Players

by Karen Swan

  ‘What are you going to do?’ he asked, twiddling with her buttons.

  She looked down, shaking her head.

  ‘Tell him about Billy – obviously. He deserves to know. But after that, I don’t know. Things aren’t good at the moment . . . If he wants to be involved with Billy I’ll understand. But . . .’ Her arms dropped to her sides, the cuffs flopping several inches past her hands. ‘But I don’t know if I’ll be able to stay around. Like you said, I don’t think I can bear to watch him play happy families.’

  She opened the doors and stood on the terrace, feeling the heat already pulsing off the sun. He came up behind her and put his hands under the shirt, kissing her neck.

  ‘I don’t want you to go,’ he murmured.

  She turned around to face him and put her arms around his neck, kissing him lustily.

  ‘I have to,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll call you.’ And she ran fleetingly on tiptoes up the dewy clover lawn.

  She didn’t see the photographer returning from a dawn shoot in the deer park. The editor wanted lots of background shots to build up atmosphere and give an insider’s view of what it was to be on the inside of this gilded circle, to capture Harry Hunter at play. But as he stood behind the oak and let the shutter click, taking frame after frame after frame, he knew he was delivering so much more than that. Harry Hunter was playing all right – the lucky bastard – and it had nothing to do with the evocative sound of leather on willow.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Cress was sleeping fitfully on the embattled green leather chesterfield when Rosie came in, jingling a large ring of keys.

  ‘What on earth are you doing here?’ she cried in amazement. Of all the things she’d never expected to see . . . Cress’s hair had mussed itself into an impressive beehive that a dedicated hour of backcombing and a can of hair-spray wouldn’t have been able to achieve, and mascara had dripped off her lashes and mixed with her tears to create a crazy-paving effect. ‘You’re supposed to be in Cornwall.’

  Cress blinked hard a couple of times, trying to work out why her assistant was standing in her bedroom. It only took a New York second to remember.

  ‘I wanted to come in and get ahead. Can’t let another bloody week pass without making some headway,’ she said briskly, her hands automatically going to smooth her swingy helmet of hair and finding that birds had nested there in the night instead.

  She grabbed a mirror out of her desk and looked at herself. She looked like Boadicea off the battlefield – and she felt it too. Her body was stiff from sleeping on the sofa, and she stretched, trying to release the kinks. She pursed her lips and looked at Rosie with raised eyebrows, her fingers laced together in a business-like fashion, trying to feel more dignified than she looked.

  ‘And what exactly are you doing here on a Sunday morning?’ Deflection as defence seemed a good option, until she’d worked out a cover story.

  Rosie shrugged. ‘I usually work Sundays now. It’s the only way to keep on top of the paperwork. That post bag is on steroids.’

  Cress looked at her, amazed. She’d had no idea.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she asked.

  ‘It never came up. D’you fancy some coffee?’

  Cress took in her assistant’s loyalty, bright green shrunken T-shirt and baggy carpenter jeans.

  ‘Excellent idea. Thanks.’

  ‘I’ll pop down to Gino’s. Back in a sec.’

  She bounded off and Cress looked at herself in the mirror again. She looked like a cracked china doll who was beginning to fall to pieces. And she did feel damaged.

  But she wasn’t broken yet. Irrationally, what she felt most of all was grateful. Grateful that Mark hadn’t heard her backtrack last night, flee down the stairs and go back out to the hire car. Grateful that he hadn’t rumbled her, rumbling him. Because then they would have had to have some terrible confrontation, with all her weakness and failings, her neglect, her absence being flung at her.

  And she couldn’t cope with that just now. Not with Harry beginning to challenge their status quo, and the complications with the Wrong Prince author.

  Mark wasn’t expecting her home until today anyway, so that gave her time to think. After all, he hadn’t technically been unfaithful, he’d just been watching. And it could just have been an unfortunate coincidence. He’d probably heard something in the garden and gone to investigate, and just happened to see them – like she had. He may only have been standing there five seconds. Who knew?

  He deserved the benefit of the doubt, she decided, grabbing her make-up from the weekend’s overnight bag and scrabbling around for the make-up remover.

