Flawless

by Tilly Bagshawe

  “Your security camera was knocked out, we believe as much as an hour before the fire began. They knew what they were looking for there as well,” the inspector went on.

  “So what are you saying?” asked Scarlett. “That it wasn’t local kids breaking in on the off chance?”

  “Definitely not,” said the inspector. “That much we know. Unfortunately, that’s about all we know at the moment, Miss Drummond Murray. Which is where we’re hoping you’ll be able to help us.”

  There was never the slightest doubt in Scarlett’s mind that Brogan O’Donnell was behind this. To her, it was the clear culmination of a pattern of threats and escalating minor attacks, the decisive blow against her business that his anonymous henchmen had been promising for months if she didn’t dismantle Trade Fair. But the problem of proving it was evident, even to her. When given a pencil and paper by the police and asked to write out a list of her potential enemies, she was horrified to find that it ran to two pages. Her anticorruption work made her unpopular with a lot of people, not just Brogan. From the cartels to the independent mine owners and dealers, everyone with a vested interest in keeping the diamond supply lines open and the labor costs down had a motive for making her suffer. Add to that her business rivals, disgruntled ex-boyfriends, and the usual lineup of local nut-jobs and the playing field was wide open.

  Nancy, bless her heart, had offered to fly out to London and help deal with everything.

  “I can at least walk Boxie and do the grocery shopping while you get back on your feet,” she protested, when Scarlett refused the offer.

  “Thanks, but there’s actually not that much to do,” said Scarlett sadly. “The insurance claims are all filed, and the investigation itself is out of my hands. The police have as good as admitted to me that they’re never going to find who did it, but they’re going through the motions, and I’ve told them all I can.”

  The remaining big things on her to-do list were the refurbishing of the building, to be paid for out of the insurance money, after which she supposed she would sell it, and the daunting task of starting from scratch, working on some new designs and rebuilding her lost stock. The pieces themselves were insured, thank God, but nothing could insure against the loss of clients, angry that their promised rings and brooches were gone and unwilling to wait the months it would take Scarlett to produce new ones. Worse still, the fire had destroyed all of her sketches, so ideas as well as finished work had been lost. If the aim of the attack had been to sound the death knell for her business, Scarlett had a sinking feeling it might have been successful.

  “Ah, good, I’m glad you’re on time.” Cameron, looking smugly immaculate in a new Paul Smith suit, glanced impatiently at his Rolex, frowning as he picked his way across the sooty debris toward his sister. “Gotta get back to the office by six. Big deal today. China.”

  Among the myriad annoying habits he’d picked up since working for an American bank was this penchant for speaking in staccato, one-word sentences. The implication presumably being that he was far too busy and important a person to be bothered with such trifling matters as conjunctions, or even verbs.

  “Thanks for coming,” said Scarlett listlessly. Emotionally, the last thing she needed in a crisis was to have her tiresome, know-it-all brother around. But Cameron did know about financing and the sort of costs involved in a total business rebuild. It had been a week since the break-in, and she still hadn’t begun to look at the figures. She could use his professional advice. “What do you think?”

  “About what? The building itself?” he sniffed, shaking some offending dust off the toe of his perfectly polished loafer. “Write off. To be honest, it’s so tiny I’m amazed you ever managed to work from here. Far too small for most retail operations, even when you get it shipshape.”

  Scarlett bridled. It had been such a stunning shop in its day, an oasis of calm and beauty. But she didn’t say anything.

  “My advice is to do the cheapest, most basic refit possible and whack it on the market,” said Cameron. “Won’t be worth much, though,” he added tactlessly.

  “I had it valued last year,” said Scarlett, feeling tearful and defensive despite herself. “The appraiser said I might get seven fifty for it.”

  Cameron laughed. “For this mouse hole? I don’t think so, Scar.”

  Inevitably, the conversation deteriorated. Utterly unable to comprehend his sister’s emotional attachment to the business she had begun from scratch six years ago, Cameron fired out one gloomy pronouncement after another, like so many poison arrows. He also felt strongly that if the attack was intended as a warning from the diamond cartels, she should listen to it.

  “You must start acting responsibly, Scarlett,” he said sanctimoniously. “Whoever did this obviously means business. You should drop this silly Trade Fair nonsense and keep your head down before someone gets seriously hurt.”

