“What? What are you?” I demand.
She colors, not a blush exactly, something closer to a flush of irritation. “We’re together.” I raise my eyebrows, but bite my tongue. “I’ve left Fred, and Jake is leaving you. We’re leaving tonight. It’s all arranged. You lost. I won.”
“Where are you going?” I ask.
“I don’t want to discuss that with you.”
“Mexico?”
She looks surprised but nods.
“Wrong, Jennifer—you are not going to Mexico with my husband. Carla is.” Understandably, Jennifer looks confused. “He’s upgraded, apparently. Having money allows you to do that, doesn’t it?”
“I—I don’t believe you,” she stutters.
“I’m sure you don’t, but I’m telling the truth. He played you as he played me. He played us all.” Her mouth falls open. I can see her little pink tongue, a tongue she used to lick and suck my husband with. I feel strangely close to her and loathe her, too. I remind myself she is not the worst. She had an affair with my husband, but Carla is worse. She had an affair with my husband and kidnapped my daughter to secure a ten-million-pound ransom.
And Jake? Jake is the vilest of them all.
How could he have plotted and hurt the way he most surely has? How could he have put his own daughter in such mortal danger? For money? For sex? “The police are on their way to the airport. They’ll arrest the two of them there. I think Patrick was in on it, too. The kidnapping, that is. Not the affair. They double-crossed him, too. He’s already at the police station.”
Jennifer starts to tremble. And now I can throw back that look of pity she was in such a hurry to land on me. She starts to turn away from me, reaching for the door handle. She’s shaking too much to manage to grasp it, turn it and leave. I guess she is in a hurry to get home as quickly as she can, tear up the letter she left her husband. I wonder where she left her note. Possibly pinned on the fridge, maybe on the table in the hallway. The letter that says she’s sorry, she’s leaving him. That she has fallen in love with Jake and wants to start a new life. I am not heartless. I open the door for her, but I wonder when she gets back to her comfortable home in Great Chester, will her husband be waiting for her or will he already have left? Taken Ridley with him. I suppose I’ll find out if Fred requests his 2.976 million. I’ve put that aside in a separate account. It’s his, whenever he earns it.
CHAPTER 53
Lexi
Thursday, October 24
It made the papers, naturally. Not just a discreet little piece in the Buckinghamshire Gazette—a few column inches, the way Reveka’s and Benke’s deaths were reported. No, our story was splashed across tabloids and broadsheets for many consecutive days as the trial played out. Of course it was. It had all the elements to titillate the morbidly curious, the wickedly gossipy: a lottery win, an extravagant lifestyle, illicit sex and shocking violence. Our family’s pain was trumpeted. We were exposed. Everyone got to know that my husband betrayed me not once but twice, both women ostensibly my friends. Friends for fifteen years. It was revealed that, more horrifyingly, he placed his child in extreme danger for financial gain. He was the one who hired the thugs who beat her, bound her, starved her for twenty-four hours. He cried in court, sobbed, swore that he hadn’t given specific instructions for any of that, and that the thugs went too far of their own accord. He had only asked that they hold her. He had thought they were taking her to a hotel, but the thugs had decided that was too risky and made their own plans. Jake had underestimated the vileness, the underlying throbbing brutality, of the people he had mixed himself up with. He begged the judge and jury to believe him. I want to believe him because he would have to be the absolute devil to have planned to put Emily, his own daughter, through such horrors, but even if I believe him, I still blame him and can never forgive him. There’s no getting away from the fact that he was the one who was responsible for the loss of her child. The loss of her childhood. And Logan’s, come to that.
Jake wanted more. Always more. A wife, a lover, another lover. During the trial it transpired he’d never offered Jennifer and Fred a million to change their testimony. He’d offered Jennifer a life with him and “his” half of the win. But it wasn’t enough for him to walk away with close to nine million, which he would have got if he’d divorced me. He staged the kidnap to siphon off ten million. If we’d divorced, we’d have split what was left, and he’d have bagged the majority of the cash.
And he still wanted more. Jennifer wasn’t enough, either.
Carla was in on the kidnapping plan. Patrick continued to protest his innocence. He also continued to insist that he was due a share of the lottery win and that they had never left the syndicate. I went along to watch the trial. It was distressing, humiliating, but how could I keep away? I noticed that when Patrick insisted that they had never left the syndicate—that they were due a share of the money all along—the judge sneered. Judges are supposed to keep their faces entirely neutral, but he couldn’t stop himself sneering. He seemed disgusted by the whole lot of them. I think that is why he threw the book at them. Custodial sentences. Three years for Carla and Patrick. Seven for Jake. The judge was a father of three teenage girls himself. He must have been sickened.
Jennifer, Fred and Ridley have moved away. Somewhere up north. Leeds, I think. They want to start again. They want to try
