LITMIR.BIZ

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and dull little worm, turning around at last. Going home.

      ‘Miserable mare,’ Becks had said with a cheery grin through a wad of chewing gum. Becks always chewed gum. Tall and lanky and sporting her usual blonde bouffant up-do, Becks had been swathed in a thick white towelling robe when she’d knocked on Lily’s room door and found her dressed and packing her things. She swept Lily into a hug. ‘You’ve had a cob on all week,’ she said, pushing Lily back a pace and staring into her eyes. ‘Anything you want to talk about?’

      Lily shook her head.

      She couldn’t talk about it. She was sure that her husband was shagging around and it was painful even to think about, much less discuss. This break had been a mistake. She wanted to go home and have it out with Leo. They had things to discuss. Important things. She’d tried before, but he’d just said she was crazy, she was imagining things.

      She knew she wasn’t imagining things.

      Sure, the marriage hadn’t been perfect. They both knew it. But they’d both tried to make a go of it, after the first flush of lust had worn off. Well, she’d tried. Obviously Leo had been trying out other things, playing other games. Like hide the sausage.

      ‘Well take care,’ said Becks, and hugged her again. ‘I’ll have to make do with Hairy Mary for company, won’t I? She’s always in that pool. She’s still in the bloody pool; she’ll look like a prune by the time she climbs out. Pity Adrienne couldn’t have come along. Or Maeve.’

      Lily forced a laugh. Hairy Mary was in fact their good friend Mary, who was married to one of the East End’s biggest drug dealers. She was a stunning little dark-haired hottie who went in for ultimate waxing; the only hair she had on her body was on her head. Maeve was Lily’s sister-in-law, married to the middle King brother, Si.

      Leo, Si and Freddy – they were a set; inseparable: brothers in arms.

      As for Adrienne…well, Lily thought that Adrienne was probably busy. And she knew what she was busy doing, too.

      ‘I think Mary does it to be streamlined,’ grinned Becks. ‘Less water resistance.’

      So, Lily went home.

      Home was a 1930s art deco mansion in deepest Essex, with both an indoor and an outside pool. Leo had fallen in love with the place when they had seen it up for sale. He liked the fact that Si’s place – equally palatial – was just up the road. Lily had been pregnant at the time with Oli, and Saz had been a bumptious two-year-old, whining with boredom as they house-hunted. This was the thirteenth house they’d viewed, and Leo had said ‘we’ll take it’ without hesitation, and promptly renamed it The Fort.

      ‘How about The White Elephant?’ Lily had joked with a tinge of acid in her voice, because it was huge, it was white, it was the thirteenth house they’d looked at, and wasn’t that meant to be unlucky?

      Besides, she was throwing up all day every day – morning sickness, what a laugh – and she was worried that she was going to heave all over the estate agent’s suit if they didn’t get a move on.

      After they moved in, Leo saw to the installation of a new security system to turn The Fort into a modern-day fortress. Leo owned, ran and understood the security biz and had installed a security system so watertight that if a mouse so much as farted in the grounds, he’d know about it. It was a double system: if you cut the phone lines, he proudly told her, it would still function. It had everything – sensors both inside the house and out, a secure entry system, and Leo added a high wall around the perimeter of the grounds. It was, truly, a fortress.

      Lily learned to love The Fort too. She furnished it lavishly. They had a cleaner in twice a week, the man came and attended to the pools, and the gardener called on Thursdays to keep the grounds in pristine condition. It was only later, way later, when the girls were in primary school and Lily had begun to suspect that Leo was indulging in a little extramarital lechery that she started to think that her ‘white elephant’ crack had been closer to the mark than either of them could have known at the time. Grandly appointed and heavily secured though The Fort was, Lily came to believe that they were not really owning the house, it was owning them. Or her, anyway. She felt trapped here – trapped, and unloved.

      Oh, Leo had been fair about it. He’d put the deeds to The Fort in both their names, and she appreciated that. But increasingly she felt like a bird in a gilded cage. Leo was free to fuck around all he wanted – she had only recently become certain of the fact that Leo was playing around with Adrienne, wife of the firm’s accountant Matt Thomson – but where, exactly, did that leave her?

      She sighed deeply as she steered her Porsche 911 through the remotely operated electronic gates. She drove up the winding approach and there was The Fort. Lily looked ahead at the well-lit courtyard in front of the huge house and felt ridiculously proud of the place. All her friends were envious that she lived here.

      Yeah, but then there’s a downside, she thought.

      She and Leo had been married a long time. Leo had started out a small-time crook, twocking motors, creating mayhem on the football terraces and running errands for the local crims all around Essex and the city. He had been her first real lover.

      But not her first real love, she admitted to herself.

      That prize had gone to Nick O’Rourke. Leo’s closest friend. She had been hotly, obsessively in love with Nick as only a very young girl can be. Then Nick had turned his back on her. She had pleaded with him, What’s wrong? What did I do?

      He had been cold as ice. ‘It’s over,’ he said.

      That had hurt so much, pierced her to the heart.

      But then Leo King had kicked in the door of her quiet little world, collecting her in his souped-up car from the school gates, impressing Lily no end and making all her gawky little school friends nearly shit themselves with envy.

      Back then, Leo had seemed so grown-up, so exotic. He was a bad boy and–like Nick–exuded a potent, violent charisma. There was Greek way back in Leo’s family somewhere, and that came out in his dark, bulky good looks. Leo was charming and brutal in equal measures, always with cash to spare and attitude by the bucketful, and Lily’s strictly boring, law-abiding parents–her dad a postman, her mother a cleaner–had clamped down on the budding relationship almost immediately.

      But not soon enough.

      Decimated by Nick’s rejection of her, Lily had sought solace in the arms of Leo. And Leo had wasted no time in popping Lily’s cherry and giving her a little something to remember him by. After that, Leo–being young and stupid, just as Lily was even younger and even stupider–had proposed. Lily’s parents had softened towards him after that. There had been a white wedding–well, ivory, anyway. Lily had forfeited the right to wear white on the day she let Leo King deflower her in the back of his hot-rod car, as her sour-faced mother never tired of reminding her.

      Nine months later, after twenty-four hours of agonizing labour, a little bundle of joy arrived and was christened Sarah. Three years after that, by which time Leo was making a big name for himself in criminal circles and they were living the life of Riley, another daughter turned up. Olivia. Oli.

      Lily half smiled as she thought of her two precious girls. Yeah, there were downsides–being married to the-ego-has-landed Leo King was one, who by the way farted like a fibre-fuelled wart hog in bed, emitting smells that could almost lead a person to think that a rat had crawled up his hairy great arse and died there–but hey, here was an upside.

      A huge upside.

      Her two lovely girls. Sarah–or Saz as she was known to everyone–getting very grown up at just nine years old, and Oli who was just six. Saz was a stately little girl, prettily blonde and dainty, very much daddy’s princess. Oli was the tomboy, the wild one, dark-haired like her dad and always faintly dishevelled. Lily adored them both, and so did Leo. He’d do anything for his girls.

      Yeah–anything

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