Wicked Beauty

by Susan Lewis

  ‘OK,’ Lucy answered.

  After putting the phone down, Rachel took a couple of steadying breaths, then found herself staring at Tim’s handsome face, which was smiling back from its frame on the round fireside table.

  ‘I can’t stand this,’ she sobbed angrily. ‘Do you hear me? I just can’t stand it. I want to know where that money came from! I need to know.’

  Her only answer was the sound of the grandfather clock ticking monotonously on in the corner, and the distant sough of the waves.

  She stared at his photo again and felt almost consumed by the frustration that was raging inside her. Four million dollars was such a lot of money, and the fact he’d never told her he had it was almost as bad as knowing it existed at all. But worse was having to decide now what to do about it, for though there had been no threat in the phone call, she didn’t imagine whoever it was would appreciate having his instructions ignored.

  ‘The trouble is,’ she said to Anna later, as they walked down to the pub, ‘if I simply do as he says, and give it back, I might never find out where it came from.’

  ‘That’s obviously the general intention,’ Anna responded. ‘But what about the voice? You said it was different.’

  ‘The accent was much stronger,’ Rachel told her. ‘More discernible.’

  ‘As?’

  ‘German.’

  Anna turned to look at her.

  Rachel looked back. Franz Koehler was from Zurich, where the Swiss spoke German.

  Anna turned to walk on, passing old Tom Drummond’s cottage at the end of the footpath, where lavish quantities of geraniums and towering gladioli were doing their best to disguise the smug, round saucer of a satellite dish – the only bloom on the block that didn’t give a hoot about seasons, fertilizer or aesthetic pleasure. ‘So are you going to tell Haynes about the call?’ she said, finally.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Rachel answered. ‘I’m still trying to decide.’

  Anna looked distinctly uneasy. ‘If you don’t, you could be biting off a whole lot more than you can chew,’ she warned. ‘Just from what we’ve found out already we know this Franz Koehler is an extremely powerful man, so if it was him who made that call … Well, we’re in no position to mess around with people like that.’

  Rachel stayed silent as she watched a cat trot out from behind the neat row of cottages they were passing and start down to the beach.

  ‘Face it, what you’re doing is attempting your own cover-up,’ Anna stated bluntly.

  ‘If that were true I wouldn’t be asking Rose Newman and Laurie Forbes to help me,’ Rachel retorted.

  ‘You would, because you need them.’

  ‘But they wouldn’t assist me in the cover-up of something criminal, you can be sure of that.’

  ‘OK. So why won’t you tell Haynes about it? Just so that I’ve got this absolutely straight in my head.’

  ‘Because I don’t know who he’s taking his orders from,’ Rachel answered, starting up the steps to the pub’s terrace where a couple of backpackers were sipping beer and studying a map. ‘If the Phraxos Group has been trying to buy its way into defence policy here in the UK, the way it presumably has in the States, then whoever’s acting as the go-between, singular or plural, is not going to want it to come out. And since we’ve got no idea how highly placed that person, or persons, is, we’ve got no way of knowing how much influence they might have on the investigation, or on Haynes himself. And I’m afraid corruption is corruption, whether my husband was involved or not, so it has to be exposed. Now, we should change the subject before we go inside. This place is haunted, did you know that?’ she said glancing back over her shoulder as she pushed the door open.

  Anna pulled a face. ‘Then just make sure you don’t tell Laurie Forbes,’ she warned. ‘She probably won’t want to stay.’

  Rachel smiled, perhaps a little too brightly, but she wanted to show a happy face to everyone inside, in the hope of making them feel more at ease. But to her dismay, the instant they saw her their conversation dwindled into silence, as though some kind of witchery was stilling their tongues and turning their eyes in other directions.

  Feeling a hollow of misery opening up in her chest, she struggled with the urge to turn back, and made herself walk across the room to the bar. ‘Hello Pinkie, Todd,’ she said, addressing two fishermen who were perched on stools in front of the beer pumps.

  ‘Evening,’ Todd grunted, obviously wishing he didn’t have to.

