DECOY (Kindle Single) Read online

  DECOY

  SCOTT MARIANI

  Table of Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  One

  The two friends were sitting in Kate’s living room over mugs of coffee. The music that had been playing earlier had stopped, and now you could hear the patter of the June rain against the dark window panes as they talked. Their conversation was low, like the music had been, so as not to disturb seven-year-old Charlie sleeping in his bedroom down the hall. Kate’s flat in the Jericho district of west Oxford wasn’t much more spacious than her car.

  ‘Four and a half grand,’ Hayley said, pulling a face at the letter Kate had shown her. The letter had been in that morning’s post but had already been reread so many times it was frayed and dog-eared. Hayley was the only person Kate had told about it.

  Kate sighed. ‘The Emmerich Clinic is the only place in Europe, never mind the UK, that offers this kind of corrective laser treatment for his condition. So I either come up with the money somehow, or I sit and watch my son go blind before he turns eight.’

  ‘Four and a half grand,’ Hayley said again, shaking her head.

  ‘Might as well be twenty thousand,’ Kate replied. ‘Or fifty.’ That was perfectly true. In a world of millionaires and billionaires, Kate was barely a hundredaire. With a credit rating to match.

  Hayley’s face was creased up with concern. ‘His eyes are getting worse, aren’t they?’ she asked tentatively, as if she hardly dared to say it.

  ‘We sat down and tried to watch a movie the other day. It was The Hobbit. Even sitting right up close to the screen he could hardly tell Bilbo Baggins from one of the goblins.’ Kate looked down at her hands, remembering how she’d had to stop herself from crying. She had to do that a lot, in Charlie’s presence. She was doing it now, too, just thinking about him. ‘It’s irreversible,’ she said, fighting to control the quaver in her voice. ‘If he doesn’t get the treatment, there’s no way to stop it happening.’

  She’d first noticed Charlie’s condition from a photo of him at a birthday party with a bunch of other kids. Every child in the picture had the red-eye effect from the flash. Charlie had the yellow-eye effect. It was only months later, when the deterioration in his sight had become noticeable and she’d taken him to an eye specialist, that she’d learned that the yellow-eye was a classic early symptom of the rare disease, something to do with retinal cholesterol deposits. The disease was called Coats. She didn’t know if Coats was the name of the doctor who’d first identified it, or the name of the poor unfortunate who’d first been diagnosed with it. All she knew that, if it was left untreated, it could mean her son having to have both eyes removed.

  Not just rendered sightless. Removed. Empty sockets. Gaping dark dead holes where her child’s beautiful sparkling blue eyes had once beheld a world full of joy and promise.

  And there was no other medical treatment than the cutting-edge corrective laser surgery offered by the expensive private London clinic. Forget the NHS. Even if they could have done something, by the time Charlie reached the front of the long queue he’d be irreparably blind.

  It tore Kate’s heart out.

  ‘Can’t Ian help?’ Hayley said.

  ‘I don’t even know where Ian is,’ Kate replied. ‘Anyway, he’d only cry poverty like always.’

  ‘Bastard. I never knew what you saw in the shit-head.’

  ‘Yeah, well, it’s a bit late now, isn’t it? We haven’t heard from him in over a year. Charlie’s even given up asking about his dad.’

  ‘Bastard,’ Hayley muttered again.

  They both went quiet for a minute. The coffee was getting cold and the rain was slapping the windows. Hayley bit her lip, thinking, and then was first to break the silence. ‘Listen. You know I applied for that small business loan …’

  Kate knew what her friend was going to say even before she said it. For the last several months Hayley had been growing more serious about setting up her own little business making jewellery. She’d been doing it for years, creating necklaces and bangles and earrings for female friends – now with a couple of courses under her belt she was ready to take the plunge, with a start-up loan of several thousand to get her going.

  ‘Well, how about if my loan comes through I give you some of it for Charlie’s operation? What am I saying? I’ll give you all of it, if it can help. I mean—’

  Kate stopped her, reaching out to touch her arm with a tender smile and tears moistening her eyes. ‘I couldn’t accept that. But you don’t know what it means to me that you offered it.’

