Ugly Money

Ugly Money
Philip Loraine

Writer Will Adams’ peaceful life is interrupted by the sudden and not entirely welcome arrival on his doorstep of his young niece, Marisa, and her best friend Nick.Marisa has learned from her parents, film director Jack Adams and his actress wife, Ruth, that Jack is not her real father and she is determined to find the man who is. Reluctantly Will agrees to help her but a shock awaits him: it looks as if Marisa’s biological father is Scott Hartman, a fabulously wealthy recluse who has not been seen for years.A near fatal accident, a false arrest, hostility from Hartman’s associate … it is becoming clear that someone wants to prevent Marisa from meeting her father. The stakes are raised still further when, through her mother, Hartman is actually tracked down and is confronted with his daughter. A bitter man, with a life of regret behind him, he decides to change his will in Marisa’s favour – a move that is to unleash a wave of violence that threatens to engulf not just Marisa, but her family.Ugly Money is an unputdownable story of intrigue, jealousy and murder which will have the reader gripped from beginning to end.

UGLY MONEY

Philip Loraine

COPYRIGHT (#ulink_bd4a4c37-4d70-5576-b371-3f944ba50b9d)

Harper

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First published in Great Britain in 1996 by Collins Crime

© Philip Loraine 1996

Philip Loraine asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Photoset by Rowland Phototypesetting Ltd

Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

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Source ISBN: 9780002326032

Ebook Edition © APRIL 2017 ISBN: 9780008258023

Version: 2017-04-24

UGLY MONEY

Writer Will Adams’ peaceful life is interrupted by the sudden and not entirely welcome arrival on his doorstep of his young niece, Marisa, and her best friend Nick. Marisa has learned from her parents, film director Jack Adams and his actress wife, Ruth, that Jack is not her real father and she is determined to find the man who is. Reluctantly Will agrees to help her but a shock awaits him: it looks as if Marisa’s biological father is Scott Hartman, a fabulously wealthy recluse who has not been seen for years.

A near fatal accident, a false arrest, hostility from Hartman’s associate … it is becoming clear that someone wants to prevent Marisa from meeting her father. The stakes are raised still further when, through her mother, Hartman is actually tracked down and is confronted with his daughter. A bitter man, with a life of regret behind him, he decides to change his will in Marisa’s favour – a move that is to unleash a wave of violence that threatens to engulf not just Marisa, but her family.

Ugly Money is an unputdownable story of intrigue, jealousy and murder which will have the reader gripped from beginning to end.

DEDICATION (#ulink_3dbb6a33-38f9-5320-888e-1c27ffd312bc)

Take note, take note, O World,

To be direct and honest is not safe.

Othello

CONTENTS

Cover (#u5de39bb9-ef18-5583-adec-95150d47a9d2)

Title Page (#uc39ba45d-915f-5bfa-88ea-5334a0dced74)

Copyright (#ulink_bfedb5b7-fa72-5e01-b9b3-641d29ce0709)

Dedication (#ulink_b83bb0d9-671d-5d95-ae6e-c98410eac718)

Chapter One: Marisa (#ulink_d10e8eba-04c2-593d-9608-3961c31d9056)

Chapter Two: Ruth (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Three: Scott (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Four: Hawk Rock (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Five: Cross-Eye (#litres_trial_promo)

Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)

Other Books By (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_06614107-cb47-566c-8462-eb775d9199a4)

Marisa (#ulink_06614107-cb47-566c-8462-eb775d9199a4)

1

I heard the other day about a man who was having breakfast, reading the paper and minding his own business, when a bulldozer came crashing through the wall of his house. Imagine it: as the plaster dust clears, there you are looking at this gigantic piece of machinery where your nice new kitchen used to be. Presently the driver will explain that he put the thing into Reverse when he meant Drive. It’s known as Chance.

Chance pitched me headlong into this story. In my case the bulldozer was my seventeen-year-old niece, Marisa, but that makes no difference at all; an attractive and determined teenage girl can cause as much damage as any mere bulldozer. I had just reached chapter nine, which means the book was half written, and research had taken a whole year. I’m a writer, yes. My name is Will Adams, though I don’t always write under it. I’m forty-three years old. I have survived marriage and the growing up of a son and daughter; I’ve survived divorce, which is only painful when enmity is involved – my ex-wife and I are the best of friends as long as we’re not cohabiting – and, in the past week, I’ve also survived death by murder.

I am … I was, until the arrival of my niece, writing a novel set in and around the small town of Astoria, Oregon, a dozen miles from the mouth of the Columbia River, and that’s why I was living there at the time in question. It’s a quiet and pleasant place, its hills decorated with wonderful, sometimes comical, wooden houses built during the Victorian and Edwardian eras, and now fashionable in our age of ‘nostalgia’: anything to escape from the mess we’ve made of the present day.

Astoria has never been very important, despite the wishes of successive city fathers; its wealth lay in timber and salmon, two commodities once believed to be in endless supply – we’ve learned otherwise. As ‘the oldest settlement west of the Rockies’, it was a lure for Scandinavian and Finnish fisher-folk; the wives worked in the canneries, and most of their names live on: Astorians don’t rush to and fro very much. Their town has been dwindling since the 1890s, and its heyday, nothing to do with timber or salmon, was in World War Two when a naval base sent the population soaring. The marvelous beauty of its setting, wooded hills, distant mountains, mighty river, savage Pacific, has remained fairly constant in spite of creeping real estate and brutal logging: a pleasant if unexciting place to live. Into this Eden, and smack into chapter nine, came Eve with a whole basketful of serpents. It started on a stormy Monday afternoon at the beginning of September, and when we get storms up here they don’t mess around: perfect weather for writing. Indeed, when the doorbell rang I had just written, ‘Chapter Nine. Lewis returned to the mouth of the Columbia in November 1927. He said he was tired of traveling and had come home for a rest, but nobody in Astoria or Ilwaco believed him; they knew he’d come back because of the gold …’

Cursing, I abandoned my desk and opened the door on this stunning blonde with dark blue eyes. She appeared to be in her early twenties, and it took me a moment or two to realize I was looking at my brother’s child Marisa, aged seventeen. I said, ‘Hi, Marisa, come on in.’ Quite a smooth reaction, all things considered, you might even say cool. If you’re not cool they have this habit of walking right over your fallen body and writing you off, politely but decisively.