  ‘Would anyone like a drink?’ Anna piped up, looking round at the watchful, wind-roughened faces. Her eyes alighted on Jake, who was sitting over by the empty fireplace, under a painting of his own great-grandfather, and Beanie’s father-in-law, the legendary Jack Cormant. ‘Rum?’ she said.

  Jake’s face turned crimson. ‘No, I’m all right thanks,’ he said, holding up his glass.

  She looked round again. ‘Anyone else?’ she offered.

  When no one answered Rachel turned to the rotund, and normally jovial landlord, Dapper Lynch. ‘Hello Dap,’ she said. ‘A lemonade for me, please. And a vodka tonic for Anna.’

  Saying nothing, the landlord set about serving the drinks.

  Rachel glanced at Anna.

  ‘Keep smiling,’ Anna said through her teeth, wanting to strangle the whole lot of them.

  Rachel said, quietly, ‘I think we should take our drinks outside.’

  Anna nodded. It was obviously too much to expect Rachel to sit through any more of this atrocious silence, though Anna would have liked to, just to make them stew in their own cowardly ridiculousness.

  The uneasiness continued as Dapper put their drinks on the bar, took the fiver Rachel offered, then handed her the change. A dozen pairs of eyes then escorted them back across the room to the door, and only when the latch clicked behind them did the voices start up again, though with markedly less animation than before.

  ‘Don’t,’ Rachel said, seeing that Anna was about to explode. ‘This isn’t easy for anyone, and getting angry’s only going to make it worse. They’ll come round. You’ll see. They just need time.’

  ‘But you’re the one who’s suffering,’ Anna seethed, banging her glass on the table and climbing inside the bench.

  ‘Let’s just leave it,’ Rachel said. ‘It’ll be all right.’

  ‘But what the hell’s it all about? I mean, it’s hardly your fault your husband died the way he did.’

  ‘They obviously don’t know what to say.’

  ‘Sorry. Condolences. Anything I can do? How are you? It’s not difficult,’ Anna retorted, hotly. ‘And I can hardly go back to London leaving you in an atmosphere like this, so it has to be dealt with.’

  ‘It will be, but not by confronting it head on, the way you’re intending. I’ll find a way to handle it, I promise,’ she said, as Anna started to object again. ‘But deciding what to do about the money is more pressing right now.’

  Reluctantly shifting focus, Anna tore her eyes away and poured the tonic over her vodka. She’d talk to Beanie before she left. She’d know what to do.

  ‘He said I should get the instructions on how to return the money in a couple of days,’ Rachel was saying. ‘But it’ll be longer than that, because Lucy will have to forward the letter, so I probably won’t get it until the end of the week. Which is worrying on the one hand, in case he gets heavy if some kind of deadline isn’t met, but good on the other, because it’ll give me time to discuss it with Laurie Forbes. Since she’s not personally involved in it all, the way we are, I’m hoping she might have a clearer idea what to do.’

  Anna looked bleakly down at her drink, for the mention of Laurie Forbes in that context made her feel horribly as though she were shirking her responsibility, handing everything over to a stranger, when she should be trying to sort this out herself. But what else could she do? She had no experience of investigating anything, never mind something like this, so it made total sense for an expert to do it. And it wasn’t as if she was just abandoning Rachel. She’d always be
at the end of a phone, would come down to visit as often as she could, and was even going to stay on an extra day to overlap with Laurie Forbes, just to reassure herself that she really was the right person for the job. In fact, since speaking to Robert earlier, she’d been toying with the idea of staying till the weekend, for he’d sounded quite buoyant, and in control, and the fact that he’d been on the point of going over to Stacey’s for the evening, to have dinner with her and her husband confirmed, to her relief, that no grudges were being held over his ugly display on Saturday night. Anna just hoped he didn’t do anything to disgrace himself again tonight.

  ‘Sorry, what did you say?’ she said, suddenly realizing Rachel had spoken.

  Rachel smiled. ‘Only that it’s really good to have you here, even though you’re obviously miles away.’ She put a hand on Anna’s. ‘No, don’t apologize,’ she said, ‘and please don’t feel you have to stay, because you’re obviously much more worried about the film, or Robert, than you’re letting on, so that’s where you should be.’

