Target

One

Sometimes a person's fate rests on a single, seemingly innocuous decision. For me it was the moment I agreed to go out for a quick beer that Sunday afternoon with my neighbour from down the road, a balding hipster called Ramon who taught salsa at the local community centre and who, against all the evidence, considered himself a magnet for female attention. I'd been cooped up working at home for most of the weekend, and although I didn't tend to like being seen in public with Ramon, who always wore a red or black bandanna, the idea of a relaxing afternoon drink round the corner from where we both lived in the bland but pleasant north London suburb of Colindale seemed like a decent enough idea.

But we all know what it's like. Where alcohol's concerned, things rarely turn out like you expect them to, and our relaxing drink quickly turned into four or five, followed by a cheap all-you-can-eat Chinese meal on the high street, and finally a trip into the West End, which was where I found myself at half past ten that night, wandering round a sweaty, heaving bar just off Long Acre, having lost a salsa-ing Ramon somewhere among the crowds a good twenty minutes before.

By this point, I'd had enough. At one time I'd liked this place. Back in the old days, when I was working in the City, I'd come here most weeks, and had even known most of the bar staff by name. But plenty of water had passed under the bridge since then, and now, at thirty-four, I felt old and out of place, the booze making me maudlin as it offered up memories of times when life was fun and easy and I was the same age as everyone else there. It was definitely time to go, but as I put down the half-full bottle of Becks I'd been nursing for the best part of an hour and headed for the exit, I spotted her coming the other way.

I hadn't seen Jenny in close to a year but the moment she caught my eye she grinned and came over, giving me a hug and landing a sloppy kiss on each cheek. 'Rob Fallon, long time no see,' she shouted above the noise, taking a step back and looking me up and down. 'You look good.'

I doubted if that was the case, not in my current state, but I wasn't going to argue. 'So do you,' I answered in that inane way people tend to do, except in this case I was telling the truth.

Jenny always looked good. She was tall and pretty with long blonde hair that was at least four-fifths natural, and the kind of golden skin the experts like to tell you is unhealthy for Caucasians, but which in her case looked anything but. I think she was twenty-seven or twenty-eight, but she could easily have passed for five years younger. It was her eyes that were her standout feature, though. They were very big and very brown, and when she fixed you with them it took a supreme effort to look away. Not that many men would want to.

If you're concluding from this that I was in love with this girl, then you'd be wrong. There was definitely an attraction there – from my point of view anyway – and we'd always got on extremely well. But there were two things that had always held me back. One: I was still in love with someone else, although after two years I knew my ex-wife Yvonne was never going to take me back. And two: I would never have met Jenny if it hadn't been for the fact that she'd been my best mate Dom's girlfriend. Because of this we'd only ever spent time together in situations where Dom was present, and since they were no longer an item, we'd lost touch. Until now.

It could have been a brief throwaway conversation, the kind people who don't really know each other have all the time, but I'd been feeling pretty lonely lately, and maybe it was the booze too, because the attraction that had probably always been there began to kick in again, and pretty hard too. So, as we shouted in each other's ears over the noise and I caught the soft scent of her perfume, I took the plunge and asked her if she fancied going somewhere else.

To be honest, I wouldn't normally have been so forward, but again, I think it was the booze. I wasn't expecting a yes either. The chances were she was here with friends who were more reliable than Ramon, and she wasn't going to leave them to go off with her ex-boyfriend's mate.

But she said she would.

And in that one moment, my fate was sealed.

We went round the corner to a quieter, more traditional pub where there were plenty of spare tables. I bought the drinks – sparkling water for me, a dry white wine spritzer for her – and we caught up on things.

Jenny worked for a web-based travel agency and she'd just come back from a nine-day trip to Mauritius and the Seychelles checking out hotels, which she told me, rather unconvincingly, was harder work than it sounded. That was the cue for us to talk about travelling and share the usual backpacker stories.

The thing I found about talking to Jenny was that the conversation always flowed naturally. I never felt like I had to put on a front, or be someone I wasn't. Maybe that was because as Dom's girlfriend she'd always been untouchable so there'd never been any need. But tonight we both avoided any mention of Dom, and when we finished our drinks Jenny bought another round, insisting I have something alcoholic so she didn't have the guilt of drinking alone. I plumped for a vodka Red Bull, hoping it would perk me up.

'So,' she said, returning to the table with the drinks, 'did you ever finish that book you were writing?'

A little bit of background here. In the days when Jenny was seeing Dom, I was working on a book. In fact, I'd been working on it for a grand total of three years, ever since I'd cashed in my share options and left the investment bank where I was employed to begin a new life in rural France with Yvonne and our then one-year-old daughter Chloe. It had always been my ambition to be an author, and I'd done enough writing in my spare time to think it was worth trying to make a go of it. It was going to be my retirement plan. Pen a succession of popular and critically acclaimed novels while growing organic fruit and vegetables on our idyllic patch of Burgundy countryside.

Unfortunately, it hadn't worked out quite like that. The book in question – Conspiracy: A Thriller, a high-octane page-turner set in the murky world of high finance (that was my tag line) – turned out to be one hell of a lot harder to write than I'd thought. I just couldn't get the plot right, and when I did, the end result was seven hundred pages long and possibly the most unthrilling thriller I've ever had to read in my life. During all this I'd become almost impossible to live with, and the idyllic Burgundy countryside, all those hundreds of square miles of it, had begun to drive me mad. Worse still, Yvonne loved it.

