by Joanna Rees
‘Right.’
‘Which makes you mine for at least the next twenty-four hours.’
Frankie nodded. ‘I guess.’
‘Well, it can’t be that bad,’ he said, pointing out to the view. He pulled a face at her and she laughed.
‘That’s better. Now then, tell you what: while you’re here, why not make yourself useful?’ he said, throwing a script down on the table in front of her. She picked it up and saw that it was for a play. ‘I’ve got a great offer to do a show on Broadway and, if I’m going to do it, I have to commit today. Take a look at it. Tell me what you think. I’m up for the part of Arty.’
Frankie stared back at him blankly. He couldn’t be serious. After what she’d just been through, he wanted her to read a play? Right now? ‘But I don’t know a thing about theatre,’ she said.
Todd shrugged. ‘You watch TV, don’t you?’
‘Sure.’
‘Well, that’s all theatre is: TV up close.’
Frankie tentatively picked up the script. ‘But why me? Why not ask . . . I don’t know . . . your PA, Claire? Someone else in the biz?’
‘No. I need a neutral. Someone who’s not on my payroll. And I like you. You’re smart. I’d like to hear what you think.’
‘But do you want to do theatre?’ she asked. ‘You must get great film offers all the time.’
He leant forward, looking around him to make sure they weren’t being overheard. ‘I know, but the last few reviews have slammed me for playing the same role. And none of these toadies will give me a straight answer. My agent is so scared of losing his commission, he won’t give me any advice. And the press are on side right now, but who knows how long they’ll let me stay at the top?’ He looked at her seriously. ‘You’re a fan. You can tell me. Am I really the same in all my films?’
He stared at her. Frankie felt her throat go dry. Jesus. He was serious.
‘Well,’ she said tentatively, putting the script back down on the table, realizing that this wasn’t about the play at all, but more about Todd’s ego. She chose her words carefully. ‘You always do the same type of movies. You know, all that action-hero stuff. And I guess it’s hard for people to differentiate when you’re so famous.’
Todd frowned.
‘But so what if you’re always Todd Lands? It seems to be working to me,’ she hurried on.
‘You don’t have to pay me compliments. I want the truth.’
‘The truth?’
He nodded, waving his fingertips at her to bring it on.
‘Well . . . it seems to me that the problem is that you’re now too famous for the movies you take on,’ she began. She bit her lip and looked at him. She could see that he really did want her to be honest. ‘Those critics aren’t seeing what you bring to the role, just who you are. No matter what you do on screen, all they see is Todd Lands the celebrity actor. I think you’re a victim of that giant PR machine you’re so fond of.’ Inwardly she winced. Had that been too honest?
Todd nodded and smiled wryly as he thought it over. ‘So maybe Broadway would be a good idea. Prove to everyone that I’ve still got what it takes . . .’
‘Todd, who cares what everyone else thinks? It’s what you think that’s important.’
And right at that moment, Frankie realized that she should follow her own advice. She would find a way of putting things right between her and Alex however long it took. Didn’t he say he’d be going to Tortola? On her birthday? She remembered him writing it down in his study. Well, if Laurent could get her a passport, then Frankie would make damn sure that she’d get herself to the BVIs. Yes, that’s what she’d do. Alex couldn’t ignore her if she was there to meet him.
It wasn’t until later on that night that Frankie had another chance to talk to Todd alone. She was dizzy with exhaustion, but despite everything on her mind, the lunch had been fun. Todd was so magnetic, it was impossible not to get drawn into his circle. Clearly buoyed up with confidence, he’d announced that he’d be taking the role in the Broadway show, much to everyone’s approval.
Now, as they sat in the candlelit orangery, having a nightcap, Todd was finally relaxing.
‘You were very charming at lunch. They all liked you,’ he said. ‘For someone who isn’t my companion, you’re doing a great job.’
Frankie laughed. ‘I thought it was a bit over the top when you told them all that I was your muse.’
‘Who cares?’ Todd said. ‘Half of them are jerks. They’ll spread loads of rumours, I know, but it doesn’t matter as long as I pull off this Broadway gig.’
