Do Not Disturb

by Tilly Bagshawe

  On cloud nine, Honor skipped into town to meet him, but her euphoria soon vanished when she heard the rate of interest they were offering.

  “That’s daylight robbery!” she gasped indignantly, the figures swimming before her eyes. “You’ve known me since I was born, Randy. How can you even think of ripping me off like that?”

  “It’s a competitive rate, Honor,” the old man insisted sanctimoniously. “If you’d prefer an equity partner, by all means go and look for one. But I think you may find it harder than you anticipate. Hotels are always a high-risk proposition, especially when you’ve got one as successful as the Herrick already established up the road. All commercial real estate’s looking very soft right now.”

  Not as soft as your backbone, thought Honor, mutinously. But she desperately needed the money. With a loan this size she could guarantee finishing the construction on time. She couldn’t afford to refuse, and they both knew it.

  At least she could enjoy the small comfort of knowing that Luxe America, the grand project Lucas had been so insufferably arrogant about in Vegas, had yet to get off the starting blocks. Bogged down in a complicated, multinational lawsuit with Connor Armstrong (funded, or so it was rumored, by Anton Tisch), he and his new American partner were forbidden to start work until the case was settled. Crushed under a pile of injunctions fatter than the Koran, they had no choice but to sit on their hands for the foreseeable future.

  Lucas’s enforced absence from East Hampton was a bonus for Honor, but it didn’t mean he wasn’t on her mind. Ever since Vegas she’d been plagued by flashbacks of their night together. She tried hard to focus on the negative: his arrogance the morning after, how dismissive he’d been of her plans to rebuild Palmers. But the physical memory of his touch still haunted her. More than once she’d woken in the middle of the night, after a particularly erotic dream, feeling so frustrated that she’d had to throw on her gym shorts and go for a run just to get it out of her system.

  Reaching the end of the strip of turf, she switched off the rickety old weed-whacker and turned around to admire her handiwork. Not bad, especially considering that the closest she’d come to manual labor growing up was handing her dirty laundry to the maid. Petra and her cronies could make fun of her all they liked. Honor didn’t care. When this place was finished, they’d all be eating their words. Trendy, flash-in-the-pan hotels like the Herrick always burned themselves out in the end. That was the nature of the beast—no one place could remain the It-spot forever. However high-end they were, and however hard they tried to differentiate themselves, the Tischens were a chain. So were the Luxes, whatever Lucas might claim. Only Palmers was a oneoff. Unique. Only Palmers had the magic.

  It was hard to define what made a hotel a classic. Even Honor wasn’t sure she could put it into words. All she knew was that whatever alchemy it took, the Palmers of her grandfather’s day had had it in bucketloads.

  And she vowed that, by this time next year, her version was going to have it too.

  Walking back to her hotel room in the sweltering, ninety-degree heat, Sian felt the weight of the world on her bony, sunburned shoulders.

  She was in Grand Cayman, on the last leg of an exhausting paper trail that might or might not throw more light on Anton Tisch’s links with the corrupt Azerbaijani government. Right now, unfortunately, her money was on the latter option. Or rather, Ben’s money, seeing as that was what she was spending.

  The last three months had been the most exciting, hardworking, and frustrating of her life. Tisch was a uniquely compelling subject, and unraveling the murky depths of his past had rapidly morphed from a professional interest into a deeply personal obsession. Regularly putting in eighteen-hour days, which often involved skipped meals, she’d now reached the point where she even dreamed about Anton at night, his pale, waxy, emotionless face competing with Ben’s freckled, broken-nosed loveliness for her unconscious’s attention.

  But as driven as she was, she constantly seemed to be moving one step forward and two steps back. An unexpected source would suddenly pop up from nowhere, providing her with the name and address of one of Anton’s underage playthings, then she’d travel halfway across Europe to discover that the girl was too drugged out of her mind to make a statement. Unsolicited letters, hinting darkly at possible involvement with the Russian Mafia and ex-KGB underworld, had Sian buying a plane ticket to St. Petersburg, only to find that her British Press Association accreditation wasn’t recognized and she was denied access to even the most basic documentary evidence. Other letters, threatening letters, had also started hitting her and Lola’s doormat with depressing regularity. Sian told Ben about the first one, from some illiterate Eastern bloc hood with an overactive imagination and a well-developed knife fetish. But Ben had overreacted so massively, threatening to pull the plug on the whole story if she put her personal safety at risk, that she’d kept mum about the rest of them.

  The frustrations of the investigation were nothing, however, compared to the torture of working with Ben. As the weeks rolled by and the case against Anton built, Sian spent more and more long evenings over at his apartment, poring over documents and planning the next prong of attack. At the beginning, Bianca had taken off and left them to it. But lately, perhaps sensing the longing that poured out of Sian like water through a sieve and wanting to guard her territory, she’d taken to hanging around, even taking a nominal interest in the story herself. Never anything less than physically perfect, she lolled on the couch next to Ben in her skinny-rib sweaters and spray-on fucking jeans, resting a flawless manicured hand on his thigh in a gesture of casual possessiveness that made Sian want to leap up and bite her, like a snake. Of course, she felt desperately ashamed of her hostility. Bianca was so self-evidently a good and loving person, and much more deserving of Ben than she was. But she couldn’t help it.

  Like a horror movie she couldn’t switch off, she played every glance, touch, and gesture over and over in her mind, analyzing Ben’s responses to Bianca and to her with the obsessive precision of a microbiologist poring over a single cell. Often she thought she noticed him distancing himself from Bianca, withdrawing eye contact or shifting positions when she came and sat next to him. Occasionally, he even seemed to look lingeringly at Sian herself, or to jump with the same high-voltage shock that she did when their hands accidentally brushed against each other. But perhaps this was just wishful thinking, in both instances? His wedding to Bianca, scheduled for this August, was still very much on. And despite numerous opportunities, he hadn’t made the slightest pass at Sian in the twelve long weeks they’d been working together.

  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 watchin
g 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.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  SIX 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.