I watched him discreetly. Then I realized his method. It was simple and crude. He was basically playing the odds. If you tossed a coin and it came up heads, you’d expect it to be tails next time. If it was heads again, you’d expect it even more so to be tails next. Heads for the third time and for sure it had to be tails next. But if it wasn’t, then the fourth time, surely.

  It wasn’t any different at the roulette wheel, apart from the risk of that green zero. Every time that little ball landed in a slot it was either red or black. I began counting. Over the next two weeks I never saw either colour come up more than four times consecutively. Yes!

  I had a new strategy.

  Bet on a colour – red. If black came up, bet on red again, doubling the amount. Then again. Then again.

  The first time I tried it, it worked a treat: £5 on red, black came up; £10 on red, black again; £20 on red, black again; £40 on red – red came up! £80 back for a £75 investment. Beats the hell out of the stock market!

  The second day I went bolder: £50 on red, black came up; I doubled, £100 on red, black again; £200 on red, black again; £400 on red, black yet again.

  And I was out of chips.

  In between the next spin of the wheel I ran to the cashier, drew £500 off my credit card – my own one, not our joint account – and returned to the table. Black came up four times in a row, while I waited, then I put the lot on red. Four conspicuous piles of twenty-five-pound chips.

  Black again.

  Shit, shit, shit.

  Mr Yuchi must have seen my disappointed face because he gave me a smile and a don’t worry about it shrug.

  So I didn’t worry about it. Just a momentary glitch. I had another hour before I had to leave and head home. I went back to the cashier, who sat in her little booth behind the counter, and asked for another £500 in twenty-five-pound chips.

  But moments after I put the card into the reader I saw her frown. She was a rather prim-looking lady in her sixties, with the kind of dyed hair that goes a little orange, in a bun on top of her head. Although she must have recognized me, as I’d been drawing money out or cashing chips in now daily for months, she looked at me like I was a total stranger. ‘Declined,’ she said.

  ‘Declined?’ I echoed. ‘What do you mean?’

  I had to work hard to suppress my anger – I blame my parents, they kindly allowed me to develop a bit of an issue with how I dealt with situations that made my anger spiral out of control. I could feel it really rising now. I had to have a word with myself, it wasn’t her fault that some bank robot with a screwed-up algorithm was denying me credit.

  ‘Your card’s declined, sweetheart.’

  ‘How can it be? I’ve got—’

  Then I was quiet for some moments. What actually did I have in it? A week ago, when I had last checked my balance, I had nearly £9,000. OK, I’d had a few bad days, but there was no way I’d lost that much.

  Was there?

  I tried to calm myself down. To think clearly. I was aware there was someone standing behind me. ‘OK,’ I said, ‘let’s try a smaller amount – two hundred?’

  Orange Hair asked me to re-enter the card. ‘I’m sorry, it’s still declined.’ This time she looked almost smug about it. There was no way I was letting her win anything over on me. Recklessly – I know – I pulled out the joint HSBC card Roy and I had and handed it to her. With the kind of nonchalant bravado I know Tamzin would have shown, I said, ‘I’ll draw a thousand from this.’

  As I turned around, with twenty crisp fifty-pound notes in my hand, I saw it was Mr Yuchi standing behind me, holding an armful of chips to be cashed. He gave me a polite nod.

  I exchanged my cash for chips at the table. Determined to make up my loss quickly, I asked the croupier at my table for fifty-pound chips.

  And lost the lot in twenty minutes.

  It was 6.30 p.m. Roy had messaged me to say he wouldn’t be home until 8 p.m. tonight. I sat at the table debating what to do and cursing my stupidity. It was the middle of the month, and our HSBC credit card statement came through on the twenty-sixth – just over ten days to go. It was still a printed statement, back then. I knew that Roy never checked it too thoroughly, he would just glance through it, looking for anomalies.

  If I could just replace that £1,000 before then, he probably wouldn’t notice; even if he did, I could tell him the bank had made an error, which it had corrected.

