Thirty
With Wayne removed from the equation permanently – or as near as dammit, what with him not being eligible for parole until he was very old or very dead – Jacqui had taken over and run the business with a grim determination.
Such resolve would certainly have surprised her husband, but she’d always known it was in there somewhere.
A largely untapped and yet plentiful supply of it.
These days, the company was making (then laundering) more money (and paying less tax) than it ever had, but getting to this point had certainly not been straightforward.
Wayne’s suppliers had to be convinced that doing business with his wife was a good, and more importantly a profitable, idea.
His sales force needed new blood and new initiatives.
His sources within the police, the border force, and even a few within HMRC had to be re-cultivated.
It had taken time before she could be sure of everyone’s loyalty. This had occasionally meant getting shot of those whose reliability was questionable, but she’d proved herself to be bang up for that side of things, too.
Quicker to give those orders than Wayne had been, according to some.
Another hidden side to her.
The fact was, Jacqui had barely stopped working since the day Wayne had been sent down.
Or to be more accurate, the day of the party she’d thrown to celebrate Wayne being sent down.
Since then she’d been living and breathing the business 24/7: connecting with lower-level employees on the streets one day, doing iffy deals with bent councillors in rooms above arcades the next, and grabbing a few hours’ sleep if and when she got the chance.
It hadn’t left a lot of room for much else.
Having provided the evidence which had done for her old man in court, the idea of being unfaithful to him in a rather more conventional manner had never troubled her for a moment.
The truth was she’d been very much looking forward to doing so, but for one reason or another the opportunity had never presented itself.
Until she’d met Richard.
He’d been driving the taxi that had picked her up from the house one day, and the next time she’d ordered a car from the same firm she’d found herself asking for him. ‘Because he’s smartly dressed,’ she’d said. ‘And he’s polite, and he turns up on time.’
And he’s hot.
She hadn’t said that though, obviously.
Seriously hot, in a silver fox, salt and pepper beard kind of way.
It hadn’t happened straight away, but ever since that first journey, to and from a service station on the A585 – for a sausage sandwich and a heated discussion with a major customer about the price of heroin – it had felt inevitable.
Then, when things had finally got serious, it had been every bit as amazing as she’d guessed it would be.
Where would you like to go this afternoon, Mrs Cutler?
All the way please, Richard.
They met on the sly, checked into out-of-the-way hotels under assumed names and drove into the countryside for picnics.
Jacqui told nobody, not even Google, and began to get a real thrill out of the secrecy and the sneaking around.
She felt like a teenager again, whispering into her phone, stealing out to the cinema or just sitting and listening to music in Richard’s taxi.
He liked the old punk bands, same as she did.
Stupidly, wonderfully quickly, they became close enough to have silly names for one another. To exchange daft presents. To send each other text messages constantly; dozens and dozens a day, sometimes.
Until those messages just … stopped.
Jacqui looked up from the kitchen island as Justin wandered in, took milk from the fridge and pulled down a box of cereal from the cupboard. She smiled as she watched him. -Twenty-seven, but not too old for a bowl of Crunchy Nut -Clusters before bed.
‘Can I ask you something, love?’
He carried his bowl across to the island and shovelled in a mouthful of cereal. ‘Yeah, go on, then …’
They hadn’t talked properly since the conversation in his bedroom, when he’d revealed the part Jacqui and her ilk would play in his university project and she’d let slip a few home truths about his father.
He hadn’t appeared overly bothered. Though he was still keeping his distance from anything connected to the family business, he seemed in a decent enough mood.
‘Have you ever been ghosted?’
He looked up and half-choked on his Crunchy Nut. ‘What?’
‘That’s the right word, isn’t it?’
‘Well, it’s a word.’
‘Like, when you’re having a thing with someone, or maybe you just think you are. One day it’s all hearts and flowers, lovey-dovey or whatever, and then the next day they just … disappear.’
‘Yeah, that’s it.’
‘So? Have you?’
He sighed loudly and scooped up another spoonful of clusters. ‘No, I haven’t, but that’s only because I haven’t been with anyone long enough to get ghosted.’
‘Oh, you will, love.’ She leaned across to pat his arm. ‘It’s about meeting the right person, that’s all. You just need—’
‘Why d’you want to know, anyway?’
Jacqui lowered her head and rubbed at a mark on the marble, feeling the blood rush to her face. ‘Oh, just curious. I saw an article about it.’
Justin looked at her, like he wasn’t at all convinced, then picked up his bowl and walked to the door. ‘I’m going to bed.’
‘OK. Sleep well, love.’
‘Is everything OK, Mum?’
‘Yeah, course.’
‘Nothing else you want to talk about?’
Jacqui’s heart sang just a little – something slow and lovely – to hear the concern in her son’s voice. She told him she was fine and that there was no need to worry. She told him he should go and get some sleep, which he’d need if he was going to get that extensive essay of his finished.
‘It’s an extended essay,’ he said.
‘Yeah, that,’ Jacqui said.
She listened to his footsteps on the stairs, then reached for her phone again.
She scrolled through some of Richard’s messages and stopped at the final one.
It was the night before Ezra Simmons had fallen into the lake; the night before everything had kicked off.
That bloody ex-soldier and his annoying little dog, and Google with his knife and Declan Miller being rude about her leopards.
She read that last text message for the umpteenth time.
She sat and wondered why it was the last one.
The obvious explanation was that he’d simply lost interest in her and moved on.
That he was just like most other blokes and gone on the sniff elsewhere once he’d got what he was after.
It might have been the obvious explanation, but it still didn’t feel right. That wasn’t Richard, wasn’t him at all.
She’d rung his number, of course, dozens of times, but it always went straight to voicemail. She’d sent emails and WhatsApp messages, but got nothing back. She’d called the taxi company, but they wouldn’t tell her any more than the fact that Richard Wiggins was no longer driving for them.
She’d never spent the night at his place, but she didn’t think it much mattered. Even if she’d known where he lived and gone round, she felt sure that he wouldn’t be there. That he did not want her to come looking for him.
There was another explanation, of course; the one that least bore thinking about.
For obvious reasons, she and Wayne did not talk a great deal these days, about business or anything else.
But Jacqui knew that he kept his ear to the ground.
If her running the business better than he ever had was humiliating, it was nothing compared to the stick he’d get inside if word got round that she was playing away from home.
That another man was doing a very different kind of business better than Wayne Cutler ever had.
If Wayne had somehow found that out, he’d want to do something about it.
She didn’t doubt that for a moment, because he definitely had what you could describe as a jealous streak.
Back when they were courting, he’d battered a lad who’d smiled when he was holding a door open for her.
A few years after that, when she was pregnant with her eldest, some bloke had offered to buy her half a Guinness in the back room of the Pump and -Truncheon and Wayne had bitten his ear off.
If he had heard whispers about Richard, she knew that he could have done something about it – that it didn’t matter a toss if he was inside.
He had the reach.
So Jacqui opened a bottle of wine and sat there hoping that she had been ghosted. That Richard had picked up another fare and was charming the knickers off some other gullible woman, miles away.
The alternative was far too painful to think about for very long.