Bad Twins

by Rebecca Chance

  Having done what she could to warn her boss about what she was going to see, Nita yielded up the tablet.

  ‘We keep the footage for a month, apparently,’ she said. ‘Thank goodness.’

  Bella felt sick. Nita was telling her that the perpetrator was someone who could enter not only the building itself without being questioned, but any of the departments: someone whose pass gave them access anywhere they wanted to go – apart from the twentieth floor. In other words, one of Bella’s three siblings.

  The footage showed the IT department in darkness, pierced intermittently by the glow of various tiny LEDs indicating that the machines were quietly running. As Bella watched, a trapezoid of light spilled into the far side of the room, a door opening. Illumination flooded the space as the overhead lights were turned on, and into the frame stepped the last person she had expected to see.

  Her brother Bart.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  By the time Bella reached Bart’s office she had worked up a head of steam powerful enough to fire a cannon. Unlike Bella, Bart staffed his office with young women who were decorative rather than functional, but even an assistant as effective and experienced as Nita could not have stopped Bella from storming across the reception area and into Bart’s sanctum. The two slim, glamorous young women wearing earbuds and streaming shows on their iPads – being Bart’s assistant was by no means a demanding job – stood no chance at all.

  Bart was sitting behind his desk, a half-empty glass of very expensive tequila in front of him, the bottle within easy reach. Even though he had the best version of their mother’s wonderfully distinctive eyes, the huge blue irises almost overwhelming the whites, Bella could clearly see that the latter were bloodshot.

  ‘Hello, Bella,’ he mumbled wretchedly.

  ‘Drinking away your guilt?’ she said sarcastically.

  Bart nodded. Bella stared at him, taken aback: she had not anticipated this swift response. He propped his elbows on the desk and rested his forehead in his cupped hands, avoiding her fierce gaze.

  ‘I feel like absolute shit,’ he muttered. ‘Bell, please believe me. I never meant to do it.’

  ‘How can you not have meant it?’ she exclaimed, so shrilly that she cringed to hear her own voice. ‘How can you possibly—’

  ‘Oh, Bell,’ Bart sighed on a dying fall. ‘You don’t really think this was my idea, do you?’

  He sat back again and picked up his glass, finishing off the contents.

  Bella plopped down in the visitor’s chair, suddenly exhausted; she was realizing that the sight of Bart on the CCTV recording had been, although upsetting, also something of a relief. Because, depressing though it was that her brother had conjured up a scheme which would ruin her chances of becoming CEO, maybe even get her fired from the company, she had preferred seeing him in that IT room rather than the person she had been dreading was behind this.

  Her twin sister.

  ‘Was it Conway?’ she heard herself ask with sheer desperation in her tone. ‘Bart, was it—’

  ‘Oh, Bell, I’m so sorry!’ Bart sounded on the verge of tears. ‘No, you know it wasn’t! Con’s a bastard, but this isn’t his style. You know that, Bell! You know it was Charlotte!’

  Bella’s head sagged on her neck as it had done earlier in the meeting, her skull too heavy for her to hold up straight. Bart reached for the bottle of Casa Dragones Joven, refilled his glass and pushed it across the desk to her.

  ‘Have a sip,’ he said. ‘Seriously, just a sip. It’ll do you good.’

  He laughed without any humour.

  ‘Says the alkie who doesn’t have a proper job!’ he added bitterly. ‘The guy who’s boozing in his office because he was stupid enough to get conned by one sister into screwing over the other one!’

  Bart was right, however, about the tequila doing Bella good. Just the smell so close to her nostrils was stimulating, the fresh, strong scent of the blue agave plant from which the liquor was extracted. Slowly, Bella picked up the glass and sipped. It roared through her like wildfire, and she sat up straighter in her chair.

  ‘She told me the whole story about Conway,’ Bart recounted, taking back the glass and setting to work on it. ‘He’s been cheating on Samantha and squirrelling away his assets. As if there isn’t more than enough money to go round, you know? That’s what really got me when Charlotte told me. It’s just so bloody petty.’

  He shook his head in disgust.

