Page 33 of Better the Devil

‘And he’s a detective, is he?’ Eleanor asked, once the coast was clear again.

‘I find it hard to believe myself sometimes,’ Logan told her. ‘But he actually knows his stuff.’

‘Hm?’ Eleanor turned to look at him. ‘Oh, no. I wasn’t doubting him. The opposite, really. I’m so used to you lot treating us like shit, it’s nice to see something different.’

Logan sat forward on the couch. This took some doing, as it had almost swallowed him when he’d first sat down. He leaned his elbows on his knees and pressed the fingers of both hands together.

‘I’m sorry to hear that, Eleanor,’ he said. ‘You’ve had interactions with the police before, then?’

Eleanor laughed. It was just one quick, flathathat came from her throat, not her chest.

‘Come on. Don’t say you haven’t looked us up,’ she said. ‘You lot have been after Victor forever, trying to pin all sorts on him. You’ve got him pegged as some big drugs dealer. Him and his brothers.’ She gestured a manicured hand at the opulence around them. ‘You think that’s what paid for all this, don’t you?’

Logan kept his gaze locked on her. ‘It’s a very nice house,’ was all he said.

‘Yeah. It’s my house. Not Victor’s. And definitely not those two chuckleheads you met last night.’

She looked him up and down, twirling a finger in her hair, the other hand still tapping out a rhythm on the back of the couch.

‘You’re wondering how I could afford something like this, aren’t you? Me, just a daft wee lassie with two kids and no qualifications.’

‘I assure you, I wasn’t. But, now you mention it…’

‘Bitcoin. Cryptocurrency,’ Eleanor said. ‘Jason’s doing, mostly. He read about it somewhere when we were in first year. About mining it. On the computer?’

From the way she looked at him, Logan concluded that there had been some sort of question in there.

‘Aye, I’ve heard about it,’ he said, which was technically true. It also quite neatly summed up the entirety of his knowledge on the matter.

‘We started in twenty-ten. His stepdad was really into tech stuff, so he had a few spare laptops at his house. Jason set them up, kept them running. I thought it was a bit of a waste of time, but he was dead into it. It made him happy.’

That slightly wistful look played across her face again. She laughed, and though it was short and sweet, it came from somewhere deeper down this time.

‘He was such a geek. He’d bring over the laptops to show me how things were going. I didn’t really understand it, but I didn’t care. I just liked him being around. My mum and dad really liked him, too. And I think they were happy that we were messing about with computers, and not with each other.’

She let herself wallow in the memory for a few moments. Out in the hallway, the thwacking of the space hopper had been replaced by the whirring of a radio-controlled car racing across the floor.

‘Do you know how easy it was to mine Bitcoin in twenty-ten? Before anyone had really heard about it?’

Logan was forced to concede that he did not.

‘Piece of piss before it started to really slow down. Other people jumping in. GPU mining kicking off. It all ground to a halt, and we sort of forgot about it. It was pretty much worthless anyway. Back then. Not now, though.’

She brushed her hair aside and tilted her head like she wanted to get a good look at him. Like she wanted to be looking right at him for the next part.

‘You know what a Bitcoin’s worth right now?’

Again, Logan drew a blank.

‘About a hundred thousand dollars. Each. Give or take.’

‘That’s a lot of money.’

Eleanor sat forward, matching his position, arms resting on her knees. ‘Itis. And do you know how many Bitcoins Jason and I mined in that first year and a half?’

Logan shook his head. ‘Not a clue.’

‘One-thousand, three-hundred, and forty-seven.’