Maestra: The most shocking thriller you'll read this year

by L. S. Hilton

  ‘Plans for tonight?’ I tried to look flirtatious but not too desperate, though in fact I’d have done them both sideways with the polished crew as cheerleaders if it got me on that boat. Boats jump borders in a way that corpses just don’t.

  ‘Just checking in with a few people. Why don’t you have dinner with us?’

  Don’t rush him, Judith.

  ‘Well, my stuff’s over at Santa.’

  ‘You can pick it up later.’

  Result.

  ‘Sure, thanks. I’d love to.’

  *

  So Steve ordered a magnum of 95 Dom, which might have impressed me in another life, and two older guys with mahogany cleavages and sullen Estonian mistresses appeared, and we ordered some baby octopus antipasti, which nobody touched but me, and then Steve ordered two bottles of lime-coloured Vermentino, and then a group of Milanese bankers who’d turned up from Forte dei Marmi appeared, and one of them took time out from fawning deferentially over Steve to whizz me back to Santa in his vintage Alfa to collect my bags, and then we had to go to a floating bar at Paraggi where the Estonians did a bit of listless pole dancing and everyone ordered sushi, which no one ate, then it was back to the boat for Cohibas and coke in the hot tub and Steve showing off his underwater stereo system which meant you could listen to Rihanna even while you were swimming in the upper deck pool, if that blew your hair back. I took every glass that was offered and didn’t drink a drop – thanks, Olly – and stayed close to Steve when one of the old walruses reached a proprietorial hand out of the bubbles towards me, and, eventually, lay down meekly in Steve’s huge bed quite ready to sing for my supper if required. But all he did was hold my hand and turn over quietly, and let me sleep in the soft unsteady cradle of the waves.

  He was gone in the morning. I sat up, glad of my clear head, and pressed my face to the porthole. Sea and sky. Fuck. I’d done it. There was a tray on the bed, orange juice, a silver coffee pot, scrambled eggs and toast under a silver cover, fruit, yoghurt, croissants. A tiny crystal vase with a single white rose. Today’s FT, Times, Daily Mail – because everyone reads that. Presumably billionaires had a special press connection, no day-old news for them. I scanned them rapidly; nothing. My bags had been unpacked, my shoes lined up and neatly stuffed with tissue, my few dresses looking forlorn on padded charcoal-silk hangers, each with a striped linen bag of rose petals. I showered in the bathroom, where the double shower and personal sauna made the Eden Roc look a bit basic, knotted up my hair and added a plain grey tee to the briefest of the bikinis I had bought in Santa. In the stateroom, Steve was in shorts, bare chested, chugging coffee from a jumbo Starbucks mug, his eyes travelling over a bank of blinking screens. Currents of money. Through the glass doors to the deck I could see Tristan lifting dumbbells.

  ‘Hey, babe.’ Babe was good. I wasn’t yet sure how to play this. I didn’t want to be relegated to Estonian slut category, but then I obviously was the kind of girl who hopped a boat with a virtual stranger at a moment’s notice. The kind of girl who checks into a hotel in Santa Margherita for two nights and then disappears, no passports, no tickets, no borders. I let my hands rest briefly on his shoulders, smelling his clean skin and cologne, planted a kiss on his slightly receding hairline.

  ‘Hey, you.’

  ‘We’re putting in at Porto Venere tonight.’

  ‘We’ was also good. Very good.

  ‘Lovely,’ I answered casually, as though I always spent my summers popping from one exclusive Italian resort town to another. Inside, I was running a victory lap of the deck, punching the air. What’s the appropriate selfie pose when you’ve just got away with manslaughter? But I’m a quick learner, a very quick learner, and I knew that the only way to pull this off was never for a moment to let it show that I didn’t have a fucking clue what I was doing. So I went out to sunbathe, noticing all the same that he didn’t give a glance to my tie-sided back view as it swung through the doors.

  After lunch – grilled fish, salsa verde and fruit served from more old crystal and thick modern china, bright orange, stamped with the boat’s name, Mandarin – Steve gave me an enthusiastic tour. I inspected the helipad, heard quite a lot about the Russian military-grade casing of the hull, the folding balconies on the sundeck, the sliding glass wall of the stateroom, the extending box release of the passerelle – whatever that was – revisited the Picassos. The crew glided around Steve like pilot fish to his shark, with a kind of trained telepathy that produced a steadying hand in a doorway or a frosted glass of Armani mineral water without a need ever being expressed aloud. Steve introduced his captain, Jan, a stern-looking Norwegian who smiled along professionally with Steve’s awkward attempts at mateyness.

