Killer Diamonds

by Rebecca Chance

  Randon had brought the diamond secretly on board the yacht, concealed it carefully until the date of the anniversary, and surprised her by dropping it in a glass of Negroni Sbagliato – a version of the classic cocktail with Campari, Martini and prosecco instead of the traditional gin, a lighter drink for summer. It had been prepared by their steward from a huge picnic basket he and the first mate had lugged onto the tender of the yacht and out onto the hot sands of Lampedusa, in a deserted cove where Vivienne and Randon could be completely private.

  Yes, Randon had admitted, it was a cliché to put a diamond into a drink; but nobody had ever done it before, he continued blithely, with a diamond that was actually bigger than an ice cube.

  Vivienne remembered that afternoon so vividly. She loved to bite ice cubes, and Randon knew it. He had watched her gleefully as she worked her way greedily down her drink, not the first of the day – they had drunk two bottles of Gavi dei Gavi at lunch, retired to their stateroom to fuck and then slept the wine off – but the first of the afternoon. Finally, her teeth had closed around the diamond, crunching down on it.

  Her eyes had snapped wide, her expression, Randon said, so comical that he regretted for the rest of his life not having his Kodak with him. He had yelled: ‘Spit it out!’, worried that she would choke on the 114-carat stone; he had been ready to Heimlich her, he told her, but she had obeyed, spitting the stone out into the palm of her hand and staring at it in amazement.

  The sheer size of it was astonishing, but it had never been a lustrous, light-filled diamond. When Tor had told her just now about the stones Angel had stolen, she had understood exactly why he had selected them.

  Vivienne brought her eyes back from the photograph to Angel’s face. His expression was literally unreadable, a blur of dried blood, but his eyes were pleading.

  ‘Ah, your mother’s identical expression,’ she observed. ‘Whenever Pearl did something wrong, whenever she needed to ask me for forgiveness, she would look at me just like that. Wide-eyed, innocent, as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. And I fell for it again and again. I gave her everything she wanted. Until, finally, she went too far. She killed someone, Angel. Do you remember that? I tried to shelter you from it at the time, but you must remember poor Thierry, who did nothing but try to stop Pearl raiding my safe.’

  She paused.

  ‘Like mother, like son.’

  ‘I haven’t killed anyone!’ Angel protested.

  ‘Not for want of trying, Angel,’ Vivienne said quietly. ‘Tor told me everything. About the cocaine you were smuggling, how he caught you and the two of you fought. You hit him with a rock and pushed him off a cliff. Then you went back to camp and told everyone you’d seen him on the opposite site of the mountain, so they’d search in completely the wrong area.’

  ‘That’s rubbish!’ Angel did his best to sound thoroughly indignant. ‘How dare he say something so outrageous! It’s slander! I could sue him for that!’

  ‘Can you explain,’ his grandmother asked, ‘why they found my rings and my pendant in your apartment?’

  ‘I was just borrowing them,’ Angel said swiftly, ‘because I wanted to show them to someone who might want to buy them. Someone very private, who didn’t want to go to the auction house. Christine knew all about it. She might deny it, but that’s because she wasn’t supposed to let them out of her offices, so of course she’ll have to cover her back now—’

  ‘Christine was in your apartment searching for them,’ Vivienne said.

  ‘No, she was there to take them back!’ Angel was warming to this story. ‘She just had to pretend that I’d sneaked them out without her knowing, because she could get the sack for doing it – but it was such a great opportunity, this person’s fantastically rich—’

  ‘Angel,’ his grandmother said quietly. ‘I didn’t believe your mother all those years ago, when she tried to convince me that Thierry had sexually assaulted her and she’d had to fight him off. And I don’t believe you now.’

  There was a long silence, during which Angel, despite himself, found his mind filled with the image of Thierry, dead on the floor of Vivienne’s Paris bedroom, the Oscar statuette clotted with blood, his mother sobbing and protesting her innocence.

