with a wig and old-lady clothes. Then you take your clothes, your passport and your mobile phone and you drop them over the side.’
Lorraine stared at him in utter astonishment.
‘In Dieppe you take a train to Paris. There you rip up your Anita Marsh passport and buy a plane ticket to Melbourne as Margaret Nelson. I’ll be waiting for you at the other end.’
‘You’ve thought of bloody everything, haven’t you?’
He could not immediately tell whether she was pleased or angry.
‘Yeah, well, I haven’t exactly had much else to do.’
‘Promise me one thing – all this money – you’re not planning to sink it into a scheme, are you?’
‘No way. I’ve learned my lesson, babe. I been giving it a lot of thought. The problem is, once you get into debt, you’re on a spiral. Now we’re free, we can start again. Start in Australia and then maybe go off somewhere else, live life in the sun. Sounds good to me! We can eventually put the money in the bank, live off the interest.’
She looked at Ronnie dubiously.
He pointed at the envelope. ‘There’s something else in there for you.’
She pulled out a slim cellophane bag. Inside was an assortment of loose stamps.
‘To help tide you over,’ he said. ‘Expenses. And give yourself a couple of treats to cheer yourself up. There’s a 1911 Somerset House One Pound – that’s worth about fifteen hundred quid. There’s an 1881 One Penny that you should get about five hundred quid for. There’s about five grand’s value in total. Take them to this guy I know – he’ll give you the best price. And when the big money comes through, he’s the guy you get to convert it into stamps. He’s straight. We’ll get the best value from him.’
‘And he knows nothing?’
‘God, no.’ He tore off a blank strip from the back of
‘We’ve had a few letters of sympathy and cards over the past weeks.’
‘I’d like to see those, read what everyone says about me.’
‘Nice things.’ She gave a sad laugh. ‘Sue was saying I needed to start thinking about a funeral. Wouldn’t have needed a very big coffin, would we? For a wallet and a mobile phone.’
They both giggled. Then she dabbed away more tears that had started rolling down her face.
‘At least we can laugh about it,’ she said. ‘That’s good, isn’t it?’
He walked around the table to her and hugged her hard. ‘Yep. That’s good.’
‘Why Australia?’
‘It’s far enough away. We can be anonymous there. Also, I’ve got an old mate who went out there years ago. I can trust him – he’ll convert the stamps back into cash, no questions asked.’
‘Who’s that?’
‘Chad Skeggs.’
She looked at him with a startled expression, as if she had just been shot. ‘
‘Yeah. You went out with him before me, didn’t you? He used to have all his birds call him
‘It’s the same name,’ she said. ‘They’re both versions of Richard.’
‘Yeah, whatever.’
‘No, it’s not actually
‘Yeah – rape used to be his idea of foreplay.’
‘I’m serious. Surely I told you the story. Back in the early 1990s, he had a Porsche. Took me out one night-’
‘I remember that Porsche. A 911 Targa. Black. I worked for Brighton Connoisseur Cars – we rebuilt it after it had been written off – wrapped around a tree. We spliced the rear end together with the front end of another one. Flogged it to him cheap. It was a fucking death trap!’
‘You sold that to your friend?’
‘He knew it was dodgy and not to drive it too fast. He just used it for posing – and pulling dolly birds like you.’
‘Yes, well, after a few drinks at the bar I thought he was taking me to eat something. Instead he drove me up on the Downs, told me he allowed the girls he screwed to call him Ricky, then he unzipped himself and told me to suck him off. I couldn’t believe it.’
‘Crude bastard.’
‘Then when I told him to take me home, he tried to drag me out of the car, said I was an ungrateful bitch and he was going to show me what a proper shag was. I scratched the side of his face, then I hit the horn and suddenly there were headlights coming towards us. He panicked and drove me home.’
‘And?’
‘He didn’t say a word. I got out of the car and that was it. I used to see him around town from time to time, always with a different woman. Then someone told me he’d gone to Australia. Not far enough in my view.’
Ronnie sat in awkward silence. Lorraine crushed out her cigarette, which was burnt down to the filter, and lit another one. Finally Ronnie spoke. ‘He’s all right, Chad is. He was probably just pissed that night. Got a big ego, always had. You’ll find he’s mellowed now, with age.’
Lorraine was silent for a long while.
‘It’ll be all right, babe,’ Ronnie said. ‘It’ll work out. How many people get a chance of a totally new start in life?’
‘Some start,’ she said bitterly. ‘Where the person we are going to be totally dependent on once tried to rape me.’
‘You have a better plan?’ Ronnie snapped suddenly. ‘You have a better plan, tell me?’
Lorraine looked at him. He seemed different from before he’d gone to New York. And not just physically. It wasn’t just the beard and the shaven head, something else seemed to have changed. He seemed more assertive, harder.
Or maybe, because of the long absence, she was seeing him as he actually was for the first time.
No, she told him reluctantly, she didn’t have a better plan.
103
Abby, waiting on the leather sofa in Hugo Hegarty’s study, blew on her tea and sipped it. Then she took a biscuit. She hadn’t eaten any breakfast and felt in need of a sugar hit. Hegarty seemed to have been gone a long time before he finally returned.
‘Sorry about that,’ he said politely, and sat back down behind his desk. Then he looked at the stamps again for some moments. ‘These are all excellent quality,’ he said. ‘Mint condition. This is a very substantial collection.’
Abby smiled. ‘Thank you.’
‘And you’re looking to sell it all?’
‘Yes.’
‘What price do you have in mind?’
‘The catalogue value is just over four million pounds,’ she replied.
‘Yes, that would be about right. But I’m afraid no one’s going to pay you catalogue prices. Anyone who buys these will want a margin. And the better the provenance, the lower the margin, of course.’
‘Are you willing to buy them?’ she asked. ‘At a discounted price?’
‘Can you explain to me in more detail how they came to be in your hands? You said, last night, you were clearing out your aunt’s house?’
‘Yes.’
‘In Sydney, Australia?’
She nodded.
‘What was your aunt’s name?’
‘Anne Jennings.’
‘And do you have anything that can show me the chain of title?’
‘What do you need?’
‘A copy of her will. Perhaps you could get her lawyer to fax it to me? I don’t know what time of day it is there now.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Middle of the night, I think. He could do that tomorrow.’
‘And how much would you pay me for the collection?’
‘With kosher chain of title? I’d be prepared to pay around two and a half. Million.’
‘And without? Cash on the nail, now?’
He shook his head with a wry smile. ‘Not the way I operate, I’m afraid.’
‘I was told you were the man I should come and see.’
‘No, not me, not any more. Look, young lady, I’ll give you some advice. Break this collection down. This is too big. People are going to ask you questions. Break it right down. There are a few dealers here in the UK. Take one plate to one of them, another plate to another one. Maybe go to a few dealers abroad. Haggle with them. You don’t have to take their prices if you don’t like them. Sell them quietly, over a couple of years, and that way you won’t pop up on any radar.’
He gathered the stamps up carefully, almost reverentially, and slipped them all back in their protective sheets.
Gutted, Abby said weakly, ‘Can you recommend any dealers here in the UK to me?’
‘Yes, well, let me think.’ He reeled off several names as he began putting the stamps back into the Jiffy bag. Abby wrote them down. Then he added, as if it was an afterthought, ‘Of course, there
