Just My Luck

by Adele Parks

  “Does Ridley know?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He didn’t want it. I guess he’s happy now. I think he’s with Evie Clarke.”

  “That won’t last,” she says loyally.

  “I don’t care.”

  “Yeah, you do.”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  She holds my hand and says nothing more. We stay like that for ages. The light in her room starts to change, it becomes orange, then pink. The sun is setting. I feel peaceful. Placed.

  “I’m sorry about that thing we did to you. In the loos, you know.” Megan is mumbling. Embarrassed. She hates apologizing.

  “It’s okay.” It seems a long time ago. So much more and so much worse has happened since. “Why were you so angry, though? You know I would have shared everything with you.”

  “My mum said it was unfair.” Megan shrugged.

  “Your mum and my dad are taking ages with the shopping,” I point out.

  “Most likely gone to the pub. I guess they have a lot to talk about. Or maybe my mum has had a call from the police station.” Megan keeps her eyes on the ceiling. I slide my glance toward her. I’m so happy in this moment, bathed in friendship and an orange sunset, I don’t want to spoil things, but since she’s brought it up...

  “It was you, wasn’t it?”

  “What was me?”

  “You were the person who gave me water and chocolate.” The words stutter out of my mouth, like a faulty firework that you can’t trust because you don’t know when it will explode. “I think you tipped off my dad. Am I imagining this, Megan, or am I right?”

  Megan doesn’t answer straight away. She takes a deep breath. “It was really fucking scary. Seeing you bleed like that. I thought you were going to die. I had to do something.”

  “So, you were there with your dad?”

  I turn to Megan and she’s crying hard now. So many tears. “No, Emily. I was there with my mum. And your dad.”

  CHAPTER 52

  Lexi

  I can’t believe what I’m looking at and yet I can. Confirmation of my worst fears. No, more than that, confirmation of a betrayal I couldn’t ever have imagined. An email confirming two flights to Acapulco International Airport, Mexico. One way. Leaving tonight. Leaving in two hours.

  I call Detective Inspector Owens and tell him what I’ve found. “You are quite sure?”

  “I’ll forward the email to you.” I sound calm, dispassionate; the DI probably thinks I’m heartless. I am. My heart has been ripped out. It’s as though Jake has plunged his fist through my chest and grabbed my heart, gouged it out bloody and beating, stomped on it. Just as easily as someone might break a window. I am shattered.

  The DI says he’ll alert the airport, get people there immediately. “They are probably at the gate. We can get the flight stopped.”

  The doorbell rings. I have no idea who to expect. Not Jake. I hope it is Emily. I’ve texted her already, and she confirmed she is at Megan’s. Even though the app on my phone told me this, I needed to have her confirm it. I don’t want her alarmed, but I have to keep her safe. I’ve told her to come straight home in an Uber, but I guess, even if she follows my instructions to the letter, she’ll be another half an hour.

  It’s Jennifer.

  I almost pity her. We were once so close. Ostensibly we were three legs of a stool, equally involved and committed to one another, but we both secretly knew Carla was the most glamorous, the most sexy. The most spoiled. We did occasionally allow ourselves a moment when we shared a look of envy as we noticed Carla’s long, smooth, tanned legs or her new designer dress, new diamonds dropping discreetly from her earlobes. That’s why discovering Jake’s affair with Jennifer had been such a shock to me. I’d have had my money on Carla being the one he fancied. I guess because I was right in the end, I backed the right horse, and I’m holding the winning ticket. It doesn’t feel like it. I feel like a loser.

  “Where’s Jake?” Jennifer demands, crossing the threshold of my door, coming in uninvited.

  “Not here,” I say simply and honestly.

  She throws me a look of pity. I absorb it and wait for the moment I can spit it back at her. “Lexi, I’m sorry, but it’s time you accepted the situation. I know you know that Jake and I are—”

  “What? What are you?” I demand.