  ‘So Charlotte gave me a USB and told me what to do with it. Said that if I put this bug in the system, it would find his money for Samantha,’ he continued. ‘Sort of like a heat-seeking missile. It’d ferret Con’s dirty dealings out and blow them up in everyone’s face so he couldn’t deny it any more. I promise you, you were never even mentioned.’

  ‘Why would that be on the Sachs computers?’ Bella couldn’t help asking. ‘Why would Conway mix up his money with the business?’

  ‘Oh, fuck knows!’ Bart shook his head again, but this time in repudiation of his own stupidity. ‘Fuck knows! She spun this whole line, though, and it made sense at the time. I promise, Bell, I promise it did. Conway was funnelling money through the company, she said, and this way he wouldn’t be able to hide it any more. She gave me a whole list of instructions so I knew what to do once the USB went in.’

  Bella, who had watched the footage of Bart repeatedly consulting first a piece of paper and then the computer screen, tapping at the keyboard as painstakingly as a small child taking their first piano lesson, rolled her eyes in impatience. What Samantha had described in the Cook Islands was a private trust, nothing to do with Sachs at all. There was simply no possibility that Conway would have been stupid enough to commingle private funds which he was trying to conceal from his wife and her divorce lawyers with those of the company; it would make no sense.

  No sense to anyone but Bart, Bella thought bitterly. Stupid, innocent Bart, sitting here in his office with zero business knowledge and the inability to believe that one of his siblings could be plotting to destroy the chances of another one becoming CEO . . .

  ‘I’ve been nursing this stupid fantasy for a while now,’ Bart was saying bitterly. ‘You’ll laugh your head off when you hear it. I was thinking that if Pa put me in charge, I could bring everyone together. You and Conway and Charlotte, fighting and bickering the way you are, as if we were kids, but worse – I hate it. I actually asked Adrianna if she could suggest to Pa that I take over as – what do they call it in politics?’

  ‘The compromise candidate?’ Bella suggested dryly.

  Bart gave her a twisted smile.

  ‘The reconciliation candidate, I think I meant,’ he said. ‘Bringing peace, stopping all the in-fighting. It was ridiculous, wasn’t it? I’m completely out of my league with all this business stuff! Everyone else could run rings round me and I wouldn’t have the faintest bloody idea! Fuck it, Charlotte already has!’

  He gestured around him with the hand that was holding the glass, slopping some tequila onto the desk.

  ‘Look at this office! State of the art – Annika and Lucinda out there, doing bugger all but taking turns polishing each other’s nails – what a bloody waste! Why do I even have it? What do I need an office for? The PRs run my charity stuff. All I need to do is turn up and run my race or drive my car or make the speech some other bugger wrote for me and flirt with the rich old lady donors. What’s the point of me? What do I do all day? Look how hard you work! You slog your guts out, and now I’ve ruined it all for you. Oh God, Bell, will you ever be able to forgive me? I wasn’t even brave enough to come and face you. I’ve been hiding out here, getting drunk, just waiting for you to work it out and come and haul me over the coals.’

  Bart’s penitence was undeniably sincere. Bella had no doubt that he had been tricked by Charlotte into planting the bug which would allow her to reach into the Sachs booking system, let her or her minions cherry-pick reservations to sabotage that would be guaranteed to draw the biggest headlines. But Bella was th
e injured party, and she had no interest in wasting one drop of energy on commiserating with Bart for his stupidity, let alone coming up with ideas for him to find something meaningful to do with his life.

  ‘Bart,’ she said, pushing back her chair and standing up, ‘I can see you’re having some sort of existential crisis. But I don’t have time for it and honestly, I don’t care.’

  Bart nodded humbly, running a hand through his hair to push it back from his face in a way that was a pale shadow of his usual jaunty, sexy gesture.

  He’s a lost little boy, his sister thought, looking down at him. He needs a sensible woman to knock him into shape, give his life some importance, an actual centre. He’s never had boundaries. Everyone’s just indulged him and spoilt him and never held him accountable for anything he did.

  Well, that changes now. I’m holding him accountable for this.

  ‘I’m going to tell Daddy what happened,’ she said quietly. ‘What you did.’

  ‘I know,’ he said without trying to plead with her, which raised him several points in her estimation.

