Unlucky For Some

by Jill McGown

  UNLUCKY FOR SOME

  A NOVEL OF SUSPENSE

  JILL MCGOWN

  Ballantine Books • New York

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  * * *

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  About the Author

  Also by Jill McGown

  Copyright Page

  CHAPTER ONE

  * * *

  In the cold, gray light of a mid-February afternoon, Michael Waterman watched Detective Chief Superintendent Raymond Yardley’s putt roll gently over the manicured green heading toward the thirteenth hole, and walked over, hand outstretched, conceding the putt before the ball had stopped moving. “Too good,” he said, taking out his wallet, and extracting five twenties. “I believe we said a hundred?”

  “We did.” Ray grinned, sliding the notes into his back pocket. “Which means a lot more to me than it does to you.”

  Michael picked up both balls and put his redundant putter back in the bag, hoisting it to his shoulder as the two men walked together toward the clubhouse. He’d lost at the thirteenth hole on the thirteenth of the month—maybe there was something in the superstition after all.

  But Ray’s burly figure dwarfed the slight, wiry Michael, and that was much more likely to be where Michael’s problems lay. Admittedly, Michael was looking closely at fifty and Ray had just turned forty, but they were both fit, they were both competitive. Age wasn’t a factor. Ray could drive the ball farther, it was as simple as that; he gave himself a better chance of a simple approach shot to the green. Maybe, Michael thought, he should go to one of these coaches to help him get more power into his shot.

  “I’d have thought you’d know better than to gamble,” said Ray. “At least when you know you don’t stand a chance of winning.”

  “I make my living from people who gamble when they’ve no chance of winning. And I would remind you that some of my best customers are coppers.”

  Ray grinned. “Oh—policemen gamble on anything. I think our unofficial bookies sometimes take more than you do in a day’s trading.” He pulled open the clubhouse door, and stood aside to let Michael go ahead. “The current book is on who’s going to head the major crime unit—the betting’s been very heavy.”

  “Oh?” Michael frowned. “I thought that had been shelved.”

  “The serious crime squad’s been shelved—it was felt that the specialist units already in place covered the causes of most serious crime. Drugs, fraud, terrorism—that sort of thing. The major crime unit will have a different brief,” he said, as they reached the bar. “What’ll you have?”

  “A whisky, thanks.” It was a rare treat; Michael never drank when he was driving, and he was usually driving. “So what would this major crime unit do?”

  “It would deal with the serious crimes non-criminals commit. The thinking is that detectives used to dealing with known offenders and hardened criminals aren’t so hot when it comes to honest citizens turned murderers. Crimes like that need a different approach. It would be a small, hand-picked unit.”

  “Is there enough of that sort of crime to keep a specialist unit going?”

  “I think so, because of the length of time they can take to investigate. But they’ll also reopen cold cases, see what someone with a bit more imagination than the average copper can do with them.”

  Michael smiled. “I’m tempted to say that everyone has—”

  “I know, I know,” said Ray, before Michael could finish. “But some of us can see past the ends of our noses.”

  Present company excepted, thought Michael. Ray might have fast-tracked his way to his current job of heading Malworth CID, but he had no imagination whatsoever. “So who’s the front-runner?” he asked.

  “Detective Chief Inspector Hill, assuming she applies for it. I told you we gambled on anything—she might not come under starter’s orders. She’s based at Malworth—she’s done a good job there.” He smiled. “She’s very attractive, too.”

  “Well—maybe I can get an introduction.”

  “Sorry, Mike, she’s taken. She’s married to DCI Lloyd over at Stansfield.”

  Even better, thought Michael. Married women didn’t expect anything from you. “She kept her own name?”

  “Only to avoid confusion. They are happily married, with a two-year-old daughter.”

  “More fast-track coppers?”

  “No. This is second time around for both of them—she’s ten years younger than him, though. I think you’ve met DCI Lloyd—he’s Welsh, not particularly tall. Very dark hair, what there is of it.”

  “Oh, yes. I remember him.” Michael smiled. “A two-year-old daughter will keep him on his toes.”

  “They’ve been together for years, but they only got married about eighteen months ago.” Ray asked for the menu, and once they had ordered, he settled in for a gossip. “Apparently, it all started twenty-odd years ago when they were both in London, at the Met. He was married, but she wasn’t. Then next thing, she goes and marries some man and goes to live in Nottingham, while he gets a divorce, but she doesn’t know that. Anyway, she manages to persuade her husband to move to Stansfield . . .”

  Michael stopped listening, as he often did with Ray. He liked his brother-in-law, but he seriously suspected that he never actually stopped talking. Having a conversation with him was almost impossible, once he’d got going. Michael wondered if he was like that at work.

  Being related by marriage to casino owners was not something the constabulary recommended to its senior officers, but it hadn’t held Ray back, because in his line of work Michael heard the odd whisper of use to the police, and it sometimes worked to their advantage. And Michael played it straight, for the most part. His business dealings were squeaky clean and always had been, but if Ray really believed that he just resigned himself to writing off large gambling debts that he couldn’t recover in court, that just showed how little imagination he had.