  “People are already getting seriously hurt,” Scarlett shot back indignantly. “All across Africa they’re dying in unnecessary wars, shot with bullets paid for by the likes of Brogan O’Donnell.”

  “I’m not talking about the bloody Africans,” snapped Cameron. “I’m talking about you. Or Mummy and Daddy. Who knows who these heavies may target next?”

  Scarlett, who hadn’t considered that she might be putting her family in danger, paused momentarily, running a frazzled hand through her hair. Outside, the sun was setting, the daylight dying like a wood-starved fire. Was that what would happen to Trade Fair in the end? Would it peter out with a whimper after all her hard work?

  “But you can’t give in to bullies,” she said eventually, trying to convince herself as much as her brother. “Don’t you see? That’s what O’Donnell’s counting on. That I’ll cave under the pressure.”

  “Oh for God’s sake, Scar, get a grip on reality. I very much doubt if Brogan O’Donnell even remembers your name, let alone took the time out of his business day to supervise this little enterprise.” He ran a hand down the peeling paintwork, pulling off a strip of wall like dead skin. “It’ll be some local dealer you’ve pissed off, some hood with a few thugs on his payroll. I mean, let’s face it: you’re not exactly Bono, the new face of world peace, are you? None of the big boys even know who you are.”

  At this point Boxford, sensing his mistress’s blood pressure rising, took matters into his own paws and made a preemptive strike against Cameron’s trouser leg, clamping the fabric between his powerful jaws and tugging until he produced a satisfying ripping sound.

  “For fuck’s sake!” Cameron howled, shaking his leg uselessly as the spaniel bit down even harder, thumping his tail on the ground in delight. “Can’t you even control your fucking dog? This suit cost me a small fortune.”

  “Boxie, get down!” yelled Scarlett, whose head had started to thump rhythmically and whose temples were now starting to ache. “Boxford! Drop!”

  Giving her a puzzled look, as if the word “drop” meant nothing to him, Boxford continued worrying the remains of Cameron’s right trouser leg until something on the street caught his attention. The next moment he’d bounded over the orange tape and up to a tanned, blond man in jeans and a blue-striped shirt. Squatting down on his haunches, the man petted the dog fondly. Scarlett instinctively smiled, until he looked up and she saw to her horror that it was none other than Jake Meyer, looking as twinkly eyed and pleased with himself as only Jake Meyer could.

  “Hello, Scarlett,” he drawled, his deep, resonant North London accent cutting through the twilight air like a rumble of thunder. “Lovely dog. What’s ’is name?”

  “Boxford,” said Scarlett automatically, forgetting to ask him what on earth he was doing here.

  “And there’s nothing remotely lovely about him,” added Cameron, staring down at his ruined suit in horror, his flabby jowls shaking with rage. “I’ve a good mind to charge you for this,” he seethed at Scarlett. “There’s nothing wrong with that animal that a lethal injection wouldn’t fix.”

  “He was sticking u
p for me,” said Scarlett, wresting Boxford away from Jake with some difficulty and pulling him close. “He could tell you were being vile.”

  “You asked for my advice, and I gave it to you,” said Cameron bluntly. “Your business is finished, and this campaign of yours is downright dangerous. If you carry on with it after this, you’re even more stupid than that mindless animal of yours. See if you can talk some sense into her,” he added to Jake, as he hobbled furiously back to his Porsche.

  Jake stood up and stepped gingerly over the orange tape. Showing a disappointing lack of loyalty, Boxford broke away from Scarlett again and began curling himself affectionately between his legs.

  “Friend of yours?” he asked, nodding toward Cameron’s disappearing car as it sped away in the direction of the City.

  “My brother,” sighed Scarlett. “He’s a banker. I thought he might be able to give me some practical advice, but all he came here for was to rub my nose in it. I assume you’ve come to do the same,” she added bitterly, leaning back against the cleanest part of the wall in the hope it might stop her head from exploding.

  “Why would you assume that?” said Jake amiably. Physically, he was the polar opposite of Magnus: shorter, broader, and blonder, a bull terrier to Magnus’s elegant, long-legged whippet. But he had the same smiling, easy confidence. If she didn’t disapprove of him so thoroughly, she would probably have found it rather attractive.

  “Because you also think Trade Fair is stupid,” she said wearily, “and that I’ve brought all this on myself. Right?”