  ‘Show her the lights, Jan!’

  Jan’s tanned forearm brushed mine as he leaned over to flick the switch. A second’s flash of erotic Morse code, but that could wait. I peered dutifully over the prow. Despite the sunlight, the dark margin of the waterline was suddenly filled with a pink neon glow. Jan flicked a switch and the illuminations fireworked through orange, cobalt, purple, throbbing diamond white. At night the thing would have looked like a Las Vegas cathouse.

  ‘Great, isn’t it! I’ve just got them.’

  There was something endearingly boyish about his enthusiasm, though Jan’s opinion of the decorative scheme was visible from Genoa. We inspected the cabins, which apart from the room which I now seemed to be sharing with Steve were surprisingly poky. When we had finished, Steve showed me his new toy, a personal planetarium installed in the wheelhouse.

  ‘It has lasers, so you can track the constellations against the real sky.’ Even the stars, here, could be rearranged for pleasure.

  ‘It’s a shame I won’t see it in action,’ I said hesitantly. ‘You’d probably better drop me off, tonight.’

  ‘Do you have somewhere to be?’

  I looked at him from under my lashes. ‘Not specially.’

  ‘Why don’t you stay then? We can hang out.’

  There was no flirtation in his eyes; I adjusted my own.

  ‘Sure. I’d love that. Thanks. Is it cool to keep my stuff in your room, though?’

  ‘No problem.’

  So that was that.

  PART TWO

  INSIDE

  11

  I once read somewhere that people would worry much less about what others thought of them if they realised how seldom they did so. As a day turned into three, then a week, then two, I got by through simply offering no information. Steve was essentially incurious, uninterested in anything except his business and his possessions, though he had obviously travelled far enough from whatever geek cellar he had crawled out of to attain a semblance of social functionality. As far as I could surmise from Steve’s minimal observations, Tristan was his sidekick, the rent-a-friend, nominally employed in one of Steve’s funds, but basically there to deal with the crew, call ahead to the clubs, produce the coke and the almost-model girls, because this was fun, wasn’t it? This was how you had fun, when you’d made enough money to make Abramovich feel shifty.

  But sometimes, across a dance floor or a dinner table, when it was time for Steve to produce his nuclear Amex and suddenly everyone turned their eyes away, I’d see him move his head dumbly from side to side, bewildered as a dancing bear. Sexually, I couldn’t work him out. The first night I had assumed he was just tired, but though he called me ‘baby’ or ‘darling’, he didn’t even try to kiss me, except for brief pecks of greeting. I slept with him as though by default; we lay quietly side by side like brother and sister. He never tried anything and I wasn’t stupid enough to initiate it, though I was careful to go to bed each night looking as though there was nothing I’d rather do. Of course, I wondered if he was gay, whether old Tris was more than a major-domo, but that didn’t seem to be the case either; Tristan gaily indulged in all the girls who shoved themselves his way. After a while, I concluded that Steve was simply asexual, that the furthest his desire went was liking to have a pretty girl around, tha
t he had worked out that picking up women was what he was supposed to do, like owning a huge boat and a plane and four houses and God knew how many cars: because he could. That was how you kept score, wasn’t it? I realised that the mistake people make about people like Steve is to imagine that they’re interested in money, when it’s impossible to get that rich if money is what you care about. To play those kind of hedge fund odds, the real guys, the serious guys (and Steve was gleefully dismissive about his peers whose funds moved only five or six billion through the labyrinths of finance), require indifference to money. The only interest is the game. I understood that.

  The longer I stayed on the boat, the further I was from that gelid body, that reproachful pallid face. I tried not to think too much about Leanne. Our brief moment of complicity belonged to another world now, yet in many ways, I could have been back at the Gstaad Club. Girls everywhere, ubiquitous on the drag down from Saint-Tropez to Sicily as rosé and bougainvillea. I’ve never met the girl who wasn’t prepared to hawk it when there was a bona fide billionaire in the room, so I realised in a while that in a sense my presence protected Steve. I made sure to be vaguely possessive in company, mirroring Steve’s ‘babes’ and draping a casual arm around his shoulders, which made me an object of irritation and fascination to the girls, but kept them off. Seated next to Steve at dinner, I would overhear them talking gaily like suburban housewives about the terrible cost of things, until sometimes I wondered why he didn’t write them a cheque for a million quid just to buy a bit of quiet.

