There she was. His Toni. His Helen of Troy. In a plain, knee-length shift dress in cream silk, teamed with low, kitten heels and a cashmere cardigan, she looked older than he remembered her. The outfit screamed rich (which she was) and demure (which she certainly wasn’t). But nothing could hide the raw sensuality of the body beneath.
Billy moved toward her, drawn like a magnet to a piece of metal, or a helpless moth to the moon. “Hi.”
Toni hugged him, squeezing tight as hot tears of guilt splashed onto his collar and trickled down his neck. “I’m so sorry, Billy.”
“For what?” Billy forced a smile, determined to be brave in front of her. “This was my decision, not yours. And if I had the time over, I’d do it again, in a heartbeat.”
“But Billy. Twenty years.”
“Fifteen,” he corrected her. “With parole.”
“But you didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Neither did you.”
“Billy, come on. I did. You know I did. We both know. Nicholas was in my group.”
“It was an accident, Toni. An accident. Never forget that.” Inhaling the scent of her skin, mingled with some faint lemony perfume, he felt overwhelmed with need for her. Despite his show of bravado, he was frightened. Frightened of jail, of a future without her. Desperately he pulled her closer, kissing her passionately, forcing his tongue into her mouth like a starving chick looking for food.
Toni recoiled. His breath was sour with fear.
“Come on.” She tried to laugh it off. “This isn’t the time.”
“I think you’ll find it’s the only time we’ve got. They’ll be taking me away in a minute.”
“Do you know where?”
“The state prison, for the time being at least. It’s in Warren, wherever the fuck that is.” Billy laughed, but there was no joy in the sound. “My lawyer said he’s gonna try to get me moved. It’s a long way for my dad to come visit.”
“Sure.” Toni nodded lamely. If she were in jail rather than Billy, as she should be, would her dad even bother to come visit her? I doubt it. But she hadn’t come here to talk about their respective fathers. She had to tell Billy the truth. To break things off between them. Under the circumstances she didn’t know where to begin.
“Look, Billy,” she started nervously. “I owe you so much I really don’t know what to say.”
“How about yes?”
He was looking at her with those puppy-dog eyes again. As if this were a movie, or a play, and any minute now they were about to walk offstage and go back to reality. And Nicholas would be alive and Billy wouldn’t be going to prison and they would all live happily ever after.
Oh, Jesus. Toni’s heart sank. Is he getting down on one knee?
“Say you’ll marry me, Toni. Say you’ll wait.”
Toni opened her mouth to speak but he interrupted her.
“I know what you’re thinking. But it might not be fifteen years. Leslie’s gonna appeal. We might even get a mistrial.”
“On what grounds?”
“I don’t know.”
For the first time since the day Nicholas died, Toni saw Billy Hamlin’s facade of bravado and manly strength slip away. Looking into his eyes now, she saw a terrified kid. Scared. Alone. Out of his depth, just like she was.
“But Leslie says it’s possible and I could be out in a couple of years. Then we could get married and . . . things.”
He stopped talking suddenly. Could he read in her face how horrified she was? Belatedly, Toni tried to look the part of the devoted girlfriend. If Billy needed a fantasy to hold on to, something to get him through the nightmare of a life in jail, didn’t she owe him that much at least?
“Please, Toni.” The distress in his eyes was unbearable. “Please say yes.”
Before she could stop herself, the words tumbled out. “Yes. I mean, of course. Of course yes! I wasn’t expecting a proposal right this minute, that’s all. But of course I’ll marry you, Billy.”
“As soon as I get out?”
“As soon as you get out.”
Billy burst into racking sobs of relief. “I love you so much, Toni.” Pulling her close again, he clutched her to his chest like a child with a teddy bear.
The guards arrived. “Time to go.”
“I know it’s gonna sound crazy,” Billy whispered in Toni’s ear, “but I mean it. This is the happiest day of my life. Thank you.”
“Mine too,” Toni assured him. “Be strong,” she added as he was led away.
Toni Gilletti waited till the cell door closed behind him. Then she sank down onto her chair and wept.
She knew she would never see Billy Hamlin again.
