Bad Twins

by Rebecca Chance

  The PR team would delicately point out how much older Thomas was than Bella, and stress that she and Ronaldo were far more age-appropriate. They would note that it was marvellously egalitarian of Bella to be dating the son of her family’s housekeeper, and very generous of her father to have financed Ronaldo’s education. The whole story, Bella hoped, would be extremely positive for the Sachs family in the press, if handled correctly.

  And, of course, if Jeffrey approved it. This was what made Bella nervous whenever she considered the future. She and Ronaldo had not talked about anything long-term, but how could she not feel excited and positive about what was happening between them? A passionate affair while she was visiting his home town, followed up by sexy Skype sessions, was one thing, but the regular contact ever since, the conversations and texts about work and life and family, the eager plans to meet up again in London, the flowers, the champagne, had moved them into relationship territory, even if they had not had the conversation that officially made them exclusive.

  Ronaldo was certainly acting more like a boyfriend than a lover: Bella had kissed enough frogs in her single years to know the difference. They talked about how their days had gone, complained about their work issues and offered each other suggestions on how to fix them. Ronaldo often said wistfully how much he would like to be able to do normal things with Bella on his next visit to London: take a Thames lunch cruise, go out to dinner, walk in Regent’s Park, even stroll around the old Little Venice neighbourhood, looking at the houseboats moored along the canal, as they had used to do when they were children.

  He was respectful about Bella’s situation with Thomas, of course. It was a unique predicament, to have started an affair with a married woman whose husband then fell down a flight of stairs and ended up in a coma. The subject was on hold, however, due to Bella’s huge work push. Apart from an occasional polite enquiry about her hospital visits, there was a tacit agreement between the couple not to mention Thomas, not until Bella’s revamp of the Sachs hotel tech upgrade and membership scheme had rolled out. Ronaldo had simply said he wanted to support her by following her lead until the enormous work pressure was off her back, for which Bella had been very grateful.

  No, it was not Ronaldo she was worried about. It was her father. This would not affect his decision about who would be CEO, as she was certainly not going to tell him until that was settled, but he was still her father, and she couldn’t help but be nervous that he would rain down hell on her for this.

  Maybe I should talk to Adrianna about it, Bella thought, over that lunch we agreed to have. She’s obviously keen on bringing our family together. She might even sympathize – it’s not like she comes from a posh background herself, I imagine. After the honeymoon I’ll get Nita and Adrianna’s assistant to set up a date.

  Bella wished the wedding hadn’t popped into her mind. It brought everything so very close. Her upgrade was due to launch in a mere three weeks! The wedding, to be held at the Sachs flagship hotel on the Grand Canal in Venice, would happen just a fortnight later, with the announcement of the CEO job scheduled for that same weekend. Jeffrey was enjoying toying with his children’s nerves by creating drama right up until the last moment.

  Bella couldn’t help wondering how Adrianna felt about her wedding being so closely tied in with Jeffrey’s final decision. It was intended as a declaration of love, a statement that he was abdicating power in order to dedicate his retirement to his beautiful new young wife. But it would mean that his four children would be on edge at best, possibly even at each other’s throats, during the entire stay, with its elaborate dinners, boat trips to private islands for al fresco lunches, and the ceremony itself.

  Then Bella shrugged. Adrianna wouldn’t care a whit, not with her goal so close: the only thing that would matter was getting the ring on her finger. Bella had to give Adrianna great credit for not pretending that she was madly in love with her octogenarian fiancé. There were no cooing displays, no sugary protestations of devotion, no theatrical caresses that would make onlookers cringe with embarrassment. Adrianna was conducting herself, all things considered, with great dignity. Much more than Jade had shown when she had been ousted from the role of tycoon’s wife.