  But the question was: where was that £1,000 going to come from? At that moment, all I could think was that it would come from drawing out more cash and winning it back.

  But it turned out there was another solution.

  Mr Yuchi.

  He came back to the roulette table and sat beside me. Although we’d exchanged glances numerous times over the past weeks, we had never actually spoken. ‘You have cash flow problem?’ he asked, his voice short, clipped, but kind. ‘Need buy more chips?’

  ‘Just having a bad run, I guess,’ I replied and gave him a smile.

  He slid his hand inside the breast of his jacket and pulled out his wallet. For an instant I honestly thought, totally irrationally, he was going to give me some cash. Instead, he pulled out a business card and laid it down on the baize in front of me. ‘You call him, he always help. Not ask too many questions. Very nice man. I have to go to work now, see you tomorrow!’

  He slipped off his chair before I could even thank him.

  Ha, that seems such a joke now. Such a sick joke. But back then it felt this friendly man with the stained teeth, who reeked of smoke, had thrown me a lifeline. Rather than a death sentence.

  I picked up the card. It didn’t have much on it. Just a phone number and a name.

  Roel Albazi.

  14

  June 2007 – Looking back

  Roel Albazi was a total slimeball, but I had one thing in my favour – from the moment I first met him, in his fancy clothes, in his ritzy office with its white carpet, hung with erotic art, and smelling of a no-doubt expensive cologne, I could tell he was trying it on with me. Yuck. His was the kind of flirting that’s both overt and subtle at the same time, the kind you get from men who consider themselves God’s gift to women.

  But I figured if I played along, he might cut me some slack. And he did. He cut me slack all the way to £100,000 of debt. On my unspoken promise.

  Well, not exactly a promise. I played the flirty card so well each time we met, while more and more cash advances kept coming. He knew my husband was a cop and that, by association, I was trustworthy, good for the money. What he did not know, and I did, was that he was on my husband’s radar. But that didn’t bother me, I needed his money, and I was certain that with his continued extended credit I would eventually hit a winning streak. It was a mathematical certainty. I just had to keep going, continue raising my stakes after each loss until it all came good again. The classic gambler’s folly, I’ve since realized – chasing your losses.

  Out of the first tranche of cash he advanced me, I covered off the missing £1K from our joint account, so no awkward questions from Roy. But that was small beer compared to the catastrophic losses at the table that followed.

  Without my fully realizing it, my life was turning, day by day, into a perfect storm. I had started to take Valium to help with the anxiety I was feeling constantly and, if I was honest with myself, it was becoming as habitual as the gambling. I had made the mistake of having an on-off affair with Cassian Pewe, the man who Roy despised more than anyone on the planet – and I was starting to intensely dislike Cassian, too. I had missed my period and I was getting panicky. I now owed almost £150,000 to a man who both repulsed and frightened me. Roel Albazi repeatedly told me over the phone his boss was concerned that I wasn’t paying anything back, and hinted none too subtly that sleeping with him might buy me some time. Yuck.

  I was thinking more and more often that the way out of this extremely serious situation was to run away from it all. Run away from the shame I’d cause myself and Roy and start over somewhere. I had no idea what I wanted to do, I just knew I wanted a different life and to escape this never-ending anxiety.

  I couldn’t turn to my parents.

  I’d started drinking a bit more than usual. On top of the Valium this was not a good mix. I knew I needed to come off the tranquillizer but it felt like a quick way to relieve some of my problems, so I just took it secretly instead. Taking the easy option.

  My dream of a lifestyle like Tamzin’s had crashed and was now burning. Tamzin was expecting another child and I’d heard nothing from her. It was impossible for me to envy her life any more than I did. She would now have the perfect new baby to go with the perfect everything else. And she clearly didn’t give me a second thought. I wasn’t anyone of significance to her, just someone she met passing through. Who she just happened to have had a drunken fling with. End of. But I couldn’t get her out of my mind. And, just to add to everything, my best friend, Becky, told me she and her husband, Elliot, had made the decision to emigrate to Australia – he’d had a job offer and they would be leaving at the end of the month. The only person I felt I could rely on, about to leave my life.

