Jail Bird

had to be enough for her. Hell, it was.

She was back with her girls, and they really were her girls again. Her beloved daughters, her family. Thoughts of family took Lily’s mind to her mother. The girls didn’t know their grandmother at all, and she felt bad about that. She couldn’t let her own difficult relationship with her mother ruin the girls’ chances of knowing their only surviving grandparent, could she? She decided that she would try again with the cantankerous old witch, introduce her to the girls, see what unfolded. Family was important.

She thought again of Leo – big, ebullient, laughing Leo, who could fill a room with the sheer immensity of his personality. He’d given her the gift of these two lovely girls, and – finally – she found that she could forgive him for all the rest. She knew she hadn’t been blameless; she’d never loved him as a wife should: he must have known it. He wasn’t a fool.

‘He’d be so proud of you both,’ she said, knowing it was true. Leo had loved his girls. He had even, in his slightly skewed way, loved her. Bye Leo, she thought with a faint pang of sadness.

Then Saz said to Lily: ‘Mum, Oli and me have been thinking. Um…about selling the house.’

Lily looked in surprise at Saz. Then at Oli. Then she shrugged. ‘Well, I think it’s probably a good thing. It’s… sort of a sad place now, ain’t that the truth?’

‘Yeah, it is,’ said Oli.

It was over. And – yes – it was time to move on.

‘Saz?’ she asked her elder daughter. ‘Is that what you really want? To sell?’

Saz was nodding. ‘Yeah, and we also thought that, maybe, we could split the proceeds three ways. Matt could help us sort out the details. A share for you, me and Oli. What do you think?’

Lily looked at each of them in turn. They both looked faintly embarrassed, a little worried. ‘I think you’re a pair of bloody diamonds, that’s what I think,’ said Lily with a smile.

Saz relaxed. She sighed, looked again at the headstone. ‘Oli’s right. It’s been sad there.’

‘We’ll have one last blow-out,’ said Lily. ‘A big party. Then we go. Okay?’

Saz and Oli nodded.

‘Okay,’ said Lily, and led her girls away from their father’s grave.

74

That evening she sat alone in the study at The Fort and watched the tape again. There was Leo, larger than life, talking to her, telling her that if she was watching this, then he was dead.

‘Oh Leo,’ said Lily, and she cried a bit for the loss of him then, the big bruiser who was the father of her girls, the one who could always make them all laugh; Leo the wide boy, the crook, the charmer, the philanderer – just like his dear old dad Bubba King had been.

One more time she watched it right to the end.

‘The boys will look after you. I love you, Lils,’ he said, and then there was nothing but white noise, and Leo was gone.

‘You bastard,’ she said softly, and then laughed through her tears. The boys will look after you. He had said that again and again throughout the tape.

She couldn’t even raise an ironic laugh at that any more, it was too sad. Oh, she didn’t doubt her troubles with Si and that lunatic Freddy were at an end. They had their culprit; she was in the clear. But look after her? No. She was on her own.

She thought again about Purbright Securities, a division of Sunstyle. She thought of one of the directors whose name Jack had given her; it was that firm that had paid for Alice’s care and fitted The Fort’s security system. She thought: The boys will look after you. Thought of Bubba King, Leo’s father, and Leo’s ‘boys’.

The house was silent all around her. The wall had been repaired, there was no way in now, no way out except through the gates. The security system was working. If you breached it, the alarm would go off – somewhere. Leo had always said it didn’t go off here, what was the point of it clanging away out here in the arse end of nowhere? It went off…well, he hadn’t specified. But she had always assumed it went straight to the local cop shop.

But wait a minute.

Would Leo really have wired his gaff up to a cop shop?

Answer: no. Surely not.

So when the alarm went off, if it went off, where was the alarm actually raised?

Lily had a suspicion, just a faint suspicion, that she knew the answer to that. She switched off the tape, and went out into the hall. Went to the security panel beside the door. Looked at it. And started to smile.

Leaving the system on, she walked out into the grounds, tripping sensors left, right and centre. She breached all the crisscrossing beams, and somewhere – she knew – an alarm was sounding, loud and clear.

It didn’t take him long to get there – she was timing it on her watch. Soon she heard a powerful car approaching, roaring along as if speeding to an emergency. She stood there, leaning against one of the wide-open gates, and then the headlight beams caught her in a dazzling field of light and the Mercedes screeched to a halt three feet from her. Someone tall and dark got out of the driver’s seat and stalked across the gravel towards her.

‘Twelve and a half minutes,’ said Lily. ‘That’s pretty good, although I believe new guidelines for the emergency services require…’

‘What the fuck are you doing?’ demanded Nick O’Rourke, breathing heavily and looking, now they were both caught in the headlights’ glare, pretty damned angry and alarmed. Which was fitting, really.

‘Testing the system,’ said Lily.

‘Which system?’

‘The one Leo and you put in place, the alarm system that’s connected straight to your house.’

Nick was silent.

‘And I know about Purbright Securities being a division of Sunstyle, who fitted the system – oh, and that you’re on the board, as was Leo when he was alive – oh yeah, and that Purbright paid for Alice Blunt’s care.’

‘Ah.’

‘And I know why Si and Freddy didn’t get to me inside.’

Nick looked at her. Placed both hands on his hips, let out a breath, looked at the ground, then back at her face. ‘Now come on. You can’t know that.’

‘All right, then. I guessed. Bearing in mind everything else that I know for sure, and are you going to tell me I got it wrong? Because I know I haven’t, Nick. You put a ring of steel around me when I was inside. Because I was Leo’s wife, and because you knew me and loved me and you couldn’t believe I’d done him but if I had, then I must have been provoked beyond reason. I guess you know by now that it was Maeve?’

‘I heard.’

Lily nodded. ‘Leo left me an old tape and on it he said the boys would look after me. He kept on saying that, the boys would look after me, but he didn’t mean Si and Freddy, and he didn’t mean any of the boys who worked for him, either.’ She paused. ‘He meant you, didn’t he, Nick?’

Nick was silent again for long moments. He was staring at Lily’s face.

‘You know what?’ he said at last.

‘What?’

‘You’re devious.’

Lily shrugged. ‘It’s been said.’

‘And you had the front to tell me dumb blonde jokes.’

‘You and Leo had a very special relationship, ain’t that right?’ said Lily softly.

Nick sighed. ‘Let’s go in,’ he said, taking her arm. ‘And talk about it.’