63

Janice Cooper sat alone in her bedroom with the curtains closed. There was only half an hour till her guests would arrive and she had finished preparing all the salads and desserts. She ran her fingers across her belly and grimaced.

Lying on the bed were the scattered petals of a red rose; she had found it in Joe’s jacket pocket a few minutes earlier. She had wanted matches to light some candles in Joe’s absence and her fingers had curled themselves around it, dried up and shrivelled but still mostly intact. Joe had never bought her roses so it was obviously meant for – or received from – some admirer of his.

She knew that people said ‘once a cheater always a cheater’ but she had really believed Joe had changed. He had been so attentive since he proposed, and had seemed genuinely happy with the prospect of them starting a family together.

Janice remembered her words to Tracy at her engagement party and bile rose up in her throat. She had promised that she would leave if Joe deceived her again; now he had, she simply needed to decide if she had the courage to do so.

* * *

Kyla Roberts sipped a lychee Martini on the deck of the cruise ship. She could see Craig splashing around in the pool; she would join him in a few minutes but, for now, she was working on her tan. She was on a seven-day trip around the Mediterranean, courtesy of a one-off ‘golden handshake’ from Joe for her hard work on recent unspecified projects.

She thought back with delight to the day that the police and Trading Standards had raided their office; the looks on their faces when they realised that all the systems were locked down and that they would not be able to extract any information from the computers. Of course, later on, head office had negotiated via its legal representatives and revealed a small amount of spotless data, after complaining bitterly about the unwarranted investigation.

She was sad to be moving on though. She had liked the set up in Mill Hill. But Craig hadn’t appreciated the looks Joe had given her once or twice when he had come to the showroom to work his IT magic, and she appreciated that to lose Craig, a man of many talents, would be very careless indeed.

* * *

Brian Bateman sat in his office cutting and pasting different names and addresses onto the pro forma letter he had prepared. He had not appreciated quite how many different clients, current and former, he would have to contact, and the task was likely to take him the best part of a week, if not a little more. Predictably, he carried out his activities in a regimented way, as agreed with Judith, giving little thought to any potential consequences or fallout.

First of all, he was tackling the next of kin of testators whose funds were sitting in his overseas account, providing them with the name of an independent solicitor to whom they could go for advice on the will he had drafted for their nearest and dearest. He was also making it clear that, if they chose not to take up alternative advice, then they could nominate a charity to which the languishing funds could be donated.

Once that was complete, he had agreed to contact all those, still living, for whom he had provided his special brand of designer-will, offering them a more straightforward alternative, or the charitable option.

Of course, he had been forced to scrap any prospect of retiring this year. But he comforted himself with the realisation that he would almost certainly have become quickly bored, and that they were unlikely to make his breakfast the way he liked it in many Spanish cafés. And he was still young and full of energy, and charged with new ideas for how to ease his clients’ difficult path through the vagaries of life and death.