The Recruit

6. Home

Ash realised he was stupid. He should have left a bit of cash in the safe. That way Giovanni would never know he'd been in there. Leaving the photo was a nice gag, but Giovanni would realise Ash had taken the money when he saw it. He might try and steal the money back. And if Giovanni was angry he'd make it ten times harder for Ash to visit Leaf.

Rudy found Ash a room and showed him the ropes. Like where the washing machines were and where he could get toiletries and stuff, then left him to unpack. The room had a bed, a chest of drawers, a wardrobe with a locker on each side and two writing desks under the window. The kid who lived on the other side had decorated his wall with game posters. There was a beanbag on the floor and boarder clothes hung neatly in the wardrobe: baggy cargos, a hooded top and T-shirts with Ralph Lauren and Hugo Boss logos on them. Whoever Ash's roommate was, he looked pretty cool. The other good thing was that the kid had a TV on his desk, meaning they could use the Playstation and or Xbox.

Ash looked at his smartwatch. He reckoned there was about an hour until his room-mate got out of school. Ash got the cash out of the bin-liner. It was all £50 and £20 notes, separated into bundles by elastic bands. He counted a couple and realised each bundle was £1,000. There were forty-three bundles.

Ash thought of a way to hide the money in case Giovanni came after it. He had a portable DVD player from the flat. It was wrecked; half the buttons had broken and the screen was slightly smashed. Ash had only taken it because Giovanni had stolen the good one with a Bluetooth radio in it.

Ash rummaged through his bags of stuff until he found his Swiss army pocket multitool knife. He picked out the screwdriver and undid the back of his DVD player. The inside was all circuit boards and wires. Ash worked fast, taking the guts out of the player, unscrewing and snapping plastic, leaving only the bits you could see from the front, like the speaker and the slot where the tape went in. He stuffed all but £4,000 of the cash inside the hole, packing the money tight so it didn't rattle. He screwed the back on again and slid the DVD player into his locker.

Ash took the four odd £1,000 bundles and hid them in obvious places: the back pocket of a pair of jeans, inside a shoe, inside a book. He peeled a hundred off the last bundle to use as walking-around money and taped the rest to the inside of his locker.

The idea was, if Giovanni tried to break into Ash's room, he'd find £4,000 easily and never realise there was £39,000 more stuffed inside a DVD player so crummy looking even Giovanni wouldn't steal it.

Ash filled the locker with the rest of his valuables. He banged it shut and put the padlock key on a cord around his neck. He couldn't be bothered unpacking anything else. He threw as many bags as he could in the wardrobe and kicked what was left under his bed.

Then he slumped on his bare mattress, staring at the wall. There were hundreds of pin holes and blobs of blu-tack where previous kids had decorated the walls. He wondered what Leaf was doing.

Just after four, Ash's room-mate, Brock, came running in. He was a kinda skinny muscular kid, but a lot taller than Ash, wearing normal casual clothes. Brock slammed the door and tried to get his key in the hole to lock it. Ash wondered what the hell was going on.

Brock couldn't lock the door before another kid rammed it. This kid looked older. Same height as Brock but half the width. Brock jumped on to his bed. The big kid bundled Brock over and pulled him to the floor. He sat astride him and punched him a couple of times in the arm.

"You think you're so smart," the thug said.

"Take it," Brock said. Brock took a couple of slaps in the face. The thug slid a set of keys out of Brock's long sleeved top and scratched him on top of the head with it.