The man in the mirror had my expression on somebody else's face.
That was the part I couldn't get past. Sharp cheekbones, a nose that had been broken and set badly, three days of stubble, and a cut above the left eyebrow with dried blood crusted into the hair around it. None of it was mine. But the look he was giving me — that flat, sick, what-is-happening look — that was mine, and it moved when I moved, and it was sitting on a stranger's bones.
I put two fingers against the cut. Pain went through my skull like a nail.
The last thing I actually remembered was a wet Tuesday and a bus stop and the interview I'd spent three weeks preparing for. Then brakes. Then headlights, very close and very white, and a sound I'd never heard before and only heard once.
Then nothing at all.
And now this room.
It was about eight feet by ten. Iron bedstead, mattress that sagged in the middle. Wallpaper peeling off damp brick in long strips, like something had started eating the wall and got bored. A chamber pot under the bed, which I noticed and then decided not to think about. One window, small, and behind it the sky was the colour of dishwater and there was a smell coming in through the frame — coal smoke, and something rotten and green underneath it, like standing water.
There was a razor on the washstand. Not a safety razor. A straight one, folded into a bone handle, with a strop hanging off a nail beside it.
I picked it up. My hand knew exactly how to hold it, and my hand had never held one in its life.
I put it down.
The door banged open behind me hard enough to rattle the window in its frame.
"Oi. What the fuck are you doing?"
A man stood in the doorway with a cigarette already going, cap pushed back, waistcoat undone. Young. My age, whatever my age was now. He looked me over with the total lack of interest that only comes from having seen someone every day of your life.
"Tommy wants us. Family meeting. Now, not in an hour."
I knew him.
Not from the memories that had been trying to shoulder their way into my head since I opened my eyes. From a television, in a flat, with a takeaway going cold on the arm of the sofa.
John Shelby.
I opened my mouth and nothing came out of it.
"Christ." He took the cigarette out and pointed the wet end at me. "You're still pissed, aren't you."
"No."
"You're stood in your vest talking to a mirror."
"I'm—" My own voice came out wrong. Lower, rougher, with a Birmingham underneath it that I hadn't put there. "Give me a minute."
"You've had all night." He was already turning. "And put a shirt on. Polly's in one of her moods and I'm not having it come at me because of you."
He went. His boots went down the stairs in a rhythm I somehow knew, three quick and a pause on the loose one.
I stood there in the cold and did the arithmetic.
John Shelby had never had a twin. I'd watched all of it, twice, and there was no fourth brother. There had never been a fourth brother.
But everyone in that house remembered one, and it was me.
I'm so fucked.
Pulling the shirt on, I found out how the rest of it worked.
I didn't know where the shirt was. My hands knew — off the back of the chair, the collar separate, the stud fiddly and I got it on the second try without looking. I didn't know the way to the stairs. My feet did.
It came in flashes with no order to them. Standing in a yard in the rain with a bucket. A woman's voice saying Jack, don't. The exact weight of a bicycle I'd never owned.
And then one that wasn't a flash. One that came in properly, with a smell attached.
Mud, and cordite, and something sweet under it. Somebody very close by making a noise that wasn't a word. My hands — his hands — flat on the wall of a trench, and the wall of the trench moving, breathing in and out with the shelling like a lung.
I stopped on the landing with a hand on the rail and waited for it to finish.
It wasn't mine. That was the thing. I had it the way you have a photograph of someone else's holiday. Every detail, no ownership. And I understood, standing there sweating in a dead man's shirt, that I was going to be carrying this man's war around for as long as I lived in his body, and I was never once going to have earned it.
They'd sent him back from France and he'd come back wrong. That much I could feel the shape of. He'd got quiet. He'd started drinking the way you drink when it's a job. And last night he'd come out of the Garrison with a skinful and gone over on the cobbles by the entry, and put his head against the kerbstone, and that had been the end of him.
I'd got the body, the family, the reputation, and the memories.
The room downstairs was thick with smoke before anyone lit anything new.
Three of them at a table with a green cloth on it, a ledger open, a bottle and no glasses. The window looked onto Watery Lane and the light through it was brown.
"Well, if it isn't Jacky boy." Arthur, sprawled, shirtsleeves, grinning at me like I'd done something funny by existing. "Thought we'd lost you up there."
