“Yeah, it’s Nadia. And I think that’s Plum in the cab,” I inform Taylor, squinting to see through the tinted windows of the taxi.
“I can’t believe she’s the same age as us,” Taylor says, gawking at Nadia’s glamour.
“Aunt Gwen says Middle Eastern girls age faster,” I say.
“Your aunt Gwen’s an evil old hag,” Taylor says. “I should know, I have her for geography.”
“Nadia is really gorgeous,” I say as Nadia bends to scoot her skinny frame into the cab.
Taylor sniffs. “It’s all makeup. She probably looks like the back of a train in the mornings.”
I crack up. “Taylor, it’s a bus, not a train. You look like the back of a bus if you’re ugly.”
“Stupid English expressions,” Taylor says sulkily. “There are millions of them, and they’re all stupid.”
The cab’s pulled away.
“They’ll be off to a really late lunch on the King’s Road.” I’m guessing, but I’ve probably got it more or less right. God knows I’ve heard them all banging on about what they did at the weekend thousands of times when I was still at St.
Tabby’s. “And then shopping in Sloane Street. We’ve got hours.”
“Hopefully you won’t need hours,” Taylor says, standing up. “Ouch, my foot’s gone to sleep.” She shakes her trainer about. “Okay, let’s get Operation Obnoxious American under way.”
I jump up, too.
“Ready to be obnoxious?” I ask.
“Jesus, after all this waiting? You kidding? I am totally ready!” Taylor says, with an ominous gleam in her eye.
And then she looks at me long and hard.
“You ready?” she asks me.
I nod. I don’t trust my voice just at this moment.
Taylor’s task, though showy, has no danger involved. I’m the one who has the scary mission to complete.
Which I am trying very hard not to panic about.
“Owww! Owww! My foot! What the hell did I trip on? Owww!”
Taylor is eerily believable. If I didn’t know this was all a setup, I’d absolutely think, like everyone else stopping to stare at her, that she’d just tripped on the carpet outside Nadia’s block of flats, fallen, and done something nasty to her foot.
She’s writhing around and grabbing it. No one’s going up to her, at least not yet: she’s making such a racket that the more repressed Brits are embarrassed by the noise. It’s not that they don’t want to help, it’s that they’re afraid that approaching her will inevitably draw them into the Scene she’s making, and one thing English people are really scared of is Being Involved in a Public Scene. It’s very shameful in our culture.
But there’s a very good reason why Taylor is shouting the place down. . . .
“Owww! It really hurts! Can I get some help here, please?” she yells in the direction of the glass doors.
The doorman has got to have seen Taylor lying there. He’s probably hoping she’ll eventually get up and walk away without involving him and his building in anything.
Taylor writhes on the carpet. “I think my ankle’s twisted!” she yells. “I am so suing this building—that carpet’s a total health risk! Who the hell puts carpet on a sidewalk, anyway?”
“Are you all right?” a young man says, stopping in front of her. He’s wheeling a bike and wearing exercise gear.
“No, I’m not! I caught my foot on that carpet and now I think I’ve twisted my ankle!” she replies loudly.
“Oh crumbs,” he says, “what a bore.”
To my great amusement, Taylor actually stops wailing and writhing for a split second out of sheer surprise at this superb example of British understatement. She goggles at him as if he were in a freak show before recovering herself and saying pointedly: “Yeah, it hurts like hell!”
“Well, let me have a quick look,” he says, propping the bike up against the building and coming to kneel beside her. “I’m a medical student, actually. Not quite as good as a proper doctor. But I think I should be able to look at an ankle.”
Nooooooooo! I yell inside my head. If he gets his hands on her ankle, he’ll see that she’s completely fine, help her up, our entire plan will be ruined—
Taylor is panicking as well, as the same thought hits her.
“Uh, I’m not sure you should do that,” Taylor says feebly, “because, of, um, medical insurance . . . liability . . .”
But just as the young man is reaching out to her allegedly twisted ankle, a third voice breaks in.
