Little White Lies (24 page)

It was nearly two o’clock. She bought her sandwiches and a brownie and hurried back to the office, passing the Jaeger store on the way. She glanced in the window; there was a sale on. She hesitated. She really ought to get a new skirt. She glanced at her watch. A plain black skirt would go with the jacket she was wearing, though to be honest the jacket was uncomfortably tight as well. Perhaps she ought to try a size fourteen. She walked in, hurriedly pulled a few items from the bulging racks and headed to the changing rooms.

Nothing fitted properly.

‘I’m afraid fourteen’s our biggest size. We don’t go any bigger. Have you tried Marks & Spencer?’ The sales girl spoke to her from the other side of the shut cubicle door. If they’d been standing face-to-face, Annick would have slapped her.

‘Fourteen’s fine,’ she muttered. ‘It’s just a
fraction
too tight.’

‘
If
you say so.’

Annick looked at herself in the long mirror. Her stomach flopped over the waistband and there were large rolls of flesh poking out of the side of her bra. There was no long mirror at home, just the small vanity mirror in the bathroom above the sink and it had been ages since she’d seen herself like this. A lone tear began its slow journey down her cheek. She brought a hand up to wipe it and caught sight of her tattoo. It took her a few moments to steady herself. It was five years since that terrible night and the end of a friendship she’d thought would last for the rest of her life. Rebecca had tried to patch things up, of course, but even she couldn’t understand how it had happened. And Tash refused to talk about it. There’d been no coherent explanation, however painful, that would allow them a way back into their friendship . . . and so it ended. It had taken months for the anger inside Annick to die down and then it had been replaced by something else that was oddly familiar – a horrible, aching sense of loss. It simply slotted in neatly with all the other losses, all the other people about whom she cared deeply but who always, in the end, left her behind.

She wiped the tears hurriedly away with her sleeve. She wasn’t about to let the damn salesgirl see her crying. She picked up the size-fourteen skirt and jacket and walked out with as straight a back and as neutral a face as she could muster.

‘I’m afraid your card’s been declined,’ the snotty salesgirl said haughtily, a few minutes later.

Annick blinked in surprise. Such a thing had never happened to her. ‘Declined? Why?’

‘They don’t tell us why. Have you got another one?’ Her very tone implied Annick wouldn’t.

‘Yes, of course I do,’ Annick snapped and pulled out her gold American Express card.

There was a few seconds’ wait as the salesgirl swiped the card, then she looked up again. Now she sounded positively triumphant. ‘This one’s not going through either.’

There was an irritated cough from the person behind her. Annick’s face began to burn. ‘Um, I might have enough cash,’ she said, quickly rifling through her purse. No such luck. Her purchases came to over £300. ‘Could you just put those to one side for me?’ she asked. ‘I’ll go to the cashpoint.’

‘If you like.
So
sorry about the wait, madam.’ The girl looked past Annick.

She ran outside and looked around for a cashpoint. There was one across the road. She ran across, fished her card out of her purse and put it in. She waited nervously for a few seconds. A message flashed up on the screen.
Please contact your bank
. She stared at it in disbelief. The card was not returned. She slid the second one in and waited. A few seconds later, the same message appeared and the machine swallowed her card. What the hell was going on? She looked at her watch. It was almost two fifteen. Guimard et Cie, her father’s bank, was on the Strand, at least a ten-minute cab ride away. She was already fifteen minutes late for the office, but what else was she supposed to do? She hesitated, and then stuck her hand out. She would explain everything to Justin later. A cab swerved round and she clambered in. It had to be a mistake. Nothing like this had ever happened to her before.

The cashier glanced at her screen, then up again at Annick. She seemed oddly nervous. ‘Could you just hang on for a minute?’ she asked. ‘I’ll be right back.’ She slid off her stool and disappeared. A minute ticked by, then another, then another. Annick looked nervously around her. She’d only ever been inside the bank a couple of times: once, when she first arrived in England with her mother and once with her father, waiting for him to conduct whatever business he had behind the wooden-panelled doors.

‘Miss Betancourt?’ She jumped and turned round. Standing next to the worried-looking cashier was a young man with a badge pinned discreetly to his lapel.
Steven Hewlett. Personal Wealth Management
. There was an odd look in his face. ‘Would you mind coming with me for a moment, Mrs Betancourt?’

‘Is something wrong?’ Annick asked, anxiously. What the hell was going on?