  ‘And obviously that means what Charlotte did too,’ Bella said, a lump of misery in her throat.

  Bart nodded.

  There was nothing left to say. This seemed to conclude the proceedings; all that was left was her appointment with their father. And yet, Bella found herself hesitating, because of the sheer gravity of what was awaiting her on the twentieth floor: the task of telling her father that two of his children had stabbed a third in the back and taken the main division of the company down with her.

  In half an hour’s time her father would be confirming that Bella was the only one of his children fit to be CEO. He would have had no problem with them scheming and plotting and manoeuvring to come out on top; it was, after all, how he had grown his company so fast.

  But he would never approve the imperilling of the reputation of the hotel chain he had built from scratch. What Charlotte had done to the brand that bore Jeffrey’s name was so extreme that she would never recover from the fallout. All Bella had to do was march upstairs, present her case, and watch her father affirm that, out of all of his four children, she was the only one remotely appropriate to be appointed as CEO.

  So why was she still standing in Bart’s office, when she should be hurrying to claim her prize?

  She reached over the table, took the glass from Bart’s hand and sank the rest of the contents. Bella had never drunk tequila neat before. She had always considered it far too dangerous. It was, she decided. Definitely dangerous. And even more effective than Red Bull.

  ‘Okay!’ she said again, and turned to go.

  ‘Be gentle,’ Bart said quietly behind her. ‘Not for us. Me and Charlotte, I mean. But for him.’

  And there it was, put into words, the reason that Bella had been hesitating. She heard those words again and again, ringing in her brain, all the way up to her father’s eyrie on the twentieth floor. Her increasingly frail-looking, eighty-year-old father, who was about to get the shock of his life.

  She heard them even louder as she stepped out and nodded at the receptionist, Tania, a very elegant German woman of a certain age who had worked for Jeffrey for over twenty years. Tania’s bearing was so impeccable that she kept her face as neutral as ever as she greeted Bella, showing no sign that she was aware of the scale of the disaster that brought Jeffrey’s daughter to his office this afternoon.

  Charlotte, who had been sitting on the sofa, jumped up and came forward to intercept her sister. Bella flinched involuntarily, even though she knew that Tania was observing the interaction to report back to their father in due course.

  But what did that matter? Bella was in the right. She had truth on her side and backup from Bart, who, riven with guilt about what he had done, would confess everything to their father if necessary. Why should she back down just because her sister was standing in front of her, those huge blue eyes burning into hers, saying insistently:

  ‘Bell. We need to talk. Now.’

  ‘No thank you,’ Bella said, pegging her chin high. ‘I have an appointment with Daddy and I’m already overdue for it, so—’

  ‘You don’t get it,’ Charlotte said urgently, pitching her voice low enough so that Tania, across the sprawling office, would not be able to hear. ‘You need to come with me, Bell. I have stuff you have to hear.’

  ‘Charlotte’ – since Bella and Charlotte never called each other by their full first names, this was a declaration of war – ‘stop it,’ Bella said, setting her jaw. ‘It won’t do you any good. I know exactly what’s been going on. I’ve come straight from talking to Bart and I’m going to tell Daddy everything he said to me—’

  Charlotte was fishing in her bag, yet another one of those hideously expensive, ridiculously flimsy ones that Thomas had despised for being disposable fashion, but so pretty it made Bella long for it to be hanging off her own wrist. From it, Charlotte’s hand was emerging, the gigantic phone she used for her social media clasped in her slender fingers.

  Charlotte had obviously prepared herself for this. She had assumed that her words would not be enough to convince her twin to come with her for a quiet word before her appointment with their father, had known that she would need to click her phone on and turn the screen towards her sister and show her what looked like a screen shot of something Bella couldn’t quite make out, but which had Skype at the top of it.

  So this was what it meant to have your blood run cold. It was the opposite of the tequila, which had warmed and stirred and fired Bella up to action. Now she was frozen, horrified, her worst nightmare come to life. She made no further attempt to protest as Charlotte took her upper arm and guided her down the corridor, towards the sprawling suite that Jeffrey had installed on this floor: bedrooms, bathrooms, a full kitchen, a sauna, a steam room, put in with the idea that he might regularly stay here overnight rather than undergoing the horrors of a thirty-minute chauffeured journey back to Maida Vale after a long day of work, and, of course, barely ever used.

