‘I’m afraid nothing has changed, Ian,’ says Karen Playfair. ‘My dad won’t sell, and I can’t make him.’
‘I hear you,’ says Ian. ‘More money.’
‘No, I think –’ says Karen, ‘and I think you know this already – I think he just doesn’t like you.’
Gordon Playfair had taken one look at Ian Ventham and disappeared upstairs. Ian could hear him stomping about, proving whatever point he was proving. Who cared? Sometimes people didn’t like Ian. He has never quite worked out why, but over the years has learned to live with it. Certainly, it was their problem. Gordon Playfair was just another in a long line of people who didn’t get him.
‘But listen, leave it with me,’ says Karen. ‘I’ll find a way. It’ll work for everyone.’
Karen Playfair gets him. He has been talking her through the sort of money she could expect if she persuades her dad to sell up. Her sister and brother-in-law have their own business, organic raisins in Brighton, and Ian has already tried this line on them, and failed. Karen Playfair is a much better bet. She lives alone in a cottage on the land and she works in IT, which you can tell just by looking at her. She is wearing make-up, but in a subtle, understated way that Ian honestly can’t see the point of.
Ian wonders exactly when Karen had given up on life and started wearing trainers and long, baggy jumpers. And you’d think, given that she works in IT, she could have googled ‘Botox’. She must be fifty, Ian thinks, same age as him. Different for women, though.
Ian is on a lot of dating apps, and sets a strict upper age limit of twenty-five. He finds the dating apps useful, because it can be hard to meet exactly the right kind of women these days. They need to understand that his time is limited and his work demanding, and that commitment is hard for him. Women over twenty-five don’t seem to get that, in his experience. What happens to them, he wonders. He tries to imagine why someone would choose to date Karen Playfair, but draws a blank. Conversation? That runs out soon enough, doesn’t it? She’ll be rich soon, of course, when Ian buys the land. That will help her.
Hillcrest will be a real life-changer for Ian, too. It will eventually double the size of Coopers Chase, and so double Ian’s profits. Profits he will no longer have to share with Tony Curran. If that meant having to flirt with a fifty-year-old for a couple of weeks then so be it.
On dates, Ian has his tried-and-tested material. He’ll impress young women with pictures of his pool, and the time he was interviewed on Kent Tonight. He had already shown Karen a picture of his pool, because you never knew, but she had simply smiled politely and nodded. No wonder she was single.
He could do business with her, though. She knew the upsides here, and she knew the obstacles, and they end their conversation with a handshake and a plan of action. As he shakes Karen’s hand, Ian thinks that using a bit of hand cream every now and again wouldn’t kill her. Fifty! He wouldn’t wish it on anyone.
The thought briefly occurs to Ian that the only woman over twenty-five he spends any time with at all is his wife.
Oh well, time to go. Things to do.
10
Tony Curran has made up his mind. He brings his BMW X7 to a halt on his heated driveway. There is a gun buried under the sycamore in the back garden. Or is it under the beech? It’s one or the other, but that’s something he can think about with a nice cup of tea. And he can try to remember where his spade is, while he’s at it.
Tony Curran is going to kill Ian Ventham, that’s a given now. Surely Ian knows it too? You can only take so many liberties before even the most calm and rational man snaps.
Tony whistles a tune from an advert and heads indoors.
He moved in about eighteen months ago, on the first real profits from Coopers Chase. It was the type of house he had always dreamed of. A house built on hard work, on making the right choices, cutting the right corners and backing his own talent. A monument to what he had achieved, in brick, glass and tempered walnut.
Tony lets himself in and sets to work switching off the alarm. Ventham had got some of his gang to fit it last week. Polish, the lot of them, but then who isn’t these days? Tony gets the four-digit code right on the third attempt. A new record.
Tony Curran has always taken his security very seriously. For many years Tony’s building company had really just been a front for his drugs business. A way to explain away his income. A way to wash his dirty money. But it slowly got bigger, took up more of his time, brought in more and more money. If you’d told young Tony he would end up living in this house, he wouldn’t have been at all surprised. If you’d told him he’d be buying it with money earned legally, he’d have keeled over there and then.
His wife, Debbie, is not back, but that suits him fine for now. Gives him time to concentrate, really think it all through.
Tony rewinds to the row with Ian Ventham, and his fury rises again.
Ian was cutting him out of The Woodlands? Just like that? A conversation on the way to his car? Outdoors, just in case Tony felt like swinging a punch. He would love to have smacked him there and then, but that was the old Tony. So they’d had a little row, nice and quiet. No one could possibly have noticed, and that’s good for Tony. When Ventham turns up dead, no one can say they saw Tony Curran and Ian Ventham having a ding-dong. Keeps it clean.
Tony sits on a bar stool, pulls it up to the island in his vast kitchen and slides open a drawer. He needs to get a plan down on paper.
Tony is not a believer in luck, he’s a believer in hard work. If you fail to prepare, you prepare to fail. An old English teacher of Tony’s had once told him that, and he’d never forgotten it. The next year he had torched the same teacher’s car, following an argument about a football, but Tony still had to hand it to the guy. If you fail to prepare, you prepare to fail.
As it turns out, there is no paper in the drawer, so Tony decides to work out the plan in his head instead.
Nothing needs to be done tonight. Let the world continue for a while, let the birds keep singing in the garden, let Ventham think he has won. And then strike. Why did people ever mess with Tony Curran? When had that ever worked out for anyone?
Tony hears the noise a second too late. He turns to see the spanner as it swings towards him. A big one too, real old-school stuff. There’s no way of avoiding the swing and, in the brief moment of realization he has, Tony Curran gets it. You can’t win ’em all, Tony. That’s fair enough, he thinks, that’s fair enough.
The blow catches Tony on the left temple and he collapses to the marble floor. The birds in the garden stop singing for the briefest of moments and then continue their merry tune. High up in the sycamore tree. Or is it the beech?
The killer places a photograph on the worktop, as Tony Curran’s fresh blood begins to form a moat around his walnut kitchen island.
11
Coopers Chase always wakes early. As the foxes finish their nightly rounds and the birds begin their roll-call, the first kettles whistle and low lamps start to appear in curtained windows. Morning joints creak into life.
Nobody here is grabbing toast before an early train to the office, or packing a lunchbox before waking the kids, but there is much to do nonetheless. Many years ago, everybody here would wake early because there was a lot to do and only so many hours in the day. Now they wake early because there is a lot to do and only so many days left.