It would have been Castle’s drinking that finally brought the axe down on him, Dolly reasoned. Even if he hadn’t threatened Rudolph directly, or tried to blackmail him for a part - and she could easily see him doing both of those things - then his inability to keep his gob shut once he’d poured a couple of Old Fashioneds down his neck would have sealed his fate. Gossip was one thing; it was par for the course, probably, in their business. But having a big-time actor - a star like Castle - actually naming names, maybe even producing evidence… no. Someone like Rudolph wouldn’t want to risk it. Not when there were other options on the table.
She stopped the limo at the top of the hill. The view was breath-taking, the way it always was at night. It was one of the things she loved about Los Angeles, about California: the lavishness of the landscape, of a geography as excessive and melodramatic as the culture it enveloped. So much less gentle than England; so much less restrained.
She pulled the gun from the holster at her ankle, where she’d strapped it. It was a new model she’d picked up on her way through Chicago, a Smith & Wesson; she didn’t like it particularly, compared with the Webley she’d used back home and in France, when circumstances demanded it, but it struck her as a particularly American choice, and that went some way towards compensating for what she considered the unpleasantly rough hand-feel of the weapon.
“Why are we stopping?” Castle said, more confused than irritated.
She turned around in her seat, pulled down the glass panel separating the front of the car from the back and pointed the gun at his throat.
“Get out of the car, Mr Castle,” she told him, letting the accent drop.
He didn’t fight her, to his credit - was far more compliant than she’d have expected of him.
He stumbled from the back seat, and she followed him outside, making sure he saw that the gun was trained on him at every point from A to B. She gestured to the edge of the hill - which was really more of a cliff, now she thought about it - and cocked the hammer, more for effect than because she imagined she’d have to use it. He struck her as a coward, a loudmouth with no substance; he wouldn’t risk her shooting him, even if the alternative was the drop below.
He took a step backwards, closer to the edge.
“What do you want?” he asked her, through his tears. She could smell the booze on his breath. “Why are you doing this?”
“For the money,” she told him, pressing the muzzle of the gun against his chest. “Why else?”
He took another step backwards, lost his footing and fell.
She heard but didn’t see him land.
It was a long drive back to Malibu, or it felt like it; all the journeys she’d taken in the country seemed to take an age, to a girl who’d grown up with the Tube. Rudolph and his wife lived by the beach, their flat-roofed Modernist mansion looking to Dolly like a tower block that had got itself tangled up in a car compactor. They had no immediate neighbours, which was just how Rudolph liked it.
She parked the limo a five-minute walk from the mansion, out of sight - although the number of limos she’d seen parked up in Hollywood made her doubt that anyone would bat an eyelid at hers - and jogged along the path to the gated entrance, electing to climb the gate rather than press the buzzer and ask Rudolph to let her inside.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he demanded, when she’d knocked at the door and he’d answered, barrel chest barely covered by a fluffy white bath robe. “You’re not supposed to come to the house, for Christ’s sake! What if someone sees you?”
“Best let me in, then, hadn’t you?” she told him.
He did it, with obvious reluctance, but didn’t show her into any of the sitting rooms or smoking lounges he used for his guests - stopping her at the bottom of the great marble staircase that led upstairs from the white-tiled atrium and demanding to know, once again, what the fuck she was doing there.
She didn’t answer him; just bent down as if to tie her shoelace, pulled the Smith & Wesson from its ankle-holster and shot him, twice, in the centre of the forehead.
She’d screwed a silencer to the pistol, before she’d left the hills for Malibu. Neither bullet made a sound.
The shots were perfect - her shots were always perfect - and he died immediately, blood pooling around his head and shoulders on the tiles.
When she’d checked his pulse, to be absolutely certain, and had satisfied herself with what she’d felt there, she took off her shoes and walked the stairs to the upper level of the mansion. There were no servants, no assistants to be dealt with; the Rudolphs lived alone, which was also how they liked it.
She found Mrs Rudolph asleep in bed in the master suite - the covers beside her unwrinkled, undisturbed.
Separate rooms, then, Dolly thought. Can’t have been a happy marriage.
Softly, gently, she tiptoed to the bed, where the woman was dozing, her mouth wide open. Barbiturates was Dolly’s guess; if she was anything like the other studio wives Dolly had met since she’d been in LA, then Mrs Rudolph was probably doped up to the eyeballs.
She took the woman’s hand from where it rested on the top of the covers - with equal gentleness, so as not to disturb her - and wrapped its fingers around the grip of the gun, pressing the index finger to the trigger.
Then, still gently, Dolly opened the woman’s mouth with her own thumb and forefinger, slid the silenced muzzle of the gun inside as far as it would go, placed her own hand on top of Mrs Rudolph’s trigger-finger and squeezed.
It was another long drive from Malibu to Bel Air, this one snarling her in so much late-night traffic on the freeway she worried she wouldn’t make it there on time.
When she did arrive, finally, Orloff was waiting for her by the front steps to his house – though he was nothing less than magnanimous in his greetings. He was a good client; one of the best she’d had. Never argued, never micromanaged; never tried to screw her on payment.
