Read Online Where Memories Are Made by Lynda Page - Free Book Online

to stop on the corner of a crumbling street of terraced houses in a run-down area of Skegness. Although he had told her he lived in lodgings, she had expected them to be in a far more salubrious area than this one.
    Having thanked her for the lift home, Al went off down the street and Jackie was in the process of turning the Lambretta around when a man coming out of the off licence on the opposite corner caught her attention. He was tall and thin, shaggy-haired and thickly bearded. Shabbily dressed, he was clutching a brown carrier bag which obviously held bottles of either beer or spirits. She did not recognise him yet he was still vaguely familiar somehow. She watched him as he turned the corner and disappeared. For the life of her Jackie couldn’t place him and so put his familiarity down to the fact that the man just reminded her of someone else, whoever it might be.
    A while later Jackie entered the back door of her home to be greeted by the sight of a pan bubbling away on the stove, keeping the meal on the plate sitting above it hot. She could hear the sounds of her mother’s and Keith’s laughter coming from the sitting room. As Jackie stripped off her coat a warm glow filled her. She had friends whose parents did not get on with their boyfriends for various reasons, mostly because the young men weren’t considered good enough for the girls, and it put a strain on the young couples’ relationships. Jackie felt herself fortunate to have a mother who thoroughly approved of her boyfriend and a boyfriend who thoroughly approved of his girlfriend’s mother.
    Using a cloth to take her plate of food off the pan, and collecting a knife and fork, Jackie went in to join them.
    The next morning when she updated Harold Rose over the food poisoning incident, all the response she got from him, while he stared over her shoulder as if at someone else, was a cool thank you and then a prompt dismissal back to her work. Jackie felt her contempt for his idea of how to manage a business rising several notches.

CHAPTER SIX
    I t was not surprising that Jackie hadn’t recognised the man she had seen coming out of the off licence. The last time she had seen him he’d looked completely different. Then he’d been a lardy, heavy-jowled young man. Now he had no spare fat on him. Twelve months in prison, for trying to sell back a gold cigarette case and lighter to the police inspector whose house he’d unwittingly stolen them from, was the cause of the change in him. Encarcerated with hardened criminal types who terrified him, Michael Jolly’s blubber had melted from him. But all those long nights spent staring up at the ceiling from his top bunk had afforded the deeply unpleasant man plenty of time to formulate a plan that would see him successfully carry out his threat to reclaim what he felt was rightfully his: Jolly’s camp and all the profits it generated.
    Michael hadn’t come up with the plan completely by himself; he didn’t possess the intelligence to plan anything more involved than a simple burglary. He’d almost despaired of ever coming up with anything that stood the remotest chance of success, when while he was swabbing out the bathrooms one morning he was privy to the conversation of two old lags who’d come in to use the facilities … each thinking it extremely amusing to urinate all over his clean floor while trying to outdo the other with details of the best scam in their illustrious past. What one old lag told the other had struck a chord deep within Michael and every night since then he had lain awake thinking about it, and how he could adapt it to suit his own purposes.
    After months of thinking of nothing else, he finally felt positive he had the ideal scheme. He couldn’t do it on his own, but one thing he’d learned in prison was that there were always others willing to do anything, no questions asked, if the price was right. All Michael had to do