Nicole was not remotely afraid of Angel. But she badly needed her latest scheme to succeed, and his help was essential; there was no point antagonizing him by pushing. She would wait patiently until he calmed down enough to hear her plan.
‘Give me fifteen minutes,’ he said.
Angel almost always spoke in short, elegant sentences; his brief, clipped words were a clear sign of his altered mood. He unwrapped the towel, threw it at the rail and re-entered the whirlpool bath less dramatically than he had exited it. Nicole reached out to the central taps to add some more hot water to the bath, understanding perfectly what he meant: it would be a quarter of a hour until the benzodiazepine kicked in and he was relaxed enough to discuss the matter.
She held out a hand for a cigarette and he obliged her, lighting one of his own. He lay back against the headrest, his curls now dampening thoroughly as the bubbles rose around his skull. They sipped muscat in companionable silence, Nicole’s exquisitely pedicured feet toying lightly with Angel’s genitals underwater, slow caresses to his penis and balls that were more soothing than stimulating. Soft music played through the built-in waterproof speakers, a trippy, hypnotic mix, and Angel, setting down his empty glass, closed his eyes, his silky blond lashes fluttering down to his porcelain cheeks. He looked ridiculously young and innocent, his pale, near-hairless chest lapped by the water, the lights flickering across his flawless skin.
Eventually his eyes opened once again, fixing on her, a signal that he was ready to hear her idea. No matter how familiar Nicole was with Angel’s beauty, it never failed to dazzle her. She had noticed even Miss Lavington – who of course had assumed that sobriquet and upper-class accent for professional purposes; her real name was Dawn Hamblett, and she was from the Black Country – had occasionally looked quite hypnotized, despite her extensive experience, when she was staring at Angel’s eerily handsome face.
‘As I was saying, the small items go to auction, but a lot of the big sales at celebrity auctions happen in private,’ Nicole said. ‘Rich people want to make sure of getting the pieces they’ve set their hearts on. Plus, the famous ones don’t want to look vulnerable by bidding on something they’re not going to get. It’s that Marilyn Monroe song – they want what they want when they want it.’
A glimmer of amusement curved Angel’s lips. ‘If I gave you the moon, you’d get tired of it soon,’ he sang.
‘Exactly! So, I’ve got a hotline to a major player in the music business who’s dying to get his hands on Vivienne’s famous rubies – the necklace and earrings that belonged to Catherine the Great.’
‘Who is it?’ Angel asked curiously.
Nicole hesitated.
‘If we’re teaming up, we’re teaming up,’ he observed. ‘All in or nothing.’
‘Lil’ Biscuit,’ Nicole said, rather reluctantly naming the successful rapper and entertainment mogul. He had recently married Silantra, the most famous reality TV star in the world, internationally known for her sex tape, frequent nude selfies featuring her generously sized derrière, and the reality show she did with her two sisters, Sugar Girls. It went against the grain with Nicole to reveal her contacts, but if she lied to Angel and he found out, she would be in trouble. Her entire plan depended on using Angel’s access to pull strings with Vivienne to favour this offer.
‘He wants to buy them for Silantra,’ she explained, ‘then write a song about her and shoot a video with her wearing them.’
‘In a thong, sticking her tits out and shoving her bum in the air,’ Angel observed.
‘You know that, I know that, but Vivienne mustn’t,’ Nicole said firmly. ‘That’s the point. They need someone to broker this: me on their side, you on yours making the deal. They know Vivienne might not be over the moon about the Booty Queen of the World using her name for publicity, so they don’t want to approach her directly.’
‘I doubt Granny Viv has the faintest idea who Silantra is,’ Angel observed.
‘Right, and we want to keep it that way,’ Nicole agreed. ‘So, I have an in with Biscuit’s manager, Jamal. We dated a few years ago. When everything blew up at home, I actually went to LA first and gave Jamal a call. I was planning on staying there for a while, but after we got reacquainted, we had a catch-up and I realized I had to come to London and talk to you about this. Silantra’s set her heart on getting the rubies, but Lil’ Biscuit’s saying no way will he buy them at an auction, because he thinks they’ll work out it’s him bidding through proxies and drive up the price. Plus, he wants the cachet of having done a deal behind the scenes.’