  “I never said it was stupid, just misguided,” said Jake, idly scratching the top of Boxford’s head.

  “Why aren’t you in LA, anyway?” asked Scarlett suspiciously. “Don’t tell me you’ve tired of fleecing the bimbos of Sunset Boulevard and decided to move back home.”

  “Me? Tired? Never!” Jake grinned. “I’m here on business for a few days, that’s all. I heard you’d been done over, so I thought I’d stop by and—”

  “Gloat?” said Scarlett.

  “I was going to say, see if there was anything I could do to help,” said Jake patiently. “What are you doing for supper?”

  “Supper? Oh, I, er…” Caught off guard, Scarlett wracked her brain for a suitable excuse, but arguing with Cameron seemed to have used up the last ounces of her mental energy. “I’m, er…I was just going to grab a sandwich, actually. There’s so much still to do here.”

  “Like what?” said Jake. “This is a job for the builders, not you and a can of paint stripper. Besides, it’s getting late.”

  He was right, of course. In fact her dinner plans had revolved around opening a bottle of Merlot on the couch at home with Boxford and feeling sorry for herself, but she wasn’t about to admit that to Jake. A small, insane part of her wanted to call Magnus—to discover that he didn’t have a soon-to-be-ex-wife after all and was itching to ride to her rescue on his white horse—but she resisted the urge. This was no time to be wallowing in romantic fantasies. Besides which, on a more practical note, she realized she didn’t have his number.

  “You won’t function properly if you don’t eat a decent meal,” said Jake. Picking up Boxford’s leash from the counter, he clipped it onto his collar, grabbing Scarlett’s tatty brown briefcase with his free hand. “Your dog agrees with me, don’t you, boy?”

  “Traitor,” Scarlett hissed at Boxford, who’d definitely taken a shine to Jake and seemed thrilled that an evening walk was in the offing. But her resolve was waning. A decent meal and some company, even Jake Meyer’s company, suddenly seemed preferable to yet another night at home, drowning her sorrows. “I have to be home by ten,” she said sulkily.

  “Eleven, latest,” said Jake. “I promise.”

  “And I need to go to my flat first, to drop Boxie off and change.”

  Jake looked her up and down. In a pair of tattered jeans and a dark-blue polo neck, with her dark hair pulled back into a tangled bun and only a smudge of day-old black eyeliner on her otherwise unmade-up face, she looked tired but somehow still adorably ravishing. After all the perfectly groomed, blonde mannequins in LA, scruffy brunette chic made a welcome change.

  “You’re fine as you are,” he insisted. “I know this little place in St. John’s Wood; it’s very casual. And the dog’ll be a star there.”

  The “little place in St. John’s Wood” turned out to be a sprawling, six-thousand-square-foot mock-Tudor villa, set back off a leafy, suburban road.

  “What are you doing?” asked Scarlett, as Jake pulled the black Range Rover, his London car, into the drive. “Where’s the restaurant?”

  “This is the restaurant,” he said, laughing. “Welcome to Casa Meyer. Don’t look so panicked. My parents don’t bite, and Mum makes the meanest roast chicken dinner this side of the Edgware Road.”

  Scarlett was about to protest that she couldn’t possibly impose on his mother and had she known he was asking her to a family dinner she’d never have come, when the passenger door opened and she found herself enveloped in the sensory explosion that was Minty Meyer.

  “Lord above, there’s nothing of her! There’s nothing of you!” she screeched, wrapping two podgy arms around Scarlett’s rib cage and squeezing. The scent of Chanel No. 5 was overwhelming and her floral silk shirt so loud that if night weren’t falling Scarlett would have been tempted to put on sunglasses against the glare. “Jake, put the dog in the garden with Bella and get him some liver and water; you know where it is,” said Minty, grabbing Scarlett’s hand without drawing breath. “Come in, come in, come in! Look, she’s shivering with cold, the poor girl, and no wonder, not an ounce of fat on those bones. Doesn’t your mother feed you?”

  “Scarlett doesn’t live at home, Mum,” said Jake, opening a side gate for a thoroughly overexcited Boxford. Bella turned out to be an eager little bulldog with a spring in her step that Boxford clearly felt boded well for their relationship. “She’s a jewelry designer—”

  “I don’t care if she’s the Queen of Sheba; she needs a good meal,” said Minty firmly. “I wouldn’t let you or Danny out of the house looking like skeletons, now would I?”

