To Kill For by Phillip Hunter

nothing to me. I turned the thing off and drove out.
    I found a small pub and ordered some food. I got a pen and some paper from the girl behind the counter, found myself a quiet corner table and began scrolling through the numbers, noting down all the details I could get from the memory. After a while, I had two sheets of paper with numbers listed. There was no Paget in the list, no Glazer, no Mike or Michael, no Derek. Instead, the details were all combinations of letters; JG, ATC, and abbreviated words like Tag and Mac. It looked like a simple code, but it was probably just Bowker’s way of being discreet. They were only abbreviations of names. Tag was something like Taggart. Mac could be anything Scottish. There was no KP, though, and no MG.
    I already had one number for Paget stored in the memory of my mobile. I checked the numbers I’d taken from Bowker’s phone against the one I had. None of them matched.
    The food came over. My head was throbbing now and I felt a clammy sickness getting a hold of me. I must have looked ill because when the girl brought my food, she lingered and looked at me.
    Something was wrong. Something inside me was squirming and clenching my guts and wringing them, and an ice-cold hand gripped and squeezed my head. It wasn’t anything I’d known before, but I recognized it for what it was: fear, of a kind. Not a fear of Paget, though, or of Cole or Dunham or any of those cunts – that kind of shit I was used to dealing with. They were just men, and I could face them and take my chances. And it wasn’t like the fear I’d felt as a fighter, covering up because my face was mush and I knew that my brain was being thrown around more than it could cope with. And it wasn’t the fear of a boy ducking to avoid Argentinean machine guns and knowing that we were going to have to advance towards them. I’d known that kind of fear, but knowing what was coming, the fear isn’t so bad. This, though, was something else, a sickening hollowness. I didn’t know what was causing it, but my mind kept creeping back to Brenda and how she’d been in those last weeks I’d known her.
    I picked at the food for a while then pushed it aside.
    I started to call the numbers I had. I went alphabetically. The first one was listed as AL. After a few rings, a man’s voice said, ‘Hello.’
    â€˜I’m trying to reach Kenny Paget or Mike Glazer.’
    â€˜You’ve got the wrong number, mate.’
    â€˜Jim Bowker gave me this number.’
    â€˜Bowker? What the fuck did he do that for?’
    â€˜He told me—’
    â€˜I don’t give a shit what he told you. You’ve got the wrong number.’
    He hung up.
    It went on that way. Most of the numbers belonged to bookies, pubs, that sort of thing. Some were individuals and most of those didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. They’d never heard of Paget or Glazer. Some were more guarded in their answers, some were hostile, some didn’t bother talking to me at all. I made a note of those ones, for what it was worth. I hadn’t planned very well how I would try to get information from anyone, and I had to change my approach as I went along, pretending that Bowker had been taken ill and that I had an urgent message from him for Paget or Glazer. I don’t know if anyone believed that; I wouldn’t have believed it. Most of the numbers were mobiles, and they were untraceable save for fancy tracking gear which I didn’t know how to get hold of. So, I plodded on with my story.
    I’d gone through the numbers from A to F and I was tired of the whole fucking lot. It was lunchtime now, and the pub was starting to fill up. People sat at the tables and ate lunches and laughed and talked loudly. I tried another number. The hum of the place started to seep into my head, the pain piling up around it. I closed my eyes for a moment and when I opened them I saw Brenda. She