He followed Cleo on down past the railway station, then through the network of narrow streets of the North Laine district, filled with its mix of terraced houses, individual shops, cafés and restaurants, and antiques dealers, until she found a resident’s parking space near her home. Grace pulled up on a single yellow line in sight of her car and got out, casting a wary eye around for any moving shadows, feeling doubly protective of Cleo all of a sudden.
He followed her through the gates of the converted warehouse building where she had her town house, and put an arm around her as she pressed the entrance keypad.
She wore a long black cape over her dress, and he slipped his hand inside it and pressed the palm against her stomach.
‘This is amazing,’ he said.
She stared at him with wide-open, trusting eyes. ‘Are you sure you’re OK with this?’
He slipped his hand out of her cape, then cupped her face in both his hands. ‘With all my heart. I’m not just OK with this, I’m incredibly happy. But – I don’t know how to express it. This is one of the most incredible things ever. And I think you will be a wonderful mother. You will be amazing.’
‘I think you will be a wonderful father,’ she said.
They kissed. Then warily, because it was late and dark, he glanced around again, checking the shadows. ‘Just one thing,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Your driving is something else. I mean, Lewis Hamilton, eat your heart out!’
‘That’s a bit rich coming from a man who drove his car over Beachy Head!’ she said.
‘Yep, well, I had a good reason for that. I was in a pursuit situation. You just did eighty in a forty limit and shot a red light for no reason at all.’
‘So? Book me!’
They stared into each other’s eyes. ‘You can be such a bitch at times,’ he said, grinning.
‘And you can be such an anal plod!’
‘I love you,’ he said.
‘Do you, Grace?’
‘Yes. I adore you and I love you.’
‘How much?’
He grinned, then held her close and whispered into her ear. ‘I want you inside, naked, then I’ll show you!’
‘That’s the best offer I’ve had all night,’ she whispered back.
She tapped out the numbers. The gate lock clicked and she pushed it open.
They walked through, across the cobbled yard and up to her front door. She unlocked it and they went inside, straight into a scene of utter devastation.
A black tornado hurtled through the mess and launched itself into the air, hitting Cleo in her midriff and almost knocking her over.
‘Down!’ she yelled. ‘Humphrey, down!’
Before Grace had a chance to prepare himself, the dog head-butted him in the balls.
He staggered back, winded.
‘HUMPHREY!’ Cleo yelled at the labrador and border collie-cross.
Humphrey ran back into the devastation that had been the living room and returned with a length of knotted pink rope in his mouth.
Grace, getting his breath back and wincing from the stabbing pain in his groin, stared around the normally immaculate, open-plan room. Potted plants were lying on their sides. Cushions had been dragged off the two red sofas and several were ripped open, spilling foam and feathers everywhere across the polished oak floor. Partially chewed candles lay on their sides. Pages of newspaper were strewn all around, and a copy of
Sussex Life
magazine lay with its front cover half torn off.
‘BAD BOY!’ Cleo scolded. ‘BAD, BAD BOY!’
The dog wagged his tail.
‘I AM NOT HAPPY WITH YOU! I AM VERY, VERY ANGRY. DO YOU UNDERSTAND?’
The dog continued to wag his tail. Then he jumped up at Cleo once more.
She gripped his face in her hands, knelt and bellowed at him. ‘BAD BOY!’
Grace laughed. He couldn’t help it.
‘Fuck!’ Cleo said. She shook her head. ‘BAD BOY!’
The dog wriggled himself free and launched himself at Grace again. This time the Detective Superintendent was prepared and grabbed his paws. ‘Not pleased with you!’ he said.
The dog wagged his tail, looking as pleased as hell with himself.
‘Oh fuck!’ Cleo said again. ‘Clear this up later. Whisky?’
‘Good plan,’ Grace said, pushing the dog away. It came straight back at him, trying to lick him to death.
Cleo dragged Humphrey out into the backyard by the scruff of his neck and shut the door on him. Then they went into the kitchen. Out in the yard, Humphrey began howling.
‘They need two hours’ exercise a day,’ Cleo said. ‘But not until they are a year old. Otherwise it’s bad for their hips.’
