Terry found it new and strange, the drugs taxing business. A bit worrying. He knew that sometimes Charlie would get a call from a dealer saying someone had robbed his stash and he’d like Charlie’s help getting it back. That was just fine with Charlie. All he had to do was corner the perpetrator and do a bit of intimidation. But what these small-time dealers didn’t realize at first was that Charlie Stone had absolutely no intention of giving them their stash back. Once he had it in his hand, it was his. He was, after all, lord of the manor. No argument.
‘You’re gonna make a lot of people very angry,’ Terry warned him.
‘So?’ Charlie asked. ‘What’ll they do?’
‘Kill you seems favourite.’
Charlie was moving upward very fast in this brave new world they’d found themselves in, and it was making Terry uneasy. He had responsibilities now. All this money was fine, but he was a married man. There was Jill, and she was already up the duff with his kid. He was pleased as punch about it, but fearful too, and fear was a thing he’d never really known before Charlie started on the drugs business.
Of course, Charlie was putting down roots as well. After a series of low-rent slappers, he seemed to have settled on the most unlikely one of all. Suddenly he’d married Nula Perkins and whisked her off to the Costas on honeymoon, shocking them all. Nula gave Terry a mild case of the creeps and Jill actively disliked her.
‘She said something really weird to me,’ Jill told him one night in bed. ‘She said, “Do you partake?” I didn’t know what the hell she meant, but I’m guessing it was either sex or drugs or both.’
‘Ah, it was probably nothing,’ Terry told his wife, but he was thinking of the way Nula was always eyeballing him – even though she was now officially Charlie’s girl.
Charlie had told him how hot Nula was, up for anything.
‘Hot as fucking mustard,’ he’d told his mate with a wink.
Terry was thinking about that ‘partake’ comment. All right, he knew Charlie was wild, but a woman, well, you expected her to have some standards. He counted himself lucky that his Jill was a one-man woman. He was proud of that fact. And she hadn’t protested when he’d told her about the business they were involved in.
‘We all got to be friends,’ he’d told Jill. ‘We work together.’
‘Yeah, and soon we’ll practically live together an’ all, won’t we?’ said Jill acidly.
Terry sighed.
Jill had kicked off when she’d been told of Charlie’s new plan. A two-up two-down on the manor was no longer good enough for Charlie and Nula Stone. They were looking at big gaffs out Essex way, talking about having one house for the Stones and another nearby for Terry and his tribe. What, live in Charlie’s pocket and in close proximity to Nula, who was already lording it over her because she was Mrs Charlie Stone? Jill’s shrieks of protest could be heard in the next county.
‘It won’t be attached, doll,’ Terry promised, to calm her down. ‘It’ll be separate, our own little place. No mortgage to bother about, no rent.’
‘And all paid for by Charlie Stone.’
‘So what? I work for Charlie. You know that. He wants me close.’
Terry knew that Charlie had decided, when the money had really started to roll in, that he needed space and country air. Charlie and Nula had scouted out a huge grand house with a pool. Him and Nula would live in the main house, which was practically a mansion, Terry and Jill in the much older – but still very grand – gatehouse down at the end of the drive. Jill didn’t like old buildings and protested about the idea, but she didn’t have a leg to stand on. Charlie wanted this, and he wanted Terry right there as his wingman, just like always; so the deal was done.
Since boyhood, that was the way it had always been with them. Charlie forging ahead, Terry following on. But now Terry was full of doubt. The world Charlie was plunging headlong into was darker and more dangerous than anything they’d ever been involved in before. Charlie was self-confident as always, but how much of that confidence was misplaced? Terry thought that Charlie was getting drunk on his own power. Terry missed the old manor. Life had been simple then. Now, Charlie had bought up a cover company, a failing furnishings manufacturer with several factory sites and offices. He’d got it for a song. Then he introduced Terry to a group of shady accountants, bent solicitors, oily bankers – people who’d shake your hand and rob your wallet, all at the same time.
Over dinner at the Dorchester the group explained how Charlie’s increasingly complex business finances could be managed, running one entirely legitimate front business – Stone Furnishings Ltd – alongside ‘the product’. They made it sound simple, like everyone did it. With port authorities in Charlie’s pay, the suits were going to set up a ‘special purpose vehicle’ in one of the low-intervention jurisdictions.
‘Like Switzerland?’ asked Charlie.
‘Like the Caymans,’ said one of the suits. ‘The SPV lends money through the Bahamas and Panama in a series of transactions that are impossible to trace until the cash comes into your account, but of course your name doesn’t appear on the shares register.’
‘Once the money’s rolling in,’ said another, ‘you start to donate to charity, right? I mean, hugely. Makes you look squeaky-clean. Then who knows? One day you get the gong.’
Charlie stared. ‘The what?’
‘The gong. The knighthood. You’ll be Sir Charlie Stone. And lovely Nula’ll be Lady Stone. How’d she like that?’
So this was their life now. They dealt with a network of iffy accountants, questionable fund managers and clever lawyers, all of them with expensive habits to feed – women, drugs, gambling. And Terry was caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, with a wife he loved to distraction and a mate he’d had all his life, closer than a brother, but who seemed to be heading in a direction that could spell disaster for the lot of them.
Finally Charlie snapped when Terry kept moaning on about it all.
‘Look,’ he said to Terry, ‘maybe it’s best we have a parting of the ways, what about that?’
‘No,’ said Terry, shocked that Charlie would even think it. ‘I don’t want that. It’s just . . .’
‘You don’t want it? Good. Then pipe down, all right? All this is doing my fucking head in.’
Terry was silent. Brooding.
‘And you don’t like the taxing business?’ Charlie went on. ‘All right then. We’ll stop it dead. Stick with the importing. How’d that suit?’
‘Yeah. Fine,’ said Terry, and felt a bit happier.
But not much.