I would love to find a job just to get out of the flat, but Nicos won’t hear of it. Sometimes I try to argue but I am scared – scared about what he is capable of. The increasing violence. Especially when he drinks, he is very angry and doesn’t know his own strength. But there is the other reason I’m scared of him, too. Thanks to my blindness in seeing it coming and Nicos’s clever manipulation, I’m so heavily addicted to heroin and sometimes cocaine – as well as alcohol – that I’m totally dependent on him.

  I realize now that the wild social life he threw me into when I first arrived on this island was all for a reason. To help him worm his way more into Jersey society through his charitable donations – and in doing so increase his contacts for his core business of drugs. When he met me in the casino he was looking for someone just like me and I fell for it.

  It makes me so sad to look in a mirror now at the clothes I’m wearing, which Nicos bought me and insists I wear. Baggy tops and trousers to hide my weight loss and my bruises, the track marks, the damage to my veins. My face shows how drawn the drugs have made me, my sallow skin, which was once so rosy. I think how good I have got at using make-up as a disguise, but underneath it all I am crumbling. I hide myself away and barely see anyone.

  And yet, despite all the attempts Nicos has made to break me, he has still not yet broken my spirit. There is still a little bit left inside, a corner of me that he hasn’t yet got to, that tells me I have to get out of this dangerous cycle of addiction.

  I owe it to myself and to my son.

  This week I read a piece on drug addiction in the Jersey Evening Post that could’ve been written just for me. It was about a doctor called Deryn Doyle who runs a clinic helping addicts. It got me thinking more clearly than I had done in a while. If I could speak to her and get some help, secretly without Nicos knowing, maybe I could get off this drug dependency – and with that, out of this relationship.

  In my more lucid moments, I think, What relationship?

  Our relationship has gone from lovers to adversarial strangers, held together by a bond.

  He supplies my drugs – holding back if I annoy him until I am desperate and pleading with him – and in return I play the role of the loving, always-smiling, presentable partner he could take on his arm to a cocktail party at Government House or to a fundraising ball for the hospice, or the Shelter Trust, or any of the numerous other high-profile charities he has managed to attach himself to.

  He certainly won’t imagine I could get myself off the drugs – and that gives me all the more determination to do it. It’s not about proving him wrong, it’s about self-preservation. I am almost ready to do it. I will book to see Dr Doyle, and then after a few more hits, maybe I will be free of this. Please God.

  I know in all honesty I have tried and failed coming off the drugs recently, but it seems through Dr Doyle’s clinic I may have access to some help. Addicts can be cured, can’t they? ‘Clean’, they call it. I want just two things right now. The first is to be clean. The second is for Nicos to have no idea that I am.

  He was out at a meeting tonight and I was glad about that. Four years ago I’d been crazy about him and now I hated him so much I could hardly bear to be in the same room. I can’t stand him touching me. Recently sex with him had pretty much stopped – coinciding with the day, three months ago, I started noticing the smell of a perfume on him that definitely was not his own.

  He had ‘meetings’ three nights a week and would never say anything about with whom or what it was about. I had long stopped bothering to ask, it just made him angry when I did. It’s a meeting, right? he would snap. A business meeting, someone has to earn the money to keep your little bastard at school.

  The programme I was watching, when the front door crashed open, was a documentary on the Colombian drug cartels, focusing in particular on a monster called Pablo Escobar. Nicos had dropped his name casually on a few occasions, like they’d been good mates. In his dreams. And yet I could see them being two fish in the same seas, except that Nicos was, relatively, a wannabe minnow and Escobar had been a Great White shark.

  There was a time when, at the sound of Nicos coming home, no matter how late, I would have jumped up and thrown my arms around him. Now I looked up anxiously.

  That was the time when he would have run over to me and thrown his arms around me.

  A time long past.

  ‘Where the fuck did you get that wine?’ was his opening gambit.

  ‘From the fridge.’

