Love You Dead (11 page)

He’d never heard from her or the little bastards again. And when he stopped to think about it, he couldn’t really blame the kids. Just how many days in all their years had he ever
spent at home with them? He’d felt a stranger every time he’d walked in through the front door.

What he really wanted now, he realized, was what he had once had and lost. To be married, have kids, live in a nice house, drive a nice car. But above all to be a proper father. A parent. The
father he’d never had.

But how?

Approaching forty, with 176 previous offences, that was not going to be so easy, he knew. Not many people would give him a job – and most of the limited options were menial and poorly
paid. His best hope was to carry on with the lucrative trade he knew – and just hope to hell he could be smart enough not to get caught and arrested yet again.

He was seeing a new lady, Angi Bunsen. She was thirty, had her own house and a job as a book-keeper with a firm of accountants. She knew all about his past and didn’t mind. She’d
told him last night, in bed, that she loved him. She wanted to have his child. He’d proposed to her as he held her in his arms and she’d said yes, she would marry him. On one condition.
No more burgling. She didn’t want a husband she’d only get to see in a prison visiting room. She didn’t want to have to fib to their children that Daddy was away on business or,
worse, have to take them to see him in his prison clothes and with his prison complexion.

So he’d promised her previously. Told her a white lie that he had a job stacking pallets in a car spares warehouse, often working late and night shifts, and she believed him. He felt
happier tonight than he could ever remember. He wanted to buy her a ring, a great big rock, put it on her finger and take her away to somewhere beautiful in the sun, somewhere that she deserved to
be.

Angi!

He really did love her. Loved her name. Loved her tenderness. Her trusting eyes. If he could only get a bit of money together to give her all the things he wanted to, and that she deserved.
There were a few ways for ex-cons to make big money legally. Telephone sales was one. He’d heard from a fellow cellmate a few years ago that some telesales companies didn’t care about
your background, so long as you could sell. But he wasn’t sure he was much of a salesman. Driving a cab was another option which appealed more. An owner cabbie could gross fifty grand a year
in Brighton. A journeyman driver got a lot less.

But to buy a taxi plate in the city was currently £48,000. And the gap at this moment between that and what he had in his bank account was precisely £47,816. He could probably get
another few hundred quid towards it from flogging his shit heap of a car – his fifteen-year-old, clapped-out rust bucket of a Fiat Panda. But for a while longer, he needed it.

Forty-eight thousand quid wasn’t an insurmountable gap. The
Argus
from time to time very obligingly printed a list of the top-twenty most expensive properties in the city.

It was as if they printed it just for him!

He’d wised-up in this past year out of prison. There was no point stealing cheap shit – just like the lesson he’d learned when he’d been caught burgling in Whitehawk. So
he’d been doing his research on the internet, learning to identify expensive jewellery and high-value watches. He reckoned himself now to be a bit of an expert. And he’d identified a
group of houses where he was likely to find these. Watched the movements of the owners over the past weeks.

He felt ready.

It was the last summer holiday that the four of them would spend together. As usual Jodie and her sister, Cassie, sat hunched and jammed-in in the back of their mother’s
ageing Saab convertible, surrounded by luggage for a three-week motoring holiday touring through France, Germany, Switzerland and Italy, being blasted by the wind. They’d have been more
comfortable in their father’s much bigger Jaguar, but he was adamant that a convertible was more fun for their holiday.

It was a cold, damp August day and their father insisted on keeping the roof down as they travelled along the French autoroute; the two girls, hair feeling like it was being torn from the roots,
had a flapping tartan picnic rug over them for warmth. As their father drove, their mother attempted to keep their spirits up and boredom at bay by playing endless games. I-spy was their default
game. Sometimes, instead, they would make up words from the letters on the number plate of the car in front of them. And the other game they played was spotting green Eddie Stobart and red Norbert
Dentressangle lorries.

Cassie was five lorries ahead of Jodie. Cassie was always ahead of her in everything. Cassie had their mother’s blonde hair and beautiful features. Jodie had her father’s dark-brown
wire-brush hair and hooked conk of a nose.

‘I spy with my little eye something beginning with R!’ their father said, glancing in the mirror. They were two hours south of Calais, in the Champagne region.