  During the meal, Michael was given a minute assessment of everyone’s chances in the Bartonshire Constabulary promotion stakes, and by the time he was being deposited at his front door, he could have opened a book on the outcome himself. He retrieved his golf bag from the boot, slammed it shut and tapped the roof of the car, watching as the X-type Jaguar swept back down his graveled driveway. He raised a hand in salute as its taillights disappeared from view, and smiled. He had never bought a Jag—he drove a modest Ford Focus, and it got him from A to B in comfort, so he was quite happy with that.

  All his adult life he had consciously veered away from the overt trappings of self-made wealth; no camel-hair coats and gold identity bracelets for him, no flashy sports cars or Havana cigars. He wasn’t about to play the part of the East End boy made good, even if he was one. His family had moved to Bartonshire from London when he was fifteen, so the accent had been ironed out, but he was an East End boy at heart.

  The Grange was the only ostentation he had ever allowed himself, and it was different, because Josephine had grown up in Stoke Weston village, and her dream had been to live in the Grange, so when it came on the market twenty years ago, Michael had bought it. It sat in several picturesque acres of Stoke Weston, and had once been someone’s country house. Whoever that was had probably only used it part of the year, and that was ostentation in Michael’s book. At least he lived there all year round. But he did employ a full-time housekeeper and gardener, not to mention part-time cleaners and groundsmen, and it was a hell of a siz
e for just him and Ben.

  Come to that, Ben was hardly here now that he was at university—perhaps he should think about selling. But then, Ben loved it, too; it had been a great place for a boy to grow up. He and his friends had played for hours in the woods, and the old summerhouse by the lake had in its time been everything from a prehistoric cave to a spaceship. They had camped out in it—though Michael would hardly call it camping, in something as sturdy and weatherproof as that—and it had been a self-important clubhouse for some secret society at one time. It was kept in good order, but no one used it at all now Ben’s friends were all grown up.

  They had held barbecues, played cricket and croquet on the lawns, messed about in boats on the lake, and everyone had had great fun. Ben might want to live here when he got married and had kids, which he would do sooner or later. No, he’d hang on to the Grange for the moment.

  Anyway, he liked being able to host parties and business gatherings here—he was very fond of Stoke Weston, and enjoyed showing it off. And he took not a little pride in the fact that he was a one-man job provider; wherever possible, he employed people from the village in his various enterprises. He knew who he could trust, and what capabilities they had to offer, so it suited him, and the resentment that might have been felt at this upstart in the villagers’ midst was totally absent.

  Fine snow began to fall, shaking Michael from his reverie. As he went into the house, he could hear Ben on the phone to someone. He had come home for the weekend for a friend’s twenty-first birthday party, and was going back tonight. Michael leaned the golf bag silently against the wall, and listened.

  “. . . but I’ll be gone by then, I don’t want to go without seeing you at all. I’ve missed you. I always miss you—you know that. Can’t you get the time off? Ask to leave early? Good. So you’ll meet me there? You know where they are, don’t you? No—not them. The ones on Waring Road. They’re only about five minutes from the bingo club. They’re empty—he’s just had them done up, but they’re not on the market yet. Yes—that’s the ones. It’s quicker to come on foot through the alleyway from Murchison Place—the one-way system takes you miles off the route. I’ll be in number three. OK, Stephen, see you at half past eight or so.”

  Michael frowned, then let the door close with a bang, and went along the hallway to the sitting room. Perhaps he’d misheard. He’d thought Ben had finished with that sort of nonsense years ago.

  Ben rose from the sofa with the easy grace that he had inherited from Josephine, along with her dark hair. Michael’s was sandy and, these days, sparse.

  As he thought of her, Michael looked quickly down at the thickly piled carpet. It had been seventeen years since she’d died, and he still felt tears prick the back of his eyes when she came into his mind. She had married him when he was twenty years old, and hadn’t enough money even to take her out for a meal, and she had given him the capital he needed to open his first betting shop. She had been ten years older than him, and everyone had thought she was mad, that he’d married her for the money, but that wasn’t how it was at all.

  And she had been right to believe in him: the betting shop had turned into shops in the plural, and he had expanded into bingo clubs, nightclubs, and the Lucky Seven casino, making himself a millionaire several times over. That was when he’d bought the Grange. Now, as Ben had just mentioned on the phone, he was moving into property development. He had repaid Josephine’s investment with handsome interest, despite her protests that she was his wife, and didn’t want the money back. She had put it all into a trust for Ben, then just a baby, to be paid out on his twenty-first, and that, unbelievably, was just three months away. Time moved on at an alarming rate.

  “Good game?”

  He looked up with a determined smile, not wanting to embarrass Ben with his show of emotion. “Not really. Ray sees me as some sort of income supplement.”

  “Oh.” Ben smiled. “I can never see the attraction of golf myself—something I daren’t say in St. Andrews, of course.”

  “I should think not.”

  He might have been blessed with his mother’s looks, but the brains that had allowed Ben to go to university in the home of golf were acquired from Michael himself, and the mature confidence and expensively educated accent—whether Ben liked it or not—from his cash. Ben had always been a little uncomfortable with the source of his privileged upbringing, Michael thought. Bingo clubs and betting shops were a little too down-market for him.