  She colors, not a blush exactly, something closer to a flush of irritation. “We’re together.” I raise my eyebrows, but bite my tongue. “I’ve left Fred, and Jake is leaving you. We’re leaving tonight. It’s all arranged. You lost. I won.”

  “Where are you going?” I ask.

  “I don’t want to discuss that with you.”

  “Mexico?”

  She looks surprised but nods.

  “Wrong, Jennifer—you are not going to Mexico with my husband. Carla is.” Understandably, Jennifer looks confused. “He’s upgraded, apparently. Having money allows you to do that, doesn’t it?”

  “I—I don’t believe you,” she stutters.

  “I’m sure you don’t, but I’m telling the truth. He played you as he played me. He played us all.” Her mouth falls open. I can see her little pink tongue, a tongue she used to lick and suck my husband with. I feel strangely close to her and loathe her, too. I remind myself she is not the worst. She had an affair with my husband, but Carla is worse. She had an affair with my husband and kidnapped my daughter to secure a ten-million-pound ransom.

  And Jake? Jake is the vilest of them all.

  How could he have plotted and hurt the way he most surely has? How could he have put his own daughter in such mortal danger? For money? For sex? “The police are on their way to the airport. They’ll arrest the two of them there. I think Patrick was in on it, too. The kidnapping, that is. Not the affair. They double-crossed him, too. He’s already at the police station.”

  Jennifer starts to tremble. And now I can throw back that look of pity she was in such a hurry to land on me. She starts to turn away from me, reaching for the door handle. She’s shaking too much to manage to grasp it, turn it and leave. I guess she is in a hurry to get home as quickly as she can, tear up the letter she left her husband. I wonder where she left her note. Possibly pinned on the fridge, maybe on the table in the hallway. The letter that says she’s sorry, she’s leaving him. That she has fallen in love with Jake and wants to start a new life. I am not heartless. I open the door for her, but I wonder when she gets back to her comfortable home in Great Chester, will her husband be waiting for her or will he already have left? Taken Ridley with him. I suppose I’ll find out if Fred requests his 2.976 million. I’ve put that aside in a separate account. It’s his, whenever he earns it.

  CHAPTER 53

  Lexi

  Thursday, October 24

  It made the papers, naturally. Not just a discreet little piece in the Buckinghamshire Gazette—a few column inches, the way Reveka’s and Benke’s deaths were reported. No, our story was splashed across tabloids and broadsheets for many consecutive days as the trial played out. Of course it was. It had all the elements to titillate the morbidly curious, the wickedly gossipy: a lottery win, an extravagant lifestyle, illicit sex and shocking violence. Our family’s pain was trumpeted. We were exposed. Everyone got to know that my husband betrayed me not once but twice, both women ostensibly my friends. Friends for fifteen years. It was revealed that, more horrifyingly, he placed his child in extreme danger for financial gain. He was the one who hired the thugs who beat her, bound her, starved her for twenty-four hours. He cried in court, sobbed, swore that he hadn’t given specific instructions for any of that, and that the thugs went too far of their own accord. He had only asked that they hold her. He had thought they were taking her to a hotel, but the thugs had decided that was too risky and made their own plans. Jake had underestimated the vileness, the underlying throbbing brutality, of
the people he had mixed himself up with. He begged the judge and jury to believe him. I want to believe him because he would have to be the absolute devil to have planned to put Emily, his own daughter, through such horrors, but even if I believe him, I still blame him and can never forgive him. There’s no getting away from the fact that he was the one who was responsible for the loss of her child. The loss of her childhood. And Logan’s, come to that.

  Jake wanted more. Always more. A wife, a lover, another lover. During the trial it transpired he’d never offered Jennifer and Fred a million to change their testimony. He’d offered Jennifer a life with him and “his” half of the win. But it wasn’t enough for him to walk away with close to nine million, which he would have got if he’d divorced me. He staged the kidnap to siphon off ten million. If we’d divorced, we’d have split what was left, and he’d have bagged the majority of the cash.

  And he still wanted more. Jennifer wasn’t enough, either.