‘And your furniture.’
‘Very funny.’ She chinked ice cubes into two glass tumblers from the dispenser in the front of her fridge, then poured several fingers of Glenfiddich into one and tonic water into the other. ‘I don’t think I should be drinking anything,’ she said. ‘How virtuous is that?’
Grace felt badly in need of a cigarette and checked his pockets, but he remembered he had deliberately not brought any with him. ‘I’m sure the baby won’t mind a wee dram or two. Might as well get him or her used to the stuff at an early age!’
Cleo handed him a tumbler. ‘Cheers, big ears,’ she said.
Grace raised his glass. ‘Here goes, nose.’
‘Up your bum, chum!’ she completed the toast.
He drained his glass. Then they stared at each other. Outside, Humphrey was still howling.
Him or her
. He hadn’t thought about that. Was it a boy or a girl? He didn’t mind. He would worship that child. Cleo would be a wonderful mother, he knew that, unquestionably. But would he be a good father? Then he followed Cleo’s gaze across at the mess.
‘Want me to clear up?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she said. Then she kissed him very slowly and very sensually on the lips. ‘I’m badly in need of an orgasm. Do you think you might be up for that?’
‘Just one? Could do that with my eyes shut.’
‘Bastard.’
23
Vlad Cosmescu chewed his gum, his eyes following the ivory ball skittering across the trivets of the roulette wheel. It made a steady rattling sound at first, then clack-clack-clacked as the wheel slowed, followed by sudden silence as it dropped into a slot.
24. Black.
Adjusting his aviator glasses on the bridge of his nose, he stared with a satisfied smile at his stack of £5 chips straddling the line between 23 and 24, then watched the croupier scoop away the losing chips from other numbers and combinations, including several of his own. Shooting his cuff, he glanced at his watch and observed that it was ten past twelve. So far it was not going well; he was down £1,800, close to his self-imposed limit for a night’s outlay. But maybe, with this win on his Tier strategy, his second in two consecutive spins, his luck was turning.
Cosmescu stacked half his winnings with the rest of his remaining chips, then joined in with the other players at the table – the reckless Chinese woman who had been playing all the time he had been there, and several others who had recently arrived – in laying out their new bets. By the time the wheel had been spinning for several seconds and the croupier had called out ‘No more bets’, almost every number was covered in chips.
Cosmescu always used the same two systems. For safety he played the Tier, betting on the numbers which made up a one-third arc of the wheel opposite zero. You would not win a lot with this system, but normally you didn’t lose a lot either. It was a strategy that enabled him to stay at the table for hours, while he worked on refining his own system, which he had been developing patiently over some years. Cosmescu was a very patient man. And he always planned everything with extreme care, which was why the phone call he was about to get would upset him so much.
His system was based on a combination of mathematics and probability. On a European roulette table there were thirty-seven numbers. But Cosmescu knew that the odds against all thirty-seven of those numbers coming up on thirty-seven consecutive spins of the wheel were millions to one against. Some numbers would come up twice, or three, or even four times within a few spins, and sometimes even more than that, while others would not come up at all. His strategy, therefore, was only to bet on numbers, and combinations of numbers, that had already come up, as some of those, for sure, would be coming up again.
Looking at the number 24 again, he pressed his big toe down twice on the pressure pad inside his right boot, then he pressed six times inside his left boot. Later, when he got home, he would download the data from the memory chip in his pocket into his computer.
The system was still a long way from perfect and he continued to lose on plenty of occasions, but the losses were getting smaller, in general, and less frequent. He was sure he was close to cracking it. Then, if he did, he would make his fortune. And then… well, he would not need to be anyone’s hired lackey. Besides, hey, if he didn’t, it all helped to pass the time. He had plenty of that on his hands. Too much.
He lived a lonely life in this city. He worked from his apartment, a big glass and steel place, high up, central, and he kept himself to himself, deliberately not mixing with others. He waited for his orders from his overlord, then, when he carried them out, he would wash some of the cash here in the casino, as instructed. It was a good arrangement. His
sef
, or boss, needed someone he could trust, someone who was tough enough to do the jobs but would not try to rip him off. And they both spoke the same language.
