Contents

DAISY’S CHAIN

Owen Jones

DEDICATION

INSPIRATIONAL QUOTES

CONTENTS

1 LA VILLA BLANCA, MARBELLA, 1995

2 DAISY’S EARLY LIFE

3 THE APPRENTICESHIP

4 DAISY FEELS HER FEET

5 THE ILLEGALS

6 TERESA’S STORY

7 DAISY’S NIGHT OUT

8 THE STRUGGLE FOR IDENTITY

9 A PLAN COMES TOGETHER

10 THE FALL GUY

11 DAISY’S MISTAKE

12 REPERCUSSIONS

13 THE PRICE OF FOLLY

14 RECOVERY

15 THE CRUISE

16 THE INVESTIGATION

17 JOHN’S PAPERS

18 THE SCREW TIGHTENS

19 THE MISSING LINK

20 THE WASH

21 JUSTICE, ROUGHLY

22 THE FIRST LINK

23 EPILOGUE

DAISY’S CHAIN

A Story of Love, Intrigue and the Underworld on the Costa del Sol

by

Owen Jones

Copyright © November, 2020 Owen Jones

Bangkok, and Fuengirola, Spain

The right of Owen Jones to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988. The moral right of the author has been asserted.

In this work of fiction, the characters and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or they are used entirely fictitiously. Some places may exist, but the events are completely fictitious.

DEDICATION

This edition is dedicated to my wife, Pranom Jones, for making my life as easy as she can - she does a great job of it.

Thanks also to Wes Waring for his advice on snipers’ rifles.

Karma will repay everyone in just kind.

INSPIRATIONAL QUOTES

Believe not in anything simply because you have heard it,

Believe not in anything simply because it was spoken and rumoured by many,

Believe not in anything simply because it was found written in your religious texts,

Believe not in anything merely on the authority of teachers and elders,

Believe not in traditions because they have been handed down for generations,

But after observation and analysis, if anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, accept it and live up to it.

Gautama Buddha

––

Great Spirit, whose voice is on the wind, hear me. Let me grow in strength and knowledge.

Make me ever behold the red and purple sunset. May my hands respect the things you have given me.

Teach me the secrets hidden under every leaf and stone, as you have taught people for ages past.

Let me use my strength, not to be greater than my brother, but to fight my greatest enemy – myself.

Let me always come before you with clean hands and an open heart, that as my Earthly span fades like the sunset, my Spirit shall return to you without shame.

(Based on a traditional Sioux prayer)

CONTENTS

1 La Villa Blanca, Marbella, 1995

2 Daisy’s Early Life

3 The Apprenticeship

4 Daisy Feels Her Feet

5 The Illegals

6 Teresa’s Story

7 Daisy’s Night Out

8 The Struggle for Identity

9 A Plan Comes Together

10 The Fall Guy

11 Daisy’s Mistake

12 Repercussions

13 The Price of Folly

14 Recovery

15 The Cruise

16 The Investigation

17 John’s Papers

18 The Screw Tightens

19 The Missing Link

20 The Wash

21 Justice, Roughly

22 The First Link

23 Epilogue

About the Author

The Disallowed – Chapter One

1 LA VILLA BLANCA, MARBELLA, 1995

Teresa was lying on her back on the bed breathing deeply with a wide grin on her face next to her boss, John, who, at sixty-five had taken far too much punishment in life to be able to take an active rôle in making passionate love himself. He liked her to swear as she pleasured them both, but it did not come naturally to her, so she usually forgot to in the heat of the moment. Teresa was forty-two and proud to have John as her lover. In fact, she had loved him for years despite the large age gap. She had first been attracted to the distinguished Englishman when he had used to come to buy things from her in Fuengirola market, and had fallen in love with him since almost the first day he had taken her on as his cook and housekeeper. Little did she know at the time that his frequent visits to the market had been excuses to see her.

“That was great, Teri, girl… Oh, yes… You’re enough to make a grown man cry”.

Teresa rolled over towards her lover onto his waiting right arm. She put her right arm across his chest as they kissed.

“You are the best”, he said to her.

“It is easy for me to make you happy, Johnny, because I love you. You are my hero and my saviour”, she replied, as she frequently did.

An explosion sounded as a muffled crump from outside. The phone rang as John was reaching out for it. It was the person he had been about to call just as he knew that it would be.

“What was that, Tony?” he asked without a trace of anxiety in his voice.

“I’m not sure yet, boss, but we haven’t been hit…” He was interrupted by a second explosion similar to the first and then a third of a different kind. “It’s coming from down the road some way off. I think it’s the O’Leary’s place judging by the plumes of smoke. I’m going outside now to get a better look”. Tony was a big man, the shape of a door with a bald head on it. He was John’s chief of security and had been with him for ten years.

John could hear him running over the phone, not breathing heavily at all, and then stop. “I’m about two hundred yards from their front gate now. It looks like the house has been hit, and the front gate… and there are bits of motorcycle everywhere… Two men are down… on fire… Oh! I think they have just been offed with a single baseball bat strike to the back of their necks. Looks like a drive-by with RPG’s to me. I’m coming back in. I don’t want to be nabbed as a witness to this”.

“No, of course not. Come back and play dumb, but see what you can find out on the QT. Appraise me later”. He rang off.

Five minutes later, John had fallen asleep, as he frequently did, and Teresa quietly got up, dressed and went back to work - it was time to arrange her employer’s dinner.

During the meal, Tony gave John his verbal report of the bombing.

“This is not official, boss, but I got it from one of O’Leary’s lads, so I reckon that it’s as near the truth as we are ever going to get. It was a drive-by and they did use rocket-propelled grenades. Apparently, they fired the first one as they passed by. It went through the railings of the gate and hit the house. The gatekeeper, who was probably counting his lucky stars that he wasn’t blown up got a few shots off.

“The riders then came back past the gate and fired again, but the tail-fire from the RPG must have ignited fuel leaking from a bullet hole in the petrol tank and it blew up. The second grenade did strike the gate, as the first one was probably meant to, and blew it in. When the bike exploded and the riders came back to Earth on fire. O’Leary’s men broke their necks with baseball bats so there would be no loose ends”.

“Who was responsible, do they reckon, Tony?”

“He said they don’t know, but when I suggested that it was a rival Irish gang from back home, he didn’t say that it wasn’t”.

“Anyone else besides the riders hurt, was there?”

“The gatekeeper is in a bad way. He’s got shrapnel wounds and those big wrought iron gates gave him quite a whack when they blew in, but he’ll probably live. A cleaner got some splinters of glass in her arris, but she’s all right. The O’Leary’s were around the back near the pool, so they are all OK too.

“Did the police get there? I heard some sirens, I think, but I was asleep by then and could have been dreaming”.

“No, they got there all right… and the fire brigade and the ambulance, after it was all over. The O’Leary’s had even put the gatekeeper and the cleaner in the Range Rover and taken them both to hospital by then. The ambulance took away the riders’ bodies; the fire brigade sprayed the smoking wreckage then checked the house for structural damage and the police cordoned off the area. There’s still a load of them out there now trying to look concerned and busy.

“They asked me if I’d seen anything and I said only the smoke. They don’t really give a monkey’s as long as there are no Spanish involved”.

“No, you’re right. Well, thanks for that, Tony. Well done, as always. Do you think that we’re in any danger?”

“No, boss, it was just the Micks, er, sorry, boss, the Irish, having a turf war. Nothing to do with us. I’ve brought a couple of extra hands in though, just to be sure”.

“Good. Have you eaten yet?” he asked motioning to a chair.

“No, but there’ll be something waiting for me in the office when I get back. Thanks”.

“If you’re sure, Tony. You’re always welcome, you know that. OK, up to you, don’t let me keep you from your grub. I’ll see you later on my rounds”. John liked to walk around the gardens near the house twice before going to bed as part of his exercise regimen.

∞

John Baltimore had first moved to Marbella twenty years before when he was forty-five, but it was only on a part-time basis, although his periods of stay gradually lengthened. He hadn’t fled there as many had before him, but he had made and inherited enough money to make him think that it was probably a good idea to get out of the UK before people, meaning the police, the Inland Revenue and the press started asking questions. If enough stones were overturned, something would eventually lead to him, so he had emigrated, although both he and his father before him had had property in Andalucía for decades.

The press had dubbed the coast of the province of Malaga, the Costa del Crime, but there was more truth to that than most people, meaning the general British public, knew. It was quite an apt description as far as concerned a sizeable British minority in the area. Many of the British Mafia had moved to the Costa del Sol with the intention of giving up their old life of crime, but became bored and went back to it. Some simply ran their old operations in Britain remotely, and others tried to muscle in on the local community, which the Spanish and others resisted. It often led to violence; sometimes the Brits won, and sometimes they didn’t.

John had given up everything in Britain, but had a string of profitable businesses in Spain, which he was gradually losing interest in, although, being a workaholic and not having an heir or even a wife any longer, he had to just keep going. He had been married three times and had had many affairs. Some of his lovers had claimed to be bearing his child, but he had never accepted responsibility, because he had expected to have a legitimate heir one day. However, that day had never come and, at his age, he had given up hope that it ever would long ago.

He had plans to make Teresa comfortable for life, as he had his ‘real’ wives, and he was toying with the idea of leaving the rest to a charity for women who had fallen on hard times. He and his father had had a hand in putting many women in that predicament, so it only seemed fair.

John’s father, after whom he had been named, although his father had originally been called Sean, had been sent by his mother to London from Dublin to prevent him from becoming involved in an uprising proposed by the Irish Republican Brotherhood, rumours about which had started to spread amongst people in the know from late 1914. They planned to take advantage of Britain’s heavy involvement in the First World War, and Germany had offered them weapons if they could organise some sort of a revolt. She had become frightened for his safety after a friend told her that John was becoming serious about joining ‘The Cause’ – to reunite Ireland and rid it of Westminster’s influence.

He had been a petty criminal in London’s East End in the first year of the First World War, but had lived in a room in a house where female Belgian refugees had been billeted. There were hundreds of thousands of Belgian refugees in the UK, most of whom were women and children. He had noticed that many of them had to go on the game to support themselves, so he had shrewdly borrowed enough money from a loan shark to rent a house, which he had used as a brothel. He had ten young Belgian women and girls living and working there around the clock within a week, and had a dozen such ‘businesses’ within a year. Within five years, he had owned the houses outright.

The first thing that he had done when he started to make money was call his younger brothers over to help him run his new, increasingly complicated affairs.

He was a millionaire before he was thirty, which he was particularly proud of, since he had arrived in London in 1914 with less than a pound to his name.

