Do Not Disturb (61 page)

She would have loved to confide in Lola about her feelings and her fears. But ever since the story had hijacked her life, a growing distance had been developing between the two girls. It got worse about a month ago, when Sian had finally bitten the bullet and broken up with Paddy. “But you can’t,” said Lola incredulously, and not a little tactlessly, when Sian told her the news. “You two are so perfect together.”

“Believe me,” said Sian sadly, “we’re not.”

“But he’s such a wonderful guy. And he really loves you.”

“I know,” snapped Sian, guilt and lack of sleep making her more than usually irritable. “OK? I know. Why d’you think I
dated him for so long? We just ran out of steam, that’s all. I can’t explain it.”

She couldn’t admit that Ben coming back into her life had so completely poleaxed her, sexually and emotionally, that she felt physically sick every time Paddy touched her. That seeing his loving, unsuspecting face come home in the evenings, clouded with doubt and rejection that he didn’t understand, made her want to sob out loud with guilt. Paddy was a lovely guy; the best. He deserved to be with someone who could love him back, who didn’t have to pretend.

Knowing that Lola thought she was simply being selfish, and that it was her obsession with work that had come between her and Paddy, made the whole awful episode even more painful. Unable to deal with the criticism, or to bear watching Lola and Marti so happy and cocooned in love for each other, she started working even longer hours, coming home later and later and sneaking out of the apartment at the crack of dawn. Inevitably, the distance between the two girls grew, at the very time when Sian most longed to be able to bridge it.

Boarding the plane for Cayman had been a relief, a welcome escape from Ben and Bianca, and Lola’s ever-present resentment about Sian’s work. But as soon as she landed in the famously secretive tax haven, and official home of most of Anton’s businesses, she’d felt her positive spirits fading.

Less than five hundred miles south of Miami, the so-called Caribbean paradise of the Cayman Islands was Sian’s idea of hell: luxuriously soulless hotels, like the Hyatt Regency where she was staying, loomed up out of the surrounding poverty like insensitive giants, their gazes focused firmly on the sunny blue sky and still waters of the ocean beyond, and not the slums at their feet. Like Miami, extreme wealth and extreme poverty walked hand in hand here. But somehow, lacking Miami’s vibrancy and the hope and energy of its ethnic melting pot, the division of wealth seemed starker and more brutal in Cayman. To Sian, it felt like
a Swiss version of an island paradise: Jamaica, run by civil servants. She could quite imagine Anton feeling at home here, even without the tax breaks, and was unsurprised to learn that, unlike most of the internationally wealthy with accounts and trusts on the islands, he’d actually bought a villa on Grand Cayman and used it regularly for a number of years.

She’d hoped he might have had some neighbors from that time who remembered him and could fill in some of the many blanks in her narrative so far. Perhaps he’d joined the local golf or yacht club? Become buddy-buddy with the Ferrari dealership in the harbor? But no. If he’d made any social contacts on Cayman, he’d taken pains to keep them as discreet as his business dealings. After three exhausting days here, Sian had still not found the lead she’d hoped for. There had been one interesting development today, a bank account number that hadn’t cropped up before on any of her searches, which she’d traced to a personal account at Uneximbank in Moscow.

When she finally got back to the Hyatt, she slid her key-card into the door of her room and sighed with relief as she walked into a cooling air-conditioned breeze. Peeling off the linen jacket that had stuck to her skin like a cheesecloth, she kicked off her shoes and flung herself back on the bed, luxuriating in the soft welcome of the mattress.

She only intended to take the weight off her feet for a minute, but the next thing she knew she was woken by the insistent ringing of the phone by her bedside. Groggily lifting the receiver, she noticed it was dark outside. How long had she been asleep?

“Hello?” she mumbled.

“It’s me.” Ben’s booming cockney voice sounded crackly, diminished by distance. But Sian’s innards turned to liquid just the same. “Just wondering how you got on today?”

