything.”
Shaun’s cheeks are flushed beneath his dark beard, his nostrils flaring. But he’s nodding, as if he’s suddenly seen the truth of his situation.
“The name was Mason,” he says reluctantly. “That’s the name they went by on the website, anyway. Assumed it was a surname but I didn’t actually ask.”
“Good,” Dom says. “That’s good. What else did Mason say? Anything unusual about the instructions they gave you?”
“There were a couple of things that struck me as a bit weird.”
I lean toward him, forearms on the table. “Go on.”
“They said I should try to find out from you exactly where the stuff had been found. Like, exactly. I should find out if it was like an attic room or under the floorboards or something, exactly where and which room. They kept banging on about that. I didn’t really get it, like why did it matter where they’d been as long as their grandad got them back, right? ”
“And what was the other thing?”
“They said there were seven things to get back: the watch, the phone, the wallet and the other stuff I can’t remember.
Anyway, they were dead specific about it, said I had to get all of them to get the other five hundred quid.
It was no good just getting a few. They needed all seven. All or nothing.”