Desire

by Louise Bagshawe

  She paled. ‘Next instalment? What next instalment? I picked her up and we went to a motel?’

  ‘Nothing that exciting. I’ll stop at St Peter’s Square. Tell them your side of the story this far.’

  She started to sweat. ‘You can’t do that. You promised.’

  ‘I promised to help you. And I can’t do that once they work out that I’m aiding and abetting. It’s got to be what it always was: the hard-bitten hack on the trail of the killer trophy wife. Because that’s what sells copy. You’re running, and I’m hunting you down. Unless I file stories that support that, we’re both in deep shit. Do you get that, Lisa?’

  The excited blush had vanished. She was clearly scared. But he saw her press her lips together, and she said, ‘Yes, I do. I guess I do.’

  ‘Besides - something journalists always say when they want a mark to spill - talk to me, get it off your chest; this is a chance to tell your side of the story. Because just about every potential juror in America thinks you’re a gold-digging killer. You need to start floating alternative theories, so at least there’s debate. Trust me.’

  ‘I have to,’ she said. ‘Don’t I?’

  ‘You don’t have lots of options. Other than jail.’ He saw the skin on her jawline ticking, and suddenly felt a wave of pity for her. ‘Look, I don’t think you did it. I sure as hell wouldn’t be driving this shitty car in the middle of nowhere if I did.’

  ‘Right,’ she said, and there was an utter weariness in her tone. ‘I know that. And you understand I’m very grateful. If I don’t seem it at times, it’s just the pressure of the situation. I’m running, I’ve been running. I don’t know where I’ll end up or if I’ll ever be safe. I don’t know who killed Josh, and who paid him to do it, and why they added me to the deal. Sometimes it bears in on me.’ A thin smile; she was struggling to make light of it. ‘And as you’re the only person here, I guess that means it all hits on you.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it. Look, go to sleep, if you can.’

  Lisa yawned. ‘I might be able to. I used to say I could only sleep lying down, totally flat, I was a light sleeper. All that bullshit. Take away those everyday luxuries and you soon find you can do a lot more than you thought.’

  ‘We should be in Vaduz in around three hours, maybe a bit more.’

  ‘OK.’ She turned her head, and looked at him through her sunglasses. ‘Thank you, Sam. Really.’

  Peter Mazin strode the length of his home office, a thirty-foot room with floor-to-ceiling glass walls that looked out over the white sands of his private beach, and the azure waves of the warm Malibu ocean.

  It was good to be him. The beach house was one of five properties that he owned. There was the estate in Nantucket, the brownstone in TriBeCa, the chic flat in Mayfair, this glorious mansion in Malibu, and his twelve-thousand-square-foot holiday home in Mustique. That was what you got for being partners with Josh Steen, even a junior partner. And today, he was no longer the junior partner, in the shadow of the big man with the big ego. He was the heir, the only game in town. All of a sudden, no longer the straight man, the backroom boy. Hollywood’s eyes were on him.

  It had happened before, he thought, watching the waves dash themselves against the puffy white powder of his exclusive acre of beach. When Don Simpson went to that big rehab in the sky, everybody discovered that Jerry Bruckheimer had been the talent all along. And without Don, Bruckheimer went on to be three times as good as the partnership had ever been. That could be me, Peter told himself. It sure could.

  The dark, secret joy in his heart he never mentioned to anybody. He tried not to acknowledge it to himself. He’d given a few dignified public statements, mourning the loss of his friend and partner. There would be a service and a eulogy next week at Josh’s Bel Air synagogue, and Peter would be reading from the Torah, saying a few words about his dear friend of thirty years.

  But what a friend. Josh was younger, handsomer. More famous. More successful. Steen & Mazin had all too often been abbreviated to ‘Steen’ by the industry. He, Peter, was an afterthought.

  But now the company was all his. Not even part of Josh’s estate. Josh had the money, the houses, the stock to leave. But they’d set up the company so that the survivor got it all. In fact, looked at in that way, Peter Mazin was one of Josh’s biggest heirs.

  He gazed over the ocean and smiled to himself.

