Samantha was almost panting in fury now, the skin around her eyes stretched wide like an animal’s.
‘Drink some tea,’ Bella heard herself say. ‘Honestly, it really will help.’
Samantha raised the cup to her lips and drank the now-cooling contents almost in one go, very much as a zombie would have done if a zombie had been commanded to finish its tea.
‘That’s why I went to see your father,’ she said, setting the cup and saucer down, so well trained in social niceties that there was barely a chink as the china touched the tray. ‘I knew he wouldn’t care at all about the trust itself. I’m sure he found all sorts of ways to hide money from your mother and from Jade. But I knew he would hate the idea of Conway being ready to leave me. Of course, Conway was planning to do it after he was appointed CEO! I’m not a fool. He was getting all his ducks in a very neat row, making things look good to his father, as if everything was back to normal. Then he’d have got the job and promptly kicked me out so he could move in some whore, exactly like your father did! But I scuppered that!’
She took a deep breath.
‘That tea was a good idea,’ she said, reaching out for a piece of shortbread. ‘I feel better. Now I think about it, I haven’t had a bite to eat all day. I couldn’t face it.’
Bella took Samantha’s empty cup and refilled it.
‘I’m very sorry,’ she said. ‘My brother’s a total bastard.’
‘He is,’ Samantha agreed vehemently. ‘Which is another reason he shouldn’t be running Sachs, in my opinion. I’m not being naive. Of course a business needs a strong boss, and sometimes you can’t be overscrupulous about how you go about things! But this company is my children’s inheritance. They’ll be part of the family trust one day. One of them may even end up running the company. I don’t want a sociopath who only thinks of himself and his own interests taking charge of it.’
Bella bit her lip to avoid pointing out that the Sachs Organization had been created and built into a hugely successful entity by Jeffrey, who exactly fitted this profile.
‘I know your father wouldn’t care about that,’ Samantha continued. ‘Or the asset protection trust. But he does care about my divorcing Conway, and believe me, that’s definitely going to happen!’
That awful dry laugh issued from her lips once more.
‘I might as well do it before he does it to me, mightn’t I?’ she said. ‘There’s no other reason for him to be hiding his assets! Your father was absolutely furious at Conway trying to pull a fast one. Convincing me to go back to him for a little while, just until he got the CEO job, and then dumping me like – like a piece of used tissue. It wasn’t really me he was trying to trick, you see. It was your father. And Jeffrey will never, ever forgive that.’
She picked up her teacup again and started to sip.
‘So that’s done,’ she said. ‘I’ve had my revenge. My family is entirely behind me when it comes to divorcing Conway, I can assure you. No one expects me to somehow try to hang onto him under these circumstances, even if I could. And I need to take very good care of Georgie in particular, make sure he doesn’t come too much under Conway’s influence. No one must ever say “like father, like son” about him.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ Bella said again, but her brain was racing. This really did sound as if Conway’s goose was cooked so thoroughly that it was charred black.
Over the rim of her teacup, Samantha was staring very seriously at Bella.
‘As I was leaving, your father asked me who I thought should run Sachs,’ she informed Bella. ‘And my answer was you.’
Chapter Twenty-Four
Bella was grateful she wasn’t holding her own cup of tea; she would probably have dropped it on hearing this statement. Of course, Jeffrey wasn’t going to make his decision based on his daughter-in-law’s opinion, but still . . .
‘There’s quite a lot I still have to tell you. You haven’t asked me why I hired someone to look into Conway,’ Samantha pointed out.
‘I suppose I assumed you had suspicions,’ Bella said, frowning. ‘Because of something he was doing? Or not doing?’
Samantha simply shook her head, still holding Bella’s eyes with her own. For the first time that afternoon, she didn’t keep talking; she waited, as Bella had been doing, while Bella turned the question over and over in her mind. And came to a single and unpalatable conclusion.
‘Oh,’ she said.
Samantha nodded.
