Although the person she was really upset with was Magnus. With less than a week’s notice, the bastard had blithely called to inform her that he’d decided to spend the holidays with his parents in Vail and wouldn’t now be coming to Scotland after all.
“But what am I supposed to do at Drumfernly for ten whole days without you?” wailed Scarlett. “I only agreed to stay so long because you said you’d be there.”
“Come on, honey. You haven’t seen your folks in a year. It’ll be fun to catch up,” said Magnus glibly. He seemed to have conveniently blacked out his memories of Caroline, and how much “fun” she could be.
“Fun? Are you out of your mind?” Scarlett pleaded. “You can’t just dump me with them, Magnus. You promised.”
“I know, I know. But my folks are old,” he said, in his best caring-son voice. “I’m all they have.”
“Come off it. Your mother’s barely sixty,” Scarlett shot back scathingly, “and your dad climbed Mont Blanc last year. They’re hardly in their sunset. Surely they can spare you for one lousy Christmas? Tell them you already made plans.”
But it was obvious she was flogging a dead horse. And, though it pained her to admit it, she was really more annoyed with him for bailing selfishly at the last minute than she was distraught at the prospect of being denied his company. Certainly his presence at Drumfernly would have made the holiday more bearable. But how much of that was because he could have acted as a buffer between her and her family, and how much was because she actually wanted to be with him, she honestly wasn’t sure. Somewhere along the line, the joy seemed to have gone out of their relationship. But right now, with Brogan yapping like a Rottweiler at her heels, she didn’t have the mental or emotional energy to try to revive it.
It was a rocky landing. After swaying the 747 to and fro like one of those horrid pirate ship rides at the fairground, the pilot slammed down onto the tarmac with all the grace and subtlety of an elephant on an ice rink. Thank God she’d left Boxie in LA with Nancy. He’d have had a heart attack stuck in the cargo hold, sedatives or no sedatives.
“Well, ladies and gents, here we are at last.” The pilot sounded awfully chipper for someone who’d just narrowly escaped death. “It’s a brisk two degrees Celsius outside, it’s pissing with rain, and we’ve just heard, for those of you that are interested, that Great Britain came last in the Olympic speed skating this afternoon. Yes, that’s right, last. Behind Samoa. What can I say? Welcome home, and merry Christmas.”
Cameron auto-locked the doors on his new Porsche from the inside and tried not to panic.
You heard about these things all the time. Wealthy, white professionals being targeted by gangs of black youths, stabbed in the heart for the sake of a mobile phone or a few lousy dollars of cash in their wallets. How much more satisfying a target must he make, broken down in his luxury car on the outskirts of Canary Wharf, home to all the fat-cat investment bankers that these so-called hoodies hated with such violent passion?
“Go away!” he yelped, as the two tall figures in jogging suits approached his driver’s-side window. “Go away or I’ll call the police.”
But they kept coming—three of them, he could see now, all with their heads down—moving like snakes along the shadow of the underpass, surrounding the car on all sides.
“Don’t hurt me!” he whimpered, cringing down in his seat as one of them tapped on the glass. “You can have the car. Take whatever you want. Just please don’t hurt me. I have a wife and child at home!”
Closing his eyes tight, like a frightened child, the next thing he heard was laughter, raucous laughter, echoing around him in the darkness.
“Get out, you prat,” said a familiar voice. “It’s us.”
“Rob?” The relief was so overwhelming Cameron thought he might be physically sick. “Christ alive, you scared me.”
“No kidding!” laughed the voice. Pulling back the hood on his sweatshirt, he revealed himself as Robert Allen, one of Cameron’s teammates at Goldman. “Ten more seconds and you’d have shit your pants, I reckon.”
The two guys with him sneered knowingly. They were also from GS, associates from the Equity Capital Markets desk whom Cameron knew by sight but not by name. Chances were they were called Chip or Chuck or some other suitably American fratboy name, he thought bitterly. Certainly they were exactly the type of guy he’d pray not to run into while cowering behind the wheel like a pussy.
