Bad Twins

by Rebecca Chance

  Bad Twins

  REBECCA

  CHANCE

  PAN BOOKS

  For the brains trust who polished the outline for me: Randon Burns, who kindly informed me who the heroine of the book actually was, and Michael Devine, who brainstormed a crucial plot point with me. Minds like steel traps, both of them!

  And for Michael Coggin-Carr, a dear friend and truly lovely person.

  Contents

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  PART TWO

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Acknowledgements

  Mile High

  Killer Diamonds

  Killer Affair

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  Jeffrey Sachs was neither a politician nor a ruling monarch, but when he issued an urgent summons to his presence, you obeyed. You jumped up from your Michelin three-star restaurant table, off the cross-trainer, out of bed with your lover; you told your chauffeur to turn around your limo, your pilot to alter the route your private plane was currently taking, your assistant to charter a helicopter. Whether you were a media tycoon, a Saudi prince, a Russian oligarch or a prime minister, you came when he called.

  And if you were an underling, working for one of the many companies he owned, as you rushed to your meeting with him you were in a cold sweat of fear, scrambling desperately to work out why you had been ordered to his presence. Because this unprecedented command meant that the meeting was bound to be life-changing. All you could do was pray as hard as possible that it would be positive.

  The four employees who were converging on Jeffrey Sachs’s mansion in Maida Vale for the appointed time of three in the afternoon were his ultimate underlings: his children. They had been trained from birth to anticipate what he wanted from them even before he voiced the words, four little von Trapps who didn’t need the whistle to get in line.

  So when an Aston Martin DB11 bounced over the bridge that spanned the Regent’s Canal, screeched around the corner of Warwick Avenue, hit the brakes, and reversed almost as fast into an achingly tight parking space, its driver was perfectly well aware that his other three siblings would already be sitting in their own cars, watching their phones tick the seconds away until a few minutes to three, at which point they would converge on the electric gates between two huge white colonnaded pillars set in the perfectly maintained hedge that ran around the mansion. The four of them had not convened previously to discuss why they thought their father had called this very unusual family meeting. Jeffrey Sachs had played the game of divide and conquer with his children so successfully that sibling solidarity was non-existent.

  ‘For fuck’s sake, Bart!’

  The driver of the vehicle parked directly behind the Aston Martin, a Jaguar SUV, leapt out and slammed the door furiously.

  ‘You’re practically up my exhaust pipe!’ he shouted at the Aston Martin’s driver. ‘Do you know how much this cost?’

  ‘God, Con, be cool,’ drawled his brother Bart, sliding out of the seat of his sports car with snake-hipped ease. ‘Don’t be all . . . uncool.’

  ‘You’re a centimetre away from my bumper, you careless fuckwit! You nearly hit me!’

  ‘But I didn’t, did I? You know, years ago in St Moritz, I accidentally shunted this German chappie in a top-of-the-range Audi,’ Bart informed his brother, his tone relaxed as he recounted the anecdote. ‘Not a big shunt, but I definitely shoved him through the snow a bit. I was terribly sorry, of course – jumped out and told him I’d pay for any damage. D’you know what he did?’

  ‘I hope he called you a twat and punched you in the face!’ his brother Conway snapped. ‘I’m close to doing that myself!’

  ‘He got out,’ Bart continued cheerfully, not a whit intimidated, ‘walked around his car and had a squint at the back of it. Then he looked at me – huge chappie, good head taller than me, they breed them really big in Deutschland – and said, completely stone-faced: “Zis is not a problem. Zis is vot bumpers are for.” Never forgot that. You need to take that attitude yourself, Con. Bit of Germanic calm’d do you the world of good.’

  Visibly struggling to control himself, his jaw muscles clenching as he ground his teeth, Conway turned away from his brother, dragging his key fob from his jacket pocket to lock the SUV.

  ‘You two! You never change, do you?’ commented a woman’s voice behind them, her high heels clicking onto the pavement as she swung both legs out of the back seat of her Range Rover, her knees pressed together as if she were an actress or a model surrounded by crouching paparazzi keen to direct their lenses up her skirt. She gave a nod of thanks to the driver, who had come around to open the door for her, and shook out her wonderfully thick mane of streaked blonde hair with a swift, practised move that settled her curls into the perfect shape into which they had been tonged by her hairdresser half an hour ago.

  ‘Honestly,’ Charlotte Sachs said dismissively to her brothers, ‘you’ll be in your nineties and still going at each other as if you were fighting about who gets to play with the Scalextric limited-edition Bentley, or whatever it was back then. When actually, we should all be worrying about what the hell Daddy’s playing at, sending for all four of us on such short notice! He never does this!’

  Unnoticed across the street, Jeffrey Sachs’s other daughter, Bella, climbed out of her own car, a sensible Audi saloon which was quite overshadowed by the Aston Martin, the Jaguar SUV, and the Range Rover. Glancing over at Charlotte, Bella realized that her sister was clearly fresh from the Nicky Clarke salon on Carlos Place.

