Crystal Coffin (40 page)

Parry left the courtroom for the first time in eight years with a smile on his face. He'd only started counting how many criminals he'd put behind bars since the death of his daughter but none of the convictions in his entire career had been as satisfying as the guilty verdict for Aaron Fletcher.

Parry limped through the dark halls of the courthouse towards sunshine and a wife who waited for him outside in the car. But in the foyer, a slender hand touched his elbow and he turned.

‘Not going to say goodbye?' Nikki asked.

Two white-gold angels dangled from her ears and tickled the corners of her smile and a slender chain disappeared below her neckline.

Nikki smiled wider and hoisted the chain to reveal two more angels that completed the set. The first one Parry had seen. The second was a recent addition, handcrafted to hold the first in cradled arms for eternity.

‘It works, you know,' she said. ‘If you like, I can give you the name of a decent jeweller.'

Parry laughed, realising just how long it had been since he'd done that. He looked around to make sure no-one was watching before he slid aside his tie, undid a button and showed her the source of his own newfound contentment.

The coffin on his dresser, he told her — the one he had hand blown for his little angel — was only glass. But the principle was just the same.

Anita Bell's path to fiction has been an unusual one. Retired aged 26 to manage her investment portfolio, she produced her first manuscript just to keep herself occupied. Although her goal has always been to write fiction, she took the advice of another published author to ‘start with what you know about'. She laughed at the time, thinking, ‘That will be a short book' — and it was.
Your Mortgage and How to Pay it off in Five Years, by someone who did it in three
took only two weeks to write and takes only two hours to read, but after finding a home at Random House, it has been a national bestseller ever since. Its sequel,
Your Money: Starting Out and Starting Over
was written in answer to the many readers who wrote in to ask for more of her radically unusual tips to handling finances and has also gone on to become a national bestseller.

It's remarkable then to note that
Your Money
was written at the same time as
Crystal Coffin
. But it's no revelation to learn that all of her books — both fiction and non-fiction — have the same inspirational theme. That youth is no barrier to success and the power to control it, is already in your pocket.