Platinum Coast

Prologue BARBADOS, 10 SEPTEMBER 1993

It was dark when the small fishing boat slipped unnoticed out of the shallow-draught harbour. There was a strong sea breeze and spray flayed the skin of Christina’s cheeks. She turned her face away from the wind and caught the smell of diesel fuel and dead fish. Bile stung her throat like acid and she fought hard to hold down the rising nausea.

A strong gust caught the Island Spirit full on its starboard side. She stumbled amongst the coiled ropes. A pair of strong hands steadied her.

‘Are you okay, Mrs Reece-Carlton?’

She stared up into the concerned face and friendly dark eyes of Father Edward Collymore.

‘I’ll be okay,’ she mumbled. She clutched the priest’s arm as the boat rolled alarmingly in the opposite direction, and smiled faintly to herself.

Ever the perfectionist, Stephen had left precise instructions in his will.

The burial at sea must be at dawn and approximately ten miles out from the north point of the island, where the Caribbean meets the southern Atlantic.

Christina looked across to the eastern horizon as the skipper cut the engines. She gripped the gaudily painted side of the boat as it bobbed in sickening motion to and fro. Slowly the sea before her lit up as though floodlit, the top of the sun’s glowing golden orb just visible above the rolling waves.

Dawn comes quickly in the Caribbean. Thick fingers of brilliant light punctured the darkness and suddenly the entire sky was filled with a bright-blue dazzling glow.

‘Now,’ Christina said to Father Collymore, who nodded and squeezed her hand.

He turned to the wheelhouse and said: ‘It’s time’, signalling to a long metal box lying in the stern.

The skipper nodded his grizzled head and went below. A few seconds later he reappeared with five brawny fishermen dressed in faded T-shirts and surf shorts or ragged cut-off jeans.

They all nodded silently to Christina and the priest as they made their way to the stern and lined up three on either side of the lead-lined coffin which contained the mortal remains of Stephen Reece-Carlton.

Father Collymore took up position at the head of the coffin with Christina by his side.

‘Stephen Reece-Carlton,’ he began in his deep, sonorous voice, ‘lived an exciting and eventful life. His departure, so premature and unexpected, will be sadly mourned. His last wish was to be buried at daybreak in the sea he had grown to love – the Caribbean – which laps the shores of our beloved Barbados, the island Stephen Reece-Carlton had made his second home.’

Christina stared at the coffin. Again, the wan smile touched the corners of her mouth. Trust Stephen to have dreamed up such a bizarre burial for himself. He had never conformed before, so why start now? Always larger than life. The smile left her lips and she felt the familiar pricking at the back of her eyes. Her husband wasn’t larger than life Not any more

Her gaze clouded with tears as she heard the priest begin to recite Stephen’s favourite psalm.

‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want, he makes me down to lie. She longed for the whole dreadful ordeal to be over.

It was, soon enough. As Father Collymore finished, six pairs of muscular arms lifted the coffin. For a moment they held it poised as the priest murmured the final words, then they let go. It hit the side of the boat with a dull thud before plunging beneath the yawning Caribbean sea.

Christina stared dully at the place where the coffin had disappeared. Sun glinted on the water and a shoal of flying-fish flew over the place where Stephen Reece-Carlton had finally been laid to rest.

She felt the engines surge and the boat turned south and headed for home.

With Father Collymore standing silently by her side, Christina turned her eyes to the sky. To the north, a cloudless horizon stretched as far as the eye could see. It promised to be another perfect day in paradise.

She wrapped her arms around herself for comfort, listening to the swish of the waves lapping against the sides of the boat. A kaleidoscope of recollections filled her mind.

Stephen had always loved the sea. The first time he had taken her deep-sea fishing he had caught an 120-pound king-fish. She had been terrified. In her mind’s eye she could see his teasing face and hear his laughter, as clearly as if it had happened yesterday. It was ten years ago. Probably more, she mused.

Then there was the wonderful holiday they had taken with friends on a small sailing ketch in the Grenadines. Long, lazy days spent snorkelling and swimming in the Tobago Keys. Bright starlit nights filled with love …

A sudden surge as a trawler ploughed into the swell brought her out of her reverie. She turned and looked back over the stern towards the place in the implacable sea where Stephen now lay.

‘Death by misadventure,’ the coroner had said, and his verdict had been final. But Christina was not convinced.

Stephen had trodden the hard path to immense wealth and power; a path which had become littered with routed opponents and embittered rivals. One of them might have sought revenge, decided to arrange his premature departure.

Christina recalled Stephen’s last conversation with her, only hours before his death.

‘Remember, Christina, when you live as close to the edge as I do, there’s always the risk of falling off. Or of being pushed. Take care, my darling, I may not always be around to protect you.’

