Bad Twins

by Rebecca Chance

  Her eyes were wide with sincerity.

  ‘So why not take my help and tell Daddy that story? Don’t worry, he won’t order an investigation that’d open up the whole can of worms. He’s old and tired and on the way out.’

  ‘Stop turning this around! You’re the one who should be worrying about him doing an investigation!’ Bella snapped.

  Charlotte’s eyes flickered in surprise that her sister was pushing back so hard.

  ‘Exactly!’ she said quickly. ‘So you wouldn’t be risking anything, you see? Tell him that you’ve found a back door in the system, that someone’s been doing this deliberately to mess with us. You can say that all the press you’ve been getting drove one of our rivals crazy.’

  ‘That’s nothing but the truth! It certainly drove you crazy!’ Bella said bitterly.

  ‘Look, Bell, this isn’t going to get us anywhere,’ Charlotte said almost gently. ‘Daddy pitted us against each other. I didn’t create that situation, did I?’

  ‘If he ever finds out what you did—’

  ‘But he won’t,’ Charlotte cut in. ‘Because you’ll be protecting me as much as I am myself. You don’t have a choice. If the police ever find out that you were Skyping with your boyfriend just before Thomas fell downstairs, they’ll look at what happened to him in an entirely new light. You’re not stupid. You know that perfectly well.’

  Bella opened her mouth to ask Charlotte if she would actually do that. Would her sister truly be prepared to send whatever she had to the police? Bella assumed this was the record of her Skype calls, all to the same account, particularly, as Charlotte had said, the damning timing of the last one.

  But what would be the point in asking that question? Of course she would say yes, whether she meant to do it or not. Bella wondered if Charlotte knew that it was Ronaldo that Bella was seeing. There was no hint of it in her manner, and Ronaldo’s Skype name and email address were both joking film references, nothing that would signal his identity.

  Bella decided that Charlotte could not possibly be aware of it. She would not only have teased Bella about dating Ronaldo, she would unquestionably have used it as extra leverage against her, pointing out that Jeffrey would be livid if the papers screamed that Tragic Coma Husband Bella was actually having an affair with the son of their father’s housekeeper.

  No, Bella could relax on that score. It was an enormous relief to realize that Charlotte would not be able to play that card against her, at least.

  ‘Let me think this through,’ Bella said slowly. ‘You’ve got records of my Skype calls – you’ve made that clear. Which means you can hold them over my head forever.’

  ‘As you can with that CCTV footage, and what Bart will say!’ Charlotte said instantly. ‘It’s a standoff, don’t you see that? You can’t tell on me and I can’t tell on you. We keep each other safe. Forever.’

  Charlotte’s use of the word ‘safe’ provoked a bitter laugh from Bella. She turned away from her sister, staring out of the window, down at the superb vista of the London streets below: even Kingsway, one of London’s uglier avenues, looked infinitely more attractive from this lofty height. But even the view below was not a respite from the sight of her twin. Charlotte’s white dress and blonde cap of hair were reflected in the glass, as if she were a ghost floating in the air beside Bella.

  ‘Safe,’ Bella repeated. ‘That’s funny.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think you had anything to do with Thomas’s fall!’ Charlotte said. ‘Don’t misunderstand me! I know how much you cared about him. And I don’t blame you for flirting with someone else, or whatever it was. I mean, with the best will in the world, Thomas was quite a bit older, and very stuffy. I’m not judging you in any way. It’s just that it looks – bad.’

  ‘Whatever,’ Bella said in exactly the same tone that her sister had used earlier. In the window she saw Charlotte flinch, as Bella had done when she saw Charlotte in Jeffrey’s outer office.

  ‘I think we’re done here,’ Bella continued, turning away from the windows. ‘You’ve made your position very clear. I’m looking forward to your full support in the meeting with Daddy.’

  ‘What?’ Charlotte exclaimed. ‘I’m not going in there! I just came up here to make sure of talking to you beforehand!’