Two languages, in fact.
Romanian
and Money.
Vlad Cosmescu had few interests outside money. He never read books or magazines. Occasionally he’d watch an action film on television. He thought the Bourne films were OK, and he liked
The Transporter
series too, because he identified with Jason Statham’s loner character in those. He watched the occasional sex film too, if he was with one of his girls. And he worked out, two hours a day, in a large gym. But everything else bored him, even eating. Food was simply fuel, so he ate when he needed to, and just sufficient, never more. He had no interest in the taste of food and did not understand the British obsession with cookery shows on television.
He liked casinos because of the money. You could see it in casinos, you could breathe it, smell it, hear it, touch it, and you could even taste it in the air. That taste was more delicious than any food he had ever eaten. Money brought you freedom, power. The ability to do something about your life and your family’s life.
It had given Cosmescu the ability to take his handicapped sister, Lenuta, out of a
camin spital
, a state home-hospital tucked away in the village of Plataresti, twenty-five miles north-east of Bucharest, and into a beautiful home in hills above Montreux in Switzerland, overlooking Lake Geneva.
When he had first seen her, ten years ago, after a lot of enquiries and a lot of bribes to find her, she was classed as an
irrecupable
. She was lying in an old, caged cot, eleven years old, eating only milk and crushed grain. With her skeletal figure and pot belly from starvation, and ragged strip of cloth as a nappy, she looked like a victim in a concentration camp.
There were thirty cots in that cramped room, with vertical bars, side by side and jammed next to each other, like animal cages in a laboratory. The stench of vomit and diarrhoea was overpowering. He watched stronger children, all retarded in some way, all still on the same bottled milk with crushed grain, despite the fact that some were in their mid-teens, if not older, swigging their liquid food then sticking their arms through the bars of their cages and taking the bottles from the younger, weaker ones – and being ignored by the solitary carer, who sat in her office, unqualified and unable to cope.
As the ball rattled over the metal slots of the wheel again, Cosmescu’s mobile phone, on silent, vibrated. He slipped it out of his pocket, at the same time clocking the winning number, 19.
Shit.
That was a bad number for him, a total loss on that one. He moved a short distance from the table, entering the number with his toes, and looked at the display. It was a text from the
sef.
Want to speak right now.
Cosmescu slipped out of the casino and crossed the car park, making his way towards the Wetherspoon’s pub, where he knew there was a payphone downstairs. When he reached it, he texted its number on his mobile phone, then waited. Less than a minute later, it rang. It was noisy in the packed pub and he had to hold the phone close to his ear.
‘Yes?’ he said.
‘You’ve screwed up,’ the voice at the other end said. ‘Big time.’
Cosmescu talked for several minutes before returning to his table at the casino. When he did so, his concentration was gone. His losses increased, passing his limit, growing to £2,300 and then £2,500. But instead of stopping, anger drove him. Anger and gambler’s folly.
By twenty past three in the morning, when he finally decided to call it quits, he was just over £5,000 down. His worst loss ever on a single night.
Despite that, he still tipped the coat-check girl and the valet-parking guy their regular, crisp, fresh £10 note each.
24
Roy Grace, dressed in his tracksuit, baseball cap and jogging shoes, let himself out of Cleo’s front door just before half past five. In the glow of the street lights, the pre-dawn darkness was an amber mist and a cold wind blew salty drizzle on to his face.
He was burning with excitement and had barely slept, thinking about Cleo and the baby growing inside her. It was an incredible feeling. If he had been asked to put it into words he could not, at this moment, have done so. He felt a strange sense of empowerment, or responsibility, and, for the first time in his career, a shift in his priorities.
He walked across the yard and let himself out of the gate, glancing up and down the street, checking for anything that might look wrong. Every police officer he had ever met was the same. After a few years of being in the force you automatically clocked everything around you, constantly, whether you were in a street, a shop or a restaurant. Grace jokingly called it a healthy culture of suspicion, and there were plenty of times in his career when that had served him well.