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there were always plenty of opportunities,’ admitted Nicole. ‘We just wanted to have a good time. The passengers were loaded so we’d get them to buy us drinks after a show.’ Nicole admitted one thing would often lead to another. ‘We would regularly wake up next to a stranger but I don’t regret a thing.’
    Naughty Nicole revealed that
    •   Sleeping with strangers was considered normal on a cruise ship nicknamed ‘the love boat’ by its young and crazy crew.
    •   
Raunchy Rebecca regularly sunbathed topless on the upper deck in full view of passengers and crew because she ‘hated tan lines’.
    •   When Rebecca met millionaire businessman Freddie Holt she told Nicole, ‘He’s my passport out of here!’
    ‘Only a handful of guests attended Rebecca’s wedding, including some of her friends from the boat,’ explained Nicole. She said they were astonished by the contrast between the bride and groom, cruelly dubbing them ‘Beauty and the Beast’. ‘Freddie is old, fat and bald,’ she explained, ‘and Rebecca was so beautiful. We all said it was only a matter of time before she began to look elsewhere.’ The two women rarely saw each other after the wedding, because they were ‘moving in different worlds’ by then, but Nicole will always remember her best friend.
    Nicole left the cruise ship last year in a row over pay. Currently unemployed, she has no regrets about her wild youth but is ‘glad to be out of that world now’. She wells up when talking about her former friend. ‘I was jealous of her money and new designer clothes. For a while I wished it was me but then I might have been the one who was murdered. It just proves that you should be careful what you wish for.’

Chapter Six
    ‘Okay,
what have you got for me?’ asked her editor. Helen placed the large black and white photograph on the table in front of him.
    Graham Seaton regarded it for a second. ‘Whoa! Where did you get this?’ he said, looking at her with something resembling amazement. ‘And
how
did you get this?’ Helen did not reveal her source was an anonymous note but admitted borrowing the little camera and managing a handful of shots at the restaurant before being spotted. ‘And is this who I think it is?’
    ‘From left to right,’ she began, ‘Alan Camfield, boss of Camfield Offshore, Councillor Joe Lynch and Jimmy McCree.’
    ‘Who needs no introduction,’ he said of the latter. ‘And just why would these three fine fellows be sitting down to a cosy lunch together?’
    ‘It’s got to be the Riverside development.’
    Her editor knew all about the region’s biggest property deal, involving acres of prime, council-owned, former ship-building land on the banks of the Tyne, currently up for grabs via a tender. ‘The councillor has no business sitting down to a cosy lunch with one of the bidders – and that’s even before you throw in the inexplicable presence of Jimmy McCree. The man’s a gangster and a very scary one. How the hell did they think they’d get away with this?’ he mused.
    ‘They weren’t expecting a journalist,’ she reminded him. ‘Not everyone in the restaurant spotted McCree. I’d be
willing to bet hardly any of them recognised Camfield or Lynch. We live in a bubble.’ Helen meant that public awareness of politicians was staggeringly low. Most people could not even name their local MP.
    ‘Jimmy must be offering up his security firm,’ said Graham. ‘He’s supposed to be going straight these days but the boys in blue aren’t having that.’
    ‘So how are we going to run this story?’
    ‘Carefully,’ he told her. ‘No matter how bad his reputation is, Jimmy McCree has never actually been convicted of any criminal offence. He’s been arrested on countless occasions, even charged a few times, including once for murder, but was acquitted every time. Everyone knows he controls a lot of the crime in this city but we can’t risk being sued,’ he grinned at her, ‘and