Flawless (11 page)

“
I wouldn’t dream of using anything immorally sourced.
” Jake mimicked her prim outrage perfectly. “Give me a break, Pollyanna.”

“I wouldn’t!” said Scarlett vehemently.

“Well, maybe you don’t have to,” said Jake. He wasn’t sure why he felt the need to defend himself and his motives to this uppity, judgmental, posh bird, but somehow he just did. “Not all of us were born in a castle and given a whopping great trust fund
for our twenty-first, you know. It doesn’t take much effort to be a champagne socialist.”

“A champagne…how dare you!” Scarlett spluttered. “You know nothing about me.”

“Danny and I worked like dogs building up Solomon Stones,” said Jake.

“As did I, building up Bijoux,” retorted Scarlett.

“And I reckon we’ve made a pretty damn good job of it,” he went on, ignoring her. “So save your lectures for the people who really deserve them, like O’Donnell. I never gave anyone lung cancer. Leave me out of it.”

The music started up again, which Scarlett took as her belated cue to leave. This time Jake didn’t try to stop her as she strode angrily off the dance floor in search of Nancy. Finding her drunkenly giggling by the front doors, surrounded by a drooling gaggle of some of Manhattan’s most eligible men, she dragged her off to one side.

“Hey, what gives?” said Nancy, aggrieved. “I was just getting into the groove back there.”

“I’m leaving,” said Scarlett bluntly. One look at her face, all narrowed eyes and flared nostrils, told Nancy that her friend was in the most almighty huff.

“What, now? Why? You were dancing with that divine bit of rough in the white suit a few minutes ago. What went wrong?”

“Your eyesight, that’s what went wrong,” snapped Scarlett. “Jake Meyer is anything but divine. I was only dancing with him because he forced me, and because I thought, foolishly, that I might be able to talk some sense into him.”

Nancy sighed. She adored Scarlett, but she did wish that her friend would occasionally take off her save-the-world hat and simply relax and have fun.

“Look, if you really want to go, I’ll give you the keys,” she said, delving into her gold clutch bag. “But I think you should stay. I’ve got more hot guys back there than I know what to do
with.” She gestured to the eager posse of admirers behind her. “It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.”

“Thanks, but I’ll pass,” said Scarlett. After two frustrating conversations, first with Brogan O’Donnell and then with Jake, she was ready to punch someone, and certainly not in the mood to make small talk with Nancy’s castoffs. “You be careful, OK? Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

“I won’t,” said Nancy, privately thinking that that didn’t leave her with too many options, other than getting into unnecessary political arguments with every guy who wanted to sleep with her. “See you at home.”

Meanwhile Jake, who had also lost his appetite for the party, managed to track down Danny.

“Where’s Annalise?” he asked, finding his brother alone and morose at the ground-floor bar.

“Gone,” said Danny. “Some bloody Adonis with a hedge fund called Chip or Chuck or something damn stupid like that turned up. Next thing you know she was climbing into the back of his Vanquish.”

“Her loss,” said Jake supportively. “Imagine her having to shout out ‘Chip! Chip!’ when she comes. He’d better have an awfully big cock to compensate for a name like that.”

Danny gave a halfhearted smile. “What about you? What happened to Scarlett?”

“Disappeared up her own arse,” said Jake, irritated. “She’s a gorgeous bird, but honestly, she doesn’t half bend your ear about all this ethical trading crap. I almost felt sorry for Brogan by the end of it.”

“Blimey, I don’t,” said Danny. “Did you see how drop-dead gorgeous his wife was? By far the best-looking woman here.”

Jake noticed the dreamy expression on his brother’s face and took him firmly by the shoulders.

“No,” he said, looking him right in the eye. “Do you hear me, Danny? N-O spells no. Mrs. O’Donnell is very definitely off-limits.”

“I know
that
,” said Danny, shrugging him off. “I’m not stupid. I’m just saying…she’s got something.”