  Anna inhaled deeply, then slowly let it go as she gazed out at the twilit sky and towering black cliffs. The undercurrent of mysticism that was so rife in these parts, combined with the feeling that past and future were mingling with the present, was never more persuasive than now, at this time of day, when the light seemed to turn the cove into some kind of netherworld, where nothing was quite what it seemed. ‘How well we read each other’s minds,’ she commented, finally. ‘And how strange the world feels, at this moment, with us two, sitting here, on the tip of England, while God only knows what roils on behind us.’

  ‘This is Cornwall, everything’s strange,’ Rachel quipped. Then, nodding towards the inside of the pub, ‘Including the people.’

  Anna picked up her drink. ‘Especially the people,’ she corrected, and clinking her glass noisily against Rachel’s, she waved out to Beanie who was just coming to join them.

  Robert was standing alone in the middle of Stacey Greene’s spacious and eclectically furnished sitting room, where the huge, inwardly sloping windows that formed the entirety of one wall looked down from the penthouse apartment on to most of central London. But his attention wasn’t focused on the view, he wasn’t even interested in the impressive collection of modern art that was hanging from the red brick walls, he was seeing only the exceptional and extraordinary creation that was a bronze table, shaped like a figure 7, which Stacey herself had posed for as a gift to her husband. It was like nothing he had ever seen before; so exquisitely crafted and erotically styled that he felt sure that if he touched it, it would be like touching the woman herself.

  As he walked around it, he felt vaguely light-headed, for on seeing it the blood had rushed instantly to his groin, engorging his penis and making him wonder why she had left him alone to admire the magnificent, yet extremely intimate, view of herself that surely was meant for her husband alone. Was she watching him from the kitchen where she was supposed to be cooking? Did she want him to caress the smoothness of the sculpture; run a finger down the line in her buttocks; toy playfully with the small mound of her vulva? It was what he wanted to do, but he wouldn’t. He would merely help himself to another of the marijuana cigarettes she kept in a box on the table, as she’d told him to, and try to stop hoping that this was a mere prelude to a private view of the real thing.

  Shaking out the match, while pulling deeply on the cigarette, he held his breath for a long, sweet-feeling time, allowing the palliative qualities of the drug to penetrate his brain and begin to soothe the savagery of his erection. He felt much more in control of the situation than he might have a week ago, but that was because things had changed since then, in a way that even he, who was ready to believe in any or all of life’s peculiarities, was still finding sublimely remarkable.

  It had happened at the dinner on Saturday night, when he and Stacey had recognized the existence of a connection between them that no one else had seen, or even suspected. Indeed how could they, when he’d masked it so cleverly with a manner that had been shocking, even to him. At one point Anna had actually gasped at the way he’d ridiculed Stacey’s likening of the proposed art and poetry project to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s depictions of the works of such poets as Tennyson and Keats, for the comparison wasn’t only flattering, it was valid. But Anna, in her dismay, had failed to register how Stacey was telling him, with her refusal to take offence, that she could see through the charade, and was willing to forgive his insults because she understood the complexities of his mind on a level that even Anna had never quite attained.

  At first it had alarmed him to think that she could so easily read the truth behind his false words, for it hadn’t been his intention to reach her that way. To the contrary, he had been trying to save himself, and her, from the unworthy motives of the project, to do all he could to destroy any interest she might have in taking part, in order to shield her from the monstrous desire that was using his talent like a Trojan horse to smuggle itself into her graces.

  He wasn’t sure at what point he’d finally cleared his head of the resistance and allowed himself to acknowledge the bond that was forming between them. It could even have been the following day before he’d fully realized what had happened, but however long it had taken, there was no doubt now that the first true meeting of their minds had taken place that night. Of course, he must credit the marijuana cigarettes she’d brought with her for freeing his inhibitions, and allowing him to see what he’d been afraid of in his normal, cowardly state: that something fundamentally profound existed between them. So she had ignored his rudeness and continued to lavish on his idea all the charm and nourishment he secretly craved. Not even his insufferable disdain of Ernesto’s claim that she was as beautiful as Rossetti’s Maria Zambaco, had provoked anything more than a humorous surprise in her sultry oval eyes, for she’d known, unlike the others who’d reddened and even muttered in embarrassment, that his contempt was for Ernesto, who hadn’t seen that her beauty could never be equal to Zambaco’s, when it was far, far superior.