  ‘I’m serious. Plus I have seven hundred or so in a savings account. I wish it was more.’

  Kate just smiled again and shook her head. She knew how much money that was to Hayley, who earned even less from her supermarket job than Kate used to make before she’d had to quit working to care for Charlie.

  ‘So how are you going to raise it?’ Hailey said.

  Kate had been thinking about that all day. So far the options weren’t exactly leaping out at her. ‘There’s a fancy new dress agency opened up on Woodstock Road. I have a few of my old glad rags they might want to buy. Might raise a few hundred. Then again, who’m I trying to kid? We’re not talking Gucci here.’

  Hayley was quiet for a few moments, staring intently into space as if some germ of idea had come to her and she was trying to get it into focus before she mentioned it. ‘You can still get into those, can’t you?’

  ‘Are you trying to say I’m fat?’ If there was any chance of finding some small shred of levity tonight, Kate was going to grab it.

  ‘Who would I be to talk? What I wouldn’t do to have your figure. I was asking for a reason …’ She waved the idea away. ‘Nah, forget it. Doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Go on. You’ve got me all curious now.’

  ‘Okay. I’ve just thought of something. Remember my cousin?’

  ‘Lucy?’

  ‘No, Lucy’s my elder cousin. I’m talking about Megan. Same age as you, twenty-eight. You met her last year.’

  ‘I remember. The pretty one. What about her?’

  ‘She was made redundant a year and a half ago. Single mother, like you, bills to pay.’

  ‘I know, we all have our problems.’

  ‘Yeah, but listen. Megan got herself a new job. In fact she works for herself now. Three nights a week, easy hours, makes a packet. All cash, too.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Something I think you’d be brilliant at,’ Hayley said. ‘She’s a female decoy.’

  ‘Decoy?’

  ‘Someone who tests to see if a bloke is cheating on his partner. Like a sex detective.’

  Kate was silent for a moment. ‘You know I’d do just about anything for Charlie. But to become a prostitute—’

  Hayley shook her head quickly. ‘Don’t get the wrong idea. Megan would never do that. Decoys aren’t prostitutes – I mean, they don’t do anything. They just test. Like bait. To see if the guys are up for it.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s what happens next.’

  ‘Nothing happens next. It’s just a way for women to find out whether their guy, or future spouse, or whatever, isn’t going to cheat on them. Like an MOT test on a car. Peace of mind. A lot of women would pay anything for that. Megan gets five hundred quid a job, and a job’s only a couple of hours or so, tops. You should speak to her. Why don’t I give you her number?’

  ‘I don’t know if it’s such a great idea,’ Kate said, wrinkling her nose.

  ‘All you need are good looks, and yo
u’ve got those. Dust off the glad rags you were thinking of selling. Sexy dress, pair of high heels, spot of makeup. You’d be a stunner. You’d have the guys wrapped round your little finger.’

  ‘No offence to your cousin. But to me it sounds … I don’t know, sordid.’

  ‘Beats doing shifts on the till.’

  ‘Let’s talk about something else,’ Kate said.

  Later that night, Kate checked on Charlie like she always did before she went to bed. She quietly opened the door. He liked to have his little blue night-light on for comfort, perhaps to ward away the encroaching darkness that might soon invade his world completely. In the shadows of his room were the posters a blind child would never see again, the toys that would be left unplayed with, the picture books that would never be opened.

  If Charlie had been awake, Kate would have read him a story. He was asleep and perfectly still, breathing ever so softly. Kate tiptoed over to his bed and stood for a few aching moments gazing down at the small form under the Spiderman duvet. Then she leaned over him and gently kissed him on the cheek.

  On his bedside table was a new picture he’d drawn in crayon and left under the night-light for her to see. You could tell it was meant to be a smiling face, but you had to look twice. Underneath it Charlie had written the message ‘I LOVE YOU MUMMY’. Like the face, you had to kind of decipher it. The letters were all messed together and the writing had gone off the edge of the paper as if Charlie hadn’t noticed.

