Jail Bird

take it’ without hesitation, and promptly renamed it The Fort.

‘How about The White Elephant?’ Lily had joked with a tinge of acid in her voice, because it was huge, it was white, it was the thirteenth house they’d looked at, and wasn’t that meant to be unlucky?

Besides, she was throwing up all day every day – morning sickness, what a laugh – and she was worried that she was going to heave all over the estate agent’s suit if they didn’t get a move on.

After they moved in, Leo saw to the installation of a new security system to turn The Fort into a modern-day fortress. Leo owned, ran and understood the security biz and had installed a security system so watertight that if a mouse so much as farted in the grounds, he’d know about it. It was a double system: if you cut the phone lines, he proudly told her, it would still function. It had everything – sensors both inside the house and out, a secure entry system, and Leo added a high wall around the perimeter of the grounds. It was, truly, a fortress.

Lily learned to love The Fort too. She furnished it lavishly. They had a cleaner in twice a week, the man came and attended to the pools, and the gardener called on Thursdays to keep the grounds in pristine condition. It was only later, way later, when the girls were in primary school and Lily had begun to suspect that Leo was indulging in a little extramarital lechery that she started to think that her ‘white elephant’ crack had been closer to the mark than either of them could have known at the time. Grandly appointed and heavily secured though The Fort was, Lily came to believe that they were not really owning the house, it was owning them. Or her, anyway. She felt trapped here – trapped, and unloved.

Oh, Leo had been fair about it. He’d put the deeds to The Fort in both their names, and she appreciated that. But increasingly she felt like a bird in a gilded cage. Leo was free to fuck around all he wanted – she had only recently become certain of the fact that Leo was playing around with Adrienne, wife of the firm’s accountant Matt Thomson – but where, exactly, did that leave her?

She sighed deeply as she steered her Porsche 911 through the remotely operated electronic gates. She drove up the winding approach and there was The Fort. Lily looked ahead at the well-lit courtyard in front of the huge house and felt ridiculously proud of the place. All her friends were envious that she lived here.

Yeah, but then there’s a downside, she thought.

She and Leo had been married a long time. Leo had started out a small-time crook, twocking motors, creating mayhem on the football terraces and running errands for the local crims all around Essex and the city. He had been her first real lover.

But not her first real love, she admitted to herself.

That prize had gone to Nick O’Rourke. Leo’s closest friend. She had been hotly, obsessively in love with Nick as only a very young girl can be. Then Nick had turned his back on her. She had pleaded with him, What’s wrong? What did I do?

He had been cold as ice. ‘It’s over,’ he said.

That had hurt so much, pierced her to the heart.

But then Leo King had kicked in the door of her quiet little world, collecting her in his souped-up car from the school gates, impressing Lily no end and making all her gawky little school friends nearly shit themselves with envy.

Back then, Leo had seemed so grown-up, so exotic. He was a bad boy and–like Nick–exuded a potent, violent charisma. There was Greek way back in Leo’s family somewhere, and that came out in his dark, bulky good looks. Leo was charming and brutal in equal measures, always with cash to spare and attitude by the bucketful, and Lily’s strictly boring, law-abiding parents–her dad a postman, her mother a cleaner–had clamped down on the budding relationship almost immediately.

But not soon enough.

Decimated by Nick’s rejection of her, Lily had sought solace in the arms of Leo. And Leo had wasted no time in popping Lily’s cherry and giving her a little something to remember him by. After that, Leo–being young and stupid, just as Lily was even younger and even stupider–had proposed. Lily’s parents had softened towards him after that. There had been a white wedding–well, ivory, anyway. Lily had forfeited the right to wear white on the day she let Leo King deflower her in the back of his hot-rod car, as her sour-faced mother never tired of reminding her.

Nine months later, after twenty-four hours of agonizing labour, a little bundle of joy arrived and was christened Sarah. Three years after that, by which time Leo was making a big name for himself in criminal circles and they were living the life of Riley, another daughter turned up. Olivia. Oli.

Lily half smiled as she thought of her two precious girls. Yeah, there were downsides–being married to the- ego-has-landed Leo King was one, who by the way farted like a fibre-fuelled wart hog in bed, emitting smells that could almost lead a person to think that a rat had crawled up his hairy great arse and died there–but hey, here was an upside.

A huge upside.

Her two lovely girls. Sarah–or Saz as she was known to everyone–getting very grown up at just nine years old, and Oli who was just six. Saz was a stately little girl, prettily blonde and dainty, very much daddy’s princess. Oli was the tomboy, the wild one, dark-haired like her dad and always faintly dishevelled. Lily adored them both, and so did Leo. He’d do anything for his girls.

Yeah–anything except give up chasing skirt, she thought.

Lily parked the car, turned off the engine and got out. The sensor came on above the front porch, further illuminating the drive where she stood in cold, bluish light.

Ain’t it funny? she thought. Crooks always expect other people to be crooked too.

There were lights blazing out from the upstairs windows, a few left on downstairs too.

‘Hey Leo!’ she called out when she stepped into the hall.

No answer.

Fallen asleep again with the telly on, thought Lily irritably.

He’d be laid out on the bed in his underpants, mouth open, snoring: not a pretty sight. She sighed and dumped her case on the hall floor. She put her handbag on the consul table under the big Venetian mirror. Her reflection stared back at her. It gave her a bit of a turn, looking at herself caught unawares. She saw not the happy girl she’d once been, but a woman weighed down by troubles. Yes, she was blonde and she looked good. Slender, dressed in designer clothes and wearing foot-fetish shoes, buffed to bronze with fake tan, sporting long acrylic nails and a lot of expensive make-up. But her face said it all. An unhappy woman stood there, her mouth turned down and her eyes, brown with tigerish flecks of gold, lacking any spark of life.

Lily looked behind her reflection at the vast hall, at the chandelier she’d sourced so carefully, the cream marble on the floor, the watered silk Dupioni drapes that had cost a bloody fortune, and she thought: Hey, guess what? It’s true. Money doesn’t buy you happiness.

Lily moved away from the mirror, not liking what she saw. She felt a huge sense of emptiness eating at her guts, a sense of complete futility. Tonight she didn’t even have the comfort of Saz and Oli to relieve it. They were staying over nearby at Si and Maeve’s for the week. If Lily was away, then that was just the way it had to be–Leo King didn’t babysit kids, even if the kids were his own. That was women’s work, not men’s.

‘Leo!’ she called again. She couldn’t hear the telly going in their huge lounge, or up there in the master suite. Maybe he was in the games room. He wouldn’t be in the heated indoor pool: Leo was a morning swimmer.

No, it was late. He would be upstairs, asleep. Nice and peaceful, the bastard. Lily gritted her teeth and thought again about the things she’d found over the last few months. The receipts for jewellery. A gold bracelet from Tiffany, a Patek Philippe ladies’ watch that she had never received. Expensive bouquets of flowers that she’d never seen hide nor hair of. And a bill from a classy restaurant– not the sort of place he’d take his hoodlum mates to.

She’d phoned the number on the bill, saying she’d been there with Leo King on that date, and she thought she’d left her scarf behind. Had it been handed in? They told her no, but it was the manager’s day off, they’d check with him tomorrow–and she’d be coming in as usual with Mr King, wouldn’t she, next week? If the scarf was found, they’d put it aside for her.

‘Thanks,’ said Lily. She’d hung up and checked the calendar. Leo had last been to the restaurant on Wednesday lunchtime.

The following Wednesday, she drove there and sat outside in her car and waited. And there he was, walking