For all his grandstanding to Scarlett and the rest of his family, Cameron was not popular at work, and he knew it. The atmosphere on the trading floor of an investment bank was not dissimilar to public school, or (he imagined) prison. The players might be older and, in theory at least, more mature—but the play itself was the same: an endless game of one-upmanship, with turf wars raging between dominant and less dominant groups. Rob was one of the leaders of the “cool” group in Mergers & Acquisitions—the guys who spent their Saturday nights at Soho House, dated well-known actresses or heiresses, and partied on each other’s yachts in St. Tropez every summer. Primarily American, this group also contained a few of the flashier French traders, and of course the Italians, who were all so uniformly handsome they could never have been anything other than popular.
Cameron, by contrast, was one of the very lowliest members of the “also-ran” group, a miscellaneous posse of nerds, losers, and married guys, most of them British, who pretended to look down on Rob and his ilk as stupid and shallow, but who secretly longed to sleep with coked-up lingerie models half their age and be arrested for speeding at the Gumball rally in Monte Carlo.
“Trouble with the old wheels, eh?” said Chip or Chuck, his white teeth flashing cruelly in the darkness. “Serves you right for being such a cheapskate. You shoulda sprung for a Ferrari, man.”
“‘I got a wife and child?’” mocked Rob. “Fuck, Drummond, have you got no shame at all?”
“His wife came with a free penis pump from the sex shop,” quipped the third guy, not wanting to be outdone by his buddies. “But where’d he buy a blow-up kid? That’s what I’d like to know!”
“Ha-ha,” said Cameron, his earlier relief at being out of physical danger draining away as the full magnitude of his humiliation hit home. None of them would let him forget this at work tomorrow morning. “What are you doing out here anyway, dressed like that? I thought you were muggers.”
“Going for a run,” said Rob, peeling off his sweatshirt to reveal a Nike tank top and an upper body that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the front cover of Men’s Health magazine. “You should try it some time. Good for the old ticker, you know? I’d say yours could do with a bit of toughening up.”
Vain dickhead, thought Cameron as the three of them began giggling again like schoolboys. But he restrained himself, sticking to polite small talk and laughing off his cowardice as best he could as they helped him push the car to the nearest shoulder. Once there, he waved them off as cheerfully as he could—they were still laughing and sending him up mercilessly as they jogged away, the bastards—and called the tow truck.
It was only half past four, but the last of the winter sunlight had already disappeared behind the horizon, and the temperature was dropping like a stone. Pulling his cashmere coat more tightly around him against the wind and drizzle, Cameron waited gloomily for rescue, glad of the hustle and bustle of the McDonald’s opposite and the weak orange glow from the lampposts, which somehow made him feel far safer than he had felt alone on the road.
He was well aware that he’d overreacted in front of Rob and the other guys and that he’d pay for it dearly in the office. But despite being one of nature’s cowards, he was pretty sure he wouldn’t have been so shaken up if it hadn’t been for all the other weird things happening to him lately. It had gotten to the point where even something as innocent as a car breakdown was starting to feel like part of a conspiracy.
It had started about a month ago, with a break-in at his apartment—not in itself such an unusual event. Cameron lived in one of the
most expensive parts of Chelsea, and anyone watching the house would have known he worked long hours. But the weird thing was that the thieves hadn’t taken anything, not even the wad of cash he’d left lying out on the kitchen table for the cleaning lady. The papers on his desk had been disturbed, and his desktop computer was switched off—odd, when he was pretty sure he’d left it on hibernate when he’d left for work that morning. But other than that, it was as if someone had broken in, looked carefully for something specific, and then left, as far as Cameron could tell, empty-handed.