  Kate felt herself choking up, and she had to leave the room before she woke him. Tears were rolling down her cheeks as she returned downstairs, still holding the note but unable to look at it. She left it face-down on the table, wiped her eyes on some kitchen paper and went to the kettle to make another coffee. She yearned for a stiff gin and tonic instead, but she didn’t have any. She couldn’t even afford to get good and drunk.

  She barely touched the coffee as she sat at the kitchen table, staring into the middle distance. An hour went by that way. She sipped the coffee, then made a face and threw it away and picked up her phone and called Hayley. Hayley’s phone was off. It was late and she was probably in bed by now. Kate left a message.

  ‘Hi, it’s me. Can you give me your cousin’s phone number? Call me back when you get this, okay? I’d like to speak to her.’

  Kate put the phone down.

  Five hundred a night.

  Four and a half thousand pounds. Nine nights.

  ‘Decoy,’ she murmured to herself.

  She went and took a long, long look at herself in the mirror.

  ‘Decoy.’

  Two

  By the time the taxi dropped Kate off outside the hotel in Wheatley, five miles from Oxford, the loud music booming from inside told her that the party had already started. It was a little after nine, and the night was balmy. The perfect night to be making your debut as a cheat-buster for hire when you ought to be at home taking care of your child.

  This was it. Her heart fluttered, and she paused in her step. Think of the money. She caught sight of her strange reflection in the tall glass doors as she walked up to the entrance. When she’d dragged the low-cut crimson stretch jersey dress from the bottom of the wardrobe she’d worried that years of storage might have taken their toll, but it had come out fine from the emergency dry-clean and actually didn’t look half bad. ‘Wear red if you can,’ Megan had advised on the phone two days earlier. ‘Black is okay, but not white, and yellow’s a total no-no.’ Virginal white didn’t exactly scream ‘seductress’, while yellow was, apparently, a clinically-proven turnoff. Black was Audrey Hepburn-cool but ran the risk of scaring some guys away. Nothing as terrifying as a sophisticated female. Red was the way to go.

  Kate was beginning to realise there was a whole science behind this decoying business.

  She’d matched the red dress with a pair of red stiletto heels that she’d only worn once before and hurt her feet. You had to suffer for your art. Her blond hair hung loose over her shoulders. Hayley, who was babysitting Charlie, had given her the spangly necklace she was wearing, one of Hayley’s latest creations, and done the finishing touches on Kate’s makeup, all pleased that her idea had come to something after all. When Kate had scrutinised the finished product in the bedroom mirror, she’d hardly recognised herself.

  Now, as she walked into the hotel, Kate realised that was all the better. This isn’t you, she kept telling herself. You’re an actress in a movie. She just had to hope it had a happy ending. Despite her resolve, her legs felt shaky – and it wasn’t just the wobbly heels. She had to fight a powerful urge to turn around and go chasing after the departing taxi, shouting at it to come back and take her home. She pictured Charlie in her mind, took a deep breath and walked on. Anyway, she couldn’t have run more than a few steps without falling on her face, not in these heels.

  The laddish crowd swarming inside the hotel bar was making as much noise as the five-piece rock band who were set up on a stage at the far end. The night was young, but judging by the volume of empty glasses that covered every table, they’d already downed enough lager to knock out a regiment. There were few women around. Kate glanced at a couple of them and wondered if they were strippers due to strut their stuff after the band had finished and the stag party became wilder.

  She still couldn’t believe how quickly the first response had come to the small, cheap ad she’d placed in the paper the week before. Just days had gone by, and she was in business. Equally astonishing was how readily the client had paid out the five hundred up front, plus expenses to cover taxi fares and drinks. Kate’s first client was a twenty-six-year-old office assistant called Tracy, who didn’t seem to be exactly rolling in money and yet had handed over the cash as if she’d gladly have paid double. ‘You’d be amazed what people will spend to find out if their partner’s faithful to them,’ Megan had said. ‘As a long-term investment in their future security, it’s a bloody bargain.’

