Leaning over the whitewashed wall, she looked out across the perfectly blue Aegean sea, watching as the sunlight glittered and danced across the ocean like God himself had scattered it with diamonds, and wondered if it was champagne o’clock yet. She needed a drink to help compress her thoughts. The paparazzi would be crawling all over them thanks to such a libellous piece of tabloid juxtaposition.
‘Merda,’ Loretta cursed under her breath. When she had called her husband ‘stupid’ she had meant it. Ramsey had royally fucked up; his would be the most precipitous fall from grace and now it looked as though they would both have to pay the price.
‘I did it for you my angel,’ he had pleaded when she had demanded to know the truth. ‘I know how you’ve always felt about Miranda Muldavey; how it should have been you who’d had her career, how unfair life has been to you … I made sure she’ll never set foot in front of a movie camera again.’ He had paused, pensive, staring up at her with impassioned dark brown puppy-dog eyes. ‘I thought you would be happy …’
Ramsey was a great surgeon, perhaps even the greatest of his time, with an unblemished reputation and a fiercely loyal clientele. Yet the afternoon Miranda Muldavey, arguably the most notorious face in Hollywood at the time, had walked into his surgery, Ramsey had seemingly abandoned all his senses and a lifetime of impeccable ethics and, blinded by obsession, committed an unspeakably diabolical act.
It made Loretta shudder to think of what her husband had done. It was true; she had always been insanely jealous of Miranda Muldavey and couldn’t help but compare herself to the beautiful actress. After all, they were of the same age, background, and they even bore similar physical attributes, yet one had gone on to achieve a level of success that the other could only dream of. Muldavey was famous for playing the romantic lead alongside some of Hollywood’s hottest men – she was revered and respected, while Loretta was notorious for her outlandish dress sense and being photographed bending over next to swimming pools – little more than a joke, fodder for third-rate gossip rags. But she had never wished the actress any real harm. Maiming her had been entirely Ramsey’s own twisted idea.
Loretta lit an L&M and forcefully blew smoke from her glossy pursed lips. Even with the best lawyers her husband’s money could buy, things were looking grim. If there was the slightest suggestion that this was something more sinister than simple negligence then it wouldn’t just be Ramsey’s livelihood and unblemished career on the line; it would be his liberty too.
Loretta looked down at the copy of the Daily Mail in her hand and felt her fury re-ignite like embers of a bonfire. If Ramsey lost everything, then what would be left for her when she came to divorce him? After all, everyone knew that half of nothing is nothing. ‘Whatever happens, we’ve still got each other,’ her adoring husband had said that morning as he had pumped away on top of her, with his usual lack of finesse.
Sighing heavily, Loretta looked out to sea. What she needed was a plan; one that would exonerate Ramsey and protect her investment. It struck her that maybe the two nurses who planned to give evidence at the trial could be bought off. After all, everyone had their price, as she herself knew only too well. And if that didn’t work then there was always blackmail. As well as a price, everyone had a past and she vowed to start digging into theirs to see if she couldn’t locate a few skeletons to use as leverage.
‘Dahling,’ Loretta strutted from the patio back into the bedroom with a renewed sense of purpose, her mood visibly buoyed. ‘Call the butler will you? Have him bring up some more vintage Krug. The ’92.’
Ramsey did not answer her.
Glancing over at her husband in bed, his large bulk buried beneath the Versace sheets, Loretta made her way towards the Moroccan-themed en-suite.
‘Did you hear me, dahling? I said I want champagne … and order some bellinis and beluga while you are at it. I’m a little, how do you say … peckish?’
Receiving no response, Loretta sighed a little irritably, making her way over to the bed where she gave her husband a less-than-subtle poke. He did not move.
Loretta felt the first icy flutters of fear settle upon her stomach like fresh snow on grass. ‘Ramsey dahling, are you ok?’
Peeling back the sheets, she audibly gasped, causing Bambino to give a skittish jump.