‘You know, I much prefer you like this,’ Frankie said. ‘The real you rather than that high-energy thing you do. I don’t know how you can turn it on and off.’
Todd smiled and rubbed the side of his face. ‘I know someone else who says exactly the same thing.’ He looked away quickly, embarrassed that such a clearly intimate comment had slipped out.
‘Oh . . . so you do have someone,’ Frankie probed.
Todd was silent for a moment longer. Then he looked into her eyes. ‘Maybe,’ he said.
Frankie smiled. ‘I’ll take that as a “yes”.’
She could tell he was weighing up whether or not to say more. ‘Is this the very well-kept secret you told me about?’ she asked, thinking she might be getting somewhere near the real Todd Lands. ‘I mean, I guess it is. You can trust me. I’m not going to tell anyone anything you tell me, Todd. You saved my life this morning. Besides, according to you, I’m your muse, so I ought to know everything about you.’
‘All right then. I do have someone special,’ he said. ‘And yes, it is very very secret.’
‘OK,’ Frankie said.
‘And you never know,’ Todd said, taking a deep breath, ‘maybe you’ll meet him some day.’
Him? ‘You mean . . .’
Todd blushed, then he put his hand on his chest. ‘Wow! It feels odd saying it.’
‘You’re . . . gay?’ Frankie was staring at him, her mouth open. She was completely stunned, but she also felt relief and hope surge through her. Todd being gay . . . it changed everything.
‘Surprised?’ he asked.
Frankie thought for a moment. No, she wasn’t surprised. The turquoise G-string . . . Suddenly, it all made sense.
‘I told you it was a well-kept secret.’
‘You can say that again.’
Todd looked at her. ‘It has to stay a secret. You must absolutely promise not to tell anyone. Anyone at all. Or my career is finished. I mean it, Frankie. I’ve trusted you and helped you out, but if I’ve made the biggest mistake of my life and you let me down, I swear I’ll sue that gorgeous ass off you. In the limo . . . you signed the contract, remember? And let me tell you, my contracts are watertight. As in totally.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Emma woke suddenly, the wooden ceiling fan blowing papers off the desk in the corner. The power must be back on. Wearily, she got up and opened the shutters, letting in light. She yawned, staring out of the window in the familiar guest suite of David Coulter’s colonial mansion and saw that the storm had finally abated. The world glistened. It smelt fresh, newly washed, but the devastation was everywhere.
She could see where the tiles had been torn down from the roof and smashed on the veranda. A banana tree had been uprooted and now lay across the drive. She leant on the wide wooden windowsill, watching the grey light creep across the horizon and over the lawns to the house. Foliage from the shrubbery had blown everywhere; broken red flowers dotted the lawn, like spots of blood. Clothes lay scattered, ripped from the line. It looked like the site of an air crash.
David’s house was built of stone and had withstood the unpredictable Caribbean weather for two hundred years or more. But now Emma thought of the corrugated iron shacks just down the road from the bottom of David’s long drive and the smiling, waving children in their immaculate school uniforms she’d passed on the drive from the airport yesterday morning. She prayed they’d all survived last night�
�s storm.
Emma rubbed her eyes. Between the howling of the wind and the lashing of the rain against the rattling wooden shutters, she’d slept fitfully, feverishly, her nightmares haunted by ghosts. But she knew that it was pointless crawling back into the bed behind her and trying to sleep now. She couldn’t sleep. And she wondered whether she would ever be able to sleep properly again. Sleep certainly held no appeal. Or relief.
The pain seemed so much worse at night, and the cruellest blow of all came if she did drift off, because for a split second before she woke up she forgot what had happened. She thought that her life was as it should be, that Julian was in bed next to her, that she was inches away from his familiar sleepy embrace.
Only then she remembered – and the pain hit her all over again like a fist.
She missed him so badly, it was as if she’d lost one of her limbs. Sadness overwhelmed her so completely that she was helpless against the enormous waves of grief that washed over her, leaving her feeling capsized and weak.