  Tristan’s assiduous messaging produced a facsimile of a social scene – hopping from tender to drinks to restaurant, then the inevitable club or sometimes a house party in the hills above a resort – though we never met anyone who resembled the figli d’oro I had spied in Portofino. The men were in funds or banks or property; once we drove up into the hills of the Tuscan Maremma to lunch at the house of an English TV pundit with a terrifying hair weave who’d been big in newspapers in the Nineties, and his crowd of incredibly pleased-with-themselves minor celebrities who spent the whole time trying to cap each other’s jokes in a monsoon of name-dropping. Every guy, no matter how paunchy or bald or vilely cigar-breathed, had a girl. Wives were not what you took to the Riviera, and glittering conversation was not what was required of the girls. They never left their men’s sides, sitting next to them, cutting up and forking in their food for them as though they were babies, not speaking unless spoken to, but laughing at everything their man said just in case it was funny, creating a force field around each couple that no other woman could penetrate. At the pundit’s lunch the only exception was a successful television comedian, a big, ungainly woman who had won several prestigious awards, who began by dominating the talk, matching the men quip for quip, but gradually descended into a bewildered and furious silence as the rosé flowed and her colleagues stopped even pretending to listen to her. I pitied her, as the faces reddened and the noise round the table swelled and her erstwhile civilised, BBC-valued peers reverted to braying Neanderthals, pawing at their harem and, I could see, taking a savage pleasure in besting her at a game she couldn’t even enter.

  Our job, the girls’ job, was to wear delicate K-Jacques sandals around our pretty tanned ankles, to swish our pretty hair and sip delicately at our wine, to play with our pretty Rolexes around our slender tanned wrists. We were the prizes, the gold made delectable bronzed flesh, Galateas who unfroze at the touch of money. No wonder she was fuming. She had been stripped of her currency as swiftly as a Neapolitan pickpocket would have relieved her of her boring Mulberry handbag. I should have said something, done something to shut those smug cunts up, but I just smiled and let my hair swing over my collarbone and fed Steve tiny bites of iced coconut soufflé. Watch and learn, baby.

  Wealth creeps under your epidermis like poison. It invades your posture, your gestures, the way you carry yourself. From the moment I stepped aboard the Mandarin, I don’t think I opened a door. I certainly didn’t carry a heavy bag, or lift a dirty plate. If the price is cosying up to some ancient boor who eyes you in the Jacuzzi like a rutting hippo, the pay-off is being surrounded by young, uniformed men with broad shoulders and clean nails who hold out your chair, fetch your napkin or your sunglasses, adjust the cushions on your sun lounger, pick up your dirty knickers and thank you for permitting them to do it. They don’t look you in the eyes; you are not for them. They clear away the ashtrays and the smeared mirrors, discreetly replenish the aspirin by the bed and the Xanax and Viagra in the bathroom cabinet, repair the insults to your flesh in hundreds of subtle, complicitous ways so that you stalk amongst them immaculate as a goddess, and, in a while, between the brim of your Ray-Bans and the tip of your imperiously tilted chin, they disappear from your sight. But don’t let the accoutrements distract you. If you don’t get the ring on your finger sharpish, you’re fucked. The real difference between the Riviera hotties and the crowd back at the Gstaad was that these girls had climbed to the next tier, which only made the precipice before them all the more appalling.

  In Porto-Vecchio, we were joined by Hermann, a reedy, silent German colleague of Steve’s, and his fiancée Carlotta, the diamond on her ring finger as spectacularly disproportionate as her tit job. Carlotta went in for the cooing princess routine when Hermann was present, playing with his earlobes and calling him ‘baby’ every five seconds. In private she took no prisoners.

  ‘He’s a fucking pig,’ she confided casually as we lay topless on one of the huge orange sun mattresses on the upper deck.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Hermann. Yeah, like I was in St Moritz last season and I was meant to be joining him in Verbier and he sent a car. A fucking car to pick me up.’

