By Friday morning, two more names had quietly disappeared from the world.
One was a solicitor in her early forties.
One was a man who ran a car dealership.
Neither death made national news.
Just local papers, both in Hemel Hempstead.
Both found at home. No signs of foul play.
The Gazette didn't say the words. But Craig knew them anyway.
He didn’t want to check the list. But he had to.
Both names came up, ages matched too.
The payments had kept trickling in.
Two more on Wednesday. One Thursday night.
His total wallet now sat at just under £50,000, with most of it already tumbled through mixers and ready to exit.
He needed it in hand now. He didn’t trust digital ghosts anymore.
So on Saturday morning, he booked a one-way train ticket to Liverpool.
Cash. One of those little third-party kiosks.
No smartphone, no bank card, no Oyster.
Just burner phones and the coat on his back.
He left his house looking like he meant to return.
Lights on timers. Curtains part-drawn. Bin out.
Just another man running errands on a weekend.
But somewhere on the long haul up the West Coast Main Line, something shifted.
Liverpool was a means to an end. A transaction.
What he needed now was time.
Time and space. Distance from Hemel. Distance from Martin Collins and his own rotting nerves.
And in that empty train carriage, with the fields slurring by and his mind too loud to rest, the word dropped in: Largs.
He hadn’t thought about Largs in years. Not since childhood holidays up the Clyde coast.
But it had space. It had sea air.
And most importantly, it was the kind of town no one looked at twice.
He picked up the cash from a pre-arranged handoff in a car park outside Lime Street.
A guy in a windbreaker with a branded Costa Coffee bag.
No eye contact. No words. Just a heavy envelope and a nod.
Craig took it and left.
By nightfall, he was in a tiny rented flat just outside Largs. He paid cash. No ID. The landlord didn’t care.
He walked down to the waterfront and stood staring out over the black, silent Clyde. His nerves still fizzed, but there was room to think now. The weight in his chest hadn’t lifted—but it had loosened, just slightly.
He knew they’d be looking for him.
The civil service. The security branches. Maybe even people higher than that.
They’d run the anomaly reports. They’d look at recent leavers.
They’d know Craig had had privileged access, even if no one could quite pin what.
But up here, he wasn’t Craig.
He was nobody.
Just another man in a coat walking through a forgotten Scottish town.
He slept with a knife under the pillow and the burner phones off.
One thing at a time.