Wicked Ambition

by Victoria Fox

  The show wasn’t broadcast till next week. Leon considered telling her about the contest but didn’t. Robin would have laughed; Lisa would think it a waste of time.

  ‘Aw, y’know, the usual.’ He brushed a lock of hair from her forehead and dismissed the instinct that he’d really rather have come back to an empty house. His girlfriend was only trying to help. Wasn’t this what he had always wanted: to find Marlon’s killer and bring that person to justice?

  ‘I’m making lasagne,’ Lisa said, ‘your favourite. Hope you’re hungry?’

  ‘Sure am.’ He squeezed her. ‘Let me jump in the shower.’

  Padding through to the bedroom, he registered files on the Marlon case stacked up by the bed, in piles at the window, and an old family album left open on the floor. Leon went to it and crouched, flicking through. Marlon, aged eighteen, a year before his death, his arm around Leon’s shoulders; Leon’s baby sister, hugging her biggest brother’s knees; their mom embracing all three kids on Leon’s ninth birthday party; Marlon returning from the track on a summer night, sweatbands on, the grin of victory across his handsome face…

  ‘Oh, shit, baby, I’m sorry.’

  Lisa appeared in the doorway, wiping her hands anxiously on an apron. ‘I meant to put those away, I swear—damn, that was so thoughtless…’ She came to retrieve them.

  ‘Hey.’ Leon stood, looping his arms around her waist. ‘It’s OK.’

  ‘It’s not. You don’t need to come home to this. It’s just I got so caught up with stuff today…’ She pulled back. ‘Leon, I made a breakthrough—at least, I think I did. A witness has come forward. It was a long time ago and I need to check beyond doubt that we can trust this guy, but if we can then the evidence he could provide—’

  Leon put a finger to her lips, partly because he wanted to kiss her and partly because, though he’d yearned for it, uncovering Marlon’s assassin scared the hell out of him. It would mean dragging up the past, opening wounds that had struggled for years to heal and exposing his mom to yet more suffering. Would it be worth it? To see Marlon’s killer behind bars, yes, but to have to go through it all again for nothing…

  ‘Come here,’ he said, closing the gap between them. She tasted of red wine.

  ‘Mm.’ Lisa sighed. ‘Leon, you kiss like nobody else.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Kiss me again.’

  He obliged, running his hands over her body and pulling her close. ‘Time to relax,’ he murmured, easing her back on to the bed. ‘We’ve both been working way too hard.’

  ‘Too hard, Mr Sway?’ Lisa swung round and climbed aboard. ‘You have no idea how hard things are about to get.’

  47

  Turquoise didn’t know how long she had been there. Daylight found no way through and the hours were impossible to monitor. A lamp had been provided, casting a meagre glow, just enough by which to decipher the fundamentals of her prison: a makeshift bathroom; a cupboard; a shelf bearing a cup (plastic, not glass) and cutlery; a wooden table and chair.

  She cowered, remembering being made to witness Ava bound naked to that chair, begging for more as Cosmo whipped his wife with brutish abandon. It had turned the couple on to have her there, the silent spectator, helpless and tied up as her vision was filled.

  Mercifully—because someone, for once, had been looking out for her—she hadn’t been forced to partake. But Turquoise was under no illusions: she knew they had been giving her a taste of what was in store and that next time she wouldn’t be on the sidelines; she’d be at the centre of the game. You like this, don’t you? Cosmo had sneered. This never stopped turning you on. Forget your dirty movie, baby, how about the real thing?

  And she had lain here, frozen and powerless to escape, fixed only on erasing every snapshot the instant it assaulted her. The only weapon she had, she used: endurance. She gave them nothing, apathetic to the end. They wanted her to kick and scream and recoil from their filthy show—her fear was their aphrodisiac—but she refused to give them that. She had seen worse. She had been through worse. Cosmo and Ava could screw themselves.