‘I’m genuinely impressed,’ Angel drawled. ‘I’d have thought he wanted to show off by spending a record figure at the auction.’
‘Not at all,’ Nicole said. ‘He’s very canny, apparently – always watching the bottom line.’
‘So you came to London,’ Angel said, ‘and looked me up so that I’d pull whatever strings I could to get the rubies for Silantra. In return for . . .’
‘Oh, a hefty intermediary fee,’ Nicole assured him immediately. ‘I pointed out to Jamal that they can’t expect to get a discount on the deal. If they want the kudos of having snagged some of Vivienne’s most famous jewellery pieces, they’ll have to pay the full valuation price plus a markup for the private sale. And a ten per cent finders’ fee to us, of course.’
‘How much do we have to cut back to Jamal?’ Angel asked.
‘Nothing,’ Nicole said with satisfaction. ‘He’s getting the sale Biscuit wants – he’ll expect a bonus from Biscuit, but we’re not paying him a penny at our end. I made that crystal clear. If we can secure Vivienne’s agreement, we can drive a hard bargain on the price – and of course the higher it is, the higher our commission. When you’re selling gemstones and jewellery, official value is completely meaningless after a certain figure, apparently. Their worth is whatever people are willing to pay for them.’
‘You have been doing a thorough job, haven’t you?’ Angel commented. ‘God, I’ve barely spoken to that old bitch in years. Worming myself back into her good graces is going to be quite a task.’
‘You’re all she has by way of family,’ Nicole observed. ‘How difficult can it be? You’re contrite, you love her, you want to build bridges . . .’
Angel stood up once more, but this time without creating a miniature tidal wave. Bubbles gleaming on his naked body, iridescent in the colour-changing lights, he reached down to extend a hand to Nicole. The blond curls plastered to his scalp gave him the look of an ancient Greek statue of an athlete, about to throw a discus.
‘Time to strategize,’ he said as he pulled Nicole to her feet. ‘I can’t just turn up on her doorstep in Geneva, say “Hello Granny, I’ve been missing you,” and then launch two seconds later into an elaborate pitch about why she should flog her rubies to a rap star for untold millions. Viv may be in her seventies, but she’s always been smart and I’ve got no reason to assume she’s losing her marbles. I’m going to have to be very cautious. She hasn’t trusted me for ages.’
‘Probably with good reason,’ Nicole said slyly, and Angel laughed.
‘Very!’ he agreed. ‘So let’s work on a watertight explanation for why I’m suddenly popping up again. Viv will be suspicious of me and my motives, and if I’m going to pull this off, I’m going to have to carry it off perfectly.’
His eyes narrowed.
‘That old bitch owes me so bloody much,’ he said, his mood changing abruptly yet again. ‘I can’t believe she was planning to shaft me like this. She took me away from my mother – poor Mummy, driven to her death by that woman . . . I could kill her. I could strangle her with my bare hands and watch her die, and it still wouldn’t be enough to compensate for what she did to me and Mummy!’
Nicole shifted nervously. She had expected that his vicious resentment of his grandmother would have abated over the years. Instead, it seemed to have grown into something poisonous and lethal, fostered in the dark and now calcified into a malformed and twisted weapon, sharp enough to
injure anyone. Even the person wielding it.
She averted her eyes from Angel’s face, which was momentarily distorted by an expression of pure hate. It was as if a sculptor, having made a clay model for a projected sculpture, had taken violently against the creation, savagely squeezing and twisting its handsome features into a mutilated version of their former beauty. It occurred to Nicole that she was seeing, in a swift visual illustration, the damage that had been done to Angel as a child, the darkness inside him that he had deliberately chosen to cultivate.