  ‘This is all Tor’s fault!’ he said sullenly, pushing the memory away. ‘He’s turned you against me! I don’t know what happened on that mountain, but his whole story sounds ridiculous. How could he possibly have survived if what he’s saying’s true? We searched that entire area for five days! What was he doing, just lying there the whole time while the helicopters flew overhead?’

  ‘He thinks he slid down a deep gully in the mountainside,’ Vivienne said. There was a glass of water on the low table beside her, and she picked it up and sipped from it.

  ‘He woke up in a deep snowdrift, all white around him, and he says it was moving,’ she continued. ‘He was confused, but eventually he worked out that he had landed in a flock of sheep that had taken refuge for the night at the base of the mountain. There was a heavy snowfall all down the mountain slope, which must have slowed him down considerably. And then the sheep broke the rest of his fall. They kept him warm, and of course they were shifting around, making air holes in the snow so they could breathe, which meant that Tor could too. Eventually he managed to get up, but he was still groggy and bruised, obviously, and totally disoriented. He had no idea how much time had passed, but he decided he shouldn’t try to head back to camp in case you were lying in wait for him. He had been hit over the head several times before the fall, and he didn’t feel he could defend himself.’

  She set the water glass back on the table again.

  ‘And also, he was nervous that he might encounter the smuggling team who were bringing you the cocaine,’ she went on, her tone still as neutral as if she were narrating the story of a film she had seen recently. ‘He was vulnerable, and they were naturally angry with him – he didn’t want to risk bumping into them and being attacked. His phone was broken in the fall, so he couldn’t use it to call for help. He steered a course away from both the camp and where he thought the mule team would be heading. There was the snow, so he could eat that to keep hydrated, and he had a couple of energy bars in his jacket. Eventually he found a small village, and they gave him some food and took him to the closest town, which was two days’ journey away. And when he told the local police what had happened, they took him straight to headquarters in the capital, La Paz – they wouldn’t let him contact anyone for days. They wanted to keep it quiet till they could round up the smugglers and trace back the plane the cocaine had been in. Apparently there’s so much corruption in the police force they didn’t want to risk the information spreading at all. They didn’t even tell their own air force. That’s why the helicopters were sent – no one but a small group of police officers even knew Tor was still alive.’

  ‘Oh, this is rubbish! He fell off the mountain, hit his head and made up a crazy story so he’d look like a hero instead of a clumsy idiot!’ Angel mumbled sullenly. ‘Or he gave himself a concussion and actually believed his own nonsense . . .’

  ‘Finally they let him get in touch with the Swedish embassy,’ Vivienne concluded. ‘And they, the Bolivian authorities and the British ones discussed the situation. By that time the expedition was leaving for the UK, so they decided to ask Tor to lie low and play it out. The British police wanted time to see where you’d been planning to take the cocaine when you got back to London, and roll up as many people in that network as possible. He felt obliged to agree, but he insisted on visiting his family as soon as they’d let him, and he’s been lying low there ever since until finally they decided that they were ready to arrest you and your contact. And he also demanded, in return for keeping quiet, that he be there when they made the arrest. Prince Toby pulled some strings, I understand.’

  She looked gravely at her grandson.

  ‘The Bolivian authorities have an international arrest warrant for you, Angel. They’re going to try you for attemp
ted murder and drug trafficking.’

  Angel swallowed hard, staring at the edge of the chaise longue rather than meeting his grandmother’s eyes.

  ‘It’s all bullshit, of course,’ he mumbled. ‘It’s my word against his.’

  ‘Tor’s story is corroborated by someone you bribed at the camp,’ Vivienne said. ‘One of the local guides.’

  ‘That’s what I need!’ Angel exclaimed. ‘Enough money to bribe people! This guide, whoever he is –’

  Fucking João! he thought bitterly. I gave him more than enough dosh at the time, and now he turns on me? You can’t rely on anyone!