‘If you wouldn’t mind coming with me . . . just this way, Mrs Betancourt. My office is just down here. It’ll be easier to talk in private.’

She followed him, her heart starting to accelerate. ‘Is something wrong?’ she asked again.

He waited until she was seated opposite him. He laced his hands together and cleared his throat. ‘Are you aware of any . . . of anything unusual happening in Togo?’ he asked carefully.

Annick shook her head. ‘No, nothing. Why?’

He hesitated. ‘We’ve been issued with a TRO on all your accounts.’

‘What’s a TRO?’ Annick asked, puzzled.

‘It’s an assets freeze. Your accounts are frozen, in other words.’

‘Why?’ Annick’s heart was thumping.

He looked extremely uncomfortable.

‘I think you’d better contact your embassy. I think that would probably be the best thing to do.’

Annick stood up. She felt dizzy. ‘My embassy?’

He nodded vigorously. ‘Yes, I’m awfully sorry, Miss Betancourt. It’s the first time . . . I’ve not had to deal with a situation like this before,’ he said apologetically. ‘I’m sure everything’ll be fine. It’s probably just a temporary thing, a blip. You know, until things calm down.’

She stared at him uncomprehendingly for a second, then picked up her bag and walked out. There was a phone box on the corner, just outside the bank’s main entrance. She yanked open the door, slotted in a few pounds’ worth of coins and dialled her mother’s private line. The phone rang, the familiar, high-pitched single ring, but there was no answer. She dialled her father’s office with shaking fingers. Again the phone rang and rang but no one picked it up. She tried all the various different numbers in the palace that she knew off by heart – the chief protocol officer, the press secretary, the kitchens . . . but again, nothing. She hung up, her heart thumping. Something was seriously wrong. She stumbled dazedly out of the phone booth. And that was when she saw it. The headline, splashed across the
Evening Standard
board.
West African Leader Assassinated. Wife and aide also killed in blast
. Her knees suddenly buckled under her.

‘Hey, you all right, love?’ A passer-by shot out a hand. ‘Woa . . . easy.’ He grabbed hold of her as she stumbled, half slumping to the ground.

‘No, no . . .’ Annick couldn’t get her words out.

‘Here, you’d better sit down.’ He helped her across the pavement to a bench. He was an older man, in a suit and tie. He looked concerned. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked in concern.

She felt as though she’d been punched in the stomach. She couldn’t breathe. Everything around her had slowed down. There was a terrible, insistent blush of fear that had burst inside her, rapidly spreading up through her body, all the way through the muscles and organs and flesh and skin. She brought both hands up to her face, pressing them against her cheeks, her ears, her neck.

‘Are you all right?’ the man repeated. ‘Is everything all right?’

She couldn’t hear him. She would never understand how to tell him, how to tell anyone, how to get it all straight.

Mrs Price was waiting for her at the flat, her eyes reddened from weeping. It was the first time Annick had ever seen her cry. ‘Oh, Annick,’ she said as soon as she walked in the door. ‘Oh, Annick.’

Annick opened her mouth but terror blocked her words. The dread was like a taste in her mouth, sharp and bitter. She stumbled again and Mrs Price quickly dragged out a chair, helping her into it. ‘I . . . I just saw—’ Annick’s mouth wouldn’t close properly over the words.

‘I know, I know. Your aunt phoned a couple of hours ago, that’s how
I
heard. I didn’t have the news on this morning, like I normally do. We’ve been trying to reach you at the office but they didn’t know where you’d gone. You’re to go to her immediately.’ In Mrs Price’s anguish her Scottish accent suddenly became more pronounced. ‘She says I’m to pack you a few things. No one knows what’s going on down there.’

‘How? It said . . . the newspaper said . . . both of them . . . ?’ Annick looked up at her in fear.

‘I know, I know. It was a grenade. Someone in the crowd. They were on a parade . . . oh, Annick. Your poor,
poor
mother. And your father. I don’t know what to say, really I don’t. I don’t know what to think.’ Mrs Price’s voice cracked.

‘My aunt wants me to go to Paris?’ Annick tried to focus on what she’d just said. ‘Which aunt?’

‘Aunt Libertine. She says I’ve got to get you on a train immediately. She’s afraid they’ll come after all the properties and the money—’

‘What money? My accounts have all been frozen,’ Annick said dazedly.

