Free Love You Dead by Peter James Page B

to – but could barely afford – The Towers Convent. Unlike
Jodie, Emira Socorro was genuinely posh. Like Cassie, she was beautiful. And like Cassie, boys flocked around Emira at parties, charmed by her exotic accent. Emira’s parents had a huge
Georgian country house, with both an indoor and outdoor swimming pool, a tennis court, a lake and a butler.
    Emira had taken an instant shine to Jodie and they had become firm friends, smoking secretly together, getting drunk, occasionally taking drugs. It wasn’t until some years later that Jodie
realized quite why it was that Emira stuck to her so closely. It was because she was useful to her in many ways. Her plain looks made Emira shine. She lost count of the times that she played
gooseberry to Emira’s endless conquests with guys. And she learned, at the age of sixteen, that the one way she could keep up with Emira was to put herself out to guys.
    She became a regular one-night-stand merchant. The easy shag for drunken guys at parties who’d failed to pull the girls they were actually after. Unceremonious humps behind sofas, on piles
of coats in a spare room, in the back of their mummy or daddy’s cars. And once in a potting shed that smelled of mushrooms.
    She found she actually enjoyed her reputation as the local bike. She enjoyed it a lot more than the sex itself, which she didn’t mind. She carried a stash of condoms in her handbag and
used to delight in boasting of her own conquests to an often-astonished Emira.
    When they were eighteen they lost almost all contact. Emira went off to finishing school in Austria. Jodie went to Southampton University to study Sociology – and to get away from her
parents.
    The last time she saw Emira was at her friend’s twenty-first birthday party – a swanky affair at her parents’ Sussex mansion, filled with beautiful people, and where the band
The Manfreds had been hired to play. Hardly anyone she knew was there and Jodie wandered around getting increasingly pissed and aggressive. Eventually she’d found herself staggering up the
driveway to her family home, sometime after dawn had begun to break, unsure whether she had just shagged the guy who’d given her a lift or not.
    Two years later she’d opened a copy of
Hello!
and seen a six-page spread of Emira’s society wedding to a young, gorgeous aristocratic rock promoter who owned a chunk of
prime London real estate, a stately home in Scotland, a clifftop mansion in Barbados and a villa on Cap Ferrat.
    ‘It’s just so nice having a private jet. It means not having to share one’s plane journey anywhere with a bunch of strangers,’ Emira was quoted as saying. Then she was
further quoted, making Jodie cringe: ‘I’m really not a snob. I have friends from all walks of life. Those are the kinds of people I grew up with, you know. Just ordinary
people.’

16
Friday 20 February
    Landing at Heathrow at 6.30 a.m. on Friday, Jodie had a slight hangover and was red-eyed from tiredness. She’d been too wired to sleep, so instead had watched a couple of
movies, but had been unable to concentrate on them.
    Now, after a shower and breakfast in the arrivals lounge, her top priority was to go home, get into her Mercedes and drive to the cattery at Coriecollies Kennels, near Lewes, to collect her
beloved cat.
    Her second was business.
    Graham Parsons had been waiting for her at the rear of Marrocco’s, on Hove seafront, seated beneath a huge painting, almost the width of the wall, of a happy-looking fat
man tucking into a lobster.
    The front part of the establishment was a colourful ice-cream parlour. The rear, smart and subdued, with comfortable seating and modern art on the walls, was a seafood restaurant. A bottle of
champagne sat in an ice bucket, and he had a plate of oysters in front of him.
    He was a solidly built, hard-looking man, just shy of his sixtieth birthday – so he had told her the first time they met, in the downstairs bar one Saturday night in