by Karen Swan
For Ells
Just keep swimming.
(With occasional yoga. And pauses for wine.)
Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
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
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Christmas Under The Stars
The Christmas Secret
The Rome Affair
Prologue
Mediterranean Sea, off the Côte d’Azur, late July 2018
She fell backwards through the air, picking up speed quickly, her green silk dress flapping loudly against her skin like a startled bird’s wings. Her hair streamed upwards, framing her last view like willow fronds as she plummeted silently through the night. It had all happened too quickly for her to feel any fear and there was a strange calmness to knowing that it would all be over any moment now. These past few months had broken her and so, perhaps, this was not the calamity it seemed as her eyes watered and her body braced. Perhaps it was merciful. Kind, even. This was not living. It was no life.
She would be gone, yes.
But she would also be free.
Chapter One
New York, early July 2018, six weeks earlier
‘Right, nobody panic,’ Xan said, standing up from his chair on the other side of the desk and waving his arms at them in a panicky manner. ‘But I need thirty penguins for a black-tie party in East Hampton. Now.’ He pushed his hands towards them both in a point. ‘Go!’
‘I love penguins!’ Poppy gasped, swinging from side to side on her spinning chair, all gangly limbs, and sipping on a green juice.
Chloe sank her chin into her hand. ‘Why do you need penguins at a black-tie party? Or is that just a ridiculous question?’
‘Seriously?’ Poppy deadpanned. ‘I can’t believe you even need to ask.’
Xan walked around the bank of desks and came and sat on the pile of paperwork between theirs. ‘The client wants them to mingle.’
‘Mingle. Huh,’ Poppy nodded, as though their sociability was the pertinent point. She finished typing an email and gave a loud exhale. ‘Well, just so long as they don’t want them serving the drinks. That really would be unreasonable.’
Chloe chuckled. God, she loved her job and the fact that this counted as just another day at the office. ‘What time’s the party starting?’
Xan pouted. ‘Two hours.’
‘Right,’ Chloe said slowly; the Hamptons were a three-hour road-trip from here as it was, and that was before you counted in that it was late Friday afternoon and most of Manhattan was trying to get out there too. ‘So then you’re looking at a helicopter.’
Xan shrugged. ‘I’ll get a Tornado if I have to – have you ever spoken to that woman?’ Chloe shook her head. ‘She makes Melania look low-maintenance.’
Poppy guffawed. She had the type of Julia Roberts mouth that reached beyond the outer edges of her eyes when she smiled – which was a lot. She was a curious contradiction of extremes – rail-thin body and super-tall, but with oversized eyes and fluffy baby-blonde hair. She was one of the most senior members of the team and yet she wore her authority lightly – anyone walking in off the street might mistake her for an intern.
‘I’ve just put a hold option on the Augusta Grand at the TSS heliport. I think it’ll be big enough to take thirty penguins, don’t you?’ Xan mused.
Poppy’s eyes danced again. ‘Oh, intriguing maths question! How many penguins does it take to fill an Augusta Grand? What is the cubic volume of an average penguin these days?’ she asked, looking at Chloe with an earnest expression.
Chloe sat back and swung in her chair too. They spent much of their days like this. ‘Depends, Pops. Are we talking Emperor, or your common-or-garden Antarctic variety? Otherwise, it’s like comparing apples and pears.’
‘Apples and pears? Stairs?’ Her voice was plummy and far too enunciated to pull off mockney convincingly, just as its lanky owner wasn’t fooling anyone with her carpenter dungarees; Poppy Langham was a viscount’s daughter with half the sheep in Shropshire grazing on her family’s land.
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ Xan sighed with a tut as they collapsed with laughter beside him; sometimes, being the only English people on the team was as foreign as coming from Mars – and just as fun.
‘It’s the cockney rhyming slang we told you about, remember?’ Chloe said, patting his knee. An avid Anglophile, Xan was often in thrall to their niche colloquialisms, although he rarely managed to deploy them correctly himself and once told their boss, Jack, on the way out to lunch, that his new car was the bee’s legs.
