The Guilty Couple(77)

Dom laughed and put the phone down. What kind of drugs was Jack on, thinking he could just ring him up, twenty-five years after they’d walked separately through the doors of Strangeways as enemies, and demand a ridiculous amount of money? Money, incidentally, that Dominic no longer had thanks to investments that had crashed and died.

Jack rang back and Dominic put the phone down again. And the five times after that. Then he took the phone off the hook. The next day he turned up at work to find Jack sitting in the foyer.

‘Give me the money,’ Jack said, sidling up to Dom before he could alert security, ‘or I’ll tell everyone who you really are and what you did. I hear you’re trying to become a partner in this firm. How do you think the other partners will react when they find out who you really are?’

Dominic strode away without saying a word but his hand shook as he inserted his pass into the electronic gate. He’d worked hard to put what had happened in his early twenties behind him. It had taken some convincing to get his parents to accept his new name, and to hide any evidence of their real surname when he took Olivia to meet them, but they eventually accepted that he wanted to put what had happened behind him and start again, and agreed to support him. He wasn’t going to let Jack Law destroy the life that he’d made, or the life he was going to have when he became a partner and he was earning significantly more. He wasn’t going to pay Jack a penny – he couldn’t afford to – but, after he left work, he went to Olivia’s gallery and checked the company accounts, just in case it came to it. She didn’t have fifty grand either.

For the next month or so there were no phone calls or unexpected visits from Jack, and Dominic breathed a little easier. Maybe Law had given up. Maybe he was chancing it with everyone he knew. And then Olivia told him she was leaving him. She was going to start a new life – her and Grace – with a man called Jack Law. It took every ounce of self-control Dominic had not to explode. For Jack to blackmail him was one thing, to sleep with his wife was another, but if that contemptuous bastard thought he was going to take his daughter as well then … well, the thought ‘Over my dead body’ flew through his mind. ‘Over my dead body – or his.’

Dominic visited a family solicitor. He asked questions about his rights as a father, about whether a career criminal like Law could even have access to his child. Yes, came the answer. As long as he doesn’t have convictions for offences against minors, yes he can.

‘You’ll probably get shared residency where Grace spends half her time with you and half her time with your ex-wife,’ the solicitor told him.

The thought of Grace living under the same roof as Jack Law was more than Dominic could bear. He walked out of the solicitor’s office and went straight to the nearest pub. He drank until his vision blurred and he fell onto a table on his way to the loo.

Three days after that, Jack turned up at his door. ‘Fifty grand,’ he said, ‘and you’ll never see me again.’

Nancy, who Dominic had been sleeping with for over eighteen months at that point, knew what was going on and pulled Dom to one side. ‘You need to tell Ian. He can find that kind of money.’

Borrow fifty grand from Ian? Never. Dom would rather tell him he was sleeping with his wife than admit he was skint.

‘Your parents then?’ Nancy suggested.

Again. No. He’d shamed them enough. He was a thirty-nine-year-old man, not a troubled teen. This was his problem to sort, not theirs.

If he handed over the money he wouldn’t be able to live with himself. And Law would only come back for more. No, there was only one solution to this problem, and that was to beat the shit out of the man so he never came back.

‘Come in.’ He stepped back from the door and ushered Jack into the hallway. ‘We’ll do this inside.’

Dominic landed the first blow the moment the front door closed. Jack retaliated. He was strong and wiry but he was four inches shorter and lighter by several stone. Then there was the fact Dominic had been working out with Dani for almost a year. He could bench press 225 pounds.

Nancy watched silently from the sidelines as the two men fought, landing blow after blow after blow. They moved from the hallway to the living room, wrestling and punching, falling and getting up again. It felt to Dominic like it was never going to end, that the other man would never tire and give up, but then he landed an upper cut on Jack’s jaw that sent him reeling backwards. His head connected with the metal corner of the wood burner and he lay still, blood pooling beneath his head, dripping off the fire surround and onto the rug.

Dom loomed over him, fists still clenched and raised, waiting for him to get back up, too buzzed on adrenaline to realise the severity of the situation. It had taken Nancy’s ‘Call an ambulance!’ scream to bring him back into himself and he sped up the stairs to the bedroom to retrieve his mobile. It was on his bedside table, abandoned after he and Nancy had had sex.

His thumb hovered over the digits. There would be questions if Jack went to hospital, and a possible assault charge. Was he really so badly hurt? There was a part of Dominic that hoped Jack might still get up and limp out of his house and his life. He weighed up his options, standing by the bed with his phone in his hand, for what felt like forever. By the time he decided not to ring 999 and returned to the living room, Jack was dead.

Panic set in as he stared down at the body. Calling the police or an ambulance was no longer an option. He hadn’t meant to kill Law but he’d be tried for manslaughter at least and he’d seen enough of prison to know he didn’t ever want to return. He rushed around the house gathering bin bags and tape and the key to the lock-up as Nancy hovered beside the body, sliding her hands into the pockets of Jack’s jeans. She’d been to Law’s flat with Olivia, she confessed when Dominic asked her what she was doing, and she was looking for his key. They took two trips to the lock-up: one to move the body, the other to transport the freezer and then they visited Law’s flat. They shoved his passport, laptop and a few other items into a bag to make it look like he’d fled in a hurry, then they dropped the bag into the Thames.