  The memory of Jade getting her comeuppance, of the sheer pleasure it had been to hit her loathed stepmother with a bolster so hard she knocked her into an armchair, made Bella smile briefly with pleasure. But then her thoughts slipped, as they so often did nowadays, triggered by her father’s upcoming wedding, into picturing her own. Not, of course, the ceremony she had gone through with Thomas, but her dream wedding to the man she was quite sure was the love of her life. Many times already Bella had pictured herself walking down the aisle, Ronaldo waiting for her at the altar, dark and gorgeous, his smile on seeing her flashing white and perfect against his smooth olive skin, his face lighting up as it always did when he clapped eyes on her . . .

  ‘Bella!’

  Nita bustled into her boss’s office, her eyes so wide that Bella could see the white all around the dark irises, her cheeks flushed and her head wobbling slightly. Nita was normally so composed that Bella instantly knew something very big had happened, and her heartbeat stuttered. As her entire focus was about the relaunch, her instant assumption was that something had gone very badly wrong with the programming. But the next second someone appeared behind Nita, and Bella knew that this emergency was nothing to do with her current project.

  ‘Samantha!’ she exclaimed, standing up, taking in the sight of her sister-in-law with a degree of shock. Samantha was as immaculately dressed as always, in a green coat open over a fitted, belted, photoprint dress, her hair and make-up perfect, but she looked as if she had clothed and painted a mannequin of herself. Her face was very white under the foundation and blusher, her movements jerky, her eyes wide and blank.

  ‘Can we get you anything?’ Bella said, glancing to Nita for a brief, charged moment and then back to Samantha again. ‘Tea? Coffee? Juice? Uh—’

  ‘I’ll get some tea sorted out,’ Nita said, as Samantha seemed temporarily incapable of speech. ‘And biscuits. Tal?’ she called. ‘Pot of tea, milk and sugar. And use the breakfast blend. Make it strong.’

  Nita guided Samantha across Bella’s office to the armchairs by the window. Samantha, near-catatonic, sank into one of the chairs, her coat still on.

  ‘I’ll leave you alone,’ Nita said, the reluctance almost audible: she was clearly dying to stay and hear what was coming.

  The office door shut quietly and silence fell, a silence which seemed as loud as a symphony orchestra, a palpable presence in the room. Bella’s mind was racing with speculation, but she sat quietly without asking questions, sensing that this was the right tack to take. Charlotte would have started chattering away immediately, but Samantha clearly needed to choose her own pace. She could have been in church, or waiting for an interview, sitting there with her hands folded neatly in her lap. In her pretty coat, so ladylike with its covered buttons and angled pockets, and her equally ladylike T-bar shoes, she was the picture of a woman who knew exactly who she was, who had her life completely organized and together. Until you looked at her face.

  Her lips, tinted in a pale coral, finally parted.

  ‘He’s been doing it forever,’ Samantha said. ‘Forever.’

  Bella’s phone rang: not her mobile, but her desk phone. Every call on this line was filtered through Nita, which meant that her assistant had decided that this was important enough to interrupt this moment of family crisis. Muttering an apology, Bella jumped to her feet and went over to the desk to pick up the handset.

  ‘Don’t say anything,’ Nita’s voice came. ‘Don’t put me on speakerphone! But I’ve just heard she was up on the twentieth floor before she came down to see you.’

  There was no need for Nita to specify further. At the Sachs Organization, ‘on the twentieth floor’ meant only one thing: Jeffrey’s offices.

  ‘I don’t know what was said,’ Nita continued tensely. ‘I’m try
ing to find out. Just thought you should know.’

  ‘Goodness, Nita,’ Bella said smoothly. ‘Of course hold my calls! You really didn’t need to check.’

  She clicked the End Call button and put the handset down on the desk, returning to the armchair.

  ‘So sorry about that,’ she said to her sister-in-law. ‘We won’t be interrupted again.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ Samantha said blankly. Her hands were still lying in her lap. She did not look as if she had moved a muscle. She was, Bella thought, the zombie version of herself.

  ‘You were saying . . .’ Bella prompted gently.