  One of his first acts had been to cancel Twelfth Night, Josh’s vanity project, the Shakespeare adaptation set on the south side of Boston, starring a young Matt Damon lookalike, the kid Josh swore was headed for Oscar stardom. Well, not any more he wasn’t. Peter’s movie Brutal, starring Louis Ferranto and Gisela Haughey, teenage starlets both, was now top of the priority list. Secretly he felt Josh might have been right about its flaws, but it was important to show Hollywood who was in charge. Brutal was the simplest way to do that. Nevertheless, Peter thought he’d hire some new writers, see what they came up with.

  Josh had left a mixed legacy. Sure, their production company was thriving. But there were a bunch of husbands around Hollywood who’d be happy to piss on his grave. And Peter was one of those husbands. Only the worst thing was, unlike some of his friends, he’d never caught Hannah with Josh. It was just a niggling suspicion, a doubt in the back of his mind. When he looked at his pretty young wife in her low-cut designer jeans, tight lycra T-shirt stretched over those glorious tits he’d paid for, there was that black, fleeting thought: had Hannah, who loved his money so much, ever traded him for a roll in the hay with the big dog, the one guy in the world who could out-bark and out-bite him? It pissed him off that he suspected Josh. Because that meant he suspected Hannah. And, right or wrong, that would ruin his life, if he let it.

  Fucking Joshua Steen. Still screwing with him from beyond the grave.

  Peter’s anger rose in his throat, till he had to swallow the bile. The fucker was dead, and he was glad. Gladder still that they’d pegged his whore of a wife for the deed. Not that he knew first hand she was a tramp, but his friends had believed that, so he was happy to as well. Josh had fucked plenty of Hollywood wives. What a fucking irony if his own unsociable Limey piece went away for stabbing him through the fucking heart. And if she didn’t do it, all the better. Somebody had just fucked Josh and his standoffish woman. Did Lisa know who? Likely she had no idea. He smirked at the thought. He had hit on that chick a bunch of times. Hot accent, looked bored with Josh. Ripe for the plucking, you’d have thought. But she hadn’t responded, hadn’t even looked his way. And at the same time, he suspected Hannah was fucking Josh. When exactly, he couldn’t be sure. She never stayed away too long, like overnight, or when there might be an obvious window. But there were enough shopping trips, spa days and lunches with the girls that he remained insecure. And whenever he looked at Josh, this ghost reared its head. But Peter dared not confront him. With what? A feeling, a sense? He was the brooding, poisonous presence that loomed over Peter’s marriage. And now he was gone, and when Peter looked at Hannah he feared he’d never know.

  On the other hand . . . Josh Steen was dead. Fucking rotting in the fucking ground, he thought with grim satisfaction. And his stuck-up bitch of a wife was running for her life. Whether she did it or not, the punishment would be the same.

  His mind wrenched itself back to the movie. It was going to be a difficult production. The cost overruns Steen had warned about were already coming true on this film set. He determined to implement Josh’s advice, before he’d unilaterally decided to scrap the project altogether: replace the below-the-line producer, get a new director with a focus on the studio’s budget and not his artistic expression. This was a teen flick, not Laurence fucking Olivier. It wasn’t cancelled. That was Peter’s decision. But it would be run the way Josh had wanted.

  And it gave him a thrill to be using the guy still.

  Craig went out into the lobby of his hotel, ignoring the drunk hooker and the two johns bothering her under the slow whirr of the giant ceiling fan, and pulled out his sec
ure BlackBerry. He hesitated for a second, the dark phone heavy in his hands. Once he made this call, it was all over. The easy way out, the clean case with the foreign suspect. He was through, and Sam Murray would become the reporter of the decade. Never mind that Craig had collected the evidence to track the real killer; he knew what the press was like. He was the frontman of this operation, and as such he would be blamed for everything. Doing the right thing was about to get him a piece of Lisa Costello’s action, whether he liked it or not.

  None of that could be helped. She was innocent. Craig knew that, and he made the call without hesitation.

  ‘Hi,’ Sam’s answerphone said. ‘You’ve reached Sam Murray. Please leave a name, a number, and a time when you can be called and I’ll get back to you. Thanks for calling.’

  Thanks for fucking calling, Craig thought, with gallows humour.