‘I was at a charity luncheon a few days ago,’ she said. ‘And I found myself having a rather odd and unpleasant conversation with a woman I shan’t name, but who clearly seemed to feel it was her business to warn me about Conway. Not just him having affairs – there was a hint about his salting money away too. It was done in a way that she could pretend she was talking about another couple, but I’m not a fool. It was clearly aimed at my situation. I found it strange enough that I googled her when I got home. She’s on several charity committees with Charlotte. Lots of photos of them together at balls.’
Bella swallowed. This was what she had herself concluded.
‘So I don’t think Charlotte should profit by what she’s done,’ Samantha said. ‘She must have investigated Conway, to be aware that it would be worth setting me onto him. Her own brother! And now, frankly, I’m wondering how the press found out about that Russian girl from the bar. It’s quite a coincidence that the story broke after Jeffrey invited you all over to tell you about this stupid competition of his, isn’t it?’
Accustomed as Bella was to keeping her face straight during tricky negotiations, she couldn’t help but react to this: instinctively, she cringed in guilt. Very fortunately for her, Samantha took her response as a sign of horror at the idea that her twin sister might have gone to such extreme lengths to disqualify her brother from competing in the race for the job of CEO of Sachs.
‘I’m afraid so,’ Samantha said. ‘I can’t prove anything, of course. But if she was prepared to set a friend of hers onto pushing me into hiring a private investigator, why shouldn’t she also have passed a story to the tabloids to discredit Conway?’
‘I don’t know what to say,’ Bella muttered, ducking her head. ‘I’m so very sorry about my family.’
‘You didn’t do anything!’ Samantha said kindly, which just added to Bella’s shame, especially as she knew that she was never going to confess to Samantha about the role she had played in finding a PI to expose Conway’s cheating. ‘I genuinely think this ridiculous idea of Jeffrey’s – setting his children a deadline, pitting you against each other – has brought out the worst in everyone. It’s not exactly a surprise to me that Conway and Charlotte are the ones who cracked under pressure. And it’s not just about you being a morally better person, Bella. You’re clearly very good at your job. I trust you with my children’s inheritance. I trust you not to squander it on vanity projects or squirrel money away for yourself in secret trusts.’
She nodded, a short little jerk of her head that seemed to signal that the conversation was over. She finished her second cup of tea, set it down and stood up, smoothing her coat.
‘Thank you for the talk,’ she said politely. ‘And the tea. Your assistant was quite right about the sugar. I feel so much better.’
‘You look a lot better,’ Bella said, jumping to her feet. It was true: Samantha had some colour in her cheeks now, looked more human than walking dead. ‘Can I – would it be okay if I gave you a hug?’
‘Of course,’ Samantha said, stepping round the table and enfolding Bella in an embrace.
‘I haven’t been perfect,’ Bella blurted out to the decorative-buttoned green epaulette on Samantha’s shoulder. ‘I’ve done things too. Please don’t think I’ve been perfect, because I haven’t.’
Bella couldn’t bring herself to confess, but apparently, greedily, she still wanted absolution from the woman she had injured. She told herself that it had been Charlotte’s idea, that her sister would have found a private investigator on her own to follow Co
nway and catch him with his mistress, and that Charlotte had only asked Bella for help so that her twin’s hands would be a little dirty too. While this was true, it didn’t help much as it should.
‘Oh, you’re your father’s daughter,’ Samantha said, disengaging gracefully from the embrace and giving Bella a little pat on the shoulder. ‘I don’t mean that badly. I don’t expect any Sachs to be a plaster saint.’
She smiled faintly.
‘We’ll keep in touch,’ she said, turning towards the door. Bella walked her out, noticing that Tal and Nita were clearly doing make-work in the outer office; they were on tenterhooks for Samantha to exit, eager to see how the talk had gone.
