Killer Affair

by Rebecca Chance

  Lexy had no idea, of course, about the second set of photographs, the very explicit ones of Deacon in his stained jeans, of her on the sink with her legs in the air, then staggering down again with her skirt hoicked up high on her thighs. If she had known about them, her reaction would have been very different indeed.

  So Lexy was under the mistaken impression that she had got exactly what she wanted. A scandal that would hit the papers and be kept there by her PR team spinning it out; stories about her making heartfelt apologies to Frank; photos of her dressing as demurely as a nun on day release from the convent as she picked up her kids from school and daycare; her and Frank photographed looking tense, heading out for a meal in a staged photo opportunity that would be labelled ‘Crunch Time’ or ‘Crisis Talks’; ‘sources close to the couple revealing’ that Lexy and Frank were close to divorce; Lexy visiting a counsellor, perhaps, since Frank was very unlikely to agree to fake visits to Relate with her; then a visit for the whole family to a theme park, the nanny staying well out of shot, which would be the first hint that the couple might be reconciling and putting the past behind them . . .

  It was straight out of any reality TV star’s basic playbook. Emily’s firm would know how to handle it for maximum effect. Ideally, if Frank could bear it, a story about the two of them spicing up their sex life would run in the week that the series and the book both launched. That would chime in with the narrative that they were pushing: that after a child together and a few years of marriage, Frank and Lexy had made the all-too-common mistake of taking each other for granted. Their different tastes had led to largely separate social lives, their once-passionate sexual connection had grown stale; they needed a shake-up.

  The classic next move was to sell the exclusive rights to an article covering a romantic weekend getaway, comped by an upmarket resort, at which Lexy would pose in a series of outfits currently available from her supermarket line. The kids would be looked after by Frank’s mother back home as the couple reconnected with each other in a swimming pool, over cocktails, on a beach at sunset; at the end of the piece they would hint coyly at the possibility of a vow renewal, whose organization would occupy a large part of the next season of Lexy’s show . . .

  But Lexy couldn’t be sure Frank would go for all this. Much as she loved him, sometimes she regretted not having married a partner who was as committed as she was to the process of moulding their lives into a narrative that would keep readers and viewers hooked. And, tipsy and coked up, she found herself spilling some of this frustration to Sam and Michelle. The latter was engaged to another reality star with whom she had very little in common apart from their active sex lives and their ambition. However, since Michelle and her fiancé Jake spent their entire time either shagging or planning out new stunts to get them into the papers, the couple that worked together seemed, so far, to be staying together.

  ‘I really should be doing pieces about mine and Frank’s sex life, like you and Jake do!’ Lexy slurred enviously to Michelle. ‘You’re so lucky that he doesn’t mind that!’

  ‘Oh, Jakey’s a total slag,’ Michelle said, hoisting the empty bottle of champagne out of the ice bucket and waving it to signify to the waiter that they needed another one. ‘Likes it every way to Sunday and doesn’t mind me spilling all the deets! The only thing I can’t talk about is the threesomes, for obvious reasons –’

  She grinned at Lexy, waving her hands as if conducting an orchestra as the two of them chorused together that refrain repeatedly nagged into them by their publicists: ‘Not family friendly!’

  ‘We’d lose every single endorsement overnight, can you imagine?’ Michelle said, as the waiter came over. ‘I don’t even want to think about what that’d cost us!’

  Her pretty face, plump with fillers, contorted as she squinched up her eyes, trying to calculate how much she earned from her eyebrow kits, being the face of a suntan line, and endorsing diet supplements, then adding on Jake’s protein powder, fitness equipment and men’s underwear deals.

  ‘Err . . . basically so much dosh,’ she eventually concluded. ‘But we worked out a good way to hide it. Everyone knows what a fitness freak Jakey is, so people take it for granted that we’ll always have a personal trainer around. Even on holiday. So we can travel with whoever it is we’re playing with.’

  She winked at Sam.