You can probably guess the rest. We argued like crazy as my dreams, held for so long during those long-drawn-out days in the office, steadily fell apart. I was selfish. I kept threatening to up sticks and head home. One day, Yvonne decided she'd had enough and told me I was welcome to go. We agreed to have a three-month trial separation. I returned to England, staying in Dom's spare room, hoping that the change of scenery would provide the inspiration I needed for Conspiracy. But it didn't. Instead, just as I was about to ask to move back in with Yvonne, having finally realized that living without her and Chloe would only make me unhappy, she announced that she'd met someone else. His name was Nigel, and he was another ex-pat. She and Chloe are still living with him, except now they've moved south, to Montpellier.

And my high-octane page-turner set in the murky world of high finance?

'No,' I told Jenny, a rueful smile on my face. 'I never did finish it.'

'That's a pity,' she said, looking disappointed. 'After all the work you put into it.'

'Sometimes you've just got to know when to quit.' I took a decent gulp of the vodka Red Bull. 'But,' I added, keen to keep her interest, 'I'm not the kind to give up. I'm writing another one now, and guess what?'

Her face brightened. 'What?'

'I've got an agent, a guy who thinks he can sell it. I sent him the first ten chapters and he took me on on the basis of them.'

'Can you tell me what it's about?' she asked, leaning forward in her seat, sounding genuinely interested.

So I told her all about Maxwell.

Maxwell was something of a legend in north London underworld circles, a former loanshark and enforcer now in his fifties who was reputed to be as strong as an ox and possessed of the highly useful loansharking talent of being able to punch open doors. In other words, not the kind of man you wanted to cross. I'd met him a few months back at a party in Hoxton hosted by one of Ramon's salsa students. Maxwell was standing around dealing coke and generally looking menacing, and somehow I'd ended up talking to him.

When I told him I was a writer (which strictly speaking was true, even though I'd never been paid a penny for it), Maxwell had suddenly become very interested. 'I've got plenty of stories to tell,' he growled, following this revelation with the immortal line 'you could turn my life into a book', which, even as a rank amateur in the literary world, I must have heard a hundred times before, usually from people whose lives would have made a bloody awful book. But in Maxwell's case, I'd seen a degree of potential.

By this time, Conspiracy was already pretty much down the pan, so I'd gone to the cottage in Berkshire where Maxwell had retired on his ill-gotten gains to interview him, not entirely sure what to expect. What I got was a friendly charismatic guy who was a hugely gregarious storyteller with a never-ending stream of original anecdotes, who'd clearly lived the kind of life that would make a perfect book. I envisaged it as a kind of British riposte to Goodfellas: a thug's journey through Britain's seedy underbelly from childhood to middle age, encompassing the crimes he'd committed along the way, and adding in a few he hadn't, including a couple of murders, just for good measure.

Maxwell hadn't taken much persuading. Since he loved talking about his exploits it stood to reason that he'd jump at the chance to make some money from them. And so, a couple of months earlier, we'd finally got down to work, and I'd produced the first ten chapters, focusing on his early life, which was the part that got me my agent. Since then I'd been ploughing slowly through the rest of it, trying to ignore the fact that what little money I had left in the world was rapidly running out. I'd even contemplated tapping Maxwell for a loan, but had quickly thought better of it. My front door was flimsy and I didn't think he'd grant me any special favours if I didn't pay him back.

When I'd finished talking, having thrown in a couple of choice Maxwell anecdotes, Jenny shook her head in amazement. 'God,' she said, draining the last of her second spritzer, 'it's incredible to think people like that exist.'

'I can promise you they do.'

'He sounds awful,' she said with a mock shudder, but I could tell from the look in her eyes that a part of her had found hearing about him exciting.

'He's like a lot of criminals,' I answered, trying to sound authoritative. 'They can be great fun right up until the minute you piss them off. Then they're not very nice people at all.'

She looked at me and smiled, and I was sure there was something suggestive in her expression. The pub was shutting and, apart from the barman who was collecting up the glasses, we were the only ones left.

I suddenly realized that I didn't want this evening to end. I hadn't been out on my own with a woman for months, and I was enjoying her company. 'Do you fancy going on somewhere?' I asked, trying to sound as casual as possible. 'I know a couple of wine bars round here where we can get a late drink.'

'I would do, but I've got work in the morning and I could do without the sore head.'

Jenny got to her feet, and I followed suit. I was disappointed, but I didn't show it. It was probably for the best: she was Dom's ex-girlfriend and it didn't feel right being too interested in her.

But as we stepped out of the pub and into the chilly night air, she surprised me by asking if I fancied popping round to hers for a nightcap. 'I'm only a five-minute taxi ride from here.'

It was difficult to tell from her tone and demeanour whether she meant the invitation as an extension to our chat or something more, but either way I forgot my earlier inhibitions, hesitating for all of a second before answering, 'Sure, that'd be great.' After all, it could do no harm. Just a drink. See what happens.

How wrong I was.

Two

Jenny lived in a flashy-looking new-build apartment block in one of the nicer parts of north Islington which, with its bright lights and reliance on tinted glass, looked more like the head office of some trendy management consultants than the kind of place anyone in their right mind would want to live. It also looked extremely pricey, and I remember thinking that I ought to become a web- based travel agent if it paid that much, but knowing at the same time that it didn't.

As the taxi pulled up outside, she reached into her handbag to pay the driver but, chivalrous to the last, I gave him my last ten-pound note, which, with London cab prices being what they are, only just managed to cover it.