  ‘– must have been leaned on by the Bolivian police,’ he continued. ‘It’s not true! None of this is true! Come on, Grandma – you can’t believe this, can you? It’s so ludicrous – much too far-fetched to be possible . . .’

  But his voice faltered as he raised his gaze once more and saw Vivienne’s inexorable expression, her lips set firmly together.

  ‘I just need some help with money,’ he said weakly, changing tack. ‘If I can pay off the Bolivian police, and this guide who’s lying, they won’t deport me. They don’t have anything on me in the UK. George won’t say a word – yes, he’s my bookie, I’ll admit that, but this whole coke story’s complete rubbish. I’ll admit I took the rings. I have a gambling problem. I ran up a huge debt with George and he was threatening me. Look what he did to my face!’

  He raised a hand to indicate the damage, as if he thought that Vivienne needed help seeing his broken nose. Like his grandmother and his mother, Angel had theatrical instincts.

  ‘I was very wrong to steal the jewellery,’ he said contritely. ‘I know that. I was just panicking and desperate—’

  ‘You stole from Christine’s auction house! You replaced three pieces with fakes! She would have lost her job when they found out!’

  Louison, who had been curled up at the base of the chaise longue, found the volume of the voices too high and angry for her now. She stood up and plopped down onto the carpet, slinking underneath the chaise longue to wait there in safety until Vivienne stopped shouting and the atmosphere was calm and cat-friendly once more. Meanwhile, all of Angel’s pent-up rage at his plans being so thoroughly frustrated, at bloody Tor coming back to life, at being brutalized in his own apartment and then having to make a humiliating escape down the laundry chute, came welling up in a tide of fury that he was no longer able to keep under control.

  ‘I never wanted to go out with Christine in the first place!’ he shouted. ‘My God, the nightmare it’s been trying to keep that stupid bitch happy! That was all your fault – you wanted me to go out with her, you were the one forcing me to marry her—’

  ‘Because I wanted great-grandchildren,’ his grandmother said in a glacial voice. ‘And you told me you had stage three testicular cancer.’

  With the skill of a great actress, she didn’t need to utter another word. She simply let the words lie where they fell, making it crystal clear that she no longer believed Angel’s claim of having been sick.

  Angel felt strangely light, as if there was a huge hollow inside his thorax. If she didn’t believe the cancer story, there wasn’t a word he could say in his defence. He would have to switch tack yet again.

  ‘Your reputation,’ he managed. ‘The publicity. You don’t want—’

  ‘Oh, Angel,’ Vivienne said quietly. ‘Is that all you can say to me? After pretending that you had cancer, and nearly breaking my heart with the thought you would die before I would?’

  ‘This is all your fault, Grandma!’ he wailed, the sob in his voice rising. ‘You took me away from Mummy, you abandoned me to one nanny after another – I hardly ever saw Mummy or you! How could you expect me to be okay? What did you think was going to happen? You fucked up Mummy and then you fucked me up too – and now she’s dead! What do you think’s going to happen to me in a Bolivian prison? I could die in there, and then you’d have no one left, no family at all . . . is that really what you want?’

  ‘If it’s my fault, Angel, then I’m setting it right now,’ Vivienne said. ‘I can’t let you go on as you are. Maybe this will be the wake-up call that you need. God knows, it’s long overdue.’

  She meant it. Angel could see that with absolute clarity. There would not be a penny forthcoming from his grandmother to pay for bribes, not even for a lawyer to fight the Bolivian extradition warrant. She was washing her hands of him, prepared to let him rot to death in the jail cell of a third-world country, and all the while she was sitting on a fortune – the jewellery she was auctioning off that should by rights be his, a few pieces of which would solve every one of his problems.

  If she died, some of it would come to you, said a small voice at the back of his skull. If she died right now, there’d be bound to be plenty of money coming your way. Enough to borrow against, to pay lawyers and guarantee bribes, keep you from being shipped to Bolivia and thrown into a hellhole of a jail there . . .

