Love You Dead by Peter James

when he stopped to think about it, he couldn’t really blame the kids. Just how many days in all their years had he ever
spent at home with them? He’d felt a stranger every time he’d walked in through the front door.
    What he really wanted now, he realized, was what he had once had and lost. To be married, have kids, live in a nice house, drive a nice car. But above all to be a proper father. A parent. The
father he’d never had.
    But how?
    Approaching forty, with 176 previous offences, that was not going to be so easy, he knew. Not many people would give him a job – and most of the limited options were menial and poorly
paid. His best hope was to carry on with the lucrative trade he knew – and just hope to hell he could be smart enough not to get caught and arrested yet again.
    He was seeing a new lady, Angi Bunsen. She was thirty, had her own house and a job as a book-keeper with a firm of accountants. She knew all about his past and didn’t mind. She’d
told him last night, in bed, that she loved him. She wanted to have his child. He’d proposed to her as he held her in his arms and she’d said yes, she would marry him. On one condition.
No more burgling. She didn’t want a husband she’d only get to see in a prison visiting room. She didn’t want to have to fib to their children that Daddy was away on business or,
worse, have to take them to see him in his prison clothes and with his prison complexion.
    So he’d promised her previously. Told her a white lie that he had a job stacking pallets in a car spares warehouse, often working late and night shifts, and she believed him. He felt
happier tonight than he could ever remember. He wanted to buy her a ring, a great big rock, put it on her finger and take her away to somewhere beautiful in the sun, somewhere that she deserved to
be.
    Angi!
    He really did love her. Loved her name. Loved her tenderness. Her trusting eyes. If he could only get a bit of money together to give her all the things he wanted to, and that she deserved.
There were a few ways for ex-cons to make big money legally. Telephone sales was one. He’d heard from a fellow cellmate a few years ago that some telesales companies didn’t care about
your background, so long as you could sell. But he wasn’t sure he was much of a salesman. Driving a cab was another option which appealed more. An owner cabbie could gross fifty grand a year
in Brighton. A journeyman driver got a lot less.
    But to buy a taxi plate in the city was currently £48,000. And the gap at this moment between that and what he had in his bank account was precisely £47,816. He could probably get
another few hundred quid towards it from flogging his shit heap of a car – his fifteen-year-old, clapped-out rust bucket of a Fiat Panda. But for a while longer, he needed it.
    Forty-eight thousand quid wasn’t an insurmountable gap. The
Argus
from time to time very obligingly printed a list of the top-twenty most expensive properties in the city.
    It was as if they printed it just for him!
    He’d wised-up in this past year out of prison. There was no point stealing cheap shit – just like the lesson he’d learned when he’d been caught burgling in Whitehawk. So
he’d been doing his research on the internet, learning to identify expensive jewellery and high-value watches. He reckoned himself now to be a bit of an expert. And he’d identified a
group of houses where he was likely to find these. Watched the movements of the owners over the past weeks.
    He felt ready.

21
The past
    It was the last summer holiday that the four of them would spend together. As usual Jodie and her sister, Cassie, sat hunched and jammed-in in the back of their mother’s
ageing Saab convertible, surrounded by luggage for a three-week motoring holiday touring through France, Germany, Switzerland and Italy, being blasted by the wind. They’d have been more
comfortable in their father’s much bigger Jaguar, but he was adamant that a