Nicos had helpfully instructed me that we must spend a minimum three nights in England, so as not to create any suspicion with the Jersey Customs and Immigration team when we return. He said the Border Force officers scrutinize the manifests of the airlines and ferries, and people making round trips in a short space of time, such as twenty-four hours, will often trigger suspicion.

  It is such a relief to spend three nights away from Nicos, and some time instead with just Bruno. I’m planning to take him to see the lions at Longleat safari park tomorrow.

  Our twin-bedded, tastefully styled room is feeling like a sanctuary after the long stressful day and I’m finding it calming, particularly as Bruno is now fast asleep, and I can finally open the heavier and bigger-than-I-had-expected suitcase that’s sitting on the floor. It doesn’t look anything special, just a big, cheap, soft-sided suitcase – I guess that’s the point, ordinary and bland to avoid suspicion.

  I’d collected it on the way here, from the storage depot in Shoreham, using the keys and the code Nicos gave me to access his locker. Now I heave it up onto my bed.

  Pop-pop go the twin metal catches.

  I lift the lid. And . . .

  Oh my God!

  It’s the smell that hits me first before anything else! It’s never really occurred to me before that money has a smell, but it really does. It’s not the glorious smell of musty paper you get in old libraries, it’s tangy, intoxicating, a seductive perfume full of promise. It smells of the French Riviera, of fast cars, of slinky black leather gloves, of expensive lingerie, of jet planes – and above all . . .

  It smells of freedom.

  I’m high on the smell and mesmerized by the sight. I’ve seen plenty of movies in which villains have suitcases full of cash, but . . .

  Shit . . .

  I’ve never actually seen a real suitcase full of real cash, until now. Bundles of fifty-pound notes. Bundles and bundles. And bundles.

  And more bundles. All neatly stacked.

  And more bundles still. All held together with red elastic bands.

  I count one bundle. There are a hundred fifty-pound notes; £5,000 a bundle.

  An hour later, after I’ve finished counting, I’m looking at £1.2 million. I whisper it out aloud to convince myself I’m not dreaming. ‘One million, two hundred thousand pounds!’

  As they call it in criminal slang, one point two million quid in folding.

  Nicos told me it would be a doddle. Collect the suitcase, spend three days in England, and then return to Jersey.

  Great.

  But I’m not comfortable leaving a suitcase containing over a million quid in our hotel room. Or our car parked with that amount inside.

  And here’s another problem that smart Nicos hasn’t anticipated. The suitcase is almost too big for the boot of my little MX5. And that gives me another problem. Where is the rest of our luggage going to fit?

  Then I’m struck with a thought. And it’s a thought that I really like. And the more I think about it, the more I like it.

  How about I take some of this money to the Rendezvous casino a two-minute walk away? That would help sort out the oversized bag issue!

  And £1.2 million would be so cool to gamble with.

  If I could figure a way to get that debt paid back to Roel Albazi, I never need to think of him ever again. I’d feel a lot better. I want to be a decent person, really. I guess that’s something my Lutheran mother instilled in me.

  Do the right thing.

  But that would mean taking up gambling again and that’s not really doing the right thing. Maybe it would lead me back down the dangerous path of gambling addiction, and it wasn’t lost on me that was why I was in this situation to begin with. Nicos never allowed me the opportunity to gamble once we moved to Jersey and luckily there are no casinos there. Instead, he got me hooked on heroin. One addiction to another. At least it did stop my out-of-control gambling habit. But just this little flutter would be OK. It was all I could think of and the obvious way into my new better life. Just a little of the money, win it back and more, raising no suspicion when I take it back as promised to Nicos, pocketing the profit. I felt confident and in control.

  I could ask the reception to help me find a local approved babysitter to watch over Bruno while he slept, disappear next door to the casino, just an hour or so, all anonymous.

  The more I think about it, the more I like the idea.

  Just one big bet – two at worst. £150K on red or black? Double the money and, bingo, out of trouble! Not that I’m worrying that I’m in any trouble – four years on, Roel Albazi in prison probably has bigger things on his mind. And anyhow, I’ve no idea how I would get the money to him.

