Love You Dead by Peter James Page B

the table and vanish.
These are not my parents. This is not my family. I don’t know these people. Really, I don’t.
    At least the weather was better here. Sunny and hot. On the second day they went on a cruise on a tourist lake-boat. She sat with her parents and Cassie on the upper deck, listening to the
running commentary from the boat’s guide, as they sailed from Como to Bellagio, where they were due to stop for an hour for lunch.
    Rising up behind the shoreline of the dark green water of the lake were steep, green hills, dense with olive, oleander and cypress trees. There were small towns and villages with yellow, pink
and white houses, apartment blocks, church towers and factories, printing silk for the world scarf trade, the guide said. Then right on the waterfront, with their private docks and moored launches,
were the grand villas of the rich and famous.
    The guide pointed out each spectacular house in turn. The Versace villa, the Heinz holiday home. The Avon Cosmetics family’s summer residence. A vast extravaganza under construction by a
Russian oligarch. Another vast and slightly vulgar edifice being restored by a London hedge-fund gazillionaire.
    While her father took endless photographs, and Cassie, bored, played Tetris on her Gameboy, Jodie stared in awe. She’d never, in her life, seen houses like this. Their home felt like a
shack in comparison. She wanted one of these places. Felt a yearning, a pang of desire deep inside her. This was the kind of place she was born to live in. She could picture the chauffeur opening
the rear door of her crimson Rolls-Royce as she stepped out onto the driveway, with a clutch of designer carrier bags from Gucci, Versace, Hermès and YSL.
    As the guide talked about an island they were passing on their right, which had a famous restaurant with no menu, Jodie turned to her father.
    ‘Daddy, how do you become rich?’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘How do I get to afford a place like any of those villas we’ve just seen?’
    She could see the same envy she had, reflected in her father’s face. It was as if he was looking at all he had never achieved in his life, she thought. ‘How do you get to afford one
of those?’
    ‘The way you do it, Jodie, is you marry a millionaire.’
    ‘Yeah, but,’ Cassie said, raising her head from her computer game. ‘Only beautiful women marry rich men.’ She turned to Jodie. ‘Which kind of rules you
out.’
    Jodie glared at her sister. Cassie was almost seventeen, two years older than her. It was always Cassie who got the new bicycle, which would then be passed on to her three years later. The new
music system, again handed down to her when Cassie was given a newer more modern one. Even her clothes were mostly hand-me-downs from Cassie.
    They were cruising past a huge villa, set back a short distance from the lake with immaculate gardens in front of it. She saw a group of people sitting at a table beneath a huge cream parasol,
having a lunch party. A large, beautiful wooden Riva powerboat was moored at the bottom of stone steps down to the dock.
    She stared at it. At the group of people. At the boat. She was feeling deep envy, and even deeper resentment. Why wasn’t this her?
    Her father ran his fingers through Cassie’s blonde hair. ‘How are you doing, my angel?’
    Cassie shrugged and nodded.
    Her mother smiled at Cassie, then at her father, then took a photograph of the two of them together, as if Jodie did not exist.
    ‘I’m going to live in a house like that one day!’ she announced.
    Her mother gave her a sweet smile. Humouring her.

22
Tuesday 24 February
    ‘Where the fuck did you get this, doll?’ Graham Parsons held up the memory stick. They were seated at a corner table in the Hove Deep Sea Anglers’ club on the
seafront, with a blurry view through a salt-caked window of upturned fishing boats on the pebble beach. In front of him was a pint of beer. In front of Jodie was a half-pint of lime and soda. A