“Think bigger, Lexi,” Jake urges. “Didn’t you see that hotel in New York cost eighty thousand quid?”
“How much?” My voice comes out unexpectedly high and squeaky. Jake laughs. He’s been ceaselessly laughing since our numbers came up. I don’t recognize him. I am beginning to think he is technically hysterical. “I thought that was a mistake. It can’t cost that much. I thought there was a decimal point in the wrong place because no one in the world would ever pay eighty grand for a weeklong holiday.”
“There was no mistake, Lexi. Two superior rooms, one suite in one of the world’s best hotels for a week, that’s what it costs.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“It would have been ridiculous last week but now, it’s a drop in the ocean,” says Jake, grinning like the Cheshire cat. “It’s a different world.”
“Not our world.”
“Well, it hasn’t been, no, but it can be now. That’s my point, sweetheart. We have an opportunity to live completely differently.”
“But on Saturday night, we agreed we’d donate to charities.”
“Yes. Absolutely. We will. But we can’t give fifteen million away. What if the kids want apartments in London when they grow up? They cost a couple of million now.”
I shrug. “Well, yes, I suppose some flats might, but it depends where you buy and—” Jake kisses me, silencing me. He cups my face in his hands. As he breaks away from the kiss, he holds eye contact. I feel dizzy. Woozy. I didn’t sleep well again last night. I’m light-headed and struggling to think straight.
“You are going to be late for work if you don’t get going. This is a lot to think about. Take a deep breath.”
CHAPTER 7
Lexi
I’ve missed my usual bus, so have to take the next one and therefore I arrive twenty minutes later than normal, which still isn’t officially late as I’m usually indecently early. I like a few minutes to myself in the mornings. Today, most of my coworkers are already at their desks. I throw out small, friendly waves and general greetings. I’ve made the right call. Being in the office, a place where I come week after week and simply try my best, is somehow reassuring. It is crazy to need reassurance after such news—after what is universally accepted to be the best news in the world—but I do. Everyone here is behaving in a dependable, ordinary way. And I like it. Jake and the children’s frenzied excitement and constant chatter about what they are going to buy next is proving to be exhausting.
Rob is stirring some hot water into a pot of oats, the breakfast he always has at his desk. He stirs slowly, anticlockwise. Judy is vaping outside in the street. At all times she insists on keeping the door to the office open as she hates to miss out on any of the chatter. It is essential to her to know who watched what on TV on the weekend, even if it means everyone else catches a chill. Heidi still has her earbuds in. She likes to listen to audio books and hates stopping midchapter. Most of my coworkers simply have their heads down. The office opens at 9:30 a.m., and these fifteen minutes represent the calm before the storm. They are generally used to gather thoughts and breath.
I plunk down in front of my screen, flick open my diary and run through today’s to-do list. This morning is drop-in clinic. I desperately hope Toma will come in today. Over the past few months I have been investigating his claim that the property owner was ultimately responsible for the appalling conditions in the bedsit he shared with his wife and child. Ultimately responsible for their deaths. Together, we have researched his hunch that Elaine Winterdale took the fall for her dodgy boss or bosses. It quickly became apparent that his hunch was likely to be correct. As soon as the trial was over, she moved into a brand-new, high-end apartment. We discovered that she didn’t own it and that the registered owner was the same company as that of the property the Albu family had lived in. It looks a lot like a sweetener to me. More digging around led to the discovery that the same property company is responsible for a number of slum residencies, just as Toma claimed, including the one Toma lived in for a while when he was working for nothing other than food and a place to stay. So not only a slum landlord then, although that would be bad enough, but a modern-day slaver. This landlord had not learned a lesson. Far from it.
Through not entirely legal means, we’ve managed to find our way into three of these slum properties. I’m not proud of this. I do try to follow rules, and of course I respect laws, but sometimes the end justifies the means. It’s not as though we were breaking and entering. I just flashed my business cards and said I had been asked to inspect the properties. I should have been prepared. After all, Toma had told me he’d had no heating in his property for two-and-a-half years—other than one small electric fire that they only dared use spasmodically because of the expense—but nothing prepared me.
These places horrified me.
One of the properties had no carpets, just bare floorboards. None of them had curtains to offer privacy or even hide the cracked or missing windowpanes. In two of the properties there were no doors on any of the kitchen cupboards. I suspected that most likely someone, in desperation, had broken them off and burned them for fuel. There was