But even he had no time for a lesson in the finer points of English slang today. ‘And that helps me with my penguins how?’
Poppy put her feet up on the desk – red and white chequerboard Vans today – a clear sign she was ready to work. ‘Right, well assuming a chopper transit time of thirty minutes, that means we’ve got ninety minutes to track down a colony.’
‘Ninety?’ Chloe queried. ‘I’d go with seventy. It’s rush hour, the traffic to the heliport?’ She gave a shrug.
‘You’re so right,’ Poppy nodded. ‘Seventy minutes. That’s what you’ve got to work with to hunt them down.’
‘Well, all this maths advice is great,’ Xan said sarcastically, picking up her juice and finishing it off, the sucking of the straw making a wonderful feature of his cheekbones. ‘But besides the cubic volume of a penguin and allowances made for rush hour, can you tell me where to find the damned birds?’
There was a brief hiatus in discussions.
‘Hmm.’ Poppy gave a mournful sigh, tapping a finger against her generous lips. ‘I definitely know where you can’t get them.’
‘The zoo?’ Chloe posited.
‘Exactly so,’ Poppy marvelled, pointing at Chloe as though she were a gameshow contestant on a lucky streak. She looked back at Xan with a stern expression. ‘The paperwork’s a bitch. You’re looking at a week, basic.’
‘Okay, so not the zoo. How about the—’
‘Aquarium?’ Chloe suggested.
He nodded. ‘Yeah, exactly. The aquarium.’
Poppy pulled a pitying expression. ‘Same problem.’ She waggled her very-chewed Bic at him. ‘What you need is a private collector.’
‘Or an eccentric billionaire?’ Chloe cut in. ‘There’s bound to be one who keeps them as giant chess pieces or something.’
‘Very true,’ Poppy said, nodding in agreement.
‘Yes, but who has a private collection of penguins on the eastern seaboard?’ Xan asked, looking panicked. ‘I mean, I know several ornithologists – Bob Truman has . . . owls and falcons? Some eagles too, I think.’
‘Trump probably has a flock of flamingos at Mar-a-Lago you could borrow,’ Chloe offered.
Xan repressed a shudder. ‘That really would mess with the dress code. It’s supposed to be
a black and white party.’
‘Oh. Bummer.’ She leaned back in her chair, swinging side to side in half-circles, her eyes pinned thoughtfully on a commuter ferry sailing down the East River. The sun was skimming through the tower blocks at a sharp angle as it slid down the walls of the sky, lending the water’s usual green tint a coppery patina. She reached for her new Dior cat-eye shades – she always left a pair dangling over the corner of her screen for just such emergencies – arching her eyebrows questioningly at Poppy.
‘Mmm. Very nice,’ Poppy said approvingly. ‘Are those the ones Charlize Theron had?’
‘Yeah, I saw them in Barneys. You like?’
‘I love. Can I try them on?’
‘Hello? My penguins?’ Xan interjected as they began playing dress-up. ‘I’m running out of time here. How far north do you think we can go in a chopper to get back to the Hamptons in time for the party? We could be nudging into Maine, maybe even Quebec?’
‘Yeah, maybe,’ Poppy agreed, admiring her reflection in the tiny mirror Blu-tacked to the corner of her screen.
‘I mean, Canada’s cold,’ he continued as she pulled a pout. ‘It’s freezing. They’ve got to have penguins.’
Poppy gave him a sad shake of the head. ‘Penguins are indigenous to the Antarctic Circle, babe. Canada has bears.’
Chloe gave a mournful sigh. ‘If only she’d asked for bears!’
‘Now that certainly would be a party no one would forget . . . It’d be a black and white and red dress code pretty damn quick,’ Poppy giggled, amusing herself.
An idea came to Xan, his face brightening. ‘Wait – never work with kids or animals, right? But some people do. That’s their specialism. So that’s what I need – the name of an animal trainer. Someone in film.’
