Moonlighting

by Kate Lace

Genres: Women's Fiction; Romance; Romantic Comedy

Synopsis

By day, Jess Dryden is a police officer. By night, she is an exotic dancer at Shoq nightclub. Holding down two jobs is not easy, but she's skint, and the money she earns dancing is too good to turn down. But when Jess's DI asks her to investigate some dodgy dealings at Shoq, her two lives threaten to collide, and the results could be explosive. And with her sexy police colleague Matt jumping to all the wrong conclusions, it's more than just her career that's on the line...

Release date: May 10, 2012

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 318

Sample

Jess Dryden kept her life compartmentalised. It was easier that way. Her sister, Abby, didn’t know that she was a Special
Constable in addition to temping in a succession of London offices, and the Metropolitan Police didn’t have a clue that she’d
originally trained as a dancer. It wasn’t lying – absolutely not. It was just being economical with the truth.


Why did she do it? Well, she kept the stuff about the Met Police away from her sister as Abby had very strong views on absolutely
everything, including her belief that anyone who had anything to do with any profession which made its staff wear a uniform
(and that probably even went for the check-out girls at Tesco) was just one step away from enlisting into a fascist organisation
and becoming a modern-day Brown Shirt. And Jess hadn’t told the Met she was a dancer – or had hoped to be one – because she
just knew it’d lead to jokes and leg-pulling and demands that she should join the Am-Dram Society or ‘do a turn’ at the Christmas
Social. No, thanks. They didn’t know about her past because it just made life easier.


It wouldn’t have been as bad if it were only the truth that Jess had to be economical with; the trouble was, she had to be
economical with everything. Despite living in a really grotty bedsit not far from Wormwood Scrubs – the men’s prison in the west London Borough of Hammersmith, known locally as ‘the Scrubs’ – her earnings didn’t quite cover rent,
food and heating. And the situation was getting worse. So that was why she phoned Abby to ask her about their gran’s house
in the hills behind Marlow above the Thames Valley.


‘What exactly do you mean?’ said Abby tartly. ‘You want me to ask the tenants if they need a housekeeper?’

‘Yes, I mean exactly that. Gran’s house is big, it has that huge attic which no one uses, and I could clean, do the gardening
and generally look after whoever is renting it at the moment and live there for free in exchange. I can’t afford to live in
London on what I earn, and if I move further out, what I save in rent I’m going to lose on train fares. Abby, I’m skint, and
I need to find somewhere I can live for almost free – or better still, completely free. I’m going to look for a better paid
job, but until I land it, I really need some help. So how about it? Please, Abby? It’s only till I get sorted out.’


There was silence.

‘Look, I’m in a hole and I need digging out,’ Jess went on. ‘If you had space I’d ask if I could move in with you for a while.’

Jess heard a snort down the phone. ‘You know that’s impossible.’

‘Yes, and I said “if you had space” and you don’t – I know that.’ Crikey, thought Jess, there was barely enough space for Abby and her husband
Gavin in their tiny terrace in Fordingham, a minute market town ten miles from High Wycombe; there certainly wasn’t any room
for her too. ‘But Gran’s house is huge. I thought you said it was four blokes sharing it at the mo. So that’s one in each
bedroom, which leaves two bedrooms and the attic. I mean, how much room do these guys want?’


‘Come off it, Abby, it’s not as easy as that. They pay rent so it’s going to look bloody odd if we let you live there for nothing.’


‘What’s odd? I’ve got a half-share in that place. I know we agreed that we’d save all the rent money till we’ve got enough
to modernise it and then sell it for a decent amount, but frankly, right now I’d far rather get half the rent. I need the
money and if I can’t have it, then at least let me live there. If I could live rent free, then the extra for my season ticket
into London from the country would be easily affordable. Besides, I said I’d be a housekeeper so I’d hardly be freeloading,
would I? All I’m asking is that you ask them.’


‘I’ll talk to Gavin.’

Jess bit her lip to stop herself from saying, ‘Whoopee!’ in the sort of sarky tone of voice that would have had her sister
slamming down the receiver harder than Wile E Coyote hit the ground after falling off a cliff. Why did Abby always have to
ask Gavin? thought Jess. Didn’t she have a mind of her own? Besides, Gran had left the house to Abby and her – not to Abby,
Gavin and her. Still, it wouldn’t do to rile her sister, so she just said, ‘Fine, please do that.’


