Flawless (36 page)

It was the first time she’d been back home in a year, and already it felt like a letdown. If only she’d made it back in the summer, when she was riding high with Flawless, Trade Fair’s Siberian campaign was taking off, and things were still new and exhilarating with Magnus. But of course, she’d been too busy to take a break back then. Now, in the winter, when the world had
shut up shop for Christmas and she finally had a week to herself, everything seemed to be going wrong.

Well, all right, perhaps not
everything
. The store was still making a solid profit. She’d had a late run of Christmas orders, some of them for complicated, hundred-thousand-dollar or more pieces, which was gratifying (if a little exhausting) right before she took off for the holidays. Working late into the night in her workroom up at Nancy’s cottage, with Boxford snoring and farting contentedly at her heels, she’d had little time to brood on the other, less gratifying aspects of her life. But there was nothing like a long-haul flight to provide one with brooding time.

After an encouraging start, Trade Fair’s momentum in the US seemed to have stalled. Scarlett had spent months working with Andy Gordon on a joint piece about Brogan O’Donnell’s cancer-stricken Siberian workers for NPR. They’d been paid for the work, so they couldn’t officially complain, but every week the airtime was pushed back, and it now looked like the story wouldn’t run at all.

“You mustn’t be too disheartened,” Andy told her over one of their many long midnight chats on Skype. “This sort of thing is very common in radio. Print media’s even worse. You just have to keep flinging mud at the wall and hope that eventually some of it sticks.”

But Scarlett’s flinging arm was getting tired, and Brogan O’Donnell’s starched Ralph Lauren shirt still wasn’t looking remotely mud-splattered. In fact, recently he seemed to have started selling himself as the diamond industry’s Mr. Nice Guy. From the Fox News interview he did a few months ago, you’d have thought he was the next Mahatma Gandhi, not a modern-day version of a tyrannical Victorian factory owner. He and Rupert Murdoch must be golf buddies or something.

Then, last month, she’d had two serious setbacks.
Vanity Fair
cut the piece they’d been planning to run in their February, pre-Oscar issue, showcasing the much-talked-about pictures for
Trade Fair’s new Russian campaign; and Ingrid Olafssen, the Swedish supermodel who’d been on the point of signing on as the face for both Flawless and Trade Fair, suddenly pulled out of her contract. Once again, Brogan O’Donnell’s foul stench oozed around both these roadblocks like raw sewage. Apparently, he’d poached Ingrid away from her agency, Elite, for an eye-watering amount of money.

She felt her stomach lurch as, without warning, the captain swung the plane down through the top layer of clouds. They must have been cleared to land at last. Gripping the sides of her seat as the cabin rattled around, she wondered if this was what it felt like for animals on their way to the slaughterhouse—bumping fearfully along in the back of a dark car, their fate entirely out of their own hands—and felt a pang of guilt about the turkey sandwich she’d just eaten. Then she thought how hard Jake would have laughed if he’d overheard her train of thought and looked out of the window again, trying to pinpoint St. John’s Wood in the dizzying cityscape below.

She hadn’t heard from him at all in eighteen days. Not that she was counting or anything. But it was by far the longest they’d gone without speaking since Flawless opened, and she couldn’t help but feel faintly bereft.

They hadn’t discussed it, but she’d totally assumed that after his Africa trip he’d fly back to LA with the diamonds, and that the two of them would head out to London together. It wasn’t a prospect she’d been looking forward to. Having flown with Jake before, she knew how irritating he would be, shamelessly flirting with the prettier stewardesses, burying himself in the latest copy of
Forever
whenever she tried to talk to him about anything serious, falling asleep the moment he slipped his eye mask on after dinner, and proceeding to snore loudly next to her for the remainder of the flight. And yet now that she’d been spared the ordeal—from Cape Town he’d decided to go straight to Europe, visiting clients in Paris and Madrid before flying on
to London—she felt as though he’d somehow let her down. As if a vital piece of her Christmas was missing, and it was all Jake Meyer’s fault.

