Players

by Karen Swan

  Cress sipped her tea and looked at the information thoughtfully. So she lived in Switzerland? Well, that explained why she was never at the Felden Street flat. But then why use a British PO box number? Was the daughter using it? She had to find Amelie.

  She crossed the room, deciding she’d better unpack before Robert, in all his efficiency, disobeyed orders and did it for her. The children were down at the pool with Greta, and wouldn’t be back for at least another hour, and Mark was catching the late flight over from New York this evening so there wasn’t any danger of him walking in.

  She picked up her butterscotch leather Coach file and pulled out the reams of paperwork. Contracts, drafts, proposals. She held the wedge, scanning for the glossy cover, but even before her brain processed what her eyes could see, she knew it wasn’t there. Frowning, she put her hand back in.

  Where was it? Jesus! She searched again, more frantically, but as she felt the soft hide brush her hands on both sides, there was no disguising the fact that the bag was empty.

  Dropping it, she stood up and walked around the room blindly, her hands raked in her hair, her breath rapid. She couldn’t have left it! She’d gone there specifically to get it. How could it not be in her bag . . . ?

  And then she remembered. She’d dropped her phone, getting it out of her handbag. It had rolled under one of Tor’s dining room chairs. She’d put the envelope down on a box as she got on her hands and knees to reach it. And then – then what happened? She closed her eyes and tried to concentrate. Tried to be calm.

  Rosie. It had been Rosie on the phone. They’d talked about the artwork for Harry’s new cover, and she’d locked up while Rosie had gone through the strapline options. Shit! Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit! The manuscript – it must still be on the box.

  It was safe enough where it was. The only other person with keys was Tor, but she needed it here. Now! Whatever was going to happen out here clearly couldn’t happen without it and she couldn’t afford to keep it in her possession. If she didn’t give it up – extricate herself now, while she still could – she would be implicated too.

  Think, Cress! Think!

  She paced the floor, her mind racing, her eyes wide. Then she ran to her handbag and grabbed the offending phone. Frantically she punched in the numbers for Monty’s apartment, where Tor and the kids had stayed last night, before going on to the airport.

  Monty – who was driving the Summershills to the airport – picked up.

  ‘Monty, I need to speak to Tor!’ she yelled.

  ‘Cress, is everything alr––’

  ‘Yes, yes. I just need to speak to her now!’

  ‘Tor, it’s for you,’ Monty said, handing over the phone. ‘She’s in one of her frenzies,’ he said quietly.

  Tor rolled her eyes.

  ‘Hi, Cress,’ she said distractedly, as she flipped through the passports. ‘What’s wrong? Monty says you’re frantic.’

  ‘I am. I am.’ Cress paused as she tried to think about how to phrase it. ‘I need your help.’

  ‘You’re not sure about the wall colour?’

  ‘Huh? No, no, it’s not that. I haven’t been over to the apartment yet. Tor, I really need you to go to Big Yellow Storage.’

  ‘What, now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But we’re just about to leave.’

  ‘I know, but this is really important.’

  She heard Tor sigh with frustration. ‘Cress! What can be so important in the lock-up that you need me to risk missing our flight?’

  ‘There’s some paperwork I need. I really need it. It’s on a box on the left as you go in. You can’t miss it. It’s a Littlington Hall brochure.’

  ‘A Littling–– Cress, you can’t be serious! What do you need that for in LA?’

  ‘I just do, Tor! I can’t explain. I’m in a horrid rush. I’m late for a meeting,’ she lied. ‘Please. If you go now, you’ll make it.’

  ‘But it’s in the opposite direction to the airport.’

  ‘Thanks, babe, you’re such a star! I massively appreciate it. I’ll tell you everything when I see you. OK, bye!’

  ‘Wait, I –– ’ But she had gone.

  Tor looked at the phone and shouted at it crossly. ‘Oh, for God’s sake! Kids, in the car now please. We’ve got to go. Now!’