  ‘Oh yes you are,’ Bella said, rounding on her. It was her turn to fix her sister with an intense look, forcing her to submit to her will. The twin sisters glared at each other as Bella continued: ‘You’re going to come in there and have my back, a hundred per cent. You’ll say how great the scheme is, how brilliant and successful you’re sure it’s going to be, how much you’re looking forward to rolling it out with Sash in the next year or so. That’s really important. You have to say you’re going to be incorporating it yourself into the boutiques. And we’ll tell him we’ll add more cyber-experts to protect us from now on.’

  Charlotte’s mouth drew into a straight line, which her twin knew from experience meant she was resisting this with all her might.

  ‘This isn’t negotiable, Charlotte,’ Bella snapped. ‘You’ve screwed me over. You’ve attacked me, when I’ve done nothing to you but keep my head down and get on with my bloody job. And you dragged poor Bart into it, so you’d have an accomplice to shift some of the blame onto, just like you asked me to look for a PI who could find out whether Conway was having an affair. You could have done that on your own, but you wanted to pull in someone else so that you’d never have to take full responsibility. Well, you’re coming into Daddy’s office and standing by me. I swear, Charlotte, if you don’t, I’ll tell Daddy everything and let you do your worst.’

  Bella did not wait for Charlotte’s assent. She had the upper hand and she knew it; she could read the energy between them. Turning on her heel, she strode from the living room, sure that Charlotte would be following.

  ‘Is he ready to see us now, Tania?’ she asked as she swept back into the reception area. ‘Charlotte will be coming into the meeting with me.’

  Tania’s eyes flickered from Bella to Charlotte, assessing the situation. Then she stood up, said, ‘Give me just a moment, please,’ and approached the huge carved door which led to Jeffrey’s office, rapping briefly on it before disappearing inside. It was barely a minute before the heavy Gothic oak trefoil-panelled door, which had once separated the vestry from the chancel in an ancient parish church, cracked open again and Jeffrey Sachs could be heard shouting:

  ‘Fine! If she’s idiot enough to back up her idiot sister, let them both in!’

  Tania emerged, silently holding the door open. It was for Bella to go first, and she did not look back at Charlotte as she walked into the lion’s den. She just hoped that, as she followed her in, her sister could not see how badly her legs were shaking with fear.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  It could almost have been a cathedral, this room, with its double-height vaulted, ribbed ceiling and its marble floor. But then, a cathedral would not have antique carpets strewn over the expanse of marble, nor landscape paintings in huge gold frames hanging on the panelled walls. Over the last decade, Jeffrey’s eyes had become increasingly weak, and the gigantic candelabra suspended directly above his head was at full wattage to compensate. It was, against stiff competition, the most Gothic item of furniture in the whole room: a wrought-iron, curlicued, elaborate monster, the size of a baby elephant, hanging from a dramatic chain as wide as a man’s forearm but also, for extra safety, secured with several finer, more discreet skeins of tension cable radiating out to the corners of the ceiling.

  The inspiration for the office had been Jeffrey’s image of himself as a Medici prince of commerce. It was a throne room crossed with a judge’s bench. Jeffrey was installed behind an enormous Victorian mahogany desk which had been designed to break down into several sections, as it would otherwise not fit through any doorway. His chair and desk were on a low dais so that visitors had to look up to him, and the chair itself was massive, throne-like and carved so elaborately that it needed daily dusting
to keep it immaculate.

  He said nothing as his daughters filed into the room, but this was only what they had expected. Jeffrey’s favourite technique, on summoning an employee to his inner sanctum, was to remain silent to see if they would lose their nerve and start to babble. Bella, however, had been in training with her father for decades longer than the average employee, so she was able to walk across the expanse of flooring and take a seat in one of the high-backed chairs in front of the dais without feeling compelled to break into a stream of apologies and explanations. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a flash of white as Charlotte seated herself, but Bella never took her eyes off her father.

  He looked shrunken and wizened, and she wondered if he realized how unflattering his throne was to him. In his prime, it had seemed like a extension of Jeffrey, making him larger and more dominating, giving him even more authority; now it functioned the opposite way, stressing his mortality. His hands were frail on the wide armrests, his thinning hair accentuated by the pool of light from the chandelier.