Although the person she was really upset with was Magnus. With less than a week’s notice, the bastard had blithely called to inform her that he’d decided to spend the holidays with his parents in Vail and wouldn’t now be coming to Scotland after all.

“But what am I supposed to do at Drumfernly for ten whole days without you?” wailed Scarlett. “I only agreed to stay so long because you said you’d be there.”

“Come on, honey. You haven’t seen your folks in a year. It’ll be fun to catch up,” said Magnus glibly. He seemed to have conveniently blacked out his memories of Caroline, and how much “fun” she could be.

“
Fun
? Are you out of your mind?” Scarlett pleaded. “You can’t just dump me with them, Magnus. You promised.”

“I know, I know. But my folks are old,” he said, in his best caring-son voice. “I’m all they have.”

“Come off it. Your mother’s barely sixty,” Scarlett shot back scathingly, “and your dad climbed Mont Blanc last year. They’re hardly in their sunset. Surely they can spare you for one lousy Christmas? Tell them you already made plans.”

But it was obvious she was flogging a dead horse. And, though it pained her to admit it, she was really more annoyed with him for bailing selfishly at the last minute than she was distraught at the prospect of being denied his company. Certainly his presence at Drumfernly would have made the holiday more bearable. But how much of that was because he could have acted as a buffer between her and her family, and how much was because she actually wanted to be with him, she honestly wasn’t sure. Somewhere along the line, the joy seemed to have gone out of their relationship. But right now, with Brogan yapping like a Rottweiler at her heels, she didn’t have the mental or emotional energy to try to revive it.

It was a rocky landing. After swaying the 747 to and fro like one of those horrid pirate ship rides at the fairground, the pilot slammed down onto the tarmac with all the grace and subtlety of an elephant on an ice rink. Thank God she’d left Boxie in LA with Nancy. He’d have had a heart attack stuck in the cargo hold, sedatives or no sedatives.

“Well, ladies and gents, here we are at last.” The pilot sounded awfully chipper for someone who’d just narrowly escaped death. “It’s a brisk two degrees Celsius outside, it’s pissing with rain, and we’ve just heard, for those of you that are interested, that Great Britain came last in the Olympic speed skating this afternoon. Yes, that’s right,
last
. Behind Samoa. What can I say? Welcome home, and merry Christmas.”

Cameron auto-locked the doors on his new Porsche from the inside and tried not to panic.

You heard about these things all the time. Wealthy, white professionals being targeted by gangs of black youths, stabbed in the heart for the sake of a mobile phone or a few lousy dollars of cash in their wallets. How much more satisfying a target must he make, broken down in his luxury car on the outskirts of Canary Wharf, home to all the fat-cat investment bankers that these so-called hoodies hated with such violent passion?

“Go away!” he yelped, as the two tall figures in jogging suits approached his driver’s-side window. “Go away or I’ll call the police.”

But they kept coming—three of them, he could see now, all with their heads down—moving like snakes along the shadow of the underpass, surrounding the car on all sides.

“Don’t hurt me!” he whimpered, cringing down in his seat as one of them tapped on the glass. “You can have the car. Take
whatever you want. Just please don’t hurt me. I have a wife and child at home!”

Closing his eyes tight, like a frightened child, the next thing he heard was laughter, raucous laughter, echoing around him in the darkness.

“Get out, you prat,” said a familiar voice. “It’s us.”

“Rob?” The relief was so overwhelming Cameron thought he might be physically sick. “Christ alive, you scared me.”

“No kidding!” laughed the voice. Pulling back the hood on his sweatshirt, he revealed himself as Robert Allen, one of Cameron’s teammates at Goldman. “Ten more seconds and you’d have shit your pants, I reckon.”

The two guys with him sneered knowingly. They were also from GS, associates from the Equity Capital Markets desk whom Cameron knew by sight but not by name. Chances were they were called Chip or Chuck or some other suitably American fratboy name, he thought bitterly. Certainly they were exactly the type of guy he’d pray
not
to run into while cowering behind the wheel like a pussy.

