Free Least of Evils by J.M. Gregson Page B

them.’
    â€˜No mate, we don’t. But that’s where we’re well placed, see.’ Gannon looked round the pub again, leaned towards Eddie, then tapped the side of his nose with immense relish. He didn’t often get the chance to enlarge on the subtlety of his plans. ‘I’ve got this contact. We pass on all the golf gear fast as shit sliding off a shovel. You don’t get a big price, but you move the hot gear on fast.’
    â€˜And how do we get these sets of clubs?’
    Again the crafty, confidential grin. At this moment, Luke himself could hardly believe how clever he was. There’s wooden lockers all along the walls. Each with a set of clubs in. They’re locked, but I’ve got keys that will open most of them. If they don’t, you’ll find a ten-year-old could force them.’
    He was so enthusiastic that Eddie had to force himself to ask the obvious question. ‘And what are the members doing while we’re pinching their gear?’
    â€˜Out on the course enjoying their daft game, most of ’em, if we choose our time right. Course, the ones whose gear we pinch from the lockers aren’t there at all.’ He watched whilst Barton nodded dubiously. ‘You in, then?’
    Eddie’s mind was screaming a no, telling him that it couldn’t be as easy as this and that Luke Gannon was far too confident for his own good. But he was grateful for the offer, even a little flattered to be considered.
    So his lips said, ‘Go on then. I need the cash, don’t I?’
    Greta Ketley conducted the affair with the utmost caution from the start. That was made easier by the fact that no one seemed to consider it possible that anyone would attempt to stray from the bed of Oliver Ketley. She rather enjoyed that thought, just as she enjoyed the enormity of her treachery. Greta was a woman who had discovered many years ago that she enjoyed danger. That was what had induced her to marry the strangely menacing Oliver Ketley, when both her friends and her saner instincts had told her that marriage to a man like him would be at best a foolish and perilous adventure.
    It had proved in time to be just that. Greta had been thirty when she married Ketley twelve years ago. She had thought of herself as experienced and worldly-wise; in most senses she had been both of those. But she had retained one naivety which is common in most of her sex: she thought she could change the character of a man through love. Oliver might be a harsh and, from what she had heard, brutal man. But he would surely respond to her devotion and her loving kindness. Every man had a feminine side, they said; she believed that every man had at least a softer side, which would find free expression when a loving woman committed herself to him for the long term.
    It had not proved so. Oliver kept her resolutely out of his affairs. She had learned after one or two fierce humiliations that she should not try to interfere with the way he made his money or the way he treated people. The last thing you wanted to be was an enemy of Oliver Ketley’s. She knew now that even a wife could become an enemy, if she tried to be more than bed-mate, ornament and hostess.
    She could have jewellery and expensive holidays and all the clothes she wanted, so long as she expected not love but lust from him and chose not to see his frequent bedding of other women. She could furnish the big new house and what was left of the old one exactly as she wished, with expense no problem. Oliver would afford her a good life, with all the luxuries she fancied. But it would be strictly on his terms.
    All of this Greta now understood. You learned more about yourself as well as others through experience, even when that experience was unpleasant. She knew that it would be highly dangerous to take a lover when you were married to Oliver Ketley. But she now knew also that she loved that very danger. What she missed in her comfortable,