  ‘Conway’s been cheating on me since we met,’ Samantha said. ‘I mean, I suppose that wasn’t quite cheating, but it would have been as soon as we were serious, and that happened fairly fast. Maybe he doesn’t even see it as cheating? I’m genuinely questioning whether he has any moral compass whatsoever. Can a sociopath even cheat, technically? Does that count? If he doesn’t have a conscience, how can he make vows or stand by them? And if he can’t, it isn’t cheating at all, is it, really?’

  It took all Bella’s professionalism not to flinch back in horror, or grip the arms of her chair for support. It was as if someone else were speaking through Samantha’s lips, a character in a modern psychological drama where people debated abstract concepts by way of conversation. Bella had never heard Samantha talking like this before, and it was frightening.

  Her sister-in-law had stopped, and was fixing Bella with a wide-eyed stare of enquiry, clearly requiring an answer.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Bella said honestly. ‘I’m not quite sure I understand.’

  ‘Prostitutes,’ Samantha said. ‘They call them escorts when they’re this expensive, but they’re prostitutes, of course. It’s just a way for the men to feel better about themselves. If you pick up some poor woman waiting below an underpass, or next to some horrible vacant rat-infested waste ground, and get her to suck you off in the back seat, you probably like that kind of thing. Even prefer it to be dirty and sordid and nasty and probably disease-ridden. Or maybe you just can’t afford anything more expensive? I really don’t know. But I know that dressing up some girl from Eastern Europe in designer clothes and charging hundreds of pounds an hour for her to spread her legs for you is still prostitution, just as much as that poor woman by the underpass with the rats.’

  Samantha’s clear, cold voice, fluting and aristocratic as ever, was oddly detached, as if she were reciting something in which she had no personal interest. There hadn’t been a question at the end of her speech, so Bella kept quiet and eventually Samantha started again.

  ‘Conway’s just like his father,’ she said. ‘I should have known. Mummy always used to say, Look at a man’s father, especially if he’s the oldest son. But we didn’t know about Jeffrey then, did we? We didn’t know what a whoremonger he was. We thought he’d done the typical thing – traded in his first wife for some gold-digger in a gallery who caught him in a weak moment and made him feel cultured. That happens all the time with bankers – they make the money and then they want to buy some prestige to go with it. But this new woman! The Russian girl he met in the same club Conway’s last one used to work at! Thinking that she’s so much better because she worked behind the bar instead of in front of it!’

  Samantha was almost spitting now.

  ‘With her special cocktails! My God! She might as well have been pulling pints!’

  Bella resisted pointed out that Adrianna was in fact Estonian. But an odd feeling was beginning to creep up on her, and it took quite a while for her to identify it: surprisingly, it turned out to be an inexplicably strong urge to defend Adrianna from Samantha’s character assassination.

  ‘Like father, like son, the headlines said,’ Samantha continued. ‘Ugh, if I ever thought that about Georgie, I’d kill myself!’

  She shuddered as she named her beloved son.

  ‘I did wonder, when the story broke and we were all over the press – which we hate, we really do hate in my family,’ she said, leaning forward, her stare now even more intense. ‘Mummy says you should be in the paper three times in your life – your birth announcement, your wedding, and your obituary. Hatched, matched, dispatched. It hasn’t exactly been easy for me being in the press so much. But I did it for him because I loved him, and because it was good for the company. That was our children’s inheritance, you see.’

  A tap came at the door, and Bella called to Nita to come in. She knew it wouldn’t be Tal, even though this task was more suited to a subordinate: Nita wouldn’t dream of passing up this chance to see what was going on in Bella’s office, take in the scene with her beady, highly observant gaze.

  Bella was quite right. Nita bustled in, placing the tea tray on the table between the two women.

  ‘Sugar would be good,’ she advised, tactfully not looking directly at Samantha as she did so. ‘Put plenty in the tea. There’s some nice shortbread and butter cookies too.’