  By the time Rosie returned with a macchiato for herself and a double espresso for her boss, steel was running through Cress’s veins again and she was sitting with her bare, pedicured feet up on the desk, with an immaculately made-up face and wearing an YSL purple silk toga, clasped at one shoulder by a cluster of pearls. Even her defiant hair had slipped back into silky subservience.

  ‘Wow!’ Rosie exclaimed, relieved to see her boss back to her usual controlled self. Something had clearly gone very wrong the night before and Rosie wasn’t buying her story for one second. ‘You look incredible. What a difference ten minutes and a couture dress makes.’

  ‘Hmm? Oh you mean this?’ She pinched an inch of the buttery fabric. ‘Yes. It was the only thing left in my bag that didn’t stink of deer.’

  She was holding the manuscript of The Wrong Prince in her hands.

  ‘We need to get on to the Box Shop.’

  ‘Already done it,’ Rosie smiled, watching Cress’s surprise pop over her face. ‘I went in yesterday, after I spoke to you. It’s pretty near to where I live anyway. I’m in Parsons Green, so it was no bother.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And it turns out my room-mate from uni is their branch manager.’

  Rosie smiled at her boss’s expression. She passed over a piece of paper.

  ‘Forty-three Felden Street,’ Cress read. ‘There’s no name?’

  ‘No. Client doesn’t have to supply one. It’s one of the perks of using a private company apparently. More privacy.’

  ‘Oh, great!’ Cress slumped back in the chair.

  ‘We’ve still got the address though. I’ll go round now if you like and knock on some doors. You go home and see Mark and the kids, and I’ll give you a call if I come up trumps.’

  Cress didn’t need to consider the offer.

  ‘No, no. Not necessary, I’ll catch them later. This is too important. We’ll go together.’

  And with that, she picked up the keys for the hire car – an azure-blue Seat, all that had been available in the depths of Truro late on a Saturday afternoon in high season – and slipped on her thong sandals, looking a ridiculously glamorous creature at 10.49 a.m. on a Sunday morning.

  Within minutes the Seat’s bright blue nose poked out on to the New Kings Road, where the flower sellers promised never to sell carnations, gerberas, gypsophila or gladioli, and where the charity shops looked like Bond Street on sale. Cress waited for an opening as the black cabs and red buses and yellow lambos streamed by, no one even thinking to let her itty-bitty blue car out into the flow.

  Cress idly watched the pedestrian buzz – teenage girls in denim minis and Uggs here, continental women in expensive paisley scarfs there. Unlike Nappy Valley, where almost everyone belonged to a nuclear family unit, this area was a melting pot of personalities and types and generations: ambitious city boys buying their first flat with their bonuses; students renting in bedsits; pensioners trying to do a weekly shop on a budget of £38 per week, then shuffling back to their £2m three-storey homes they’d owned since the sixties and bought for £1,500.

  After four minutes, a kind cabbie took pity on her and let her out, and with a hundred-yard sprint and two right turns, they swung into Felden Street. Cress had driven by the end of the road hundreds of times, but she’d never had reason to turn in here. It was populated with lots of tall narrow ho
uses with pretty paned windows and ice-cream-coloured stucco walls. The gardens were well tended and mostly mature, being generally too small to convert into off-street parking spaces. Cress idled along, counting down the numbers. Fifty-nine, fifty-seven, fifty-five, fifty-three, forty-nine, forty-seven, forty-five, forty-three. Aha. There it was.

  It was an innocuous-looking building. It didn’t have the tonal splash of the pinks melding into lilacs, melding into blues, further up the street. Rather, it was putty-coloured pebbledash, with a varnished pine door and plastic double-glazing. The garden had been concreted over, but there was no car parked on it, simply an unruly collection of bins, most of which had lost their lids. A strip of doorbells ran down the side of the front door.

  Cress cheered up. Whoever lived here wasn’t rich. They needed money. They needed her.

  With characteristic cheek, Cress swung the little car into the drive – she’d be damned if she was going to swell the mayor’s coffers any more than she had to – knocking over a couple of the bins as she struggled without her parking sensors.