‘I’ll ring you in a day or two. Let you know.’

‘Good. Thanks.’

Jess disconnected the call and slumped back into the tatty armchair in her grotty room. Why did she always feel fed up when
she’d just spoken to her sister?


Actually, Jess knew full well why. It was because Abby always treated her as if she was second-rate, a disappointment – a
failure and not terribly bright. Obviously, being her big sister, Abby never quite said as much, but Jess could tell. It was
implicit in everything Abby said that Jess was the one who had never quite lived up to their mother’s expectations, who had
never quite got the grades, never achieved her potential. However, Jess couldn’t see why being a committed Green Party activist,
conservationist, champion of animal rights and all-round tree-hugger gave Abby the high ground – but she was over four years
her senior so Jess had learned not to argue. Besides, Abby had a quicker wit and a sharper tongue and always bested Jess in
an argument so it was a waste of time to try.


There was also the hard fact, which Jess knew in her heart, that she was a bit of a failure. Since the age of six she’d spent twelve years training to be a professional dancer, only to fail to get
beyond parts in the chorus of her local rep. She’d been good, very accomplished technically, but she didn’t have that special
quality that turned a good dancer into a really talented one. She’d auditioned for dozens of shows but had never made a break-through.
At eighteen, when she’d failed to get into a performing arts college she’d given up the struggle and learned to type and use
a computer instead.


It was while she was typing that she’d decided that an office job was going to kill her emotionally. She felt she had to do
something that involved activity, being with other people who had a bit of a spark, doing some sort of good – anything but
sitting behind a desk. And there was still a part of her that wanted to dress up – to play a role. Somehow the idea of joining
the police seemed to tick all these boxes.


She’d been excited about the prospect when she’d told Abby. She should have known her sister would be horrified (obviously
joining the Met was just one rung down from becoming an SS stormtrooper) and then, when the Met hadn’t wanted her as a proper
copper because they’d been on a recruiting drive for males from ethnic minorities and a white female didn’t fill the bill,
Abby hadn’t bothered to disguise her schadenfreude. There was no way now that Jess was going to tell Abby she’d decided to get in through the back door by working as a Special.


And if she didn’t hurry up and get down to the station she wasn’t going to be working as a Special for much longer.

Wearily Jess hauled herself out of her chair, took her glasses off and popped in her contacts, then went to get her coat.
It was a triumph of her willpower over her exhaustion that she forced herself out of the front door and back onto the cold
pavement. The four hours of sleep that she’d grabbed after coming back from work were not really enough to keep her going
through the night shift, but she told herself that as tomorrow was Saturday she could sleep as long as she liked, once she
came off duty in the morning. Just eight hours of pounding the beat, being visible to the public, sweeping up drunks and stopping
fights – then she could sleep all day. Besides, if she slept all day she wouldn’t be tempted to eat – handy as there was no
food in the fridge – and on her meal-break at the station she could tuck into a huge fry-up for under a fiver. One of those
tonight, and another tomorrow, would see her through the whole weekend and she wouldn’t be using her own gas to cook for herself
at home. It had to be cheaper, she told herself.


Jess locked the peeling door behind her, walked down her street to the main road and the brightly lit shops that she could
rarely afford to do more than gaze at. God, being poor was grinding. She hated it; making do and mending, always having to
think about every last penny, never having money for small luxuries.


It would be so much easier if she was like her sister and cared nothing for luxuries. Abby and Gavin despised such things
– or at least Abby did; there wasn’t much proof that Gav did, what with his job working for a software company with his laptop,
nice suits and swanky company car. Which, in Jess’s opinion made him a two-faced creep: preaching one thing and doing another.


Abby might have her faults but at least she was consistent.

Gavin had seemed to be totally committed to Green issues when he and Abby had been courting, but now they had been married
for almost four years he seemed little more than lukewarm about the plight of the planet. It was like he’d been out to impress
her and now he couldn’t be bothered. OK, they were the only people Jess knew who used rainwater to flush their loo, plus they
had a solar panel on their roof to provide hot water and Abby grew almost all their own veg, but Gav flew when he travelled
abroad on business – even if it was only to Paris – and drove to work each day rather than travel on public transport.


