Love You Dead

15 Thursday 19 February

Jodie had plenty of time to think on her journey back to England. She’d caught a late flight at LaGuardia to Washington and checked into an airport hotel before returning to the airport first thing and buying a ticket on another internal flight, to Atlanta, using another alias, Jemma Smith.

From there she bought a ticket on a Virgin flight to London. She figured people would be less likely to be looking out for her here in Atlanta, although due to the US immigration system, she would have to leave under the same name that she came in on, Jodie Bentley.

She had bought a thriller by a British writer called Simon Toyne, because she had liked the cover. It helped to distract her, but with all the thoughts going through her mind it was hard to concentrate for any length of time.

She had made use of her enforced stay in Washington, having her hair dyed blonde at a salon she found in the airport. And she bought some new clothes. Several times she’d thought about phoning Romeo Munteanu through the hotel, to see how much he’d pay to have the memory stick returned, but held back. She needed to know what was on it before making a move — if she made one at all.

One thing she knew for sure was that it had a value to someone, otherwise he would not have gone to such trouble to conceal it in his suitcase. And she knew for sure, too, he would be trying to track her down, although she was pretty certain, with what she had done, that she’d bought a time advantage.

On the plane to London whilst waiting for boarding to be completed, she flicked through the airline magazine. There was a travel article on Venezuela. It brought back a memory.

Emira.

Emira del Carmen Socorro! Her Venezuelan-born best friend at the posh school Jodie’s parents had sent her to — but could barely afford — The Towers Convent. Unlike Jodie, Emira Socorro was genuinely posh. Like Cassie, she was beautiful. And like Cassie, boys flocked around Emira at parties, charmed by her exotic accent. Emira’s parents had a huge Georgian country house, with both an indoor and outdoor swimming pool, a tennis court, a lake and a butler.

Emira had taken an instant shine to Jodie and they had become firm friends, smoking secretly together, getting drunk, occasionally taking drugs. It wasn’t until some years later that Jodie realized quite why it was that Emira stuck to her so closely. It was because she was useful to her in many ways. Her plain looks made Emira shine. She lost count of the times that she played gooseberry to Emira’s endless conquests with guys. And she learned, at the age of sixteen, that the one way she could keep up with Emira was to put herself out to guys.

She became a regular one-night-stand merchant. The easy shag for drunken guys at parties who’d failed to pull the girls they were actually after. Unceremonious humps behind sofas, on piles of coats in a spare room, in the back of their mummy or daddy’s cars. And once in a potting shed that smelled of mushrooms.

She found she actually enjoyed her reputation as the local bike. She enjoyed it a lot more than the sex itself, which she didn’t mind. She carried a stash of condoms in her handbag and used to delight in boasting of her own conquests to an often-astonished Emira.

When they were eighteen they lost almost all contact. Emira went off to finishing school in Austria. Jodie went to Southampton University to study Sociology — and to get away from her parents.

The last time she saw Emira was at her friend’s twenty-first birthday party — a swanky affair at her parents’ Sussex mansion, filled with beautiful people, and where the band The Manfreds had been hired to play. Hardly anyone she knew was there and Jodie wandered around getting increasingly pissed and aggressive. Eventually she’d found herself staggering up the driveway to her family home, sometime after dawn had begun to break, unsure whether she had just shagged the guy who’d given her a lift or not.

Two years later she’d opened a copy of Hello! and seen a six-page spread of Emira’s society wedding to a young, gorgeous aristocratic rock promoter who owned a chunk of prime London real estate, a stately home in Scotland, a clifftop mansion in Barbados and a villa on Cap Ferrat.

‘It’s just so nice having a private jet. It means not having to share one’s plane journey anywhere with a bunch of strangers,’ Emira was quoted as saying. Then she was further quoted, making Jodie cringe: ‘I’m really not a snob. I have friends from all walks of life. Those are the kinds of people I grew up with, you know. Just ordinary people.’