  She and Rosie got out and walked up to the front door. There were no names next to the bells.

  Cress rang one at random.

  A minute passed. She tried another. Nothing.

  They pressed all five bells, but still nothing.

  Cress took a couple of steps back and looked up at the building. It faced her blankly. No curtains twitched and all were open.

  They were just opening the door of the little blue car when they heard the sound of a deadbolt being pushed back behind the pine door. They paused, mid-action, and waited for it to open. When it did, they found themselves face to face with a tiny, very lined little woman with eyes as small as a shrew’s. She wore a headscarf over her hair, which made her look like a Hungarian doll, and she was wearing a polyester housecoat, decorated with lime and pink flowers.

  ‘Hello,’ Cress said in a patronizing tone, clasping her hands together in front of her as though she was about to burst into song. ‘I wonder if we could trouble you for a moment.’

  The little woman’s eyes narrowed to pinpricks, looking like full stops on a crumpled piece of paper. She didn’t trust the effete manners of her neighbours. They only ever extended to plummy-voiced freeholders, and certainly not to immigrant labourers living in dingy bedsits. The postcode was the only thing they shared in common.

  ‘We’re looking for somebody . . .’

  ‘No, no, I know nothing,’ the old woman said immediately, shaking her head and going to shut the door. ‘Leave alone.’

  ‘No, wait, please. We’re looking for a writer.’

  The woman stopped closing the door, and although she didn’t open it wide, she held it in place. She was listening.

  ‘We want to offer him a deal. Lots of money. We want to help him.’

  ‘No know writer.’

  ‘Are you sure? Brendan Hillier?’

  ‘No Brendan here.’

  ‘You’re absolutely sure about that?’

  ‘I sure.’

  ‘Right.’ Cress sagged. She shook her head wearily. They were wasting their time. ‘Sorry for troubling you,’ she said. ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘Is Bridget,’ came the voice at the door.

  Cress whirled around. ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Is no Brendan Hillier. Is Bridget Hillier.’

  ‘Bridget Hillier? Is she here?’

  ‘Never see her.’

  Christ – give me a break, Cress thought.

  Then an idea struck her. She clasped her hands piously together again.

  ‘I don’t suppose you would be so kind as to let us have a look at her mail tray, would you?’

  The door started to close again.

  ‘I’d make it worth your while,’ she said hurriedly, reaching for her bag. She realized suddenly how incongruous she must look, wearing a cocktail dress in the middle of a Sunday morning and offering a little old lady a bribe. ‘I just want to see if a letter I wrote has arrived.’ She shrugged with what she hoped came across as innocence – not an easy look for her to pull off – and held out a £20 note.

  The little old lady could move surprisingly fast when the mood took her, and she snatched the note before opening the door sullenly.

  ‘Thank you,’ Cress said.

  A row of plastic boxes sat on a shelf just inside the door, each one marked with A, B, C or D. The C box was overflowing, and as Cress looked around, she saw that an overflow pile had begun to rise in a corner on the floor.

  Most of the post had company postmarks, so she was able to identify the senders without opening the mail – Carphone Warehouse, BT, London Electricity, DVLA, HM Customs, Pure cashmere catalogues, Coco de Mer brochures, the White Company – but precious little had a hand-written envelope, and Cress’s letter wasn’t in the pile.

  Cress sat on her knees, her silk dress snagging slightly on the seagrass floor. She smiled up wearily at the little old woman, who had folded her arms across her low-slung bosom and was tapping her foot impatiently. Twenty pounds didn’t buy more than a few minutes on the parking meters round here, much less for rifling through people’s mail.

  Cress reached up to the shelf to pull herself to standing, and as she did so, she noticed a separate bundle of mail that had been stacked away from the others.

  ‘What’s this?’ she asked. ‘Who does this belong to?’

  The old lady shrugged impatiently. ‘Nobody know. No name. Eez pest.’

  Cress looked at the address: PO Box 598.

  ‘That’s it!’ she cried, faltering as she saw how many there were. ‘Those are my letters! Oh, I’m so pleased! I thought we’d lost them for good.’

  The old lady frowned at her.