And without her home, she felt more adrift than ever. She could never have imagined that something so solid – so hers – could be whipped from under her nose like that. But Wrentham, including all her furniture, her art and all the precious little things that had made it a home, had gone. It filled her with a sense of helpless injustice and of violation so profound that she couldn’t shake it.
Now, as always with the morning light, came her focus on the one thing that fuelled her need to go on. One man. One name.
Khordinsky.
Once again, Emma cast her mind back to Natalya Khordinsky at the Gala Lunch, how she’d pronounced that her husband thought that everything could be obtained, and how Emma herself had been so dismissive of such an arrogant assumption.
How safe Emma thought she’d been. How invulnerable. How disparaging she’d felt about those newly moneyed Russians and their vulgar ways.
But she’d been so, so wrong. The Khordinskys had got their hands on Wrentham. She still couldn’t make sense of it, no matter how many times she tried to think it through. It wasn’t possible for them to know that Wrentham was going on the market unless they’d known about the details of the finances controlling the platinum deal. And Julian would never have put Wrentham up – or, more likely, been persuaded to put Wrentham up – as security, if he’d thought for one second that his life was in danger, or that the deal wasn’t certain. It just wasn’t a risk he would have taken.
Which meant that somehow Yuri Khordinsky was involved. He had to be. How else would he have been able to get hold of Wrentham so quickly?
But, as Pim and Susie had pointed out, all of that was just speculation. She had no proof. Not yet anyway. Because that’s what Emma had vowed to herself as she’d stood in the rain looking at Julian’s coffin. She would find proof that Julian wasn’t a crook, or a fool, or a coward. She’d prove to everyone that he’d been swindled right from the start. She wouldn’t have a moment’s peace until she’d done everything she possibly could to uncover the truth.
Because Emma didn’t believe that Julian had committed suicide. Everyone kept telling her to accept it, that it had been a spontaneous selfish act, that he’d obviously seen no alternative. But she knew Julian better than anyone else. He just wouldn’t have done that. Not to himself and not to her. And certainly not for the trite, implausible reasons he’d given in his note. It went against everything she knew and loved about him.
Something didn’t add up. The only reason Julian would ever have sacrificed himself was to save her and his family. Which meant that whoever had perpetrated the fraud over Julian’s platinum mine was truly responsible.
That was why she was here in Tortola staying with David. She was going to start at the beginning of the paper trail. It was here that Julian had registered Platinum Reach; this was where the money had come and where the rot had set in. Emma was determined to find out who else he’d seen and who’d been involved in the company. There had to be lawyers. Accountants. Witnesses or evidence. Something to prove Julian was innocent, that he’d just been duped. That he’d been talked into something that was out of his control.
Emma went back to the bedside and picked up her iPhone. She looked at her mail, but there was nothing new. She opened her saved folder, reading for the hundredth time the last message she’d received from Cosmo.
It was the only communication she’d had from him since their terrible row. She read it now. I’m sorry for the things I said. The less you know the better. But I am determined to clear Dad’s name.
Now her fury over him missing Julian’s funeral had turned to panic. Cosmo was half the man Julian was. What chance did he have against the people who’d brought Julian’s life and dreams crashing down around him?
The less you know the better. What did that mean? What was Cosmo up to?
She emailed him again. It was at least the twentieth reply she’d typed. She didn’t expect him to answer. She’d long ago given up hope of that. He was as stubborn as a mule – even more stubborn than her when he put his mind to it. But she knew he’d read it, wherever he was. Whatever he was doing. Even if, like her, he’d come to the BVIs to trace his father’s business back to the start. He’d read her mail and know she was still here for him, whenever he needed her and whatever he found out. She typed: I’m thinking of you, Cosmo, and sending you my love. Be careful. Don’t try and fix this alone. You are not alone. Call me and I’ll be there.
She took in a deep breath, steeling herself for the day ahead. Someone here must know who else was involved in the company. And she was determined to find them.