  Her accent was vaguely European, but I couldn’t place it. I wondered if she still could.

  ‘Oh God, that’s awful.’

  ‘Yeah, I made my own bed in the chalet for like a week, and he can’t even be bothered to send the fucking heli for me. You should only fly private, you know,’ she added seriously. ‘Like, don’t let them take advantage.’

  ‘Are you going to marry him?’

  ‘Sure. We got engaged when I got pregnant last year, but he already has like six kids from previous, so he made me get rid of it.’

  I touched the warm skin of her shoulder sympathetically.

  ‘That’s awful. I’m so sorry.’

  She bit her overfilled lip theatrically. ‘Thanks. But I got a flat on Eaton Place for hoovering it out, so it wasn’t that bad.’

  Once I’d started breathing again Carlotta was noodling on her phone.

  ‘Did you hear about the Swedish girl at Nikki Beach?’

  Of course I’d heard about the Swedish girl at Nikki Beach. Everyone from Antibes to Panarea that year had heard about the Swedish girl at Nikki Beach.

  ‘She was in the pool for, like, a day’ – five hours, two days, it varied – ‘before anyone noticed she was dead.’

  ‘Gross.’

  ‘Yeah, gross. She was already, like’ – Carlotta fished for the word – ‘mouldering.’

  *

  Carlotta shared the vulnerability of the classless; I understood that. But I wasn’t like her; I didn’t want to snag a rich husband and spend the rest of my life as flotsam on the tide of Euromoney. Dressing the part was a different matter. Steve might not have been the cockrocking king of Mayfair, which suited me fine, but his few fixed ideas about women conveniently included their need to shop. The acquisition of clothes was apparently my sex’s highest calling, and since I had the brains never to ask him for so much as an ice cream, I did rather well.

  As we glided slowly south through the sparkling breezes, and July slipped into August, whenever we docked, Steve would ask me if I needed to pick up a few things, then solemnly hand me a boggling wad of notes. At first I was careful, keeping much of it back, so that I could at least offer to pay my share of drinks and dinner, but after a few days it didn’t seem relevant. So I bought expensive things, things I would never be able to
afford again, a lifetime’s rainbow of cashmere, a hammered linen Vuitton raincoat, a perfect chestnut crocodile Prada tote. I’d catch a glimpse of myself in the boutique windows or the glassy smoothness of a harbour, tanned in my simple white shirt and cut-offs, hair tied up messily in a Dolce & Gabbana scarf, swinging my ribboned bags of loot, and wonder whether I ought to be surprised at my metamorphosis. But I wasn’t, really. I looked in the water and there saw, finally, myself.

  *

  Philip Larkin once wrote wistfully of a world where beauty was accepted slang for yes. Fucking can be such a very uncomplicated pleasure, as ancient and elemental as the salt-earth taste of an olive, or a glass of cold water after a long, dusty walk. So why say no? Monogamy must be so much easier for the plain.

  After a few weeks as Steve’s pseudo-girlfriend, I was climbing the walls. If you’re like me, the trick is to learn to spot the other ones who feel the same. When Jan had given his slightly contemptuous tour of the Mandarin that first day, I had made sure my attention remained on Steve, but there had been one other moment, a few days into the trip, when I had passed him on the deck and watched his eyes follow me precisely the way Steve’s didn’t.

  I had to let it sit for a while. I wasn’t dumb enough to fuck up my chances for the sake of a shag, but it was a wonder Tris hadn’t noticed Jan’s looks and given him his P45, he was so mercilessly appealing. Thick through the shoulders and tight through the waist, eyes blue and deep as a fjord, framed by thick grey lashes like a cartoon donkey. Caveat emptor: I wasn’t complaining. So one afternoon, as we were gliding through the Maddalena archipelago, I asked Steve if he wanted to go for a picnic.

  ‘We can take the tender, go snorkelling!’ I enthused.

  ‘Sorry, babe, I have stuff to do. Get Tris to take you.’

  ‘Of course. I didn’t mean to disturb you.’

  I barged into Tristan’s cabin without knocking. He was watching porn on his laptop in his underwear, pasty and hungover under his tan. I just glimpsed a POV of Jada Stevens lifting her famous spherical arse to the camera before he flipped the lid shut irritably.