  ‘Letters?’ Rosie said. ‘Don’t you mean . . .’

  ‘Precisely,’ Cress said quickly. ‘Well, we may as well take them back if they’re just sitting there. They contain confidential information,’ she said confidingly to the old lady, who was looking increasingly sceptical.

  ‘And of course, we must thank you – again –’ she said, handing over another twenty, ‘for being so kind as to assist us.’

  The old lady smiled at last. ‘Eez pleasure.’

  Cress pushed the bundle of letters into her bag and they went back to the car.

  ‘Bridget never here,’ said the old lady, the bribe loosening her tongue like liquor. ‘But her daughter some time.’

  ‘Really? I don’t suppose you’d happen to know her name.’

  ‘Eez Amelie.’

  ‘Amelie?’ Amelie Hillier. Finally, she was getting somewhere. ‘Thank you! Thank you very much,’ she smiled.

  She had two new names. She had her competitors’ letters. She knew she was closing in on her man.

  Chapter Thirty

  England whizzed past the window, but Tor saw none of it. Not the magnificent stained-glass windows of Ely cathedral glinting in the morning sun, nor the centuries-old trees of Thetford Forest shedding their summer coats, nor the ancient walls of the Sandringham estate standing as proud as any soldier, nor the imperious and splendid colleges of Cambridge bleaching in the sunshine. She didn’t notice how the winding coast roads, dusted with sand and tickled by reeds, gave way to marshy fens, and then to traffic lights and dual carriageways, or how the sudden rush of chimneys introducing London’s outer boundaries sat on the rooftops, smokeless and decorative.

  The unopened copy of The Times sat on the vinyl-topped table. She hadn’t got past the front page. She hadn’t needed to. Global disasters couldn’t compete with the implosion of her world, yet again.

  Her eyes flickered down and she took in Amelia’s emerald satin dress again, the way it lifted her swollen bosom, how those clever little pleats beneath the bust-line created just enough fabric to accommodate that teeny hint of bump, without adding inches to her hips.

  James photographed well, she thought, what she could see of him. He was half cropped out, but he looked bemused, hanging back a bit to let the photographers get their
shot of the star, his eyes down, but his mouth in a wide smile, an insouciant hand in his pocket.

  Tor had long been of the opinion that most men couldn’t carry off black tie. They looked like schoolboys in their first suit, too starched and aware of what they were wearing. But he looked good in it, wearing it with all the ease of pyjamas. He was buttoned up, showing off the jacket’s immaculate cut, but all Tor saw was the spread of his shoulders, and remembered how the barathea had rippled beneath her fingers that night.

  Three months. That was what Amelia would have been when they’d gone to bed. Had he known? Surely he must have. She’d always known she was pregnant by seven weeks . . . He had to have known. It was his bloody job to know. He couldn’t not have known.

  She felt the tears threaten but she sniffed quickly, trying to pull herself together. Not that it mattered. The first class carriage, bought for a £5 upgrade offer, was practically empty. The commuters were already at their desks and the only other passenger was an elderly man in checked golfing trousers and a trilby, doing the crossword and stuck on 15 across.

  She dropped her head back against the headrest and closed her eyes, letting the banished memories from that night, only two weeks ago, flood her senses, flushing her cheeks with shame and – she hated herself for it but it didn’t change the bloody fact – desire.

  He’d known but he’d still pursued her. When she’d said she was going to Harry, he’d actually barred the door. He simply couldn’t countenance losing out to Harry Hunter. Not again. Harry had stolen Coralie from him – wasn’t that what Kate had said? He’d seduced her just for the principle of getting in first. There was no greater turn-on than winning to these alpha males.

  She lifted her head sharply and looked, unseeing again, out of the window. He was detestable. The lowest of the low. A liar and a cheat. And that wasn’t even bringing up what he’d done to Kate and Monty. Or Hugh. Clearly, he was a man who couldn’t bear to lose, whatever the costs, whatever the consequences. She felt the hate and the fury flash around her blood. She hated him. She really did. She really, really hated him . . . She took a deep breath and tried to capture the moment. She was going to hold on to this feeling and sustain it and be inured to him once and for all. Because she hated him.