He might have forgotten all about this curious incident had it not been for that night the following week, when he could have sworn a black Fiat was tailing him home from Nobu, and then two days later he saw the same car driving slowly past Pucci Pizza on the King’s Road while he was enjoying his usual Saturday pepperoni garlic crust special. It was only after he contacted the police and was outraged by their lack of concern, bordering, in his opinion, on derision, that he remembered Scarlett and her wild accusations about Brogan O’Donnell after Bijoux burned down.
Was there more to her claims than he’d imagined? Was it possible that whoever his little sister had so needlessly irritated last year was now extending their long arm of retribution toward him?
He glanced at the clock on his BlackBerry—five fifteen; where the fuck was the tow truck?—and then at the calendar. Scarlett should have landed at Heathrow three hours ago. As soon as he got this mess with the car sorted out, he’d call and have it out with her. If she wanted to risk her own skin pursuing some hopeless save-the-nig-nogs campaign, that was up to her. But if she thought she could turn his life upside down with impunity, goddamn it she had another thing coming.
After a nightmare two hours at Heathrow—British Airways had somehow managed to lose her luggage, necessitating an endless round of form filling before she could catch the tube home—Scarlett finally collapsed through the door of her flat at half past six at night.
Christ, it looked depressing. With hindsight, she really ought to have rented the place out. But when she’d left for LA in January, she’d still been kidding herself that the move was temporary, and getting a tenant felt uncomfortably like admitting defeat. Instead, she’d arranged for Mrs. Minton from downstairs to keep an eye on the place and pop in every now and then to open the windows and vacuum up the worst of the dust. This she had clearly done. The whole flat smelled of wood polish and carpet cleaner, and there was some horrid blue gunk down the toilet. She’d even gone out and bought a bunch of lilies from the market in an effort to make the place a little more welcoming, and changed the sheets on Scarlett’s ridiculously big bed. But nothing could quite eradicate the feeling of emptiness that hung in the air as Scarlett wandered from room to room. All the warm, homely atmosphere seemed to have been sucked out along with the carpet dust. From the empty grate in the sitting room to the bare, disinfected fridge, the entire place seemed to be enveloping Scarlett with a cold reproach, as if to say “and where the hell have you been?”
She was desperate to have a bath, but there was no hot water, and when she went to turn the boiler on the pilot light was dead as a doornail. It was turning out to be that sort of a day. Skulking into the sitting room, she turned on all the lights—perhaps some hundred-watt illumination would lift her mood?—and lit the fire with the last of the Tesco extra-long matches before grabbing the bedspread and blanket from her bed and dragging them onto the sofa. Deciding to order some takeout—fish and chips from The Pie Shop should hit the spot—she picked up the phone and was surprised to see the red message light flashing. The recorded message told people not to leave voice mail here but to try her LA number. Maybe it was her parents, calling to welcome her home?
Close, but no cigar. Hitting the PLAY button, she found herself greeted by a torrent of abuse from her brother. It was all a bit confusing, but he seemed to be accusing her of having had him followed or some such nonsense. She caught the name O’Donnell and the tail end of a typical Cameron rant about Trade Fair and how she was in over her head, but she deleted the rest of the message before she got to the end. Whatever his problem was, she had no doubt he’d fill her in up at Drumfernly this weekend. She was far too tired to deal with it now.
The second call was from Nancy, sounding happy and excited. She deleted that message too, deciding it was quicker to call straight back and hear the good news, whatever it was, in person.
“Omygoditsyou!” Nancy picked up after one ring, in full-on hyperactive mode. Scarlett must have caught her right after her midmorning quadruple espresso. “Thank God. Did you get my message? I have soooo much to talk to you about.”
Scarlett, feeling desperately weary, was about to explain that she hadn’t heard the message, but had barely drawn breath before Nancy started up again.
“He is gorgeous; he is divine. I don’t know where to start!” she squealed. Then, as if registering that Scarlett had not yet spoken, added, “But how are you, sweetie? How was your flight? Must have been nice not to have to listen to Jake ‘I put the me in Meyer’ the whole way.”