Three days after the verdict, Leslie Lose flew to Washington. He arrived at the secure underground parking garage at nine-fifteen at night, the agreed time.
He’d half expected his client to send a courier, someone anonymous to complete the transaction. Instead, slightly to Leslie’s surprise, the client showed up himself. He was an important man, and his presence made Leslie feel important.
“Two hundred thousand. As agreed.” Rolling down the smoked-glass window of his Lincoln Town Car, he handed Leslie a fat stuffed envelope. “You cut it fine.”
“I knew what I was doing. It’s all about knowing your jurors. Let’s just say I knew mine very well.”
“Clearly. I was sure they were going to acquit. But you pulled it off.”
Leslie smiled, wrapping his sausagelike hands around the package greedily.
“You should have had more faith, Senator.”
Senator Handemeyer smiled. “Perhaps I should have, Mr. Lose. Perhaps I should have.”
Billy Hamlin’s attorney watched in the dark as the Lincoln drove away.
Part Two
Chapter Nine
Oxfordshire, England. Present.
“Oh, Michael! Oh, Michael, I luf you, I luf you so much! Please don’t stop!”
From his uncomfortable position in the backseat of his vintage MG convertible, Michael De Vere wondered, Why do women say that? “Don’t stop.” Surely no one would stop at this particular juncture? Although presumably some men must; otherwise girls wouldn’t bother to say it, would they? As Michael’s mind wandered, so his erection began to wilt. But once started, he couldn’t seem to stop. What did Lenka, his latest conquest, think he was about to do? Whip out the Racing Post and start looking through the runners and riders for the four-fifteen at Wincanton? And if he was going to do that, what made her think that shouting “Don’t stop” was likely to change his mind?
“You stopped.” Lenka’s voice trembled with reproach.
“Paused, darling. I paused.”
It was four-fifteen on a glorious May afternoon and Michael De Vere was late. He was supposed to have dropped Lenka at Didcot railway station an hour ago. But what with the sunshine and the blossoms bursting out of the hedgerows, and Lenka’s impossibly short Marc Jacobs miniskirt riding up her smooth, brown thighs, one thing had led to another. Or rather, one thing had almost led to another.
Lenka pouted. “You don’t find me attractive?”
“Darling, of course I do.”
“You don’t luf me.”
Michael De Vere sighed. Clearly he was not going to be able to resume play. Pulling up his jeans, he started the engine.
“Lenka, you’re an angel, you know you are. But if I’m late for mother’s dinner tonight, she’ll be serving my balls deep-fried for pudding. I’m afraid that’s what’s putting me off.”
The girl glared at him. “You lie! You are ashamed of me, this is the problem. You are embarrassed to introduce me to your mother.”
“Nonsense, darling,” lied Michael, glancing appreciatively at Lenka’s underwear-exposing skirt and enormous silicone breasts bouncing happily beneath the skimpiest of PETA shirts. “Mother would adore you.” You’d be right up there with anthrax and Che Guevara. “I simply don’t think tonight’s the right moment to introduce you, that’s all.”
Ten mi
nutes later, waving Lenka off from the platform, Michael De Vere breathed a sigh of relief and cheerfully deleted her contacts from his cell phone.
Sexy, but way too high maintenance.
Michael had enough stress to contend with, what with his mother being appointed home secretary the very same week that he had decided to quit Oxford. Not just decided. Actually done it. This morning Michael had gone to his tutor, signed the relevant forms, and packed up his gorgeous rooms in Chapel Quad, never to return. He planned to break the happy news to his parents over dinner tonight.
Naturally they would both have a fit, not least because his mother’s new job meant that this was now a story. HOME SECRETARY’S SON FLEES BALLIOL TO BECOME PROFESSIONAL PARTY ANIMAL. The Daily Mail always used words like “flee.” They were such arses. Michael felt bad about the inevitable negative coverage, but it couldn’t be helped. He’d set up an events company last year with his best friend, Tommy Lyon, and the pair of them were printing money. The future was bright, and Michael De Vere could smell success from here. This was no time to be messing around analyzing T. S. Eliot.
