‘Thanks. Okay, so, the first part of the plan worked. I got in, set up the account, credited ten grand. The next bit was the genius bit, I thought. I got the system to send me a cash card along with a pin number assigned to this bogus account. I set up a PO Box and collected the card from there, strolled down to the local Midland and took out my first grand.’ He grinned. ‘It was so exciting. I could hardly believe it had worked. That evening I went online and started telling all my hacker buddies about what I’d done. Suddenly I was their hero. Even Dark Fox said he was impressed.’
‘But you got caught.’
‘Yeah.’
‘What happened?’
‘It turned out Dark Fox was an undercover cop. It must have been one of the first cases of computer entrapment. They traced me to the PO Box and that was it. I was arrested and charged for theft. Sent to prison for five years, though I was out in three.’
Kate took Paul’s hand again. He hadn’t hurt anyone. The money was a drop in the ocean of the bank’s vast profits – it wasn’t like he’d taken it from some little old lady’s account.
‘I still don’t get it, though,’ she said. ‘You were convicted of a computer crime. You did your time, as they say. Why did that stop you from wanting to call the police about Mrs Bainbridge?’
‘I haven’t finished yet. It gets . . . a lot worse. I feel scared to tell you, Kate. I’m worried that it will make you hate me.’
‘I need to know, Paul.’
‘I don’t know . . .’
She stood up. ‘If you don’t tell me I’m going to walk up to the bar, ask to use their phone, and call the police right now. I mean it.’
The men at the bar were watching Kate, their hands momentarily stilling their cigarette packets as they witnessed the rising tension. Paul gestured for her to sit. ‘Okay, I’ll tell you.’
He hesitated. ‘They put me in a cell with a bloke called Tony Plumber. He was a bit older than me and a lot harder. This was his second time inside.’
‘What was he in for?’
‘Tony was a traditionalist. He’d robbed a bank the old fashioned way, with a stocking on his head, and a sawn-off shotgun. He thought it was hilarious that he’d been stuck in a cell with some nancy who’d tried to rob a bank with a computer. “What you should have done,” he said, “was take the computer into the bank and whack the cashier over the head with it. You want to try robbing the proper way.’’’
It was then that Kate realised where this story was going. ‘Oh, Paul . . . You didn’t.’
He nodded, shamefaced. ‘I was angry. With the system, the world. I felt like I hadn’t done anything that bad, not compared to someone like Tony, who walked into a bank with a gun and terrified a load of people – yet he’d got the same sentence as me. Also, I was furious about the entrapment. And then the final straw – I heard about Stephen’s death . . . I was fucking furious with the whole world. Bitter. And Tony could sense that. He said that when he got out he was planning another job, one that was foolproof, and that if I wanted I could be part of it. He liked me, he said. He wanted to show me how to rob a bank the proper way.
‘He got out a couple of months before me, and when I was released, he was waiting for me. To be honest, I’d had second thoughts since he’d left, without having him there winding me up every day, but then I went through all the predictable shit that so many ex-cons go through: my old friends had all moved on and I couldn’t get another job, especially in IT, not with my record. My family were in trauma after Stephen’s death and that, added to their shame over what I’d done, meant they didn’t want to know me. The girl I’d been seeing when I went inside had stopped visiting almost immediately. I was alone. Apart from my old cellmate, Tony Plumber.’
Paul ploughed on. ‘I had a habit of falling in with bad influences, didn’t I? First my old school mates, then Tony. He took me under his wing. Me and him, we were going to be rich, he said. One job, then off to the Costa del Sol.’ He laughed. ‘It all seems so clichéd, but that was the world Tony existed in. And I went for it.
‘There were the two of us plus a driver, some bloke called Colin. Tony told me to meet him at his garage one Thursday morning. We were going to hit the NatWest in Bromley. It was raining, I remember. When I turned up, Tony handed me a pistol. I think it was then it struck me, that this was actually real. I tried to back out, but Tony got angry and told me that it was too late. He pointed his gun at me. I was shitting myself. We drove to the bank – I felt so sick, Kate. My legs were wobbling when we got out of the car. Tony hissed at me that I’d better pull myself together because we were going in now.’
Paul’s face had gone white.
‘We pulled stockings over our heads and ran into the bank, me a couple of paces behind him. It was nearly empty – just three people in the queue and two cashiers, a bald bloke and a young girl. It’s as clear now as if it had happened yesterday. Tony started shouting, pulled out his gun and the customers automatically hit the deck. Tony pointed his gun at the female cashier and was screaming at her to put the money in bags. I was pointing my gun at the other cashier, though my hand was shaking so much I nearly dropped it several times. I could see cameras filming us, and I was so desperate to get out of there. But Tony was getting angrier and angrier. The cashier was being too slow. She was stuffing the money into a bag and then she dropped it on the floor. When she bent down to pick it up, Tony started screaming, You bitch. You fucking bitch. She just pressed the panic button. I could see his finger tensing on the trigger. He was going to shoot her.’
He looked into Kate’s eyes. ‘So I shot him.’
‘You . . .?’
‘I shot him. In the side, here.’ He touched his right side, just beneath his ribcage. ‘It was a fluke shot – I was lucky I didn’t shoot the cashier by mistake. He fell on the floor, thrashing about in his own blood. The rest of it is a blur. I dropped my own gun and waited for the police to arrive.’
‘Oh Paul. What happened?’
‘Tony survived, though he lost a lot of blood. And I was sent back to jail, although my sentence was a lot shorter than it would have been because my barrister successfully argued that I was an innocent who had acted to save the life of the cashier, blah blah. Tony testified against me but that actually helped because he was so awful, and the jury really took against him. Plus the cashier that I’d saved spoke up for me. It was quite big news at the time, though you would have missed it because you were in America.’
He told her the rest of the story, about how after this spell in prison he was head-hunted by a computer security firm who had realised that taking on ex-hackers was a sensible move, even ones who had dallied with armed robbery. Paul’s brilliance with computers, along with his insight into the way criminal minds worked, made him a perfect employee. And he wasn’t angry any more, he said. He was reformed and grateful for the chance to start again.
‘But I have a record with guns. There were no witnesses to Mrs Bainbridge’s shooting, so what do you think the police would think when they checked my background? They’d assume that I did it.’
‘No, because I’d tell them it was Sampson. I’m a witness.’
‘It wouldn’t be that simple, Kate. We’d both be arrested, probably. And what would you
