Chapter 10
Tony Curran is going to kill Ian Ventham; that’s a given now. Surely Ian knows it too? You can only take so many liberties before even the most calm and rational man snaps.
Tony whistles a tune from an advert and heads indoors.
He moved in about eighteen months ago, on the first real profits from Coopers Chase.
It was the type of house he had always dreamed of.
A house built on hard work, on making the right choices, cutting the right corners, and backing his own talent.
A monument to what he had achieved, in brick, glass, and tempered walnut.
Tony lets himself in and sets to work switching off the alarm. Ventham had got some of his gang to fit it last week. Polish, the lot of them, but then who isn’t these days? He gets the four-digit code right on the third attempt, a new record.
Tony Curran has always taken his security very seriously.
For many years his building company had really just been a front for his drug business.
A way to explain away his income, a way to wash away his dirty money.
But it slowly got bigger, took up more of his time, brought in more and more money.
If you’d told young Tony he would end up living in this house, he wouldn’t have been at all surprised.
If you’d told him he’d buy it with money earned legally, he’d have keeled over there and then.
His wife, Debbie, is not back, but that suits him fine for now. It gives him time to concentrate, really think it all through.
Tony rewinds back to the row with Ian Ventham, and his fury rises again.
Ian was cutting him out of the Woodlands?
Just like that? A conversation on the way to his car?
Outdoors, just in case Tony felt like swinging a punch.
He would’ve loved to have smacked him there and then, but that was the old Tony.
So they’d had a little row, nice and quiet.
No one could possibly have noticed, and that’s good for Tony.
When Ventham turns up dead, no one can say they saw Tony Curran and Ian Ventham having a ding-dong. Keeps it clean.
He sits on a barstool, pulls it up to the island in his vast kitchen, and slides open a drawer. He needs to get a plan down on paper.
Tony is not a believer in luck; he’s a believer in hard work.
If you fail to prepare, you prepare to fail.
An old English teacher of his had once told him that, and he’d never forgotten it.
The next year, he’d torched the same teacher’s car, following an argument about a football, but Tony still had to hand it to the guy.
If you fail to prepare, you prepare to fail.
As it turns out, there is no paper in the drawer, so Tony decides to work out the plan in his head instead.
Nothing needs to be done tonight. Let the world continue for a while, let the birds keep singing in the garden, let Ventham think he has won. And then strike. Why did people ever mess with Tony Curran? When had that ever worked out for anyone?
Tony hears the noise a second too late. He turns to see the spanner as it swings toward him.
A big one too, real old-school stuff. There’s no way of avoiding the swing, and in the brief moment of realization he has, Tony Curran gets it.
You can’t win ’em all, Tony. That’s fair enough, he thinks, that’s fair enough.
The blow catches him on the left temple and he collapses to the marble floor. The birds in the garden stop singing for the briefest of moments and then continue their merry tune, high up in the sycamore tree. Or is it the beech?
The killer places a photograph on the worktop, as Tony Curran’s fresh blood begins to form a moat around his walnut kitchen island.