She had thought it a strange thing to say at the time. She had not understood what he was driving at. Now, perhaps she did. When it was too late.

She shivered and turned to face the shore. They were close to land. Past the vast turquoise semi-circle of Brighton Beach she could see the bustling harbour and low stone buildings of the island’s capital, Bridgetown.

‘Don’t worry,’ Christina whispered, ‘I’ll take care of myself. I had a good teacher, the best there ever was – Stephen Reece-Carlton.’

21 SEPTEMBER 1993, NEW YORK

He wasn’t going to catch her; not this time. Her legs torn and bleeding, Christina brushed through the sharp, brittle cane-stems as flying cockroaches buzzed and whistled past her head. The island sun in the cloudless sky was merciless, scorching her shoulders and arms whilst the rushing blood pounded in her ears.

Suddenly, the cane field cleared to a wide expanse of dry scrubland across which she saw the old abandoned plantation house. The breath sobbed in her throat as she ran towards it.

The crumbling coral-stone steps leading up to the front door looked scarcely able to take her weight. She stepped up them cautiously, glancing behind her There was no one there. She had lost him.

‘Thank God.’ she gasped as she pushed open the heavy wooden door with its peeling paint Inside the house it was cool. She stood for a few moments, adjusting her eyes to the gloom as her rasping breath echoed around what she gradually came to see was a vast, domed hallway dominated by a broad, sweeping stone staircase to her left.

She stopped at the landing, her expression a mixture of fear and fascination. She could hear something. It echoed faintly around the vast, empty house a hushed, repetitive scraping sound, sinister yet strangely familiar As if in a trance she walked slowly towards the noise It was coming from one of the bedrooms. She tried the doors as she moved along the landing. They were all locked, except one – the door to the room whence came the ghostly sound. She opened the door and edged into the bedroom. Then she smiled.

Crossing the room she leaned over the old-fashioned gramophone and lifted the stuck needle. The record crackled slightly as she replaced it in the groove and Mozart’s Symphony No. 41 erupted around her

It was loud, so loud that she did not hear the sound of manic laughter coming from the man who had appeared behind her. She heard nothing but the music until he was upon her.

She whirled round as he grabbed her arm.

He was wearing a crude voodoo mask. It covered his face, but she could see his eyes, cold and unblinking. Dead green eyes. The man’s laughter turned into a high-pitched shrieking which shook his body. She tried to struggle but it was no good, he was too strong. Yet, strangely, she was not afraid.

He reminded her of one of the grotesque laughing men she had seen at fairgrounds when she was a child. Somehow he wasn’t real. Yet he was real; so were his actions.

He began unbuttoning her blouse. She watched him as if from a distance, impassively, knowing that it was useless to resist. He bared first one breast and then the other. She cried out as he squeezed one nipple viciously. His laughter had subsided; he smiled at her pain and seemed almost peaceful.

He moved his hands up over her breasts towards her neck. She stiffened as the fingers closed around her throat. Now she was afraid. Rigid with fear she waited for him to tighten his hands. Then she saw the ring: the tricoloured band of gold that she had given Stephen on their wedding night. And it was then that she began to scream …

‘No, Stephen, no, please.’

Christina woke up shouting, drenched in perspiration and knotted in a tangle of silk sheets. Shaking uncontrollably, she sat up and tried to calm herself as her overloaded mind began to distinguish dream from reality. She was not on the island, she reminded herself, but in New York for a meeting with Kingsleigh Klein, Stephen’s lawyer. After a few moments she reached across and switched on the bedside light. It was 3.15. She leaned back against her damp and crumpled pillow and took a deep breath. It was the same nightmare she’d had for the past ten nights, since returning from Stephen’s burial at sea to the familiarity of the apartment in New York’s prestigious Sutton Place.

She ran a shaky hand through her dishevelled hair. Tonight, she thought, of all nights she had needed a good seven hours’ sleep. She contemplated taking a sleeping-pill but thought better of it. It would make her groggy in the morning, and she couldn’t afford that. Not tomorrow at the meeting which Kingsleigh Klein had unexpectedly called to ‘discuss the disposition’ of Stephen’s Platinum Resorts shares. Christina had been surprised that this had not been covered in his will, but at the time it had been read to her by an overawed young associate from Bascombe and Partners on Barbados she had been too stunned and disorientated by grief to ask any questions. All she knew was that Stephen had left a great deal of money – many millions more than she had dreamed possible – in outright legacy to herself and in trust for their son Adam and Stephen’s daughter from his first marriage, Victoria.

She shivered, though this time it wasn’t the bad dream that caused her uneasiness. It was the cold breath of reality.