  God, my mind is so messed up.

  But this money is burning a hole. I could turn it into so much more and Nicos would never know. I hand him the suitcase in three days’ time, with £1.2 million in it. And I’d have another million or more, stashed secretly. And I’ll use it to get away from him.

  It’s a good plan.

  Game on.

  I’m feeling lucky tonight!

  55

  26 September 2011

  The ferry back to Jersey from Poole takes four hours. And four hours is a long time when you’ve got a kid sitting next to you who keeps wanting to play throaty lion roars at full volume on his games console.

  I made the mistake of downloading the sounds for him. Angry lion roars, hungry lion roars, attacking lion roars. He thinks they are really funny and keeps giggling, but no one else sitting around us on this packed seating area at the front of the Condor Liberation is particularly amused. Each time he pulls his headphones plug out of the side of the player pretty much the whole ferry gets treated to the sounds.

  But that’s the least of my problems at this moment. I have a much bigger one. Which is that it didn’t go too well at the casino three nights ago. Nor did it go too well two nights ago. Nor last night.

  Not well at all.

  In fact, that’s really a bit of an understatement.

  It would have quite suited me not to return to Jersey at all – today, at least. Instead I would have preferred to stay on and try to recoup my losses, but Nicos needs me – and the money – back urgently. Today. Not tomorrow, today. Late tonight he has a rendezvous several miles out to sea with another boat for this big deal – his biggest deal ever – and the calm weather is about to change. Tonight is the window, the tide is right and the forecast is calm seas. Tomorrow night a force seven, gusting nine, is forecast. A heavy sea for two boats to meet alongside mid-ocean without real danger. It would have to be tonight.

  Of course I don’t tell Nicos over the phone of the major problem I have. And I’m relying on the fact that I will delay our return by enough time that if Nicos starts checking the money, he’s going to be in a very big rush, too concerned with heading out to sea for his rendezvous to count every single banknote.

  I’m really relying on that quite a lot. But I have some distraction ideas in case I need to use them.

  I’m well aware of the calibre of people he is having his offshore rendezvous with. The reputation of the gang headed by Saul Brignell, which controls, if the press is to be relied on, up to a quarter of all heroin to the south-west region of the British Isles.

  And Nicos is relying on me to have collected the £1.2 million they will be waiting for, forty-four nautical miles north-west of Jersey, at midnight. He has a cunning plan that he told me about before I left for England. The drugs will be wrapped in waterproof packaging. After he loads them onto his boat, he will only travel a couple of miles back towards Jersey, then he will drop them into the ocean, at five different points, each marked with a small red buoy – the same ones the local lobster fishermen use.

  Then over the next week, he will accompany a bent local fisherman, called Adam le Seelleur, to haul up each package in turn and bring them back to shore along with the rest of his catch.

  So smart, so cunning.

  But my plan is even more cunning.

  56

  26 September 2011

  ‘Where the hell have you been, you stupid bitch?’

  That was the greeting Nicos gave myself and Bruno as we arrived back at the flat after three days in England, just before 7.30 p.m.

  He was shaking with rage. Scarily so. I was convinced he was going to hit me again and, still holding the suitcase of cash, I stepped in front of Bruno, protectively. The bastard could hit me all he wanted but never my son.

  Nicos looked like a demon was inside him. He paced up and down the apartment, seemingly fixated on his watch. ‘Do you have any idea what the fucking time is? What the fuck have you been up to? You should have been here four hours ago. I’ve got a deadline – you know I’ve got a deadline. It actually crossed my mind you might have run away with all the cash or gambled it! But I know you’d not be that stupid.’

  ‘I texted you,’ I replied. ‘The ferry from Poole was late,’ I lied. ‘I texted you that.’

  ‘Why didn’t you get a fucking plane?’

  ‘You told me to take the ferry.’

  He looked at his watch again. ‘If I’m late for the rendezvous, you know what’s going to happen? The whole deal could be off. Do you understand?’

