‘Thanks,’ I say quietly, and step into a large, wood-paneled room. It has soft rugs, a heavy wooden desk at one end of the room, and a nest of expensive leather couches at the other end. There is an air of old world opulence about it all. Here, one can feel safe and cultured. The outside world never intrudes. Here, Jake is King. From here, he controls his empire.
He gestures toward the sofas.
I move over to them. My legs feel like jelly and my skin is tingling with nervous energy. Stop it, I tell myself. You have nothing to fear. I am on the same side as Jake. I don’t want to hurt Dom. I love him. It is perfectly obvious that he is in terrible pain, and I just want to help him.
‘I was just about to have a drink. Would you like to join me?’ he says.
I start to shake my head and then decide that I actually do need something strong to calm me. ‘I’ll have whatever you’re having.’
‘I’m having a whiskey,’ he says, and I nod.
He moves toward a drinks trolley. With his back to me he pours two fingers of whiskey into two glasses and comes toward me. As he crosses the room, he passes the last rays of evening light coming from the window. They hit the side of his face and I am struck by how handsome all the Eden brothers are.
I take the glass and bring it to my lips. The whiskey is strong and hits my empty stomach like liquid fire.
Jake doesn’t say anything, simply watches me with a deliberately bland expression. I know that his first and most natural instinct is to protect his brother. These gypsies stick together. For them, blood will always be thicker than water. He will help me, but only if it means it will also benefit his brother.
Fuck it. I decide to take the bull by the horns.
‘Last night Dom had a nightmare. When I woke him up he thought I was dead. And then he… he … said he couldn’t continue our relationship anymore and walked out of my flat. I haven’t spoken to or seen him since. Can you tell me anything that would help me understand what’s going on, Jake? I … I’m … really … um … in love with your brother.’
An expression of pity crosses his face. He takes a gulp of whiskey and turns his face away from mine. Seconds pass in silence. He appears to be looking into a distant past. At something that saddens him very much.
He turns to me. ‘When Dom was seventeen years old, he fell in love with a girl. She was sixteen. A laughing, wild, rebellious gypsy girl. Her name was Vivien. He thought they were soul mates because they were both so crazy and so alike. They could finish each other’s sentences. He wanted to marry her straightaway, but I forced him to wait until he was eighteen.
‘“You have your whole life ahead of you. What’s the hurry?” I told him. The truth was, I disapproved of her. She was bad for him. Too wild. She took too many risks. She egged him on, dared him to new and dangerous adventures. The kind of things that could land him in prison. Together, they reminded me of Bonnie and Clyde. I hoped, I prayed it would not last.
‘But I was wrong. The love he had for her didn’t die. It just became stronger. They became inseparable. After his eighteenth birthday, very reluctantly, I started to make plans. Everything was ready. In one month they would have been married, but then she did something no one had ever dreamed she would. I don’t know how she did it, but she stowed away on a smugglers’ boat that Dom was on.
‘It was night and the sea was rough. Something happened on that boat. She fell overboard and was swept away.’
TWENTY-ONE
With the swiftness of a gull, Vivien went over. She rushed to her fate, so near to me that I know I could have caught her if only I’d put my hand out.
Her hopeless, terror-stricken, doomed face, I saw for merely a moment, but it would be forever etched in my soul. The wide, laughing mouth had become a dark hole in her white face, and her beautiful, dancing eyes were huge with shock. Legs wheeling. Arms flailing. Desperate …. Oh God! How desperately she had looked for something to hold on to, anything, other than salty, gray air and diagonally flashing rain.
The cast iron rule was:
If you fall overboard that’s your fucking funeral. The boat stops for NOTHING.
One look at Preston and Dallas and I knew: they had absolutely no intention of stopping. Hardly surprising since the pair were certifiable psychopaths. It was the reason Jake wouldn’t have anything to do with them. But me, I had to be the big I AM. I had to work with the most dangerous thugs in Britain to prove what a tough guy I was.
So …
They wouldn’t stop. I couldn’t overpower them—both carried guns. The choice was simple to make. I didn’t think. I didn’t hesitate. Not for one second. In a flash I pulled out a lifejacket from under the canopy and, with it clutched in my hand, I vaulted over the side of the vessel into the roiling sea, as far away from the pull of the boat as possible.
I hit the water, and sank quickly into a pitch-black abyss full of bubbles. Using my arms to counteract the downward pull, I fought and kicked my way back up, and burst onto the surface with a great gasp. I knew when I jumped overboard that the sea was choppy and treacherous, but in the light of a three-quarter moon it looked as if I was in the middle of a mass of boiling black oil.
Fortunately, it was late July and, though the water was cold, it wasn’t paralyzing. At a guess I would say it was just over fifty degrees Fahrenheit. In that temperature a man could survive for a good few hours before hypothermia set in. That is, if he was wearing a lifejacket or had something to hold on to.
I was wearing my GPS tracker, and I knew that either Preston or Dallas would radio Jake to let him know what had happened, and he would come for me. But it could be hours. I could survive, but what about Vivien? She was small, and the shock of falling into the water would have caused her to swallow a lot of salt water. I looked around frantically.
Until you’ve been alone in the middle of an endless stretch of water, you don’t know how truly small and insignificant you are. I was like cork bobbing on an unforgiving, restless landscape that contained absolutely nothing, not one fucking thing. It had swallowed everything.
She was nowhere to be seen.
I screamed for her over the sound of the boat’s engine, but there was no reply. Telling myself that she wasn’t scared of water, she was a good swimmer, and she was young with a robust constitution, I hooked my hand through one of the armholes of the lifejacket and began to swim strongly toward the area where she’d fallen.
But the truth was I was petrified. I’d never been more afraid in my life. My body was pumping with adrenalin. The raw panic surging through me was tempered only by incredulity that this was actually happening to me.
In my head my father was saying, Don’t thrash about, lad. Keep still. Float. And don’t fuckin’ stretch your hand out—it cools the body. Use your legs. Conserve your heat. Conserve your heat. Conserve your heat … But my hands and legs were moving about wildly. There was no thought of conserving heat.
The sound of the boat died away and I stopped swimming. Treading water, I shouted out to her, and listened. Nothing. Where the fuck is she? My heart was beating so hard I felt it bang in my ears. I knew if I didn’t get to her soon, she would die.
I turned round and round, scanning the dark, restless water, hoping, praying. And then, with a surge of excitement, I saw her. She had just colored her hair—the most horrendous orange you ever saw—and I hated it, but it was glowing and floating like seaweed in the moonlight.
Jesus!
She was floating face down! Like a doll being tossed about in the waves.
Fuck me, Vivien! You were planning to go down without a word.