groaned. He was a bargainer, Jackson reckoned. Did he want to bargain with God? Was that what Pascal’s wager was?
‘Or, I’ll finish you off right now and you’ll go straight to hell. Do the right thing,’ Jackson said again. ‘Take some responsibility for all the pain and suffering you’ve caused. Confess your sins,’ he said, appealing to the man’s inner Catholic. ‘Find redemption. Absolution. And Andy,’ he added, putting his lips closer to his ear, ‘if you don’t keep your mouth shut about who shot Stephen Mellors, I’ll hunt you down and tear your heart out and feed it to my dog.’
When he retrieved Dido later she gazed at him enquiringly. She didn’t look as if she would be a particularly eager participant in the promised gore fest. He gave her a dog treat instead. She really did seem to prefer the ones shaped like bones.
High Noon
Love was hard to come by, but money was easy. If you knew where to find it. In a safe, of course, where else? When they renovated High Haven, Tommy had installed one, a sturdy, old-fashioned one, a vault. It stood in the corner of the office, drilled into the floor, and came with a big key and an even bigger double-handed lever on the front, just asking to be turned. It could have played the central character in a heist movie. It was a safe that said, ‘Look at me, don’t bother looking for anything else.’ It contained, however, only a thousand pounds or so in cash, which was small change to Tommy.
The safe also contained some odds and ends of jewellery, trinkets really, alongside a few documents that looked as if they might be important but weren’t. ‘So then,’ Tommy had explained to Crystal, ‘if someone breaks into the house in the middle of the night and holds a knife to your throat’ (why were they holding the knife to her throat and not his? Crystal wondered) ‘and tells you to open the safe, it won’t matter.’ (A knife to her throat wouldn’t matter?) ‘You can open this one and they’ll think they’ve got away with our loot.’ (Loot? It was Tommy who thought he lived in a heist movie, not the safe.) He kept the ‘important things’ – their passports and birth certificates, his ‘investment’ Richard Mille watch (criminally expensive), Crystal’s diamond bracelet and her diamond pendant necklace and twenty thousand pounds or so in twenty-pound notes – in a different, somewhat smaller safe, one that had been drilled into the wall of the study and that hid itself behind an indifferent print of yachts at sea called Sails at Dawn. ‘A safer safe’ was what Tommy called it, pleased with this ruse.
‘Your old man must be really paranoid,’ the man who had fitted the safe had laughed. He was from the straightforwardly named Northern Safe Installers (‘All our engineers have enhanced DBS checks and vetting to BS 7858 standards’) and spent most of the day hammering and drilling in the study. ‘It’s like Fort Knox in here,’ he said.
‘I know,’ Crystal said, handing him a well-sugared mug of coffee and a four-finger KitKat. She kept a special supply of treats for workmen. They respected her for it and proved eager to please her with all sorts of extra little jobs. (‘While you’re here, do you think you could just fix …?’ and so on.) Tommy said it wasn’t the four-finger KitKat that made them want to please her, it was her tits and her arse. Crystal wondered sometimes – if she was substituted overnight by a replica, a really good robot (a ‘high-functioning android’, Harry supplied), would Tommy notice? ‘Two safes,’ she said. ‘I know. You’d think we were hiding the Crown Jewels.’
‘Three,’ the safe-installer corrected, intent on labelling the various sets of keys.
‘Three?’ Crystal queried lightly. ‘He has gone overboard, hasn’t he? He’s a one, Tommy. Where’s he putting the third one? There’s hardly any room, surely?’
The second phone. The third safe. The fourth musketeer. Five gold rings. Just one, actually, and it was brass, not gold – a recessed ring pull, fitted flush into a floorboard.
‘Better safe than sorry, I suppose,’ Crystal said.
‘Funny,’ the safe-fitter said.
Later that evening, when she looked in the study, she found that Tommy was in the process of hanging Sails at Dawn in front of the second safe. She could see that he had covered the hiding place of the third safe with the heavy metal filing cabinet. It was too bulky to