  Tor sat back in her seat and gave a huge sigh of exhaustion. Since Cress’s phone call, it had been pedal-to-the-metal trying to get everything done in time. Traffic around the storage centre had been shocking, and the fact that Monty drove her car like a sofa didn’t help. Meanwhile Marney had cried the whole way because she’d left behind her favourite comfort blanket in the rush, and Oscar had tripped and got a nosebleed because his shoes were on the wrong feet.

  Tor looked up and down the row of seats at the children, who were now settled with comics, colouring pencils, sweets and round-the-clock films. She took a sip of her gin and tonic and closed her eyes. She could relax at last.

  Tor wondered how Harry’s apartment looked. She had to admit she was excited to actually be getting to see it. She couldn’t wait to see the Reynolds in it. The red tape for exporting the painting had been shocking, and she had initially only been coming out to take possession of it at Harry’s address. But once Cress had got wind that she had to go to LA, the whole trip had snowballed and now here she was, with the whole family in tow, attending the Oscars too, as part of Harry and Cress’s party, before they all went to Disneyland together.

  Even Hen was coming. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles was putting on a major exhibition of Christian Dior, and, as one of his favoured models, they had asked her along as a guest of honour. She’d packed up twelve museum-quality pieces of vintage couture and they were flying with her at the front of the plane.

  Tor took another sip of her drink and looked out of the window. Cress had some serious explaining to do. It was just as well the flipping brochure had been exactly where she’d said it would be, else they wouldn’t have made it. They’d only just got there with a few minutes to spare before the check-in desk closed. She’d even had the nerve to text her – she didn’t dare ring again – and instruct her to put the brochure in her bag, not in the hold. I mean, really? What could possibly be so important?

  Tor fished around in her bag and took out the prospectus. She had to make a decision about whether to take up Marney’s place in Year One by Easter, six weeks away. The school had agreed to hold a place over for her, for compassionate reasons, for this year, but they were heavily oversubscribed and if she wasn’t going to take them up they needed to offer it to someone else.

  She looked at the cover, as glossy as Vogue , with photogenic children playing in the strategically planted daffodils and swinging from monkey bars, their straw boaters seemingly surgically attached.

  Tor took another sip of her drink. Now that the money had come through from Planed Spaces, she could afford – in principle – to send Marney there, to pick up life in London again. She had just renewed the tenants’ contract for another six months, but it was up at the beginning of September and she knew she had to make a decision about where their lives were going to be based.

  She thumbed idly through the pages, blankly acknowledging the techno white boards and IT suites, flashy recording studio and pool. She liked the uniform too, which she knew shouldn’t count, but actually did.

  She flipped through to the back cover, and was checking the termly fees and additional extras (of which there were many) when Millie scrambled up to sit on her knees and knocked Tor’s arm, sending the gin everywhere.

  ‘Millie! Be careful! Look what you’ve done,’ she tutted. Luckily, the pages were so highly glossed that the drink collected in mercurial clumps and skittered off them without soaking through. But the old brown envelope tucked into the back cover was so old and crinkly, it absorbed it like blotting paper.

  Tor quickly put the remains of her drink down on Millie’s table, and pulled out the paperwork, wiping it with the sleeve of her jum
per.

  She wiped away the excess liquid from the worst affected sheets at the top of the pile and began blowing on them. It looked like they’d be OK. Did it matter? What was it anyway? She eyed the papers. A manuscript?

  A piece of thick parchment was paper-clipped to the top, and typed with the words:

  ‘Bright with names that men remember; loud with names that men forget.’

  Don’t let him be forgotten. Do the right thing.

  Tor frowned. What did that mean? She thought . . . she thought she’d heard that somewhere before.

  She turned the note over but the other side was blank. She looked at the next sheet. It was a title page.

  Scion

  by Brendan Hillier

  Beneath that was written, in faded red ink:

  July 17th 1989

  I’d be grateful to get your feedback on this. It’s taken two years but I hope you agree that it’s got something.