  ‘So why didn’t you put it back in to keep it cold?’

  It was a fair point. The half-full bottle was sitting on top of the breakfast bar. Nicos was right, I should have put it back into the wine fridge that was built into the bar. But the truth was I was drinking it so quickly, I didn’t have to worry about it getting warm. I was celebrating my future, when the drugs became just a part of my past, part of life’s rich tapestry. Granted, I hadn’t got there yet but at least I was thinking about it and that was worth a celebration.

  He was drunk and furious. A dangerous combination, and a regular one.

  He peered at the bottle. ‘Can’t you read, woman? Are you illiterate or something? This was on the bottom shelf of the fridge, which I told you never to touch.’ He held the label in front of my face.

  Chassagne Montrachet 1997, I noted. I knew I shouldn’t have said it, but I couldn’t help it, I was drunk myself and angry – more angry than scared at this moment. ‘It’s old, so I thought I’d better drink it before it was past its best before date,’ I replied.

  ‘You stupid bitch.’

  That was the last thing I remember hearing before my hair felt like it was being wrenched out of the top of my head.

  My next memory was waking up, feeling dizzy, with a blinder of a headache, and looking at my watch. The back of my head felt sticky.

  Sticky with blood.

  It was 3 a.m. I was lying on my back on the kitchen floor, bleeding from the back of my head. When I see Nicos come over to me the first thing I think is that he’s there to comfort me, to take away the pain. Instead, he injects me with a hit of heroin.

  And weirdly, I’m grateful.

  48

  Jersey, Channel Islands, 2011

  I can’t even remember when it was that my pity had turned to hate but I truly hated Nicos. He’d lost his wife and kids. That’s got to have a massive impact on anyone’s psyche, so for a while I tried really hard to feel something for him. He had shown me kindness when I needed it, and without him I know I would not have been able to leave my previous life behind without a trace. So I always felt I owed him for turning up at the right time. Sadly, any hope of him loving me in the way I first loved him never came, he played on my weaknesses like the bully he was. The heroin. The threat always hanging over me that he could reveal who I was at any moment. I was putty in his hands. I needed some of the balance of power to swing my way. And it took me a long time to find the strength and the right time to do something about that.

  When he started hitting me, I knew there was no going back. I had to get off the heroin and get out. But that is no easy task. Heroin gives that euphoric high that takes me away from all my shit, but the addiction is overbearing. I hate myself for it.

  He was raging at Bruno last night, another major incident. Bruno had done nothing wrong. My poor boy was so desperate to get away he fell over, cracking his head on the corner of a glass table so badly I had to get him to A&E at the hospital, where they put in eleven stitches. I couldn’t even drive him there as I was drunk and drugged, which makes me so ashamed and I’m sure the taxi driver was judging me.

  This morning I had woken up more desperate and determined than ever to get off the drugs, to be free from this. I just took a little hit, promising myself it would be one of my last. I’d got good at negotiating with my inner voice about why it was justified this time, and that it would be my last or one of my last, in order to give myself a little way out in case I slipped back or needed another hit. It was 11.32 and I thought Bruno was playing in the room next door. I came round in my drug daze to see him sat opposite me, my needle in one hand, pressing it tentatively against the skin of his opposite arm. My heart literally stopped.

  At 11.37 this morning, I vowed to change.

  The tipping point. No more drugs. Ever.

  Seeing my vulnerable, curious son sitting there with my dirty drugs in his hand. The dirty drugs that Nicos got me hooked on. It couldn’t get any lower.

  49

  Jersey, Channel Islands, 2011

  Drugs came into Jersey via planes, boats and the mail – fake Amazon parcels being favoured by some dealers. Nicos had a local Customs officer in his pocket, keeping him very sweet indeed with regular payments into a Panamanian bank account.

  Panama was one of a decreasing number of countries in the world where you could open a bank account with no questions asked and, equally important, no replies given to questions from prying law enforcement agencies.

