by Sam Blake
*
At 9 a.m. Vittoria’s phone alarm went off. She’d gone back to sleep after waking so early, and now she stretched stiffly and slipped out of bed, heading to get the shower running before her breakfast arrived. The Hogarth’s plumbing always took her a few moments to work out; two shower heads and mysterious dials with indecipherable markings made it a bit of a challenge no matter how many times she stayed there. Vittoria had stayed in a lot of hotels on her travels and the guest information on how to operate the TV and Wi-Fi and the location of the gym never seemed to include basics like how to get the shower working. She still reckoned that the most impressive thing about James Bond was that he could walk into his hotel bathroom in Casino Royale and switch the shower on at the right temperature first go.
Her shower finished, wrapped in one of the hotel’s thick white robes, Vittoria bent down to pick up the magazine and quickly opened the door to unhook the bag of newspapers, bringing everything over to the bed to leaf through.
The Sunday Inquirer was on the top.
And a picture of Bellissima Serata was on the masthead.
Vittoria suddenly felt a hideous blast of déjà vu. Last time it had been Yana – what was she going to find now? Opening the paper, Vittoria recoiled at her husband’s smiling face, the photo blown up to almost the full size of the page. Beside him – in the cockpit? Dio Mio! – her hand clearly snaking up Marcus’s thigh, was Bellissima Serata in a low-cut black dress, all her assets on view.
Vittoria’s heart dropped. What had he been doing this time?
And in the cockpit? Surely that was against all the security regulations? It certainly didn’t look like he was concentrating on his job. Even if they were on the ground and the plane was empty there were incredibly strict rules about the public having access.
Vittoria’s mind flew as she picked up the other papers and hurriedly flicked through them. There was no mention anywhere else – it looked like an Inquirer exclusive. Vittoria closed her eyes, trying to centre herself, to control her panic. The Inquirer must have a vendetta against Marcus – it was just like … last time.
Perhaps the shock had made her stupid.
This was exactly like the last time.
Vittoria relaxed, smiling as a knock on the door announced the arrival of her breakfast.
Chapter 24
IN NOTTING HILL Stephanie Carson was finding it increasingly hard to sleep at night as her bump grew. And with Marcus in Singapore, in a completely different time zone, texting her what felt like every two minutes to see how she was feeling, she’d really not had enough sleep. As her clock clicked around to nine thirty, she decided to get up, stiffly rolling on her side and swinging her legs out of the bed. It was Sunday – she could have a nap later if needs be.
A few minutes later, leaving the kettle to boil in the kitchen, she ran back upstairs to have her shower, luxuriating in the relaxing warmth of the water. Filming yesterday had been brutal; she didn’t know if she’d ever get rid of the soreness in her muscles. Letting the hot water wash over her back, Stephanie decided she’d throw on her jeans and collect some almond croissants and the papers across the road, and then she’d come home and settle in for a relaxing morning.
*
The sun was shining in through her large bay window as Stephanie pulled out the kitchen chair and sat down to look at the papers. She loved mornings like this, fresh and bright with the ground still wet last from last night’s rain.
She yawned and stretched. She had spent all yesterday afternoon on set chained up in a shipping container, curled up with her back to the camera. The director was trying to get as much in the can as he could before she had the baby. So far clever angles had concealed her bump from the viewers and the writers had managed to get around her projected absence with a twist in the script. They were in the middle of a complex storyline about a Mexican Don blackmailing a banker – it was all organised crime and drugs and their ratings had never been so good, so it needed to be right. Although any of the other five storylines that she’d discussed with the director would have been less arduous than the one they’d gone for, she was sure.
They’d had so many script meetings to nail it down. The director had been really keen on one treatment where her character, Lola Dalloway, undercover at an embassy reception, had her champagne poisoned with ricin. The idea was that Lola would collapse and be rushed into intensive care. Which meant they could cut in lots of shots of her in hospital while the rest of the cast tried to work out if her cover had been blown, if the drug had really been intended for her or if something even more sinister was going on. It would have the tabloids hopping with speculation about her survival, and then, when she’d had the baby, she could recover dramatically.
Which was completely ridiculous, as she’d quickly found out. She’d needed the loo and, slipping out of the script meeting, she’d googled ricin to find out what on earth they were all talking about. It came from castor oil beans, apparently – and was super deadly, if that was a thing. As she’d sat on the loo she’d realised it would be just as easy not to bring her back into the show, and she wasn’t about to risk that.
She’d marched back into the room and told them exactly what she thought of that plan. She might have shouted a bit and burst into tears, but they’d all hurriedly decided that Lola surviving a poisoning attempt was stretching things a bit, so now she had been kidnapped and was being held in a shipping container somewhere near Canary Wharf.
Which was where Stephanie had spent yesterday. Wondering if a champagne reception, with or without ricin, might have been a better option after all.
There was so much secrecy around these storylines that she wasn’t even sure where the shipping container had been exactly, just that it was bloody uncomfortable and the silly cow who was covering the lead camera kept getting the lighting wrong.
She still had no idea either how she was supposed to get away, but if the cast had no idea which way the storyline would go, the acting was better, more heartfelt and genuine. Apparently. Nobody knew for sure if she’d live or die.
