Not Dead Enough

–’ he paused to read from his notes – ‘07985 541298. So I checked that number out.’ He looked Roy Grace squarely and triumphantly in the eye. ‘It’s Brian Bishop’s mobile phone.’

70
    They say the recipe for success in life is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. The bit they don’t tell you when you start a new business is the cash you need to find. You need the lawyer and the accountants to set up the company, the Patent Agent to file for your copyright on your software, the design company to create your logo and your corporate image, and the packaging for your product, which you need to have if you intend to be a global player, and of course your website. You need an office, furniture, phones, fax and a secretary. None of this stuff comes cheap. Twelve months on from my Big Idea, I was over one hundred thousand pounds out of pocket and not yet ready to rock and roll. But close.
    I had taken out a second mortgage on my flat, sold everything I could sell, and, on top of that, a bank manager who believed in me had given me a bigger loan than he really should have. I had, as the Americans say, bet the ranch.
    I was reading all the financial pages of the newspapers and subscribed to the trade magazines of every business I intended to target. So imagine my dismay one day when I opened a supplement of the Financial Times to see an article written by a journalist called Gautam Malkani on my business.
    It was a complete carbon copy of everything I had thought of doing. And it was already up and running.
    And my photograph was staring out at me from the pink page.
    Except the name of the company was different from the name I had chosen.
    And the name beneath my photograph was the name of someone else, a man I had never heard of.

71
    Marija Djapic pressed the entry code and let herself in through the wrought-iron gates. It was just gone nine a.m. and she was a little later than usual, thanks to her daughter. She noticed the man immediately, standing outside the front door of number 5, looking as if he had been waiting for a while.
    She strode across the cobbled courtyard, puffing from the exertion of her long walk here, made harder by the weight of the bag which she lugged everywhere, containing her work clothes, shoes, lunch and a drink. And she was perspiring heavily from the heat. She was also in a foul mood after yet another row with Danica. Who was this man? What did he want from her? Was he from another of the collection agencies she owed money to on a credit card?
    The thirty-five-year-old Serbian woman walked everywhere, to save money on bus fares. She could reach all of her employers on foot in less than an hour from the council flat in Whitehawk she shared with her bolshy, fourteen-year-old prima donna. Almost every hard, sweated penny that she earned went on buying Danica the best she could afford in their new life here in England. She tried to buy decent food, made sure Danica had the clothes she wanted – well, some of them, at any rate. As well as all the stuff she needed to keep up with her friends: a computer, a mobile phone and, for her birthday two weeks ago, an iPod.
    And her reward was for the girl to arrive home at ten past four this morning! Make-up all smeared, pupils dilated.
    And now this smarmy-looking man was standing by the doorstep, doubtless waiting to snatch the cash that would have been left for her on the kitchen table out of her hand. She looked at him warily as she rummaged in her bag for the keys to Cleo Morey’s house. He was tall, with slicked-back brown hair, handsome in a way that reminded her of a movie actor whose name she couldn’t place and dressed respectably enough in a white shirt and plain tie, blue trousers, black shoes and a dark blue cotton jacket that looked as if it was a uniform of some sort, with a badge sewn on the breast pocket.
    Marija glanced warily around for signs of life elsewhere in the courtyard and, to her relief, saw a young woman in Lycra shorts and top pulling a mountain bike out of a front door a couple of houses down. Emboldened, she put the key in the lock and turned it.
    The man stepped forward, holding out an identity card bearing his photograph. It was laminated and hung from his neck on two thin white cords. ‘Excuse me,’ he said very politely. ‘Gas Board – would it be convenient to read the meter?’ Then she noticed the small metal machine with a keypad on it which he was holding.
    ‘You made appointment