‘Rheims!’ Cassie shouted out as a sign for the city loomed ahead.

‘No!’ he replied.

‘Road sign?’ said their mother.

‘No!’

A large, crimson limousine with GB plates glided past them. Jodie saw, in the back seat, a snotty-looking girl of about her age, wearing Walkman headphones, looking down at them
disdainfully.

‘Rolls-Royce!’ Jodie said.

‘Yep!’ her father said, as the Rolls pulled away into the distance.

Jodie stared at it, enviously. Why weren’t they in that car, instead of this crappy old Saab?

‘Your turn, Jodie!’ her mother said.

‘I’m bored with this silly game,’ she replied, sullenly, still watching the sleek car that was now barely a speck on the horizon. Where were those people going? To somewhere
special with swimming pools and discos? They wouldn’t be staying in the kind of crummy hotels they stayed in every night, she bet.

She should be travelling down through France in a beautiful Roller like that, too. One day, she vowed, she would. One day people would be staring up at her with envy, as she passed them in the
fast lane.

It wasn’t a dream, she knew. It was her destiny.

The following week they stayed three nights in Como. Not in the famous Villa d’Este on the waterfront of the glorious lake – the kind of place where the girl in the
crimson Rolls-Royce would have stayed – but in a B&B in a narrow, dusty backstreet, where she was kept awake in the small bed she had to share with Cassie by the constant blatter of
mopeds and scooters.

As a treat, their parents took them for a drink at the Villa d’Este the first night. At the table next to them, at the lake’s edge, sat a beautiful family. The tanned father wore a
silky white shirt, pink trousers and black loafers. The mother looked like a contessa, or maybe a movie star. They had a daughter, a few years older than herself, who was wearing a very cool dress,
Manolo Blahnik shoes, and had an elegant Chanel handbag. Jodie wondered if they were famous, because a waiter in a smart red jacket fawned over them repeatedly, topping up their glasses from a
bottle of champagne then replacing it in the shiny silver ice bucket. The three of them were talking, animatedly. The father puffed on a large cigar and the mother was smoking a slender filter-tip
cigarette.

There were beautiful people at the other tables, too. Elegant women with silk scarves and jewellery; handsome, tanned men in white shirts and sleek trousers.

Her parents seemed so drab in comparison. Her father was wearing a yellow shirt with a fish pattern, boring grey chinos, socks and sandals. Her mother was looking a little smarter but the effect
was ruined by a dreary white cardigan. Cassie wore an Oasis T-shirt and jeans. It took her father an age to attract the attention of a waiter, and when one finally came he seemed so aloof, as if he
could tell they did not belong there.

God, Jodie wanted to slide under the table and vanish.
These are not my parents. This is not my family. I don’t know these people. Really, I don’t.

At least the weather was better here. Sunny and hot. On the second day they went on a cruise on a tourist lake-boat. She sat with her parents and Cassie on the upper deck, listening to the
running commentary from the boat’s guide, as they sailed from Como to Bellagio, where they were due to stop for an hour for lunch.

Rising up behind the shoreline of the dark green water of the lake were steep, green hills, dense with olive, oleander and cypress trees. There were small towns and villages with yellow, pink
and white houses, apartment blocks, church towers and factories, printing silk for the world scarf trade, the guide said. Then right on the waterfront, with their private docks and moored launches,
were the grand villas of the rich and famous.

The guide pointed out each spectacular house in turn. The Versace villa, the Heinz holiday home. The Avon Cosmetics family’s summer residence. A vast extravaganza under construction by a
Russian oligarch. Another vast and slightly vulgar edifice being restored by a London hedge-fund gazillionaire.

While her father took endless photographs, and Cassie, bored, played Tetris on her Gameboy, Jodie stared in awe. She’d never, in her life, seen houses like this. Their home felt like a
shack in comparison. She wanted one of these places. Felt a yearning, a pang of desire deep inside her. This was the kind of place she was born to live in. She could picture the chauffeur opening
the rear door of her crimson Rolls-Royce as she stepped out onto the driveway, with a clutch of designer carrier bags from Gucci, Versace, Hermès and YSL.

