Three days later (and the deadline having passed), the total stood at seven payments.
All through different wallets.
All clean.
No replies. No threats. Just digital silence and the clink of coins in his pocket.
£35,000 in total.
He’d already mixed the first three. The rest could wait.
He’d split them up, layer the transactions, and eventually clean them through a cash-out in Liverpool.
He knew what he was doing.
He just didn’t feel good doing it anymore.
The adrenaline had worn off by now. Replaced by a strange stillness.
He slept in short, shallow bursts. He hadn’t eaten properly in three days. He found himself refreshing pages that didn’t matter, checking the wallets too often, opening X out of muscle memory.
He wasn’t looking for praise or justice or rage.
He just wanted to know if anyone had noticed.
In the early hours of a Tuesday morning, unable to sleep, he found himself on the Hemel Gazette website.
Mostly local rubbish—planning permissions, sports scores, bake sale photos.
Then one headline stuck:
"Tragedy at Car Park: Local Teenager Dead in Apparent Suicide"
Craig’s stomach knotted.
He clicked it.
It was short. No details about why.
Just a name:
Martin Collins, 18, of Hemel Hempstead.
Found dead after jumping from the top of the multi-storey near Queensway.
Next of kin notified.
Police not treating the death as suspicious.
Craig stared at the name.
Something in it scratched at him. A cold recognition he didn’t want to believe.
He pulled up the mailshot list again. Sorted by first name. Scrolled.
There it was.
Line 063. Martin Collins. Age 18.
Anomaly detected: two nights spent at the Holiday Inn Express with a paid escort, age estimated 35–40. MESSEJ threads pulled via smartphone ID. Sensual tone. Transactional implications.
Address: rental flat in the Leverstock Green area.
Target email: [email protected].
No partner.
No marriage.
Just 18. And lonely. And probably desperate.
Craig felt his throat go dry.
He closed the file, then opened it again, as if somehow it would change.
It didn’t.
He sat there in the dark, shaking.
He hadn’t known. Of course he hadn’t.
The AI didn’t care about context. It just flagged anomalies.
Even worse, the mail merge script paired each target with any adult of the opposite sex registered at the same address—spouse, partner, flatmate, it didn’t matter. The AI flagged it as a probable domestic relationship and Craig never checked the edge cases.
In Martin’s case, the match was his mother.
He’d told it to find infidelity. But that wasn’t what it had found in Martin’s case.
It had found a kid who paid for a night he thought he needed.
And then Craig had threatened him with exposure.
Threatened to send it to his mother.
Craig leaned over the desk, breathing through his teeth.
One hand on the table. One over his mouth.
He stayed like that for hours.
At some point, the sky outside turned from black to blue.