Bad Twins

by Rebecca Chance

  This was the technique she had seen Charlotte operate to great effect in her own office when Conway had stormed in; push back harder, show no vulnerability, take their energy and use it against them. It had stopped Conway in his tracks, and for a moment she thought that it had also worked on Thomas. He took a deep breath, and something moved behind his eyes. Resignation, Bella thought. Admission of defeat, or at least that Bella was doing nothing but tell the truth. His shoulders sagged, his head bowed a little.

  Then he raised it again and looked straight at her, and she saw that his eyes were black.

  ‘Give me the laptop, Bella,’ he said with ominous calm.

  ‘No! It’s mine, and I won’t!’

  She sounded like a little child, she realized. But that was what this situation had devolved to. First it had been like a French farce, the husband catching the wife with her on-screen lover: now it was something much more frightening. Thomas knew he had no right to demand to see anything on her computer, and yet he was advancing on her as she backed away . . .

  ‘Stop it! Leave me alone!’ she said, even as she edged towards the door.

  ‘Bella. Give me the laptop,’ he repeated, still in that eerily calm tone.

  Bella had no idea what he would see if he managed to get hold of it: definitely the history of her Skype chats, with only one name on the account she was talking to, clearly a man’s. But would he be able to replay what had just happened? Did it record in some way? The mere possibility made sweat spring out on her palms, the laptop slippery in her hands.

  She wasn’t feeling remotely guilty, however. Thomas deserved this. He had neglected her for a long time, and she had finally found someone who actually wanted her. Big deal.

  ‘I want a divorce,’ she blurted out.

  Four little words. Five little syllables. But the relief of saying them was immeasurable to Bella. It was more than a weight coming off her shoulders; it was as if a growth had been cut away from her body, leaving her feeling so light she was almost hovering above the ground.

  Until Thomas’s face darkened with fury and he lunged towards her.

  Bella turned and ran faster than she would ever have thought that she could move, her breasts bouncing uncomfortably in the nightdress. She made it to the head of the stairs before her husband caught the back of her robe and dragged her to a halt. It was a brutal jerk, and it scared her badly. Swinging round, the laptop gripped in her hands, she whacked it across his face without even thinking about the damage it could do.

  The corner smashed into his nose, and he reared back, grunting in shock. His hands went up to cover it protectively, releasing his grip on her robe. She stared in horror at what she had done, at what was happening between them. Never had Thomas given her any indication that he had this kind of anger inside him. Never had he laid a hand on her like this.

  ‘I’m sorry!’ she said. ‘But you shouldn’t have grabbed me! Can we—’

  Thomas’s hands came away from his face. There was no blood, but a bruise already looked as if it was forming across the bridge of his nose, and there was something off with it, something dissonant, as if Bella were viewing him through a distorting lens.

  ‘Fuck you, you bitch,’ he said, his voice thick. ‘I catch you cheating on me and you hit me? I think you broke my nose! How fucking dare you!’

  ‘I didn’t mean—’ Bella babbled, truly frightened now.

  Her back was to the newel post at the corner of the balustrade, a heavy dark-wood feature in keeping with the mock-Tudor style of the house. She could have swivelled around it and darted down the stairs, but every instinct was telling her not to run. Her husband, who had so shockingly revealed his lack of self-control, might react once more as a predator animal did when something had defined itself as prey by fleeing rather than standing its ground.

  So instead she swallowed hard and said in as strong a voice as she could muster:

  ‘Thomas, come on. You grabbed me, I reacted. Let’s take a deep breath, calm down and talk about this like adults.’

  It was a very good speech. Her tone was excellent, her words sensible. She thought for a second it had done the trick. And then her husband said slowly, sounding exactly like the child she had just tried to tell him he was not:

  ‘You hurt me. Now I’m going to hurt you.’

  She barely recognized him. His eyes were even blacker, the bruise on his crooked nose darkening rapidly, and he was breathing heavily. His hands lifted, formed themselves into open claws, and came straight for her throat.

