Wicked Beauty

by Susan Lewis

  Feeling restless and frustrated again at being so far away, Rachel said, ‘Maybe I should come back to London. I can be more help to you there.’

  ‘I promise you, I have plenty of help,’ Laurie responded, ‘and all you’d be doing is feeding me the numbers of your contacts when I need them, and you can do that from where you are. Anyway, there’s more news, and I’m afraid this is where it starts to go a bit downhill.’

  Immediately Rachel tensed, and for a brief instant she almost put the phone down rather than hear what was coming next.

  ‘The results are back,’ Laurie said. ‘From the sheet.’

  Rachel’s head started to spin: the very fact that Laurie had prefaced it the way she had, told her all she didn’t want to know. ‘It was his,’ she murmured, feeling the final, tiny shred of hope shrivel and die.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Laurie responded. ‘I prayed it wasn’t going to turn out that way …’

  Rachel started to speak, but her chest was too tight. She tried to breathe, but seemed unable to get any air, then she began to shake as though her entire body was in some kind of seizure. ‘I can’t stand any more,’ she cried helplessly. ‘It’s got to stop! Please! It has to stop!’ She dropped the phone and pressed her hands to her face. ‘It has to stop,’ she sobbed.

  ‘It’s all right. It’s all right. Take it easy,’ Chris said, holding her as if to keep her together.

  ‘I’m OK,’ she gasped. ‘I’m fine. I’ll be fine.’ She was looking wildly around the room, not sure what she wanted to do, or say, where to go, how to get there …

  ‘Just take it steady,’ he cautioned, still holding on to her.

  Cruel images were flashing through her mind of Tim and Katherine making love, of them laughing together, whispering, shutting her out … Oh God, how could he have done this. How could he? She’d tried to believe in him and he’d betrayed her. All this time … What a fool she’d made of herself. It had all been a lie. Everything. His love, his loyalty, his politics, his integrity … How she hated and despised him now. How she wished she could erase him from her life and stop feeling this endless pain.

  ‘Rachel?’ Chris said softly.

  She turned to look up into his face, then suddenly her arms went round him and she was pulling his mouth down to hers.

  His lips were firm, yet tender, holding to her own as his fingers splayed over her throat. She pushed her tongue deep into his mouth, then began fumbling frantically with his shirt.

  Catching her hands between his, he pulled gently away, and looked down at her grief-stricken face.

  ‘Oh God, I’m sorry,’ she sobbed, wrenching herself free. ‘I’m so sorry. I don’t know why I did that.’ Shame was almost choking her. ‘I have to go …’

  ‘No,’ he cried, grabbing her before she could run from the room. ‘It’s all right. Laurie told me …’

  ‘What did she tell you? That my husband was a lying, cheating bastard …’

  ‘She told me about the results,’ he cut in, ‘because she was afraid you wouldn’t, and she thought you’d need someone with you when you found out.’

  Her eyes were darting around the room again. ‘She was probably right,’ she said, distractedly, ‘but I don’t expect she thought I’d try and seduce you. Oh God, I can’t believe I did that. I’m sorry. I’m just so sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be,’ he said gently.

  She turned away, still shaken by how determined she’d been to get him to make love to her. Even now she wasn’t entirely sure she’d stopped wanting it, if only to blot out the terrible hurt of being so wrong about someone she loved so much.

  ‘Would you like me to leave now?’ he offered.

  No, she wouldn’t. ‘Yes, I think so,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, I just …’ She turned to look at him, and her heart seemed to crumble at the concern in his sombre dark eyes. Somehow she managed to smile as she said, ‘If I promise not to take it any further will you hold me?’

  Bringing her to him, he folded her deeply into his arms and pressed his mouth to her hair. She held him too, her face hidden in his shoulder, her body feeling swamped and comforted and totally protected by his. She wasn’t going to think any further than this, because it didn’t matter that he wasn’t Tim, or that she might feel ashamed again when he finally let go. All she was going to do was stand here and pretend, just for a moment, that everything in her life was good and safe and true, and not crashing down around her like an avalanche that just didn’t know when to stop.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, finally stepping back. Then with an awkward laugh, ‘It’s the second time you’ve been there when I needed that.’ Then her eyes closed as the truth of Tim’s betrayal swept over her again.