  Angel had not planned for this eventuality. During the frantic cab ride here, desperate and terrified though he had been, he had not allowed himself to entertain the thought that Vivienne might be so intransigent as to refuse to help him. It was inconceivable to imagine that his grandmother, no matter how furious she was, would actually be willing to see him extradited to a country as dangerous as Bolivia. So he had not considered the consequences of that decision, how she might force him to react, because she was driving him to do something unthinkable to save his own skin –

  She’s old, said the voice in his head. Yes, she looks amazing for her age, but she’s still seventy-three. Becoming frail, delicate. Liable to have a heart attack when her grandson crashes in to see her, covered in blood, and tells her the police are chasing him because he’s accused of all sorts of terrible things. Wouldn’t that shock an old woman enough so that she dropped down dead?

  It was the only way out, the only way to save himself. And it was her fault, as it always had been. She had pushed him to this. What kind of unnatural grandmother would let her grandson be thrown into a Bolivian jail? How could she possibly look him in the eye, as she was doing now, knowing what would happen to him if she refused to help, and think her conscience was clear?

  He would make it quick. He’d be more merciful than she was, condemning him to a slow, horrible fate for God knows how many years in a third-world prison. But she deserved this, she had it coming.

  It was her fault. She was making him do this.

  Those, in the end, were the words that were ringing in his head as he raised himself on his knees, leaned forward, grabbed one of the leopard velvet pillows from the chaise longue and, gritting his teeth, shoved it into his grandmother’s face and held it there as she struggled beneath his weight.

  Go fast, he thought, his heart racing. Die fast. Have a heart attack – go fast – you’re seventy-three, how long can you hold on, for fuck’s sake?

  She was writhing, but her hands weren’t coming up to pull at his, as he was expecting and dreading. Those fingers, those bony fingers with the rings on them, digging into his, pulling at them; how awful would that be? It would haunt him forever, even though he was completely sure that this was the fate she had earned by neglecting him and driving his mother to drugs and refusing to help him when he needed it so dreadfully—

  The bullet slammed into his right shoulder. He registered shock, his body jerking back at the impact, one hand letting go of the pillow and raising to the point of impact, feeling the hole, the blood starting to pump out of it. And then Vivienne shot him again, at much the same angle, and the sheer pain of his shattered shoulder knocked him out. He fell backwards, the pillow, still grasped in his other hand, falling on his chest.

  Gasping for breath, Vivienne lowered the pearl-handled derringer. She had loaded it and tucked it away underneath a pillow to one side of the curving back of the chaise longue after Tor had rung her, twenty minutes ago, knowing that Angel, on the run, had very few places left to go. She had kept the gun after the r
un of The Letter had finished; Randon had insisted upon it.

  ‘Just in case,’ he had said. ‘You never know, darling – with all these jewels I’m lavishing on you, someone might try to grab some. I like to feel you could defend yourself. But please don’t shoot me in a fit of temper, will you? You’re more than capable of it!’

  Randon hadn’t known what she was truly capable of, Vivienne thought. No one had, until today; not even her. But when she had opened the safe in her boudoir, taken out the derringer, and placed it beside her, she had known that she would be prepared to defend herself if it were necessary.

  The door burst open; Gregory raced into the room.

  ‘Madame!’ he exclaimed in horror, staring from Vivienne to Angel’s prone body, and then back to Vivienne again, and the gun she was holding in her lap. ‘Oh Madame, I should never have left you alone with him!’

  ‘It’s over now, Gregory,’ she said softly. ‘Ring for an ambulance. And call my publicist, please.’

  Vivienne glanced at her once-beloved grandson, at the ruin of his handsome face, the blond curls that were so like his mother’s, whom Vivienne had also once loved so much.

  But not enough. Clearly, not enough.

  ‘Help me up, Gregory,’ she said, clicking the safety back on the derringer, then holding a hand up for assistance in coming to her feet. ‘I can’t possibly stay in the room with him. I shall wait in the salon. With a large brandy.’