As the guide talked about an island they were passing on their right, which had a famous restaurant with no menu, Jodie turned to her father.

‘Daddy, how do you become rich?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘How do I get to afford a place like any of those villas we’ve just seen?’

She could see the same envy she had, reflected in her father’s face. It was as if he was looking at all he had never achieved in his life, she thought. ‘How do you get to afford one
of those?’

‘The way you do it, Jodie, is you marry a millionaire.’

‘Yeah, but,’ Cassie said, raising her head from her computer game. ‘Only beautiful women marry rich men.’ She turned to Jodie. ‘Which kind of rules you
out.’

Jodie glared at her sister. Cassie was almost seventeen, two years older than her. It was always Cassie who got the new bicycle, which would then be passed on to her three years later. The new
music system, again handed down to her when Cassie was given a newer more modern one. Even her clothes were mostly hand-me-downs from Cassie.

They were cruising past a huge villa, set back a short distance from the lake with immaculate gardens in front of it. She saw a group of people sitting at a table beneath a huge cream parasol,
having a lunch party. A large, beautiful wooden Riva powerboat was moored at the bottom of stone steps down to the dock.

She stared at it. At the group of people. At the boat. She was feeling deep envy, and even deeper resentment. Why wasn’t this her?

Her father ran his fingers through Cassie’s blonde hair. ‘How are you doing, my angel?’

Cassie shrugged and nodded.

Her mother smiled at Cassie, then at her father, then took a photograph of the two of them together, as if Jodie did not exist.

‘I’m going to live in a house like that one day!’ she announced.

Her mother gave her a sweet smile. Humouring her.

‘Where the fuck did you get this, doll?’ Graham Parsons held up the memory stick. They were seated at a corner table in the Hove Deep Sea Anglers’ club on the
seafront, with a blurry view through a salt-caked window of upturned fishing boats on the pebble beach. In front of him was a pint of beer. In front of Jodie was a half-pint of lime and soda. A
handful of the other tables in the pub-like room were occupied on this wet Tuesday lunchtime. There was a quiet murmur of conversation in the room, and a smell of fried food.

‘Does it matter, Graham?’ she asked.

He sat in his smart suit and tie, a silk handkerchief protruding flamboyantly from his breast pocket. She was dressed in jeans, a roll-neck sweater and a black suede bomber jacket.

‘Yeah, it does. Quite a lot, doll.’

‘Oh?’

He stood up. ‘I need a fag. Be back in a minute.’

‘I’ll come with you. I could do with one, too.’

They stepped outside onto the terrace, with its empty tables and chairs. Head bowed against the icy wind and rain, Graham cupped his hand over his lighter and lit her cigarette, then his.
‘Do you have any fucking idea who you’re messing with?’

She stared out at the grey, roiling sea. ‘No, that’s why I gave it to you.’

He smoked his cigarette, holding it between his forefinger and thumb, as if it were a dart. ‘What do you know about the Russian Mafia?’

‘Not a lot.’

‘Yeah, well, you’ve just bought yourself a front-row seat. Ever hear about blood eagles?’

‘What?’

‘I’ve met a few members of the American Mafia in my time. They’re all right, in as much as you can say that. They get rid of their enemies by killing them quickly and
efficiently – a double-tap – two bullets to the head. But the new generation of Russian and Eastern Bloc Mafia are different. They like to send out signals, yeah?’

‘Signals?’

‘
Screw us and you’re not just going to die. You’re going to go through living hell first.
Understand?’

‘What kind of living hell?’

‘You really want to know?’

‘Yes.’

‘Someone pisses them off, they’ll go into their home. Torture and kill a child in front of the family. Just to teach them a lesson. Or they’ll make the kids watch their parents
being tortured to death, so they’ll know never to mess with them.’

‘I’m not scared, Graham.’

‘Yeah? Well you should be.’

They finished their cigarettes and hurried back inside. Their plaice and chips was waiting for them.

As they sat down, he picked up the bottle of ketchup and shook it over his chips. ‘I heard from my sources, there was a low-life Romanian found in a posh hotel room in New York a few days
ago. He’d been
blood-eagled.
’