  ‘Or, when Sam was having it off with us, we said that she was lonely ’cause she just got dumped and that’s why we took her to Marbs on holiday. Got some nice pieces out of it too – Jakey got a few articles about him being grumpy that he wasn’t getting enough alone time with me because I was having cocktails with Sam, and I got three weeks’ worth of columns about how friendship’s so important because men can come and go, even the best ones, but friends are forever—’

  ‘That was a good week!’ Sam said nostalgically. ‘And I got loads of publicity off it too – honestly, I don’t think I’d’ve got Strictly Come Dancing without it. They were really keen on me being single so they could run stories about me getting off with my dancing partner – as if, he was a total gayer – and all the wives worrying about me being a danger to their marriages because of the Strictly break-up curse. All bollocks, of course. You know me – I never want just a guy in bed.’

  ‘Yeah, poor Jakey!’ Michelle said, grinning. ‘In Marbs he was all, like, I wanna just fuck Sam this afternoon one-on-one and she’d be, Yeah not feeling that so much, Michelle needs to sit on my face while you do it, okay?’

  She hiccupped as the waiter came back with the new bottle of champagne.

  ‘Need the loo again,’ she said significantly, picking up her bag and heaving herself to her feet. ‘You wanna come, Lex?’

  ‘Just one more time,’ Lexy said, a statement she had made several times already that night. ‘Then I’ve really got to get going – where’s Brandon, I need him to sort my car out . . .’

  ‘You told him to piss off a couple of hours ago!’ Sam said, giggling. ‘What are you, mental? Don’t you remember? You said he was doing your head in, hovering around telling you that you ought to get going!’

  ‘Oh! Did I?’

  Lexy had no idea how much she had drunk by now. They had been joined for a while by the Clearly Cloudberry PR, who had made a big deal of ordering rounds of shots for the table, cleverly extending the promotional evening to the club terrace. Lexy had been entirely genuine when she said she liked the cloudberry flavour, and had put away more shots than anyone. She had a legendarily hard head, but everyone had their limits, and the amount she had drunk meant she needed to do more lines so that she didn’t fall over, and then the lines made her want to drink more to balance herself out. It was what she had once heard Sam call a viscous circle.

  ‘I need to get a car,’ she heard herself say, and realized that she was starting to slur. ‘Got to get home to Frank.’

  ‘He’s in London?’ Sam looked surprised. ‘I thought he never stayed up here.’

  ‘No no, Shandbanksh,’ Lexy said. ‘Sandbanks.’

  ‘Lex –’ Michelle plopped back onto the banquette again. ‘No way can you get back there tonight! You’ll puke all over the fucking car and then pass out in the mess!’

  This frank assessment was so accurate that both Lexy and Sam erupted into laughter.

  ‘Okay, when you’re right you’re right,’ Lexy admitted. ‘I’ll crash at the flat tonight and then go back at the crack of dawn tomorrow morning . . . come on, then, Mish, just one more trip to the ladies, then I’ll head off . . .’

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Of course, it wasn’t just one more trip. They didn’t leave until the club closed at three a.m., and even then Lexy was reluctant to move from the cosy banquette, the salacious gossip, the champagne and the charlie. The manager had to usher them out tactfully, instructing the bouncer downstairs to make sure that all three of the very coked-up and drunk women were safely seen into black cabs. Lexy was so out of it that she had no memory of the last hour she had spent in the Camden Club,
of her journey home, or the tumble she had taken getting out of the lift, fumbling for her door key in her bag. One of her heels had caught on the edge of the carpet, and, her hands occupied, she couldn’t save herself: she had crashed heavily down on her knees, her bag flying across the corridor.

  Luckily she hadn’t woken up the neighbours as she kicked off her shoes, scrabbled to retrieve the bag, hoisted herself to her feet and drunkenly tried three keys in the lock before finding the right one. Once inside the flat, she had been unable to wriggle out of her dress, due to its extreme tightness and her extreme inebriation. She had managed to remove most of her hairgrips, but that was the extent of her efforts.

  Having fallen into bed, snoring heavily, with all her clothes and make-up on, she had slowly, painfully awoken to a pillowcase smeared with mascara, lipstick and, gruesomely, a drop or two of blood from her nostril: the coke she had taken had irritated the lining of her nose. Her eyes closed, she was still half-dreaming, and the image she was seeing was a nun standing in a tower, pulling on a bell rope, tolling it over and over again. On the roof below was a woman’s body, spread-eagled, a blonde woman in a grey skirt suit who had fallen from the tower . . . the bell kept ringing, the nun kept tugging that bell rope like an automaton, on and on and on . . .