  “And why you should want to play on a freezing cold day in the middle of February is beyond me. It’s snowing, for God’s sake!”

  Michael sat down, and picked up the newspaper. “It wasn’t snowing when we were playing. It was a bit fresh, I grant you. But it’s character-building.” He turned the page of his newspaper. “Will I have the pleasure of your company this evening?” he asked, with studied would-be indifference to the answer.

  Ben glanced at his watch, reminding Michael irresistibly of a clothing catalogue model. Tall, slim . . . whatever he chose to wear looked like what everyone else should be wearing. What with that and his rosy financial prospects, the girls should be queuing up. But he still hadn’t got over that foolish notion.

  “Sorry—no. My train leaves at ten past ten, and I’ve promised to meet some people for a drink before I go.”

  “Have you eaten?”

  “No—I’ll grab something on the train. I’m off to have a quick shower—I’ll pop my head round the door before I go.”

  Michael nodded acknowledgment, and waited until he could no longer hear his son’s footsteps in the hallway before picking up the phone and hitting the redial button.

  In Malworth, Keith Scopes was gloomily eyeing the safe in the security office of the Stars and Bars nightclub, thinking that if he could just borrow two hundred quid to buy some stuff, he’d be able to pay it back in no time. Long before Mr. Waterman missed it—he wouldn’t be emptying it until tomorrow morning. If he could just get hold of some Es and some coke, he could sell it tonight and put the money back before anyone knew it had gone.

  Being security personnel was the perfect cover—he was there to prevent drug abuse or any other sort of trouble on Mr. Waterman’s various premises, and that’s what he did. He didn’t know where the street-dealers he sold the stuff to plied their trade, but the deals were made on the understanding that they steered clear of anywhere he was working. And he didn’t deal very often, which was why the police didn’t know that he did it at all. Just now and then, when he needed to boost his income with something more certain than gambling. The problem tonight was that he had no income left to boost.

  The safe was sitting there with over two thousand pounds in it, Keith knew. Just a couple of hundred, that was all he needed. Then a quick trip to Barton, and he’d be laughing. It would be so easy, but he had no access to the safe, so it was wishful thinking. Mr. Waterman might call him a security officer on his wage slip, but in his case that was code for hired muscle. Keith had plenty of that; plenty of muscle, plenty of hair—Michelle said he looked a bit like Elvis in his prime. That was why she went out with him in the first place, apparently, even though he was a bit on the short side for her.

  Funny that, he thought. A bloke that’s been dead for a quarter of a century still turns them on. But whether or not he had Elvis’s looks, he didn’t have his money. And he didn’t have a key to the safe, or anything else, come to that. No one with his record was ever going to be given the key to someone else’s safe. Mr. Waterman wasn’t stupid.

  “You couldn’t lend me twenty until payday, could you?” he asked Jerry.

  “Jesus, Keith—it’s only Sunday!”

  “Yeah, well—my hot tip is still running.”

  “Sorry, mate.” Jerry fished a fiver out of his back pocket. “That any good to you?”

  Not really, but Keith took it, nodding his thanks.

  “Why don’t you tell Waterman not to bother paying you at all? You just give it all back to him.”

  “I
don’t bet in his shops,” said Keith. “I don’t want him knowing all my business.”

  “Oh, right—you’ve certainly got one over on him there, Keith.” Jerry clipped on his tie, and checked himself in the mirror.

  Mr. Waterman was very particular about how his staff looked. Jerry said he was worse than his sergeant-major in the army had been. Nightclub doormen wore dark suits, white shirts and clip-on ties. Casino staff wore black-tie. Keith, who worked where he was needed, even had a security guard’s uniform, because he sometimes looked after the security at Mr. Waterman’s house parties, and the security men at the Grange had to look official.

  “You want to marry Michelle and have some kids,” said Jerry. “Then you’d have to stop throwing your money away.”

  “Why would I want to do that? I’m twenty-one, not forty-one. We’re all right as we are.”

  “That Tony Baker bloke should be interviewing you for his book.”

  “Who?”

  “Tony Baker. You know—the guy off the telly who was at the casino on Saturday night. Sharp dresser—light brown wavy hair, tall, permanent tan. Thinks he’s it.”

  “Oh, him. I didn’t know he was on TV. Why should he interview me?”

  Jerry shook his head. “He’s researching gambling, isn’t he? He might want to find out what makes a born loser give his pay-packet away every week. It’s time you settled down—you can’t duck and dive all your life.”

  “Why not?” Keith’s mobile phone’s ring vied with the music that was suddenly booming out from the club as the DJ tested the sound system, and he kicked the door shut as he fished it out of his pocket. “It’s my life.” He still had to hold a finger in his ear when he spoke. “Hello?”

  “Got a job for you,” Waterman said. “Tonight.”

  It was his fairy godmother. Keith listened to what he had to do, already spending the money. Mr. Waterman was pretty generous when he wanted something done that he couldn’t do himself.

  “I’ll text your mobile when it’s time. Come to the bingo club for your money when you’ve done. Any questions?”