‘Cazzo merda! Fucking shit!’ she sprang back from the bed, her heart knocking painfully inside her chest as though it were made of brass. Ramsey’s lips were formed in a perfect ‘O’ shape; his eyes open wide in a ghoulish mask of surprise and despair. Paralysed to the spot, her heartbeat pulsing loudly in her ears, Loretta glanced at the telephone on the bedside table. With a shaking hand she went to pick it up but changed her mind, instead tentatively pressing a red manicured finger against her husband’s neck to check for a pulse. His skin still felt warm to the touch and although overcome with revulsion, she held it there for a few moments. Detecting nothing, she took his wrist between her thumb and forefinger; again, nothing.
He was dead.
Jesus. The poor bastard must’ve gone and had a heart attack. Lightheaded with adrenaline, Loretta looked down at her dead husband with a mix of shock, repulsion and pity. And then it struck her with all the force of a swinging axe; the trial! Even she knew that a dead man cannot be tried. And no trial meant no compensation to be paid, or no list to be struck off, or no reputation to be sullied. It also meant that as his wife, his next of kin, she stood to get the lot; the houses across the world stuffed with priceless furniture and antiques, fleets of luxury cars, a private jet, and enough diamonds to put Switzerland out of business … It would all be hers.
Snatching up Bambino from the bed with a squeal, Loretta dramatically threw herself down onto her husband’s lifeless body.
‘Oh my poor dahling,’ she said, covering Ramsey’s rapidly paling face in scattergun kisses as tears began to track her cheeks. She had been wrong to call him stupid earlier. The man was a fucking genius. In that moment, Loretta truly loved her husband for the first, and last, time. ‘Grazie tesoro bambino,’ she sobbed, as she finally reached for the phone. ‘Grazie …’
CHAPTER 3
Victoria Mayfield stared at her computer screen; it was as blank as her mind. She had been sitting at her antique shabby-chic Parisian desk inside her study for just over an hour now, her fingers hovering precariously above the keyboard.
She looked up to the ceiling, ran her hands through the top of her glossy chestnut hair and took an audible breath. Her agent would be expecting the first few chapters of her much-anticipated new novel by next week and she had not written so much as a line.
Following the success of her debut novel, Mirror, Mirror some ten years ago, and the equally lauded sequel, Broken Glass, the name Victoria Mayfield had become synonymous with young, hopeful and desperately romantic women the world over – and it had made her ridiculously rich and famous in the process. Such accolades meant nothing to Victoria now though. She would have traded it all in a nano-second to have her life back to how it had been a couple of years ago when CeCe was alive.
Abandoning her laptop, Victoria left the room and wandered out onto the landing of her four-storey Notting Hill mews house and found herself hovering outside CeCe’s bedroom, staring at the brightly coloured wooden letters that spelled out her daughter’s name: CECELIA.
Stealthily looking around as though someone were watching her, Victoria pushed open the white door and tentatively stepped inside. Her therapist had advised against spending time in the nursery, had even suggested that she might clear it out and re-decorate as ‘part of the healing process’ but she would not hear a word of it; these small things, they were all she had left.
Victoria inhaled the clean, baby-like scent of the room. Staring at the assortment of soft toys, she picked up CeCe’s favourite rabbit, clutching it to her chest. On the wall to her left, white wooden photo frames containing professional black and white shots of her daughter, her bright-eyed, tiny chubby face all gummy smiles, hung from the picture rail b
y pink silk ribbon.
‘Hello sweetheart,’ she spoke softly. She ran her finger over one of the pictures, stroking her daughter’s tiny face through the glass. She moved towards the beautiful antique white sleigh crib that CeCe had once slept in and smoothed over the soft patchwork quilt that she’d had made by French artisans in Paris and for a split second she felt as if everything was normal; a mother preparing her child’s bed for her mid-morning nap. The painfully fleeting feeling gave her such an intense rush of pleasure that she almost gasped out loud.
Picking up a blanket, a brightly coloured cashmere affair by Brora, Victoria held it up to her face and inhaled deeply. She was sure she could still smell the newness of her daughter on it and an involuntary cry of anguish rose up in her throat and escaped her lips in a low moan.
‘Why, God?’ She shook her fist up at the ceiling, choking back sobs. ‘Why did you take her?’