  ‘What’s up, Sam, it’s Craig. We found semen stains on the headboard. They’re being analysed. Lots of other fibres too. If the semen ain’t Steen, she’s in the clear. Maybe you should get her back here, get her a lawyer.’ He paused in the baking, humid Thai heat as something occurred to him. ‘If you contact her, remind her that she’s a hell of a rich woman. As far as I know, she was Josh Steen’s only heir. And if she didn’t kill him, the entire bunch belongs to her.’ He sighed. ‘Let’s hope she’s grateful.’

  The prop plane banked to the left and settled down towards its descent. Felix found the whirring of the engines soothing. More so than a jet. They were headed to Geneva airport, and the small size of the plane meant his luggage would be out in minutes.

  He had no certain knowledge that Sam Murray was going to Geneva, or even Switzerland. But hunches had served him well in the past. That they had hooked up he had little doubt. Sam’s silence to his editor - he hadn’t called in some time - was just too much with sums this large riding on a story. He’d been tracking her in a highly efficient way; Felix thought Sam Murray might have made a good assassin, with a little more discipline and the right disposition. But that last key factor was something he lacked; he had dropped the pursuit and picked up the girl.

  That thought made Felix’s lip curl. He had weaknesses himself. Returning to the scene might be prime amongst them. But he never claimed to be the best in the world. Still, he’d never gone so low as to get caught up with a target, or a client. Sam Murray had a good thing going before he went native. How was Lisa Costello? Felix wondered, licking his lips. She must be a great little lay for Josh Steen to have taken up with her in the first place. Didn’t have the perfect beauty, the wafer-thin body with plastic tits, or even the connections of his other girls. Felix had run his eye over the target’s file. He suspected that Lisa was a hot piece of ass. She had something about her, a fire that the other girls lacked.

  He remembered her body, passed out on the bed, while he sedated and killed Josh Steen. Gave him just enough anaesthetic to paralyse him, not enough to make him pass out. Felix liked the look in their eyes while he did it. Helpless, in pain. It was fun disposing of Josh Steen, his wife’s hand wrapped around the dagger and Felix’s holding it in place while he stabbed. Making sure to stand well back from the spurting blood. Why the fuck should Steen be the one lying next to those rocking curves in the antique bed and the private luxury estate? He’d waited obsequiously on all those moneyed guests, seen the palatial bungalows some of them were put up in, the obscene wealth thrown casually around that party. Drugs barely hidden. Caviar piled up like it was mashed potato. Vintage champagne, premier cru, flowing freely everywhere. Designer dresses, rocks round the necks of the girls that could have lit Los Angeles on their own power. Platinum Rolexes everywhere.

  It made him burn, fucking burn, with resentment. He killed people for a goddamned living, and whilst the money was good, he couldn’t play in this league. Why the fuck should these overprivileged trust-fund brats have everything he was working so hard to get?

  And all worshipping at the court of Josh Steen and his lackey Peter Mazin. Felix disliked them both heartily. It was great watching the blood bubble at the side of Steen’s mouth. All the cash in the world couldn’t save him then.

  And he’d felt the familiar stirrings in his cock. The sense of power. That he was here, taking the life of somebody who thought he was untouchable. It was a favourite game of Felix’s, to try and watch the exact moment they died. To catch the precise second when light dimmed in their eyes, consciousness slipped away. That was it; no way back. But Josh had cheated him. His eyelids shut before he died. That made Felix mad. He’d thought about killing Lisa then; pity he hadn’t. But the richness of the joke, setting her up for it, the fear of the squalid, hot Thai jail cell, the mock trial and then the execution . . . that was one reason not to. The other was the publicity. He’d known how America would react to the female O.J. And word would get out in his business whose kill it was . . .

  Lisa had lain there, her pretty little antique gown soaked in Josh’s blood. Man, that was horny. Like a wet T-shirt contest using blood. Her juicy tits jutting out from under the red, sopping fabric, her limp hand on the ivory dagger. The feelings in his groin deepened and clutched at him. No time to rape her, but he stood by the bed and jerked off. It was an awesome sight, the greedy Steen all messed up, his blood seeping out of him, and his pretty wife, her thighs and half her ass exposed where the nightgown rode up, set up to take the fall. Little gold-digger got more than she bargained for, huh?

  When he’d come, he showered, right in their bathroom. Yeah. The arrogance, the confidence. Another job well done. And Felix was right on top of the world . . .

