Free No Place in the Sun by John Mulligan

it seemed less threatening than he had first thought. ‘Ok, give me a free ticket, maybe I’ll win the camcorder and take pictures of you for all the model agencies.’ No harm in laying it on a bit thick, it might get results.
    The girl never stopped smiling. ‘You must come to view the project, it’s not far away. I have a car.’
    ‘I have a car too, it’s just down by the beach car park; I’ll follow you.’
    She was persistent. ‘It’s too easy to lose someone on the way, come on with me and I’ll drop you back here after. Don’t worry, I won’t bite you or try to take advantage of you.’
    Tom was wary. ‘I might give it a miss this time, catch you another time maybe.’
    Her face fell; the smile still there but forced. ‘Please, I need you to go there or I don’t get paid, there’s no catch, it will just take only half an hour to walk around and look at the place, you don’t have to buy it or anything. Please.’ She was pleading now.
    Tom felt sorry for her, he had been there a few times, trying to make a sale and losing it at the last minute. She was an amateur though, he never dropped his guard or resorted to pleading; you could never get a sale that way. You had to keep the pretence up all the time, to make the customer want what was on offer.
    ‘Ok, I’ll go and look, but I’m not buying anything, not today anyway.’
    She kept up the patter all the way to the development, which turned out to be a lot farther away than he had expected. The road passed through a narrow underpass below the motorway and left the built-up area behind, winding is way uphill through a dry and barren landscape until they arrived at a recently built apartment block with the bare concrete shells of three other blocks just behind it. There was no sign of any building work going on around the other buildings, just half-used pallets of materials and piles of rubble and soil with weeds growing out of them. Tom was not too impressed, but he made no comment and followed Kathy into the foyer of the completed building. Two young men, dressed in standard salesman uniforms of black trousers teamed with white shirt and tie, jumped to attention when they saw the newcomer arrive.
    The nearest of the young men stretched out his hand. ‘Good morning, I’m Timothy.’ This one was English, North of England, maybe Manchester. Sounded like a character from Coronation Street. Tom shook the proffered hand. ‘Tom, I’m here to collect a camcorder.’
    ‘Oh yes, very good.’ The salesman smiled nervously, not sure whether or not he should laugh at Tom’s joke; he got straight down to business.
    ‘We’d like to show you the complex, and to explain how you can be a part of Pueblo Alto Blanco. First I need a few details.’ He clipped a pad to a clipboard and clicked a pen, ‘Name?’
    Tom gave him as few details as he could, skipping things like telephone number on the excuse that he didn’t have one yet. Timothy was persistent, ‘do you have a home phone number maybe, or an email address?’
    ‘Just moved house’ Tom wasn’t giving too much away. ‘I still have to organise all that stuff.’
    Reluctantly, Timothy closed the clipboard and showed Tom around the complex. The apartments were attractive enough, marble floors and small balconies, and good enough views down the hill towards the sea, which could barely be seen in the distance. ‘Not sea views as such, we prefer to describe it as ‘sea glimpses’, but the important thing is the build quality, and of course the prices.’
    ‘So, how much is one of these, then?’ Tom was still trying to figure out the setup; it wasn’t a timeshare, Kathy had assured him that it wasn’t, so what was the score here?
    Timothy seemed reluctant to get down to the details, there was more to see. They left the show apartment and he led Tom to a large room off the lobby, where a scale model of the entire complex took up most of the centre of the room. Four blocks were planned, as well as a