John junior was the product of one of the many liaisons with one of the working girls, but not one with the man he had called father, his adoptive father, because his own parents had been killed by his own family in two separate gun fights. John senior had adopted John junior, because he was ashamed of what his brother had done, and of how his offspring had wreaked their revenge. It was also rumoured that a low sperm count ran in the family and John junior had always thought that he followed in the tradition of his male antecedents.

∞

Two months later, after another session of lovemaking, but before John drifted off to sleep, Teresa whispered in her boss’s ear:

“Johnny, my darling hero, you are going to become a father…”

“Eh? What are you talking about, Teri? I can’t have children… I’ve never had any and I’m certainly too old now! Anyway, you told me that you had passed through the menopause, so you can’t have any either”.

“That is what I thought, so this baby is a gift from God for us, Johnny…”

“A bloody miracle, if it’s true. Have you been to see a doctor yet?”

“No, not yet, but a woman knows these things; she doesn’t need a doctor to tell her”.

“Maybe not, but a man does, so you go and find out for sure tomorrow, my girl”.

“But what if it is true, Johnny, what will you say then?”

“It simply can’t be true. I cannot, and you cannot have a baby!”

“But, what if it is true?”

“Rubbish, it can’t be. You’ve got wind… or you’re putting on weight. That’s what it is, you’ve put on weight”.

“No, Johnny, our baby is only the size of a peanut! I am not bigger because of that. In fact, I am the same weight as always: fifty-two kilos, but I am with child. Impossible as it may seem, I am pregnant. I remember the feeling from before, but I will check with the doctor tomorrow”.

“Good! You do that and you will see that I am right”.

Seconds later, he was asleep and Teresa was going about the business of ensuring her beloved’s comfort.

∞

When John heard the news that he was to be the father of a child before the year was out, he didn’t know how to react. It all seemed to be happening so fast, but he was secretly overjoyed, although the hard man in him won over, so he insisted on a DNA test. When the amniocentesis test at ten weeks proved him to be a parent, he offered to marry Teresa, but was disappointed when she seemed reluctant.

“I thought you would have liked to marry me, Teri”, he said.

“I would have,” she admitted dolefully “but not just because I’m carrying your baby. I would have liked you to ask me to marry you because you love me”.

“But I do love you, Teri, you know that. I’m just not very good at saying things like that, but I thought you knew it”.

“A woman likes to hear it as well, Johnny…”

“I suppose a man does as well, my dear, I will admit to you that I do, ‘though if you ever tell anyone I said it, I’ll deny it”.

“You silly macho men”, she mocked him gently as she lay in the crook of his arm. “You want to hear it, but you don’t want to give the same pleasure to the people you love. That is selfish, is it not?”

He didn’t answer for several minutes, but Teresa was willing to wait.

“Yes, I suppose it is”, he finally admitted. “I am so sorry that I have not told you before that I love you. I have never said it to anyone in my whole life, except perhaps to my mother. I don’t remember. Have I ever told you about her?

“Her name was Fleur and she came from Belgium, but we won’t talk about her any more for now. Will you, please, marry me, Teri? It will make me the happiest man in the world, and I know that that sounds corny, but I am a man of action, not words… I think you know that already too”.

“It does not sound corny, Johnny, they are beautiful words…” Her eyes filled with tears. “I will marry you, Johnny. I have always loved you, but I want you to promise me that you will look after our child. I don’t care about myself, but our baby must be taken care of, or it would be better if I left now”.

“My dearest Teresa, if you will only marry me, our baby, boy or girl, will inherit everything that I own”.

“In that case, Johnny, I accept. I will marry you”.

∞

John wanted the marriage ceremony to take place within a week, but Teresa insisted on planning and doing everything properly, except that she did not ask John to convert to Catholicism and she didn’t ask that the baby be brought up a Catholic either.

At fourteen weeks, after the huge wedding, Teresa told John that they were expecting a girl. She was worried that John might be disappointed, but she couldn’t detect any sign of it.

John, for his part, thought that he should have been disappointed, but was surprised to find that he wasn’t.

“What name should we give her?” asked Teresa one morning in bed.

“Could we call her Daisy?” he asked.

“Of course”, she mused. “Daisy… Margarita in Spanish… a pearl… a hidden gem. It is the perfect name for our daughter, our gift from God, who should never have been”.

2 DAISY’S EARLY LIFE

Teresa’s pregnancy, her third, though the others had terminated prematurely, was straight forward, although she was naturally anxious because of her past. John was aware of this and provided a private nurse for her and a second car, so that the gardener could take her to hospital, if he or Tony were not at home. However, all went well, and Daisy was born at home on December 14th, a sunny afternoon, with the assistance of a midwife who was provided by the family’s insurance company. It was a trouble-free birth and John gleamed with pride at the sight of his beautiful wife holding their beautiful baby.

John had never been one for photographs, but within a week he had hundreds of them. He showed them to his friends and acquaintances, and when they said that she had his nose or eyes, he was as proud as punch, although he couldn’t see it himself. To him, she was the spitting image of his darling Teresa, and he would not have wanted it any other way. He never took her outside the gates, but he liked to stroll around the garden with her in her pram, describing the flowers and the birds to her, when he was certain that nobody could hear him. He had melted Teresa’s heart one morning when she was popping in to see Daisy and saw John singing ‘Ba, Ba, Black Sheep’ to her. He had flushed red with embarrassment when he saw her listening, and she had never seen him do it again.

The garden walks had stopped taking place shortly afterwards, and that had an effect on Teresa as well, because John was not used to socialising without a partner and so wanted his wife to accompany him, which meant that they needed a nanny. Although, it was not what Teresa wanted, she felt that she had to comply, because John had been so kind to her.

The periods of time that baby Daisy was left with her nanny, Lisa, grew longer and more frequent, until the baby showed more affection towards Lisa than her mother. It broke Teresa’s heart, but there was nothing she could do about it. Around about this time, Tony, noticed that little Daisy was often alone in her playpen in the garden, so he began to stop by to amuse her. He didn’t have a problem with anyone seeing him or thinking him a fool and liked children, always having regretted not having any of his own. Daisy took to him too and they became firm friends.

John was absent from home ever more often, although his office was there, but not knowing any different, it didn’t bother him. It was how he had been brought up.

As a toddler, she proved to be a quick on the uptake, learning Spanish and English at roughly the same speed. Teresa used this opportunity to improve her own command of English, which until then had been reasonably average for the area and her background. It was to stand her in good stead in later years and improved her relationship with her daughter.

Despite that, however, Daisy grew up more or less alone, or, more accurately, with the servants. She lived in the same villa as her parents, but John was used to being single and was too long in the tooth to change. He liked to go out for drinks and meals in the evening and he expected his wife to accompany him as his friends’ wives accompanied them, despite the fact that this usually resulted in the women sitting at one end of the table and the men at the other after the meal was over.

By the time they got home, more often than not, little Daisy had already been tucked up in bed by her nanny and gone to sleep while being read a story. To be fair, Daisy’s nanny could not have loved her more if she were her own, and Daisy’s mother did her best to make up for her regular absences because she never stopped feeling guilty about them, but she was now confident that Daisy’s future was secure and that was what she cared about more than anything.

Daisy would never have to do what she had had to do to secure a future for herself and her children when she had them one day.

Daisy followed the path of many children of wealthy parents. In her early years, it ranged from being spoiled by guilty parents to being neglected by them again the same day; then, when she reached five years of age, she was put in pre-school, where teachers attempted to replace the children’s parents and nannies. Everyone was well-meaning, but it only resulted in more confusion, isolation and loneliness for the children concerned, including Daisy.

She was growing up a little cold-hearted; a loner who didn’t look for friendship or company. That didn’t stop other children trying to befriend her, but none of them got close to her. She had no idea what a best friend was.

School was just more of the same, although Daisy did seem to excel at it. If the truth were known, it was because she was trying to get her father’s approbation. She was more certain of her mother’s, who did spend some amount of time with her when she didn’t have to fulfil her ‘duties’ to John’s social life.

It was at this stage in her life, in junior school, that she first started to hear about her father’s exploits and reputation as a ‘hard man’. Some even went so far as to describe him as ‘merciless’ or a ‘cold-blooded killer’. However, these descriptions of her father did not make her question his character, they only served to enhance his hero status in her young mind. After all, didn’t her mother consider, and frequently call, him ‘her hero’?

She never spoke of her feelings on the frequent occasions when people spoke badly of her father, but neither did she respond when people spoke of him in awe, although inwardly, she was glowing with pride for the person she was learning more about from others than she was firsthand from him.

She was taught in English and Spanish at the same school and was completely fluent in both. She mixed just as easily with the rich and poor Spanish kids as she did with rich Brits. She never met any poor British people, so, until she went to boarding school in Britain at sixteen to do her ‘A’ Levels, she had no idea that they existed. In that respect, she was like a lot of Spanish children.

Her parents took her to London to start boarding school, but when they left her there, her mother in tears, she found that it was the man she called Uncle Tony, the head of security for her father that she missed the most. The nannies had come and gone, just as her teachers at school, but Tony had always been there, which was more than she could say for her parents. He had taught her to ride a bicycle with support wheels, and it was he who took them off and caught her when she toppled over. He had also taught her to swim, climb trees, kick and throw a ball and even the rudiments of boxing and karate. She had fond memories of watching rugby with him on the television and enjoyed seeing him get excited when England scored points or played especially well.

Several times, she almost shed a tear for those happy days, which she knew were probably gone forever.

It was in boarding school and university, where she studied Business and Economics at the LSE, that she developed the thick skin of a rhino and the cunning of a fox. She had always had the uncanny ability to remember every word that anyone had ever said about her, her family, and especially her father. She was also in the habit of writing it all down in diaries, and had been doing so for a decade, but it was only a way of committing it to memory. She had discovered in her childhood, that once she had written something down longhand, she never forgot it.

For something to do outside of school, and then university, she took lessons in mixed martial arts. She was adept at full contact Kyokushinkai Karate and had studied Aikido and boxing by the time she had left school.

John and Teresa felt like the proudest parents on the planet when they went to London to watch their daughter receive her first-class honours degree. They celebrated at the Ritz directly afterwards with friends and then at friends’ of Daisy’s in the evening. It was a perfect day, and perhaps the only one for ten or fifteen years when Daisy had felt of worth to both her parents at the same time.

John and Teresa offered her a round-the-world, first-class flight ticket as a reward for her achievement, and had a brand new Porche 911 Carrera S Cabriolet in the garage in Spain as a surprise, but to their amazement, Daisy declined the ticket.