  Lexy managed to pry her eyes open, a sticky procedure because of the mascara and fake eyelashes she was still wearing. She hadn’t closed the curtains the night before, and the daylight was so piercingly bright that she had a sudden, vivid flash of sympathy for vampires. She turned her head sideways into the pillow, squinting, getting accustomed to the light. Gradually, she realized that she had been seeing the last few frames of the Hitchcock film Vertigo. And the reason her brain had summoned up the image of the nun in the belltower above Kim Novak’s corpse was that a bell was indeed ringing insistently.

  It was the landline. That was why Lexy had taken so long to recognize it: she was much more used to the ringtone of her mobile. She sat up, groaning as the movement caused pain to stab through her head, and promptly fought an urge to retch, sitting still till the nausea passed. After a while, she noticed a pattern. The phone rang seven times, stopped, then started up again almost immediately, as the caller got the answering machine, hung up, and then redialled the number straight away.

  As her eyes focused, she caught sight of herself in the floor-to-ceiling mirrored fitted wardrobes opposite. Lexy had, ironically, loved this feature when they bought the flat. So much time, money and hard work had gone into her appearance that she relished the sight of the fruits of her labour. Today, however, the woman in the mirror was not a lithe, big-boobed sex symbol but an extra from the Rocky Horror Show. She moaned aloud. Her bra was digging into her, and her Spanx were so tight she had probably got a yeast infection from wearing them for so long.

  She swung her legs over the side of the bed and yelped at the sight of her right knee. On it was a weal the size of a two-pound coin, red and puffy. A flash of memory snapped across her brain, like a near-subliminal cut in a film: the carpeted floor of the corridor hallway, seen in a very tight close-up, so close that she must have been on hands and knees looking down at it . . . It hurt to put weight on that leg. She might have twisted the knee a little when she landed on it. Nothing major, but she would definitely need to stay off high heels for a while.

  Everywhere in this flat were reflective surfaces. It was a new-build, its interior design all glass and chrome or mirrored walls. As Lexy limped into the ensuite bathroom, she had to direct her gaze to the floor in order to avoid catching a glimpse of her smeared, grotesque face. She turned away from the mirror over the sink, peeling off the Hervé Léger dress; the wriggling, writhing movements required to drag it down to her ankles made her feel off-balance and nauseated. It was just as painful wrenching off the Spanx. She pulled off her fake lashes, started the shower running, smeared her face in make-up remover and stepped under the rainforest shower head, turning the temperature down as cold as she could bear to help with her screaming headache.

  Black trails poured down her face as her make-up washed off, the chilly jet on her scalp at first agony but then slowly doing its work, waking her up and cooling her down, helping to diminish the effects of the hangover. She managed to stay under it for a good five minutes before she finally stepped out and wrapped a towel around her, brave enough now to look at herself in the mirror. It wasn’t a pretty sight. The whites of her eyes were bloodshot, the eyes themselves seeming to have receded in her face, small and piggy, her skin blotched.

  If she had been able to, she would have rung up Skin3 right away, begged for an emergency appointment and gone in for a full restorative face mask. The staff were very used to her staggering in, hungover and in need of TLC: first, Eva would mix her a restorative potion of cucumber water in which she had dissolved glutamine powder, an amino acid that she swore acted as a conditioner for the stomach, soothing a tummy sore from a heavy drinking session. Then she whisked Lexy into a mercifully dark treatment room where the vitamins and collagen she so sorely needed would be worked deep into her epidermis as soothing music played. Lexy always emerged a different woman after one of these emergency sessions, ready to face whatever the day threw at her.

  But, she told herself wistfully, she had to get back to Sandbanks as soon as possible. The phone was still ringing; whoever was calling her would not give up until she answered. She patted in her serum and eye cream and vitamin oil, dusted herself with a layer of mineral powder, then spritzed her face with hydrating spray, more powder, even more hydrating spray, till at last she could bear the sight of her reflection. Padding back into the bedroom, Lexy took a deep breath, sat down on the bed and, finally, raised the receiver.

