Chapter One
Three Years Ago
She wakes up with a stiff neck, slumped across her desk. The heating’s gone off and her circulation has slowed, and the cold has woken her. If it hadn’t, she’d probably have slept through until lunchtime. Wouldn’t be the first time…
She sits up, her head fogged and her mouth dry. Checks her watch and sees that it’s very nearly six. She’s tired. She’s always tired, these days. Night work really only suits the very young, and Lisa’s thirty-four – no spring chicken, in clubland. As of her last birthday, some of the girls who work here are literally young enough to be her daughter, and she’s feeling it. She used to get through the cashing-up by four-thirty on a Saturday morning, but tonight even the quadruple espresso she took up to the office hasn’t kept her awake.
She pushes herself up from the chair and stretches. At least she’s finished. She remembers, now, deciding that maybe she’d take ten minutes just to close her eyes before she took the cash to the safe, to try and ensure she wouldn’t crash the car on the way home. I’ve got to leave this job, she thinks. I don’t want to spend my nights seeing men at their worst, all slavering with lust and googly-eyed from whatever they’ve been at in the toilets, and I’m too old for these hours. These hours and the stress and the worrying I might end up in jail.
None of it adds up. It never does. She knows how many bottles of champagne are left in the cellar, and how many there would be if they’d sold them in the numbers the bar tabs add up to. It’s the same every week. Two hundred people in the club on a good night, and though sometimes they’re footballers or the modern robber barons of the City, slumming it among the tarts and the yobs, or silly young actors who think their stint in the soap they’re in will last for ever, £998 for a bottle of champagne is still steep enough to make them think about the choice between drink and dance; and most of them opt for a bottle of Absolut at four hundred and fifty pounds and a bunch of private dances at fifty pounds (plus tip) a pop. But every Saturday, according to the bar tabs, they sell a hundred, hundred and fifty bottles of fizz. And all of it paid for in cash.
She slaps herself about the face a couple of times to try to wake herself up. Come on, Lisa. Sooner you get this finished, the sooner your day off begins. You can think about this when you’ve slept. Think about handing in your notice before there’s police swarming all over this place. The Adidas bag is back by the desk, where Malik always drops it after he’s been to the bank in the morning. She picks it up and starts counting the bundles of notes into it, one by one. For God’s sake, she thinks – some of them are still in their wrappers. He’s not even trying to make the notes look used any more.
Of course she knows what Tony’s up to. Basildon lads with no obvious source of capital don’t end up owning nightclubs by twenty-six, with no investors. But a place like Nefertiti’s – yeah, get the pun; great name for a lap-dancing establishment, all flash and splash and paps on the door – is a licence to print money. Or if not print it, at least wash it greyish clean. That’s why he makes sure they’re always in the papers, why he bribes the grabby whoremongers of sport and pop and TV to come here with free drinks and girls all night in the VIP lounge. Get a reputation for being where the high rollers go, and nobody will question what you claim they spend, because everyone reads about such crazy profligacy every day in The Sun and everybody knows that footballers are stupid. Those clubs in town, the big ones, can take half a million easy on a Saturday night, on maybe twenty grand’s worth of booze, though they probably actually hand over some goods in exchange for the money, of course.
And here it is: she finishes counting and confirms what she already knows. The bag contains a hundred and eighty-five thousand pounds, give or take a few hundred, in fifties and twenties. And on Monday morning it will go into the bank, and from the bank it will go into the white economy.
She does a last check round the office. Now all she has to do is take the cash down to the safe that’s sunk in concrete in the basement store cupboard, do a last visual round the bar, and then she can lock up and leave it to the cleaners. She quite likes this time of night, despite the smell of spilled drink and sweat and poppers, the lonely smell of spooge from the back rooms. She likes it when the lights are fully up and she can see how this place the punters think is fairyland is made of smoke and mirrors. Velvet benches in pure, liquid-shrugging nylon; the light-up dance floor that’s black with sticky muck, the ornate Louis XV-style mirrors whose frames are made from purest polystyrene. Even Nefertiti herself, presiding over the entrance lobby with her black bangs and her golden crook, titties out for the lads, was cast in stone-effect resin in a factory in Guiyang. She turns out the office lights, turns the key in the door and walks down the stairs.