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. My floorboard was back down. He'd even put the rug straight.
I'd been in that room four days. He'd been in it 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 revolver sat against my ribs, useless. There was a thing I understood then that I hadn't the day before: I'd bought a gun and a flat 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 and let himself in.
"So." Tommy sat back. "Twenty-eight pound spent. Eighty under the boards. Where does a hundred and eight pound come from, Jack?"
"I won it."
"Where."
"Cards. A house off Bordesley Green, back of a pie shop, I don't know the fella's—"
"Solly Kaplan's."
"Aye."
"Solly Kaplan died in February." He didn't move. "The pie shop's a laundry now."
I said nothing. There wasn't anything to say that wasn't worse.
"Try again."
"Tommy—"
"There's a second lie in you, I can see it sitting there." He tapped ash off a cigarette I hadn't noticed him light. "Get it out and we'll get past it quicker."
I had about four seconds to decide, and in those four seconds I did the stupidest arithmetic of my life. I thought: he wants to know whether I'm dangerous to him. I thought: the fastest way to stop a man thinking you're a threat is to prove you're an asset. I thought about the one thing in the whole city I knew that nobody else was supposed to know.
And I opened my mouth.
"I know about the guns."
The room went very still, and it wasn't a dramatic stillness, it was worse than that. It was the stillness of a man deciding.
"What guns."
"The ones from the BSA. Twenty-five machine guns, ten thousand rounds, packed for Libya." My mouth kept going even as the back of my head started screaming. "They went missing in June. Everybody's been told it's the IRA. It isn't. They're in this city and you know exactly where they are."
Tommy put the cigarette down in the saucer Lizzie had left on the desk.
Then he stood, and drew, and put the barrel against my forehead, and the whole thing took less than a second and a half and he never once looked hurried.
"Who told you."
I'd got it exactly backwards. I'd thought knowledge was a gift. Four men alive knew where those guns were. Handing Tommy the secret didn't prove I was loyal — it proved I was connected to somebody, and there was only one kind of somebody who'd been asking about those guns since June, and he had a Belfast accent and he'd put his fists through Arthur's face.
"Nobody told me."
"Wrong answer." The metal pressed harder. "Campbell put a copper in the Garrison, did he? Sat him at my own table, gave him my mother's name—"
"Tommy."
"—drinking my whisky, playing my brother's cards—"
"Tommy."
"Give me a reason." He said it quietly. That was the worst part. He wasn't angry. Arthur would have been shouting; John would have hit me already and felt better for it. Tommy was standing in my office with a gun against my head making a business decision. "One. Now."
And I gave him the only thing I had left, which was the future.
"Don't believe me," I said. "Test me."
His eyes moved. Barely.
"You want to know if I'm Campbell's. A copper's man knows what's happened. He knows what's said, what's written, what's been reported." I kept my hands flat on the desk where he could see them. "I'll tell you something that hasn't happened yet."
"Go on then."
"Within the fortnight, John's going to come to you and say he wants to marry."
Nothing moved in his face.
"He's got the four children and no woman to raise them and 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." I made myself hold his eyes. "And the reason you say no won't be the reason you give him. 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 gun didn't move.
"Nobody's said that out loud," I said. "Not to John, not to Polly, not to you. There's no report, no witness, no copper on God's earth who could have handed me that. Wait a fortnight. If it happens, you'll know what I am."
"And what are you?"
"I don't know yet."
That was the first true thing I'd said since he sat down, and I think he heard it, because after a moment he took the barrel off my head, and set the gun on the desk with his hand still on it, and sat.
Nobody spoke for a while.
"You want me to wait two weeks," Tommy said eventually.
"Yes."
"And in two weeks, if you're wrong."
"Then I'm wrong in front of you and you do whatever you were going to do tonight."
He nodded slowly, like I'd said something reasonable, and then he reached across and pulled the four stacks of notes toward himself.
I felt that in my stomach.
"That's—"
"That's a bond." He squared the piles against the desk. "Money with no name goes to the family until it gets one. If you're what you say you are, you'll have it back with interest. If you're not, well." He put it away inside his coat, and it took him a while, because eighty pound is a lot of paper. "You won't be needing it."
"Tommy, I've got a wage to pay Friday. Two of them."
"Then you'll find out how the rest of Small Heath lives."
He picked up his hat.
"The rooms stay. The girl stays, that's between you and whatever you think you're doing. The bookmaker stays, and if he's half as frightened of you as he looks he'll be the best-kept book in the city." He set the hat on. "And you don't say the word guns again. Not to Arthur. Not to Polly. Not in your sleep."
He stopped at the door.
"You know what's odd," he said, not turning round. "Nine days ago you couldn't look at blood. Then you cut a man in the street in front of forty people, and you took a room, and you hired a whore off Watery Lane to write your letters, and you've got a revolver under your coat you never used to carry."
"People change."
"No they don't." He opened the door. "They get replaced."
Then he was gone down the stairs, and I sat in the dark listening to his footsteps until the street door went, and only then did I let my hands shake.
The system had waited, patient as a clerk.
RELATIONSHIP: THOMAS SHELBY — Trust: Withdrawn. Status: Under Observation.
Cash: £0
Influence: 21 → 14
Territory: Watery Lane — Forfeited (held in bond)
NEW TASKObjective: Survive Thomas Shelby's judgement. 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 applied. The system had spent nine days pretending to be a scoreboard, and the moment my life was genuinely on the table it stopped pretending and told me what it actually was.
It didn't want me to win.
It wanted to see what I'd do.
"Ninety pound," I said to the empty room, and laughed, and it came out wrong. "I had ninety pound this morning."
A board creaked on the stairs.
I had the revolver 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, with a gun on your head, that his brother's going to want to marry someone and be told no."
I said nothing.
"Because I've known John Shelby since I was fifteen," she said. "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 and how the house is and how a man can't do it on his own."
She lit the cigarette. Her hand wasn't steady either. That was almost a comfort.
"So you tell me, Jack." The match went out between her fingers. "Whose name was he going to say?"