Gav’s lapses might have been offset by Abby’s zealous recycling and by the way she only bought second-hand books, clothes
and furniture, but Jess didn’t think Gav gave a fig about his carbon footprint any more. And although she did agree with Abby
about the state of the planet and the awfulness of conspicuous consumerism, it was the way Abby banged on about it all the time that got up her nose. She knew that Abby’s sentiments were admirable and she did respect her sister’s commitment to the cause
– but it would be nice if, just occasionally, Abby could worry about her little sister instead of the planet. Abby could,
if she wanted, buy new clothes or the odd luxury, which was more than Jess could. Maybe, Jess thought, if she could choose
between ethical and extravagant she would choose ethical, like her sister, but it was the lack of choice she hated and the
inability to splurge on something new and expensive.


Which made her wonder, not for the first time, why on earth she moonlighted from the day job as a volunteer police officer.
Dumb, she knew. Well, not dumb that she did her bit for the community, but dumb that she chose to do it in a way that didn’t help out her finances at the same time. But she had to keep telling herself that it was all part
of her cunning plan to join the Met as a proper, fulltime copper. Her track record as a Special would surely stand her in
good stead, the next time she put in her application.


Of course, being a Special also injected a bit of excitement into her otherwise mundane life. There was nothing glamorous
about being a temp, and at the moment she was temping for a company that imported wholesale plumbing supplies from the Far
East. Dealing all day with invoices and orders for ballcocks, cisterns, washers and taps left her feeling brain-dead with
boredom by the time she got the bus home.


It took Jess a good thirty minutes to walk a couple of miles to her police station which was between Kensington High Street
and Earl’s Court. There were buses and tubes but walking was free. She arrived just before ten o’clock and greeted her co-workers
and fellow police officers, then made her way through to the locker room and began to get ready to go on duty. As Jess slipped
into her stab vest and buckled on her belt kit, she was thankful that she’d found something to do that she really enjoyed,
now she’d come to terms with the fact that she was never going to make it as a professional dancer – an ambition she’d had
since the age of six when she’d seen Cats and fallen in love with the idea of wearing costumes and make-up and performing.


‘Dancing’s for sissies,’ Abby had said disparagingly when Jess, on the train journey home from the show, had confided her
dream in a whisper to her older sister. But Jess’s mum had been more supportive and had found the money for her to go to stage
school to learn ballet, tap, modern and jazz dancing. Abby had been offered the same opportunity, but had muttered deprecating
things about it being a ‘waste of money’ and ‘only for losers’ and had loftily said that she’d rather boil her own head than learn
to prance around like a twit like Jess. But there was something about the way she had spoken which made Jess wonder if Abby
hadn’t painted herself into a corner. Perhaps she was jealous of Jess and her new skill, and had felt that she’d cut her own
nose off to spite her face. But as her sister was the sort who would never admit she was wrong or mistaken, it had been pointless
to approach the matter.


And even more pointless, thought Jess, wishing for what would never happen now. She wasn’t ever going to be a dancer and that
was that. And working as a Special mightn’t be glamorous but it certainly gave her a buzz – and besides, there was another
bonus: Matt.


Matt Green was a proper copper who was also, in Jess’s opinion, the sexiest thing on two legs. Sadly, their paths didn’t seem
to cross that often since their shift patterns rarely seemed to coincide, and even when they did, they didn’t seem to get
to work with each other. However, there was always the chance that she might get lucky the next time she was on duty. Whenever
she saw him, Jess felt her innards go wobbly, her skin go tingly and her heart race. And no wonder, given his intense blue
eyes, slightly olive skin tone and dark wavy hair. He looked fantastic in his uniform, although Jess had a private fantasy
about what he might look like out of it, which did nothing for her equilibrium or her blood pressure. The one time they had
had to work together she’d spent the entire night either burbling incoherently or in a clammy state of embarrassment at her
inability to string a sentence together in recognisable English. Yet despite his unfortunate effect on her she still longed
for a repeat experience. But not tonight, she noted sadly, as she read the roster sheet. Bum. Maybe Saturday she’d get lucky.