  ‘Maybe you could ask the ferry company for compensation,’ I replied, mockingly.

  ‘That’s not even funny,’ he snarled, snatching the suitcase out of my hand, dumping it on the floor, then kneeling and popping it open.

  And suddenly I felt a catch in my throat. Shit. Shit. Shit. Please no.

  As he raised the lid he said, ‘Let’s just check all is in order, shall we?’

  His words filled me with terror. I stood, frozen. I knew he was on a deadline, which was why I’d deliberately arrived back so late. I honestly thought he would have just grabbed the suitcase and rushed off. I turned to Bruno and told him to go to his room. Obediently he towed his little Trunki off.

  I watched Nicos stare at the tightly packed bundles of fifty-pound notes, each held together with a red band. I was bricking it. Taking more of his time than I’d hoped he had, he lifted out one bundle at a time along the top layer, flicking through each of the banknotes in turn like a bank teller, then putting them down on the floor. His eyes darted up at me constantly, suspiciously. He looked at his watch again and I thought he was about to close the lid. Instead he began to remove the second layer.

  I tried to appear carefree, but my hammering heart felt like it was going to break loose inside my chest. He removed one, checked it, then another, then another. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Bruno come back into the room.

  ‘I’m hungry, Mama!’

  ‘I’ll get you something in a minute, darling.’

  I was watching Nicos checking through the second bundle, when I heard a crash and a sound like pebbles rattling across the floor.

  Bruno, standing on a chair, had pulled down a box of Cheerios. They had spewed out of the packet and were everywhere.

  ‘Jesus, you asshole kid!’ Nicos yelled. ‘You—’ Then he looked at his watch again. ‘Shit, I have to go.’

  ‘I’ll clear it up,’ I said.

  ‘Fucking right you’ll clear it up.’ He hastily crammed the bundles back inside the suitcase, closed the lid, then lugged it into the hall.

  The door slammed shut.

  He was gone.

  57

  26 September 2011 – Nicos Christoforou

  The Bolt-Hole was Nicos’s private in-joke. Well, not completely private, because it was Sandy who had suggested the name for his boat to him. When the time comes to flee Jersey in a hurry, that’ll be our bolt-hole, right, Nicos?

  One of the keys to living on this island and trying to stay under the radar of the police and all other authorities was to not look flash. For that reason he drove a bland, six-year-old Honda SUV, which was fine for the island’s narrow roads, and he flew in and out on British Airways or EasyJet, or sometimes, to vary things, on the little twin-prop Blue Islands flight to Southampton. He mostly only used private jets when he was out of sight of Jersey.

  So far as the Jersey Revenue knew he was a Greek guy who owned a number of small-time nail studio businesses, lived in rented accommodation and paid his taxes. Even his sleek thirty-eight-foot powerboat was dressed down to look like many of the other sport-fishing boats in the marinas of St Helier, St Aubin, St Catherine’s and Rozel, with a pair of rod-racks sticking out of the stern.

  At 8 p.m. on this fine evening, the sun travelling down the clear blue sky before soon bouncing off the horizon, he parked his SUV opposite the yellow-painted edifice of the Normans hardware building. Dressed in a windcheater, jeans, a peaked cap and boat shoes, he then hefted the large, heavy, red and black Musto waterproof holdall out of the tailgate, along with – just for effect if anyone was watching him – a fishing rod.

  Then he walked as jauntily as he could, trying to mask the heavy weight of the bag, trying to appear to all the world like a guy off for an evening’s fishing, hopefully to bag a bluefin tuna or some bass at the very least. He ducked through a gap in the railings and looked down for a moment at the vast array of boats moored to the network of pontoons. RIBs, dinghies, sailing yachts, speedboats, cigarette-shaped racing powerboats, cabin cruisers, fishing smacks and a handful of serious, ocean-going multi-million-pound superyachts.