  ‘It was probably just a one-off thing,’ he said, as though reading her mind. ‘A post-election high …’

  ‘Please, don’t defend him,’ she interrupted. ‘I don’t think I can take it right now.’ Already she could feel the hurt turning to anger, which was a better place to be than this awful lonely despair and foolish delusion, and her voice was edged in bitterness as she said, ‘To think of all I’ve been going through, everything Laurie’s doing … My stupid, pathetic belief that I could clear his name, when all the evidence … What’s the matter with me? Why can’t I accept what’s staring me in the face? Oh, no, not my husband. He couldn’t possibly be involved with a company like Phraxos. Nor could he possibly be unfaithful. The stain must belong to somebody else. He’d never do anything like that. We were too close …’

  ‘If you don’t stop giving yourself a hard time we might have to go back to the seduction scene,’ he warned.

  Not quite able to laugh, she shook her head and turned to where the phone was still lying on the floor. Picking it up, she put it back on the base, then spotting the package from the Virgin Islands, she took a deep, shuddering breath and picked it up. How trivial and long ago the good news about the villa seemed now.

  Imagining the worst she was facing with this was the post office queue to send whatever was inside back again, she tore open the envelope and drew out a neatly folded single white sheet, and another sealed brown envelope. Casting a quick eye over the covering letter from Mrs Willard, the villa’s manager, to Mrs Hendon apologizing for not returning her things earlier, she opened the other envelope and pulled out its contents.

  Frowning, she turned the passport and driver’s licence over in her hand. ‘Whose is it?’ she said. Then she registered the name on the licence. ‘It can’t be,’ she murmured, a strange buzzing starting in her ears as she glanced up at Chris.

  He looked down at it, then his eyes came up to hers, equally shocked. ‘It’s yours,’ he said.

  She was shaking her head. ‘But I wasn’t there,’ she cried.

  Taking the passport he flipped open the back page. ‘This is yours too,’ he said, turning it so she could see.

  ‘But it can’t be, my passport’s here in … Oh my God! Oh Jesus Christ!’ The world was starting to spin very fast now. ‘The picture,’ she said. ‘That’s not me.’

  He looked at her incredulously, then snatched it back again.

  His eyes returned to hers, for there was no doubt that despite the dark hair, and printed name, the woman in the picture was very definitely not Rachel Hendon.

  Rachel clasped a hand to her head, still unable to believe it. ‘You recognize her, don’t you?’ she said. ‘You’ve seen her on the news. You know who that is?’

  He nodded. Yes, he knew who it was. How could he not, when it was the woman they all so urgently wanted to find.

  Chapter 16

  LAURIE WAS SITTING at a trestle table in the middle of removal chaos. She was in the new office that she, in Rose’s absence, had rented for the programme. Her laptop was open, her mobile phone tucked into her neck as she typed in the information she was receiving from an AP correspondent, stationed in Paris. Each time she spoke her voice echoed up into the domed ceiling and around the fan-shaped room with its two red brick walls forming a V behind he
r, and one wide arced wall full of windows that looked out on to Narrow Street beyond. A mere three-minute walk from Rhona’s flat, the office could hardly be more conveniently located, especially as it was a stone’s throw from a DLR station, and it wouldn’t be hard to get to and from Elliot’s apartment either – though that was irrelevant now she no longer lived there, so she’d just drop it from the equation.

  Right now she was so involved in trying to get more information on Professor Bombola while coordinating everything else that was coming in that the subject of Elliot wasn’t causing quite so much distraction as it normally did. The fact that it would come back later, with a vengeance, was something she’d have to deal with then.

  ‘OK, yes, I’ve got that,’ she said, glancing up as Rose’s son, Dan, who was one of the programme’s co-producers as well as chief cameraman, struggled in with a huge box of files and tapes. ‘Can you email me a list of the addresses?’ She typed, listened, typed again, then said, ‘Brilliant. I really owe you for this. If you hear any more, you’ve got my number,’ and ringing off, she jumped up just in time to catch a stack of cartridges that was about to cascade from Dan’s box.