‘Sounds good,’ Poppy nodded, handing Chloe back her glasses.
Xan gasped again, becoming animated now. ‘Oh! There was that Jim Carrey film a few years ago, wasn’t there? That had penguins. Oh, oh! What was it called?’ he asked, snapping his fingers excitedly as he tried to recall the name. ‘. . . Mr. Popper’s Penguins!’
Poppy did a full revolution in her chair, her ridiculously long legs zigzagging to keep her feet off the ground. ‘I loved that film! We bunked off a geography field trip to go and see it when I was in the Upper Fifths.’
‘I think I must have missed it,’ Chloe wrinkled her nose and did a spin of her own.
‘Oh babe, you’ve gotta see it.’
‘Right – so we just need to find out who supplied the birds for that,’ Xan mumbled, giving up on their help and rushing back to his side of the desk. ‘They might have a contact on this coast . . .’ His voice trailed off. ‘. . . What’s this?’ He read something on the screen before looking up at Poppy. ‘You’ve already sent me a number?’
‘Oh. Yeah,’ Poppy shrugged. ‘The guy owns a wildlife reserve in Vermont; he hires out some of the animals to certain events to fund his conservation activities.’
‘But . . . but why didn’t you just tell me that in the first place?’ he almost shrieked. ‘I’ve just wasted ten minutes standing talking to you.’
‘Not wasted, Xan. The journey is the destination, remember,’ Poppy grinned, shrieking as an açai berry was flicked her way.
Chloe laughed, returning to her own work. As the Corporate Partnerships Director she didn’t have to get her hands dirty dealing with the weird, wacky, bizarre and often outright strange requests of their members. Rather, it was her remit to find inroads with companies with overlapping synergies and customer demographics to theirs, securing deep discounts and ready access for their members. Invicta was already the premier luxury concierge club across Europe and although America was a relatively new frontier for the company, operations here were growing faster than anywhere else globally; she had only been based in the New York office for five months but, as in London, much of her time was spent networking, breakfasting, lunching and generally schmoozing for the greater good, with the result that she already knew the city more intimately than most of its born-and-bred inhabitants. They say it takes three winters before someone can call themselves a New Yorker but she already had her ear to the ground of this city, she had taken its pulse and she knew exactly what would make its heart beat faster – be it a new Soho House outpost, the opening of Ian Schrager’s latest hotel or Scandinavia’s Noma doing a $2,000 per person, one-off pop-up dinner at members-only club Spring Place. Since arriving in February, she had thrown herself into her work with the zeal of ten men and there was not a five-star hotel bar she hadn’t drunk in, a Michelin-starred restaurant she hadn’t dined in. Poppy was as much her dance-floor partner as she was her desk-mate and Chloe had started to become accustomed to seeing photographs of the two of them in the social pages several mornings a week. But if it sounded great – it was great – her definition of luxury had changed, and as she began to feel her new roots graft to the bedrock of this city, nothing was more enticing than the prospect of a quiet night in; there was only so much top-end living a quiet former Brownie from Northumberland could take.
‘Yessss,’ Poppy said, putting the phone down and giving a little fist pump.
‘What?’
‘That was the confirmation I’ve been waiting for, to say that Alexander can have a week’s exclusive use at the new Soneva resort in the Maldives. It doesn’t open for another month, but you know how he gets about his privacy.’
Chloe did indeed know. Poppy was a lifestyle manager for the top-tier clients; she only ever handled five at a time – a membership fee of $200,000 a year bought her almost-exclusive attention – and Alexander Subocheva was the top banana. An old-school oligarch, with a mining, hotel and electronics empire with outposts around the world, he lived one of the most extraordinary lives on the planet. Absolutely nothing was off limits to him. When he had wanted to ride motorbikes down Big Sur with Tom Cruise, Poppy had arranged it. When the world’s only remaining privately owned Leonardo da Vinci had come up for auction, he had sent her along to get it for him so that it could be hung above the bed in his private jet. This holiday sounded entirely reasonable under the circumstances; he might as easily have asked to vacation on the moon as there.