Ironically, his mother’s wrath would probably be as nothing compared to his father’s. Teddy De Vere was a Balliol man himself, just as his father and grandfather and great-grandfather had been before him. Short of desecrating his grandmother’s grave, or announcing he was gay, or (unimaginable) that he’d joined the Labour Party, in his father’s eyes there was no worse crime that Michael De Vere could have committed than dropping out of Oxford.
Yes, tonight’s dinner would be tricky enough, even without Lenka’s histrionics. The only silver lining in the whole ghastly business was that Michael’s sister, Roxie, would be there to support him.
“Last card.”
Teddy De Vere slammed the nine of clubs down onto the green baize card table with a theatrical flourish. It was a family joke that Teddy never won at cards, or indeed at anything: Monopoly, Pictionary, charades. You name it, Teddy lost at it, repeatedly and often quite spectacularly. As chief financial officer for a successful City hedge fund, not to mention a respected Oxford-educated historian, Teddy De Vere was no fool. But he played the fool to perfection at home, delighting in his role as the butt of family jokes, a sort of willingly tamed circus bear.
As usual, his daughter, Roxie, had gone out of her way this evening to give him an advantage in their predinner game of Oh Hell. For once, Teddy seemed genuinely to be winning.
“Oh, very good, Dad.” Roxie smiled encouragingly. “All you need now’s a two.”
She placed the two of clubs gently on top of Teddy’s nine.
Teddy frowned. “Hmm. Well, I haven’t got a two, have I?”
“Then you have to pick up two, Daddy.”
“Blast it.”
“Last card.”
“Now hold on just a minute . . .”
Roxie played the jack of clubs and sat back, triumphant. “I’m out.”
Teddy’s face was such a picture of outrage, she couldn’t help but laugh.
“Oh, darling Dad, never mind. Maybe you’ll win the next one.”
Father and daughter were sitting in the library at Kingsmere, the De Veres’ ancestral pile in North Oxfordshire. Since Roxie’s “accident,” her bedroom had been moved to the ground floor, with Teddy’s old study converted into an en suite bathroom. As a result, the formal drawing room was now upstairs overlooking the deer park. But the library, a cozy, red-walled room with dark leather Chesterfield sofas, hunting paintings on the walls, and dog baskets nestled by the permanently crackling fire, remained exactly as it had always been. Roxie loved the room for that, for not changing. She loved it most of all when her father was in it.
“How about a nice, dry sherry before dinner.” Teddy leaned back in his chair and stretched out his legs. He wore the same deep purple corduroy pants every evening, winter or summer, rain or shine. He had about a hundred pairs of them upstairs in his dressing room. To Roxie, everything about her father suggested familiarity and ritual, a comforting sameness in a bleakly changing world. “Your mother’ll be home in a minute.”
Roxie didn’t need reminding. Turning her wheelchair around, she pushed herself over to the bar to fix Teddy’s drink. Roxie rarely drank before dinner but tonight she made an exception, splashing the pale amber Manzanilla into two tumblers instead of the usual one. Mummy was bound to be unbearable tonight, gloating and full of herself after her big victory. Home secretary. The words stuck in Roxie’s throat. How had her mother managed it? Why could others not see through Alexia the way that she, Roxie, could? Her mother would be the triumphant star of her own show at dinner, smug and unbearable. But then wasn’t she always?
There had been a time, long, long ago, when Roxanne De Vere had loved her mother. Yes, Alexia had always been ambitious, self-contained, and distant in a way that other little girls’ mothers were not. But even so, Roxie remembered happy times. Long summers spent on the beach together in Martha’s Vineyard, eating picnic lunches and playing fairies-and-elves. Christmases at Kingsmere, with Alexia lifting Roxie up high to hang hideous, garish homemade decorations on the tree. She remembered wheelbarrow races in the garden, and—incongruously, for Alexia was a notoriously awful cook—making blackberry jam.
But then came Roxie’s teenage years, and everything changed. From the first, mother and daughter battled. They battled about everything from politics to music, from fashion to religion, from which books they liked to the color of Roxie’s hair. On the surface it was normal coming-of-age stuff. But over time, Roxie began to sense a deeper rift, something more disturbing.