“It was,” lied Scarlett. “The flight was fine.”
“OK, good, so, Che Che,” said Nancy, back on message now that the pleasantries were over.
“Who?” asked Scarlett.
“Che Che. The guy I told you about.”
“You slept with a guy called Che Che? What is he, a maracas player in a Cuban band?”
“Why do you assume I slept with him?” Nancy feigned outrage. “We only met last night. What are you saying? That I’m some kind of slut?”
“OK,” said Scarlett, “so you didn’t sleep with the maracas player—”
“He is not a maracas player. And of course I fucking slept with him,” laughed Nancy. “Jesus, are you kidding me? With the body that guy had on him? Not to mention his—”
“All right, all right,” said Scarlett. “I get the picture.”
“The picture” turned out to be a lot more interesting with Che Che than with Nancy’s usual conquests. A black African painter—“Not African American, real African” as Nancy told her proudly—he’d fled to the States four years ago as a refugee from Sudan and made a name for himself on the LA art scene.
“He’s totally different from everyone else I’ve dated,” gushed Nancy. “God, Scar, I wish I could describe him to you. He has this strength, this presence. I think I’m gonna move in with him.”
“Nance,” Scarlett did her best to sound disapproving. “You’ve only known the guy twelve hours.”
“I know,” said Nancy, as if amazed by the situation herself. “But when you know, you know, right? Like you and Magnus?”
“I suppose so,” said Scarlett. She didn’t want to think about Magnus.
“Anyway, Boxie adored him on sight,” said Nancy. “The only fly in the ointment is my parents. You know what I mean. They’re not exactly…enlightened.”
Scarlett smiled at the understatement. Mr. and Mrs. Lorriman were decent people, but they made Mitt Romney look liberal. They’d almost certainly prefer for their only daughter to be abducted by aliens than for her to bring home a black boyfriend—never mind a Sudanese freedom fighter, or whatever this fellow was.
“I wouldn’t worry about that yet,” she said kindly. “Like I say, I’m sure Che Che’s wonderful, but you only just met. Maybe he won’t have to meet your parents?”
“He will,” said Nancy, seriously. “I’m telling you, Scar, you don’t get it. He’s the one. I’m gonna marry this guy.”
The conversation continued in this vein for another five minutes, with Scarlett finally hanging up when Nancy launched into an impromptu ode to Che Che’s “insanely huge” manhood. That was more than even Scarlett could stand on no sleep and an empty stomach.
Deciding a change of air might do her good, she abandoned the takeout idea and decided to walk to The Pie Shop instead. The rain had stopped, and it was only a ten-minute stroll down Portobello. Ducking into her bedroom to dig out some winter clothes,
she pulled the first two sweaters she found on over her head and, teaming them with a pair of comedy Christmas reindeer gloves and matching hat left over from last year’s Christmas stocking, headed downstairs.
Opening the front door, she jumped a mile.
“Jesus! Oh my God, you frightened the life out of me.”
There, swaying on her doorstep, his finger on the buzzer to her apartment, was Jake.
“Sorry,” he said, stepping back onto the path into the pool of light thrown by the streetlamp. Only then could Scarlett see that his lip was bleeding and a bruise the size and color of a small plum had formed above his left cheekbone. “I didn’t mean to scare you. Nice hat, by the way.”
Blushing, she pulled the offending article off her head and stuffed it into her jeans pocket.
“What happened?” she asked. She reached up to touch his bruised face, but he instinctively pulled back.
“Oh, nothing,” he said unconvincingly. “I fell out with a bloke in the pub, that’s all. Arsenal fan, you know what that lot are like.”
“Hmm,” said Scarlett skeptically. “I see.”
In fact, he’d run into a guy he’d sold some dodgy diamonds to years ago, quite by chance—a guy who unfortunately wasn’t inclined to let bygones be bygones in the spirit of the season, as Jake suggested, and who had declined his offer of a drink with rather more force than Jake felt was strictly necessary.
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