Bella was still flooded with guilt. She hoped devoutly that it did not show on her face as she waved Samantha goodbye and wished her the best. But as Samantha’s green coat whisked away down the corridor, Bella froze in place. An instinctive chill of fear ran down her back as she absorbed how far Charlotte had been prepared to go to sabotage Conway’s renewed chance at snagging the prize. Charlotte would not have set Samantha on to digging for dirt if she hadn’t known that there was plenty to be found. Which meant, as Samantha said, that Charlotte had investigated her brother first.
And if Charlotte was doing that to Conway, why would she have refrained from digging for dirt with her other siblings?
Like an automaton, Bella turned to go back into her office. Nita was on her feet, obviously champing at the bit to brief Bella on what she had learnt; but Bella needed to process the revelation that had just hit her.
‘Give me a few minutes,’ she said through numbed lips. ‘I’ll buzz you when I’m ready.’
Ignoring Nita’s visibly disappointed face, Bella closed the door and leant back against it. Her office was quietly but expensively decorated, plush and classic, richly carpeted and wallpapered in dark jewel tones that made her feel calm and comfortable, plaid cushions on the armchairs. It was a safe haven, a place in which Bella could incubate ideas, take brainstorming meetings that would focus on key issues. She retreated here when she needed to mull over something that was bothering her.
Right now, however, it no longer felt like a sanctuary. Bella was not seeing its familiar, reassuring surroundings, but the hallway of her home, Thomas tumbling down the staircase, head over torso over head; she could hear the sounds too, the dull thunking of his flesh and bones against the carpet. There was no way that Charlotte could ever find out that Bella had been involved in Thomas’s fall, surely? No one else had been there!
Bella had done nothing wrong: she had been the victim rather than the aggressor. But no one else knew that. No one could testify on her behalf that Thomas had chased her out of the bedroom, put his hands on her, that it had been a sheer accident that she had knocked him down the stairs. No one had seen her bruises but her solicitor, and his testimony would be awkward, considering he would have to admit that he had tacitly advised her to conceal the marks from the police.
They could find out, however, that she had been having an affair. Everything was available online now if you knew how to look for it. They could trace her Skype sessions, check the time she and Ronaldo had been online that evening, make a connection between Thomas’s unexpected return home and a scene which might very well have ensued when he caught her on a call to her lover. Then, of course, that near-fatal fall, which had seemed entirely accidental to the investigators, would take on a very different aspect.
Bella and Ronaldo had been extremely discreet, but there would still be CCTV of him visiting her suite in Chicago. If that had been erased by now, the footage from the Sachs Piccadilly would definitely still be in existence. Bella didn’t read crime novels. She had no sense of what the police could do, or what information Skype, for instance, might be prepared to give up. But she did know that a search warrant could force her to hand over her laptop.
She would have to get it wiped. She would have to come up with a reason to ask Nita to organize that without it seeming suspicious. Would that be enough? Bella had no idea, but it would at least be a start, surely . . .
It was telling that Bella had no hesitation in assuming that her twin sister might be capable of betraying her to this degree. But only in retrospect would she realize that she had been protecting entirely the wrong area. Like a general convinced the attack would come from one front, she concentrated her forces there, defending that flank with everything she had, while the enemy had focused on an entirely different point of approach.
It would only take another week before the full scale of her misjudgement became all too horrifyingly clear.
Chapter Twenty-Five
SACHS-SENSATIONAL MELTDOWN!
Stranded travellers beg hotlines for help!
CAT-ASTROPHE!
Megastar Catalina gets Sachs-ed from her hotel booking!
Computer says NO ROOM AT THE INN for preggers Catalina!
OUT FOR THE COUNT!
Billionairess Countess of Rutland melts down as her ritzy New York reservation turns out to be at an AIRPORT IN NEW JERSEY!
It was unbelievable. Unprecedented. Truly as catastrophic as the blaring headlines suggested. For once, the tabloids were not exaggerating. The front page of the Sun was almost entirely taken up by a photo of rock goddess Catalina, who had booked the entire top floor of the Sydney Sachs. She was standing in the centre of the hotel lobby, surrounded by her entourage, having been told that there was no record of her reservation. The famously gracious and good-tempered star looked uncharacteristically furious, hands on her hips, her signature mane of hair tumbling around her frowning face, her gorgeous husband by her side carrying their adorable, though tired-looking, toddler in his muscular arms. Catalina had recently announced her second pregnancy, and though she was so slim and fit that she was barely showing, the press were making the most of this extra twist to the story of her being denied accommodation.