  I felt totally adrift. I was a boat that had broken its mooring and was in a storm-tossed sea heading onto rocks. And there wasn’t anyone I could turn to. How could I tell my husband I’d run up a gambling debt of nearly £150,000 to a murderous loan shark?

  I did try to talk to Becky, but suddenly I felt I didn’t know her any more. Her head was now in Australia. All she was interested in was showing me the website of the house, eight minutes’ walk from Bondi beach, that Elliot and she had rented for a year with an option to buy. And showing me magazine pictures of their dreamy ideas for the kitchen, the lounge and the master bedroom – and of course the deck and the barbecue area. And the baby room, too – she was three months pregnant. She offered me the chance to help her with the interior design, saying how much she valued my creative input, but I just couldn’t muster up the energy to do it. I felt like I had already become one of the ghosts of her past life.

  Of course you and Roy will come and stay, won’t you? You must!!!

  Our Pilates instructor had gone off to Thailand at the start of that summer for a two-month-long wellness convention, or something or other, so the girls’ group didn’t meet twice a week as it had before.

  I felt so lonely, suddenly. And scared. And utterly lost. I had to find a huge amount of money. Sure, we had some equity in the house, but no way near enough. Besides, I could hardly say to Roy that I owed all this to a gangster he was gathering evidence on. My only hope was that he busted Albazi. But when – quietly fishing for information – I mentioned his name at home, it didn’t sound like the police were anywhere close, yet.

  There was a time in my life when I slept like the proverbial log. Now I lay awake, dozing intermittently throughout each long night, and in the mornings opened my eyes, exhausted, with the sense that the whole world was out to get me.

  The calls and texts from Albazi were getting more frequent and less and less friendly. Then, one morning, I saw a car parked in our street, just across the road from our house. We lived in a quiet residential area of neat semi-detached and small detached houses. We lived among decent people in a nice neighbourhood.

  This was not the street for a black car with blacked-out windows to be parked.

  I’d never thought about suicide before. Amongst his skill sets, Roy was, back then, a suicide negotiator for the police. He could be called out at any time of the day or night. It might be to talk someone down from a high-rise window ledge or a cliff-top, or on one occasion a teenage girl who had doused herself in petrol and was threatening to set fire to herself with a cigarette lighter. That one hadn’t ended well.

  I knew how much the attempts upset him, even the ones he foiled. He maintained that however desperate someone might be, there was always a way through, always some light at the end of the tunnel if only they could be shown it.

  In the same way, he believed there was decency in almost everyone, however rotten they might seem at first. He used to say that everyone’s journey to a custody cell began in the family home in the first years of their life.

  But that June afternoon, as the little ball nestled between the frets of the only green slot on the wheel, the croupier, using what looked like a posh version of a windscreen scraper, swept up the last of my chips and my last hope.

  I was done.

  Feeling utterly desperate. My credit card was all but maxed out and I was trapped. If there was any light at the end of the tunnel, it was the train coming towards me. I really seriously began considering killing myself. Perhaps I should end it all?

  Could anything be worse than where I actually was right now? Frightened. Possibly pregnant with a baby I longed for but couldn’t fully explain; a husband who loved me so much but was never good enough for me. A twisted web of acquaintances who knew me a bit but didn’t really. Doubted by my never proud parents. All my savings blown. Abandoned by my friends. No idea where my life was going. Alcoholic . . . maybe? Probably not. Addicted to Valium? Probably. And gambling. Maybe? Who knows. Am I there yet? Does anyone know? When do you know?

  And a debt that was going to turn very ugly very soon, and that was frightening me the most. I was getting increasingly frequent phone calls from Roel Albazi, which I started to ignore. Then he sent his flunkey. A bald-headed guy of around forty, who was taller than the front-door frame of the doctors’ surgery. He was scrupulously polite, had a big smile and spoke calmly, as he accosted me on my way out of the office. He asked me if it was all right to have a word with me.