  ‘Just as I thought, the Associated Press has been tracking our professor for a while,’ she told him. ‘He’s got some very interesting friends of the presidential or fabulously rich kind, and they meet in some very way out places. What time are the removal men coming back? We need proper desks, and decent chairs to sit on.’

  ‘They’re on their way, should be here in about half an hour,’ he told her, fanning his lightly bearded face with a rag as he headed back out to his car. ‘When’s Gino starting?’

  ‘The week after next,’ she called after him, then snatched up her mobile as it rang, daring to hope it might be the good professor himself, or someone affiliated, with a positive response to her request for an interview. ‘Hello, Laurie Forbes.’

  ‘Hi, it’s me,’ Elliot said.

  Her heart turned over. ‘Hi,’ she responded.

  ‘We need to talk.’

  Though she’d have liked to think he was referring to their personal situation, she just knew he wasn’t, so disabusing herself of the hope, she said, ‘What’s up?’

  ‘In person,’ he responded. ‘Where are you now?’

  ‘At the new office, in Limehouse. Why don’t you come and see it?’

  ‘I should be there in ten minutes. In the meantime, do me a favour, don’t make or receive any more calls.’

  Her head drew back in surprise, but in his usual fashion he’d already clicked off the line, leaving her annoyed that he’d just assumed she’d do as he said. ‘Elliot’s gracing us with a visit,’ she told Dan, as he struggled in with a stack of shelves and a toolbox. ‘We’re not supposed to answer the phones until he gets here.’

  Dan’s bushy black eyebrows arched with intrigue. ‘Did he say why?’ he asked.

  ‘You know Elliot,’ she responded drily. ‘Why explain anything if he can get away with a simple command?’ Then starting out to Dan’s car to help carry in more boxes, she said, ‘Did you make any progress booking our flights to Washington?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he answered. ‘We’ve clocked up enough air miles between us to do this one for free. The accountants will like that. We go next Tuesday, and Mr Landen’s secretary assures me he’ll be available for a whole hour on Wednesday morning at eleven.’

  ‘So magnanimous!’ she said. Then setting down the stand for a water-cooler she helped him put the tank on top, and filled a small paper cup. ‘You know, regardless of whether or not we get hold of Bombola,’ she said, ‘I still think we should go to Paris later today.’

  Finishing his own drink Dan tossed the cup into a black plastic sack. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘At the very least we might be able to grab a couple of shots of him coming or going from his hotel.’

  ‘Exactly. The mysterious Nigerian professor whose assets were frozen by the dead-or-alive guy until January of this year, when suddenly, boing, they’re released again. Add that to his shares in the Phraxos Group, and his meeting at the Kensington Palace Hotel with Tim Hendon, a month before Tim Hendon was murdered … Sprinkle in Katherine Sumner’s presence at that meeting, her known romance with Franz Koehler, and now also with Tim Hendon … And what have we got? OK, nothing that adds up to more than a bag of juicy maybes, but it does comprise the kind of speculation that you and I know very well is going to open a few more doors than are opening right now, if only to throw out some hefty denials – and oh, how incriminating those denials can be!’

  Dan was chuckling. ‘What about this passport thing?’ he asked, starting back out to the car. ‘Any more there?’

  ‘Yes, there is. I spoke to the villa manager last night. Apparently Katherine – or Mrs Hendon, as she called her – and her husband turned up a few days later than their original booking, and stayed the rest of the three weeks. An ingenious move, really, to pose as Mr and Mrs Hendon, whose booking had been made long before the killing and whose name isn’t so uncommon, so, if you’re the villa manager, you probably don’t give any more than a passing thought to the scandal going on in Britain. Obviously they can’t be the same Mr and Mrs Hendon, because there’s not much chance of a dead man and his wife turning up for their Caribbean holiday, is there? So now what we need to know is, who was playing Mr Hendon? Xavier Lachère?’

  ‘Did the villa manager say what he looked like?’ Dan asked, lugging another heavy box back in through the door.