  ‘Hello? Hello? Lexy, is that you? Hello?’

  It was Brandon, sounding fairly deranged at the surprise of hearing something else but the expected seven rings and then the answering machine clicking in. Lexy opened her mouth to say ‘Hello’ back, but it came out like the croak of a dying raven. She cleared her throat, hawked up a large gob of phlegm, and tried again.

  ‘Hello? Brandon?’ she managed hoarsely.

  ‘Lexy!’ he squealed. ‘Oh my God, what a relief to hear your voice! Emily was saying we should call the management of your building and try to get in so we could see if you were there and doing okay – you are okay, aren’t you?’

  Lexy winced at the stream of words, holding the handset further from her ear.

  ‘Yeah, I’m okay. But I have a monster hangover,’ she said.

  ‘Have you gone online? The photos are all over everywhere, everywhere! It’s bad, Lexy. You look like you were having sex with him. Were you having sex with him?’

  No one could have seen that Deacon had fingered her, Lexy was sure. All that would have been visible was his hand up her skirt, and though that wasn’t great, it certainly didn’t translate to looking as if she was having sex with Deacon . . .

  ‘No, I wasn’t,’ she said firmly.

  ‘Lexy?’ the head of the agency interrupted. ‘It’s Emily. Brandon’s been ringing you over and over for hours. What the fuck were you thinking? Frank’s furious and I don’t blame him! You’ve gone way too far!’

  ‘I really didn’t . . .’ Lexy said feebly. ‘I didn’t have sex with him, I really didn’t . . .’

  ‘I’m booking a car for you right now,’ Emily said crisply. ‘It’ll be twenty minutes, tops. Clean yourself up, get dressed in your most covered-up, repentant outfit. Flat shoes. No ripped jeans. Nothing tight. No leather, apart from your shoes. Make-up minimal – it has to look like you’re not wearing any at all. Hair back, so everyone can see you looking sad. Dark colours only, no jewellery, but make sure they can see your wedding ring. Do the walk of shame through the paps. No sunglasses. Rub your eyes in the car as you get there so it looks like you’ve been crying. Got all that? Do I need to come round and check you over?’

  ‘No, I’ve got it,’ Lexy said feebly, overwhelmed by the barrage of instructions.

 
‘Remember, it’s a total walk of shame,’ Emily said. ‘You’re humbling yourself, showing everyone how terrible you feel. Get home and do whatever you need to do to calm Frank down. Charge your phone in the car – it’s out of juice. If you spend the time looking at the press, trust me, you won’t even need to rub your eyes. This is not the kind of thing we were after! You know better than this, Lexy! Thank God we’ve got months before the series and the book come out to fix this fucking disaster!’

  Ensconced in the car, her phone charging, Lexy Google-searched herself. She was dressed exactly as per Emily’s instructions, in navy jeans, a long, bottom-skimming, high-necked grey sweater, and a demure knee-length navy coat, ballet flats on her feet. Her hair was brushed back into a ponytail, her only make-up a single layer of mascara. It would have taken an observer quite a while to recognize the woman in the back of the car as the one in the photographs, with the latter’s piled-up hair, fake eyelashes and smeared lipstick, her disproportionately large boobs spilling over the tight bodice of the dress, her skirt high enough to look as if she wasn’t wearing any underwear at all . . .

  Photographs of her with her bottom in the sink and her legs splayed in the air on either side of Deacon. Photos of her staggering back down again, heel tipping underneath her, her skirt caught up almost to her crotch, but not high enough to show the Spanx that would to some degree acquit her of having just had penetrative sex. Photos of Deacon turning away towards the woman, looking dazed and shocked, the stain on his trousers visible.

  Okay, at least those last ones proved that he hadn’t got his cock out – but still, they looked awful, because the clear inference was that he and Lexy had been so hot and heavy that they would have done it if they hadn’t been interrupted. And since that was probably no more than the truth, Lexy’s emotions as she stared at those pictures were cripplingly painful.