  ‘We were hacked,’ Bella announced, sitting up confidently. She was happy to hear her voice ring out loud and confident; the room had tricky acoustics. Many Sachs employees had speculated over the years that these had been designed so that Jeffrey’s slightest utterances would boom out imposingly while the responses would get lost. That, or his interlocutors would make the mistake of shouting to overcompensate.

  ‘Someone put a bug in our system,’ she continued, as Jeffrey’s only response to this piece of information had been to frown deeply and gesture for her to continue, another technique he used to intimidate. ‘They’ve been picking out the most famous guests, the ones who were bound to get a huge amount of publicity if their bookings went horribly wrong, and messing with them in particular. Of course there are a lot of average travellers whose bookings got scrambled too, but it’s no coincidence that we’ve found ourselves losing reservations for Catalina, the Countess of Rutland, Wayne Burns – really high-profile VIPs, names known to gossip readers worldwide. We’ve isolated and blocked the bug and are hoping to trace it back to whoever was using it. We don’t know that yet, but we can absolutely assure you that the problems in the system are over. Can’t we?’

  Bella looked pointedly at Charlotte, who responded with a nod.

  ‘What?’ It had taken a while for Bella’s information to sink in, but now Jeffrey half rose from his chair, his face flushing deep purple. ‘Someone targeted us? Someone dared to come against Sachs, against me, to make everything I’ve worked for all these years a public laughing stock? That’s my name in every story that’s plastered over the news stands! They’re making jokes about my name, dammit! I’ll . . . I’ll . . .’

  He subsided back into the chair, pounding the arms with his withered fists, struggling to catch his breath.

  ‘Jeffrey, you promised me you wouldn’t get over-excited!’ came a low voice, and Bella jumped in shock as Adrianna appeared from behind the huge chair, as usual seeming to move more like a perfectly calibrated, well-oiled machine than an actual flawed human being. She must have been sitting in the shadows at the back of the huge room.

  ‘Here,’ she continued, snapping open an ivory pill box on the desk, pouring a glass of water from the insulated silver jug beside it, and handing both to her fiancé. ‘This will help.’

  Jeffrey Sachs, terror of his company, merciless discarder of two wives who, in his opinion, had passed their sell-by dates, tyrant to his children, took the pill as dutifully as a good little boy obeying his nanny.

  ‘Take a few breaths,’ his fiancée instructed, watching him carefully. ‘Finish the water.’

  Propping her toned buttocks against the arm of the chair, she looked down at Jeffrey’s daughters.

  ‘Give him a little while,’ she said, and it was not a request but an instruction. ‘You understand, I’m sure. I’m concerned for your father’s health.’

  Naturally, Bella and Charlotte nodded; Bella was expecting silence to fall as they waited for Jeffrey to drink his glass of water, but to her surprise, Adrianna continued: ‘So, the company was hacked?’

  Bella’s eyes snapped wide. She couldn’t help looking over at her father. If he said anything, even lifted a hand to indicate that she should not answer until he was ready to speak . . . but he just kept sipping at his water with his thin, beaky lips. Bella’s gaze returned to Adrianna, half sitting, half standing, her face as impassive as always, and she realized that Adrianna had expected this, was waiting patiently for Bella to assess the situation and decide to respond to her question.

  ‘Yes, it was,’ she eventually answered, and heard Charlotte shift in her seat, reacting to the fact that Bella had accepted Adrianna’s authority to question her.

  ‘We’re still processing everything that’s happened, of course,’ Bella continued smoothly, concerned that the much younger, computer-literate Adrianna might be able to pick holes in her story that Jeffrey would not. ‘But the breach has been found, which is the main thing. There won’t be any more headlines about guests with missing reservations, or people sent to a three-star hotel rather than five. We’re obviously hoping to be able to trace it back and find the source, but the immediate crisis has been resolved.’