Down in Road Town harbour, flotsam marred the choppy blue Caribbean water: storm detritus, palm leaves and litter. Emma had stationed herself with her back to the harbour and its bobbing parade of gin palaces and yachts. She sat outside the front of a busy café on the quayside, assaulted by the loud reggae playing on the radio hanging from the beam above her. But she endured it for the table’s almost 360-degree view of the harbour and the main street with its hotchpotch of dusty red-brick and faded pastel-coloured buildings.
Billboards clung to their sides advertising sun-creams, soft drinks and beers, resorts and strip clubs. Shops, yacht brokers, restaurants and banks jostled for space along the pavement. There were plenty of people too, leaning against walls, perching on motorbikes, sitting on slatted wooden chairs. Flicking through newspapers, puffing on cigarettes and sipping coffees. There were people from all walks of life: beach bums, yachties, gigolos and suits; all of them taking advantage of the relative cool of the morning before they were forced to flee the encroaching humidity and retreat to the cool confines of their shuttered, air-conditioned offices behind the tinted windows above the shop-fronts. Or to brave the hot stoves in the restaurants, or search the beaches for middle-aged women with dollars in their purses and a twinkle in their eyes.
This early-morning scene should have been pretty and inviting, Emma thought, like a snapshot from a tourist-board brochure. But after last night’s storm, there was an unsettled air hanging over it all. Everyone looked on edge; collectively, they had one eye fixed on the horizon, searching for a gathering pall of cloud. And they had one ear listening out for a change in the tinkling of the ships’ rigging in the harbour, which was chiming gently – at least for now – in the breeze.
None of the people gathered here today even dared whisper it, but you could tell they were all thinking the same thing. Hurricane.
More bad weather was forecast. It was all over the papers and websites and on the television news. Emma couldn’t have chosen a worse time to come.
Yet the words of warning splashed across the headlines didn’t bother Emma. She was fixated on two glimmering words on one of the several golden plaques attached to the windowless black door of a thin brick office wedged between a diving shop and a juice bar.
Heavenly House. What a joke. The place was so grim, it looked more like an adjunct of hell. It was the kind of place she would have walked right past if
she hadn’t already known it was there. But she did know, because she had the address. Because the two words on the plaque she was fixating on read PLATINUM REACH.
Two little words.
The beginning of Julian’s end. Emma had been here for over an hour already. Watching. Waiting. But so far no one had turned up for work.
There were eighteen other companies listed on the door of Heavenly House. She’d already Googled the lot. They were all totally disconnected, ranging from pharmaceutical companies to grain-importers. None of them or the people listed as working for them meant a thing.
But still, someone had to work here. Someone who knew something about Platinum Holdings and its link to Platinum Reach. Someone Julian had flown here to see. Someone whom Emma was going to meet, no matter how long she had to wait.
Emma was just ordering her second juice smoothie when she saw a man ride up to the office on a moped smoking a cigarette. He was white and had to be in his fifties; he was wearing a scruffy green cotton suit stretched across his plump frame. Even from across the road she could see a dark V of sweat up his back. She watched him park and unlock the door of the building.
Emma quickly left some dollars on the table and hurried across the road, sprinting to catch the door before it closed.
Inside, it was stifling: no air-con. No reception either, just a single bare lightbulb and a stack of wooden crates blocking a thin corridor leading to a back door and a rickety tiled staircase leading steeply upwards. Emma heard a noise upstairs. Footsteps. She didn’t give herself time to chicken out: she started climbing.
At the top, she knocked on a frosted glass door. ‘Hello?’ she called, pushing it open.
The man she’d seen arrive was still smoking a filterless cigarette. He had bulging eyes and a crooked nose. He looked up briefly from the mound of papers spread across his desk, then he switched on his computer and fan.
‘Yes?’ he said, smoothing his greasy brown hair over his balding head.
‘Platinum Reach,’ Emma said, trying not to choke on the acrid cigarette smoke which filled the room. The shutters were still closed, the small windows shut. ‘Are these the offices?’