  Kind regards,

  B. Hillier

  Tor gawped at the pages and read them again. It couldn’t really be saying what it was saying, could it? I mean, it couldn’t be real. Surely, it was a joke. Scion was Harry’s book. It was what had made him. He owed everything to that story – his fortune, his reputation. Hell, he was about to get an Oscar for it.

  But this – this clearly suggested the book had been written by another man.

  She looked back at the cover note . . . do the right thing . . . and closed her eyes in quiet despair as the true scale of her friend’s ambition dawned upon her. The stress headaches, the war with Harry . . .

  It had been too much to resist. Cress clearly wasn’t anywhere close to doing the right thing.

  Cress took out her earplugs, pushed the mask off her eyes and was deliberating on what to do next to kill time without actually doing anything that involved moving her head, when she saw the red light flashing by the phone. She picked it up. The connection from the in-flight phone was crackly.

  ‘Cress, it’s Tor. I’ve got the paperwork you wanted.’

  Pause.

  ‘We need to talk.’

  Chapter Fifty

  Tor found Cress sitting by the pool, sucking in her tummy and ignoring the children, who were doing handstands with Greta underwater – not because she didn’t want to see their latest accomplishment, but because the sight of Greta in a bandeau bikini was more than she could bear.

  ‘What have you got yourself into?’ Tor said quietly as she sat down, still in her jeans.

  Cress didn’t say anything, just quivered silently behind her magazine – not with fear, but with relief. Someone knew. Thank God someone knew! Ever since she’d picked up Tor’s message, the minutes had shuffled reluctantly round the clock as she’d waited and waited for Tor to cross the Atlantic and then the whole of the United States, so that they could have this quiet, aghast conversation.

  ‘Who is he? Who is Brendan Hillier?’

  Cress dropped her magazine and Tor could see, even behind her giant shades, how exhausted she was. How long had she been carrying this secret?

  ‘Well, he’s dead,’ Cress said baldly. ‘A dead writer who wrote Scion. That’s about all I know.’

  ‘That’s all?’

  Cress shrugged. ‘Believe me, I’ve been trying to find out more about him. The death certificate says he died in August 1989. Diabetic coma.’

  ‘August ’89? The date on his covering note says he sent it in July.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Who was he sending the book to in 1989?’

  Cress shrugged. ‘I assume to the person who sent it to me. But I don’t know who that is.’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  Cress shook her head.

  ‘Someone served up Harry Hunter on a plate to you and you have no idea who that person could be? Don’t you think that’s rather dangerous? How do you know they don’t want a pound of flesh from you too?’

  Cress bit her lip. ‘Well, I think they do, now.’

  Tor frowned at her.

  Cress’s face collapsed. ‘All they asked me to do was “the right thing”. I was supposed to expose him. Blow the whistle. But I didn’t! Why didn’t I?’ She clenched her fists into a ball and punched her thighs. ‘I creamed the profits from Harry’s lies for myself and to consolidate Sapphire’s position in the market.’

  Tor shook her head, despairing and disappointed.

  Cress sighed. ‘And now there’s a new demand. That’s why you had to bring out the Scion manuscript. He wants it back – whoever he is. He said Harry’s time is up. I was supposed to expose him, but I didn’t. So I guess now he’s going to do it himself.’

  ‘So then you’re out of the loop?’ Tor said, brightening a little.

  ‘Or in the frame,’ Cress replied miserably. ‘What if he chooses to implicate me with Harry’s lies? I didn’t do what he asked in the first place. Quite frankly, he should drop me in it. I’m no better than Harry.’

  A waiter came up.

  ‘Oh, um, a Perrier please. Cress?’

  Cress shook her head, and then, after a moment, changed her mind and called the waiter back. ‘Actually, I’ll have an iced towel.’

  ‘Well, at least all this explains why the two of you have been at each other’s throats.’ She paused, thinking. ‘In fact, under the circumstances, you both appear to have behaved reasonably well. At least he’s only been trying to discredit you through the media.’

  ‘Tor, he’s damn near broken up my marriage and my family.’

  ‘Yes. But he could have done a lot worse than that. Your house could have been ransacked, the children . . .’

