Killer Queens (10 page)

She had rehearsed it again and again. Nothing had been left to chance; even the ski lift, after she had ridden it up to the summit of Jebel Attar, just after dawn had broken, had been temporarily disabled for twenty minutes by the operator, who had thought he was being bribed by a hireling of Belinda’s to ensure that she wasn’t followed by any photographers or nosy parkers. Of course, the real reason had been to make sure that no one could follow her too closely, or even, from the lift itself, spot a clue that the avalanche which entombed her might not have been quite the tragic accident that it had seemed . . .

Even before she had reached that stand of tightly packed Spanish firs, Belinda had started to execute a hockey stop, shifting almost all her weight onto her left ski, then letting the skis turn to parallel the instant the first tree blocked her from view, leaning hard up the slope, driving the edges of the skis hard into the packed snow, forcing her to a halt. The man waiting for her caught her arm, steadying her as she skidded to a stop, nodding in appreciation of her skill as the other man, poised at the far end of the line of trees, set the fake Belinda into motion.

The real Belinda watched in something close to horror, her breath coming in swift pants from the rapid exercise, as the dummy set off. Modelled bending over its skis, the poles tucked under her arms, it looked almost exactly like her, folded into the shape which Belinda had been careful to make in her swift descent. The model was dressed in an identical blue ski suit and the same hat and goggles that Belinda was wearing, a dark wig that matched Belinda’s hair streaming out from under the hat.

It only took a few seconds. The second man deftly operated the dummy’s radio controls, sending it down the slope underneath the hanging ridge; a moment later, he triggered the hidden explosives planted beneath the rocks along the ridge, sending them and their heavy covering of snow crashing down on the speeding figure below. No one else was anywhere nearby. The previous skiers had long gone, the jamming of the ski lift’s cable had ensured that there would be no others who might be put in danger; as Nigel Slyme, tears pouring down his face, snapped away, capturing the ‘death’ of his idol, the real Belinda was quickly pulling on a bright red jacket over her blue suit, as the first man, on his knees, unfurled a pair of black ski trousers, specially made to snap on over her existing ones. She dragged off her hat and goggles, handing them to him to slip in his backpack; in return, he tossed her a new pair of goggles and a red hat with a blonde ponytail sewn to the back.

It had barely taken half a minute to completely transform Belinda’s appearance. They had practised this drill again and again, getting it as fast as possible, in the days leading up to today. A weekday had been chosen so there would be fewer people on the slopes. It was a morning clear enough for any photographs to be unmistakably of Belinda. Finally, a discreet tip-off to Nigel Slyme to ensure his presence and the crucial documentary photos of Belinda’s ‘death’ – in exchange for a backhander, of course, so that Nigel believed he had paid a bribe to catch the princess quite unawares in a rare early-morning moment of solitude.

Then, after the successful entombment of the remotely controlled dummy, the breathlessly fast cross-country ski in the opposite direction from Oukaïmeden, down the steep slopes of the Toubkal National Park, to where a Jeep was waiting to take them to an impromptu helipad. The scramble into the helicopter with Italian military markings, the two men left behind in the Jeep, Belinda alone with the two pilots as the machine lifted into the sky. And the hop, skip and jump flight across the sea to this little island, her final destination on the escape route.

Belinda looked down at herself. She was still in the double layers of skiwear; it had been cold in the military helicopter, which didn’t have the insulation of the more luxurious models. The small heliport was on the highest point of the island, a peak that had been flattened and concreted over, and Belinda could see almost the entire landmass of the islet below, grassy slopes leading down to little white beaches, the roof of a pale stone villa on a terraced plateau: the only building, it seemed, on the whole island. The sea was a delicate emerald-blue, lapping softly at the shoreline. It was the perfect retreat from the world.

Belinda had not known where she was headed, hadn’t wanted to know; planning her own death had been almost more than she could cope with. Even now, the magnitude of what she had just undergone had barely sunk in. She was still shaking, and not from cold. It was a bright spring day, the sunlight bouncing off the sea, and she was more than insulated in her double layers of skiwear. She had pulled off the goggles, and the hat, with its itchy attached ponytail, in the helicopter; she raised a hand to shade her eyes from the midday sun, but was still unable to let go of her grip on the co-pilot.