She knew that there was going to be conflict. In the weeks and months ahead the wolves would be after her, snarling and snapping, eager for blood. She had always hated the deviousness and brutality of high-powered business. It frightened her. Yet later that morning she was to be pitched right into the middle of it, thrown into the arena to fight it out with Antonio Cellini and the stepchild who had always hated her.

At least with Antonio it would be purely business. With Victoria it would be personal. It always had been. Like Christina she had expectations of Stephen’s Platinum Resorts Inc. shares. After all, like Christina she had been much loved by him.

Though unlike me, Christina thought, as she made herself more comfortable against the pillows, she was also completely spoiled and indulged by Stephen.

She shook her head ruefully. She had never been able to make it work with Victoria. From the very beginning, at their first meeting, Christina had seen something in those lovely eyes that did not belong in a child. She had tried to win Victoria over, to become friends with the beautiful child who had fast become a beguiling young woman, but she had failed. Her efforts over the years had been constantly rejected; now the gap between them was filled with distrust and resentment.

It was, she supposed, the classic stepmother – stepdaughter relationship. With Stephen in the middle.

Despite his acuteness in business he had never been able to see how treacherous his own daughter could be. He had showered her with material possessions; her trust funds and the country properties she would inherit in England made her worth tens of millions of pounds. And with her looks and brains she was bound to acquire herself a fabulously wealthy husband.

But it wasn’t enough, not for Victoria. Platinum Resorts Inc. remained, a monument to Stephen’s vision and legendary flair. Tomorrow the disposition of his holding in the company was to be made clear.

Tomorrow, at the lawyer’s meeting, Victoria was certain to make her move.

Robert Leyton awoke with a colossal hangover.

Delicately he eased himself out of the bed, careful not to jolt his sore and aching head.

Behind the bathroom door was a full-length mirror. Robert squinted at his reflection. He looked like death. The muscles of his stocky, gone-to-seed body were slack and his face was drawn and haggard, eyelids drooping heavily over his dark eyes.

‘Getting old, my son,’ he told himself in the mirror.

His hand shook as he slowly and painfully shaved the dark stubble off his chin, careful not to nick himself. He didn’t want shaving cuts on his face today, not with a meeting with that smart lawyer coming up. Besides, as Victoria’s chief trustee he owed it to her to put up a good appearance. He must do his best for Stephen’s daughter. His old friend and partner would have expected no less.

He lit a cigarette with a hand that trembled slightly and inhaled, letting the smoke curl lazily away from his thin lips as he gazed out of the window at the driving rain. Thirty-two floors below him it was washing some of the surface filth off the streets of the city. He hated New York; had never been able to understand why Stephen had loved it so much.

But then, there was much about his former partner he had never understood.

Staring sightlessly out of the window, he drew smoke deep into his lungs and recalled Stephen’s words to him the day before he died. His voice on the telephone had been cold and deadly serious.

‘Robert, you must promise me something. It’s very important. If anything happens to me in the next few days I want you to go to Zurich, to see Nicolas Wagner. He has a letter in his possession. It’s to do with Platinum Resorts …’ – the company Stephen had founded without Robert’s participation – ‘He’ll know what to do if you tell him it’s time. He’ll contact Klein first. It’s all arranged.’

Robert had expressed surprise. He had never known Stephen be so mysterious. ‘But why?’ he had asked.

‘Because you’re the only one I can trust to do it.’

‘Do what?’

‘Stop that bastard Cellini getting his hands on Platinum Resorts! He’ll do anything to gain control, anything. It’s up to you to stop him.’

Robert had shivered. He doubted if there was anyone who could stop Antonio Cellini getting what he wanted. Except a man like Stephen.

‘Have I your word, Robert?’ Stephen’s voice had been low and urgent. ‘You’ll pull out all the stops?’ It had been a demand.

Though mystified, he had agreed. ‘Yes, of course, Stephen. You know I will. Anything you say. But come on, why so serious? You’re as fit as a fiddle. Nothing’s going to happen to you.’

‘I know that,’ the voice at the other end of the telephone had snapped back. ‘It’s merely a precaution. You know me. Better safe than sorry.’

They were Stephen’s last words to him.

The following day Christina had phoned and broken the fatal news in a distant, choking voice.

Victor, the butler, had found Stephen’s body at the foot of the stairs in their Barbados home, Crystal Springs House. His neck was broken.

The island coroner had ruled that it was death by misadventure. Robert had difficulty accepting the verdict, but kept his own counsel. It surely could not have been coincidence that Stephen had set in motion those complicated and highly secret arrangements ‘in case of’ his own death?

He turned from the rain-splattered window and savagely screwed his cigarette out in an ashtray. What, he wondered for the hundredth time, had Stephen got himself mixed up in?

After the fortieth length, Antonio Cellini pulled himself effortlessly out of the heated water and padded across the marble tiles to a towel draped on a chair at the side of the dark-blue-tiled swimming-pool.