“And everything went smoothly?” he asked, passing her an envelope that felt satisfyingly thick as she slid it into the pocket of her chauffeur’s jacket.
“Smooth as silk. They’re out of the picture, both of ‘em. Rudolph’s missus, too.”
“Good, good. Let’s hope it’s the last of the scandals you and I and the studio must deal with, eh?”
“Let’s hope,” she agreed, smiling - certain, knowing Orloff, that it wouldn’t be.
Chapter 9
Holloway Road, London, April 1998
Getting dressed for a job in Harriet Marchant’s flat was surprisingly challenging, El was discovering.
The problem wasn’t just the smallness of the place, although that was a factor: the living room, bedroom, kitchen and tiny bathroom that had been ample for Harriet and RD Laing was threatening to burst at the seams with the addition of Rose and Sophie on the pull-out sofa bed, and El on the single mattress pushed into a sloping crevice between the television and one of Harriet’s many Scandinavian shelving units.
It was all the stuff: the charity-shop paperbacks and hardback limited editions; the social psychology monographs and journals Harriet kept on hand for her own academic research; the figurines and collectible characters from films El had never watched and comic books she’d never read. And the memorabilia; so much memorabilia.
Harriet was a rock fan; El had known this from early on in their acquaintance. She practically lived in band t-shirts - the inexhaustible supply of long-sleeved, voluminous, mostly black but occasionally tie-dyed cotton jerseys that seemed to comprise the entirety of her wardrobe, all of them emblazoned with the names of albums by Metallica and Slayer, Kiss and Iron Maiden and the Sisters of Mercy. What El hadn’t known, before she’d imposed herself on the flat and on Harriet’s goodwill, was the extent of her would-be sister-in-law’s enthusiasm for the genre.
It was everywhere: on every wall, every surface, every slice of carpet not occupied by book piles or bedding or one of RD Laing’s water bowls. There were posters, signed record covers protected by sturdy-loo
king frames; even a couple of electric guitars strategically mounted between bookshelves. But there were also some more esoteric items: a battered Trilby in a glass display case; a tiny, wheeled replica of a tour bus; an enormous plastic tongue that doubled as a floor lamp.
Navigating it all made the performance of even the most prosaic tasks a Krypton Factor-level feat of mental and physical agility.
Currently El was balanced on one foot in front of the living room mirror, doing her best to apply the makeup and hair products that would restore her to the woman she’d been when Patricia Swift had seen her in the wine library - her other foot resting, of necessity, on a pile of Napalm Death concert programmes so substantial that it forced the accompanying leg outwards at a ninety-degree angle, giving her the look of an incompetent acrobat carrying out an unusually complicated warmup stretch.
It was in this position that Harriet found her upon returning to the flat - the afternoon lectures she’d been scheduled to give unexpectedly interrupted by a fire in the student union.
“Do you normally stand like that when you get ready?” she asked, taking in the scene from the hallway.
“I didn’t want to, you know… disturb anything,” El answered, half-apologetically.
She drew a final stroke of Spanish red across her bottom lip, ran her steel comb through her hair to augment the severity of the centre parting, disentangled her foot from the programmes and stepped back from the mirror.
“Don’t feel you have to stop on my account,” Harriet said, picking her way through the doorway to the sofa.
It sounded disdainful, faintly spiteful even, though El was inclined to think that Harriet hadn’t intended it that way. She wasn’t an especially warm character, except perhaps where Rose and Sophie were concerned, but she wasn’t an unkind one, either. Rather, or so El was beginning to suspect, it was as if she’d never learned how to demonstrate friendliness; how to articulate the minor but essential phatic expressions - and attendant non-verbal gestures - that told other people she had any interest at all in what they had to say.
And with a father like James Marchant, El had reminded herself more than once, is that any surprise, really?
El’s sense that Harriet was wary of her specifically, however, hadn’t abated since circumstances - and Rose’s anxieties - had thrust them together.
Was it, she wondered, that Harriet thought she wasn’t good enough for Rose? That El would lead Rose even further down the rabbit-hole of criminality than she had already, if left unchecked?
Or was it only that Harriet was, as Rose herself had pointed out, desperately protective of both her older sister and her niece, and felt obligated - though they’d been in her life barely more than a year - to look out for them, to guard them against anything with the potential to bring them heartbreak, up to and including El herself?
As closed a book as Harriet was, El found it impossible to know for sure, despite the many efforts at cold reading she’d thrown at the problem. And she’d been unable, thus far, to muster the courage to ask her, head-on.
“Unless you were on your way out anyway?” Harriet added.
It wasn’t in all likelihood a dismissal, El thought. Very likely wasn’t a demand to make herself scarce, so that Harriet could go back to enjoying the full benefit of her own merchandise-laden living room uninterrupted.
But it felt like one.
“I’ve got a two o’clock with the life coach woman,” she replied, laying the groundwork for an imminent retreat from the awkwardness between them.
“Ah. I see. Well, that explains the get-up, I suppose, doesn’t it?”
El bit her tongue.