  Charlotte guided her twin into a living room which had been decorated decades ago, all heavy pelmeted furniture and equally thick rugs. It looked preserved in amber, kept immaculate by the cleaners, so dated that it could be hired out as a film or TV location for a 1980s shoot. Only when Charlotte had closed the door and pulled her sister right across the expanse of carpet, over to the windows, safely away from any eavesdroppers, did she finally say:

  ‘Whatever you wanted to tell Daddy, Bell, forget it. I know everything. Do you really want the police to reopen the investigation into what happened to Thomas?’

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  There are sights you can never unsee, words you can never unhear. The gloves were off. The truth about Charlotte’s character was finally clear to her twin sister. Bella had been aware, of course, that her sister was very self-centred, would put her own interests over those of her twin without a second thought; but she had had no idea of the depths of unscrupulousness to which selfishness and ambition would propel Charlotte.

  Now she knew, however, and as the knowledge sank in, she felt, to her surprise, extremely calm. The worst had happened. After having thoroughly sabotaged her sister’s professional life, Charlotte was now threatening her with the possibility of criminal charges in her personal one.

  So: Charlotte could never be trusted again. Bart was weak and easily entrapped in scheming. Conway was self-obsessed and patronizing, looking down on his sisters for being female. Which meant Bella was on her own. Bella had always been on her own.

  What a realization! Bella had never felt so centred in her entire life. And the strange thing was, she thought, gazing at her sister, her living mirror, that Charlotte had never looked so beautiful.

  ‘Blackmail and backstabbing really suit you,’ Bella said calmly. ‘You’re absolutely glowing.’

  Charlotte frowned; out of everything her sister might have said, she had not been expecting this. She shook her head as if a fly were buzzing around her.
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  ‘Did you hear what I said?’ she asked.

  ‘How could I avoid it? You’re threatening me! I assume you’ve been hacking into my computer? You’ve already done it with Conway’s.’

  ‘How do you—’ Charlotte began. ‘Oh, Samantha. She guessed. I could have been more subtle about that, but I was in a hurry.’

  She was dressed in off-white, a fitted dress with gold metal inserts at the neckline which substituted for jewellery. Her hair was parted in the centre and drawn back into a bun at her nape, simple gold studs in her ears. The whole effect was of purity and simplicity, doubtless selected specifically, Bella decided, to make her look as innocent as possible.

  ‘I can’t feel guilty about Samantha,’ Charlotte said, shrugging. ‘Not really. Con would have left her anyway. Look, Bell, I don’t want to draw this out or make it harder than it has to be. I just need you not to tell Daddy about what Bart and I did with the Sachs reservations, that’s all.’

  ‘“Bart and you”?’ Bella echoed. ‘That’s outrageous! You make it sound as if you were equal conspirators! It’s bad enough you dragged poor Bart into this. At least be honest about what you did!’

  ‘Whatever,’ Charlotte said simply. ‘Really. Whatever. None of this matters. Don’t you see that? The only thing we’re here to talk about is what you go and say to Daddy. I’m not going to completely dump you in the shit without a paddle, okay? That would be stupid of me. You might get tempted to spill the beans, even with me knowing all about your Skype chats – not to mention the timing of the last one. I’ve got a cover story worked out for you with the whole bookings debacle. We were hacked by a rival and you’re tracking it down.’

  ‘Are you serious?’ Bella said incredulously. ‘How could I possibly trust you to keep my stuff secret after I’ve lied to protect you?’

  Charlotte was ready for this.

  ‘Because you’ve got the CCTV footage of Bart in the IT department,’ she said, and watched her sister register surprise. ‘Oh yes, I’ve got my team too, just like yours. Stupid me, I could have sworn it got wiped every week! I must have missed the protocol being extended to a fortnight. Anyway, that’s water under the bridge now. You’ve got the dirt on Bart. He certainly won’t lie for me, and unfortunately everyone will believe him as soon as he starts spilling his story. Bart’s totally transparent. You can expose me any time you want – don’t you see that?’