'You're both a bloody treat. Fantastic.'
There was no sharp step off the treadmill – he knew too much about too many. If he grassed he had the certainty that no gaol was safe for him. And no safety for Melanie and Hannah… He helped his wife and daughter into their coats, shrugged into his jacket and paused in front of the mirror to lift his tie. He collected his keys.
His own vehicle was a scarlet-bodied vintage Jaguar. His 'girls' followed him out to it and closed the door, mock old timbers, behind them.
He drove away, left lights blazing behind him. He went down the tarmacadam drive, past the post-and-rail fencing of the paddock, flicked the sensor that opened the outer iron gates and turned into the lane.
Their chatter was vivid around him – who would be there, what the cabaret turn would be, what they'd eat. The foreboding fled him. In his compart-mentalized life, George Wright could usually slip without effort from the world of supplying heroin and cocaine, sold to him by Ricky Capel, into that of one more successful and legitimate businessman resident in the Kent countryside.
Melanie was saying what she'd heard – it was supposed to be a secret worth taking to the grave – about the identity and the act of the cabaret from London.
Hannah shrieked: 'Watch out, Daddy!'
Hadn't seen the man. He swerved to the right side of the lane, then corrected. Only a glimpse. A man, a dosser, vagrant or tinker, stood blinded by the Jaguar's lights, pressed himself into the hedge and averted his face. He was clutching a plastic bag. They were past him. He swung his head, looked back into the darkness beyond the glow of his tail-lights, saw nothing. 'Bloody hell! Never seen him before.
Where does he think he's going? You did the alarm?'
'Of course I did,' his wife answered. 'Relax, George.
We're going to a party. Forgotten that?'
It was another half-mile down the road to the party's fairy-lights and the thud of music.
They had done an hour at the Fortescues' house of drinks, nibbles and conversations yelled to be heard above the four-man, striped-waistcoat-and-bowler-hat jazz band when his host loomed at George Wright's side. 'You see that?'
'See what?'
'Didn't you hear them?'
'Hear what?'
'God, George, are you deaf or pissed? Two fire engines going up the lane like bats out of hell. What's up past you? Only the Gutheridges' place, but that's two miles, then the Blakes' market garden, then the cottages, but if they were going to any of them I'd have thought, coming from Ashford, they'd have used the Tenterden road
… know what I mean?'
George Wright broke away, ran up the stairs, headed for the side bedroom where the Fortescues' boy, Giles, slept when he was home from school. He blundered through a room filled with books, hi-fi equipment, hockey sticks and tennis racquets and dragged aside the curtains. He pressed his face against the mullion lead and the glass – real, not mock like the windows of his home – and saw the glow in the sky and sparks climbing like they were fireworks, and fancied he could make out through the screen of trees what seemed to be the licking tongues of flames… He sank to his knees and the sweat ran to his stomach bulge and he seemed to hear laughter, like Ricky Capel's, that billowed up the stairs with the music.
'Don't mind my asking, Ricky – where's your necklace?'
'Round my throat. Where else would it be?'
'Not that one, not your mum's. The one I gave you.
Why aren't you wearing it?'
His hand went up to his throat. He felt the thin chain – Sharon's present to him for his twenty-first – and touched the crucifix that hung from it. 'Don't know,' he said. 'Don't rightly know. Somewhere.'
She was paring her fingernails, had her head down as she sat in the easy chair and the TV prattled with a game show, worked hard with the file, did it with the same intensity with which she cleaned the house.
'You said you liked it. Why've you taken it off? Cost ever so much.'
Ricky had said he liked the heavy gold chain from a Bond Street store. He had not taken it off. It had cost a little more than three thousand pounds, and that was with the discount for cash – his money. 'It's somewhere.'
'Of course it's somewhere… '
She must have been satisfied with her fingers. She kicked off her slippers and started on the toenails, scraping at them like it mattered. 'Have you lost it?
Don't tell me you've lost it. Did you?'
He had not known that he wasn't wearing it. She had bought it for him last Christmas and he had worn it every day, every night since then.
'I don't know where it is.'
'You have lost it?'
'Maybe I have, maybe I haven't.'
'You got to know whether you lost it or not. You got to know whether you didn't like it and took it off.'
'I don't.' There was a snarl in his voice but with her head bent over her toenails she would not have seen it. 'Well, have you looked for it? Yes? Where have you looked for it?'
'I didn't know it wasn't on.'
'Oh, that's great. I buy you a necklace, big money.
You say you like it. You promise me you do. You lose it and you don't even know.'
Her voice had a chisel rasp. Seemed like the beat of a dripping tap, had that rhythm and persistence.
'I'll look for it.'
'I hope you will…' Right foot done, she started on the toes of the left. 'I'd say that looking for it is the first thing you should do. That necklace, Ricky, was supposed to be important.'
'I said I'd look for it, all right?'
'Where? Where are you going to look for it?'
'I don't know. If I bloody knew it wouldn't be lost.'
'No call for you to swear at me, Ricky. I just gave it you, I didn't lose it.'
He had been so tired that evening. What he'd wanted was to be quiet at home. She'd cooked him a good spaghetti, with meat sauce, and had not burdened him with talk. He needed, that evening, to think through the implications of the instructions he'd given to the cousins. Both of them, they both come first.
Getting stuff into the gaols and into the City, two priorities to run together. Maybe Benji should run the gaols and maybe Charlie should aim himself at the City and the tossers there. Maybe he should bring in Enver Rahman and get his people to handle the distribution to a prison employee – whoever Benji could bend to carry the stuff inside – and maybe his people could sit in a sandwich bar in the City and trade stuff there. All to be worked out, all to be turned over in his mind… not the loss of a necklace.
'I'll find it.'
She turned to him. Didn't often see it, but there was a stubbornness in her eye. 'You should – what's a better time to start than now?'
'I'm thinking.'
'Thinking about where you lost it? Changed the sheets this morning, it's not there. Did you take it off and pocket it? No, you'd remember. What about the car, Davey's car? Ring him – tell him to look in the car for it.'
'No.' His mind raced.
'Why not?'
'It's too late.' He tried to recall when he had last noticed the necklace.
'Too late? It's not ten o'clock. What else has that idle ape got to do?'
'He's my cousin, and I'm not ringing him.' He thought he knew.
'I'll ring him.'
'You bloody won't.' It had bounced on his chest as he heaved himself up, into her, on the big bed in the Chelsea Harbour apartment, and her nipples had snagged the chain.
'I care about that present, even if you don't. Watch me.'
Joanne was up, going for the hall and the telephone.