He was a young man in the prime of life, unscrupulous and dangerous – pitted against Vivienne, a seventy-three-year-old woman who, no matter how resilient, could not help but be relatively frail and vulnerable. Nicole had put the two of them on a collision course, and she was not going to reach out her hand and steer Angel away.
After all, Vivienne was partly responsible for how Angel had turned out. She would just have to take her chances.
Chapter Seven
Tylösand – later that evening
Christine had stayed in the Hotel Tylösand’s spa until a quarter past seven, just as she had planned. Meeting Vivienne was her priority, and no matter how much her thoughts kept drifting to the strapping figure Tor had cut in his clinging black wetsuit, she made sure her eyes were firmly fixed on any doorway through which her target might emerge. The spa was generously proportioned, with a swimming pool large enough to do lengths on the ground floor level, and two Jacuzzis behind it with views over the sand dunes beyond; upstairs was the fitness centre and a central heated soaking pool inside, with another outside on the terrace.
Christine had positioned herself on a lounger by the soaking pool, and in the warm, scented room, her main challenge was keeping awake. The panorama before her was a study in muted shades blending into each other, a watercolour with flashes of metallic paint: the grey slate of the outside pool; the bleached wood of the terrace; the glass balcony walls bordered with steel handrails. And then the sand dunes, flowing up into a breakwater and down on the other side to the seashore, the steel-grey sea and the paler blue-grey sky beyond. Beiges, blues, greys, a softly moving picture, the steam rising from the hot water of the outside pool, the breeze lifting sand and rippling it down the slopes, the grey sea water beyond, breaking against the shore in steady ebbs and flows.
The constant, gentle motion of wind, water and sand had hypnotized the hotel guest on the lounger beside her into sleep. He was snoring softly, his quiet rumbles hardly audible above the fountain streaming gently over the tiled curve of the indoor pool, running off in the channels sunk in either side. Christine sipped cold water and green tea to keep her alert; every so often she ate an apple from one of the fruit bowls placed around the relaxation area. The sharp acid spike made her mouth water in reflex, the sensory jolt helping her to be vigilant every time the door to the staircase opened to reveal who was entering the pool area.
However, yet again, her luck was out. Vivienne Winter did not grace the spa with her presence that evening. As Christine returned to her room to change for her appointment with Tor she had mixed feelings – disappointment mingling with panic at the thought of how large her bill must be by now, swirled round with the excitement of having a date for drinks with a fantastically attractive man. It was awful of her to even think that, having invited her, Tor would pay; but she was almost certain that he would, and at least that meant she could have a few glasses of wine with dinner without worrying about the expense.
The fact that she was going on a date in a foreign country, with someone she barely knew, who she had met in such a random way, took a considerable amount of pressure off the situation. In London, she only really met men through work, where she spent the vast majority of her time; having realized that her value to Berkeley was not in her connections but her abilities and work ethic, she had been living, sleeping and breathing gemmology, wanting to make sure that every single appraisal she did was the best it could possibly be.
Tor had called her beautiful on the beach; she knew she wasn’t beautiful, but she was certainly pretty, with a nice figure, and she was asked out quite often by clients and fellow art experts. It had always been hard, though, for Christine to avoid an overly cautious, controlled manner on those occasions. She was trying so hard to fit into the upper-class world of art dealing that she was self-conscious all the time. Her accent, her background, her style in clothes and jewellery, her income level, were all so different from those of the staff and clients of Berkeley that she constantly felt she was in danger of making a social mistake so grave that people would never take her seriously again. As a result, the men who had liked her enough to ask her out found her demeanour much too stiff and rarely rang her again, preferring a woman who would at least laugh at their jokes.
So Tor – not only a foreign man, but met abroad; not part of the Berkeley social set; not familiar with the exact nuances of accent and behaviour that were so important to the British class system – was a breath of fresh air. Tor was certainly not going to judge her for not being posh enough, not ‘weekending’ in the country, being unable to ride a horse, or having gone to a comprehensive.