‘I don’t know. She just said it’s best for you not to be here. She thinks you’ll be safer in Paris, that’s what she said. Oh, dear . . . oh, Annick.’

Mrs Price’s voice kept receding off into the distance as more and more urgent, terrible thoughts took hold. One part of Annick’s brain received the information mechanically processing the words, but the other was flooded with a choking sense of terror. ‘What shall I take with me?’ She heard the words as if they’d been spoken by another.

‘As much as you can, that’s what she said. You might have to be there for a wee while,’ Mrs Price said, looking around her fearfully as though expecting someone to burst through the door any second. ‘I’m going down to Kent to stay with my sister until . . . until well, until things settle down. I’ll help you pack. Come on, we’ll do it together.’

Annick allowed herself to be taken by the arm and led her into the bedroom. She looked around her dazedly. ‘What should I take?’ she asked again helplessly.

‘Let’s start with your clothes and any personal things you might want, photos and such. We . . . we don’t know when you’ll be back, that’s the thing.’

Annick couldn’t speak. She watched as Mrs Price hauled down two of the big suitcases from on top of the wardrobe. They were covered in dust, which she hurriedly wiped off with her sleeve. It was such an unlikely gesture for someone as fastidious as Mrs Price; Annick’s sense of panic deepened. She began to cry as Mrs Price flung clothes into the suitcase, pausing every now and then to hold up something, a wordless question.
This? How about this?
Clothes, photographs, books . . . all quickly disappearing as she efficiently packed up Annick’s life.

At last it was done. She put an arm around the still-weeping Annick and led her back into the kitchen. ‘You’d better have something to eat,’ she said, opening the fridge.

‘I . . . I can’t,’ Annick shook her head. ‘I can’t.’ She looked round the kitchen, at the pale green walls that hadn’t been painted in years; at the new white fridge that she’d bought only the other month to replace the one that had stood in its place since she’d moved in; at the worn Formica countertop and the stainless steel kettle that sat to one side. There was a vase of flowers on the windowsill – Mrs Price must have put them there. Her eyes filled with tears again. Her world was coming apart. Again.

TASH
London, England

Trouble was brewing. As soon as she stepped out of the lift she could sense it. The office was quiet;
always
a bad sign. Genevieve, the bubbly receptionist wasn’t at her desk. That too was a bad sign. Genevieve was always at her desk. She walked into the large, open-plan office overlooking the High Street that she shared with four others and found it empty. That was the worst sign of all. An almost empty office meant one of two things: either everyone was in the bathroom, crying their eyes out, or they were upstairs in Rosie Trevelyan’s office, possibly also crying. Neither scenario appealed. Rosie Trevelyan, Tash’s boss, was the glamorous editor-in-chief of indeterminate age of
Style
, one of the most respected magazines in the fashion industry. They were three weeks away from signing off on the July issue. Tash had been at
Style
long enough to know that the last three weeks were always the most stressful. She was also smart enough to find as many reasons to be outside the office as possible in that time. Today she’d slipped out early to scout out a couple of locations for an upcoming shoot and had managed to turn it into an all-day event. Her colleagues, Michelle Riddle, the senior fashion editor and Holly Wilkes, the fashion features editor, could handle whatever Rosie chose to throw at them, or so she hoped. The fact that neither was in the office, however, was ominous.

She walked over to her desk, shoved a pile of papers out of the way and sat down. If the entire team was upstairs receiving a drubbing, there was little that could be gained from joining in. Better to just sit tight and get on with her own work. If Rosie felt like yelling at her too, she’d summon her soon enough.

She surveyed her desk with a mixture of dread and satisfaction. There wasn’t a spare inch of its surface that wasn’t covered by layouts, printouts, photographs, torn-off newspaper and magazine articles, scraps of fabric samples and (the one thing she’d learned from working at Lady Davenport’s), dozens of yellow Post-it notes covered in her trademark scrawl.
Call Testino re: Rome. Get milk. Call Mama re: doctor’s appointment. Don’t forget Emma’s birthday Friday
. There was nothing of such importance that it couldn’t wait until she got home. She quickly suppressed the urge to smile. Home. After three long, horrid years of flat sharing, she’d finally,
finally
got her own place. At thirty-seven square metres (not counting the bathroom, thank God) it was hardly big enough for a bed
and
a sofa (a sofa-bed solved that problem) but it was in Earl’s Court, not too far from the flat in Kensington where she’d spent the first twenty-three years of her life with Lyudmila.