Jess was sound asleep on Saturday morning, after a hard night of breaking up two fights, which had resulted in five arrests
for disorderly conduct and assault and then the mountain of paperwork the arrests had engendered . . . when her mobile hauled
her back into consciousness. Bleary-eyed she checked out the caller ID – her sister’s home number – before she hit the button
to answer it.


‘Hi, Abby,’ she mumbled, still fuzzy with sleep.

‘It’s Gavin.’

‘Oh.’ She snapped awake. Gavin never phoned her. Was something wrong?

‘Just a quick call,’ which sounded reassuring. ‘I’ve got an idea for a job for you that might earn you more than typing. A
mate of mine told me about it. It would save us the hassle of having you live in your gran’s house.’


What?! Save us the hassle of having you live in your gran’s house? That woke Jess up even more and she could feel her blood pressure hurtling upwards. Any second now it might burst out of
the top of her head like lava out of an erupting volcano. She was livid. However, before she had time to form a coherent response
and tell Gavin exactly what she thought of his last statement, he carried on.


‘There’s a job as a dancer going. Good money too.’

That stopped Jess in her tracks. ‘A dancer?’ But almost more surprising than the possible job opportunity was the fact that
it was her brother-in-law passing on the information. Gavin? Trying to help her? Jess felt stunned. Gav and she had never
got on and neither of them made a secret about their feelings for the other.


‘There’s this joint in London and they’re looking for girls to dance for the punters.’

Jess’s heart sank. That sort of dancing, she should have guessed. It was probably the only sort of dancing Gav knew about. ‘Forget it, I’m not interested.’


‘Hear me out, Jess. It’s good money and you don’t have to take all your clothes off.’

She sniffed disbelievingly. ‘Really.’ All the places she’d ever heard of where the girls danced ‘for the punters’, that was
exactly what they had to do.


‘No, they don’t. This is a class joint. Honest. I hear that some girls earn up to a grand a night. I’ll email you the details.’

That was a shitload of money. Maybe she owed it to herself just to take a look at the job on offer; after all, just looking
wouldn’t put her under some sort of obligation to do anything about it. But a grand a night . . . Blimey, a couple of nights
a week doing that and she could clear her debts, move into a decent flat and pay off her overdraft in less time than it would
take to say, ‘Get your kit off.’


Jess checked that Gavin had her email address and disconnected the call. As she put her phone back on the bedside table she
thought about the possible job. Exotic dancing, or whatever this club was going to call it, certainly wasn’t what she’d foreseen
as a career path when she’d first slipped on a pair of ballet shoes. Her vision of curtain calls for some West End show had
long since crumbled, but until quite recently she’d hoped she might get some chorus work in a provincial theatre. Working in some seedy club in London was not what she wanted, but could
she afford to turn it down? And whatever Gavin said, she was sure that for that sort of money she would be required to do more than just dance. No way would it be possible to be that highly paid and not
be expected to provide extras. The thought made Jess shudder.


Besides, what would her mother say if she were still alive?

Jess thought she knew.

A couple of hours later, curiosity had got the better of Jess and she was round the corner from her flat at an internet café
and logging onto her email. She found the one from Gavin amidst the plethora of spam offering her enlargement procedures for
bits of her body she didn’t possess, pills of dubious origin and assurances that she’d been bequeathed large sums of money
from bizarre relatives and well-wishers in far-flung corners of Africa.


The email gave her the club’s website that Gav promised would tell her all she needed to know about getting an audition, which
he also promised was just a formality. Although how he knew was something that worried Jess. ‘But don’t tell Abby I put you
on to this,’ he’d added. Like she was going to. She could just hear the sort of scathing comments Abby was bound to come out
with. ‘Slut’ was a word that would feature large in them – or possibly ‘slapper’. But dancing on a podium didn’t necessarily
mean that you were just a heartbeat away from prostitution – although, considering the thoughts that Jess had already had
about that sort of club, the punters and the dancers, there was a chance that it might be a possibility. However, her conversation with Gav had roused her curiosity and while she was on the internet there was no harm in checking out the website, was there?


