Free Gangsters' Wives by Tammy Cohen

be druggies, drunks, villains and hangers-on. He appears on stage shows in small provincial towns, sometimes with Dave Courtney – a sad testimony to that young boy, with such proud parents, who set off from his small town in Wales to study at Balliol College, Oxford.
    Of course I used to think he was wonderful too. Howard had, and continues to have, an amazing ability to make people fall in love with him. When you meet him you get the impression that life with him would never be dull. Howard’s charisma wins everyone over, always has and probably always will.
        Mr Nice & Mrs Marks
is published by Ebury Press

‘CARLY’
     
    Now twenty-six, Carly [all names in this chapter have been changed] was just eighteen when she became involved with John, a powerful figure fourteen years her senior. John was living on the Costa del Sol after fleeing from his native Ireland where his drug-trafficking activities had earned him the epithet ‘Ireland’s Most Wanted Man’. Carly, young and naive, was blinded by love and seduced by the opulent lifestyle John was offering. She became so embroiled in John’s life and ‘work’, helping out at every level of the business, that when the relationship began to unravel, she feared he would never allow her to leave. Now a cash-strapped student with a new boyfriend, Carly still hasn’t quite left the past behind her. Nervous, but articulate and composed, she checks the door often when giving her interview, and insists all names are changed for fear of reprisals …
    When I was in college the other day, I took out a pen to copy down some notes. The girl next to me gasped when she noticed the sparkling crystals inset all the way along. I felt my face burn with embarrassment as I returned it quickly to its box. Because that set of two Swarovski pens would probably cost more than that girl lives on in a month. If there was ever a symbol of pointless excess, those jewel-encrusted pens are surely it. They’re also one of the few reminders I have left of the life I used to live.
    To look at me now, in my nondescript jeans, with my hair scraped back, you’d never believe I used to regularly go out shopping with €3000 or €4000 stuffed into my purse. If I liked a thousand-euro handbag, I’d get three in different colours. I had everything money could buy – Prada, Gucci, Jimmy Choo – the higher the price tag, the more of it I had. And when I grew bored with the boutiques of Marbella and Puerto Banus, I’d fly to New York for the weekend to hit the shops there – first class, of course. I owned a car before I’d had my first driving lesson, and once I passed I drove a different car practically every month – Porsche, BMW – the names were all the same to me. I had everything money could buy. If you could have seen my soul, it probably had a designer label on it. But you know what, I might have gained all this shiny, glittering stuff, but I’d lost something I thought I’d never find again. I’d lost all knowledge of who I was.
    I certainly wasn’t brought up in that kind of lifestyle. I was born in England and spent my first ten years there in a very normal household. Mum was a nurse, Dad did a variety of different jobs. My brother and I went to school and learned the difference between right and wrong, just like everyone else.
    Then, when I was coming to the end of primary school, my parents decided they’d had enough of rising prices and – ironic though it seems now – soaring crime levels in Britain. They decided to move to Marbella on Spain’s Costa del Sol, where they believed a better life awaited us.
    I went to Spanish school when we moved and got on well, becoming fluent in a very short space of time. We all settled in and though, as a traditional bolthole for UK criminals, it wasn’t the promised land it might have seemed, the weather and the beach lifestyle made up for the downsides.
    Being fluent in Spanish – not as common as you’d think amongst the