  How was it that the perfect Hollywood marriage, the most celebrated on the planet, resorted to this for their kicks? All that money and fame wasn’t enough: when it came to it Cosmo and Ava wanted nothing more than to be on their hands and knees in a basement (Turquoise knew the cell lay beneath the Angelopoulos mansion: blackly she had heard laughter and conversation seeping through as they entertained guests) with their only company a kaleidoscope of sex toys, each other, and the girls who were made to watch…

  Turquoise shuddered to consider how many women they had brought down here. Cosmo and Ava had met each other through that world and it was that world that united them now. They thrived on it, powerful beyond the law, their victims too afraid to speak out.

  At the super-couple’s level, no thrill could ever be enough…except this.

  She wondered if anyone was searching for her. Surely they would worry, surely Donna would come by and see she wasn’t home, surely Bronx would try calling…

  Who else did she have? And how would they know to look for her here?

  Turquoise curled up on the mattress, shivering. She was cold. The hours passed.

  Some time before dawn the door swung open and Ava appeared. Dressed in a Ralph Lauren palm-green V-neck and casual slacks, her sandals pebble-smooth and her toe-nails cleanly painted, she cut the consummate housewife.

  When she saw Turquoise she smiled brightly as if greeting a houseguest, stepped in and closed the door behind her. She was carrying a tray.

  ‘Lunch,’ she said kindly, settling the tray on the floor. It bore a plate of sandwiches, their crusts immaculately severed. ‘You have to eat; you’ll starve to death at this rate!’

  Turquoise read between the lines: strength was important for the sport they had in mind. It was also important if she stood any chance of breakout, but she refused to give Ava the pleasure of watching her take food like a dog from a bowl. She turned to the wall.

  ‘I’m not leaving until you at least drink the water,’ promised Ava, perching on the chair. It was impossible to grasp that this staid, collected woman, the woman Turquoise had thought of not just as a friend but as a sister, was the one who had been strewn back on this very same apparatus, an animal surrendered to raw desire as Cosmo’s whip had licked her breasts, her thighs, her ass and her legs. ‘I find the water down here a little foggy.’

  Turquoise watched her hatefully.

  ‘Come,’ said Ava, holding out the glass. ‘Drink.’

  Reluctantly she took the water, gulping it as thirst overtook, and lay down and closed her eyes. Ava could be heard making for the door, her shoes a soft pad on the hard ground, the stealthy assassin: so stealthy Turquoise hadn’t seen her coming for years.

  ‘Turquoise?’ Ava said before she departed.

  Turquoise opened her eyes but remained silent. The room was off-kilter. Her insides pinched and she was feeling drowsy, close to dreams…

  ‘You won’t forget this, will you?’

  The door shut, leaving her in darkness.

  Daylight roused her, the warm, unmistakeable glow she had been denied for what seemed an eternity, and she woke up in a dolls’ house. At least it appeared that way, her possessions so familiar that in a fresh context they appeared smaller and closer. Safer. Safe.

  Turquoise thought she must be hallucinating, and blinked and blinked to bring herself back, with each brief elimination terrified she would be returned to that cold, airless room, a captive in the monsters’ den.

  But no, it was real; she was home. Here, in her bed, miles from them.

  A miracle.

  The sound of her phone shocked her into a state of blinding relief.

  Stumbling through her daze, she reached to pick it up. She was dressed in the same clothes she’d been in since arriving at the Angelopoulos mansion, and the mirror by her bed revealed a drawn complexion, dark shadows beneath her eyes and dry, cracked lips…but life, all the sam
e, still alive.

  ‘Thank God!’ Donna Cameron’s voice shot down the line. ‘Where the hell have you been? I’ve been calling you all week!’

  She fought to engage. ‘What day is it?’

  ‘What do you mean, what day is it? It’s Saturday. Where were you? We were ready to bring out the search party!’

  Saturday. She tried to fathom how long she’d been prisoner at Cosmo’s.

  ‘What’s the matter? Is everything all right? You’re not sick?’

  ‘Everything’s fine.’ Her brain crawled into gear, a marvel given the circumstances. ‘I, er, must have come down with something.’

  ‘Are you better?’

  ‘Yeah…’ Turquoise rubbed her head, remembering the drink Ava had forced upon her. I find the water down here a little foggy. ‘I think so.’

  ‘You don’t sound good. Shall I come over?’