Stephanie took a sip of her tea and opened the magazines that came with the Sunday Times, flicking to her horoscope at the back of Style magazine. According to her stars she was going to have a surprise this week. She just hoped it was a nice one and very expensive.
Pushing the rest of the Sunday Times to one side, Stephanie scanned the Sunday Inquirer’s front page, picking up a croissant and taking a bite as she opened the paper.
She froze, the pastry suspended halfway between her mouth and the plate.
Marcus smiled back at her, filling almost the entire page. Beside him was some tart with pneumatic tits, sitting far too close to him.
Frowning, Stephanie began reading the article. The tart had been in that terrible TV show Stephanie couldn’t remember the name of, but she did remember the tabloids getting very excited about her experience with poles, and not the ones with a capital P. Christ almighty, what had Marcus been doing? Stephanie felt her temper boiling. It was bad enough she had to share him with that cow Vittoria …
Stephanie reached for her phone. She had no idea what time it was in whatever part of the world Marcus was in, but he had some explaining to do. Stephanie hit Marcus’s number. It was engaged.
He was probably talking to the tart.
Impatiently, she hit Call again, knowing her number would show on his phone as incoming.
He still didn’t pick up.
Staring at the pictures in the paper, she realised there was an inset of Marcus in one corner of the bigger image. He was in a nightclub, a cocktail in his hand. He’d obviously taken this woman out for the night and then taken her up in the cockpit. Or perhaps he’d met her on a flight.
She tried him again. Still engaged.
Furious, Stephanie stood up and turned around to find her iPad on the counter. She needed to see if this was online too.
Of course it was.
Bellissima Serata looked back at her sm
ugly, pouting, her breasts pressed into Marcus’s chest. That had to be a stage name. Stephanie did an Internet search for her, masses of links appearing. Instagram, Facebook. Stephanie typed ‘translation’ into Google. Bellissima Serata meant ‘beautiful night’ in Italian. She bet it had been a beautiful night, an expensive one too.
Stephanie reached for her phone just as it started to ring.
‘Have you seen the paper? I can only see it online.’ Marcus sounded breathless.
‘I think half of London has seen it by now.’
‘It’s bad.’ It was more of a statement than a question.
‘It certainly is. What the fuck’s going on?’
‘I don’t know, honestly, I’ve no idea. There was a stupid gossip piece in the paper about me being in The Velvet Club with her last week. It’s all nonsense – I’ve never met her.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me? For God’s sake.’ Stephanie scanned her iPad and checked Twitter. ‘She doesn’t seem to be denying knowing you.’
‘Well, she’s hardly going to do that if she can get this sort of coverage is she?’ Marcus snapped back at her. ‘I’m sorry. It’s not a real photo but no one will believe me. Work has been on; I have to go to a meeting on Tuesday as soon as I land. I don’t think I’m going to be getting a promotion.’
‘But what can they do?’
‘Suspend me?’ His voice cracked. ‘That photo was supposedly taken in the cockpit. That’s against about fifty major regulations.’
‘Jesus. But you can’t lose your job – what will you do?’
His voice was low and angry. ‘God knows. I’ll probably end up flying for some spurious African crop sprayer.’
Stephanie’s mind whirred. How was she going to afford the house, the baby, without Marcus working?
‘But you need to prove it’s photoshopped. There must be a way. Where were you that night? There’s a date stamp on the corner of the little photograph.’
Marcus breathed in sharply. ‘According to the date and time stamp I was flying the next day, which,’ he stopped, as if he was trying to control his voice, ‘on top of everything else, breaks the eight-hour bottle-to-throttle rule. But it’s nonsense. I wasn’t drinking. That night I was with you.’
‘So you can’t have been there, in that bar, with her?’
‘Obviously.’
‘So—’
He cut her off. ‘If I tell them I was with you, Vittoria will find out …’ He said it slowly, like he was speaking to a child.
‘Well, what’s wrong with that?’
‘Christ, Steph, we’ve been over this. She could do anything. She’ll fight the prenup and try and take me to the cleaners, for one thing. She’ll want the house. My father’s house. If we end up in court, everything will be out there. The press will love every bloody minute of it.’
Stephanie exhaled loudly, trying to keep her voice level. ‘Well, if you want to keep your job, it doesn’t look like you’ve got much choice.’
‘I can’t … I’ll think about it. I’ve got forty-eight hours before the meeting to work something out.’
‘She’s going to go nuts anyway, you know. You’re all over the bloody papers with some sleazy ex-stripper. Someone’s going to tell her.’
‘That’s not as bad as her finding out about you, about the baby – you can be sure of that.’
She heard his phone pip with an incoming message. ‘Look, that’s another call coming in – I’d better go. I’ll call you later, sweet pea, when I’ve more idea what’s going on.’
And with that he clicked off.
Stephanie looked at the phone, anger bubbling inside her. This gave him the perfect reason to tell Vittoria that he wanted a divorce. And he didn’t seem to have realised it. If Stephanie was married to him, being plastered all over the news with a tart would be enough reason for her to throw him out, and she was quite sure Vittoria wasn’t that different from her.