Alexia, always considered a great beauty in her youth, seemed to become envious of her daughter’s burgeoning good looks. Roxie couldn’t pinpoint it exactly. It was hard to remember specific incidents, as Michael was forever asking her to when he leaped to their mother’s defense. Nevertheless, Roxie developed a strong sense of her mother’s resentment. She felt Alexia’s eyes on her when she came out to the pool in a bikini, a gaze that blazed with a heat that was not admiration but rather a caustic, acid burn of envy on Roxie’s skin. When Roxie started bringing boys home, things went from bad to worse. Alexia seemed to go out of her way to humiliate her, putting her down during family meals, or worse, taking over the conversation and ensuring that she, the great Alexia De Vere, was the center of attention at all times. She would grill Roxie’s boyfriends about everything from their family backgrounds to their career ambitions—God, she was such a snob! No one was ever good enough.
Roxie’s father, on the other hand, took a very laissez-faire attitude toward his daughter’s dating. Naturally this drove Alexia to distraction.
“Can’t you say something, Teddy?” she used to roar. “I know you don’t approve. Why do I always have to be bad cop?”
But Teddy steadfastly refused to get involved, doing the best he could to keep the peace.
Until the day Roxanne De Vere met Andrew Beesley and everything changed.
Andrew Beesley had been hired as Roxie’s tennis coach.
He became the love of her life.
Roxie had loved Andrew deeply and passionately, but her mother was determined to destroy her happiness. Deeming Andrew unworthy and a gold digger, Alexia ruthlessly drove him away. Teddy, loving but weak in the face of his wife’s determination, had failed to stand up to her. When Andrew returned to Australia, Roxie’s heart shattered. In despair, she jumped from her bedroom window at Kingsmere, a sixty-foot drop that ought to have killed her. Instead, with bitter irony, Roxie survived the fall, only to be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life, doomed to remain her parents’ dependent. She would never escape her mother, but would live out the remainder of her days a cripple under Alexia’s roof.
There was nothing left for her mother to envy now. Alexia De Vere was once again the fairest of them all.
Roxie’s accident was never referred to openly at Kingsmere, mostly because Teddy couldn’t bear it. Of a different, older generation, Teddy De Vere buried
his grief deep, preferring denial to the harsh light of truth.
Roxie could live with that. She loved her father. What she couldn’t live with was the fact that her mother had never been punished for what happened. Never suffered, as she should have. Alexia De Vere was still happily married, still professionally successful, still famed for her beauty as well as her brains and, since Roxie’s fall, for her resilience in the face of adversity. Actions should have consequences. But instead of suffering, Alexia De Vere sat back while yet more laurels were heaped upon her head. Her surprise appointment as home secretary was just the latest in a long line of unearned glories. It made Roxie sick.
“Cheers.” She clinked her glass grimly against Teddy’s.
“And to you, my darling. I know you’re not looking forward to this evening. But try to keep things civil, for my sake, if not for your mother’s. Being asked to be home secretary is a big deal, you know.”
“Of course it is, Daddy.”
Mummy’s triumphs always are.
Gilbert Drake fell to his knees in the front pew of the tiny country church and made the sign of the cross.
He was frightened, despite the righteousness of his cause. How could he, one man, a lowly, insignificant taxi driver, deliver just retribution to the most powerful woman in England?
He prayed for courage, and a verse from Deuteronomy came to him, a gift from the Lord.
“Be strong and courageous, do not be afraid or tremble, for the LORD your God is the one who goes with you. He will not fail you or forsake you.”
Sanjay Patel had been failed and forsaken. By his friends, by the courts, but most of all by that evil she-devil Alexia De Vere.
Gilbert Drake stayed in the church, praying, until darkness fell. Then he zipped up his hooded jacket and walked into the night.
“For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful. Amen.”
Alexia De Vere listened silently as her husband said grace.
When they had first married, Teddy’s insistence on this arcane ritual used to irritate Alexia intensely. Neither of them was particularly religious, so why the pompous, public show of piety? But over time Alexia, like Roxie, had come to take comfort in Teddy’s unchanging eccentricities. When the storms of her own life had raged, Alexia De Vere’s husband had proved to be the rock she needed, the one, true, solid thing she could cling to. Very few politicians were so lucky.