For all his grandstanding to Scarlett and the rest of his family, Cameron was not popular at work, and he knew it. The atmosphere on the trading floor of an investment bank was not dissimilar to public school, or (he imagined) prison. The players might be older and, in theory at least, more mature—but the play itself was the same: an endless game of one-upmanship, with turf wars raging between dominant and less dominant groups. Rob was one of the leaders of the “cool” group in Mergers & Acquisitions—the guys who spent their Saturday nights at Soho House, dated well-known actresses or heiresses, and partied on each other’s yachts in St. Tropez every summer. Primarily American, this group also contained a few of the flashier French traders, and of course the Italians, who were all so uniformly handsome they could never have been anything other than popular.

Cameron, by contrast, was one of the very lowliest members of the “also-ran” group, a miscellaneous posse of nerds, losers, and married guys, most of them British, who pretended to look down on Rob and his ilk as stupid and shallow, but who secretly longed to sleep with coked-up lingerie models half their age and be arrested for speeding at the Gumball rally in Monte Carlo.

“Trouble with the old wheels, eh?” said Chip or Chuck, his white teeth flashing cruelly in the darkness. “Serves you right for being such a cheapskate. You shoulda sprung for a Ferrari, man.”

“‘I got a wife and child?’” mocked Rob. “Fuck, Drummond, have you got no shame at all?”

“His wife came with a free penis pump from the sex shop,” quipped the third guy, not wanting to be outdone by his buddies. “But where’d he buy a blow-up kid? That’s what I’d like to know!”

“Ha-ha,” said Cameron, his earlier relief at being out of physical danger draining away as the full magnitude of his humiliation hit home. None of them would let him forget this at work tomorrow morning. “What are you doing out here anyway, dressed like that? I thought you were muggers.”

“Going for a run,” said Rob, peeling off his sweatshirt to reveal a Nike tank top and an upper body that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the front cover of
Men’s Health
magazine. “You should try it some time. Good for the old ticker, you know? I’d say yours could do with a bit of toughening up.”

Vain dickhead
, thought Cameron as the three of them began giggling again like schoolboys. But he restrained himself, sticking to polite small talk and laughing off his cowardice as best he could as they helped him push the car to the nearest shoulder. Once there, he waved them off as cheerfully as he could—they were still laughing and sending him up mercilessly as they jogged away, the bastards—and called the tow truck.

It was only half past four, but the last of the winter sunlight had already disappeared behind the horizon, and the temperature was dropping like a stone. Pulling his cashmere coat more
tightly around him against the wind and drizzle, Cameron waited gloomily for rescue, glad of the hustle and bustle of the McDonald’s opposite and the weak orange glow from the lampposts, which somehow made him feel far safer than he had felt alone on the road.

He was well aware that he’d overreacted in front of Rob and the other guys and that he’d pay for it dearly in the office. But despite being one of nature’s cowards, he was pretty sure he wouldn’t have been so shaken up if it hadn’t been for all the other weird things happening to him lately. It had gotten to the point where even something as innocent as a car breakdown was starting to feel like part of a conspiracy.

It had started about a month ago, with a break-in at his apartment—not in itself such an unusual event. Cameron lived in one of the most expensive parts of Chelsea, and anyone watching the house would have known he worked long hours. But the weird thing was that the thieves hadn’t taken anything, not even the wad of cash he’d left lying out on the kitchen table for the cleaning lady. The papers on his desk had been disturbed, and his desktop computer was switched off—odd, when he was pretty sure he’d left it on hibernate when he’d left for work that morning. But other than that, it was as if someone had broken in, looked carefully for something specific, and then left, as far as Cameron could tell, empty-handed.

He might have forgotten all about this curious incident had it not been for that night the following week, when he could have sworn a black Fiat was tailing him home from Nobu, and then two days later he saw the same car driving slowly past Pucci Pizza on the King’s Road while he was enjoying his usual Saturday pepperoni garlic crust special. It was only after he contacted the police and was outraged by their lack of concern, bordering, in his opinion, on derision, that he remembered Scarlett and her wild accusations about Brogan O’Donnell after Bijoux burned down.