And then she saw the man she loved running up the path from the villa, and with a sobbing cry of relief she dropped the supporting hand and took off, positively sprinting into the arms of Prince Rahim Mohajeri bin Azhari. A Saudi prince with a Berber mother, Rahim was half international playboy, half humanitarian, and the only person in the world to whom she had been able to confide the shocking truth about the sham that had been her marriage.

She slammed into Rahim, crying fully now, crying for everything she had left behind and for the uncertainty of how she would live out the future. His arms closed tightly around her, and she buried her face in his neck, breathing in the warm, musky scent of his Acqua di Parma cologne and the delicious, infinitely reassuring smell of his skin. Behind them, the helicopter, its rotor blades spinning, took off again, so noisy that by the time the last echoes of its progress had died away, its dragonfly silhouette disappearing across the sea to the Italian mainland, Belinda’s sobs were dying down into little gulps and sniffs. Rahim, into whom his Harrow education had instilled formal manners, produced a perfectly ironed handkerchief from the pocket of his blazer and dried her eyes with loving care and attention.

‘Come, my darling,’ he said, wrapping his arm around her shoulders and leading her down the stone steps set into the side of the hill. ‘We will have some mint tea and something to eat, and you will settle into this lovely place.’

‘Where is it?’ Belinda asked, blowing her nose. ‘You know I’ve never been any good at geography! We flew for absolutely ages . . .’

‘We are in the Tuscan archipelago of little islands,’ her lover informed her. ‘Over there—’ he pointed across the sea in an easterly direction, where a faint dark outline could just be made out – ‘that is Elba, where Napoleon was imprisoned after he abdicated. And there—’ he swung around – ‘you will not see it, because it is too small, but below is the island of Pianosa, a nature reserve on which for many years there was a high-security prison. They kept Mafiosi there, in extreme isolation, so they could not communicate with their
capi
back in Sicily.’

‘Goodness!’ Belinda sniffed with wry amusement. ‘You make it all sound so depressing! All these prison islands!’

Rahim laughed. ‘I’m telling you this to show how secure it is here, my love. Elba is a pleasure resort now, but most of the little islands are nature reserves, like Pianosa. They can scarcely be visited at all, unless you have a special permit from the European Union, or if you are in the forestry department. You see, I’ve done all my research! And this island, Montecapra, is leased from the government by Massimo Benefatti—’ this was an Italian billionaire well-known to both Belinda and Rahim on the international party circuit. ‘Ostensibly, it is a wildlife sanctuary, but Massimo comes here also to enjoy the peace and tranquillity. The airspace and the waters are protected by the Italian airforce out of Pisa, to prevent fishermen and tourists visiting the nature reserves. So you see, it is impossible for a paparazzo to come anywhere near Montecapra.’

They had reached the villa by now, a beautifully restored eighteenth-century building, its high windows framed by traditional dark green shutters. Belinda paused, taking it in. During her marriage to Prince Oliver, she had stayed in most of the royal palaces in the world, hotels for which the designation five-star simply wasn’t enough, private mansions of incredible luxury, even the White House. But right now, this simple, elegant villa, on an island in the middle of the serene Tyrrhenian Sea, was the most perfect refuge she could imagine.

Rahim took her into the villa, through a central hallway with Roman-style mosaic floors which led straight through the ground floor of the house to a long loggia at the back, its glassed-in high windows giving spectacular views over the sea below. Belinda divested herself of the jacket and snap-on ski trousers, but shook her head when Rahim suggested she go upstairs to change.

‘Tea first,’ she said, managing a watery smile. ‘Tea and biscuits for shock. It’s the English way.’

‘The English way, but Moroccan tea,’ Rahim said, smiling back. ‘It is the perfect blend of you and me, darling.’ His grin deepened. ‘I know what you would say if you were more yourself – you would tease me and tell me to stop being such a flowery Arab. But I can’t help it sometimes. I like to say poetic things, you know.’

A servant was holding the back of a delicate velvet armchair, waiting for Belinda to seat herself. He pushed in her chair as Rahim poured tea from a clear glass pot, fresh mint leaves steeped in hot, not boiling water, pale green aromatic steam rising from its surface. Rahim trickled a little thyme honey into each cup, stirred them well, and then handed one to his lover. The servant had retreated discreetly: Belinda, very gratefully, reached for the plate of fluted, sugar-topped lemon biscuits and started to work her way through it. She had never had to watch her weight, having always been very physically active; she had skied and ridden horses all through her teens, and had actually met Prince Oliver not, as the press had reported initially, working as a chalet girl in Verbier, but teaching beginners to ski on the nursery slopes.

