Flawless (5 page)

Also, darling, I know Cameron will want to share the driving
, Caroline went on,
but I do think it’s important you let him rest as much as possible. He’s been terribly busy at the office lately and he desperately needs a break.

And I don’t?
thought Scarlett furiously. Cameron, her older brother, sole heir to Drumfernly and the rest of the Drummond Murray family fortune, had always been the apple of their mother’s eye. Now an investment banker, clawing his way up the ladder at Goldman Sachs and already earning a second small fortune, he’d become even more insufferably self-important recently, glued to his BlackBerry as though the world would stop if it lost contact with him for even a minute. Scarlett wouldn’t have minded so much if he, or any of her family, had taken her own career a bit more seriously. But none of them had given her the slightest praise or encouragement for her achievement with Bijoux, or for the huge strides she’d made in her Trade Fair campaign. The only thing Caroline Drummond Murray was interested in for her daughter was a successful marriage, which in her book meant marriage to the eldest son of one of a select group of Scottish families, no matter how dull or uninspiring he might be. And on this front Scarlett was determined to remain an abject failure.

Too pissed off to read any more, she ripped open another white envelope and pulled out a glossy, stiff-backed card with a picture of the Rockefeller Center ice rink and Christmas tree on the front. Inside, to her joy and relief, was a letter from Nancy, her oldest and closest girlfriend, crammed with gossip and plans for Scarlett’s New Year’s shopping trip to New York. Nancy was based in LA, trying to make it as a scriptwriter, but her family were dyed-in-the-wool New Yorkers, and she always spent the holidays there. The thought of her five-day vacation with Nancy was the only thing keeping Scarlett even faintly sane as another Christmas at Drumfernly loomed.

“Oh, shit! Bugger, bugger, bugger!”

Leaping to her feet, she turned off the gas and pulled Boxford’s charred mince in its smoking pan off the hob. Climbing up onto the table, still in her underwear and T-shirt and with her long, damp hair stuck to her back like seaweed, she hurriedly disabled the smoke alarm before it could go off and annoy the neighbors. “Sorry, Boxie darling,” she said, opening the tiny barred window a crack to let out the fumes and salvaging what was left of the good meat with a wooden spoon as the dog padded through into the kitchen, tail wagging. “I’m afraid it’s half rations. I got a bit distracted.”

Deciding that the rest of the post could wait, she gave him his meal, padded out with a bit of regular soft dog food, and set about preparing her own meal. When focused, Scarlett was actually a decent cook and had been an ardent fan of fresh organic ingredients long before it became fashionable. Not usually a big drinker, the prospect of tomorrow’s drive and all the wrapping and packing she still had to do tonight was so depressing that she ended up opening a bottle of Jacob’s Creek and finishing almost all of it while she ate, flicking idly through the latest copy of
Forever
, the diamond industry’s quarterly trade magazine.

“Oh, look, Boxie, look!” she slurred excitedly, stumbling upon a feature about her Trade Fair fund-raiser last month at
the Dorchester. “They’re actually writing nice things about us for once. Can you believe it?”

The event, an auction hosted by two of Scarlett’s more successful model girlfriends, had been attended by the usual dogooder crowd of charity junkies—bored, wealthy wives, mostly, who liked to soothe their consciences after a hard day exercising their husbands’ credit cards at Boodles by “giving something back” the only way they knew how: getting their hair and Botox done, slipping on a couture dress, and dropping five hundred pounds a head on a ticket for a glamorous charity dinner at one of London’s top hotels.

“You must stop it,” Scarlett told herself firmly, skimming through the gushing review and accompanying pictures of Jemima Khan looking as horse-faced and inbred as ever. “Don’t be so judgmental.” As much as she might disapprove of her patrons’ lifestyles, she needed both their money and their high-profile support if her campaign was to have any chance of success. Thanks to the hostility of the cartels, Trade Fair got precious little good PR. She should be grateful for this article, however creepily sycophantic it might be, and for the socialite supporters who made it possible. Scribbling down the name of the journalist on the back of an envelope, she made a mental note to call and thank him in the morning.