  Sticking to his strict business maxim of keeping his friends close and his enemies closer, Alan Medcraft was as close as an enemy could be. Having obliged the Customs and Immigration officer by depositing, over the past few years, half a million pounds – and counting – into his Panamanian bank account, Nicos had enough on the guy to have him banged away in La Moye – the island’s prison – for much of the rest of the fifty-year-old’s active life.

  ‘Symbiotic!’ Nicos liked to announce whenever the man was in the apartment. ‘Alan and I have a symbiotic relationship.’

  I think Nicos liked the sound of that word more than he actually understood what it meant. It was typical of the way he behaved generally, using brute reason instead of brute force – except with me, where it was usually the reverse.

  He liked to invite Medcraft up to our apartment, and ply him with vintage whiskies and cognacs and fat Cuban cigars – which stank the apartment out for days. Although, to be honest, I didn’t mind that. It masked the smell, that seemed to be increasingly common, of the alien female perfume on Nicos. Although the fact that he had a lover – or maybe more than one – was fine by me if it meant he left me alone.

  Medcraft was no dormouse. He was a good six foot tall, looked like he worked out, and could have given Nicos a beating if he chose to. He had a shaven head and a sly, slimy smile that said, in my interpretation, I’m corrupt as fuck. But try proving it!

  He was an invaluable asset to Nicos, giving him intel on any particular operations the Customs and Immigration officers were carrying out, or what area they would be focusing on in the coming weeks. And even more importantly, diverting attention away from Nicos’s chosen supply route for his next big consignment. Sometimes that would be a drop from a light aircraft flown over from the south coast of England or the west coast of France, other times it would be a yacht out at sea with which Nicos would rendezvous in his own boat.

  He once told me how that worked. He would take a briefcase full of cash, concealed inside a sailing bag, and meet the drugs yacht several miles offshore. Sometimes, Alan Medcraft would have prearranged a major operation on the other side of the island as a distraction.

  Nicos had also let slip, whether from bravado, to impress me, or because he was genuinely nervous of them, that the people he met out at sea were not to be messed with. Anyone who crossed them never got a second chance. They were members of a violent Liverpool gang, controlled from his prison cell by its founder, Saul Brignell, who had direct links with one of the Colombian cartels. His gang distributed drugs in major quantities throughout the British Isles, via lorries, boats and helicopters. They boasted that no one who had ever crossed them was still alive.

  Then Nicos told me he’d been offered the deal of a lifetime. A consignment of crystal meth, cocaine and heroin, available in a week’s time via a rendezvous at sea, with a street value in Jersey, when cut, of around £20 million. The deal was on offer to the first Jersey dealer who could come up with £1.2 million in cash.

  Nicos told me he had that money. It was stashed in a secure storage unit near Brighton. But he’d been warned by Alan Medcraft that Jersey Customs and Immigration were mounting a major operation on both the private and commercial airports and the ferry port over the next month, and that he was very much on their radar.

  Suddenly, behaving all sweetness and light to me for the first time in many months, Nicos asked me how I would feel about driving to Brighton and fetching the money.

  Seriously, £1.2 million?

  You have a new name, a new look, no one in the Brighton area is going to recognize you. I give you the security code and the two keys for my locker at the storage depot. You drive over on the ferry in your car – and they won’t be interested in you. Alan told me they are not targeting anyone with a Jersey licence plate. Anyone asks you why you’re going or why you’ve been to England – and they won’t – you just tell them it was for a funeral.

  He hadn’t needed to try hard to convince me at all, I would have bitten his hand off for any chance to be away from him for a few days. And what he didn’t realize, because he was so wrapped up in his own greedy plans, was that this was perhaps a deal of a lifetime for me. This was my way out. Although I tried my best to look like I really needed to think about it, full of nerves and not in any way enthusiastic.