“I’d rather just fly back to Malaga with you, if it’s all the same”, she said. “I want to contribute something to the family business. There will be plenty of time for flying around the world later. I want to work in the family firm with you, Dad”.

Dad, at eighty-six, wasn’t sure what to make of that, but felt a warm glow in his heart. He put his arm around his daughter and squeezed her. It was a rare moment of togetherness for both of them.

As an alternative to the round-the-world flight, Daisy’s parents treated her to a £5,000 shopping spree in the heart of London. John made his normal excuse of a bad back for not accompanying his wife and daughter, but they knew that he didn’t like shopping anyway and went alone. They had a whale of a time and paraded their new outfits in front of him on their return. He feigned interest, but again, they both knew him too well to expect any enthusiasm about fashion from him.

Worried about the British press, John decided that it would be safer for him to head back to Spain the following day and his small family were all too pleased to go with him. He had been away so long that Britain, and not even London, felt like home any longer. Teresa liked London, but only for the shopping and Daisy was keen to begin her new life. She felt older, more responsible, and more able to get to know her parents on a higher level than was possible when she had been a child.

“Don’t you have a boyfriend or someone special that you would like to say ‘Goodbye’ to?” asked her mother.

“No”, she replied rather shyly, but she wasn’t being coy because she did have a boyfriend, it was just that she was acutely aware that people expected a beautiful young woman like her to have one, but she did not. Teresa didn’t believe her, but let it drop. The fact was there had been scores of boys and men after her in the five years that she had been away, but she had not been able to get emotionally close to any of them.

She had tried in the first year, really tried, but she did not enjoy kissing, especially French style, and she didn’t like being groped or being expected to please boys. She had made love three times with two different partners, but she hadn’t enjoyed the experiences. After that she had given up, and used the excuse of a fictitious fiancé in Spain to keep her pride. She hadn’t even had girlfriends who were close enough to have noticed that they had never met her fiancé, whom she called Dick, because it made her laugh.

She had come to the conclusion that she was asexual, but knew deep down that that was not true either. She did fancy boys, not girls, but she didn’t like them, or at least none of the ones she had met so far and she had to admit that that was quite a few in university.

However, in order to throw her mother off the scent, she went out on her own for a few hours that night, but it was only to see a film and have a burger.

The three of them, especially Daisy, were happy to fly back home to Spain the following afternoon.

3 THE APPRENTICESHIP

On the Sunday afternoon after their return, Daisy said to her father after lunch, “Dad, I am ready to help you in any way you want to use me. I want to be your right-hand man, girl, or, er, woman, whichever you care to think of me as. I think that our affairs are best kept within the family, so, if you like, I will take over Tony’s job as your deputy from tomorrow”.

She had expected, or at least hoped for another hug from her hero for that declaration of loyalty, but she was disappointed again, not that she had let such things show on her pretty face for many years.

“Tony has been with me for thirty-odd years… You can’t just step into his shoes like that, my dear… and anyway, what on Earth would your mother say? Tony has a dangerous job. I can’t put you in his position…”

She was heartbroken, but only she knew it.

“I just want to help, Dad. I want to play my part in the organisation you have set up and that has paid for our lifestyles… mine and Mum’s”.

“That is very sweet of you, Daisy, but I don’t see how you can… I’ll tell you what I’ll do. Give me a couple of days to think about it and I will get back to you with a position in our family business. Is that OK?”

“Promise?”

“I promise, chicken, by the end of the week”.

She loved it when he called her ‘chicken’, and kissed him on the cheek.

“You run along now and let me think about it”, he said

∞

John was proud of his daughter and the way that she hero-worshipped him, but he was worried that the hero-worshipping would not stand up to much scrutiny, if he allowed Daisy to know too much about his business interests. So, he tried to keep her at arm’s length by giving her a job, which only had connections with the legal face of his financial affairs.

“Daisy, I have found the perfect job for you”, he said to her one day. “We are going to convert your study into a proper, prestigious office and you can keep tabs on the finances. You will be the firm’s bookkeeper… or accountant, when you are completely up to speed with the financial laws in this country. I know that you’ve studied all that with regard to the UK, but Spain is slightly different, so you are going to have to get your head around that now”. He was hoping that by piling this extra load onto her, she would not have the time to study his affairs.

“You want me to be a clerk? After spending all that time studying - sixteen years or more - I will become an apprentice bookkeeper?”

It was clear that he had offended and disappointed her, and that sidelining her was not going to be as easy as he had hoped. It was a problem that he had not foreseen.

“You have to start somewhere, chicken, and that cannot be at the top. Everyone has to earn his or her place in an organisation by starting near the bottom… And you won’t be right at the bottom. Every firm needs good accountants, or the government and some employees will skin you alive.

“Your job will be to stop our firm from leaking money”. He was thinking on his feet now, which he was good at. “You will have to analyse each aspect of our business and match it to its financial results. Then you will be able to suggest improvements to how we do things. You know, I am getting old, and I can no longer have my fingers on the pulses of all our operations like I used to.

“That is why I need you. A trusted, intelligent and well educated member of the family… a younger person who has stamina and a zest for getting the job done properly. There is no-one else who fits that bill, is there?”

She stared into his eyes to judge whether he was scamming her, but had to agree that there was no-one else to fulfil that function. “I know you’re flannelling me, Dad, but it’s hard to argue with you, so I’ll do what you want me to, but I am determined to have a real job, not some silly excuse that you’ve made up for me. I am serious about wanting to make a real contribution to our business. I want to put something back. Do we understand one another?”

“Yes, darling, but you must understand this too: it will take a little time to bed you into this new rôle. It is not so much a new job, I used to check up on all my businesses as a matter of course every day or week as the circumstances dictated, but I have let it slide, so I want you to pick up from where I left off. However, it is a new rôle for you and it will take some time to teach it to you.

“Do you understand that?”

“Yes, Dad, when do I start? I can’t wait to be working with you”.

“Me too, love, but let’s get you a new computer just for office work and a bigger desk. You can sort all that out and enrol yourself on some kind of accountancy course. Ask Manuel, our accountant, what he recommends and get the same software as he uses too”. As John was saying all this, he realised that the ball was back in his court to give his daughter a meaningful function that she could be proud of doing well.

He still didn’t want her to go anywhere near the dodgy things he did though.

∞

When Daisy sat behind her desk at nine o’clock the following Monday morning, she switched on her Apple Mac and stared at an empty accounting program. No-one came to see her, no-one sent her any data and no-one asked her for any advice. However, she was determined to make this job her own. She knew that her father was hoodwinking her somehow, but she was equally certain that he had been telling the truth when he had admitted that he had let things slide over the last few years. One way or another, she was going to reel in that slack.

However, faced with nothing tangible to do, she started her working life by filling in all the settings for the dozen or so programs on her new computer and then she went for lunch.

“How was your first day working for your father?” asked her mother.

“Oh, I set up all my programs and waited for someone to tell me what to do… or at least give me some information about the businesses I’m supposed to be scrutinizing - like their names and addresses, but no-one came. So, I just did what I could and came for lunch”.

“That’s the way, dear. You’ll get there in the end. Slow and steady wins the race”. She looked at her mother, who was often prone to inappropriately-timed, meaningless platitudes, but she was eating and not looking her way. Then she turned her gaze to her father, but he was avoiding her too.

“So, Dad, who is going to help me get started?” She was determined not to let the matter drop.

“Sorry, chicken, what was that? I was thinking. Before I forget, did Manuel send you the info I asked him to?”

“I don’t know what info you’re referring to, do I? However, since neither he, nor nobody else for that matter, has sent me anything all morning, no, he did not”.

“Perhaps I forgot to ask him to. Just a sec”. He pushed a few buttons on his phone and spoke to someone. “No, I don’t know her new contact details. I’ll let her tell you herself”. He passed Daisy his phone, saying, “You need to get some business cards printed so people know that you exist and how to get in touch with you. I don’t even know and I live in the same house as you!”

The point was taken. Whether people didn’t know what to do with her or not, she was equally to blame for being inaccessible. That afternoon, she designed a business card using an on-line printer, cut the design out using Jing and emailed it to a local printer for immediate processing. A thousand colour cards would be delivered the following day. The only field that she had a problem with was her job title. She was determined not to be described as a bookkeeper or even an accountant. She liked the description she finally came up with though: ‘Trouble Shooter’.

It matched the family’s temperament, she thought, and sounded aggressive for a woman. Especially a pretty, young, blue-eyed, blond lady. It was perfect. Then she entered the names and details of her father’s businesses and familiarised herself with where they were and what they did.

At dinner that evening, she presented her father with the list of fifteen businesses that she had been given.

“All right, Dad”, she began, “I want to make myself known to the managers of each of these companies and state my intention of studying them. Do you think it is better if you take me around and introduce me or do you want to phone them first and take a letter of introduction from you?”

“Which one do you want to start with?”

“I thought that it would be better to start with the two smallest ones. Then I can perfect my technique before tackling the larger ones. What do you think?”

“That sounds fine to me. Is this list in any particular order?”

“Highest profit to lowest. Don’t you even know that? The second column shows percentage profit of turnover”.

“I get these figures every quarter from Manuel, but as long as they seem reasonable, I don’t worry about them much”. And it was true. He was a multi-millionaire and his legitimate businesses more than covered his lifestyle, but his other interests brought in far, far more.

“I will take you to meet the first couple on your list, no problem, but I can’t guarantee to take you to all fifteen of them. What are you talking about, one a day?”

“That is the ground plan, but it really depends on what I find. Some could take much longer”.

John nodded in agreement. “I will take my car and you can go in your own. Once I have introduced you, I will go about my business and you about yours. Is that all right with you?”

“Sure, that’ll be perfect. There’s no need for you to hang about twiddling your thumbs”.

∞

The first on her list to be visited at eleven o’clock was a ‘Cambio’ - a place where people could exchange currency and cash travellers’ cheques on the seafront in Los Boliches thirty minutes north of Marbella. As they drove there in their separate cars, Daisy explained her concerns to her father over their hands-free mobile phones.

“It is struggling, Dad. The rent is high for a kiosk, but the returns are negligible. It might be worth closing this business down and reinvesting the funds elsewhere”.

“Whoa, girl! Slow down. Your assignment is investigative. You must bring your findings to me and then we will decide what to do. Don’t start closing my businesses down before you discuss it with me. Is that clear?”

She hadn’t quite meant it like that, but it was a lesson to her to choose her words more carefully when discussing sensitive issues. She apologized. “Sorry, Dad. That came out wrong. I was thinking aloud”.

“Then that is another thing you have to learn to do. Be wary of telling people what you are thinking. It is acceptable with your mother and me, but on no account with anyone else. It’s like telling people what cards you have. It’s silly”.