“That’s right,” said Jake. “It’s called a billion dollars in the bank and an old man with half the Russian mafia at his beck and call. Promise me you’ll steer clear.”

Danny looked puzzled. It was unlike Jake to take a throwaway remark so seriously. “Relax,” he said. “I promise.”

S
IX MONTHS AFTER
the Tiffany party, London was enjoying a rare summer heat wave that seemed to have infected the city’s inhabitants with a quite uncharacteristic joie de vivre. People on the streets began smiling and waving at one another in the mornings, commiserating that they were forced to spend such a gorgeous day stuck in an office, and bemoaning the general lack of air conditioning. Stifling, stuffy tube trains emptied as commuters opted to walk or bike to work, thronging to the parks and banks of the Thames like salmon swimming upriver to spawn. There was plenty of “spawning” going on too. Everywhere you looked lovers seemed to be strolling hand in hand, the women with their legs and cleavages at last on show, the men looking happy but at the same time awkward and British in their shorts and flip-flops, as if the soaring temperatures had forced them all to pretend to be Italians without providing the requisite tanned skin and laid-back manner needed to pull the look off.

Nature had also risen to the occasion. Even in the heart of the city, window boxes and tiny postage-stamp front gardens exploded into riotous color with poppies, freesias, roses, clematis, and buddleia bushes all jostling for position and their share of the apparently endless sunlight. Cafés and pubs battled with stick-in-the-mud local councils to be allowed to put tables and
chairs on the pavements, and illicit smokers hung out of every window, enjoying the summer smells of freshly mown grass and Starbucks’ iced Frappuccino.

At Bijoux Scarlett had thrown open all the windows and doors and done her best to allow the spirit of summer inside with the help of huge porcelain water pitchers filled to the brim with daisies, dandelions, and other pretty weeds she’d gleaned from Holland Park earlier. She’d never seen the need for the vastly expensive, imported flower arrangements that so many fancy shops went in for in their window displays, when there was a plentiful supply of free, home-grown flora out there for the taking. For Boxford’s sake as much as her own, she’d also invested in two expensive Conran ceiling fans, which left her permanently windblown and dusted with pollen, but which did at least keep the worst of the punishing temperatures out.

“It really is very beautiful.”

The young woman holding the platinum-and-amethyst pendant in her hands looked down at it longingly. “I particularly like what you’ve done with the diamond setting, so subtle. I’d hate it if it were all…”

“Sparkly?” offered Scarlett.

“Yes. You know, overdone,” agreed the woman. “Still, fifteen thousand pounds. It’s not cheap, is it?”

“No,” Scarlett admitted, admiring her own handiwork over the customer’s shoulder. “No, it’s not. I think it looks exquisite on you, but I quite see that it’s not something one can just splash out and buy without a second thought.”

It was funny: when it came to her Trade Fair campaign she was quite capable of being pushy, yet with her own designs she’d never mastered the art of the hard sell. The thought that she might be pushing someone into buying a piece they didn’t really want, or worse, couldn’t afford, seemed straightforwardly wrong to Scarlett, no matter how many times wiser heads described it as “business sense.”

“I’ll take it off the display for a few days if you like,” she said kindly, “while you think it over. I’m afraid I can’t really hold it any longer than that.”

Inside a not-so-small voice was shrieking,
What the hell are you doing? Your business is going under; you can’t hold it at all!
But the woman looked so relieved and hopeful Scarlett hadn’t the heart to play hardball. Besides, in the past she’d won many a loyal customer through being reasonable and patient. Perhaps this was simply a delayed sale?

God, she hoped so.

It was astonishing how a thriving business like Bijoux could have been brought so low in such a short space of time. This time last year she was going full bore, with a healthy waiting list of custom orders shoring up the retail business and suppliers lining up to work with her. Now it was as if everything Scarlett touched turned to dust in her hands, as if somebody had put a hex on her. And she had a pretty shrewd idea who that somebody might be.