  The way the two daughters had reacted to their father’s summons, a call from his personal assistant which had come in a couple of hours ago, had been entirely typical of their respective characters. Bella had spent the time holed up in her office, frantically passing in review as many of her current and recent projects as she could, while Charlotte had rung up Nicky Clarke and insisted he shoehorn her in for an emergency appointment. To Bella’s extreme frustration, Charlotte appeared not just perfectly groomed but superbly confident, much more prepared than her sister for a crucial, once-in-a-lifetime meeting with their father.

  Because Charlotte was carrying herself with the assurance of a woman who had enough sway for Nicky Clarke himself to do her hair on such short notice, and who knew that the two-hundred-pound blow-dry made her look like a million dollars. By contrast, Bella was the sturdy workhorse to her sister’s show pony. Bella reached a hand up to hook her shoulder-length hair behind her ear, gloomily aware that the best she could hope for was that it be neat and tidy. Meanwhile, Bart exclaimed wistfully, quite ignoring the last part of Charlotte’s comment:

  ‘That Scal
extric! God, I was obsessed with it for years!’

  His eyes were misty with memory. For a moment, he looked exactly like the small boy who had adored his racing cars. In many ways, he still was that small boy: impulse-driven, greedy, and highly skilled at coaxing others to give him what he wanted.

  ‘Remember my 1970s McLaren Formula Ones, Con?’ he continued, oblivious to his brother’s scowl. ‘I practically took them to bed with me every night.’

  It would have been instantly obvious to any observer that the four of them were siblings. The family resemblance was extremely strong. They were all blond and fair, colouring they inherited from their mother who, though American, had entirely German family origins. Christie had been a model for years, famous for her extraordinary cornflower-blue eyes; like hers, her children’s irises were unusually large, which made their eyes seem almost otherworldly, flooded with intense colour.

  As children they had all been angelically flaxen-haired, which had added to the unearthly impression. Bart’s tousled locks, more like a surfer’s than a businessman’s, were still sun-kissed, though their bright gold, like Charlotte’s, owed more to art than to nature. Charlotte’s exquisite layers of pale caramel to gilt were hand-painted every two months using a technique called balayage; Bella never seemed to have time for the colourist, and her hair was the exact shade that Charlotte’s would have looked had she left it untouched, a soft, light golden brown. Since Bella’s husband preferred the natural look, however, she was perfectly fine leaving it as it was.

  That decision, however, always weakened when she saw Charlotte again. It wasn’t just the hair. Since the sisters were identical twins, Bella was the living example of how Charlotte would have looked had she never gone to the gym, hired a dietician and nutritionist, seen her personal trainer three times a week, taken Yogalates classes or had both a breast and a nose job. Even when the twins were small, Bella had felt that she was a distorting mirror version of Charlotte: plumper, dowdier, less toned, half a step behind, her demeanour anxious where Charlotte’s was coolly confident.

  As soon as they could toddle, Jeffrey had joked that he could tell that Charlotte had been born first. Charlotte was quicker-witted, with a tremendous need for attention and an instinct for grabbing the spotlight. As the girls grew up, Charlotte was the one with the innate sense of style, spending a great deal of time choosing her outfits every morning. Bella had swiftly given up any attempt to compete. Better to be different than a weaker copy of her five-minutes-older sister. At least this way she had her own identity, even if it meant being cast as the shy, retiring, quiet one.

  So Bella was the overlooked child, the one who could be absent from a room without anyone noticing, the one who put her head down and got on with work. She was the only one of the four to take a first-class degree at university, though that was attributed by her father to her being a plodder, rather than her having superior brainpower. Even now, she noticed, her siblings had formed into a triangle, albeit a grumpy one. Conway was telling Bart to shut up about his bloody Formula One Scalextric cars, Charlotte was mocking Bart’s childishness, but none of them were looking around for Bella, the least important, the second violin in the quartet.

  She was used to it. But it never stopped hurting.

  ‘It’s two minutes to three, everyone,’ she said as she crossed the street, and then wondered why she had bothered. Why she was acting as a sort of personal assistant to her more glamorous siblings, rounding them up, when they were all in their thirties and perfectly well able to check the time on their extremely expensive watches?

  The trio turned to look at her, almost surprised at hearing a fourth voice. The men could have been Ralph Lauren models in designer business wear, dark suits of which they knew Jeffrey would approve. Bart, in a form-fitted purple shirt intended to be worn without a tie, was dashing and rakish, but Conway, with his smoothed-back hair, immaculate suit and crisp white shirt, was the picture of a handsome but conventional executive, the sexy, buttoned-up boss who starred in a thousand soft-porn fantasies.

  ‘Hey, sis!’ Bart bounded over to hug Bella. ‘Looking good! This is bloody weird, eh? What the hell’s going on, d’you think?’

  He had an easy compliment for every woman he met, and every recipient blossomed into a delighted smile at the words: whether they were sister, administrative assistant, CEO or prime minister, no female was immune to his boyish charm and the sincerity in his periwinkle-blue eyes. Because Bart meant every word of every compliment he paid. He adored women, and they returned that emotion even more fervently.