Victoria Mayfield was the kind of woman who had it all; good looks, talent and intelligence. A loving daughter, a giving friend and a loyal wife, she had always been aware of her privileged background (Daddy was a hedge-fund manager and Mummy, a well-respected stage actress), and had never taken any of it for granted. It wasn’t in her nature to be ostentatious. Daddy had said she was just like his own mother, Cecelia, a woman she had never met but sensed had had kindness running through her very core.
Victoria Sheldon (as she had been before marriage) had seemingly inherited all the good of her grandmother, as well as the aesthetically pleasing Sheldon genes. Hers was a natural beauty. Her face, perfectly symmetrical, was a compilation of both her stunningly attractive parents; she had her father’s intense, deep green eyes and large red lips, and thanks to her mother she had also inherited a mane of thick, glossy, chestnut hair – which she had only recently, at the age of thirty-seven, felt the need to maintain with a few highlights – and a small upturned nose that sat in perfect proportion to the rest of her slim, oval face.
Her eleven-year marriage to Lawrence Mayfield, a handsome, talented film director, had been, by and large, a blissfully happy one. Perfectly matched, they complimented one another perfectly; his natural vivacity offset by her quiet charm.
On the surface, to an outsider who happened to be looking in, Lawrence and Victoria Mayfield had the lot; an enviable marriage, success and acclaim in both their chosen professions, plus a personal fortune that ensured they had the very best of everything. There was just one blot on their sublime landscape: they could not conceive.
‘Give it time,’ others said when month after month, Victoria’s unwelcome period had arrived with all the regularity of a baddie in a fairy tale. Five years down the line however, with numerous failed IVF attempts behind them, it transpired that they had what a glut of specialist doctors referred to as, ‘Unexplained Infertility’. Devastated that they might not ever be able to consolidate their love for each other with a child of their own, they had made the painful decision to stop with the treatment and let fate dictate. And so it had. Less than a year later, Victoria had found herself expecting.
Victoria sat down in the large comfortable nursing chair, a chair she had sat in to cradle her daughter’s tiny body as she fed her, and looked down at the small, soft rabbit she held in her hand, its beady black eyes shining up at her. Every cell in her body wanted to scream with anguish. It was all so cruel and unjust. There was a world of unwanted and unloved children out there, neglected and abused by their parents, and yet God had not seen fit to take their children from them, had he? Deep down in Victoria’s shattered heart, she knew that God had had nothing to do with CeCe’s death; she just needed someone to blame, and He seemed as good as anyone.
It had been uncommonly cold that night of the 16th July. Victoria remembered this because she had felt the need to wear a pair of light cashmere pyjamas to bed – unusual for the time of year.
After giving five-month old CeCe her bedtime feed and placing her down into the beautiful crib, she had watched her tiny daughter kick her chubby baby legs and coo, happily fixated on the mobile of bees and butterflies that gently danced above her, lulling her to sleep. Victoria had felt an overwhelming rush of love for her daughter as she watched her drift off in her crib. She was so adorable! Her saucer eyes were sapphire blue and twinkly, fine platinum curls settled at the nape of her sweet-smelling neck and her rosebud lips were as pink as the flowers themselves. CeCe was her greatest achievement; a baby made all the more precious by coming into the world against the odds.
Lawrence had been in Guatemala the night of the 16th July. He had been filming a documentary on drug mules, a somewhat dangerous assignment, and one that had caused Victoria some consternation at the time. Still, she had slept soundly that evening, a fact she felt guilty about to this day.
CeCe looked peaceful when Victoria had approached her in her crib the following morning. She had slept seemingly soundly and Victoria marvelled at what a clever little girl her daughter was; she had never suffered the torture of sleep deprivation like so many of her fellow new mothers who bitterly complained, bleary-eyed and tetchy, over strong cups of espresso at NCT classes. It was only when she got closer to the crib that Victoria realised that something was wrong. Terribly wrong.
