Dead if You Don’t

34

Saturday 12 August

18.30–19.30

Kipp Brown drove home from the Amex almost on autopilot, immersed in thought. He hit the clicker for the gates and drove in, round the wide driveway, his tyres crunching on the gravel. He circled in front of the lawn, which was dominated by a mature monkey-puzzle tree, and pulled up in front of the house. Stacey’s Volvo wasn’t there; a small relief in one way as she would become distraught the moment she knew. That was one thing less to face right at this moment, while he tried to keep his thoughts focused.

But just to check, he pressed another clicker to open the garage double doors. Her convertible Mercedes SL was in there, but not her Volvo. Then he remembered — she was playing in a tennis tournament at her club in Hove, the Grasshoppers. Several deep barks came from inside the house, from their German Shepherd, Otto.

Despite the evening sunshine, Wingate House had a dark and foreboding feel. When they’d come to view it, ten years ago, Kipp had instantly fallen for its imposing, baronial look. The 1920s seven-bedroom Edwardian mansion made a statement. One of the grander houses in the city, with its snooker room, basement cinema, swimming pool and hard tennis court, it would be a showcase for his success, as well as a great place to entertain clients. And a far cry from the tiny house where he had grown up.

Back then, when Stacey had cautiously asked him whether they could really afford to buy this place, he had assured her yes, they could comfortably afford it. His business was growing rapidly, profits piling up; he couldn’t put a foot wrong. He really believed he had the Midas touch, and so did his clients. Word of mouth spread and spread. He became the go-to man in Brighton if you needed a mortgage, wanted the best return on investment funds or a good deal on the numerous other services he offered. Anything you required in the world of finance, you could ‘Trust Kipp’ to get it for you.

Back in his schooldays at Dorothy Stringer, his best friend was Charlie Lang. Charlie’s dad, Neil, was a well-known bookmaker. They lived in a fancy house, with sea views, in Brighton’s ritzy Tongdean Avenue, and his father drove a two-tone beige and brown Rolls. Whenever Kipp went there for tea, Charlie’s dad would regale him with racing stories about big winnings.

When Kipp was nine, his father had died suddenly from a heart attack. Kipp liked to boast he got his taste for gambling, whether on the stock market, the horses or the gaming tables, from his mother. His earliest childhood memories were of her forever sat in front of the television, fag dangling from her lower lip, the racing pages of the Mirror open on her knees, shouting at the horses on the screen. Or of her coming back from bingo after a big win and throwing an armful of notes into his bedroom. He didn’t know then that she was gambling away the life insurance money she had received after his father’s death.

His early childhood was constant feast or famine. Days when there was nothing to eat in the house except mouldy bread and the scrapings from an already scraped-out Marmite jar. And other, rarer days, when his mother had a big win and they’d trundle a trolley around a supermarket, his mother telling him to grab anything he wanted and put it in.

At some stage of his childhood, he could not pinpoint exactly when — perhaps around the age of fifteen — he’d begun to realize he had a talent for mathematics. He started taking an interest in the way his mother bet on the horses. And on bingo. From tips he gleaned from Charlie Lang’s dad, he found himself giving her advice on odds, and her winnings became more frequent and bigger.

He left school early, having talked himself into a job as a bookie’s runner with Neil Lang. He did this for a couple of years, making what he thought was good money at the time. Then, at a race meeting at Brighton Racecourse, he got chatting to a big punter, called Steve Crouch, who seemed to take a shine to him and offered him a job.

Crouch was boss of a successful Brighton Independent Financial Advisor and Wealth Management company. Over the next few years, Kipp rose from the bottom rung of the ladder to become one of their top advisors, before deciding at the age of twenty-eight to go it alone. Now, seventeen years on, he was one of Crouch’s most formidable competitors. Or had been.

It seemed sometimes as if for years he’d been blessed with almost magical powers of prophecy, that any investment he made for his clients came good, way above the annual average for fund managers; then, suddenly, after Kayleigh’s death, the wheels fell off.

He knew the reasons. He had begun drinking heavily, and gambling heavily, too, as a way of taking his mind off his grief. Stacey had retreated into a shell, not letting him touch her for over a year. Then, stupidly, he’d had a fling with an old flame he had bumped into by chance. Sadly, a short while after, the woman had been found murdered, and he was briefly a suspect. Although he’d tried to keep it under wraps, Stacey had found out. He’d been trying to repair the damage by regularly coming home with flowers or a surprise gift of a piece of jewellery or tickets to see a favourite band of hers, but with little effect, so far.

His wealth management performance — once an impressive 14 per cent year-on-year growth for his clients’ money — had diminished to just 2 per cent last year, barely above bank interest rates. In his view, part of the business of wealth management was pure gambling. You bet your clients’ money for them at different levels of risk, which they dictated. From the high risk, gambling on something like coffee bean crops being abundant or failing, down to the more mundane areas, such as fixed-interest government bonds. In this currently turbulent world there were huge gains to be made — or lost — on commodities, and on metals like gold. He’d managed throughout this past year to get most things badly wrong. On some occasions, spectacularly wrong.

As Stacey had become increasingly distanced and withdrawn, he’d found solace in gambling. Online poker and blackjack, and sometimes online roulette, too. Gambling had always been his way of relaxing. And always remembering the grand lifestyle of Neil Lang’s family.

These days his favourite places, locally, were the Premier Bar at Brighton Racecourse on race days — doing the maths, placing accumulator forecasts with the Tote on race meetings around the country — or playing the tables at Brighton’s Waterfront Casino. Just as in his early days in financial management he’d had that golden touch, it had always been the same with the casino. Stacey used to love coming with him back then, agog at how he always seemed to walk away from a roulette wheel thousands of pounds up, and on more than one occasion, hundreds of thousands.

Not any more. His magic touch, if it was ever that and not simply a long winning streak, had deserted him. Online, in the casino, at Brighton Racecourse and, even more crucially, at work. He blamed it on his marital problems distracting him.

But his clients, many of whom had entrusted their entire life savings to him, weren’t interested in his marital problems.

And when the ransom demand came in, as surely it would, the people who had taken Mungo wouldn’t be interested in his marital problems either.