  ‘“Nice looking man. Very quiet.”’ Laurie quoted, going after him. ‘That was about all I could get from her without alerting her to the fact that something was wrong, but I’ll call again later and give it another go. We should go straight after, though, get some interviews with the locals who might have seen Katherine and the mystery man, and some footage of the villa. We might even track someone down who knows where they went afterwards – unless they’re still there, on another island, or in another villa. I need to contact a local hack to start asking questions, especially round Mahoe Bay where Franz Koehler’s place is.’

  ‘Well, if you ask me,’ Dan said, going to help himself to more water, ‘she’s in some exclusive Swiss clinic, recovering from a serious remodelling of the face and reading up on her new life history, all paid for by Herr Koehler himself, while little friend Lachère gets a nice fat reward for minding her and keeping the big bad policemen away.’

  ‘There are two problems with that,’ she responded. ‘First that Koehler’s looking for her himself – that’s if his press statement’s to be believed, of course. And second, why go to the Virgin Islands first, and not straight to the Swiss clinic?’

  ‘They have clinics in the BVIs, don’t they?’

  She nodded. ‘Of course. So OK, maybe you’re right, she went straight to the Caribbean, had plastic surgery, then convalesced at a villa she knew would be free.’

  ‘What about Koehler, are they still questioning him?’

  ‘I don’t know what the game is with him,’ she replied. ‘When you get to that level, none of the normal rules seem to apply. However, Haynes admitted the other day that he believes Koehler really doesn’t know where she is.’

  Dan frowned, then shook his head. ‘Not buying it,’ he responded. ‘Of course he’s going to tell the police he doesn’t know where she is, he’s hardly going to admit he’s got her propping up a bridge in Sydney, or morphing into a Pamela Anderson lookalike at some la-di-da spa in the Bahamas, is he?’

  ‘No. But look at it this way. Gustave Basim, the third person in the flat, obviously knew what happened that morning, and now he’s no longer with us. Katherine also knows what happened, and she’s vanished. The general consensus seems to be that she’s still alive, so is she afraid of going the same way as Gustave Basim? She clearly took part in the killing, either as an accomplice, or as the killer herself, so she can’t go to the police for protection, and though Koehler might have been involved in helping her get away from the scene, since he was in London at that time and l
eft his hotel at an hour that coincided rather neatly with her need for a ride, she’s since realized what a vulnerable position she’s in, so is now on the run from just about everyone.’

  Dan looked thoughtful, then swung round as a voice behind him said, ‘Hi! Anyone home?’

  ‘Gino!’ Laurie cried, jumping up to embrace the old friend she’d just enticed from newspapers into TV. ‘What a lovely surprise. We weren’t expecting you for a fortnight.’

  ‘I know,’ he said, hugging her warmly, ‘but I’ve got a day off, and I thought you might need a hand with the move. Hi, Dan. How’s it going?’

  Dan gave him a thumbs up as he filled another cup from the cooler, then indicating the car he said, ‘There are more boxes out there, or you can start putting up some shelves.’

  ‘OK, in at the deep end,’ Gino responded, rubbing his hands together. Noticing a black Porsche pulling up outside, he looked curiously at Laurie. ‘Is that Elliot?’ he said.

  Glad no one knew how nervous she felt, she nodded.

  His brown eyes widened. ‘So have you two …?’

  ‘No,’ she interrupted, wishing she knew how to put her feelings aside. Hoping that it might in some way distract her, she went to tug the drill out from under the shelves. ‘How shall we go to Paris?’ she said to Dan, while handing the drill to Gino. ‘Train or plane?’

  ‘Probably train,’ Dan answered, glancing at his watch. ‘We could leave Gino in charge here and start making a move, if you’re willing,’ he said to Gino.

  ‘No problem,’ he responded. ‘I’ve got to be back at the office tomorrow, though.’

  Dan nodded, then turned to high-five Elliot as he came in the door. ‘How are you, my friend?’ he said. ‘It’s good to see you.’

  ‘You too,’ Elliot responded, his tall, muscular physique filling the doorway.

  ‘How’s tricks?’ Gino said, giving him a wave.

  Elliot smiled, but his eyes were already moving to Laurie, his permanently austere expression masking anything he might be feeling inside, so whether he was finding this difficult, as it was the first time they’d seen each other since she’d left, she had absolutely no idea.