LITMIR.BIZ

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sensor came on above the front porch, further illuminating the drive where she stood in cold, bluish light.

      Ain’t it funny? she thought. Crooks always expect other people to be crooked too.

      There were lights blazing out from the upstairs windows, a few left on downstairs too.

      ‘Hey Leo!’ she called out when she stepped into the hall.

      No answer.

      Fallen asleep again with the telly on, thought Lily irritably.

      He’d be laid out on the bed in his underpants, mouth open, snoring: not a pretty sight. She sighed and dumped her case on the hall floor. She put her handbag on the consul table under the big Venetian mirror. Her reflection stared back at her. It gave her a bit of a turn, looking at herself caught unawares. She saw not the happy girl she’d once been, but a woman weighed down by troubles. Yes, she was blonde and she looked good. Slender, dressed in designer clothes and wearing foot-fetish shoes, buffed to bronze with fake tan, sporting long acrylic nails and a lot of expensive make-up. But her face said it all. An unhappy woman stood there, her mouth turned down and her eyes, brown with tigerish flecks of gold, lacking any spark of life.

      Lily looked behind her reflection at the vast hall, at the chandelier she’d sourced so carefully, the cream marble on the floor, the watered silk Dupioni drapes that had cost a bloody fortune, and she thought: Hey, guess what? It’s true. Money doesn’t buy you happiness.

      Lily moved away from the mirror, not liking what she saw. She felt a huge sense of emptiness eating at her guts, a sense of complete futility. Tonight she didn’t even have the comfort of Saz and Oli to relieve it. They were staying over nearby at Si and Maeve’s for the week. If Lily was away, then that was just the way it had to be–Leo King didn’t babysit kids, even if the kids were his own. That was women’s work, not men’s.

      ‘Leo!’ she called again. She couldn’t hear the telly going in their huge lounge, or up there in the master suite. Maybe he was in the games room. He wouldn’t be in the heated indoor pool: Leo was a morning swimmer.

      No, it was late. He would be upstairs, asleep. Nice and peaceful, the bastard. Lily gritted her teeth and thought again about the things she’d found over the last few months. The receipts for jewellery. A gold bracelet from Tiffany, a Patek Philippe ladies’ watch that she had never received. Expensive bouquets of flowers that she’d never seen hide nor hair of. And a bill from a classy restaurant–not the sort of place he’d take his hoodlum mates to.

      She’d phoned the number on the bill, saying she’d been there with Leo King on that date, and she thought she’d left her scarf behind. Had it been handed in? They told her no, but it was the manager’s day off, they’d check with him tomorrow–and she’d be coming in as usual with Mr King, wouldn’t she, next week? If the scarf was found, they’d put it aside for her.

      ‘Thanks,’ said Lily. She’d hung up and checked the calendar. Leo had last been to the restaurant on Wednesday lunchtime.

      The following Wednesday, she drove there and sat outside in her car and waited. And there he was, walking into the restaurant–with Adrienne Thomson, wife of the company accountant.

      Leo was taking the mickey, making her look a bloody fool. And now she’d had enough. Now the games were going to stop. She was going to lay it out for him, spell it out plain: either he stopped, or she was walking away, and she was taking the girls with her and he was going to pay, pay and pay again for making her look like such a total schmuck.

      Grimly, Lily started up the stairs.

      All right, marriage to Leo had for her always been a compromise. But she had worked at it, made a life, a family, a home. But this was the final straw for her.

      Lily had never been the confrontational type. She had always felt she’d struck lucky, marrying a bloke who could keep her in style. She lived well. Lunches with the girls. Spa breaks. Holidays in Marbella and Barbados. The works.

      She’d grown up poor, with parents who’d been forced to penny-pinch to get by. She knew it had scarred her. This life–her life–was so different. Her mum could never quite believe it when she called–and being Mum she was always quick with the snide remarks, the ‘getting above yourself’ lectures, all that sour inverted-snobbery stuff. What did she want, the miserable bitch? That her daughter should have to scrape along through life, cleaning other people’s lavvies like her?

      ‘Pride comes before a fall,’ Mum would sniff, glaring disdainfully about at her daughter’s opulent lifestyle. ‘Salt of the earth, the working class, don’t you forget that, my girl.’

      Lily ignored her. She knew that she, Lily, had never changed, that she never had and never would put on airs and graces. She was still herself, still true to her roots–she was still quiet, awestruck Lily Granger, who had been painfully dumped by Nick O’Rourke and then been amazed that his pal Leo King fancied her and not any of the other, more exuberant girls in her circle. She was the same Lily Granger who had become Lily King, the biddable, reserved and faithful wife of Leo King.

       Biddable.

      Lily’s lip curled in bitterness as she thought of what a prize idiot Leo had taken her for. Yeah, she might live in luxury, but she’d been made to look a twat. She was sure his mates and his business ‘colleagues’ would know what he was up to, would pat him on the back and think him a big man for cheating on his wife with poor Matt Thomson’s old lady.

      ‘You dog,’ they’d say admiringly.

      And if the boys knew, then her friends knew too.

      Leo was a major Essex ‘face’, and he and his boys were behind many a heist. Leo, his brothers and Nick O’Rourke led a cadre of suited-and-booted villains, all deeply dangerous and mired in running ‘front’ companies. Lily didn’t know much about their business, and she didn’t want to. The money poured in; that had to be enough. So she’d put the blinkers on, kept her head down and ignored the rest.

      There was always a price to pay in this life. She had come to know that over the years, shedding her girlish innocence as she got to know the man she’d married. There was a price to pay–and that price was her dignity. And just lately that price seemed too fucking high, by about a mile.

      She was outside the closed bedroom door now, and her heart was beating hard with the tension of it. Because he would kick off. She knew that. Leo had never once hit her–he never would–but his temper was formidable, his rages seemed to fill up the space all around him, to suck all the oxygen out of a room. She didn’t ever like to upset him, but now she’d been pushed too far.

      Yeah, the worm’s finally doing a U-turn, she thought.

      ‘Leo!’ she called again, wanting to wake him quickly, wanting more than anything to get this over and done with.

      He’d deny it. She knew damned well that he’d deny it. But there were things she knew for sure now; there was proof, and she had right on her side.

      ‘Leo, will you wake up? I want a word,’ she said, nerves making her voice harsh and demanding as she swung the door wide open, crashing it back against the wall in her haste to get in there and get the damned thing said.

      And then she saw the blood–splatters and loops and obscene thick skeins of blood–and the body with its head shot clean away. She stopped dead in the doorway, all the strength draining from her limbs in an instant, her lips mouthing words that would not come.

      Her long nightmare had begun.

       3

      2009

      Lily King was out. She was standing at the gates of Askham Grange nick, wearing jeans and a white t-shirt, a grey hoodie and white trainers, clutching a black bin bag full of her worldly possessions.

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