“You can’t leave that bicycle against this building, young man!” it says reprovingly. “I’m going to have to ask you to move it at once.”
Taylor and the medical student both turn to look. It’s the doorman. Not the one who was on duty that fateful Saturday night of the party, a much older one, with a forbidding scowl. The medical student looks nervous. Taylor, however, rises magnificently to the occasion.
“I’m sorry, buddy, what did you say?” she asks angrily. “This nice guy is trying to help me after I fell over and probably broke something on your stupid carpet, and you don’t even bother to come out and check if I’m okay? Oh no, all you care about is a damn bike! If I’ve hurt myself, my mom will sue your asses from here to L.A. and back, believe me, and the fact that you didn’t even bother to come out and see if I was okay will look really bad in court!”
“Um, steady on,” the young man says uncomfortably to Taylor. “I don’t actually mind moving my bike.”
“You can both help me in right now so I can sit down inside instead of lying on some dumb carpet on the sidewalk, and this doctor guy can see if my ankle’s okay!” Taylor continues, barely registering his interruption. “Otherwise you”—she points at the doorman—“will be on the business end of a big fat lawsuit! My mom just loves to sue people!”
Blimey, I think, who is Taylor channeling? This isn’t her at all, and she’s doing it so well! The doorman starts to say something, but then he catches Taylor’s eye and thinks better of it, I can tell.
“Let’s get you into the lobby, then, miss,” he says, coming over to where she’s lying. “And perhaps after that the young gentleman wouldn’t mind taking his bicycle round to the service entrance.”
The medical student says something, and they both start helping Taylor up, but I barely catch this, as I am now in motion, sneaking along the pavement, close to the wall, moving fast and confidently, hitting the center of the gray doormat, which triggers the opening of the glass doors. Just as they start to open, which might catch the doorman’s attention, Taylor, who’s been keeping an eye on my progress, lets out a big “Owwww!” of pain and sags heavily against the doorman, so that his entire attention goes into not dropping her.
I’m in. My trainers make no noise at all on the marble floor as I sprint across it. This is one of the most dangerous bits of all, because I don’t know where I’m going. I dart my head frantically from side to side, looking for what I know has to be around here somewhere. . . . Keep going, Scarlett, keep looking. . . . It’s not behind the doorman’s big desk, but it must be nearby, surely, because he’d need to get to it on a regular basis. I’m past the desk and scouring the wall with my eyes—a door! Yes! I dash toward it and pull it open. A second later and I’m inside—and not a second too soon, because I can already hear voices in the lobby. Taylor’s is raised as loud as possible to warn me of their presence.
I look around. I’m in a corridor—concrete floor, steel-gray walls, bright fluorescent lights running overhead—a stark contrast to the discreetly lit dark wood and marble of the lobby I’ve just come through. This is most definitely the servants’ area of the building. Good. I move down the corridor, listening intently in case there’s anyone around, but the only noise I hear is my own breathing . . . and my sharply indrawn gasp of excitement as I round a corner and come face to face with what I’m looking for.
Three small lifts, set into the wall at waist height. Each one of them with a sign over the top labeled Penthouse A, B,
or C. I press the call button for C, and it opens immediately.
Oh God. I bend down and look inside. I’ll fit, but it’s going to be a tight squeeze.
I take a deep breath and brace myself. I knew what I was in for. I can’t back out now.
I have to do this.
Before I can think it over any more, I climb awkwardly into the lift. It’s about the size of a kennel—for a big dog, thank God, a Doberman’s kennel rather than a Chihuahua’s. Still, it rocks beneath my weight. I have to wiggle round once I’m inside, so my upper body is at the front, and that makes it rock even more. I’m curled up tight, my trainers crammed against the far wall, and I reach out with one hand to press the button on the outside wall to start the lift moving, knowing that when I do, the doors will close, and I’ll be shut inside this small airless space. It’s the scariest thing I’ve had to do in my life.
I press the button and scoot my hand back inside as quickly as I can. The doors close. And the lift wobbles as the mechanism starts to engage. The floor I’m lying on jolts and rocks and starts to move upward, agonizingly slowly, so slowly that it feels like it could jam and stop dead at any moment, trapping me in here.