"He was talking to himself in the mirror," John said.
"Was he."
"Full conversation."
Arthur laughed and it turned into a cough. "Any of it good?"
"Sit down, Jack." Tommy didn't look up from the ledger when he said it.
I sat.
I'd expected to be frightened of Arthur. Arthur was the one who broke things. But Arthur felt easier than that. He wanted me to be the same as I'd always been, and I had the sense that if I said nothing at all he'd go on believing it.
Maybe that was wrong. I'd had this face for an hour and I was already making rules about people.
Tommy hadn't looked at me once, and I could feel him doing it anyway.
He finished a line in the ledger. Capped the pen. Then he did look up, and it was about a second and a half longer than it needed to be, and there was nothing in his face at all.
"You've a cut on your head."
"I fell."
"I heard."
That was all. He turned to Arthur and I sat there with my heart going and understood that I'd just been measured, and that I had no idea what the result had been, and that he wasn't going to tell me.
"News from Belfast," Arthur said.
The room settled.
"They've sent a copper. Special man, out of the Royal Irish. Coming to clean the city up, that's the word." Arthur turned the bottle a quarter turn on the cloth. "He's bringing his own men. Not Birmingham lads."
"Let 'em come," John said, and put his hand flat on the table, not hard, but it made the bottle jump. "We're Peaky Blinders. They come down Watery Lane, we'll take the smiles off their faces and post 'em back to Belfast."
"John."
"I'm only saying, Tommy."
"You're only saying it loud."
I was looking at the ledger. It was the safest thing in the room to look at. And I was thinking: they don't send a man from Belfast for bookmakers.
They'd sent him because something had gone out of the BSA factory that shouldn't have. Guns, packed and crated and bound for somewhere hot, and now not on the ship. Twenty-something of them, and they were in this city right now, in a lockup or a barge or a yard, and one of the men at this table already knew exactly where.
I knew that. It sat in my chest like a swallowed coin.
And I couldn't do a single thing with it. I couldn't say it. Saying it would be the last thing I ever said, because there were maybe three people in Birmingham who knew, and a fourth who suddenly did would be a problem to be solved before lunch.
"What's he after, then?" Arthur said. "This copper."
Tommy pulled a cigarette out and took his time with the match.
"He'll tell us," he said. "Men like that always do."
He shook the match out.
"Bookmaking's up. The Garrison run's short again, and I'll be having a word about that. And nothing changes on the street until I say it does — not for a copper from Belfast, not for anybody." He put the cigarette in his mouth. "That's the meeting."
Chairs went back. Arthur reached for the bottle now the business was over. John was saying something about a horse.
I stood up too fast and put a hand on the table to cover it.
Tommy was watching me again.
He didn't say anything. He didn't need to. I had four brothers-worth of shared childhood I'd never had, an aunt who'd raised a boy I'd never been, a twin who'd shared a bloody womb with me, and every single one of them had years of Jack filed away that I could not access, could not fake, and would be tested on every day for the rest of my life without ever being told when the test had started.
Being a Shelby wasn't cover. It was the most closely watched job in Small Heath, and I'd walked into it halfway through.
"I need air," I said.
"You need water," Arthur said cheerfully, and poured himself a drink.
I got as far as the passage.
The head thing came all at once. The floor went soft on one side and I got a shoulder against the wall and stayed there with the bricks cold through my shirt, breathing, while the passage did a slow turn to the left and came back.
Hospital, I thought. Then I remembered what that meant here.
No scan. Nobody who could look inside a skull and tell you what was going on in it. A man could put his head on a kerb and be dead by Thursday, and it wouldn't even be remarked on — it had already happened once this week, to the man whose shirt I had on.
I laughed, and it came out badly.
I was going to have to be Jack Shelby. Not for an afternoon. For years. In a house full of people who'd known him since before he could walk, in a family the police were about to take an interest in, in a city where the man at that table would kill me the moment I became inconvenient, and he'd do it without raising his voice. And I had no money, no allies, no plan, and somebody else's nightmares.
Then a sound went off in my skull.
Clean. Electronic. A bright little two-tone chime with absolutely no business existing in Birmingham in 1919, and it didn't come through the passage or the wall or the air.
MAFIA SYSTEM ACTIVATED
I stared at the bricks.
"...What?"