  ‘Good, good,’ Adrianna said, nodding. ‘Jeffrey, you hear that? It is excellent news, and the girls have been very fast in fixing the problem. Who could expect something like this? It is unprecedented. Oh, are the financial details secure? Jeffrey,’ she added, ‘wanted to be absolutely sure of that.’

  ‘Oh yes, a hundred per cent,’ Bella said quickly. ‘Those are all encrypted, and no attempt was made to gain access to them. I can completely confirm that.’

  ‘And what about Sash?’ Adrianna’s green eyes slid sideways to observe Charlotte. ‘Since you are here too, Charlotte, Jeffrey was wondering if the boutique chain was affected by this?’

  Jeffrey, still sipping his water like a baby bird taking nourishment, nodded in confirmation.

  ‘No, thank goodness,’ Charlotte said, her voice clear as a silver bell. ‘Obviously the aim was to sabotage Bella and the fantastic job she’s been doing. I’m terribly excited to roll out the revamp to the Sash hotels in due course.’

  Adrianna stared at Charlotte for a long moment, then awarded this a little nod. Turning fractionally on the arm of the chair, she looked at her fiancé.

  ‘Better now?’ she said, taking the empty glass from him and placing it back on the desk. ‘I can leave you if you promise not to get upset again.’

  ‘No, no! Stay!’ Jeffrey beamed at her. ‘Very good questions! What it is to have a woman with a brain!’

  Bella and Charlotte stared straight ahead with impassive expressions.

  ‘Hacked!’ Jeffrey repeated, shaking his head, and Adrianna reached out to take his hand. He clasped hers gratefully. ‘I had no idea!’

  ‘Neither did I!’ Bella assured him. ‘It was a wild guess. I was brainstorming with my team, and we started to think about how many high-profile VIPs this had happened to. Not just the really important people, but ones who would be guaranteed to make the headlines. It seemed more suspicious the more we thought about it. Of course, we’d been looking for flaws in our new software, not for bugs from outside! So when I directed a team to search for those instead . . .’

  Adrianna was nodding along with this explanation, pressing Jeffrey’s hand to signify that she found it acceptable, her gigantic diamond engagement ring flashing out miniature rays of multicoloured light every time she did so.

  ‘We found it pretty fast, thank goodness,’ Bella concluded. ‘The theory is that the people behind it were assuming we’d react as we did, think it was our own mistake. I mean, it’s unheard of to sabotage a hotel chain in this kind of way! You might get hackers threatening to do it, blackmailing us to pay in Bitcoin, but even then they go after the financial side of things, customers’ credit card details. Plus, they rarely attack without warning – they give you plenty of notice because they want you to pay
up instead. No, only a professional rival would go after our bookings.’

  Adrianna looked thoughtful as Jeffrey blurted out:

  ‘Bastards! This would never have happened back in my day! Yes, there’d be dirty tricks, no denying that. We’d bribe, beg, offer whatever stars wanted to stay with us if we needed the publicity. I had to tell heads of security to turn a blind eye to what some film stars wanted – Christ, all sorts of things! Still goes on, of course. But this . . . this . . .’

  His face began to darken again.

  ‘We’re checking everything we can,’ Bella said quickly. ‘If we can find out who did it, we will.’

  ‘This is because your scheme was so successful!’ her father pronounced, much to Bella’s delight. She felt her heart surge at the words. ‘They’re all jealous! I saw that for myself at the awards. Everyone wanting to interview you, talk about the project, say how new and exciting it was. Don’t think I didn’t take that in!’

  He was gaining steam, and Adrianna patted his hand, signalling that he should pace himself.

  ‘It’s a tribute!’ Jeffrey said loudly. ‘Looked at in the right way, it’s a bloody tribute! But this press coverage . . . damn it, it’s very bad. We have to find out who did this to prove we were deliberately sabotaged, clear our reputation—’

  ‘Just to say, it’ll be very, very hard to prove,’ Charlotte cut in. ‘They’ll have hired it out to hackers, there’ll be layers of cutouts and false trails to try to stop us tracing it back . . .’