CeCe’s perfect face was tinged blue and when Victoria snatched her up from the crib her body felt cold and rigid. The logical part of her brain immediately told her that her daughter was dead but her heart steadfastly refused to concede this fact, even for a second. And so she had run, clutching the child still wrapped in her soft cashmere blanket, down the stairs, her hysterical, bloodcurdling screams so desperate and piercing that they alerted her housekeeper way down in the basement of the house almost instantly.
‘Oh please, God,’ she had screamed. ‘No … nooooo.’
Marney O’Brien would never forget the look of pure despair etched on her employer’s face that morning. Her low primeval screams would haunt her till her death.
*
From that day onwards, inside her own mind Victoria Mayfield had never really stopped screaming. Even Lawrence struggled to reach her. Though Victoria still loved her husband, their union was now forever blighted, defined by heartache and loss. This feeling was exacerbated by the fact that the doctors had said they were ‘unlikely, if ever’ to conceive again. As if fate hadn’t bestowed them a cruel enough blow, Lawrence had suffered a crippling bout of mumps in the year that had followed little CeCe’s death, rendering his already dwindling sperm count virtually non-existent.
‘Perhaps you might consider adoption?’ the US specialist had gently suggested, his five-thousand-dollar-a-pop fee affording them the soft touch at least. It was an option Victoria had flatly ruled out. She had felt the feet and elbows of flesh and blood inside her belly; her creation, their creation, and knew there could be no substitute.
Two years had passed since CeCe’s death, and with still no baby, Victoria was getting desperate. She couldn’t afford to wait five years like she had done before; she wasn’t getting any younger. As far as she was concerned, a life without children would be no life at all.
From the comfortable confines of CeCe’s nursing chair, Victoria was dragged from her thoughts by the sound of her private phone ringing in her bedroom next door. She heard the incongruous sound of her own cheerful voice as the recorded message kicked in.
‘Tor! Hi! It’s Ellie. Fancy a little lunch this week, if you’re around? I was thinking Nobo perhaps? Or The Belvedere? Your call … I don’t know about you but I could do with the company – and a glass of something alcoholic! Actually, sod it, make it a bottle with the week I’ve had …’ Ellie laughed, though Victoria’s intuition detected an edge to her friend’s tone. ‘Anyway, if you’re about, give me a shout. Otherwise, catch up soon. Hope all’s well, darling. Call me …’
Victoria’s friendship with Ellie Scott was the best thing, the only good thing that had come out of all the wasted time they had spent at the fertility clinic. It had been comforting to meet like-minded people who unde
rstood the emotional ups and downs of endless fruitless IVF cycles and heartbreak, and through it the Mayfields and the Scotts had forged a strong bond.
Victoria made to pick up the phone but hesitated as the image of her daughter’s coffin bubbled up in her mind; a beautiful white solid oak casket adorned with a stunning array of pink flowers that spelled out the word ‘Angel’. It had looked so small as it disappeared through the burgundy velvet curtain of the crematorium that she had wanted to run after it, to rescue her daughter’s tiny body before she turned to dust, to hold her hand, be with her, like a mother should be. She had become hysterical at that point and a doctor had been called to give her a shot of something that had made her sleep, a sleep in which she prayed to a God she despised that she might never wake from.
Victoria abruptly stood. Kissing the rabbit on its soft fluffy face, she replaced it carefully onto the shelf and left the room, taking one sorrowful last look around before closing the door behind her.
Making her way into the vast walk-in wardrobe in her bedroom, she drew back the bespoke sliding doors and began to pull various dresses from their padded hangers, only to instantly discard them in a pile behind her.
Getting pregnant was no longer merely something she hoped for, but a base need within her that had to be filled, as essential as the very oxygen she breathed. Picking up the pile of dresses and throwing them onto the bed, Victoria knew what she had to do. She could no longer wait for fate to chance its arm any more than she could face another year of bitter childless disappointment. She could almost feel her eggs drying up with each second that passed, her empty womb growing less and less accommodating by the day. With all options exhausted, she had made the decision to take matters into her own hands. She would be pregnant by the end of the year and if the doctors and her husband couldn’t help her, well, then she would have no choice but to help herself.
The Perfect Escape Page 29