  Nita’s glance at Bella as she whisked out of the room again and shut the door behind her was comprehensive, a brief nod all Bella needed to confirm for her that Nita and Tal were working the phones and email, reaching out to everyone at Sachs who might have information on what had just happened in Jeffrey’s office on the twentieth floor, and whether Samantha had chosen to visit Bella directly afterwards, or if she had made any other stops along the way . . .

  As Bella poured the tea and added both milk and sugar, two teaspoons each, she was reminded horribly of the sweet Darjeeling the patient liaison officer had made for her as she waited to hear news of Thomas’s operation. It had helped, though. Nita was right. Samantha made no objection when Bella handed her the cup, staring down at it as intently as if she had already drunk it and was trying to read her tea leaves.

  ‘Women like me don’t leave just because of infidelity,’ she said to the milky brown liquid. ‘It’s not the way I was brought up. We turn a blind eye and remind ourselves that we’re the mother of their children. But then, when they’re up to something, it’s usually with someone else’s wife, and it doesn’t last that long. They’re just letting off steam. And it keeps it in our social set. No messy gossip.’

  Bella could only be grateful that she had her cup and saucer in her hands and was blowing to cool down her tea, so that she could keep her head lowered and not meet Samantha’s gaze at this point.

  ‘I still don’t quite understand,’ Bella said to the cup. ‘I mean, the problem is that—’

  ‘He’s been paying prostitutes huge sums of money for the entire time that we’ve been together,’ Samantha said simply. ‘I got someone to go through his emails and bank records. It was terribly expensive, but we can afford it!’

  The horribly dry laugh that issued from her throat was painful to hear.

  ‘And of course a lot of Conway’s prostitutes were classed as business expenses, too!’ she added. ‘Under the category of entertaining clients! Very tax-efficient! But believe it or not, his cheating isn’t actually the main issue. I’m sure that’s quite the surprise, isn’t it?’

  Bella’s head jerked up, and she felt herself unable to control her expression. What could Conway possibly have done that was worse than a near-constant procession of prostitutes during his marriage? Bella was sadly unsurprised by this revelation about her older brother. While she wouldn’t go so far as to call him a sociopath, she had always known that Conway was intensely selfish. If he wanted to have sex with a lot of strange women, he wouldn’t consider his marriage vows any barrier to his desires. Samantha had been absolutely right about the oldest son taking after his father: Conway was a chip off the old block.

  Still, women like Samantha were supposed to stand by their husbands at all costs, support them right or wrong, work behind the scenes and charmingly in public to build their careers. Samantha had already taken Conway back after the public scandal. Something truly extraordinary, truly unpardonable must have happened to drive her self-possessed, exquisitely ladylike sister-in-law to
these lengths—

  ‘Conway’s set up an asset protection trust in the Cook Islands,’ Samantha informed her in a flat voice. ‘I don’t imagine you know what that is, do you? I didn’t. It’s terribly high-level tax-avoidance stuff.’

  Bella had worked that out for herself already at the mention of islands. This was very, very bad indeed. No wonder Samantha had gone for broke with Jeffrey.

  ‘They’re in the middle of the South Pacific,’ Samantha was explaining. ‘Much further than the Cayman Islands or Bermuda! And if you want to sue a trust, you have to fly out and do it there with their own courts! I checked with some estate lawyers. They say it’s even harder to get money out of there if it’s owed to you than Switzerland. So if Conway stows money in a Cook Islands trust he controls – I know that’s not supposed to happen, but there, apparently, they can set these things up so that the settlor actually runs things. They appoint puppet trustees who do what the settlor wants. Anyway, once it’s in, it’s impossible for anyone but him to get it out again. And obviously, he’s done this because he’s planning to divorce me and try not to pay me what he owes.’

  Bella had reached this conclusion too.

  ‘You know what this means?’ Samantha asked rhetorically. ‘He’s cheating our children! He’s taken away money that ought to belong to George and Emily! They deserve to grow up in the best circumstances possible, not be short-changed in any way. And then, imagine if he’s hiding that money away because he wants to marry some Russian prostitute and have children with her who’ll get what George and Emily ought to have, what’s rightfully theirs—’