He moved on the ground as he had in the water: effortlessly and with an animal grace. Standing at six one and weighing 180 pounds, he had the body of a man of thirty. Which, he considered, wasn’t bad when next birthday he would be fifty-three.

Wrapping himself in the towel, he looked across the grounds of the Southampton colonial-style mansion he had finally bought from his parents-in-law. He never tired of the sense of pride that view gave him; it represented everything he had ever wanted, everything he had worked for and achieved.

A flash of blonde hair appeared at a bedroom window but was gone before he could lift a hand to wave. He wondered why Susanna was up so early. It was unusual.

He jogged barefoot up the well-manicured lawns and through the open french windows. He was surprised to see his wife sitting fully dressed at the head of the polished dining-table in the elegant, pale-green morning room. She was spreading butter sparingly over a wafer-thin slice of toast.

‘Good morning, Susanna,’ he said brightly. ‘Up so early? To what do I owe this pleasure?’

She ignored his question. ‘Antonio,’ she demanded with barely controlled irritation, ‘how many times do I have to ask you? After you have been swimming, please come in through the kitchen. You are dripping all over the Aubusson.’

Her blue eyes were cold and full of disapproval.

He was tempted to tell her acidly that the faded, threadbare rug he was soaking had cost him several thousand dollars. That if he wanted to stand on it, wet or otherwise, he would. And that furthermore, if there was one thing he had learned in his long years of association with a tight-ass like Stephen Reece-Carlton, it was that it was vulgar to use anything but the generic: ‘the car’, not ‘the Mercedes’; ‘champagne’, not ‘Dom Perignon’; ‘the rug’, not the goddamned ‘Aubusson’! He caught his own chain of thought and smiled ironically. Well, what do you know? Some of Stephen’s class had finally rubbed off. Too bad it had to be after his death. He wondered if he ought to correct the supposedly classy woman he had married. But he thought better of it. He didn’t want another argument, not this morning. This morning he had more important things on his mind.

‘You haven’t answered my question,’ he continued, glancing at the Louis XV clock, yet another of Susanna’s expensive antiques. ‘Why aren’t you still in bed? You’re never up at this time in the morning.’

‘I have an appointment with Clifford Norton about the party next month. He goes on vacation this afternoon. This morning is the only time he could make.’ Her mouth nipped at a corner of the toast and she chewed it slowly and delicately. He grimaced. It irritated him the way she ate like a bird.

‘Not another party, Susanna,’ he moaned. ‘I’m sick of your constant parties. All those phoney people descending on us like a cloud of locusts. Give me a break. Haven’t we done our quota of entertaining for this year?’

She gave him another icy stare but said nothing. He grabbed a warm croissant from a plate on the table and bit into it as he walked out of the room, leaving a trail of crumbs behind him. He bounded up the wide staircase two at a time and almost collided with a maid. She was new, dark-skinned and attractive, and he smiled at her. He didn’t bother to learn their names any more, they changed so often.

He padded through Susanna’s bedroom suite, which interconnected with his own. He hated the fact that they had separate rooms. He missed waking up next to her.

It has been wonderful, once: to be aroused by the musky remnants of her expensive perfume, to touch the silky strands of her wayward hair, to caress with eager fingers the fine golden hair of her bush. But it hadn’t lasted long. He had realized early in their marriage, after a few cold and indifferent submissions, that Susanna loathed sex in the morning.

And that had been the beginning of their growing apart; the start of what had eventually led to separate bedrooms. It had never excited him to have his women acquiescent. He wanted them eager for it, hungry enough to match his own appetite. His mind strayed to the good-looking maid he had encountered on the stairs. She had possibilities, he thought, and felt his penis stirring into life.

He shook his head vigorously, shaking off thoughts of sex, then smiled to himself. The prospect of a fight always made him horny, and today at the meeting he expected there to be a bloody battle. It was important to keep his mind on business.

Christina, he was certain, could be persuaded to stay out. She had Adam to look after now. Victoria, though, was going to need some careful handling. She always did …

He showered and dressed in a sombre Armani suit, a blue shirt and silk paisley tie, then ran a comb lightly through his hair which, except for the distinguished wings of grey at the temples, was as thick and dark as it had always been.

He smiled at himself in the mirror, showing a set of even white teeth. He felt good: alert and exhilarated, his veins pumping with adrenalin, anticipating the battle.

He was sure he would win. Now, at last, he would gain control of Stephen Reece-Carlton’s business empire. His grin widened at the prospect – and at the thought that his triumph would have Stephen Reece-Carlton turning in his grave.

Victoria surveyed herself in the full-length wardrobe mirror of room 263 of the Plaza Hotel.