“Fine,” said Sian. Still half asleep, she stifled a yawn.

“Shit, I didn’t wake you, did I?”

“No, no, not at all. Of course not.” Desperate to prolong the conversation, she forced herself to pep up and launched into a garrulous monologue about the day’s progress, or lack of it. “I did come up with one new lead though,” she said, and told him about the Russian bank account. “I’m thinking of leaving here early and flying out to Moscow in the morning to do some digging.”

“I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” said Ben, who suddenly had visions of her being pursued down a dark alleyway by a bunch of murderous Kremlin hoods. “If Tisch is involved with anything dodgy out there and you show up sniffing about, things could get very nasty very quickly. Those Russkies don’t just put the frighteners on people. They mean business, and they don’t give a shit if you’re a woman or what country you’re from.”

“Come on,” said Sian teasingly. “Don’t you think you’re being just a teeny bit melodramatic? What are they gonna do, slip strychnine into my tea?”

“They might,” said Ben, trying not to sound as desperately anxious as he felt. Sian was so obsessed with getting her scoop, she might easily do something reckless. And the former Soviet underworld was no joke. “Or they might just shoot you in the head, like poor old Anna Pollywhat’s-her-face.”

“Politkovskaya,” said Sian. “And they won’t. She was after Putin. I’m after a German financier the Kremlin probably hasn’t even heard of. Don’t worry.”

But Ben did worry.

Sitting alone in his empty office—it was half past nine in London, and apart from the poor drones in M and A, the rest of the City had long since gone home to bed—he launched the Google home page. Typing in “Russia, Journalist, Murder,” he was horrified to read that almost three hundred members of the press, many of them foreign nationals, had been killed since the fall of communism in Russia. Sian was incapable of being discreet. She was bound to go barging in there like Ruby Wax on
speed, demanding “airn-sers,” as she would put it. You could hear her American accent from a hundred paces, he thought lovingly.

Why the fuck had he written her that stupid check up front? Now he had no control over where she went or what she did.

Switching off his PC, angry at himself, he grabbed his jacket from the back of the chair and flipped off the light, wishing that the thought of going home to Bianca didn’t make him feel so irrationally depressed. Tam was right. For a soon-to-be-married multimillionaire, he really was turning into a miserable old git. He had to get a grip.

S
IX WEEKS LATER
, Lucas was sitting in the spectacular vaulted Gothic waiting room of the Palais de Justice in Paris, waiting for the latest round in his case with Connor Armstrong to be called. He’d begun the morning angry. After months of legal wrangling that had seen him flying back and forth from Paris to Madrid to the European courts in Strasbourg like a fricking shuttlecock, they were still no nearer a resolution. But now, after three hours numbing his ass on a hard wooden bench, he was simply bored.

There weren’t even any good-looking women to distract him. He shared the waiting room with a shaven-headed French-Arabic boy in a light polyester suit three sizes too big for him, who had the word “defendant” written all over him (although it was his tailor who deserved the life sentence), two lawyers, and a middle-aged matron with tightly curled red hair, whose bottom seemed to spread across the bench like dough, threatening to engulf Lucas at any moment.

“Would you like to have a look?” Smiling warmly, the matron offered him the copy of
Hello!
magazine she’d just finished reading. “It’s a good one.”