“OK, Dad, I’m reading you loud and clear”. In fact, she had known that for a very long time, but she had thought that it didn’t apply to her parents, as he had just said. However, apparently it did and so another lesson was learned.

John introduced his daughter to Paco, who was running the small shop, accepted a cup of coffee and then left them to it. Paco and John had behaved towards each other like old friends, but when the latter had left, he was wary of Daisy.

She questioned him about the number of transactions per day and the average value of them, the busiest times and the busiest days. She already had this information up to and including the end of the previous quarter, but she wanted to know how much on the ball Paco was.

At two o’clock, she feigned hunger and drove off. However, she only drove her ostentatious Porche out of sight and then walked back to a restaurant on the beach diagonally across from the kiosk wearing a headscarf and sunglasses in a mock-starlet disguise. She picked at her sea bass salad followed by ice cream for hours and photographed everyone who went to the kiosk with the zoom lens of her Nikon SLR camera.

She was excited about her findings and wanted to report them to her father over dinner that night, but she resisted the temptation because of what he had told her that morning. She simply told him that a full analysis would take several more days and that she would not be needing him to introduce her to the next business until the following Saturday, if he wanted, or the Monday.

She returned to the restaurant for a long lunch every day that week and wrote up her report on Friday evening. Her first analysis was complete and she was immensity proud of it.

She presented it to her parents after dinner on Friday night.

After a report lasting twenty minutes, she gave voice to her conclusions.

“My first impression was that the manager, Paco, was either often not open or massaging the figures. However, I am pleased to report that, although Paco seems to be losing his grip on the firm, he is honest, and does work all the hours he claims. However, it is a barely profitable concern because a) people are happy to withdraw local currency direct from their bank accounts using an ATM card, and b) sales of travellers’ cheques have been in decline for years and that is affecting profits.

“On a purely profit-based motive, it would be reasonable to close this concern. The returns could be put into one of the other businesses, but I cannot yet say which”. She sat down to applause from her mother.

“Didn’t Daisy read that well, Johnny? Just like a real professional… and don’t forget, ‘A stitch in time saves nine! That’s what I always say”.

They both looked at her, nodded, smiled and then looked at each other. Daisy hoped for praise, but knew better than to expect it.

“Thank you, Daisy”, replied John after a few minutes’ reflection. “I think that you are correct in your analysis. Fundamentally, correct, anyway. Did you notice anything about Paco?”

“He was infirm, if that’s what you mean?”

“Yes… his legs are mangled. He is, as you say, infirm. Theresa, do you remember Paco? The guy who runs the Cambio in Los Boliches?” She nodded and tears came into her eyes.

“How is the lovely man, Johnny? Is he well?”

“Yes, dear, he’s fine. Daisy has been spending time with him all week…”

“Oh, there’s a good girl, Daisy! Never forget your Uncle Paco”.

Daisy was confused. She had never heard of an ‘Uncle Paco’ before. “Who is he, Dad?”

“I’ll tell you who he is, chicken, he used to work with Tony. One day, a man tried to spray me with machine gun fire as I got out of the car in Fuengirola. Your mother was still in the car and Paco was holding the door open for me. He pushed me back inside and took five bullets in the legs.

“Five bullets meant for me, and possibly your mother too. I, we, owe Paco our lives. After that, he became infirm, as you rightly say, so we set him up in a little business to give him an income and some respect.

“I say this not to criticise your work, which is factually accurate, but Paco has a job for life… and he returns a small profit too, which your mother and I put into a fund that he is unaware of for him when he retires”.

Daisy felt as if she had been set up to fail, but took comfort from the fact that she had made an honest effort to analyse the business within the framework of the knowledge that she had been given.

It took months to analyse the other fourteen businesses, but there were no more hidden pitfalls, although one of the bars was run by another ex-employee. John’s legitimate empire in Andalucía consisted of three middle-of-the-range hotels, an 8-Till-Late convenience store, four restaurants, four bars, a travel agency, a tour operator and Paco’s Cambio. However, she did find discrepancies with two of the bars and two of the hotels.

One afternoon, while passing the time of day with Tony in the garden, she asked his advice as she had done all her life; he was much more of an uncle and a confidant to her than any of her real ones.

“Uncle Tony, you have been with my Dad a long time, do you think I am helping the firm or just being fobbed off?”

“Little One, I have never lied to you willingly, but you have to be aware that my first loyalty has to be to your father. If he is telling you that you are helping, then who am I to argue? He has the global picture… I take care of security and a few other things. My advice is that you must trust your father’s judgement. After all, he has done pretty well so far, hasn’t he? But, if you can’t see your way to doing that, then you have to follow your own heart. I’m sorry that I can’t be of more help, but I will always be your friend, if you need me. I can promise you that”.

“I know, Uncle Tony… I know that. You are a rock and always have been”. She reached up despite her height, to kiss him on his craggy cheek. He put an arm around her shoulder and squeezed her.

“I’d better be getting on with my rounds, young lady”, he said letting her go and walking away. She was the only female he hadn’t had sex with who meant anything to him except for his cat, which he now regretted having named ‘Pussy’ every time he had to call her in.

4 DAISY FEELS HER FEET

Daisy enjoyed getting to know the managers of her father’s legitimate businesses over the following months and collected a great deal of data, which she proceeded to analyse and convert into suggestions for streamlining and improving them. All of these outfits were between Marbella and Los Boliches, which is a reasonably short coastal drive. She was therefore quite surprised to find out how little most of them knew of each other’s existence.

She had suggestions for each of the businesses individually and she had ideas for them globally as well. She wanted to be professional about her approach, so she scheduled a meeting with her parents, so that she could explain her plans.

“Should I invite Tony too, Dad?”

“No, he must know what we decide, but we do this as a family first and iron out any wrinkles. Then, when we are absolutely sure of our position, we can discuss it with others.

Never let outsiders see the insiders squabbling over details. The front that we present to the outside world, even to Tony, must be a united one. Even if we don’t all agree on everything in private”.

Daisy had heard it all before, but nodded solemnly. “I’ll remember that, Dad”

“How’s your course in Spanish accountancy law going? Are you still doing it?”

“Sure, I am. Why ever wouldn’t I be? I told you that I was serious about helping and I’ll prove it to you too in my presentation. In fact, I am enjoying the course, ‘though many wouldn’t. It’s a bit dry, if you know what I mean”.

“I can imagine, but someone has to do it, and that someone is you for the moment. Sorry, chicken”.

“No apologies necessary. I asked for a job with responsibility, and now I’ve got one. I’m happy, really”.

“Good…”

“I’m going out with a few of the girls tonight, Dad, so don’t wait up for me. I’ll see you in the morning at ten for the presentation. Bye, Dad. I love you”. She put her arms around his shoulders, pecked him on the cheek and left looking very happy.

He smiled inwardly; he was so darned proud of her that he thought he might explode sometimes.

∞

In the morning, she had the chef prepare coffee and rich, chocolate cake for eleven o’clock in her office, because it was one of her parents’ favourite combinations.

It took her to just after eleven to outline the individual modifications to the fifteen businesses, but she continued while her mother sliced the cake and poured the coffee.

“… and that brings me to the theme of ‘Integration’. I feel that we don’t encourage our businesses to make use of each other’s specialities. For example, none of the hotels, bars and restaurants recommend one another.

“I find that very odd and shamefully wasteful. For example, one of the hotels and three of the bars do not provide any food other than toasties… and one does chips.

“I propose that we encourage the bars and that hotel to order take-away food from our restaurants, if they are within a reasonable distance of each other. My suggestions for link-ups is in paragraph seventeen. The five groups that you see, one hotel and four bars, are all within five kilometres of the restaurants in their group. Where two or three restaurants can be linked to one establishment, we could have special combined menus drawn up. There is no need to explain that the food is not cooked on the premises, unless the manager is asked, is there?”

It was a rhetorical question, but her father shook his head in agreement.

“The bar that is a little isolated could form ties with third-party restaurants for a percentage of the take”. She looked up to see her father nodding at the page in front of him. It encouraged her, so she continued with a flourish.

“The next stage, we could call ‘Globalisation’. Not the same globalisation as MacDonald’s practices, but our own version. Only one of our bars has a decent website, and three of the other establishments have crappy ones. I propose that we create a first-class web presence for all of our businesses and include links to others where they could be beneficial. We can hire someone to do this for us, and I will monitor it.

“And finally, we come to ‘Familiarisation’. What is this? It is my term for creating a mutually-cooperative, family atmosphere within your group. We could all meet for a chat, drinks and a meal once a quarter or twice a year… even once a year. Whatever you both think is best. You might even declare a group bonus of one or two percent of net profits across the board, but again, that would be up to you.

“Thank you for your attention, that is the end of my report”. She sat down and both her parents applauded her.

“Well done, Daisy!” said her mother. “Wasn’t our little girl wonderful, John?”

“She sure was, Teri. I knew you were special, chicken, but there is a lot more in there”, he said waving the report in his hand, “than I was expecting and ninety-odd percent of it I agree with right off the bat. As your mother says, well done. You’ll have to give us a couple of days to mull this lot over, but then we’ll come back to you with any questions we may have. Is that all right with you?”

“Sure, Dad, anything you say”. She was in Seventh Heaven.

“Let’s go down to lunch”, he suggested, looking at his gold Patek Philippe wrist watch.

∞

Her father was delighted with all of Daisy’s proposals and told her so.

“The only one I’m not sure about, is installing wired money into Paco’s place. I did look at it - Oh, ten or twelve years ago, but the figures didn’t stack up. You can make fresh enquiries, if you like. The rest is great”.

“So, what’s the next step, Dad?”

He looked into space for a moment before speaking. “When we are ready, we will run it past Tony. Then, if he can’t see any problems, we’ll call all the managers in one by one and explain the new regime to them, and, in the interests of your ‘Familiarisation’, if you like, we’ll hold an informal pool party, where we can discuss it with everyone and introduce them all to each other. Does that sound all right?”

“Yes, Dad, it sounds perfect. Shall I organize that or will you?”

“Let’s talk to Tony first and then leave that to him. You are a new liaison officer, but it was always his rôle. You two have always got on well, so try not to upset him. Remember, no-one likes to feel downgraded… that they have lost a bit of power… especially to a new-comer, even if she is the boss’s daughter”.

“OK, Dad, I’ll leave that one to you then”.

∞

After she had explained the new structure of the family firms to Tony, and her parents again, she found herself with the Big Man in the garden, as often happened.

“Did you really approve of our ideas, Uncle Tony, or were you just accepting a new style of management?”