  Seagulls swerved around above him and rigging clattered in the light breeze as he carefully made his way down the stone steps and onto the pontoon where Bolt-Hole was moored, at the far end. The salty tang of the sea and smell of boat paint and varnish and rope, as well as the cawing of the birds above, took him momentarily back to his childhood, to all the times he’d accompanied his uncle, who was a fisherman, out to sea.

  Jersey had one of the biggest tides in the world, its land mass increased by over one third at low water. And at low water this harbour basin was mudflats, with everything on it stranded. But he had three full hours before that happened. After his rendezvous, where he would make the switch of cash for the drugs, it wouldn’t be until 4 a.m. tomorrow before there’d be a high enough tide for him to get back into the harbour. But he wasn’t worried about that for now. All part of his cover that he was out night fishing, and he fully intended to try to catch some fish after the rendezvous, to bring back and maybe cook for supper tomorrow.

  Sandy wasn’t crazy about the way he cooked fish in their flat, on an open skillet with lashings of olive oil and garlic. She said it stank the place out for days.

  Well, she wasn’t going to have to worry about that for too much longer. After this deal was complete and he’d got the full value for the drugs in Jersey, he was planning to do exactly what Sandy had done, and disappear.

  And Sandy wasn’t going to be part of that plan.

  58

  26 September 2011 – Nicos Christoforou

  Less than thirty minutes after Nicos fired up the four Mercedes diesel engines, Bolt-Hole was making great headway, the twin propellors throwing up an arcing mare’s tail wake, the tall white pinnacle of La Corbière lighthouse already a tiny speck astern in the rapidly fading daylight. And Sandy and Bruno were even tinier specks.

  He double-checked that the transponder, which would reveal his position and course to the coastguard’s radar, and also to anyone with a marine tracking app on their phone, was switched off. On a private vessel of this size, there was no legal requirement to have it on – it was purely for safety, so that other vessels could see him.

  Exactly what he did not want.

  He’d also made sure the port, starboard and masthead lights were off. In this falling darkness, he should now be pretty much invisible. And he would maintain complete radio silence. Not that it was likely the coastguards would be listening, he had learned. Their role was mostly around marine safety. Drugs they left to the Customs.

  They would have been clocked on the Noirmont Point radar – during the war a German underground command bunker – and again on the Corbière radar at the western extremity of Jersey, but no one would have taken any notice of him. Just one of hundreds of small boats sailing around the Channel Island waters, and just another dickhead who’d forgotten to switch on his transponder – and nav lights. Or maybe a bolshy Jersey or French fisherman – of which there were dozens – ignoring the regulations.

  The boat’s expensive speaker system was pumping out music. Feel-good songs that Nicos shouted along with. He loved driving this beast of a machine, which could top 50 knots in a calm sea and outrun anything the coastguard could throw at him – if it ever came to it. He loved all the electronic displays, especially the ones that showed him, on the instrument panel, an X-ray view of the engines working, the pistons and cams rising and falling. But best of all was the digital navigation system.

  The waters around the Channel Islands were notoriously tricky. They were booby-trapped with submerged rocks and treacherous currents, such as the Alderney Race, where the current could run as fast as 12 knots, propelling some hapless yachts backwards. Even with all his years of experience with boats, he treated these waters with respect.

  But tonight, now well clear of land and heading out into deep water, following the satellite navigation set to the agreed rendezvous point in Hurd’s Deep, just shy of fifty nautical miles from Jersey, he had no worries. Secure in his padded seat, he made constant small adjustments to the wheel, maintaining his course, leaving the island of Guernsey just twinkling lights now, well to his stern, on the north-west course he had set. The increasing Atlantic swell was throwing the boat around and he reduced the speed to 20 knots below her maximum.

  He was in more of a hurry than he had wanted to be after the Cheerios incident, but he was still happy he’d left plenty of time for the rendezvous. The echo sounder was showing the depth of ocean beneath him, steadily increasing over the next two hours from 20 metres to 50 then 60. Suddenly, as if they had gone over an under-sea cliff, the depth increased to 175 metres. They had hit the channel known as Hurd’s Deep.