  Afterwards, Bella kept telling herself over and over again that she had never meant to do it. She sat, sobbing, head in her hands to avoid the sight of her husband being loaded onto the stretcher, one of the paramedics putting his arm around her shoulders in consolation, telling her that it would all be okay, getting a foil blanket and putting it round her because she was shivering uncontrollably.

  I didn’t mean it, ran on a loop inside her head. I didn’t mean it. I had to defend myself, I had to . . .

  All she had done was to shove the laptop towards him in an attempt to keep some distance between them, stop his hands from reaching her neck and starting to squeeze. And because Thomas was lunging towards her, the metal edge hit him squarely in the solar plexus, taking the wind out of him. Bella twisted past him, trying to reach the staircase, all thoughts about not fleeing blotted out now that he had threatened her. If she could make it downstairs, out into the street, she would stand there and yell her head off for help: in the quiet of the Suburb, that would immediately have the neighbours running out to see what was going on.

  But she didn’t make it. Thomas recovered quickly enough to grab her forearms, the laptop caught awkwardly between them. His breath was hot on her face, his closeness a horrible, twisted parody of the embraces that she had wanted from him so badly and that he had refused to give her. Frustration and anger rushed up in her in a great surge. Thomas was trying to grab her, control her. After the long years that she had yearned for more physicality from him, this was what she was getting? Now he wanted to put his hands on her?

  Fuck you! she thought, and she shoved the laptop at him again, hitting him once more in the solar plexus, so forcefully this time that he doubled up, propelled away from her. They were so close to the top of the staircase that those couple of steps back sent him over the edge. He lost his footing, tripping over his own feet and falling backwards in a contorted ball, banging against the heavily carpeted steps in a series of dull thuds that seemed to go on forever.

  Bella stood there, her breath coming fast as she watched her husband’s body beat itself again and again into the staircase. Finally, it crashed to the hall floor, resolving itself into a tangle of limbs flung out from his torso at strange angles, and lay entirely still.

  She did not move, not yet. She was waiting to see if he showed any signs of getting up, or whether he had been thoroughly knocked out, or worse, by the fall. Her heart was pounding out of her chest. But her strategic brain was turning over, processing what had happened, working out her next necessary move.

  After a few minutes in which Thomas remained prone and motionless, Bella took her laptop back into the bedroom, moving slowly because her limbs were trembling, and replaced it on the table. She took off her make-up, pulled back her hair into an elastic, put away her sexy nightwear and changed into a pair of cotton pyjamas. Now she looked like a woman who had been spending the evening quietly at home by herself. Holding on tightly to the wide banister, she walked downstairs very carefully, still shaking with shock; what a comedy of errors it would be if she too ended up in a pile in the hall next to her husband.

  Carefully picking her way past Thomas’s crumpled body, she headed for the small rolling travel suitcase and leather laptop carrier that were still standing where he had left them, just inside the front door. Unbuckling the latter, she pulled out his own MacBook, her hands wrapped in the sleeves of her pyjama top to conceal her fingerprints. As well as she could with that grip, she bashed
it once, twice, three times against the carpeted stair edge, denting and buckling the metal so that it looked as if it had tumbled down the stairs with Thomas, smashing into his nose as it went.

  One more thing, and that was the worst of all. Cautiously, Bella pushed at Thomas’s body with her foot. Thank God he was lying face down. He didn’t move at all: real life, she told herself, was not like horror films. The villain didn’t take a catastrophic tumble down a staircase and then jump up a few minutes later, freshly recovered and ready to attack the heroine once again. Kneeling down beside her husband, she took his limp hands and pressed them around the laptop, splaying them wide, so it looked as if he had been holding it during his fall. That would explain any marks or bruising that were not consistent with him hitting against the staircase.

  And then, and only then, did she ring for an ambulance.

  Chapter Nineteen

  ‘Bell! You poor thing!’

