The first answer was the obvious one. Money. There were good rewards on offer for information on criminals and Tomboy needed the cash. He wanted to retire from the game with his freedom intact because he believed that with the onset of technology, and its availability to the police for fighting crime, the writing was on the wall for middle-ranking career criminals such as himself. So it was a case of making hay while the sun shone, building up a nice little nest egg (he'd set a target limit of?50,000), and then getting the fuck out.

The second answer was that if he didn't dob them in, someone else would do it anyway. Criminals are usually notorious braggarts. Since they can't tell the whole world what they've done for fear of retribution, they like to boast about their exploits to one another. And since by definition they're a dishonest lot – as Tomboy once said, 'Whoever heard of such a thing as honour among thieves?' – sooner or later someone's going to inform on them if the money's right. All he did, if you believed his rationale, was get in there first.

So that was Tomboy's philosophy. There's no point in not doing the deed because one way or another it's going to get done, and if you're going to get paid to do it, all the better. I thought about that as I drove home through the rain that night. If I hadn't killed those men, someone else would have shot them. Either way they ended up dead. If you're in the line of business where you make enemies of people who'll pay to have you killed, you've got to be prepared to accept the consequences. That was how I justified it to myself, and that was how Tomboy had always justified it to me, and it had never done him any harm. In fact, it appeared to have done him a lot of good. The last I'd heard he was living out in the Philippines. He'd made his fifty grand, probably a lot more knowing him, and had invested it in a beach bar and guesthouse on one of the more far-flung islands. He'd sent me a postcard from there a couple of years back on which he'd extolled the virtues of the laid-back tropical lifestyle. It had ended with him saying that if ever I fancied a job working at his place, I should let him know.