Rob Johnson - Lifting the Lid by Rob Johnson Page A

her as much as he had done during those heady days of teenage romance. Harry knew she felt the same way about him.
    He exhaled a large cloud of cigar smoke and smiled. He had worked hard all his life to be where he was now, lazing in the late afternoon sun at his Greek villa while Donna sent ripples of silver across the surface of the pool. By his own admission, his labours had rarely been within the boundaries of what might be considered legal, but there again, as he often told himself, how many bankers, stockbrokers, lawyers or politicians were there who could honestly say they had never once broken the law in pursuit of their goals? Okay, so maybe very few of them had actually had people killed during the process, but what about the arms dealers whose apparently legitimate trade resulted in the slaughter of countless thousands of innocent men, women and children? At least he’d never been responsible for the deaths of any women or children, and most of the men had pretty much deserved what they’d got.
    As far as he was concerned, he was little different from any of the so-called captains of industry who are driven to succeed at all costs and no more ruthless than the chief executive of some blue chip multinational. Where his own ambition and work ethic had originated from, he couldn’t be sure. He certainly hadn’t inherited them from his father, who had been a builder by trade but a drinker by inclination. Like so many of his contemporaries growing up in the East End of London, he had simply wanted to escape – to carve out a better life for himself – and this of course meant making money. Lots of it.
    Some of his own mates had looked to the boxing ring as their way out, but Harry had seen at first hand the physical cost to too many of the older kids who had explored this route and failed. Apart from joining the army, the only other alternative was crime. Not the petty pilfering, burglary and car theft sort of crime, but the big league, where the risks were inevitably greater but the rewards immeasurable. Harry had witnessed the consequences of failure in this area too, but he had believed himself to be far smarter than those who had got caught, and to a great extent, he had been proved right over the following years.
    He took another sip from his rum and Coke and set the glass down on the low table beside him. Donna was beginning to climb the ladder out of the pool, and he went to meet her with a gaudily patterned beach towel. She squeezed some of the water from her long and unnaturally auburn hair when she got to the top step, and Harry reached behind her to drape the towel over her shoulders. She hugged it around her and kissed him lightly on the lips.
    ‘Thanks, love,’ she said, looking into his eyes as if in the aftermath of the first passionate kiss on their first date.
    Harry took a couple of paces backwards and gave a sweepingly flamboyant bow. ‘We aim to please, madam.’
    Donna laughed and gave him a playful tap in the ribs with the side of her foot as she walked past him. He feigned falling sideways onto the tiled floor, theatrically rolling in fake agony until he fell off the edge and into the pool with a dull splash.
    By the time he’d clambered out, Donna had already put on her sunglasses and had settled onto her own lounger, reading a Hello magazine.
    Harry stood gazing down at her with the water dripping from his body and forming a small puddle by his feet. She still looked good even now, he thought, especially in that one-piece black swimsuit with the gold plastic clasp just under the cleavage. He hawked and then turned sideways to propel the resulting phlegm into the pool.
    Donna dropped the magazine onto her lap and stared up at him. ‘Harry,’ she said with obvious disgust. ‘Why do you do that?’
    ‘Chlorine, love. Plays ‘avoc with me sinuses.’
    She picked up her magazine and snapped it open with a long-suffering sigh.
    ‘Besides,’ said Harry, ‘it gives the pool cleaner