It’s pitch-black. I’m already getting a cramp, and I’m absolutely terrified. I close my eyes tight and say every prayer I know.
twenty-three
WHAT NADIA SAW
I have Taylor to blame for all of this. She had the brilliant idea of looking up the details of the Farouk penthouse online, so we could see if there might be any way to sneak in. She found a big article in a glossy magazine about the building, which apparently was new just a few years ago, and in the gush of purple prose about its famous architect and interior designer, we learned more about how the very rich live than I really wanted to know. All the penthouse apartments have saunas and wet rooms and built-in climatized closets for fur storage and temperature-controlled wine rooms. They also have service lifts, so that when a delivery arrives downstairs with the doorman, no one in Penthouse A, B, or C has to do anything as vulgar as going downstairs to collect it (just imagine!). Instead, the doorman signs for it, rings upstairs to make sure someone’s in to receive it, and then puts it in the appropriate lift.
“Wow,” Taylor had said, reading that aloud. “You could order Chinese food and it would arrive in your apartment, like the restaurant was in your basement. How cool is that?”
For security reasons, the lifts aren’t full-size, the article explained. From my perspective, they aren’t even half-size. As the Penthouse C lift slowly judders and rattles its way up the shaft, I am packed in tighter than cartons of Chinese delivery food under a delivery guy’s moped seat. My stomach is so squashed into my knees that I’m beginning to feel queasy. My face is pressed into the metal floor of the lift, which is really cold. And one of my feet is torqued at an odd angle, which is beginning to hurt.
It’s stopped! My heart jolts as hard as the lift coming to a halt. I actually squeeze my eyes shut, so scared that I’m stuck in the lift shaft and Taylor will have to send in the troops to rescue me and we will both be in the worst trouble in the world.
The doors aren’t opening. And it’s not just my panic that’s stretching time out infinitely, making the couple of seconds before they slide open seem like an eternity. Oh no. They’re really not opening. And there’s no thin strip of light between them that would show that we’ve reached Penthouse C, which would at least mean that I could try to force them open and climb out.
Oh God. I feel nausea rising up my esophagus. Acid bites at the back of my mouth. If I have to ring Taylor, this entire mission will be aborted. . . . They’ll have to get the Fire Brigade in to save me. . . . Nadia will hear about it and she’ll tell everyone at St. Tabby’s, the humiliation will be worse than anything I’ve been through before. . . . Even Dan’s death wasn’t humiliating, because he wanted to kiss me, but this, well, I might as well just kill myself now.
It occurs to me that by the time the Fire Brigade or the lift engineers come that problem may well be solved. I will probably have run out of oxygen by then anyway. They’ll have to drag my corpse out of the lift.
This idea is not as comforting as my brief fantasies of suicide might have made it seem. I thrash around frantically, trying to get to my mobile phone. But guess what? I am wedged so tightly into this dog-kennel of a lift that I can’t get to my phone. I can feel its outline in my jeans pocket, but my arms are sandwiched between my legs and the walls, squashed in like a sausage in its casing, and I can hardly get any movement in them, let alone extract one and reach into my pocket. The phone is right there. It’s actually digging uncomfortably into my thigh. But it might as well be on the moon for all the use it is to me.
I stop thrashing around, as that’s making the lift rock precipitously and I’m scared I might break the cable and send it crashing to the ground floor. The acid in my throat is making me retch a little. I’m more frightened than I’ve ever been before in my life. And with horror, I realize something that hadn’t occurred to me before.
I weigh too much for this lift. It’s all my own fault. I am so fat that I have managed to jam this lift between floors. Oh God. What fun Plum and Nadia and Venetia and Sophie will have with this. I can’t bear it. I physically can’t bear it. My foot, which is twisted under me, is starting to hurt really badly now. I’m scared my entire body is going into spasm.
And then, suddenly, the lift jerks under me, like a horse that’s finally decided to start walking again. I catch my breath, unsure if this is good or bad. But how could it be bad, how could movement be bad—even if we’re going down again, at least I’m going somewhere there might be fresh air, which has to be better than this.
