Lorraine would be hurting. But in time she would understand that there was no gain without pain.
One day the silly cow would understand – one day soon, when he showered her in fifty-quid notes, bought her everything she ever wanted and more!
They would be rich!
Just had to suffer some pain now.
And be very, very careful.
He looked at his watch to double-check: 6.02. It took a few moments for his tired, jet-lagged brain to work out whether the UK was ahead in time or behind. Ahead, he finally decided. So it would be just after 11 in the morning in Brighton. He tried to think what Lorraine would be doing. She’d have phoned his mobile, phoned the hotel, phoned Donald Hatcook’s office. She might be round at her sister’s house, or, more likely, her sister would be round at theirs.
A police officer was speaking now, straight at the television. He was saying volunteers were needed to come and help out on the pile. They needed people down in the disaster area to help with the digging, to hand out water. He looked exhausted, as if he had been up all night. He looked like a man stretched to breaking point from tiredness and emotion and just sheer workload.
Volunteers. Ronnie thought about that for some moments. Volunteers.
He climbed out of bed and stood in the puny shower, feeling strangely liberated, but nervous. There were a thousand and one ways he could screw this up. But also there were ways he could be smart. Really smart. Volunteers. Yes, that had something! That had currency!
Drying himself, he focused on the news, watching a New York channel, wanting to see what was predicted for the city today. The other shoe that was going to drop that people were talking about? Meaning more attacks. Or was business going to get back to normal today? At least in some parts of Manhattan?
He needed to know, because he had transactions to make. His new life was going to require funding. You had to speculate to accumulate. Stuff he needed was going to be expensive and, wherever he got it, he would have to pay in cash.
The item he wanted was coming up on the news now. The parts of New York that would be closed off and the parts that were open. What was running on the transit system. It seemed there was a lot, that most of it was operating. The anchor woman was saying, solemnly, that yesterday the world had changed.
She was right, he thought, but for many today it would be business as usual. Ronnie was relieved about that. After his binge in the bar yesterday, his evening meal and his advance on the room, his resources were down to about three hundred and two dollars.
The reality of that was hammering home. Three hundred and two dollars to last him until he could make a transaction. He could pawn his laptop, but that was too risky. He knew, to his own cost, when the computer at the car dealership had been seized a few years back, that it was almost impossible to wipe a computer memory clean. His laptop would always be traceable back to him.
They were talking about volunteers wanted for the pile on the screen again now. Volunteers, he thought. The idea was taking root, exciting him.
Now, thanks to the morning news, he had another piece of his plan in place.
60
Sussex House had originally been acquired as the headquarters for Sussex CID. But recently, despite the fact that the building was bursting at the seams, a uniformed district, East Brighton, had been squeezed into the premises as well. The Neighbourhood Specialist Team officers, involved in community-orientated problem-solving, occupied a tight space behind double doors leading directly off the reception area.
One downside of this location for Inspector Stephen Curry was that every morning he needed to be in two places at once. He had to be here for his daily briefing with the duty Neighbourhood Policing Team inspector, which ended just after 9 o’clock, and then he had a mad dash through the Brighton rush hour to be at Brighton Police Station in John Street for the daily 9.30 review meeting chaired by the Superintendent Crime and Operations for Brighton and Hove Division.
A strong-framed man of thirty-nine with hard-set good looks and a youthful air of enthusiasm about him, Curry was in even more of a rush than usual today, looking anxiously at his watch. It was 10.45. He had just returned to his office at Sussex House from John Street, to deal with a couple of urgent matters, and was about to fly back out of the door when Roy Grace phoned him.
He carefully wrote down the name Katherine Jennings and the address in his notebook, then told Grace he would get someone from his Neighbourhood Specialist Team to stop by the place.
As the matter didn’t sound urgent, he decided it could wait till later. Then he jumped up, grabbed his cap off the door, and hurried out.
61
Lorraine was sitting once again at the kitchen table in her white towelling dressing gown, a cigarette in her mouth and a cup of tea in front of her. Her head was pounding and she was bleary-eyed, not fully with it, from an almost sleepless night. Her heart felt like a lead weight in her chest and she had a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach.
She tapped the cigarette on the ashtray, sending a quarter-inch of ash tumbling in to join the four fresh butts already there this morning. The Daily Mirror lay beside her and the news was on television, but for the first time since yesterday afternoon, her mind was on something else.
In front of her lay the post that had arrived that morning, as well as yesterday’s and Monday’s. Plus more opened post she had found in Ronnie’s bureau in the small spare room upstairs he used as his office.
The letter she was looking at now was from a debt-collection agency called EndCol Financial Recovery. It was acknowledging an agreement Ronnie appeared to have entered into to pay off the hire-purchase payments on the large-screen television in the living room. The next one was from another debt-collection agency. It informed Ronnie that the phone line to the house was going to be disconnected if the outstanding balance of over six hundred pounds was not paid within seven days.
Then there was the letter from Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs, demanding that nearly eleven and a half thousand pounds be paid within three weeks or a distraint order would be made.
Lorraine shook her head in disbelief. Half the letters were demands for payment on overdue bills. And one, from his bank manager, told him that his request for a further loan had been rejected.
The worst letter of all was from the building society. She had found it in his bureau and it informed Ronnie that they were foreclosing on the mortgage and commencing court proceedings to repossess the house.
Lorraine crushed out the cigarette, buried her face in her hands and sobbed. All the time thinking, Why didn’t you tell me this, Ronnie darling? Why didn’t you tell me the mess you – we – are in? I could have helped, gone out and got a job. I might not have earned much, but it would have helped. It would have been better than nothing.
She shook another cigarette out and stared numbly at the screen. At the people in New York walking around with their placards, their photographs of lost loved ones. That’s what she needed to do, she knew. She had to get over there and find him. Maybe he’d been injured and was lying in a hospital somewhere…
He was alive, she felt it in her bones. He was a survivor. All these debts, he would deal with them. If Ronnie had been here last night, he’d never have let them take the car. He’d have cut a deal, or found some cash, or torn the fuckers’ throats out.