  ‘No!’ Silence. ‘I’m OK. Really. Something I ate, I guess…’

  ‘I’m cancelling Monday’s appointments. There’ll be more unhappy faces but now I’ve got hold of you I can at least give them a reason.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Don’t thank me, just concentrate on getting well. You didn’t seem right at our lunch, either. I thought I told you to rest?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Hmm. I’ll touch base tomorrow. We’ve got a ton of PR gigs lined up.’

  Her heart dipped to her toes and dribbled out through her feet. ‘For True Match?’

  ‘Of course for True Match,’ Donna teased. ‘Have you been working on any other movies? Nice of you to tell me: no wonder you’ve been off the radar.’

  Turquoise managed a weak laugh. ‘I’ll be on it, don’t worry.’

  She hung up and stared at the wall.

  A piece at a time, she assembled the picture. Cosmo and Ava had drugged her and returned her here under cover of night. Part of Turquoise was amazed at her escape; another expected it. Kidnapping one of the most famous women in the world had been a thrill more dangerous and exciting than any they had known. They’d made the most of it, they’d had their fun—and in the process had issued a warning that resounded through her like a bell. The couple weren’t messing. The implication was clear. They had driven home that no matter what measures Turquoise took to reveal Cosmo’s crime, they would always be one step ahead. Cosmo’s name and reputation would be protected against all possible assailants, and with the support of his wife he was invincible. They would stop at nothing.

  Turquoise was alone—and trapped, utterly trapped, in that isolation.

  She realised how much she had invested in Ava’s ignorance—that when awarded the facts, Ava would always have sided with her because Cosmo would turn out to be a different man from the one she had married. Instead Turquoise had lost not just her safety net, her ally, but a friend she had cherished beyond every other and saw now she had never known at all.

  In a stupor she faltered to the shower, her legs like lead, and climbed in beneath the needles of driving water, embracing their warmth across her face, through her hair and down her aching spine. With every scrub she removed traces of Cosmo and Ava, peeling away the nightmare but still finding more to fear beneath and scouring so hard her flesh blazed pink.

  On emerging she checked her body—for what, she wasn’t sure: bruises, cuts, some evidence of where she had been, anything to stop the crazy suspicion that she might have imagined it. Her shaking fingers were all the evidence she needed. One thing she’d learned was to trust her own skin; it had seen her through enough.

  Her heart was going like crazy and the heat had made her faint. She sat on the bed and gripped the sheets, teeth chattering, her wet hair snaking down her back.

  Gathering her strength, Turquoise stood, slipped on a towelling robe and made her way downstairs. The door to her office stared back at her, wide open. She went to it.

  The room was just as she had left it. Her guitar was propped up against the desk, a songwriting pad open and weighted down with a coffee cup.

  Her eyes fell on the wooden cabinet.

  Be there. Be there. Be there.

  She crossed the space and knelt, carefully sliding her hand into the narrow gap. At first she fumbled for it, convinced it had vanished—they’d found it and removed it and everything was over—before she nudged something hard with the tips of her fingers. Her palm closed around it and a laugh fell from her mouth, hysterical with relief.

  Withdrawing the package, she clasped it to her.

  More than the value of the object was the value of its rediscovery: when all else had deserted her, it remained. She still had something on that evil sonofabitch.

  Pressing it to her beating chest, she knew that however hard they tried and however afraid she became, they would never be brave enough to take it from her.

  48

  Kristin checked herself into an Italian spa a fortnight after Bunny’s funeral.

  ‘If anyone needs time out, it’s you,’ advised her label. ‘Take as long as you need.’

  She couldn’t think of anything that would make things right. All the relaxation in the world couldn’t dull the pain of having lost what she had, but, while despair over Bunny eclipsed everything else, Kristin’s implication in the Fraternity drama—at least as far as the press were concerned—was a goldmine. Getting away was the right thing. Reporters were on her twenty-four/seven for a judgement, any juice they could squeeze about what Scotty had been like in bed, if she had ever suspected anything, what sort of a boyfriend he had been, emotionally and physically—horribly invasive and personal questions she would never have considered answering even under the best possible circumstances.