The lift sighs, clanks, gathers itself up, and starts rising again. My face presses harder into the metal floor, as if it’s coming up to squash me. I don’t care. I don’t care about anything but getting out of this bloody contraption. I am so grateful I could cry.
It stops again. I realize I’m still holding my breath. The doors ping open. Daylight floods in. I hear a weird yelping noise and realize that’s me, letting out my breath on a hysterical sob of relief. I’m really glad no one else was around to hear that.
Ironically, it takes ages to untwist my pretzeled body and crawl out of the lift, and the doors keep trying to shut on different bits of me. But finally, I clamber out and onto a granite shelf, which seems more than capable of bearing my weight. I sit there, looking around, getting my bearings, and firing off a quick text to Taylor so she knows I made it in okay and not to stage an emergency lift extraction on my behalf.
This place is even more impressive in the daytime. I’m in the main hallway, and there’s a big skylight above it through which daylight pours down, showing how shiny and spotless and gleaming every surface here is. Marble floors, granite shelves, walls painted faux tortoiseshell, waist-high vases filled with exotic flowers. Their florist bill alone must be gigantic.
I jump down from the shelf and stroll into the living room, which I remember from the party. It looks like a film set. I can’t believe people actually live here. The mirrored bar glitters with reflected sunlight bouncing off the faceted bottles and glasses; the leather sofas are arranged at perfect right angles to each other. There’s nothing out of place here, not a newspaper thrown on the floor or a mug with coffee dregs standing on one of the many smoky-glass coffee tables.
Through the French doors I can see the terrace, and if I went up to them I could see the exact spot where Dan died. But I don’t. It would be too much of a temptation to go outside, and I’m sure I can’t, as the doors must be alarmed. Besides, I need to focus on what I’m doing, searching for anything that might help me work out why Nadia left me that note. If I start remembering that night right now, back in the place where it all happened, I know I’ll start crying, and I mustn’t do that. I mustn’t. For all I know, Nadia might be back really soon. I didn’t go through that terrifying ride in the lift just to get caught here by Nadia.
So I turn my back on the French doors and the terrace, setting my teeth against the temptation, and begin to make a circuit of the apartment, looking for Nadia’s room. In the process, I learn something about myself: I am a horrible snoop. I want to look in everything, every single drawer and cupboard, open every door to see what’s behind it. I am massively curious about how these people live, what they own, what their secrets are. I keep reminding myself that only Nadia is my business, but it’s really hard to keep going through this lavishness without gawking at everything in sight.
The wet room and sauna are particularly impressive.
I don’t know what I was imagining that Nadia’s room would be like. I don’t even realize it’s hers at first. I mean, she just left it to go out to brunch, she’s the only person in residence here, with no one to shout at her for not picking up her clothes from the floor, and yet her room is so tidy and spotless that at first I actually assume it’s yet another spare bedroom. It’s done in pale greens and even paler yellows and it looks incredibly elegant, like a guest room in a magazine, with everything matching and perfectly in place. The silk coverlet is embroidered with a pattern of white bamboo, and the bed is piled high with white and pale gold silk pillows that look pretty but must be really slippery to sit on or put behind your head if you want to curl up in bed. The light green carpet is so thick and plush you could sleep on it. There’s an en suite bathroom all in pale yellow. It’s gorgeous. It’s just weird that it feels like no one actually lives here. I only realize it’s Nadia’s room when I open one of the wall-full of built-in cupboards and recognize her clothes hanging there. My God. She has an entire cupboard just for her jeans. I goggle at it for a long time in utter and complete jealousy.
Then I pull myself together and get to the task at hand: searching through her stuff. I don’t know what I’m looking for, or even if there’s anything to find. But Taylor and I decided that this had to be the first step. We didn’t think that confronting Nadia would have any results at all: she’d just deny everything and say Lizzie is a delusional idiot, which, frankly, would be hard to counter. We need some evidence, something concrete.
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