  As we were on a busy street in the centre of Hove, which made me feel pretty safe, I told him that was fine. He then leaned down and, face to face with me, very gently and very kindly, said, ‘My boss, Mr Albazi, doesn’t want you to come to any harm. But he needs a repayment plan. He’s worried for your safety, he likes you, he doesn’t want to see you end up dead. But it is not in his gift to protect you.’ Then he winked at me, and before turning and walking off, he added, ‘I think it would be nice if you called him. Mr Albazi would appreciate that. Make an appointment, perhaps? But make it soon. While you can. While you are still alive. You are much too young to die.’

  15

  Early July 2007 – Looking back

  It was 8.20 a.m. and I was worried the chemist might not be open yet, as I headed to work. After several gloomy days of rain, summer was back and as I walked through glorious early morning sunshine, I was feeling more positive than I had in a long while. I’d barely slept all night, having made my decision that I would do a pregnancy test today. When I’d looked it up online, it said it was best to do it in the morning.

  I’d also made another, firm, decision about what I would do if it was positive.

  There were normally two of us on reception in the mornings, but my colleague, Julie, was away on holiday, and once I got behind the desk it would be non-stop all morning, with no chance to slip out to the shops until I finished my shift at 1 p.m.

  To my relief the chemist was open. After a quick chat with a helpful assistant, who explained how to use the testing kit and even excitedly wished me ‘good luck!’, I was on my way with a small box in my handbag. The box had a cover pic showing an elegantly shaped blue-and-white plastic tube, with a tiny window in it. On the top of the box in bold yellow it proclaimed: OVER 99% ACCURATE.

  I went into the surgery via the rear of the building, but as I approached reception I could see there was already a queue of people, the young, the old, the very nearly dead and one old boy slumped in a chair, white hair sticking up as if he had just been electrocuted and who looked like he could actually be dead.

  I took their names in turn, ticking them off the list, then told them to take a seat and the doctors (there were six) would call them.

  I just wanted to go to the loo. To open my pregnancy testing kit. To find out!

  I couldn’t wait.

  Anyhow, most of the people waiting in line didn’t need me. Their doctors would come out and summon them in. I took the opportunity to stick a BACK IN 2 MINS! sign on the counter, grabbed a urine sample pot, which the girl at the chemist told me was easier to use, scarpered through the door behind me and into a cubicle in the ladies’, closing and locking the door behind me.

  I took the box, branded Clearblue, out of my handbag and ripped it open with clumsy, nervous fingers, breaking a bit off a nail in the process. They were all chipped anyway, long overdue for a visit to the nail studio. I always avoided going for as long as possible, because the sweet young girl there was a chatterbox who drove me mad, talking non-stop. Anyhow, now I needed to spruce up for my new life. I made a mental note to book an appointment. Then I unfolded the instructions and read them carefully.

  Two minutes after dipping the test stick into the sample pot, not even thinking what carnage might be going on in the waiting room, there was just a single red line. Not pregnant.

  Seriously?

  I wasn’t sure how I felt about this. On the one hand, I was elated considering the mess my life was in, but at the same time, deeply disappointed. I wanted to be pregnant and I didn’t want to be.

  ‘Shit,’ I said. ‘Shit, shit, shit, sh—’

  I stopped. Stared wide-eyed at the tiny window. Was it my imagination?

  A second line was starting to appear, very faintly at first.

  It got steadily brighter and darker. Until it was as strong and thick as the first line.

  Twin red lines now. Parallel.

  I stared at them, numbly, then sat down on the loo seat and stared at them even harder. For reassurance I took the package out of the bin where I had shoved it and read the wording in yellow at the top. OVER 99% ACCURATE.

  My skin seemed to have taken on a life of its own, as if it was crawling around my body independent of the rest of me. It was a weird sensation. It stopped then started again. Like I was covered head to foot in a colony of millions of ants or something. I shook, hard, and yelled, ‘Stoppit! Stoppit! Stoppit!’