  So now, as he joined her in the kitchen, still smoking one of her special cigarettes, though he couldn’t quite boast the confidence she exuded as she moved about the magnificent stainless-steel environment, preparing a meal with her own exquisite hands, he could say that he was certainly less nervous than he had been, and that he probably had a much greater understanding of the subtext that was flowing back and forth between them as they conversed. Whether she actually shared any of his more physical feelings, he had not yet decided, but for now, it was enough to know that she understood them, and was unafraid, even willing, for him to be the first to set eyes on the exquisitely erotic table.

  ‘How can I express how honoured I feel,’ he said, going to sit at the central island.

  She smiled, almost coyly. ‘You liked it?’

  ‘How could I not?’ He might have told her that her husband was an extremely lucky man, but he was too jealous of him even to acknowledge he existed – except when telling Anna that he’d be here tonight, of course, but that was far from his mind now.

  ‘You know, I sometimes feel quite transparent to you,’ he told her, as she carried a chopping board to the centre island, and began to slice a red pepper.

  Her eyes were suffused with merriment as she glanced up at him. ‘Why do you say that?’ she asked.

  ‘Because you, as an actor, go deeper into a writer’s psyche than anyone else. There’s a place, on a level that no one else understands, or even reaches, where we meet and virtually become one.’

  Her lovely head tilted to one side as she considered that. ‘Is it we who become one?’ she asked finally. ‘Or do we create another that stands alone?’

  ‘Our creation would still be us,’ he responded. ‘Like parents who are reproduced in a child by the combining of their genes, our creation has been fertilized by our joint intellect and visceral understanding of what is needed to bring it to life.’

  She nodded slowly, and he watched as her
long fingers scooped up the narrow strips of pepper and placed them randomly, though deliberately, over a crispy green mound of salad. Behind her two fillet steaks sizzled slowly in a pan, their mouth-watering aroma drifting around the kitchen as sensuously as the Offenbach that came from the CD. Beyond the sinks and drainers were wall-to-wall windows that, like those in the sitting room, looked out over lights that were starting to twinkle in the dusk.

  She lifted her eyes and as they gazed deeply into his own he could feel the gentle but insistent power of their attraction coiling around him. He longed to know how intense the chemistry was for her, but he wouldn’t ask, for they hadn’t yet reached a point where they were ready to articulate anything of what was happening between them. Indeed, were it not for her reaction on Saturday, and now this invitation tonight, while her husband was away, he might not be daring to presume that she felt anything at all.

  She turned back to the stove, still saying nothing, but the smile hovering playfully on her lips told him more clearly than words that he was right, he was transparent to her, and that she was enjoying the idea of cerebral copulation as much as he was.

  Chuckling quietly he lifted his cigarette from the ashtray and took another long and satisfying pull. Were it possible, he’d be happy to sit here for ever, admiring the swan-like grace of her movements, the exquisite shape of her bones and bunched chaos of her hair, snared as it was at the nape of her neck. He could allow himself to envisage her as Prosperina, or Delia, with himself as Tibullus. Or he could imagine what it was like to be the man she had married, to be with her every day in this kitchen, knowing she wore nothing beneath the long, crêpe-de-Chine dress and apron, and that she was his to embrace, or ignore.

  ‘Tell me who you really are, Robert Maxton,’ she said finally, her tone imbued with a tease. ‘I want to know what drives the writer inside you. Where do your ideas come from? How do you decide which direction they should take?’

  Fortifying himself with another heady pull on the cigarette, he let the smoke go slowly, then said, ‘If I could answer those questions, it would suggest that I’m in control of the process, and I never truly believe that I am.’