He was normally as guarded with his words as Daisy’s father, but not as far as she was concerned. He had always told her as much of the truth as he felt she needed to know or could handle.

“I honestly approve of what you said in there. It’s a sign of the times, I suppose… We wouldn’t have thought of what you proposed… our style was to tell them, the managers, what to do and hassle them if the money wasn’t right… But those ways are dying out… The police are nowhere near as corrupt as they were twenty years ago, and it has become unfashionable to batter uncooperative managers… So, all in all, I think that your way is a good update to the company’s style… and to be honest with you, I’m pretty sure that your father agrees…”

“So, you think I’m doing OK, Uncle Tony?”

“More than ‘OK’, Little One, much more than that. You’re a chip off the old block if ever there was one”. Daisy took his huge bicep and hugged it to her cheek as they walked along. “There is something else though, I would rather you call me just Tony from now on. It doesn’t change anything, but…. I don’t know, it just sounds better to me…”

“No problem. ‘Just Tony’ it is!”

“There’s just one other thing, if you’re taking the gypsy’s, I still might clout you… boss’ grown up daughter or not”.

“Message read and understood. Thanks for the pep talk. I’ll see you later.

“Oh, Tony, there’s one other thing, do you still have a few minutes?”

“For you? Always. What is it?”

“You know the Stranger’s Arms in Los Boliches?”

“Yes, one of your Dad’s”.

“Yes. Well, I’ve been in there later at night, after most people’s regular working hours, I mean, and I got the impression that some of the girls were ‘working’ in there”.

“Isn’t that the idea”, he said but knew what she was getting at.

“No, I mean ‘working’ working… on the game. Does Dad allow that sort of thing on his premises?”

It was a difficult question to answer given the code that he had adopted when talking with Daisy.

“Let’s just put it this way… My interpretation of your father’s rules is that managers have a large amount of leeway, so long as their activities do not bring us into conflict with the police or the general public.

“Does that answer your question?”

“Sort of, but not really. Does he allow working girls to ply their trade from his bars?”

“If he doesn’t know about it… and if neither the police nor the general public complains”.

“Is that ‘Yes’ or ‘No?”

“It means what I said”.

“So, that’s a ‘Yes’ then?”

“That could be an interpretation, I suppose”.

“Are the girls freelancing or do they work for us?”

Tony hesitated for a few seconds before saying, “They do not work for any of the fifteen firms on your list, if that is what you are asking”.

“It was, but now I am asking whether they work for any of our firms that are not on my list?”

“Ah, now you have painted us into a corner. I cannot answer that question. Only your father can do that”.

“I understand that I am putting you in an impossible position, Unc… Tony, but I cannot possibly do my job properly unless I know exactly what is going on. Don’t worry about it. I’ll ask Dad.

“See you later”.

∞

When she spoke to her father several days later, he was expecting the question, because Tony had forewarned him. He had deliberated over what his response would be for many hours during the nights since.

“It is like this, chicken”, he said as they sat in his large, airy, bright office, which had a whole wall of sliding glass that opened onto the pool, “… it really isn’t easy to put it in a way that you will understand… When my father and I first came here to live, Oh, about fifty years ago, Spain was nothing like it is as you know it now and neither was I. Yes, we had money, but we, or especially I, still had dreams. Dad was rich and was satisfied, but I was still a young man and wanted to make my own mark… to prove myself too.

“I, or we, got into time-share, which was a new concept back then. Land was cheap and so was labour, but the locals still couldn’t afford the prices we wanted to charge for the houses - villas and condo’s, we called them - so we had the idea of bringing over loads of middle-class Brits to buy them by the week instead.

“That went smoothly, but then we realised that they needed something to do… especially in the evenings. They could lie on the beach with their wives or girlfriends all day, but after that, they wanted to do what their body clocks told them it was time for… an after-work drink. So we surrounded the villas, hotels and time-share apartment blocks with bars, restaurants and discos, which were the new thing.

“In those days, Brits were earning ten times more than the local Spanish boys and it didn’t take long for the girls to cotton on. We had no choice but to cooperate with them. If we didn’t allow them in our bars, they would hang around outside upsetting the female holidaymakers, and bribe the police not to move them on.

“Or, even worse, they would go to a competitor’s bar where they were welcome and take our punters with them. The only sensible solution was to let them in, so that the customers could chat them up and buy them drinks. We did eventually get rid of the pimps, which the girls were grateful for.

“But it’s about bums on seats at the end of the day. Customers sitting at the bar tend to spend more than those at a table, and sometimes, the bar stools were full of girls spending hours over a glass of water, so we had to charge them for using our bars as their offices. We eventually came to a working arrangement that was acceptable to all parties, and that worked well, but times and situations change, and businesses have to change with them.

“Nowadays, a lot of the girls are working the summer months to pay their university fees. Others might want a new car or a trip to the States… and some of the migrant girls just want to be able to send their families some money to help out… or to get them over here to be reunited as a family. Many are saving to bring their parents or even husbands over”.

“But it’s wrong, isn’t it, Dad?”

“What is?”

“Prostitution… making money from girls selling their bodies…”

“The law says it is in some countries… but not in others. Prostitution, prostitutes… they are such horrible words, aren’t they? I know about sticks and stones, and words and all that, but it is not true. Words can and do hurt. I’ll tell you about my childhood one day, and believe me, they did hurt. Those words are overloaded with preconceived ideas put there in the past by middle-class people with safe jobs. Women who had never had to work in their lives and men who made use of the girls in the evenings after condemning them during the day. A wise, middle-class woman once said to me on the subject of working girls, “There but for the Grace of God go many women’. I urge you never to forget that you were born privileged, Daisy. Your position in life is not normal… you could have been born a pretty, penniless refugee as well. What would you exchange for food and lodgings then? Think about it long and hard… Your conclusions might surprise you.

“Anyway, I’ve already tried to explain that we would have gone under if we hadn’t worked with them in the old days - but the same is still true. Men like a bit of nooky when they’re on holiday. Surprising, isn’t it, that even these lowly, penniless girls can shape business? Still, the only thing that has changed is the reason why the girls want money. In the Sixties, it was for was for life’s basic essentials, and now it is often for luxuries… except in the cases of the refugees, of course. Is it wrong to help people achieve their goals? Is it not better not to criticize someone, unless you can honestly say to yourself that you have walked in their shoes?

“I don’t think that it is wrong to try to understand and to try to help, especially when the people who are making the laws are also sitting in the bars of an evening with their hand inching up the bare leg of the pretty, young stranger sitting next to them. Most people are hypocrites, chicken. It’s all ‘Do what I say, not what I do’. You are still young, and I wanted to shield you from the crappier side of life, as I have done your mother, but I have realized that I was wrong. You are working in the firm, and Andalucía is not large. Now that you are living here and taking an active rôle in the community, you were bound to hear about our family reputation sooner or later”.

“What else am I likely to hear?” She was all ears. Her father had never talked to her about his family, his past, or his business interests so openly before. However, she was shocked at herself more she was with him. She had expected to take the high moral ground, but she found that she was not. She also realised that the kids in school had been speaking more than a little of the truth, not that that made any difference to what she thought of them - they had still meant to insult her family after all and that was enough, whether they had been right or not.

John sighed. “Well, also back in the early days, the girls liked to smoke grass or dope. Many of the them came from Morocco, and the best weed and light-weight hashish comes from there… just across the water, in fact, from Ketama. You have to remember that these girls had watched the men in their families smoking it all their lives and it was cheaper than beer and safer than moonshine. It was also the start of Flower Power, Jimi Hendrix, and the Hippies. The possession of drugs was a criminal offence in Britain, and here, but the local police would look the other way.

“So, the girls would have their smoke, and share it with their clients… and some savvy hippies even came just for the ‘scene’ as they called it. It was inevitable, we got into supplying drugs to first the girls and then to others. That was profitable, I can tell you!

“We would send a Transit van, like a camping wagon. over to Morocco for a month, and it would disappear into Ketama for a week while touring. The farmers would dismantle the vehicle, stuff it with four or five hundred kilos of dope and rebuild it. A day later it would be on sale here. We could average £1 a gramme, so that was half a million a month in those days! And all for an out lay of fifty thousand!

“The problem was that it was so lucrative that others tried to muscle in. We fought off competition for years… that’s how Paco got shot. I was shot twice on other occasions and escaped injury dozens of times more. Still, those drugs never hurt anyone. I used to smoke them myself and I bet your mother did too before we got married. We got out of drugs when the chemists moved in. A bit of coke or speed, even a trip was OK, but when they started enhancing the basic drugs, we stopped.

The Irish and the Russians control most of that now, and we just let them get on with it. They’re forever shooting or blowing each other up… It’s a mug’s game… not for me and my family, but I won’t deny to you that we did do it for about thirty years or maybe a bit longer.

“What else is there…? We smuggle cigarettes to the UK, where the government has taxed them so much that the ordinary smoker can’t afford to buy legit cigarettes. Er, gambling… we do a lot of that. We have places where known clients can bet on horse racing and the like… mostly British races, but the Internet is eating into that… We have strip joints, but we are not involved with any other kind of porn… We don’t do guns, except for our own personal protection. I suppose you could say that we do a bit of most things, but not the extreme stuff… any longer.

“Does that answer your question?”

“Yes… it gives me a lot to think about… Could you give me a list, like you did last time?”

“Yes, if you’re sure. Give me a couple of days though and never let it leave the house”.

She walked upstairs to her own office in a daze. Most of the bad things people had said about her family were true after all.

When she collapsed into the swivel chair behind her desk, she wasn’t sure what to make of it all. She phoned down to the kitchen for a coffee and a cake, pushed back into her chair and put her feet on her desk. She was analysing her feelings and was surprised to find that there was no trace of disappointment. Her father had told her what had happened and why and it made perfect sense to her. They were different days, long before she was born; her father, and, no doubt, her mother had faced challenges and dealt with them in the best ways that they were capable of. It was easy to criticize people for what they did, but how would her offspring judge how she would deal with the problems that would one day come her way? Kindly, she hoped, but then didn’t everyone want that too? Yet she knew that it didn’t always work out that way.

She couldn’t wait to see her father’s new list and get involved with the people who were working with the businesses on it. It all seemed so much more exciting than the ‘legitimate list’.