But she really needed him to keep his job. She knew his family had loads of paintings and antiques and stuff but she needed support. She loved this house and private schools were expensive. If the price he had to pay for keeping his job was losing half his assets to Vittoria, was that really that bad? Whatever way you looked at it, there didn’t seem to be a good way out of this one.
Stephanie knew she should have pressed him to tell Vittoria sooner, but he’d always had some sort of excuse – all the stuff going on at home, the burglaries. She should have told him to choose, to make up his mind, but part of her couldn’t face that, couldn’t face the chance that he might leave, that his home and lifestyle might mean more to him than she did.
Stephanie massaged her bump. The last thing she wanted was to have to fight a huge paternity suit, but if it came to it, there was no way her son was going to lose his birthright. If Marcus thought Vittoria could be difficult, he hadn’t seen anything yet.
Chapter 25
SERGEI WAS WAITING for Edward Croxley when he arrived upstairs in The Nest Restaurant at The Rookery in Covent Garden. It was busy even though it was only Monday. A private club, it was an ideal place to meet – the noisy chatter of diners and the sounds from the open kitchen made it hard for people to overhear them. And it was very busy – the least likely place they might be accused of meeting to discuss sensitive business.
Croxley had left his coat downstairs and made his way up the broad unvarnished wooden stairs slowly, his suede shoes silent on the treads. Generously proportioned rooms opened off every landing of the Georgian townhouse, giving a variety of restaurant experiences, some more formal than others. Looking in as he passed, Croxley recognised a lot of faces from the TV and stage, beautiful women and men in deliberately casual, yet obviously expensive jackets.
But he wasn’t thinking about who he might bump into.
He needed to come up with a convincing story to buy him a bit more time with Sergei and, more importantly, with Igor Kaprizov. He wished he had never even met them at this point.
Why had he got involved with the Russians in the first place? He knew why. And it wasn’t like he hadn’t realised how dangerous they were, but he’d been lulled by the knowledge that they looked after their own and they paid well. Very well.
It had all been so easy, too easy. Meeting Igor Kaprizov at a private view at a gallery in Mayfair, they’d got chatting beside a rather ridiculous monochrome print of something with feathers. Kaprizov had invited him to a reception in Kensington, and then there had been an invite to his stunning home overlooking the sea in Cannes, lemons growing on the trees shading the patio, fabulous wine, beautiful women …
Croxley should have guessed they were checking him out, that they’d identified him as an ideal go-between for their black-market art business.
Bringing antiquities into the UK through country house auctions created a path to the buyer that had been wiped clean of Middle Eastern dust and made everything very respectable. British aristocratic families were notorious collectors, had travelled the empire acquiring all sorts of items, and anything could turn up in the hidden drawer of a games box or a bureau.
Croxley had to admit the country house sale route was genius. Even if they did find them, local auctioneers didn’t always recognise or have the experience to date these types of items – indeed, he’d discovered London dealers didn’t always get it right either. And the Russians banked on that ignorance. They knew what they were doing and often had a group of hungry buyers organised for a very private auction before the items even left Iran or Syria. They had just needed a pair of trusted hands, hands with a reputation that would give buyers confidence, to pick up the items legitimately and bring them to them.
And he’d walked right into their plan. He’d been wowed by Kaprizov. By the money and the lifestyle. Then he’d met Sergei, Kaprizov’s number-one operative in London. He was charming, knew people Edward had been to school with, had flattered Edward with his knowledge of the big deals he’d done.
They’d expected Edward to join them in Cannes, had
mentioned it at that party in London. Kaprizov’s plane would be available; a car would collect him. Kaprizov’s secretary had called him with the travel arrangements as if it was the most normal thing in the world. The first day they’d gone out on his yacht, had eaten lunch on the deck, the sun strong. The girls had all been Russian, he’d assumed – they certainly didn’t have any English, but then they hadn’t needed it. He’d got back to the villa that night drunk and exhausted, had fallen into the bathroom and then into the huge bed.
It was only in the morning that he’d found the newspaper, casually left on the dresser – the Irish Times from July 2008, his name listed as one of the partygoers at a twenty-first birthday party in Berkshire that had ended in tragedy.
And he’d known they were closing in.
And then over dinner, the men had spoken English, laughing at the tale of what exactly had happened to one of Igor Kaprizov’s business partners, one who had double crossed him, and how much he’d screamed to die. Edward really hadn’t needed to hear the whole story to be reminded of how they dealt with their opponents.
Later in the evening Sergei had taken him to one side, handing him a cigar as they leaned over the ornate wall separating the patio from the cliffs below, the sea lapping as the tide changed, the scent of roses drifting on the evening breeze. And he’d explained what they needed and how good Kaprizov was to work for, and how he looked after his own.
Croxley had known he was snared then, that if he was in, he needed to get as much out of them as he could.
And everything had been going so smoothly.
Sergei looked after him well; he’d become more involved in the art business, had sold several pieces for them, appearing to be the front man on some big deals that publicly had done him no harm at all. They had helped get his name out there, which was obviously how Vittoria Devine had heard of him. Which was looking like it could be a very good thing.