  ‘Tor, don’t!’ Cress cried, sitting bolt upright.

  But Tor shook her head. ‘Think about it, Cress! You’re blackmailing the most famous man in the world. You can’t honestly think he’d let you get away with it? You’d have given up that manuscript in an instant if he’d gone directly for your family, and he’d have been in the clear. You’ve been unbelievably lucky that he’s not entirely without scruples.’

  Tor’s Perrier and the iced towel arrived, and Cress immediately covered her face with it, her hands up to her head, letting her tears soak into the chill as she realized how much she’d put her family in jeopardy.

  Tor leant forward and squeezed her leg. ‘Cress, I’m not trying to frighten you. I’m just saying you’ve been very lucky. But we need to get rid of that manuscript – give it back to whoever wants it – and then let Harry know it’s gone too. You need to remove yourself from this equation completely. Let whoever’s after him deal with him themselves. It sounds like they’re going to anyway, now.’

  ‘But I don’t know who that is, Tor – I’ve got no idea who wants it back.’

  ‘Well, they’ll be in touch if they made you bring it out here,’ Tor said.

  Cress stared at her friend who was trying so hard to make this all go away.

  ‘Where is the manuscript anyway?’ Cress asked suddenly.

  ‘I just left it in your suite.’

  Cress gasped. ‘You did what?’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Tor reassured. ‘I hid it under the mattress. Even I knew better than to leave something like that lying around.’

  Cress stood up and pushed her feet into her flip-flops. ‘Well, we’d better put it in the safe.’

  They went over to the lifts and got in, Tor pressing the button for the sixth floor.

  They sped up.

  ‘You’re panicking over nothing,’ Tor muttered, as Cress put the key in the door. ‘I’m not a complete . . .’

  The scene that greeted them left them both speechless. Clothes were everywhere, cakes trodden into the carpet, tea spilled over the bed, the red Valentino dress torn, the mattress half on the floor.

  ‘No!’ Cress cried, as her brain processed what her eyes were seeing. She ran over to the bed, trying to lift the mattress, but it was no good.

  She knew even before she got there that the manuscript had gone.

  The hotel staff had no r
ecord of a Robert ever having been employed by the hotel. In fact, to Cress’s mortification and fury, her suite didn’t come with butler service at all, and nothing they did – replacing her Valentino dress with an identical replacement, upgrading her to the presidential floor – could comfort her.

  ‘It’s Harry!’ she wailed. ‘He’s set me up, don’t you see? He got me to take the Scion manuscript – my leverage against him – out of hiding and to bloody bring it to him! The bastard! The bastard! There never was a plan to expose him. He’s tricked me. He’s stolen it back!’

  Chapter Fifty-one

  Tor stopped and blinked as she stepped out into the blinding sunlight, raising her arm to shield her eyes. It was eight o’clock, and she was surprised to see that the terrace was already full. She had assumed everybody would choose room service, today of all days, but there was a carnival atmosphere about already and the excitement at the day’s forthcoming activities was palpable. As she looked around, Tor realized she recognized at least one person at every table, and she put her arms around the children’s shoulders, less as a protective measure than as a way of guaranteeing they didn’t break away and cause chaos and destruction.

  Yellow parasols were opened above teak tables, casting not shadows but pools of sunny light on to the limestone floor and bathing the A-list diners in gold. Le monde dorée, she thought to herself.

  ‘Look, Mummy, there’s Aunty Cress and Uncle Mark,’ Marney said happily, pointing towards the Pellings, who were eating breakfast in uncharacteristic silence. Cress had her giant shades on already, and even beneath the yellow parasol she looked bleached in the morning sun.

  They made their way over. ‘Quietly, please, Marney. People want to eat their breakfast in peace. And don’t run,’ she hissed, as Marney broke into a gallop.

  ‘Hi, Tor,’ Mark said, getting up and kissing her on both cheeks. He waved over a waiter. ‘Could you put another table next to this one please?’

  Tor stood back a little while the waiters moved tables and chairs to accommodate them. ‘How are you, Mark? When’d you get in?’