5 THE ILLEGALS

When Daisy had received the list of legitimate businesses, she had recognised the names of most of them, despite having spent most of her late teens in the UK in school and university. However, one name jumped out at her - a bar in the nearby hills with a salacious reputation amongst the locals. It was said to be a bordello, a brothel, and it was marked on the list as that - one of five such ‘bars’ or ‘hotels’. There were seven ‘madams’, each running girls; twenty smugglers each running mules carrying contraband (mostly cigarettes) to the UK; three illegal gambling dens, an ex-customs agent who helped men obtain dodgy family permits for spouses who would otherwise not have qualified for a UK visa and a money laundering service, which charged a whopping forty percent.

She had no figures to work from, and based on her naïveté, the illegals didn’t seem to be worth much, but she remembered that her father had said that they raised five times more than the legals did.

She needed another heart-to-heart with her father before she would get to the bottom of the businesses on the new list, but she was looking forward to it immensely. She broached the subject with him, guardedly for her mother’s sake, over lunch and he told her to find him in the garden at three.

“Are you going for a walk in the garden with your father, Daisy? That’s nice. It’s a real picture out there. I’d love to come with you, but three o’clock… I’ll be in the middle of my siesta. Why don’t you make it later, say five thirty and then I can come with you? You know that three’s company and two is, er, not’, she said hesitantly.

“Perhaps we’ll still be out there when you wake up, Mum. You have my mobile number, give me a ring and we’ll come and get you”.

It seemed to satisfy Teresa and she shrank back into her own little world, where everything was always lovely and the sun was always shining or the moon was always full.

∞

“If you are determined to go down the route of managing the other side of the firm, I want you to learn how to use a firearm and I want everyone to know that you know how to use one. I am scared to death of you entering this world, but if I died tomorrow, you would have to anyway, so you might as well do it with my help as without it”.

“OK, Dad, I quite fancy that idea anyway… I always have. How do you mean to go about it?”

“I, no, you will open a legally registered gun club with you as the owner. Tony or someone he recommends can manage it for us, but I want you to be seen there at least twice a week, and whether you turn out to be a good shot or not, we will have the word put about that you are a marksman, er, woman. That will give you some protection, but we will also get you a weapon that you can handle well, whichever that is. Tony will sort that out with you. Just ask him”.

She nodded, already feeling an adrenaline rush pulsing through her veins.

“These are all quite low risk businesses to be honest, but you never know when some upstart is going to want to get in on the act. The gun is not to be used to start trouble, do you hear me, only to defend yourself should anyone else start anything. Get it lodged in your brain right now, that you cannot win a turf war. Any old Joe Blogs from Liverpool could hire a hundred guns to come after you and you would be dead, and you would probably get your mother and me and Tony and his men all killed as well trying to look after you. Those old, black and white, American mobster films were just films. That is not how it works, at least it has never been like that in my time.

“It’s the lone gunman that you have to be watchful for… or woman, I guess these days. I have had a couple of bullets and one hurts me every day, but nowhere near as much as the ones my men took for me. I think about those guys and their families every day. Never forget this: when you affect a person’s life or even take it, you will change many lives including your own”.

They both fell silent for several minutes. Daisy didn’t dare break her father’s mood, and he wanted to give his words chance to sink into his intelligent, but perhaps impressionable daughter.

He explained about the illegals, as he called them and where and how they operated, promising to give her the managers’ names and addresses in the near future.

“When all is said and done, Daisy, the way I see it is, whether you like it or not, whether you’re a feminist or not, there will always be a market for girls selling sex. Old men don’t want to shag old women - that is not the way they think. They still want young ones, and at fifty, sixty or seventy, they get more of a thrill out of bedding a twenty-year-old than a twenty-year-old boy does. Much more… much, much more. So, as long as there are old men with money, there will be young women willing to sleep with them. It is not called the oldest profession for nothing. I see it as a sort of dating service. It helps both parties get what they want and some of the girls end up getting married too.

“So, that is one staple, and money laundering is the other main one. Arranging family policy permits to get girls into Britain used to be very profitable, but the vote for Brexit may have put the kibosh on that, we’ll have to wait and see. Anyway, laundering money will always work, because there will always be newbies who don’t know how to do it, ‘though to be honest, even some of the big firms can’t be bothered. They must factor the cost of laundering into their prices. In fact, it’s a lot easier than you would imagine, if you know how.

“Any questions, am I going too fast for you?”

“No, I find it all fascinating… perhaps when everything has sunk in, and I have looked at the details you’re going to send me, I will have a few points”.

“Not send, chicken, handed. The illegals need to be dealt with with the utmost privacy. And that means no unnecessary records, not even between family, and even those notes have to be shredded or otherwise destroyed. Do you understand me? If you chuck a note from me into your waste-paper basket, the cleaner may find it, or the dustman, or someone at the landfill, but there might even be people, say, the Inland Revenue, looking for scraps of information… or the media. You have to train yourself to be meticulous when dealing with any potentially incriminating evidence. That, and security, which it is a part of, must be your main preoccupations. Have you got that?”

“Yes, Dad. You have taught me to be cautious, and careful about security all my life, so this is just taking it a stage further”.

“Yes, but before I was mostly worried about you being kidnapped and held for ransom, now the worry is that you could land us all in jail. That might kill your mother, I might never see the light of day as a free man again, and you might spend years in the nick… not to mention the hundreds of other lives that would be affected if all of our businesses were to be closed down. Being the boss certainly carries privileges, but it also bears responsibilities… and they can be heavier than you can imagine at the moment…” He drifted off again, but she was still loathe to bring him back to the topic in discussion.

“Have you ever heard me called Micky the Bastard?” he asked suddenly.

She genuinely wasn’t sure whether she had or not, but the epithet did sound vaguely familiar. “I don’t think so, Dad”, she chose to reply because she found it embarrassing. “Why’s that?”

“Oh, it’s a nickname that has followed me about for most of my life. It started even before I went to school. You don’t know my family history, not really. You only know a potted, sanitised version of it. Your mother and I thought it better not to saddle you with it in the early days, but it is time you learned the truth now. Let’s sit on that bench over there in the shade.

“To start at the beginning, I have to take you back to the First World War. The Germans invaded Belgium one day, so, many Belgians crossed the Channel to London. In the main, they were middle-class, but they had to leave most of their possessions behind. Within a short space of time, many of them were penniless. Most of the men amongst them joined the army and went back to fight, leaving the women to fend for their families as best they could. Some supplemented their incomes by working on the streets at night.

“An enterprising young Irishman called John saw an opportunity, rented a house and put a dozen of the prettiest girls into it. Well, to cut a long story short, he soon had several properties and scores of girls and within a few years he owned those buildings. My mother was one of the children of those women… a second generation Belgian, you could say, and she worked in one of John’s houses. Most people who were willing to talk about my past said that she only looked after the girls - cooking, cleaning, washing and the like, but maybe they were only trying to be kind. I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter to me. I’m sure that she was only doing what she had to do.

“Anyway, John could not manage his empire alone and gave his family jobs to help him. One of these was one of his brothers called Dermot. Dermot raped my mother one day and I am the result.

“I know what that look is on your face, but don’t feel sorry for me. Pity your grandmother, if anyone. She had me and I grew up with her and her mother. I don’t know if her father came back from the war or whether he was already dead when they arrived in Britain. Anyway, my birth certificate said Father: Unknown. I don’t remember anything about those days. Then, one day, when I was about two, my mother shot Dermot dead. Again, I don’t know what drove her over the edge to do it, or whether she had just been biding her time.

“Two or three days later, Dermot’s three sons burst into our rooms and shot my mother and grandmother dead. I don’t know why they left me alive… perhaps they couldn’t kill an infant in cold blood, or perhaps it was because I was their little brother - half-brother.

“The next bit is blurry, but the police must have come and put me in care. John, Dermot’s older brother, the man I called ‘father’, then adopted me and brought me up as his own. He didn’t have any other children.

“He had my name changed by deed pole to match his and I became John Baltimore. I don’t even know what my original names were. John, Dad, never told me, never kept the original paperwork, and I never asked. It just didn’t seem to matter. That makes you half Spanish, a quarter Belgian and a quarter Irish by blood, but half Spanish and half British legally.

“Anyway, back to my little story. Some people were envious of my good fortune at being adopted by the millionaire John, and referred to me as Mick the Bastard… ‘Mick’ meaning Irish, unless my original name had been Michael… or even Michel. Mick soon became Micky and I always imagined that ‘bastard’ came from ‘lucky bastard’, but maybe that was wishful thinking. Anyway, the nickname stuck.

“Kids can be so cruel, you know. They taunted me with that name throughout school and I cried myself to sleep most nights, until John found out about it. He made me take boxing lessons and the name-calling dwindled… to my face at least, but now the nickname certainly didn’t refer to my legitimacy, but to my ability and readiness to exact revenge with my fists quickly and without mercy. Then the nickname suited my purpose. People don’t use it here much, but they still do among the old crowd in the East End, although most of my contemporaries are dead now”.

Daisy waited a while to see if he would continue, and then said, “Wow! I didn’t have a clue about any of that. I’d heard vague rumours about Mafia and London gangland, but I never paid them a great deal of attention… well, I tried not to anyway”.

“Like I said before, we tried to shield you from my past, but you have chosen to be a part of it. Still, you can ignore what I just told you, if it suits you better. It doesn’t matter”.

“So, if I Google your names, I might find something?”

“You might do. You may find some oblique references with regard to the Richardsons or the Krays, but we were not in their league. John, my Dad, had properties and girls and then just property. John was before those big gangsters’ time… they were more my age… but we were in different businesses… there was a slight overlap perhaps. However, our solicitors have gone to great lengths to remove any references to me or Dad from the Internet. Google cooperated, and so did most of the other search engines, and we have been keeping a low profile since we’ve been living in Spain… certainly a much lower profile in any case”.

“How did you meet Mum then? Was she a part of all that stuff too?”

“Your mother? No, Heaven forbid! I don’t think she had ever even been abroad when I met her. Still, I think that that’s her story to tell, so I won’t go into it, but I can assure you that you were not a product of violence like I was. In fact, neither of us thought that we were capable of having children. I took a few beatings in my younger days, and the doctors said that I’d probably never be able to have any… and your mother said that she was past the menopause. Crikey, I was no spring chicken either! Your mother called you ‘a gift from God’ and I wanted to give you the name of a flower in memory of my mother, whose name was Fleur.

“Your mother and I were in love, er, and still are… and I am your real and biological father. See what a mess you’re getting me into? That’s why this subject is better left to your mother”.

“OK, Dad”, she replied smiling. “We all know that you don’t do emotions very well. You know, I’ve learned more this afternoon than I did in any one week in uni. Thanks for telling me… I’m sure that it couldn’t have been easy. I love you, Dad. Do you want me to walk you back to the house?”