“Thank you,” said Lucas, who wouldn’t normally have wiped his ass with
Hello!
but who was so bored he welcomed any
distraction. Flipping through the glossy, picture-filled pages, he sneered inwardly at the ludicrous pretensions of the “celebrity” subjects. Horse-faced minor aristocrats blabbed on shamelessly about their relationships with royalty while posing outside their crumbling estates. Trained for nothing and having never done an honest day’s work in their lives, this was probably one of the few ways they knew to make money, money they so clearly needed to prop up their oversize houses. Lucas pictured them once the cameras had stopped rolling, sending the ball gowns and jewelry back to the pawn shop and retiring to the two rooms of the stately home they could still afford to heat, to rustle up some canned baked beans on toast. Everything these magazines pedaled was a sham. But a few pages later, his internal diatribe came to an abrupt halt when he found himself face-to-face with a quite stunning photograph of Honor. In a wood-nymph-green silk dress, sprayed onto her tiny body like gold leaf, five-inch Jimmy Choo heels, and with a simple but exquisitely cut amethyst pendant resting on her bronzed chest, she looked sexier than he’d ever seen her. Her hair, which had been mermaid-long in Vegas, was now cut into shoulder-length layers that had been streaked alternately in honey and chocolate, a perfect shade for her darker, sun-kissed skin. She was lying on a stone bench in the rose garden at Palmers, propped up on one elbow with her haunting, angular face cupped in one long-fingered hand, and her green cat’s eyes burned out of the page like two nuggets of kryptonite. Lucas, for one, felt his superpowers waning when he looked at her, so regally, coolly beautiful and yet at the same time so vulnerable and slight, like a leaf that might blow away on the wind at any moment.

The piece was about Palmers, a three-page spread combining archive shots of the old hotel with bigger, sunlit pictures of the rebuild that Honor had famously commissioned now. Tucked away in the corner was a small shot of the charred remnants of the old building, taken the day after the fire. Looking at it, Lucas
felt sick, thinking how close Honor must have come to being killed that day.

The insurers are still refusing to pay our claim, even though the police have said they’re forensically certain the fire was a deliberate act of arson
, she was quoted as saying to the reporter.

“Disgusting,” said Lucas out loud, surprising his fellow waitees with this burst of indignation on Honor’s behalf. “Fucking bloodsuckers.”

Without an arrest and a conviction, they say, the causes are still open to question.
He read on.
It’s been a tough slog to raise the money to rebuild her. But I’m really proud of what we’ve achieved.

I bet you are, thought Lucas, looking at the pictures of the new hotel rising up from the earth, as white and pure as a spring snowdrop. He was still angry at Honor for the hot and cold signals she’d given him in Vegas, and for being too stubborn to call him and apologize afterward. Why was it that women could never admit when they were wrong? But he had to admit she’d had more balls than he’d given her credit for when it came to rebuilding Palmers. They weren’t finished yet, but Honor had already pulled off what he and most others in the business had considered an impossible feat. She deserved serious kudos for that. Still, she must be absolutely desperate for money to have agreed to a cheesy
Hello!
feature like this one. Gossip mags were complete anathema to Honor—she considered them very much Tina territory—and Lucas could only imagine the frantic pride-swallowing that must have gone on before she poured herself into that deliciously revealing dress.

It was ironic that, even with her money problems, Honor was storming ahead at Palmers while he (who thanks to his new investor, the oil heir Winston Davies, had money coming out of his ears) was stuck not passing Go at Luxe America. Perhaps he’d been naive. But Connor had complained so vociferously about the business before Vegas it hadn’t occurred to Lucas that he would object to being bought out. And indeed, he’d already
accepted the more-than-generous offer for his shares both verbally and by e-mail by the time Anton had gotten involved in February, stirring the pot as only he could do.

Everybody knew what had happened. But unfortunately, none of them could prove it. Tisch had gotten in touch with Connor and started throwing money around like a newly signed footballer in a brothel, promising him the earth and all its riches if he refused to sign the contract and stayed on at Luxe as a “spoiler” partner, preventing further expansion, including Luxe America. Lucas and Winston countered, citing their verbal agreement and the e-mails, not to mention the fact that Connor had already taken receipt of the first installment of Winston’s funds by the time of his sudden change of heart. In the end, it was highly likely that the courts would rule against Connor, but that wasn’t the point. With Anton’s legion of international lawyers behind him, Connor was quite capable of dragging out the case for months or even years, flitting from one jurisdiction to the next each time a decision went against him, and lodging appeals every time Lucas’s attorney opened his mouth.