Skipping past a piece on the three-million-dollar revamp of Cartier’s flagship on Bond Street, her attention was caught by a picture of the Meyer twins, Jake and Danny, arm in arm and grinning at some trendy new jeweler’s in New York.

Flying the flag for British bespoke expertise in the diamond trade
, read the accompanying blurb,
Solomon Stones’ founders Jacob and Daniel Meyer enjoy some Stateside hospitality at the new Max Peterson store on Park Avenue.

“Wankers!” Scarlett heard herself yelling at the page. She’d definitely overdone it on the old pinot. “Flying the flag for grasping, unprincipled womanizers, more like it.”

She’d met the Meyers only once, last year at an industry function in Amsterdam, but already knew them well by reputation and had disliked both of them on sight. Arrogant, vain, and immensely impressed by their own perceived “charm,” she’d watched them oil their way around the great and the good at the party like a pair of Cockney jellied eels. With their cosmetically white smiles, year-round tans, and loud, flashy suits, they radiated insincerity and self-interest like a pair of politicians running for office. Well known for their shady business practices and, far more unforgivably in Scarlett’s eyes, for their continued willingness to buy stones from tainted sources like Congo and Angola, they were nevertheless welcomed by high society in London and America, feted as much for their good looks and reputed prowess in bed as for their beautiful, cut-rate diamonds.

Jake, the cockier of the two, had been foolish enough to make a halfhearted pass at her in Amsterdam, so she’d had an opportunity to examine the fabled “Meyer magic” at close quarters. Personally, she couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. Fine, so he had nice features, but then so did Ted Bundy, and he wore enough Gucci Envy to fell an elephant at fifty yards. Was she really the only woman in London immune to his charms? The only woman who cared about the appalling conditions in Africa that Jake and his ilk were helping to perpetuate?

At least spending the holiday immured at Drumfernly with her parents would mean she was in no danger of running into the Jake-and-Danny show. When the Meyers came back to London at Christmas, the It-girls, models, and wives who made up the core local diamond-buying market—not to mention Bijoux’s own customer base—seemed to degenerate into an embarrassing flurry of excitement, like giddy schoolgirls. Always listed in
Tatler
’s top five “Most Eligible Bachelor” rankings, despite the fact that neither of them had lived in London for eons, both Jake and Danny were considered big society draws. It made Scarlett’s blood boil.

Still, this was no time to be wasting mental energy on Jake stupid Meyer. She still had everything to do before tomorrow, and a mountain of wrapping paper, Scotch tape, and ribbon waiting in a reproachful pile on her bed. She’d better get moving before the wine really got the better of her and she forgot which present was for whom.

“S
O
I
TOLD
him,” said Cameron, drawing breath for the first time in at least a minute, “I said, ‘Listen, Muhammad,’ I said, ‘I don’t care how rich you are, or how your grandfather’s grandfather used to do business. We are Goldman Sachs. We are
the
premiere investment banking organization
on this planet
. And we do our deals our way. Now are you in or are you out?’ And of course, the poor little guy’s balloon was well and truly popped after that,” he laughed. “It’s always the same with the bloody A-rabs. All they need is a firm hand, and next thing you know they’re eating out of it.”

“Hmm,” said Scarlett, who’d tuned out her brother’s self-aggrandizing monologue well over two junctions back on their torturously slow slog up the M1. “Well, never mind. It sounds like you did the best you could.”

“What do you mean?” snapped Cameron. “I just told you, I nailed that little dweeb. Sheikh bloody Muhammad might be a big noise in Kuwait, but he’s a pretty small fish in the sort of waters Goldman swims in, I can tell you.”

“But didn’t you say earlier that his net worth was somewhere north of ten billion?” said Scarlett, casting around for any scrap of information from his tedious, long-winded speech that she could remember.