  ‘Fine,’ Ramona bleated when she said she was going. ‘Leave me to perish.’

  ‘If you need me, Mom, I’ll stay.’

  ‘Both my daughters abandoning me,’ she announced, collapsing melodramatically on to a couch and nearly flattening Betsy the cat. ‘What about my convalescence?’

  It was out of the question in any case that Ramona would go because she had invited a camera crew into her house to film a documentary called BUNNY WHITE: RIP A BEAUTY QUEEN, and was required to be within shooting distance every day of the week. She said she was doing it ‘to raise awareness of the pressures of fame on young women’, which was the most grotesquely hypocritical thing Kristin had ever heard, but arguing with a mother in mourning was not on her agenda. Perhaps this was Ramona’s way of dealing with things.

  Until the previous summer, Cacatra Island, the über-exclusive Indian Ocean getaway, had been Hollywood’s number one celebrity spa. Then scandal had hit, a madman storming its shores in a stunt that had culminated in murder. LA had been rocked by the repercussions. Whispers of a secret clique abounded and the island had never recovered, passing into the hands of fashion powerhouse JB Moreau and becoming, for now, a private residence.

  Quick to claim the crown of The Place To Be for recovering Hollywood stars, Tuscany Bounty Fields, TBF to those with their shrinks on speed-dial, was a recuperative hub on the west Italian coast. It was zero frills, in the grounds of an old monastery and bordered by golden fields and slender cypress trees. Kristin’s room was plain, a single bed made with starched white sheets, a wooden closet and desk. Her cell was confiscated and her only glimpse of the outside world was a small arched window with a view to the rolling, burnished landscape beyond. Each client was permitted a luxury, one personal possession from home, and Kristin took a photograph of her and Bunny by The White House pool last year. In it Scotty Valentine could be seen reflected in Kristin’s Ray-Bans—he had been taking the picture—and somehow the three of them together articulated the impending disaster: Kristin, squinting through the heat, not seeing clearly; Scotty on the outside, eternally so, no matter how he pretended otherwise; and Bunny smiling on, blind to it all, gazing lovingly at the boy who loved neither her nor her sister nor any woman.

  How had it ended in such tragedy?

  Bounty Fields was a reminder that the globe t
urned on its axis outside LA and its vainglorious bullshit. Meditation was encouraged, as were long walks, exercise and the exploration of a library of carefully selected novels. Kristin recognised a TV starlet in the courtyard one morning after breakfast but neither girl acknowledged the other.

  One morning she headed for a deserted medieval village overlooking the Casentino valley. It was one of several that had been abandoned years before when its inhabitants had left for the city, and it stood now ghostly among oaks, remote and rejected but infused with the kind of unsinkable beauty that time cannot steal. As she descended towards the cluster of part-derelict houses, the midday sun casting a glow across the hills, studded with goat herds that were alert when they saw her but unafraid, stumbling clumsily to the rusted metal jingle around their necks, it felt as if she were entering an afterlife, a precursor of heaven, so uncanny were the polished gleam and the still, calm slowness of the perfumed, nutty air.

  It made Kristin believe that something virtuous existed beyond what she knew. When it came to it, this was the decision that mattered—was the world a good place or a bad?

  Survival on a knife’s edge: light on one side, dark on the other. When bad things happened, as they had to Bunny, did the door stay ajar? Was there a gap still wide enough for dawn to pass through? Did the sun swallow the moon, or was it the other way around?

  She prayed with all her heart that Bunny had gone to a happy, better place: a place like this, with luminous hillsides and sparkling streams and a full, domed sky bursting with blue. It was the kind of thing the old Kristin would have written songs about, those fantasy realms where fairy tales existed and no harm came to the righteous. But if life didn’t work that way, if there was no sense or justice, did those worlds, too, automatically expire?

  Kristin settled on a grassy mound, tucking her skirt under her knees and winding the coarse stalks around her fingers. A goat watched her inquisitively, its beard wiry and grey but its eyes alert. Its hindquarters were awkward as it moved off, lopsided and rickety as old chair legs. It disappeared into a dusty half-house whose windows were punched through and whose door was collapsed on one side.