Then scuttled away, like the coward she thought she probably was.
Patricia Swift was waiting for her at the basement bar in Chelsea they’d agreed would serve as the best and most neutral venue for their preliminary session.
El - Allegra Moncrieff, as Swift knew her - had expressed a slight hesitation in them meeting at all, taking greater pause still at the suggestion that they work together.
“You did call me, though, didn’t you?” Swift had purred back at her down the phone, not an ounce of her self-assurance slipping. “You didn’t have to - you could have ignored your friends and thrown away my card. But you didn’t. And I’d wager that's because a part of you knew that I could help you, if you’d only let me. You should listen to that part, Allegra. Because I can help you.”
“I don’t know,” El had said. “I just don’t know, Patricia.”
“And that’s understandable. When you’ve no experience with a process like this - like mine - it’s perfectly reasonable to have concerns. But wouldn’t it be better for us to thrash them out together? I mean,” she’d added, with a throaty laugh, “what’s the worst that could happen? If nothing else, you’ll get a good lunch and a glass or two of something delectable. I guarantee I can do better than that swill they served you at the club.”
She rose to her feet as El entered the bar, beckoning her over to their table and greeting her with a spattering of air kisses uncannily similar to those Allegra Moncrieff had offered her friends at the wine library.
“Allegra, darling,” she said, so intimately El was sure even fragile Allegra Moncrieff’s suspicions would have been raised, “I’m so glad you decided to come.”
“I’m not committing to anything,” El replied, lowering herself onto the unoccupied chair with a stiffness indicative of Allegra Moncrieff’s uncertainty.
“Not a problem. Drink?”
She grabbed the bottle without waiting for El’s response, pouring them both a generous splash of an ’87 Merlot El knew to be only marginally better than the unpleasantly crunchy Cabernet she’d sampled on the Pentonville Road.
They made what Swift - and probably Allegra Moncrieff - must have thought was pleasant conversation for a few minutes, Swift’s contributions focusing primarily on the Millennium Dome and what she considered the inadequacies of Tony Blair’s leadership, and El giving little in exchange but an intermittent murmur of agreement.
When the first round of Merlot had been demolished and El was mid-way through doling out the second, Swift went in for the kill.
“What is it you’re looking for really, Allegra? Your friends told me you’ve been having a touch of a life crisis recently. That you’ve been looking for something - a larger purpose. Do you want to tell me about it?”
Allegra Moncrieff was vulnerable, and rich, and cosseted; Swift knew as much already. It made sense to El therefore that she was also more than a little self-centred; that she enjoyed the sound of her own voice to a greater extent than most.
Even the most meagre expression of interest in her personal life, El had decided, would be enough to precipitate an uncorkable outpouring of oversharing.
And thus, with the conversational door opened, she overshared.
It wasn’t just Archie leaving her that had turned everything upside down, she said. She’d known that had been coming for a while; despite what she’d been telling her friends, and her overbearing mother, she’d been aware for months of his infidelities and the plans he’d hatched to start a new life with the most recent of his conquests.
She was lonely, and she was depressed, even with Valeria, her Red Sable Pomeranian, to come home to; that much was true. But loneliness wasn’t the full extent of what kept her awake at night, nor even the half of it.
The fact was, she felt rudderless - ever since she’d given up the job she’d loved the previous year. Entirely adrift in her own life.
“And what was it you did?” Swift asked.
She’d been a merchant, she said - dealing in wine, and spirits, and the occasional very rare case of Champagne. It was one of the reasons she knew the club on Pentonville Road so well. She’d run a little boutique place over in Mayfair - strictly appointment-only, and catering to a very specialist, high-net-worth clientele. The job had taken her all over: Bordeaux, Napa Valley, Marlborough, the Western Cape… anywhere and everywhere she
might lay her hands on the singular, high-priced bottles her clients demanded. It was fun, it was lucrative, and she absolutely loved it; couldn’t have been happier with her career choice, with the state of her professional life.
Until she’d met the old woman.
“She actually walked into the shop off the street,” El said, aghast even in the recounting of it. “I usually kept it locked between appointments, but evidently I’d forgotten to put the bolt on that morning, and then suddenly… there she was, just standing there, as if she expected me to serve her! I didn’t know what to say.”
Old was probably an understatement, she added - the woman was ancient, wrinkled as a prune and bent practically double. In her eighties, at the very least, though she could very easily have been ninety.
“I couldn’t imagine what she might want. But then she brought out this photograph and laid it down on the counter…”
It was a polaroid, El explained. Slightly blurry, as if the photographer’s hand had been shaking as they’d captured the image.
“Do you know how much this is worth?” the old woman had said, her voice like dry leaves crackling in the wind.
Morbidly curious, Allegra Moncrieff had leaned in for a closer look - and her eyes, as they’d focused, had very nearly fallen out of her head.
“It was a bottle,” El told Swift. “Not wine - whisky. As I say, the shot was fuzzy, very poorly done, but I could just about read the label… and it was a Glenallan. A 1937 Glenallan Duo. Do you know what that is?”
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