The eighty pounds was on the desk.
He'd stacked it beside my ledger in four piles, neat, the way a man counts when he's done it professionally. The board by the fireplace was back down. He'd even put the rug straight.
I'd had the rooms four days. He'd been in them maybe twenty minutes.
"Sit down, Jack."
I sat, because the alternative was standing in a doorway with a gun in my coat and no idea what I'd do with it, and Tommy had already worked out that I didn't know either.
"You searched my rooms."
"I searched my brother's rooms." He turned a page of the ledger with one finger. "If they were somebody else's I'd have sent John."
The Webley sat against my ribs, useless. I'd bought a gun and a lease and a woman at a desk, and none of it had made me safer, because the only man in Birmingham I actually needed to survive had walked up my stairs with a key he'd got off Kettle and let himself in.
"So." Tommy sat back. "Let's count."
He put his finger on the ledger.
"Six pound to Kettle, three months. Two pound ten of furniture, a shilling each to the lads who carried it, and sixpence on top to keep quiet about a cabinet with nothing in it, which they didn't." He turned the page. "Eight pound to a moneylender on Coventry Road, paid by a man with a scar on his face who told the moneylender where he works now. Four pound to Kettle for a dead lieutenant's Webley — that's Kettle again, he's had a good week off you. Two pound for a month over the chandler's, ten shilling a week. A new ledger, one and six, which I'm reading. And sixpence at the ironmonger's for a key I'm told the Stark girl now carries." He closed it. "And eighty pound under a board."
He let that sit.
"A hundred and three pound, near enough. Since Easter. You had three pound at Easter, Jack. Polly counted it."
"Tommy—"
"So that's a hundred pound in this city with no name on it. And I've come to ask what its name is."
"I won it."
"Where."
"Cards. A house off Bordesley Green, back of a barber's, I don't know the fella's—"
"Mickey Doyle's."
"Aye."
"Mickey Doyle's been in Winson Green since January." Nothing moved in his face. "The barber's is a barber's. His wife runs it. She's Methodist." He tapped the ledger once. "Try again."
I said nothing. There wasn't anything to say that wasn't worse.
"Let me save you the second lie," Tommy said. "I've had you watched since the yard. Kettle. The chandler's wife. Scudboat, who'd tell me if you sneezed. You've been to no police station. You've met no man you shouldn't. You've written no letters — I know, because the Stark girl opens your post and she's not written anything down, which is how I know she's good at the job." He took a cigarette out and took his time with the match. "A copper's man does copper's things. You've done none. So I don't think you're Campbell's."
I hadn't known I'd been holding that until it went.
"Which leaves a thief," he said, "or something I haven't got a word for."
He looked at me over the match.
And I made a decision I'd been not making for a week. I stopped lying to him.
"I can't tell you where it came from."
"Can't."
"Can't. Not won't. There isn't a version of it you'd believe and there isn't a version of it I can prove." I put my hands flat on the desk. "You can decide what that means. But I'm not going to sit here and give you a third one that you'll take apart in a sentence."
He smoked.
"That's the first honest thing you've said since I sat down."
"I know."
"It's not enough."
"I know that too."
"Then give me something I can use." He tapped ash into the saucer Lizzie had left. "Not the money. I've already got the money. Give me a reason to believe there's a word for you."
So I gave him the only thing I had, which was the future.
"Within the fortnight," I said, "John's going to come to you and tell you he wants to marry."
Nothing moved in his face.
"He's got the four children and no woman to raise them. He's tired and he's lonely and he'll have picked one out already, and when he tells you her name you'll say no. And the reason you say no won't be the reason you give him." I held his eyes. "And the way you'll fix it — the way you'll turn a problem into a profit, because you always do — is you'll find him a Lee girl and buy peace with a wedding."
The cigarette stopped halfway to his mouth.
"Nobody's said that out loud. Not John, not Polly, not you. There's no report and no witness that could have handed me it. Wait a fortnight. If it happens, you'll know there's something here you haven't accounted for. Something that isn't Campbell and isn't a card table. You still won't have a word for me. But you'll know you need one."
"And what are you?"
"I don't know yet."
That was true, and I think he heard that it was, because he finished bringing the cigarette up, and drew on it, and sat there for a while looking at the piles of money instead of at me.
"John," he said eventually. "Marry."
"Yes."
"A Lee girl."
"Yes."
