Dead if You Don’t

40

Saturday 12 August

20.30–21.30

With tears streaming down her face, her hands shaking, Stacey cut open a packet of digestive biscuits and tipped them onto a plate. Kipp checked through the freezer drawers to see what they had. The two detectives had told them they would remain in the house with them until Mungo had been safely returned, and they would appreciate some food.

Stacey, who knew the contents of the freezer better than her husband, who could never find anything either in there or the fridge, told him to move out of the way and unearthed a stack of pizzas, several fish pies and frozen vegetables, and four loaves of bread, dropping most of them on the floor in her distress. Along with the eggs they had in the kitchen, there was at least enough for a couple of days, although the tall guy looked like he needed to eat twice as much as anyone else.

Kipp carried a tray with two mugs of coffee and the plate of biscuits down to the basement, feeling even more gloomy than before. On top of everything else, he’d lost his large bet at the football, and Sandown Park had been a catastrophe, also. He’d got the first five winners, but the sixth had been soundly beaten, and the seventh had refused to leave the starting gate. He was down over twenty thousand pounds on the day. Twenty thousand he did not have.

He needed to win that, and much more, back urgently. A dark thought had been occurring to him for some time now, and it was becoming more tempting. All gamblers went through streaks. Just as surely as you knew a winning streak would turn into a losing one sooner or later, you also knew that a losing streak, so long as you could stay in the game, would turn back into a winning streak. He had sole control of his clients’ money. Currently, because of uncertainty in the stock markets, he kept several million pounds liquid, waiting for signs of an upturn or good opportunities. That’s what his highly paid team of analysts were there to do. Advise him when and where to place funds.

But only he could give the instructions to the bank to move those funds.

If he put any into his own account he would be breaking the law. But so long as he paid the money back and quickly, no one would ever have reason to notice. He could do it, he argued with himself, if he really had to. But the thought made him very nervous.

Back upstairs, Stacey had a large wine glass in her hand, already half empty. ‘I just can’t believe you let Mungo out of your sight. Talking to a bloody client. Do your clients mean more to you than your family?’

‘Stace, the Amex Stadium is one of the safest places on earth. Police everywhere, a million CCTV cameras. And no, my clients don’t mean more to me than my family. All through our marriage I’ve worked my butt off to give us a good lifestyle. Where do you think this house came from? Where did the Mercedes you always wanted come from?’

‘One of your rare gambling wins,’ she retorted, the barb striking home, painfully. And a bit too truthfully.

So much that she said these days stung him. He stared at the photograph of the two of them, next to the one of Mungo and Kayleigh, on the antique dresser behind her. They were leaning back against the terrace railing of a mountain café in Zermatt, Switzerland, with the Matterhorn rising out of a crystal-blue sky behind them. Both had their fancy ski jackets unzipped and were wearing dark glasses. Stacey, with her wild blonde curls, was grinning at the camera, her hand behind his neck, teasing his hair as she loved to do. No woman he’d ever met had turned him on like she did. And until Kayleigh’s death, he’d never had such a close mate as Stacey.

God, they had been so happy. Back then.

While Kayleigh was alive.

Until that dreadful morning of her birthday. She’d been so pleased with that hoverboard. He remembered the moment of panic on his daughter’s face as she had suddenly shot forward out of the park. Out into the road. The screech of brakes. The scream.

The silence.

Stacey had sought solace in booze ever since. She was high-maintenance. She’d told him her secret one day, soon after they’d married, that she’d been sexually abused by her father. The monster had abused not only her but all three of her sisters — and her brother. And her weak mother had been in denial throughout their childhood, desperately trying to cover everything up in an attempt to hold her train crash of a family together.

It had left Stacey deeply insecure. In need of proving something to herself — a sense of self-worth. At nineteen, she’d been a Mayfair Magazine nude centrefold, in an attempt at shocking her family and getting attention. She went from that to horses, taking up eventing; then to starting an escort business; and then she’d designed a range of handbags.

Kipp first met her soon after he had started to make serious money as an Independent Financial Advisor, when she’d set herself up in yet another business venture, this one finding homes in the Brighton area for the upwardly mobile. He’d registered as a client. She found him a house on the smart Barrowfield Estate — and by the time he’d exchanged contracts, they’d fallen in love and she’d agreed to move in with him.

But after their kids were born he realized, too late, where he had gone wrong. He’d thrown himself into expanding his business, at first failing to recognize Stacey’s postnatal depression after Kayleigh’s birth, and her need for attention. And boozing.

And then Kayleigh had died.

‘Stace,’ he said. ‘He’ll be OK, we’ll get him back.’

‘And if we don’t?’

‘We will.’

‘Oh, sure we will, just like that, eh? Just like your winning horses, right? Just like your killer poker hands, yes? Just like you have all those can’t-fail roulette systems. Mungo will be back. Just like your numbers will turn up, right? Just like they always don’t. You’re such a loser. I can’t believe you let him go.’