  Carla was in on the kidnapping plan. Patrick continued to protest his innocence. He also continued to insist that he was due a share of the lottery win and that they had never left the syndicate. I went along to watch the trial. It was distressing, humiliating, but how could I keep away? I noticed that when Patrick insisted that they had never left the syndicate—that they were due a share of the money all along—the judge sneered. Judges are supposed to keep their faces entirely neutral, but he couldn’t stop himself sneering. He seemed disgusted by the whole lot of them. I think that is why he threw the book at them. Custodial sentences. Three years for Carla and Patrick. Seven for Jake. The judge was a father of three teenage girls himself. He must have been sickened.

  Jennifer, Fred and Ridley have moved away. Somewhere up north. Leeds, I think. They want to start again. They want to try again. I wish them well, but mostly I wish them well away from us. I still have an account with almost three million pounds put aside. It’s Fred’s, if ever he should want it enough. He knows the terms. And if he never claims it, I might give it to Ridley, when he’s old enough to manage that sort of wealth properly.

  We’ve put money in trust for Megan and her brothers, too. We wanted them to come and live with us, but the social services decided it was too complicated. They are living with Carla’s sister in Surrey; apparently, she’s a lovely woman. They are settling well enough. I know they will be taken care of, looked after and loved. Emily has stayed in touch with Megan. Their relationship isn’t as tight as it was—how could it be? But they send one another snaps and messages. There’s talk of a meetup in London. I don’t know if it will happen. Time will tell whether they can remain close, after everything. It might be better if the friendship fades. If they move on. Like the social worker said, it’s complicated.

  My children are doing okay. Considering everything, they are doing brilliantly. They have had to deal with so much. They’ve been hurt and horrified in a way that will take years to heal properly. They’ll never get over what’s happened, but I think they will get through it. I’m impressed by their courage, their resilience. We spent the summer in Moldova at Toma’s school for underprivileged kids. It was just what we all needed. To get away. To climb out of our own lives and skins for a while. The work he is doing there is astonishing. He’s genuinely making a profound difference, offering opportunities through education. Lives will be changed for the better. I love him for it.

  I love him for many reasons.

  The kids have returned to their old school. Logan was delighted. He has a great friendship group and simply slipped right back into it. Emily seems to be getting along very well with Scarlett, Liv and Nella. They are sweet girls.

  Sadly, I never went back to CAB. Our family name has been dragged through the mud and I’m basically a reluctant celebrity. Ellie couldn’t in all conscience sanction my return—it would be too disruptive. I miss the bureau, but I understand. You can’t have everything in life. Besides, I want to offer the kids as much stability as I can, and being at home helps with that. I don’t need the money. The police recovered the ten million Jake pretended he’d given to the kidnappers. It was spread through various accounts: most in his and Carla’s name, about a million in Patrick’s account. The money in Patrick’s account suggested his guilt, no matter how much he protested his innocence. I don’t know if that money was his cut of the kidnapping or Carla leaving him a bit of money to assuage her own guilt. Or was it crueller than that? Did she and Jake frame Patrick? I guess that will remain a mystery forever. The money has been returned to me. Emily, Logan and I have spent a lot of time talking about what we might do with it next. Following the experience in Moldova, they both seem keen to set up something similar here in the UK—a trust that gives opportunities, creates light where before there was only despair.

  “Not all of it, though? Right, Mum?” Emily asked. “I mean, we can spend some of it on clothes and stuff.”

  “Of course, I promise.”

  We ended up staying in the rental longer than I expected. It seemed sensible to stay somewhere gated throughout the trial, to avoid being stalked by hungry journos, but we’re moving back into our old home. Whilst we’ve been here, we’ve had some work done on our old place. An extra bedroom, a sunroom. I’m looking forward to going home. To getting back to normal.

  CHAPTER 54

  Saturday, April 13

  “Not this week,” announced Jake, looking up from his phone, his face pulled into an expression that approximated a comedic take on disappointment. “Not a single number.”