  Charlotte tore down the corridor of the hospital, arms outstretched, her clear, ringing, aristocratic tones catching attention, her extreme beauty drawing double takes from even the most hardened of emergency nurses and doctors, especially with the ludicrously handsome Paul following behind her.

  Bella looked up from her seat at the approach of her sister and brother-in-law, heads turning behind them to goggle at their sheer gorgeousness. Charlotte dropped to her haunches in front of her twin, pulling her into an awkward embrace.

  ‘I’m so sorry!’ Charlotte said against her sister’s shoulder. ‘I’m so sorry!’

  The man sitting on one side of Bella, tapping away on a tablet, cleared his throat, stood up and shifted to an empty row of chairs a little further down the corridor, giving Charlotte his seat. She slipped into it, still hugging her sister, not acknowledging the man in any way, let alone thanking him.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked, as the woman who had been flanking Bella in the other seat looked up at Paul, gesturing to indicate that he was welcome to take it if he wanted. He shook his head, muttering thanks.

  When Bella didn’t answer, the woman leant over to Charlotte. She was wearing a simple two-piece dark-blue uniform, a lanyard hanging round her neck.

  ‘I’m Ms Sachs’s patient liaison officer,’ she said. ‘She’s in very understandable shock at the moment, and I’m here to—’

  ‘How’s Thomas?’ Charlotte interrupted impatiently.

  ‘Mr Hargreaves is in surgery,’ the patient liaison officer said. ‘There’s been extensive bleeding and swelling as a result of the head trauma, and he has some broken bones. I’m afraid we can’t possibly give a prognosis at this stage—’

  ‘Oh, Bell!’

  Charlotte snapped her attention back to her twin, cradling Bella’s face in her hands now.

  ‘Darling, what happened?’ she repeated. ‘Did you see it? Have they given you anything for the shock? I didn’t even know Thomas was home – wasn’t he supposed to be away this weekend?’

  ‘Um, I’m really not sure if you should be asking her all these questions when she’s not in the best state to . . .’ the patient liaison officer began awkwardly.

  She wasn’t sure, however, of what was correct procedure here. It was unprecedented for a patient liaison officer to be involved in effectively babysitting a patient’s wife while the patient was in intensive, long-drawn-out surgery. But her instructions had been to stay with Bella Sachs until she eventually left the hospital, making sure that she had everything she needed.

  It was equally unprecedented, in the patient liaison officer’s experience, for the wife to have been accompanied to the hospital by someone who her boss had told her was a very high-powered solicitor: this was the man who had just moved his seat, apparently also prepared to stay with his client the entire time she was at the hospital. But then, the officer had never before had to look after a patient’s relative who had her name on a whole chain of hotels. She hadn’t realized there was an actual family behind the Sachs hotels, like the Hiltons: was there a Marriott family too? Clearly, though, when you were at this stratospheric level, normality bent and expanded to accommodate you.

  The patient liaison officer’s words stuttered to a halt as Charlotte waved a hand to silence her. Bella had started to speak.

  ‘He came back from Berlin,’ Bella told her sister. ‘I wasn’t expecting him . . . it was so nice to see him . . . he dashed upstairs to surprise me and then he said he’d go downstairs and make us drinks and order some food from Deliveroo. He had his laptop. I always told him not to walk with it open, and he always did! I heard a crash and ran out – he was lying there in the hallway, not moving . . .’

  The solicitor, who had been listening intently, his eyes fixed on his client, nodded in approval.

  ‘It was such a shock, it happened so fast!’ Bella went on. ‘I rang the ambulance, and then I rang Daddy straight after . . . silly, really, ringing Daddy! But I was so scared, and it felt like being a kid again, needing my dad!’

  This elicited another nod of approval from the solicitor. Unsurprising, considering that Bella’s story had been carefully worked out by him some hours before. Summoned by Jeffrey Sachs, he had arrived at the Hampstead Garden Suburb house very shortly after the paramedics had whisked Thomas off to hospital, thus ensuring that no one from the police could talk to his client before he had consulted with her first.