“No, you run along, I’ll just sit here a while and smell the flowers. Be careful, won’t you. I would never forgive myself if anything happened to you”.

“Nothing’s going to happen to me. You worry too much”.

“If you need anything, anything at all, just come to me or see Tony. Watch him and learn from him. He’s a good man and can teach you a lot”.

“I will, Dad. Don’t worry. Shall I have Maria bring you out some iced coffee or ice cream?”

“No, I’m fine. I’ll go in shortly. Is that one of Tony’s new toys up there?” he asked pointing at an object in the sky.

“I’m not sure from this distance. It could be a bird or a drone. If you watch it a while, it’s flight pattern will tell you. Yes, I think it’s a drone, but I don’t know whether it’s one of his or not. Do you want me to phone him and ask?”

“No, I’m just curious, that’s all. I’ll just watch it and find out for myself. I’ll see you later”.

“OK, if you’re sure. See you”.

“Did you have a happy childhood, Daisy?” he called after her.

“Yes, Dad, very”. Then she continued on her way.

“Good. I’m glad of that”, he mumbled to himself. “I sometimes feel that I didn’t spend enough time with you… I regret that, but just didn’t know how to. Sorry, chicken”.

She returned to her office, head swimming with her new knowledge. She picked up her mobile, activated it and pushed a button.

“Are we still on for this evening, Tony? Great. I’ll see you at seven. Oh, Tony, were you flying a drone a few minutes ago? No? OK, it’s just that we saw one between us and the hills to the north-west”.

∞

Daisy was waiting on the front porch when Tony brought the Mercedes around and got in without more ado.

“Daisy, instead of going down the coast as you suggested, let’s go to another bordello tonight - it’s up in the hills near where you saw the drone. We’ve also got a casino between here and there that I can show you on the way back. We can do your two choices another time”.

“Yes, sure, no problem. You saw the drone then?”

“No, not really. I saw a distant speck which could have been anything. I’ll have someone look out for it tomorrow with binoculars”.

“Could it be a threat then, do you think?”

“No, not really, but anything could be a threat. It’s just best to be aware, stay alert and keep on top of things. I try to avoid surprises. We aren’t having strife with anyone though, so it could be anything from hobbyists to drug enforcement.

“We practically own the little village we’re going to now. There is a nice bar, which will hold twice the local population, a dozen girls working in it, a snack bar and a dance floor, where they also do karaoke three times a week. Not tonight, I might add. I hate karaoke”.

“Me too”.

“The bar has a couple of rooms upstairs, but most of the girls sleep at the guest house. Your Dad owns both establishments and everyone in the village works for us except two old ladies with small shops. They are all very loyal to the Boss, so it will be a good place to start. We have started making enquiries, on your behalf, regarding an old, disused mine nearby, which we could convert into an indoor firing range. We can drive past it, if you like”.

“Yes, please. You don’t let the grass grow under your feet, do you?”

“It’s the way we’ve always worked. Take as long as you need coming to a decision, but once it has been made, get on with it, before someone beats you to it”.

“The strategy seems to work. I’m just here to learn, so, please, teach me”.

“OK. There’s the village, Santa Amalia, up ahead to the left. It really isn’t far out of town”.

“What, those six or seven buildings halfway up the mountain?”

“Yes, and there is the mine on our right…” Tony swung the car around the next hairpin bend, “Right here”. He stopped the car, but didn’t switch off the engine or make any move to get out. “I know it doesn’t look much at the moment, but it’s close to the village, so it will become a part of the community”. He drove on for a kilometre and stopped in a car park, which already contained half-a-dozen cars and a taxi. “The taxis’re ours - part of the tour operators”.

She nodded. “I take it you’ve warned Rick, is it, that we are coming? OK, so let me go in first, and you follow me in in five or ten minutes’ time”.

“Whatever you want; but are you telling me five or ten minutes. I like to know where I am”.

“Let’s say ten minutes, I want to get a feel for the place before they know who I am. Oh, and do your ‘Hello’s’ before you acknowledge me, please”. With that, she hopped out of the car and dashed around the front to the entrance. Tony set the alarm on his watch for nine minutes and scanned the skies.

Meanwhile, Daisy entered the bar. She was greeted by stares from the staff and the girls seated at the bar, where she proceeded to sit down. The lighting was on the dark side and there were quite a few even darker nooks and corners, some of which were occupied by couples. It was obvious that there was a lot of groping going on.

“Hello, Miss, are you lost?” asked a voice which surprised her.

“No, why do you ask?”

“We don’t get many unaccompanied young ladies in here. How can I help you, Miss?”

“A bottle of San Mig, please”.

“Certainly, Miss. With ice and a glass?”

“No, just the bottle, please”.

He placed it before her. “That’ll be seven Euros fifty, please”.

“Put it on a tab, I’ll probably have a couple more”.

“As you wish. Would you like some company?” he asked thinking that she could be a lesbian.

“Later, perhaps. I just want to relax a few minutes”. He took the hint and moved to the other end of the bar to talk to the girls, all of whom were about her age and just as pretty. Two of them looked Arabic; one was possibly Moroccan Rif. The door opened behind her and Tony emerged from the thick red cloth that was hanging just inside it She looked away before his head poked through. He passed her by and sat in front of Rick. She could just about hear them talking. Daisy caught the word ‘lezzer’ and watched them both turn to look at her.

“Hello, Tony!” she said holding up her right hand in greeting. She took great pleasure in watching Rick’s features squirm as he realised his mistake. Daisy picked up her drink and clutch bag and moved to sit with them. Tony made the introductions.

“Daisy”, she said. “Sorry about the subterfuge, but first impressions and all that”.

“Rick”, he said, nodding glumly.

“I saw a drone over this way this afternoon, did you see anything, Rick?”

“Me? No, but then, I don’t go outside that often. This place can be a twenty-four/seven operation. You’d be better off asking some of the villagers, or I can ask the cleaners in the morning and phone Tony, if you like?”

“Sure. Thanks”. The three of them and all the unoccupied girls looked at the red curtain as they heard the outside door open. The security camera inside the door showed a white male of about thirty years of age. He sat at the bar a few seats away from Daisy and ordered a pint, which one of the female staff provided for him. Minutes later, he was standing next to Daisy.

“Why don’t you come and join me, darling? I haven’t seen you here before”.

“No, thank you”, she replied, “and get your hand off my leg”.

“Oh, playing hard to get, are we?” He began to stroke her thigh.

“I won’t tell you again”, she warned him. He tried to rub her crotch, and as she saw Tony get up, she lashed out with a backhanded chop to his carotid artery. He dropped like a sack of coal down a shute. Tony picked him up and carried him to a sofa.

“He’s unconscious, but all right. Sorry about this, Rick. You can deal with this can’t you? We’d better be going. Come on, young lady”.

They hurried to the car and got in. “That was a dangerous thing to do back there, even though he was in the wrong”.

“I wouldn’t allow any man to do that to me in any bar. I would have reacted like that whether you were there or not, and whether I was in one of Dad’s places or not”.

“I believe you, but that’s not the point. If you are going to punish someone, break his nose, knock a tooth out, but do not, ever knock him spark out on a tiled floor… or any hard floor for that matter. What if he had broken his neck on a barstool or banged his head on the floor, had a brain haemorrhage and died? You’re up for man slaughter, not just assault. And that would bring the cops sniffing around and several people could go down with you. It was a stupid thing to do, Daisy! You should have let me give him a slap and throw him in a taxi. Please, don’t do it again in one of our bars”.

“Point taken. Consider me reprimanded. Are we still going gambling?”

“No, I’m taking you home. We’ll go another evening”.

She didn’t say another word. She knew that he was right, but felt justified in hitting a man who was assaulting her

6 TERESA’S STORY

As she was getting dressed for breakfast the following morning, Daisy was thinking about the night before and how to best handle the situation. She didn’t yet know whether the man she had hit had fully recovered or not, but she knew that Tony would have to report the incident to her father. She also realised that it would be awkward for him to bring the subject up, because it would mean admitting that Tony had told on her.

She concluded that the best thing to do, would be to admit it to him as soon as possible. She didn’t mind doing that. People would realise that she had simply made a mistake, lashed out, and would be grateful for her honesty. ‘At least, I hope they will’, she thought.

“Good morning, Mum, how are you today? Lovely day, isn’t it?” she said to her mother who was already seated. “Where’s Dad?”

“He hasn’t come back from his morning stroll around the garden, dear. Did you sleep well?”

“Like a top. Shall we start without him? He’s probably talking to Tony”.

“Yes, all right”, she replied, but instead of going to the buffet, Teresa walked to the open French windows and scanned the garden. “I can’t see him”, she said, but it does look lovely out there”. She helped herself to bacon, eggs and mushrooms and then joined her daughter at the dining table. “The Costa del Sol is so beautiful at this time of the year!” she said in the Andalusian dialect of Spanish.

“Yes, cool in the morning, warm in the afternoon, and cool again at night. I love the autumn too”, she replied in the same tongue. Daisy had learned the local dialect from her mother when she was young, and then Catalan at school. She was fluent in them both and could switch between them and English mid-sentence. They tended to speak the dialect when they were alone or with the servants, Spanish when out, and English if John or Tony was with them. John could understand most things but spoke with an awful accent. Unfortunately, Tony’s Spanish was still poor even after thirty years in the country. He was wont to say that he didn’t need to speak Spanish, and life was proving him to be correct.

When her father entered the room a few minutes later, he looked in a good mood, so Daisy greeted him with, “Buena sera, Papa. Como estas?”

“Good morning, Daisy. It’s a gorgeous morning out there. Now, what shall I have this morning?” he asked looking at the choices. The same as you, Teri, I think… and some toast. I suppose it’s cold?”

“Yes, do you want me to ring for more, Dad?”

“No, there’s no need, thanks. It’s my fault that I’m late. Cold won’t hurt”, he added sitting down.

Daisy ate more than she usually would have and had three cups of tea, waiting for the opportunity to arise when she could talk to her father. Eventually, Teri excused herself to go to talk to the cook about dinner and Daisy seized her chance.

“I hit a man last night and knocked him out… in the Azure Club”. John looked up from his newspaper, but didn’t say anything with his mouth.

“I had asked Tony to start taking me to the businesses on the new list, and he chose that one so that he could talk to Rick about the drone and show me the proposed site for the gun club at the same time. I think that it would work there very well.

“Anyway, we were sitting at the bar talking to Rick, when this bloke started groping me. I warned him to stop, but when he didn’t I hit him. He collapsed to the floor unconscious and Tony brought me home. I’m sorry if I caused you any trouble, Dad, but I can’t bear men who think they can treat women however they like”.