Cameron gave an unimpressed shrug of his thirty-year-old-associate shoulders. “So?”

“Well, nothing. It’s just I’m sure I saw in the paper the other day that Goldman’s market cap is around thirty billion. So doesn’t that mean that this chap, this one ‘little’ man, could buy up a third of your entire company if he wanted to?”

“I’m afraid it’s not that simple.” Cameron snorted, adding patronizingly, “I wouldn’t give up the day job if I were you, Scar. You wouldn’t make much of an i-banker.”

He didn’t appreciate being caught out on the facts by his dippy little sister. Since when did Scarlett know what a market cap was, anyway?

Scarlett, in fact, couldn’t have been less interested in her brother’s latest professional “triumph” if he’d been recounting it to her in Urdu. On previous journeys with Cameron, she’d passed the time by playing an adapted mental version of soccer whereby she scored a goal every time he said the words “Goldman Sachs,” four goals for any regurgitated American business-school phrases like “think outside the box” or “step up to the plate,” and six for real clangers such as “I’m gonna blue-sky this with my boss.” But after last Christmas, when she’d racked up dozens of points before they’d even got past Luton airport, she decided the game was no longer enough of a challenge.

Besides, her head was throbbing so badly it was all she could do to concentrate on the road, never mind listen to the constant stream of drivel emanating from the passenger seat. Having collapsed into bed at three o’clock this morning with bits of Scotch tape still stuck to her hair, she’d been woken up at six with a pounding hangover to the sound of workmen drilling up the road outside her window. From there the morning had gone from bad to worse, starting with cleaning up a big pile of dog shit in the kitchen (poor Boxford’s beef hadn’t agreed with him) and progressing to the hell on earth that is Harrods’ food hall on the Saturday before Christmas. After an hour and a half of standing
in line, smiling politely while tourists pushed in front of her, trod on her foot, and engaged in piercingly loud conversations in their own various languages within millimeters of her battered eardrums, she finally emerged onto Walton Street weighed down with overpriced cheese, meats, and chocolate like a packhorse, only to find that her car had been ticketed and was in the process of being clamped—with poor Boxford howling in the back!

Much screaming and a hefty bribe later she was on her way again, but on arrival at Cameron’s gorgeous townhouse by the river in Chelsea, she found him still asleep and not yet packed, curled up in bed at noon in his Conran silk pajamas like the Sultan of bloody Brunei.

She’d been furious at the time, of course. But now, five hours into their (at least) ten-hour journey, she realized she preferred him asleep.

Desperate to take advantage of the lull in conversation, she switched on the radio. Her head hurt too much for music, so she plumped for Radio 4, hoping that the soothing tones of Jenni Murray on
Woman’s Hour
might calm her battered spirits. They listened in silence to a repeat of last Sunday’s
Thought for the Day
—some sweet rabbi from Leeds talking about the importance of tolerance at Christmas and the close bond between Judaism and Christianity—and through a series of lighthearted, festive news items about drunk and disorderly carol singers and a parrot who could apparently recite “’Twas the night before Christmas.” But the mood in the overstuffed gray Volvo changed dramatically when a report came on about the American mine owner Brogan O’Donnell and the mysterious lung and throat cancers affecting workers in his Russian diamond mines.

“It’s hard to describe the bleakness of Yakutia,” the Scottish reporter was saying, his feet crunching audibly across the Siberian ice. “This remote region of Russia produces over ninety-eight percent of all the country’s diamonds—that’s twenty percent of the world supply of gemstones. Everything here—the entire
landscape—is white gray, and the cold is absolutely…paralyzing.” You could hear the biting wind whistle in the background and the poor man struggling to get his breath. “A lot of people are making fortunes here, many of them foreigners, like the American billionaire Brogan O’Donnell, chairman of O’Donnell Mining Corp. But for the miners, working in these utterly appalling conditions day after day…it’s a very different story. When you’re struck down with a serious illness in Yakutia, there’s precious little help on offer.”