He shook his head, once, slowly — not disbelief. Something closer to a man hearing his own thought in someone else's mouth and not liking the sound of it.
"Two weeks," he said.
"Two weeks."
He reached across and pulled the four stacks toward himself.
I felt that in my stomach.
"That's a bond." He squared the piles against the desk. "Money with no name goes to the family until it's got one. Two weeks, and if your fortnight comes off you'll have it back, with interest, from my hand, in front of Arthur and John so they know what you are." He put it inside his coat. It took a while. "And if it doesn't come off, we'll have a different conversation, and I'll have your eighty pound to pay for it."
"I've wages Friday, Tommy. Two."
"Then you'll find out how the rest of Small Heath lives." He picked up his hat. "It'll do you good. You've had money a week and you've spent it like a man who never expects to see the end of it."
He stood. He didn't go.
"Here's the rest of it," he said. "Since you want to know where you stand. This office is a Shelby office. Your book goes through Polly, Fridays, like every other book. The girl stays. The bookmaker stays. You'll pay them out of what you earn, and you'll earn it on my streets, doing my work, and I'll know what you took to the penny." He set the hat on. "You wanted something of your own. There isn't any such thing. Not in this family. You should've asked."
"And if I'd asked?"
"I'd have said the same. But you'd have kept your eighty pound."
He stopped at the door.
"Saturday," he said. "Cheltenham. You're coming."
I hadn't expected that either.
"Kimber liked the barmaid. Stood in front of her like a man looking in a jeweller's window." Tommy turned the handle. "I want him looking in that window all afternoon while I talk to his accountant. She'll be in the enclosure in a good dress, and she'll be on a Shelby's arm so he knows whose window it is, and it can't be mine, because I'm the man he needs to underestimate." He looked back at me. "You've a face for a collar. You'll be her husband for the day."
"Her husband."
"Mr and Mrs Shelby, up from Birmingham for the racing. You'll be charming, you'll be a bit dull, and you'll let Kimber think he could take her off you if he tried." He opened the door. "Don't let him."
"Tommy—"
"You don't know what happened to you," he said. "I don't either. I've decided not to mind, so long as it keeps happening." He went out. "Saturday. Six. Wear the collar."
Then he was gone down the stairs, and I sat there listening to his boots until the street door went, and only then let my hands do what they'd wanted to do for twenty minutes.
The thing behind my eyes had waited.
RELATIONSHIP: THOMAS SHELBY — Trust: Suspended. Status: Under Observation.
Influence: 21 → 14
Territory: Watery Lane — Held in bond.
NEW TASKObjective: Prove the prediction.Time limit: 14 days.Failure: Termination of host.Reward: Undisclosed.
I read that last line three times.
Termination of host. Not task failed. Not penalty. Until tonight it had been a scoreboard. Now it had a word for killing me.
Host.
Tommy had, as far as I could tell, just brought me in — the office, Cheltenham, his own brothers as witnesses to whatever I earned. And the thing that had made all of it possible was sitting in the corner of my sight telling me that if I failed it, I wouldn't be around to be disappointed.
Tommy had given me a fortnight. It had given me a fortnight. Only one of them had said what happened after.
"Suspended," I said to the empty room, and laughed, and it came out wrong.
A board creaked on the stairs.
I had the Webley out and up before I'd finished turning, and Lizzie was standing three steps down in her coat with her key in her hand and my gun pointed at her chest, and she didn't scream and she didn't run.
She looked at the barrel. Then past it, at me.
"You want to put that away," she said.
I put it away.
"I left my cigarettes." She came up the last three steps, slow, and stood in the doorway. Her face was doing nothing at all, which from Lizzie meant a great deal. "I was on the landing when he came in. I couldn't get past him and I wasn't going to knock."
Twenty minutes. She'd been on the landing the whole time.
"Lizzie—"
"How much of that am I supposed to have not heard?"
"All of it."
"Right." She came in and picked her cigarettes off the desk and stood there holding them, not leaving. "Then let's start with the part where you told Thomas Shelby, to his face, that his brother's going to want to marry and be told no. Because I've known John Shelby since I was fifteen."
She lit the cigarette. Her hand wasn't steady either. That was almost a comfort.
"And he came round my rooms three times last month, and he didn't want what he usually wants. He wanted to talk. About the babies. About the house. About how a man can't do it on his own."
The match went out between her fingers.
"So you tell me, Jack. Whose name was he going to say?"