Rahim watched her with great approval; he liked a woman with a healthy appetite.

‘We will spend some weeks here,’ he said to her. ‘Or, if you wish, I will leave you to be alone, as long as you need.’

Belinda, her mouth full of biscuit, shook her head so vigorously that some sugar crumbs sprayed out onto her ski suit. Normally, she would have been mortified by this breach of good manners, but as she looked down at the crumbs, she realized that she didn’t give a damn. She was no longer a princess. She wasn’t even Lady Belinda Lindsey-Crofter any more. She had no idea, in fact,
who
she was.

So all she did was dust the crumbs onto the floor, swallow the rest of her bite, and say vehemently: ‘I don’t want you to go. Stay with me. I couldn’t cope on my own, not at all.’

‘Good.’ He looked very grave. ‘But Belinda, you must take this time to decide if this is really what you want. It is still not too late to go back. It will be a scandal, yes, but we can manage that. We will say that you were frightened for your life – which is no more than the truth – but that you could not bear to never see your children again.’

‘I don’t know if I
can
bear it,’ Belinda said quietly. ‘I honestly don’t. But Oliver would have killed me if I’d stayed. I know he’s tried once already. And if I admit to something as wild as staging my own death in an avalanche, that’ll be
exactly
what he needs to make me look completely bonkers. It’d be even easier for him to try again. Slip me an overdose and say that I popped too many pills by accident.’

Rahim nodded slowly, taking in her words. Belinda had desperately hoped that her divorce from her ex-husband, Prince Oliver, heir to the British throne, would protect her from his malice; but Oliver had been violently opposed to the divorce, had fought tooth and nail to convince her to stay married to him. If anything, his anger towards her had worsened after they were no longer man and wife; he had been terrified that she would spill his secrets, despite a condition of her divorce settlement being utter discretion about his private life. An aide of his had come to her, in absolute terror, to warn her that someone in her inner circle was in Oliver’s pay, planning to doctor her food so that it looked as if she’d taken an accidental overdose.

And I believed every word. I know that Oliver was capable of doing it.

I may not be able to be with my children as they grow up and have children of their own. But at least I’ll be alive to see them from a distance.

Wordlessly, she picked up the teacup and sipped the sweetened mint tea, staring out over the waves below.

Living with Oliver gave me two near-breakdowns, sent me onto antidepressants and to therapists I couldn’t confide in properly, because I was absolutely forbidden from telling the truth about the future King of Britain.

But when I divorced him, I realized I was in more danger than ever.

She turned to look at Rahim, seeing the concern in his dark eyes as he gazed at her. He had always believed her, had loved her for years. Had intuited that the reason she was so nervous, so twitchy, wasn’t that she was a neurotic prescription-pill addict, the rumour that Oliver’s camp had so gleefully spread about her. Rahim was the only one who had ever loved her for herself. All the other men who had courted her had been attracted not just by her looks and her status, but by the reputation for instability that had grown around her.

Men love crazy women,
she thought ironically.
Just like women love bad boys. I was guilty of that too. I thought Oliver was a bad boy, a wild prince, who was settling down finally, because he’d fallen in love for the first time. I bought into that whole idiotic, romance-novel, Mills and Boon story that Oliver was selling me. I thought I was The One. I had no idea at all that I could never have been what Oliver wanted, or needed . . .

The slowly dawning realization that Oliver had married her for all the wrong reasons – while still expecting her to play the perfect wife and mother, not just in public but to his family – had sent Belinda into a terrible downward spiral. She
had
become reliant on antidepressants, but never as much as Oliver’s spinners had elatedly whispered to the press. She
had
been close to breakdown, but she had never tipped over the edge, as they had said. And she had resisted the temptation to sleep with Rahim until she had been officially divorced. Bad enough that Oliver had not even been faithful to her for twenty-four hours; she had learned from the same aide who had warned her about the murder attempt that Oliver had cheated on her the night of their wedding. She wasn’t going to sink to his level, even if she had every justification.