“You were sitting at the bar in a bordello full of working girls… what is a man supposed to think?” The reply surprised her.

“I did tell him to leave me alone, before I hit him…”

“Yes, but the music can be quite loud in the Azure sometimes, perhaps he didn’t hear you”.

“Oh, I’m pretty sure that he heard me all right!”

“Pretty sure’, but not absolutely sure?”

“OK, absolutely sure”.

“Good, say what you mean, and mean what you say. There’s a world of difference between ‘pretty’ and ‘absolutely’. If the man had pressed charges, or died, a solicitor would have had no trouble gaining a conviction, if you said ‘pretty sure’ and he had witnesses to back him up.

“Thanks for telling me, although I suppose you knew that Tony would have had to anyway. In fact, that’s why I’m a little late for breakfast, I was just talking to him in the garden. You will be pleased to know that the guy checked out of hospital this morning at eight with only a sore throat and a packet of lozenges. He’s a regular up in the Azure, so Ricky will tear up his bar tab the next time he goes in there. I’m sure he won’t cause any trouble about it, but you do have to be more careful.

“When I was young, if some bloke had touched my girlfriend like that, I would have done a lot more than you did, and John, my Dad, or Dermot even more again, but that’s why we always had to be looking over our shoulders… and why some of us got shot.

“It’s a mug’s game. Leave it to the professionals. Tony would have sorted him out if you’d waited, and Ricky can leap that bar like an athlete. Next time, if there is one, make more verbal ruckus. Shout, scream, even pretend to be hysterical, but make sure that you have plenty of witnesses that can see that you are being molested or assaulted. They won’t stand for it in Spain. There’ll be macho blokes all around you in minutes prepared to defend your honour, and go to court for you for one of your smiles”.

She smiled at him broadly.

“Believe me, chicken, it’s true. Learn to use your assets and the characters of the people around you. They are useful weapons, don’t leave them lying around going to waste.

“So, what are you getting on with today?”

“Just routine stuff like checking suppliers’ discounts and deliveries against invoices”.

“All right, well, off you go then. They won’t check themselves. See you later”.

“Bye, Dad, and thanks. You weren’t hard on Tony were you? I’d hate to think that he got into trouble because of me”.

“No, you’ve no cause to worry on that score”.

∞

Tony didn’t have time to take Daisy out for a few days and she didn’t really have any friends in Malaga any more. The British children she had known in junior school were either still abroad in universities or working in Europe’s cities, while most of the Spanish children she had known had polarised to people of their own nationality. It had been a recurring problem for her since she had gone away to private schools. School holidays and university mid-term breaks had been boring, and now her whole life was like it. If it wasn’t for her job, she knew that she would have to move back to London for her sanity. It, therefore, came as a great relief when an old friend from school, Amy, called one afternoon.

“Amy! It’s so lovely to hear from you! What a godsend! Where are you?”

“In my parents’ house. I got back last night. How are you doing, darling?”

“I’m OK during the daytime, because I’m working for Dad, but the evenings are lethal. Until you phoned, the only person I knew to go out with was my Dad’s bodyguard”.

“Uncle Tony?”

“Yes, that’s right. He’s a sweetie and all that, but not really clubbing material, so I’ve been slowly going potty”.

“Well, I’m here now, for about a week. Do you fancy going out tomorrow night?”

“Do I ever? I’d go out right now, if you said so”.

“No, I can’t tonight, sorry. Mummy has organised some terribly boring family get together for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. I’d invite you over, but I don’t think it’s your thing”.

“No, nor do I. I’ll give that a miss. Where and when tomorrow?”

“Do you want to eat first or later?”

“First”.

“OK, how about the Alhambra?”

“Great choice, we haven’t been there together for years. Seven o’clock?”

“Fine, I’ll book us a table. See you tomorrow, Daisy, must dash. Daddy’s beckoning me”.

“OK, see you, Amy. Thanks for thinking of me”.

She sat behind her desk staring out of the window towards the sea and thought about the life she had chosen for the first time.

She could see that it might be a very lonely life, if she were not careful. The Costa del Sol was densely populated around the seaboard, but her father knew so many people, that she had never been able to have any fun without it getting back to him. If she got drunk or kissed a boy, her father knew about it before she even got home. It had been like that since she was about twelve.

In the early days, she had mixed with Spanish and British equally, but as they had grown up, the two nationalities had gone their separate ways - grown apart. It had happened quite naturally, and she couldn’t explain why. They still spoke when they bumped into each other in town, but there was no friendship. They didn’t phone each other or invite each other to parties any more like they had done in junior school. She considered it a real shame, and then wondered whether the reason had been purely cultural, or whether it had been her fault for going away and not keeping in touch often enough. She had to admit to herself that that might have had something to do with it. She had been mesmerised by London, it’s lights and its speed of life. London never slept, whereas, Malaga slept at night and during the afternoon siesta. Not that there weren’t places that were open all night, there were, but they were often full of drunken foreign tourists. It was ironic that the drunken foreign tourists that she and her friends so despised, paid for her family’s affluent lifestyle, and that fact did not pass her by. She had often tried hard to disabuse herself of the feeling, but she had not succeeded so far. It was another reason why the summer was the worst season for her. The sheer volume of tourists in the summer changed the nature of the area considerably.

The man she had hit in the Azure had been a tourist, she knew it instinctively, because true ex-pats were more gentlemanly than he had been. Tony had said that he came to Fuengirola frequently, and she believed him, but the man still had the arrogance of the tourist. He still thought that everyone and everything could be bought, just because the poorer locals fawned all over tourists with their wallets stuffed with cash that they had had to save all year in order to be able to go on holiday.

They didn’t know what the locals really thought of the two-week tycoons, and Daisy considered herself as much a local as anyone, although she was less sure whether she was Spanish or British.

It looked as if her Spanish friends had decided that she was British though, she thought somewhat sadly. She was half and half, but caught between the two stools, and it hurt.

It occurred to her that her father had carved out a life in the area and was happy. It was now her turn to try to do the same, but would that mean finding a Spanish spouse, like her father had done? If he had done it consciously. She felt the desire to talk to her mother about how she and her father had got together, as her father had suggested.

∞

That evening, while her father was otherwise busy, Daisy sat with her mother and watched television, waiting for the opportunity to talk about the subject that she was really interested in. She seized her chance during a commercial break after a particularly melancholy episode of a Spanish soap.

“Mum, after watching that, it makes me realize that I don’t really know how you and Dad got together. Share it with me, please! I’d like to be able to tell my kids when they ask one day too. Go on, I bet it was dead romantic!”

“Oh!” she almost blushed, but her eyes became dreamy and distant. “You know that my parents and most of my family were killed by Franco and the fascists, well, I stayed with some old family friends in the hills around here and didn’t return to the city until it was safe in about 1986. I mean to live, because I never stopped popping in and out of the towns to shop or do whatever it was that I had to do on behalf of myself or others in our community. It wasn’t so dangerous by then either.

“Anyway, I eventually moved back to Fuengirola and worked in various shops and on the market selling farm produce. I also used to cook things to sell for myself… a tray of paella, some cakes… and pasties and pies went down well with the British.

“One man used to come every day there was a market, and he would buy half a dozen pies and half a dozen pasties off me every time. I thought he was the most dashing, handsome man that I had ever seen and when he smiled at me and complimented me on my cooking, I was so taken with him that I could barely speak! My colleagues used to poke fun at me saying that I used to go as red as a schoolgirl after her first kiss… but he was so… so exciting to be around”.

“Oh, Mum, how romantic, please go on!”

“Yes, it was. Anyway, I gradually began to find out more about him, and one day, he asked me if I would consider working for him. He offered me good wages and my own room in his house - this one. I had never had my own room before. I was as happy as a hippo in mud. It wasn’t long before I was made head cook and then housekeeper too. They were heady days for a woman with my background, and I was looking after the man I loved. All right, not as his wife, but that didn’t bother me much. I would have done anything he asked me to and gladly done it for nothing. I even dared to think the unimaginable… that he might have feelings for me too, but I knew that he was the type of man who found it difficult to express his emotions, so I used to encourage him in any little way that I could”.

“How, Mum?” she laughed.

“No… I cannot tell even you that… Everyone needs to retain some pride and that means keeping some secrets to oneself, but you are a woman, and if you ever need to know how to get the man that you love, you will find a way. I am sure of that. Let’s just say that all women have their wiles when push comes to shove in matters of the heart.

“It took a while, and a bit of coaxing, but one day he asked me to marry him and then along you came, although neither of us thought that we could have children. You are our gift from God, the hidden pearl that we didn’t know we had within us. You are our very precious Margarita, or simply, our Daisy”.

“That’s a lovely story, Mum, I hope that I have one like it to tell to my children one day. Thanks for sharing it with me”.

“You won’t have one just like mine, because I was poor and you are rich, but I am certain that your tale will be equally romantic and special to you and your children, when your time comes”.

They hugged and kissed each other on the cheek.

“Are you happy here, working for your Dad, Daisy?”

“Yes, I think so. I would rather work for the family than anyone else”.

“It’s just that I don’t see you having much fun. When I was a girl, life was very hard. There was oppression, hunger and death all around, but if somebody played a guitar or a fiddle at the camp fire, we all forgot our troubles for a while and danced and sang. I don’t see young people having much fun these days… despite the fact that they, even the not so well off children, have more riches than we could ever have imagined. Why is that, darling?”

“I don’t know, Mum, spoilt, I suppose. I don’t really know much about other kids though… not even privileged ones like me. I’ve lost touch with all my school friends from around here… long ago. I didn’t even notice it happening. Then I got back from London and there was no-one left to talk to. I am going out with Amy soon though. Do you remember her?”

“Yes, she was always a nice, polite girl. Is she still living around here?”

“No, she’s just visiting, and then there’ll be just me again”.

“All right, I know that most of the British children have moved away to study or work, but what about the Spanish children you used to know at school?”

“That’s what I was just saying, I didn’t notice us drifting apart, and now there is no contact at all any more… unless we bump into each other in the street. Perhaps they feel that I abandoned them by studying in the UK, or perhaps they think that I have chosen to be British rather than Spanish, or fifty-fifty. Could that be it?”

“I don’t know, my dear. I didn’t have foreign friends, or not northern European ones anyway, when I was growing up. John was the first one who took an interest in me - and the only one, I might add, before your imagination starts to run away with you. After the war, the British always seemed too aloof, so… Oh, I don’t know, aristocratic in those days. Then from the Seventies on, droves of younger people came… most of them Brits around here in the Eighties and Nineties, but they weren’t very nice. They

7 DAISY’S NIGHT OUT