  ‘Hi, Bart,’ Bella said, glowing happily at the embrace. He smelt wonderful, as always, his body hard and muscled under the expensive suit.

  She pressed the gate bell, heard Maria the housekeeper respond. It was a voice as familiar to the children as that of their mother and father, possibly even more. Maria had been working for Jeffrey Sachs for over thirty years, but her accent was still as strong as ever; she barely spoke English apart from at work, as she lived in the Portuguese stronghold along the Golborne Road, twenty minutes away on the borders of Notting Hill. So many of her fellow immigrants had opened businesses there that it was quite possible to speak Portuguese the entire time.

  ‘It’s us, Maria,’ Bella said, the door buzzing and clicking open even before she had finished.

  It was September, and the garden was at peak beauty. It wasn’t large by general standards, but for central London it was generous, made to look even more so by the clever, architectural use of perspective, low topiary contrasting with high narrow cypresses and carefully placed statuary. A fountain tinkled gently behind a sculpted wave of lavender and rosemary bushes in which bumblebees were busily buzzing; the lawn was as perfectly manicured as the topiary, a smooth sheet of green which looked as if every single stalk had been measured with a ruler and cut to the same length. The only colours were the soft mauve of the lavender and the textured greens of the foliage. Jeffrey Sachs did not like flowers.

  He did not particularly like nature, either. One might have expected to find the owner of this flourishing, immaculately maintained garden to be sitting on the terrace in the sunshine, listening to the softly flowing water and the bees in the rosemary, the lawn flooded with golden light that made the grass glow a deep emerald. His children, however, knew better. They walked up the wide pathway to the white-stuccoed Georgian mansion without even a glance sideways to the sprawling lawn beyond.

  ‘Miss Bella! Miss Charlotte! Mr Conway, Mr Bart! I’m so happy to see you all!’

  Maria, short, stout, greying hair pulled back, not a scrap of make-up on her round beaming face, was at the door to greet them. She hugged her employer’s children as they came in, not letting each one go until she had wrapped her arms around them for a good ten seconds.

  ‘I never see you no more!’ she complained. ‘All my babies, and I never see you!’

  Their task was to accept her reproaches without protesting, and they knew it. The reasons why Jeffrey Sachs’s adult children rarely visited the house in which they had grown up were known to all, and could not be said aloud. Maria embraced Bart last and longest; he was her favourite, naturally, being the baby and the most adorable. She ruffled his hair fondly.

  ‘Always a mess!’ she said with a huge smile. ‘Always so naughty! You have a girlfriend, Mr Bart?’

  ‘Maria, it’s just “Bart”!’ he said as he always did, dropping a kiss on her forehead. ‘Come on now!’

  ‘He’s got twenty girlfriends,’ Charlotte said to her reflection in the huge silver-gilt mirror over the marble fireplace as she rearranged her tresses post-hug. ‘They all know about the others, but they’re all hoping they’ll be The One.’

  Bart threw his arms wide, grinning bashfully.

  ‘It’s Maria’s fault!’ he said. ‘She didn’t have a daughter for me to marry! That’s the only woman who could make me settle down.’

  ‘How’s Ronaldo?’ Bella asked, a touch of pink appearing on her cheeks. She had glanced int
o the mirror once Charlotte had turned away, not wanting to see the direct comparison between herself and her twin sister, and was annoyed now to notice the colour that had blossomed there, the sparkle in her eyes. This always happened when she mentioned Maria’s ridiculously handsome son, with whom the children had, to some degree, grown up; Ronaldo had been her first crush, and was still her absolute physical ideal, though she had not seen him since she was a little girl.

  ‘Oh, he is very good, very good! But you must go in,’ Maria said nervously, looking up at the huge ebony grandfather clock, which had been chiming as the children walked in. It was already five minutes past the hour. ‘Mr Jeffrey don’t like to wait.’

  Conway huffed out a sarcastic laugh.

  ‘You don’t need to tell us that, Maria,’ he said, shooting a quick look in the mirror to reassure himself that his tie knot was perfectly centred. Careless, charming Bart, the spoilt playboy of the family, was the only child of Jeffrey Sachs’s not to bother to check that his appearance was as immaculate as his father would demand; he strode across the black-and-white-chequered hallway, his heels ringing a tattoo on the marble. Setting his hands to the double doors at the far end, he slid them open simultaneously, pushing them into their recesses. The grooves in which they moved were polished and oiled, so the process was near-soundless, but the effect was undeniably dramatic.

  Even more so, however, was Bart’s reaction to the sight before him. He stood stock-still as, behind him, his siblings, eager to follow him into the living room and demonstrate to their father that they had been on time, cannoned into his back; they had naturally been expecting him to walk straight in.

  ‘Well!’ Bart said, unabashedly staring at the woman draped over his father’s armchair as elegantly as a swatch of silk velvet in a fabric store which had been expertly thrown out from its roll by the salesperson to show the drape and shimmer of the material. ‘This is quite the turn-up for the books! And who might you be?’

  Chapter Two