Love You Dead by Peter James Page A

convertible was more fun for their holiday.
    It was a cold, damp August day and their father insisted on keeping the roof down as they travelled along the French autoroute; the two girls, hair feeling like it was being torn from the roots,
had a flapping tartan picnic rug over them for warmth. As their father drove, their mother attempted to keep their spirits up and boredom at bay by playing endless games. I-spy was their default
game. Sometimes, instead, they would make up words from the letters on the number plate of the car in front of them. And the other game they played was spotting green Eddie Stobart and red Norbert
Dentressangle lorries.
    Cassie was five lorries ahead of Jodie. Cassie was always ahead of her in everything. Cassie had their mother’s blonde hair and beautiful features. Jodie had her father’s dark-brown
wire-brush hair and hooked conk of a nose.
    ‘I spy with my little eye something beginning with R!’ their father said, glancing in the mirror. They were two hours south of Calais, in the Champagne region.
    ‘Rheims!’ Cassie shouted out as a sign for the city loomed ahead.
    ‘No!’ he replied.
    ‘Road sign?’ said their mother.
    ‘No!’
    A large, crimson limousine with GB plates glided past them. Jodie saw, in the back seat, a snotty-looking girl of about her age, wearing Walkman headphones, looking down at them
disdainfully.
    ‘Rolls-Royce!’ Jodie said.
    ‘Yep!’ her father said, as the Rolls pulled away into the distance.
    Jodie stared at it, enviously. Why weren’t they in that car, instead of this crappy old Saab?
    ‘Your turn, Jodie!’ her mother said.
    ‘I’m bored with this silly game,’ she replied, sullenly, still watching the sleek car that was now barely a speck on the horizon. Where were those people going? To somewhere
special with swimming pools and discos? They wouldn’t be staying in the kind of crummy hotels they stayed in every night, she bet.
    She should be travelling down through France in a beautiful Roller like that, too. One day, she vowed, she would. One day people would be staring up at her with envy, as she passed them in the
fast lane.
    It wasn’t a dream, she knew. It was her destiny.
    The following week they stayed three nights in Como. Not in the famous Villa d’Este on the waterfront of the glorious lake – the kind of place where the girl in the
crimson Rolls-Royce would have stayed – but in a B&B in a narrow, dusty backstreet, where she was kept awake in the small bed she had to share with Cassie by the constant blatter of
mopeds and scooters.
    As a treat, their parents took them for a drink at the Villa d’Este the first night. At the table next to them, at the lake’s edge, sat a beautiful family. The tanned father wore a
silky white shirt, pink trousers and black loafers. The mother looked like a contessa, or maybe a movie star. They had a daughter, a few years older than herself, who was wearing a very cool dress,
Manolo Blahnik shoes, and had an elegant Chanel handbag. Jodie wondered if they were famous, because a waiter in a smart red jacket fawned over them repeatedly, topping up their glasses from a
bottle of champagne then replacing it in the shiny silver ice bucket. The three of them were talking, animatedly. The father puffed on a large cigar and the mother was smoking a slender filter-tip
cigarette.
    There were beautiful people at the other tables, too. Elegant women with silk scarves and jewellery; handsome, tanned men in white shirts and sleek trousers.
    Her parents seemed so drab in comparison. Her father was wearing a yellow shirt with a fish pattern, boring grey chinos, socks and sandals. Her mother was looking a little smarter but the effect
was ruined by a dreary white cardigan. Cassie wore an Oasis T-shirt and jeans. It took her father an age to attract the attention of a waiter, and when one finally came he seemed so aloof, as if he
could tell they did not belong there.
    God, Jodie wanted to slide under