Last Shot by Jock Zonfrillo

Author:Jock Zonfrillo
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Australia
Published: 2021-07-27T14:00:00+00:00

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The next assignment Marco put us on was as far away from that side of British life as you could get, both in terms of lifestyle and as the crow flies. It was in Cornwall, on the western tip of mainland Britain.

One of Marco’s business partners was Sir Rocco Forte, son of Lord Forte and from a family of legendary hoteliers. His sister Olga Polizzi was a highly respected hotelier with an eye for interior design and a talent for bringing out the potential in places.

Olga had just bought a hotel in St Mawes, a sleepy little fishing village a few hours south-west of London, which she was going to refit into what would be the Hotel Tresanton. The vision was to revamp it into a weekend retreat for well-heeled Londoners, so she needed a restaurant that would act as a drawcard. For that, she needed Marco, and he asked Richard and me to go and build the restaurant from the ground up. He trusted us to make sure it was all primo, because there were some big reputations at stake and nobody involved wanted any bad press.

Kelly and I discussed moving down. We thought we might like the peace and quiet of country life. London could be a bit grim; a bit relentless, and if you’re new to town like Kelly was, it could be a hard city to crack. It was so expensive, too. Just paying the rent and our debt was such a grind that we did nothing but work: me in the restaurant, Kelly as a waitress at a pub in Knightsbridge. Six nights of the week I would come home at two in the morning after finishing service, and if we ever had a day off together, we’d be too exhausted to do anything.

One evening we tried to go out to dinner. We got all dressed up, went to a lovely, dimly lit fine-dining place and took our seats at a corner table. The waiter came over to take our drink orders, from Kelly first, but when he turned to me I’d fallen asleep. Not an efficient, ten-second ‘just closing my eyes’ power nap either, but fully collapsed, head back, mouth open, snoring in the candlelight. Kelly had to keep kicking me under the table so I’d open my eyes. That was as close as we got to a normal life in London. We were in one of the most vibrant, exciting metropolises on the planet and all I wanted was a kip.

So we packed up our life in London and drove down. At the time my car was a Ford Sierra Cosworth, a really fantastic rally car I had de-badged and sprayed burgundy to stop people from stealing it all the time. At the very least, living in a small town where everyone knew everyone meant I could park it on the street without it getting nicked. I loved it, and enjoyed nothing more than getting on a good country road and flooring it, so I had a good feeling as we drove south-west out of London.

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