‘What happened?’ Nita wailed.
It was the first time that Bella had ever seen her assistant yield, even for a moment, to despair. This could partly be attributed to exhaustion: practically no one who worked for Sachs had slept in the last twelve hours, ever since the magnitude of the crisis became clear. Naturally, with the entire relaunch, the IT team had been on double time, ready to iron out any kinks as soon as they were spotted; no matter how much beta testing they had done, how many complicated scenarios they had run to present as many challenges to the new system as possible, Bella had arranged that every employee on the tech side was paid to be on emergency standby, ready to jump into action at ten minutes’ notice when needed.
This precaution had been providential when disaster hit. Because it hadn’t been the new system that had collapsed so much as the existing one. Somehow, horrendously, the upgrade had corrupted much of what had already been in the system, and every single staff member was working round the clock to try to retrieve what had been lost.
‘Sachs hotels worldwide lose millions as bookings fall off cliff’, announced the Financial Times, more soberly than the red-tops but just as accurately. The company had been inundated with cancellations as travel agents, corporations and private travellers fell over themselves to shift future bookings to hotels that could at least, presumably, be counted on not to lose them.
‘Can you let me know how the Catalina situation was resolved?’ Bella asked the speakerphone: she was on a group call to the Sachs Sydney, her team clustered around the conference table in her office.
‘Yes! Thank God we had a quick-thinking night manager!’ the Sydney head of operations said. ‘Normally, I’m sure someone would have flagged up that day that her reservation wasn’t showing on the system any longer. But with all the ramped-up concerns that we had about the new tech coming in – the whole install of the smart monitors on the minibars, and the new key readers – I know we weren’t the only ones to have teething problems with those—’
‘No, no, this isn’t a fault-finding mission,’ Bella interrupted; how many times had she had to repeat these w
ords to panicking heads of ops today? ‘We’re just trying to verify what happened and how soon it got resolved.’
‘Almost all of Catalina’s party’s rooms were there!’ the Australian-accented voice said quickly. ‘They were showing as booked, but they were pretty much still available! That’s why the night manager was so smart – she sent someone up to the penthouse floor to make sure. The few people who had checked in on that floor agreed to move so that we could give her all of it. Obviously I comped their stays, plus her team gave them VIP passes to one of the concerts. We made sure we took care of Catalina to the nth degree – she and her team are totally cool now. But the press has been appalling. Once you have those cameras snapping away . . . and there’s nothing we could do about that, there’s always one pap who sneaks into the lobby . . .’
‘I know,’ Bella said with ineffable weariness. ‘Okay, it sounds like you handled it fine. We’ll sort out a bonus for the night manager later on. That was fast work – trust me, not everyone was as quick to physically check whether the rooms were available. You’re not the first one to report vanishing reservations, but this is the largest-scale situation we’ve heard of. Everyone’s checking for VIPs whose bookings may have gone missing.’
‘A whole floor just disappeared!’ the head of ops said in disbelief. ‘I’ve never seen anything like that in my life!’
Bella had a sudden vivid image of the entire penthouse of the Sachs Sydney, with its superb view of the Harbour and Opera House, vaporizing into nothingness. Would you take the lift up and then step out into empty space? For a moment she visualized herself surrounded by white clouds, as if she herself were up there, high above the city, looking for the missing thirty-seventh floor, which had somehow come unmoored and floated away . . .
Bella was insanely tired. Her eyes closed: the image of being carried away on a billowing white cloud was so hypnotic that it had made her nod off for a moment. She felt her head bob forward like a heavy weight and that snapped her back to reality. She was terrified that she had made a noise, a snuffle that was the beginning of a snore.
Bad Twins Page 28