  “Situation normal,” said Lexi. No one else responded at all. The lull in conversation seemed heavy. Fred had been talking about, oh, something or other, Lexi couldn’t recall, his car engine? Tire pressure? It hadn’t been gripping, but Jake’s interruption to announce they weren’t lottery winners had created an atmosphere. No one liked to be reminded that they’d lost at anything, even if there was never any real expectation of winning. “Oh, by the way, it’s time to chip in to the kitty again,” she said.

  “Why are we even doing the lotto?” asked Patrick, his face flushed, his voice booming. “What’s the bloody point?”

  Lexi couldn’t understand why he was suddenly grumbling. He’d hit the bottle of red hard that he’d brought with him. Polished it off before she had even served the main.

  “Well, we do it because we’ve always done it, haven’t we? Since we first met. It’s our thing, our gang’s thing.” She smiled coolly. “Do you remember, we used to say if we won, we’d invest in twenty-four-hour childcare?” The absolute dream of all exhausted, shell-shocked new parents.

  “That would still seem like a good investment,” commented Carla with a wry grin. “Perhaps not a nanny but a private detective, someone to follow Megan around—I never know where she is or what she’s up to nowadays.”

  “Or a clairvoyant,” added Jennifer. “To read Ridley’s mind. You are so lucky, Lexi, to have a chatty girl. I don’t get more than a grunt out of my son—typical boy.”

  “Is that the best you can come up with? Spending the dosh stalking your kids?” Jake challenged. “If I won the lotto, I’d have much more fun spending it.”

  “You’d buy a Lamborghini and a yacht, I suppose,” said Fred with a grin.

  “Absolutely,” Jake beamed. “You?”

  “A bigger house. Several bigger houses, actually. One here, one in London.”

  Jennifer joined in. “South of France.”

  “California,” added Carla.

  “What about you, Patrick? Would you invest in property?” Lexi couldn’t stop herself sounding challenging. Not considering all she knew. Patrick had a lot of property already, most of it unfit to keep an animal in. Lexi had found it difficult to sit at the same table as Patrick tonight, to feed him. Considering her suspicions. She now was fully aware that he was a slum landlord—her investigations with Toma had uncovered as much. She was waiting on one more piece of information to discover if he was
the slum landlord. The one that murdered Reveka and Benke. She would know for certain next week. Everything would change next week.

  “Maybe,” said Patrick, and he yawned. He looked bored.

  “Or would you perhaps just make improvements on the places you already own?” she asked hopefully, desperately. Part of her wanted to keep the show on the road. They had all been friends for so long. If they weren’t friends, what would they be?

  “Oh, no, not that,” he chuckled. His big belly, the result of too many indulgent work lunches, shook. “Don’t want to spoil the tenants.” Lexi felt sick.

  “I think I’d send Ridley to a posh sixth form. Marlborough or Eton,” chipped in Jennifer.

  Jake excitedly took up the mantle. “I’d want swimming pools in all my properties. I’d only ever fly first class from then on in.”

  “I’d dress entirely in haute couture, even to do the housework,” said Carla.

  “You don’t do the housework,” muttered Patrick. “We have a cleaner.”

  “Wouldn’t any of you do anything good with it?” All five pairs of eyes swivelled to Lexi, who had asked the question.

  “Good?” they chorused.

  “Give to charities? Sent up trusts or foundations?”

  “Oh, yes, yes, of course,” they hurried to reassure her.

  “I’m just saying it would be great fun to spoil oneself, you know, totally,” commented Carla. Patrick looked irritated. As far as Lexi could tell, he did a good job of spoiling his wife as it was; the woman could be so greedy. Did she have any idea how others lived so she could wear Jimmy Choos, so her husband could get fat? Surely not. Lexi hoped not. If Carla knew about the state of the properties, that would be too much. That would be unbearable.

  “I’d buy a really decent watch for every day of the week,” said Jake. “You know, a Patek Philippe for Monday, a Chopard for Tuesday, a Rolex for Wednesday—”