She only wished she had known she’d be going on a date when she’d packed for her trip to Sweden. She had brought only a carry-on bag on her budget airline flight, trying to keep costs down as much as possible, and she had packed to impress Vivienne Winter with her professional demeanour, not look sexy for a hot Swedish man with a body made for a clinging wetsuit. Even her swimsuit was demure; she couldn’t possibly have her boobs on display as she accosted Vivienne Winter in the spa. Christine had actually bought a one-piece online especially for the purpose, black with a high-cut neck.
Thank God I didn’t meet Tor wearing it, she thought. He’d have assumed I was a nun on holiday!
She was washing clothes every day to save money on laundry costs. A bra and knickers hung from the shower fitting, a T-shirt over the towel rail, turning the huge marble bathroom into a considerably less glamorous makeshift drying room. At least, however, that meant that the bra she needed for the one cocktail dress she had brought was clean.
Although the dress did not say ‘nun on holiday’, as it left her arms bare, it was an extremely basic black shift, bought from John Lewis: a department-store version of a designer style, perfectly respectable for auction house cocktail parties, and all that she could afford. Her nails were shellacked in a French manicure – elegant if not exactly alluring – and she piled her light brown hair on top of her head in a sexily dishevelled loose bun that countered the respectable neckline of the dress. There was nothing she could do about the boring black court shoes she had brought, the ones she wore for long days at viewings with barely a chance to sit down. She would have given anything to have her best patent-leather heels with her, the ones that made her legs look leaner and longer, her ankles narrowed, her bum higher and rounder.
But there was no point crying over spilt milk, or shoes she hadn’t packed. She lined her eyes with so much black pencil that you could practically see them from the moon, applied three coats of mascara, doused herself in perfume and, picking up her little clutch bag, headed downstairs.
Clearly the universe is determined to make me seem like a really good girl tonight, she thought wryly as she stepped into the lift. Ladylike dress, grandma shoes. I’ll just have to flirt extra hard to make up for it.
The lift doors opened onto a huge atrium whose white walls served as a background on which to display a stunning collection of paintings and photographs on a grand scale. Placed around the space were various highly modern sculptures on display plinths, plus a large, gleaming red motorbike in what looked like mint condition. It had been explained to Christine on check-in by a proud receptionist that the hotel was part-owned by the Swedish musician Per Gessle of the band Roxette, who, with his wife and business partner, took a lively interest in modern art; they had the biggest collection of photographs by Anton Corbijn in the world.
But as Christine
stepped out of the lift, her eye was caught not by the sculptures – or the huge oil painting, as big as a picture window – but a shining, incongruous shape to her left: it was a vintage car parked in the glass-walled lobby. And it certainly hadn’t been there earlier in the day. She couldn’t help walking over to confirm she was really seeing it: a silver-white Morgan two-seater with red interior, low to the ground, built for speed, its back flanged out aerodynamically, the legend ‘Speedster’ running along the side. How someone had managed to drive it in and park it so neatly between the supporting pillars of the lobby, she had no idea; the main lobby access was through revolving doors.
Christine stood gazing at it, highly impressed. She was used, of course, to seeing all kinds of art installations for her job, but the audacity of this one, a car that seemed to have driven into the sweeping lobby straight through its glass walls without leaving a mark, was both theatrical and charming. The two young women behind the long wraparound lobby desk were giggling, their heads together, and Christine assumed they were talking about the Morgan for a moment, until she noticed the direction of their stares; not at the car at all, but the art gallery in the corner of the lobby.
A man was leaning in the open doorway, chatting to someone inside, and as she glanced over at him she felt herself blush. It was Tor, wearing a blue sweater and grey trousers, his copper-gold hair like a flame in the softly glowing lights of the lobby. His throat, bared by the open neck of his sweater, seemed as wide as one of the lobby pillars, and she had a vivid flash of the body underneath his clothes, the solid muscle she had seen outlined by the wetsuit.
Killer Diamonds Page 13