She cut and pasted the web link and hit the return key. As she waited for it to load she pushed her glasses up her nose and
took herself back to the couple of foreign holidays they’d had with their mum (before she had got ill and Abby had discovered
the Green Party and Animal Rights and had decided that having fun was wrong), when she and Abby had strolled along a Mediterranean
beach in their skimpy bikinis that had hardly hidden anything at all and had tried to pretend they were ignoring the approving
glances and whistles of the local males. In fact, looking back, Jess was now sure that Abby had been quite provocative in
the way she’d swung her hips and stuck her chest out but, being only about ten or eleven at the time, Jess hadn’t been worldly
wise enough to appreciate quite what her older sister was up to.


Abby had lapped up the attention, the lustful looks and the occasional wolf whistles – although she’d denied it hotly later.
Was that so very different or more acceptable than dancing in a club? No doubt Abby would think so – she would say that on
a beach, wearing almost nothing, she was freeing her body, or being liberated. Just as she would say that dancing in a club
was a subjugation of the female spirit to the lewd desires of the male psyche, or some such wordy bollocks.


Not that Jess felt she was capable of dancing in a revealing costume in front of a load of tanked-up and testosterone-laden
men but if she did, well, the way she looked at it, it was more about earning cash with her god-given talents than being some
sort of sex slave or being subjugated – assuming she wasn’t actually required to be some sort of sex slave or be subjugated.
In which case she would stand entirely corrected and Abby would be proved right. Actually, thought Jess with a wry smile,
if she was a sex slave she’d probably have to lie corrected; she didn’t think she’d be on her feet much.


The website loaded and Jess was surprised to see that the club – Shoq – was really quite sophisticated as she clicked through
the various pictures and files. The décor was ornate but not over the top, the lighting was pretty decent from what she could
see, there was no hint of rooms to rent by the hour and their restaurant offered a very sophisticated menu. Improbable though
it seemed, maybe Gav hadn’t been lying about what the girls there were required to do. And the girls, although heavily made-up,
didn’t look like they were on the game or anything really sleazy. Actually, Jess thought, some of them looked very classy.


So, given the quality of the dancers, Jess decided that even if she wanted a job there she probably wouldn’t get one. How
could she, Jess-from-the-sticks, short-sighted, world-class failure, temp typist and part-time flat-footed copper, possibly
fit into that world? Sadly she closed down the web page and put the job opportunity to the back of her mind. Living for free
and doing housekeeping in lieu of rent would be much more her thing.


Except that, according to Gav, it would be a hassle if she moved into her gran’s old house. Why would it put anyone out to have her living in the attic? It wasn’t as if the
house wasn’t big enough to accommodate another person. It was just typical of the couple’s ability to make her feel as if
she was a complete waste of space.


She sighed as she thought about the happy times she and Abby had spent in the house when Gran still lived there, when Mum
had still been alive, when Abby had been just her big sister and hadn’t taken on the role of being her moral guardian and
her superior in every way.


And they had had happy times there. She tried to recall if it had ever rained. It must have done, but in her memories, when their mum had taken Abby and her there on holiday, the two of them always seemed to be playing in the garden,
or lounging on the swingseat on the big back lawn reading books, or scrambling up the old apple tree by the garage. Maybe
it had rained on the days she and Abby had played shrieking games of hide-and-seek over the house, or when they’d made toast
in front of the sitting-room fire, scorching their knuckles along with the slices of bread. Accurate or not, her early memories
of time spent at the house were filled with joy and laughter.


That had changed when Mum had been taken ill when Jess was eleven and Abby fifteen and they’d moved away from their house
in Manchester to live with Gran permanently. The games of hide-and-seek were replaced with more grown-up games of doctors
and nurses – only they weren’t make-believe as they’d had to help their grandmother cope with a seriously ill patient. Jess
couldn’t remember any happiness in those last, dark months, just the constant trips up and downstairs to see if Mum wanted
anything, to help her take her pills, to carry up trays of food or glasses of water. There was the endless laundering of her
bedding, the doctor’s visits, the whispered conversations between him and Gran, her mother in and out of hospital, the agony
of watching that vibrant laughing woman fade to. . .