  Kate paused in the middle of the room and glanced around her. A couple of guys at a nearby table looked round, threw up-and-down glances her way that were none too subtle, then exchanged wolfish grins of appreciation. So far, the red dress seemed to be working.

  Kate took out her phone and checked the image Tracy had given her of Adam, her fiancé. It showed a pleasant, if slightly gormless-looking, guy with a spiky hairstyle and sticking out ears who appeared less mature than his twenty-seven years. Kate scanned the room as discreetly as she could, and spotted him sitting on a stool at the bar nursing a pint.

  Target acquired at ten o’clock.

  Just a movie.

  Kate got herself a gin and tonic and took a few quick sips before she did anything else. The alcohol would relax her a little, allow her to act more naturally on this, her first assignment. It felt good, so she took another couple of sips. It was the reason she’d allowed herself the extravagance of a taxicab all the way from Jericho and back. She didn’t want to get plastered, but she might not finish the evening totally sober, either.

  During the few minutes that Kate used to finish her drink, order another and steel herself, Adam didn’t move. The band had launched into a sloppy, overloud rendition of some old R’n’B number. Finally, she took a deep breath and walked over to him. It wasn’t hard to tell from his slumped, round-shouldered posture and the glaze in his eyes that Adam was already a little toasted. Kate took another deep breath, put on an artificial face and sidled up next to him.

  ‘Hi,’ she said over the din of the music.

  He looked up from his pint. ‘Oh. Er, hi.’

  According to Megan, the top decoy agencies were hot on ethics. Setting up a perfect situation to snare a guy was considered a kind of entrapment. The subject’s free will was everything. It had to be his choice; he had to come to you. So Kate was careful to keep the ball in his court.

  ‘Adam, isn’t it?’

  He blinked.

  ‘Jenny. Jenny Wright. Remember? I temped in accounts at Sanderson for a couple of months last year.’ Sanders
on was the catering wholesalers in Wheatley where Adam had worked for the last two years. In January he’d got promoted from the fork-lifts to warehouse supervisor. Information courtesy of Tracy. Find out all you can, Megan had said.

  Adam swallowed and blinked again, straining to recall her face.

  ‘Haven’t forgotten me, have you?’ she said playfully. ‘We chatted at the Christmas works do.’ At which, according to Tracy, Adam had got totally blitzed, and of which he was likely to remember little.

  ‘Oh, right. I was a bit wasted that night,’ Adam said with a feeble smile.

  Kate giggled. ‘Yeah, that was a good night.’

  ‘I think I do remember you, though,’ Adam said. Was that a quick downward flicker of his eyes, checking out her cleavage?

  Remember the drill. He makes a move, you’re out of here.

  ‘Heard you got promoted. Nice one.’ Kate laid her handbag and phone on the bar and perched herself on a stool close to his, making sure that the hem of the red dress slid up a little to reveal a few more inches of leg.

  ‘Oh, yeah. Thanks.’ Adam wasn’t the most gifted conversationalist. Still, every word was being recorded. Some seasoned decoys worked with state-of-the-art miniature pinhole cameras transmitting wirelessly to a concealed storage device elsewhere in the room, such as in a bag carried by a second undercover colleague. That was the major leagues. Kate was making do with the digital voice recorder app on her phone that also allowed her to download the recording to disc afterwards to present as evidence to the client. If visual evidence of the subject’s improper behaviour was needed, she could use the phone to catch it on video.

  Client. Subject. Thinking like a pro already.

  ‘Want to dance?’ she asked, smiling.

  Adam seemed to hesitate. ‘I don’t know …’

  ‘Come on. You danced like a nutter at Christmas. Don’t you want to dance with me?’ Although how you could dance to the noise the crappy band was grinding out was a good question. Kate moved closer to Adam. Plenty of eye contact, a bit more leg and loads of opportunity to peer down her top. It wasn’t enjoyable. She had to smile and remind herself that this wasn’t her.