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‘I could so do with a drink right now,’ she said. She had filched a couple of bottles of great claret from the Midas Corporation boardroom and they were lying like forbidden fruit at the bottom of her case.
‘Should I see if I can find some tea or something?’ said Denise, standing and walking around The Landing.
‘No, a fine place like this calls for a good glass of wine,’ said Molly, testing the water for a drinking companion.
Denise gave her the smile she was looking for. ‘It’s tempting, but we’re not going find any on Donna’s detox weekend, are we?’
‘That’s where you might be wrong,’ said Molly, uncoiling her body and walking upstairs to the bedroom.
‘Why did I agree to this?’ slurred Denise. It was near midnight now and the two bottles of claret were lying guiltily on the floor between them, almost drained. ‘I haven’t drunk in ages and Donna will kill us if she finds out.’
The lights were off and the two women were sitting in front of the crackling amber fire. She was glad Donna had shacked her up with Denise, not uptight bloody Karin.
‘How do you know Donna then?’ asked Molly finally, who had waited all night for her moment. She had asked her before the introductory seminar, and her answers had been so vague that Molly had sensed there was much more to it than she was telling.
‘We go a long way back, way before Donna lived like this,’ said Denise, wiping a thin trail of red liquid from her lips. Molly noticed an inflection in her voice that she recognized as envy.
‘Before she became the queen of detox,’ smiled Molly, encouraging her. ‘I mean, who’d have thought Donna the party girl would have ended up running a retreat?’
‘Well, she did always know where there w
as money to be made,’ said Denise.
‘It didn’t take a genius to work out that marrying a rich man was going to be a good thing, did it?’ said Molly, probing gently.
‘But Donna hit the jackpot, didn’t she?’ insisted Denise. ‘Out of all the girls I knew back then, she was the one I thought least likely to do it. To, you know, get all this.’
‘Which girls?’ asked Molly, pouring the last of the claret into Denise’s glass.
Denise paused before she spoke, fixing her slightly unfocused vision on Molly in what she obviously thought was a piercing stare.
‘How long have you known Donna?’ she asked.
‘A long time too,’ lied Molly.
‘So you know?’ said Denise cautiously.
Molly nodded convincingly, feeling a sense of welling euphoria that she was on the brink of discovering something potent.
‘I was the one who sorted it all out for Donna,’ began Denise. ‘I had about a dozen girls, pretty party girls or failed models usually, girls that would always be up for anything.’ She took a sip of wine and smiled almost boastfully. ‘I wasn’t always Denise Jeffries the bored housewife from Esher, you know. I was Denise Duncan, girl about town.’
Molly said nothing, like a shark that had sniffed blood but that was just waiting to move in for the kill.
‘Do you know Adnan Hashemi?’
‘Yes,’ said Molly. She had of course heard of the now-dead Saudi arms dealer who had been a big player on the London social scene in the 1990s.
‘I was his mistress for a little while,’ said Denise. ‘His wife still lived in Jeddah, and I had a little apartment overlooking Hyde Park. And for a small window of time, I had the most wonderful life’, she said, staring at the fire. She turned back to Molly and took another sip. ‘Adnan had friends. They liked British women and I knew a lot of pretty girls. Donna was young, maybe nineteen or twenty. She had come to London to train as a beauty therapist but was out on the circuit a lot. Legends, Tramp, all those, which is how I knew her. She was ambitious, she liked the high life, and Adnan’s friends thought she was wonderful.’
Molly couldn’t believe what she was hearing. ‘Does Daniel know any of this?’ she said softly, trying to disguise the surprise in her voice.
‘What’s there to know?’ said Denise. ‘That his wife did the international party scene for a little while? That some men gave her money and took her shopping? What’s the big deal in today’s day and age?’ She shook her head, as if trying to clear the fog of alcohol. ‘There’s really very little to tell, and, even if there is, in whose interest is it to go delving too deeply?’
Molly raised her glass and smiled. ‘I’ll drink to that.’
46
Molly hadn’t had so many compliments since she’d had that discreet Harley Street eye-lift two years ago. The turnout was spectacular. At least 200 people were milling around The Standlings’ clipped gardens on a blistering hot summer’s day and most of them were social A-list. There was a senior flight of executives from the Midas Corporation, and important bankers. She had also commandeered a handful of wealthy Europeans who were passing through London. Adam had been in touch with a raft of wealthy friends from New York, a software billionaire, a cosmetic mogul. And all for a little village fête.