  I had a bright red MX5 which I loved, and the idea of a few days blasting up English roads faster than the 40mph limit here in Jersey filled me with joy. And I was glad to be able to take Bruno with me, and get him away from Nicos.

  My potential plan, which still needed some serious thought, was making me feel happy for the first time in a very long while.

  One thing worried me: even though I knew I now looked totally different from Old Me, and I had a convincing passport as Sandra Jones, I was still pretty nervous about going anywhere near Brighton, just four years after leaving.

  But the opportunity was too good to miss.

  And I had that plan – rough, unformed, just a tiny germ at this stage, but a plan nonetheless. The opportunity to escape from Nicos, with Bruno, and start a new life. The gift he had inadvertently given us. People talk about all their Christmases coming at once. It was all my Christmases, all my birthdays and more, so much more.

  A new life was something I had been craving even more than my next heroin fix. But as long as I was on heroin I was dependent on Nicos and knew I couldn’t leave him. I only had the chance to escape once, so I had to do it well.

  And now there was good news on that front – or at least reasonable news. Since meeting with Dr Deryn Doyle, I’d been trying to wean myself off heroin, but the side effects were horrifying. I felt nauseous and vomited a lot, as well as having diarrhoea and agonizing stomach cramps. I constantly felt paranoid and was unable to sleep. I took to drinking more alcohol, but all that did was make my cravings for heroin stronger.

  I thought I could come off the drugs through willpower alone, but I couldn’t, and now I really needed this to work and to do it without Nicos knowing. I went back to see Dr Doyle and she prescribed methadone, which would take away the craving without giving the amazing high of heroin. And it would also alleviate the withdrawal symptoms.

  The journey of a thousand miles begins with the one step, I kept reminding myself. It would be a long, hard fight to freedom, but I had started it. I was on my way.

  Through an anxious and uncertain facade, I told Nicos I would do it.

  50

  September 2011

  It was a very strange feeling, sitting up near the front of the Condor car ferry as we approached Poole harbour on this Sunday afternoon, with the seriously swanky homes of Sandbanks lining the entire waterfront to the right. Some of the most expensive properties in the UK, and anyone with a ferry ticket and a pair of binoculars could peep right into their living rooms – or bedrooms if that was your thing.

  They’d have a great view today, on this glorious afternoon, with barely a cloud in the sky.

  Suddenly I had a thought. What if I had a pair of binoculars and could stare into Roy’s living room right now? What would I see? Four years on?

  Would I see him with a new woman?

  And if I did, how would I feel about that?

  Something twisted deep inside me. I suddenly felt like when I was in need of my next drugs fix. As if all the lights in the universe had been extinguished.

  I didn’t want to think of it, of Roy with someone else.

  But could I blame him?

  Did I actually want to wish some kind of curse on him, banishing him to life on his own, a life of celibacy, a life of – what exactly? A life of darkness, of never-ending missing me?

  Maybe he’d already forgotten about me?

  Maybe if I looked through the window of our house – home – with those binoculars, I would see him with a beautiful new lady, a couple of kids, playing one of his beloved collection of 45rpm vinyls.

  And how would I feel about that, about seeing him happy?

  The hollow feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach told me exactly how I would feel.

  Bruno, on the seat beside me, was absorbed in a comic. It was a big deal returning to England after all this time. It may not seem a long while to have been away, but it was over three years that I had lived abroad, in Jersey. My car, down on Deck B, was on Jersey plates and Sandra Jones had a Jersey licence.

  She had a whole different past to Sandy Grace, too. I’d figured that, even before Nicos had told me to think about it. I was Sandra Jones, from Battersea, London, where I had been working as a receptionist in a large doctors’ practice before moving to Jersey to be with my boyfriend, Nicos Christoforou, who worked in the finance industry for a trust company. That was his cover. Half the people on the island seemed to work for trust companies. Just saying the words ‘trust company’ was a great way to cauterize the trailing ends of any awkward conversation about what he actually did.