‘Nice.’
Beside her, Poppy’s fingers tapped on the keyboard as she fired off a happy email to his executive assistant.
‘How’s Pelham, by the way? Did they get out okay?’
Poppy groaned. ‘Only just – not that he knows that.’ She had spent most of yesterday trying to charter a fully skippered yacht to sail her favourite – rather beleaguered – client Pelham, Lord Hungerford, from Belize to Tulum after their driver, heading for the jungle, had called to say they’d been targeted by Guatemalan bandits and were being followed. Poppy, who remembered the ‘flexibility’ of official authorities there from her gap year, had calmly told him to head for the coast and she’d deal with the rest; Chloe had overheard her – it had been like she’d been giving directions to the pub. ‘As far as he’s concerned, we changed itinerary because of the weather forecast.’ She grinned. ‘Poor Pelham.’
Chloe couldn’t help but laugh. It was a refrain she heard a lot: ‘Poor Pelham’; after thirty years’ philandering, gambling and squandering of the family fortune, he’d had an epiphany when his fourth wife ran off with his stepson from his second marriage, and had spent the best part of the last year trying to win back his first wife, Clarissa – ‘the love of my life and the best thing that ever happened to me, but I was too bloody blind to see it,’ he’d moaned down the phone to Poppy. He and ‘Rissa’ had settled into a comfortable friendship over the years – she had chosen to forgive his betrayal ‘for the children’s sake’ – but although she was happy as his ‘companion’ in their newly warmed-up relationship, she refused to countenance moving to anything more formal again, despite Pelham’s ever more extravagant declarations of love. He had been trying to propose for several months but kept being thwarted in his attempts, not just by Rissa’s stubbornness but by various ac
ts of God too, and now . . . lawless South American bandits.
‘So anyway, Elle and I are hitting Montauk this weekend if you fancy it?’ Chloe said, flicking through a ritzy brochure outlining a projected luxury property development in the Swiss Alps; she was negotiating a deal for their members to get first dibs and buy off-plan, and she had a meeting pencilled in for the following week to tie down terms. ‘We’re getting the 7.09 p.m. Jitney.’
‘Ugh, I’d love to but I really can’t.’ Poppy flopped again, throwing her long limbs out like a starfish, head tipped back so that her hair dangled down almost to the base of her chair. ‘I’ve got to stay here, just in case. Alexander’s got his big dinner tonight and I cannot afford for a single thing to go wrong. He’s got it all so top-secret.’
‘Why the big fuss?’ Chloe could only imagine the combined net worth around that particular dinner table – equivalent to the GDP of a lesser European power, perhaps?
‘He’s rooting out some potential investors for the hotel chain; he’s pretty keyed up about it so I need everything to go off perfectly.’
‘Which it will.’ She knew better than anyone the effort Poppy had gone to. As her neighbour, she had overheard everything from the genesis of the idea to its execution. Alexander’s brief had been: ‘Something spectacular, unforgettable. A statement of my unique vision and pioneering luxury.’ And so Poppy had come up with a silver-service dinner on an iceberg.
The logistics had been formidable – high winds, and the inherent fragility of the iceberg that had been identified as best suitable for the job meant arriving by helicopter wasn’t an option, and Poppy had not only sorted out the catering and travel logistics to get the select few guests to Greenland, but had also arranged for each of them to be measured – wherever they had happened to be in the world at that point – for bespoke reindeer-hide suits that would be ready and waiting for them to change into on the jet. Once they landed, dog-pulled sledges and drivers were waiting on the ground to transport them to the safest disembarking point off the mainland (which was changing daily due to the ice melt) from where a Rib of ex-Navy Seals would take them to the iceberg. An ice sculptor had spent the past three days carving a turned staircase for them to walk up and a fleet of butlers were going to be waiting at the top with trays of perfectly chilled vodka. It was incredible, ridiculous. Exactly what passed as normal for a man like Alexander Subocheva.