A Twist of the Knife by Peter James Page B

to win the lottery. It was a fact. An absolute racing certainty. He was so damned confident that he was going to win that often, over a few drinks at his favoured corner table in The Dog and Pheasant, which he visited most nights, he would spend time going over the list of all the things he was going to buy and the investments he would make with the money.
    He subscribed to a range of lifestyle magazines, which he always read cover to cover, tearing out and filing away pages featuring items he was considering buying when ‘L-Day’, as he called it, finally came. A yacht – probably a custom-built Sunseeker; cars – well, it would have to be an Aston Martin Vanquish for himself, and a convertible Mercedes SL AMG for madam; a private jet, of course – he rather fancied a Lear; a Hublot watch.
    There’d be a new house too. Gail told him she thought it was strange that he had a new house so far down his list of priorities – considering they weren’t exactly living in a palace right now. Yep, right . . . well, that was another story.
    Ricky was a systems manager, with responsibility for the computers in the Brighton head office of a national web design and development company. Algebra and maths were his thing, always had been, and it was through playing around with the six numbers of the lottery that one day, eight years back, he had his light-bulb moment. He saw something in the randomness of those figures that, so far as he could see, no one else had – and certainly not anyone at Camelot who ran the lottery.
    A year ago the firm had gone into liquidation and he had so far not found another job. He’d done a few bits and pieces of IT work for friends and acquaintances, and they were kept afloat – just – by Gail’s job as a bookkeeper for a small firm of estate agents. Gail was worried as hell about their financial future, but he was happy and confident. He was going to win the lottery. Oh yes. His system rocked!
    You make your own luck in life.
    Whenever he talked about it to Gail, her eyes glazed over. He’d told her, on their first date, that one day they were going to be richer than Croesus. But when, after that light-bulb moment, he had begun to explain how, expounding enthusiastically his applications of elements of calculus, Pythagoras, Noether’s Theorem and the Callan-Symanzik Equation, her eyes would always begin to glaze over. In fact, throughout the years of their marriage, her eyes had begun to glaze over faster and faster. Recently, the moment he began to talk mathematics, he could almost hear them glazing over. It was as if the cords holding up shutters had been severed, and they’d fallen with a resounding crash.
    But Ricky barely noticed. He wasn’t talking to her anyway; he was really addressing himself, reassuring himself, reconfirming all that he knew. He was going to win one day for sure. The big one – the National Lottery. And, for a whole number of reasons, it would be really convenient for him if it happened quite soon. Ideally within the next few weeks, please! His fortieth birthday was looming, and it was not a milestone he was happy about. He’d read somewhere that if you haven’t made it by the time you are forty, you are not going to make it.
    And, as Gail had only too accurately pointed out, in eight years of spending twenty pounds a week on tickets for his system, to date he had had just one small win of fifty pounds to show for his efforts.
    She’d calculated that if he had banked twenty pounds a week over this same period of time, they’d have over eight thousand pounds saved – and more, with interest.
    ‘Just how far would that amount get you today?’ he would retort.
    ‘It would get us a new dishwasher, which we can’t afford,’ Gail reminded him. ‘It would enable us to pay for a holiday – which we haven’t had for two years because you say we can’t afford one. It could replace my car, which is a basket case.’
    Most importantly of all, in her mind, it