  For a few moments he bathed in the glow of the memory. And then it hit him, as the plane tipped down further into its descent, that he’d been wrong. Premature. The job wasn’t quite done, was it? Lisa Costello hadn’t taken enough of the drug to knock her out long enough. Instead she’d woken up - and she’d run. And to his amazement, she’d run pretty smart.

  Now there was trouble. And he had come to Switzerland to end it. No more loose ends. Lisa Costello was not an optional extra any more. She was the main event. He wondered if he’d get to fuck her before he killed her.

  Chapter Eight

  ‘We’re here.’

  Lisa opened her eyes wearily and looked around her. ‘Here?’

  ‘Liechtenstein. Tiny sovereign state, ruled by a prince. Ran for years on free banking and secrecy.’ Sam grinned at her. ‘Good place to hang out. I know people here.’

  ‘I’ll follow you, then.’ She got out of the car, luxuriating in the feeling of stretching her legs. They were standing on a cobbled street under a cliff. She looked up and saw a fairy-story castle looming overhead, perched almost a mile above them. ‘Wow.’

  ‘The princely family are billionaires,’ Sam said. ‘This place may be small, but it’s perfectly formed.’

  ‘I guess so.’ It was a little cold now, the sunset almost vanished in the sky. ‘Now we’re here, what’s next?’

  ‘I get us into a hotel that doesn’t need passports and doesn’t ask questions. One where I know the old woman that runs it.’

  ‘Sounds perfect.’ She was fiercely glad she had Sam Murray. He was taking care of her. She almost felt safe with him; as safe as she could.

  She glanced around. Apart from the castle on the clifftop, they were in a modern-looking slice of middle Europe. Spacious roads, modern hotels and apartment blocks, built in the sixties and seventies, with some of the attendant ugliness. Behind them there were flat fields. The postage-stamp principality seemed prosperous, but not at all quaint. There was money, and farming, and tourism. Lisa turned her attention back from her uninspiring surroundings to Sam. He was a lot more gripping.

  ‘Then I file the story. I’m going to drive back into Switzerland to do it, in case my calls are being tracked. It’s safe to say they probably are.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘I come back. We have dinner. Then we start going through your story, Lisa. We start investigating who did this and why. I’m
going to ask lots of questions, some of them a couple of times. Try and be patient.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Patience isn’t your strong suit,’ he said drily.

  She blushed. ‘I’ll try harder. Sam . . .’

  ‘You don’t have to keep thanking me. Let’s just get on with it, OK?’

  ‘OK,’ Lisa said. She fought the desire to say more, to blurt out why she was grateful, to excuse her snappiness. Sam didn’t want to talk, he wanted to move. He was taking command of this nightmare, trying to lift it off her back. The thought made her almost light-headed. She busied herself with her backpack, not trusting her body. Her emotions might show in her face. The last thing she needed was the humiliation of him knowing she wanted him.

  ‘Where’s the hotel?’ she asked, looking safely down at the cobbles of the street.

  ‘About three streets away. Follow me.’

  She walked behind him as he led her into a main road. The buildings here were modern low-rise offices with a couple of flat-fronted churches thrown in, and some hotels and bed and breakfasts in ersatz Swiss chalets. The roads were wide. It was all something of a contrast to the fat round tower and classic castellated walls of the palace perched high above them.

  As twilight deepened, rain started to drizzle around them. The headlights of cars reflected in the road. It was soulless, she thought, modern and anonymous. And Sam Murray knew his way around.

  ‘Right here,’ he said, stopping. Lisa looked up at the building. It was a small house with wooden shutters painted apple green, and an ad outside in German. ‘Frau Vollenhaus owns this place. I knew her from LA, before she came back here.’

  ‘What did she do in LA?’ Lisa asked. ‘How did you know her?’

  Sam shrugged. ‘You don’t want to find out.’

  She stiffened. Was his arrogance infuriating, or erotic? Both, she decided. ‘Yeah, I do, Sam. I’m going to be staying here while you drive back to Switzerland for your goddamn interview, meaning I’ll be by myself. And so I’d like to trust the person I’m staying with. What was this woman to you? Why do you trust her to keep a secret?’