  So by the time the police turned up at the hospital to interview Bella, as was routine in this kind of situation, her story was ready for them in minute detail. The solicitor had asked her a slow, patient, and very careful series of questions, most of which, in fact, were prompts towards the construction of a version of events that would keep Bella as far away from the entire incident as possible. He was an expert at making gentle suggestions couched to end with an interrogation mark.

  And once the story had evolved into its final form, the solicitor had impressed on her that it needed no elaboration. She was to keep it simple, to repeat the same series of facts, and if pressed she should say that she was too upset to talk further. The role of Jeffrey’s eye-wateringly expensive firm of solicitors, whom he had on permanent retainer, was to avoid any hint of scandal and to minimize any legal misfortune that might occur to him or any member of his family.

  Bella knew this perfectly well. It was why, directly after calling 999, she rang her father. Just as she had expected, after expressing due concern for Thomas, he had told her to sit still and wait for a phone call from Greenberg and Clinton. A mere five minutes later it had come, from a soft-spoken man who identified himself as her solicitor and instructed her not to admit anyone else to the house but him; she was under no obligation to talk to the police should they turn up, he had informed her, no matter what they told her. She should not go to the hospital with the ambulance if they offered her a lift; he would take her there himself.

  As it turned out, the police had come instead to the hospital, which had provided them with a private room for the short interview. This was no more usual than the assignation of a patient liaison officer to Bella, but everyone knew exactly who Jeffrey Sachs was and what spheres of influence he could summon up if he chose.

  It was a poignant fact that for the truly rich, even near-infinite wealth could not entirely protect them from occasional fleeting moments of contact with how the rest of the world lived. You could give birth, or have procedures scheduled, in private hospitals like the Portman or the Wellington, but for A&E visits, let alone brain surgery after a life-threatening fall, you needed the NHS. Still, the NHS was very aware of the need to avoid complaints from one-percenters with connections to the highest levels of government.

  ‘Oh, Bella,’ Charlotte breathed on hearing her sister’s version of events. ‘I bet he opened up the bloody laptop to look at Deliveroo and tripped. How awful and stupid, especially when you must have been so happy to see him! I’m sorry it took us so long to see Daddy’s call. We were at an opera benefit and had our phones on silent. God, I don’t even know what to say!’

  The pa
tient liaison officer couldn’t help thinking that Charlotte did not seem to be exhibiting any symptoms of being tongue-tied.

  ‘Hi, you must be Ms Sachs’s sister,’ she said, leaning forward. ‘I’m Joan. Can I get you a cup of tea or something? Ms Sachs, would you like another one?’

  ‘That would be nice,’ Bella said over her shoulder.

  ‘And something to eat!’ Charlotte said. ‘You must be starving – you haven’t had your dinner. Can you bring us the menu?’

  The solicitor, although remaining blank-faced as befitted his profession, saved up the sight of Joan’s expression so he could imitate it as faithfully as possible to his colleagues the next day at work.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Ms Sachs,’ Joan said, almost wringing her hands. ‘We don’t actually have a menu here! I was going to make you and your sister tea in the nurses’ room, which’ll be nicer than the vending machine ones . . .’

  ‘Darling, this isn’t a private hospital,’ Paul murmured to his wife.

  ‘I can see that!’ Charlotte’s gaze was positively blistering as it swept round the corridor, taking in the battered chairs and peeling paint. ‘But surely there must be something – a cafe – a bistro—’

  ‘This time of night I’m afraid it’s just the vending machines,’ Joan said in a tiny voice. ‘And there’s a McDonald’s across the street. I mean, we’d all love the cafe to stay open, obviously, but management—’

  ‘This is intolerable! Nothing but vending machines?’ Charlotte exclaimed. ‘Paul, do something!’

  ‘I’ll get the tea in the meantime, shall I?’ Joan said, taking the opportunity to escape the scene. She was briefly detained by Paul, and blushed deeply at his sheer beauty as he apologized for stopping her and asked quietly how long she thought the wait would be before they had any news about Thomas.