After their very public run-in in New York, it became painfully apparent that Brogan O’Donnell had the knives out for Scarlett. In the four years since she’d started Trade Fair, she’d made a number of powerful enemies. It was safe to say that none of the big jewelry chains or diamond-mining groups much liked her, and there were plenty of corrupt government officials from Mozambique to Moscow who wished fervently that she and her meddlesome crew of cronies would take up some other crusade. But not until she crossed swords with Brogan had she realized quite how damaging a truly personal vendetta could be, to her campaign as well as her livelihood. It seemed there was no aspect of her life that his malevolent influence couldn’t touch.

At first, the intimidation was gradual, so much so that at times she questioned whether Brogan was masterminding it at all or whether she was simply being paranoid. Trade Fair was the first thing to suffer, as one by one she found her speaking engagements being canceled for vague, unspecified reasons. Those
venues that did bother to come up with excuses were far from convincing. The concert hall in Geneva claimed to have double booked itself for Scarlett’s two-night run, an unheard-of error for the efficient Swiss to make. Still, at least they’d had the decency to warn her in advance, unlike the Corn Exchange in Cambridge, who called only hours before she was due to go onstage with her slide show to announce that they’d been overrun by rats (
rats!
) and forced to shut up shop for the night.

If it had happened once, it might have been bad luck; twice, a freak of coincidence. But in the six months since she’d met Brogan, she’d mysteriously lost all but two of her public-speaking gigs. Quite apart from the lost money and time, it was a serious blow to the campaign’s momentum, as so much of Trade Fair’s success was built on word of mouth as Scarlett traveled from city to city.

And it wasn’t just Trade Fair that was suffering. By February, her problems had started to spread to Bijoux too. All of a sudden suppliers she’d worked with for years began refusing to do business with her.

“But Johnny, this is madness,” she’d remonstrated with her longest-standing diamond dealer when he pulled the plug on her by phone. “If it’s a price issue, surely we can talk about it?”

“It’s not the price, Scarlett,” he said awkwardly.

“Well what, then? Something personal? Whatever it is, you can be honest with me. We’ve known each other long enough.”

“It’s nothing personal, truly.” She could hear the tension in his voice on the other end of the line and was left with the strong impression that he was enjoying the conversation even less than she was. “It’s purely business. I just…I can’t sell to you anymore. We’re oversubscribed, and I just can’t do it. I’m sorry.”

Johnny Fitzhammond was a brilliant diamond man, always had been, but there was no way he was “oversubscribed.” An ex–crack addict, he’d been almost destitute when Scarlett started working with him. She knew for a fact that none of her major
competitors in London trusted him enough to forgive him his past.

No, it was patently clear that Brogan had gotten to him. Just as over the next few months he’d get to her other suppliers, the magazines who sold her advertising space, even some of her clients. If it hadn’t been for her online business, she might have gone under altogether, and she still wasn’t out of the woods yet. Thank God she’d bought the store outright rather than leased it. At least that meant Brogan couldn’t bribe the landlord to hike her rent up.

Boxford, his shaggy coat blown into a bizarre, spiky up-do by the ceiling fan directly above him, gave his mistress a reproachful look as the young woman customer left the shop empty-handed.

“Oh, don’t you start,” said Scarlett, crossly. “She’ll come back, all right?”

Sitting down cross-legged on the floor, her legs unusually bronzed from the sun and as long as two slender saplings in the pair of frayed denim shorts and pink espadrilles she was wearing, Scarlett pulled the spaniel into her lap.

“Sorry, old boy,” she said, ruffling his knotted, dangly ears. “I shouldn’t take it out on you.”

It had been a tough few weeks.

It all started with the anonymous, threatening letters. Scarlett dismissed the first one as the work of some crank. But when two more arrived, each more luridly menacing than the last, she called the police. No one at Ladbroke Grove station seemed particularly interested. The problem, apparently, was that none of the letters contained an explicit death threat.