  Not much danger of that, thought Scarlett, looking at Jake’s enormous trucker’s shoulders straining the cotton of his shirt as he strolled up the front steps.

  “Now stop interrupting me please, Jacob, and go and tell your father to open the wine. And put the fire on!” she yelled after him, as he disappeared into the house, abandoning Scarlett to her clutches.

  In fact, once she’d got used to the volume and the constant prodding and poking—Mrs. Meyer was clearly not a big believer in the idea of personal space and continued to grab, squeeze, and otherwise molest her throughout the course of the evening—Scarlett found herself warming to Jake’s mother. She might be loud and vulgar, but she was also kind and loving, and welcoming in a way that Scarlett’s own mother would never have been to a surprise dinner guest.

  Ushered into a reception room almost the same size as Drumfernly’s Great Hall, but smothered in enough soft furnishings to fit out a Vegas hotel—thick velour curtains in a truly hideous cat-sick pink hung from the windows, tied back with enormous black-and-white silk bows, and every sofa was piled high with silk cushions in a dizzying array of colors and fabrics—Scarlett found herself being forced into a chair and plied with enough appetizers to feed a small African nation. By the time Jake finally reappeared, having fed and watered Boxford and fixed himself a large gin and tonic, she was already starting to feel like a French goose on a foie gras farm.

  “Is she always like this? With the food, I mean,” she whispered, when Minty disappeared into the kitchen in search of yet more caviar blinis. “I’ve just been force-fed more than I normally eat in a week.”

  “This is nothing,” he laughed. “Wait until we sit down to dinner.”

  He wasn’t kidding. The dining room, an even more opulent space than the “lounge” (complete with baronial marble fireplace, full-sized crystal chandelier, and, at the far end
of the room, Minty’s astonishingly tiny wedding dress suspended from the ceiling in a glass case, like a sleeping Snow White), was dominated by a twenty-foot onyx table, on which was spread a feast that reminded Scarlett of childhood history-book pictures of Roman banquets. There were four people eating: Jake, herself, Minty, and Rudy. For this intimate, “casual” family gathering, Minty had laid on a roast chicken each, along with overflowing bowls of floury roast potatoes, parsnips, salads, butter-drenched sweet corn, and a gravy boat roughly the size of a child’s head filled to the brim with delicious-smelling, piping-hot gravy. Having thought she couldn’t manage another bite, Scarlett suddenly felt her stomach give an audible rumble and her mouth start to salivate.

  “This looks incredible, Mrs. Meyer,” she said honestly, as Minty heaped a Ben Nevis of roast potato onto her plate. “I’m so sorry for imposing myself like this on your family meal. Jake never mentioned—”

  “Nonsense, nonsense, we always have last-minute guests on Friday nights. Besides, I enjoy cooking, especially when my Jakey’s home.” She gazed at her son with unashamed admiration, and Scarlett saw in an instant where all the Meyer brothers’ cocksure confidence had come from. Her poor husband, plowing quietly through his own mountainous meal at the head of the table, barely got a look in. “Have you and Jakey been friends for long?”

  “Well, we’re not exactly…” began Scarlett awkwardly, unsure how she might finish the sentence without either lying or being unforgivably rude.

  “We’ve known each other a couple of years,” said Jake, coming to her rescue. “Scarlett’s a designer and a campaigner for mine workers’ rights. She thinks Dan and I are responsible for all the wars in Africa,” he added, mischievously.

  “Don’t be silly, Jacob, why on earth would she think that?” said Minty, impaling a caramelized carrot on her fork and dunking it in horseradish sauce. Turning to Scarlett, she added proudly, “My boys’ diamonds are the best on the market. Take a look at this.”

  For one awful moment Scarlett thought she might have been about to remove the rainbow blouse, as her pudgy, diamond-encrusted fingers delved beneath the fabric, deep into the fjord of her cleavage. Instead, mercifully, she retrieved a platinum chain, on the end of which hung a pendant of such breathtaking vulgarity it was hard to put into words. A sunburst of yellow and pink diamonds, it looked like something 50 Cent might give to his girlfriend, or Indiana Jones might use to unlock the secrets of the Holy Grail.