The Millionaires' Death Club Read online

  ‘You’re not welcome,’ the taller man said. ‘Our club is particularly exclusive. We accept only the best.’

  ‘The best?’ Jez blurted. ‘So what the hell are we? Bums?’

  ‘You’re dramatis personae, I understand,’ the man said, almost spitting with contempt.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Very well – actors. Or should I say impersonators.’ He stepped forward, towering over Jez. ‘Isn’t that right? – you do impressions of real people.’

  ‘You don’t like our movies, huh?’ Sam said quietly.

  ‘You know what,’ Jez said, ‘for ninety-nine percent of people on this planet it would be the biggest honour of their lives if we showed up on their doorstep.’

  ‘We’re the one percent,’ the man responded with total disdain. He turned his gaze towards me, giving me a look that suggested I might be something he’d picked up on the sole of his shoe and accidentally tramped into his house. ‘I’m asking myself why two American impersonators and their fluffer have come to our house and why they’re in possession of a stolen document.’

  I was immediately indignant. Fluffer?

  ‘Shall I call the private security firm, Charles?’

  ‘How about we call the cops?’ Jez said.

  ‘We’ve just spent two hours answering their plodding questions,’ the taller student said, ‘and I don’t think they’ll be anxious to come back for more. Now, I think it’s time you left.’

  So, the police had shown up, just as I expected. I shuffled nervously.

  ‘These people aren’t worth it,’ I said. ‘Let’s get out of here.’ I realised I couldn’t hear Liszt any longer.

  A moment later, one of the rear doors opened. A stunning woman appeared. When I say stunning, I mean…Jesus. There was absolutely no doubting who it was – the no-longer-mythical goddess. Shit!

  Tall and slim with exquisite high cheekbones, shining skin and a perfect jaw line, this Glamazon sauntered across the hall towards us. Her blonde hair was cut in dramatic spikes, punkish style. Her eyes were an astonishing shade, a kind of electric blue. When she looked at you, it was like having high intensity lasers trained on you. She had a kind of lustrous, supernatural beauty.

  Bitch.

  Wearing tight blue jeans and a fabulously trendy denim cardigan buttoned at the belly button, it was obvious she had no bra on.

  ‘Now, gentlemen, we don’t wish to be rude, do we?’ she said in an incredibly posh voice, the plummiest of the lot. ‘After all, these men have travelled an ocean to see us.’ Infuriatingly, she didn’t bother to acknowledge my existence. ‘And they know something about us,’ she continued as she promenaded over to Sam and stopped in front of him. I couldn’t help noticing that her fingernails were painted with black varnish. ‘What is it you think you know?’ she purred.

  Sam stared, mouth open, and kept staring. I knew what that look meant – I was never getting him back. I glanced at Jez. He was just as bad. Christ Almighty. Two Hollywood megastars, struck dumb in an instant. I wanted seriously bad things to happen to this woman.

  ‘They know that this is where the action is,’ she said, answering her own question. She flashed a heart-stopping smile. ‘They want entry to the greatest show on earth.’ She patted Sam’s cheek as if he were a pet dog. ‘Isn’t that right, Mr Sam Lincoln?’

  ‘You know me?’

  ‘Of course I do. I’ve seen all of your movies.’

  ‘Are you a fan?’ he asked, hopefully.

  ‘Hardly. But I think you’re one of mine,’ she said, eyes twinkling.

  Sam’s eyes were glued to her as she turned round. Her jeans had a rip over the top of her bum. No underwear. Sam’s gaze was drawn there as if attracted by the world’s most powerful magnets. Jez’s too.

  Wake up, you clowns, I thought. You can’t be falling for this. Forget goddess, this woman was a witch, pure and simple.

  She hadn’t finished her introduction. ‘As you always like to say, Sam – if you’re not in, you’re out. That’s right, isn’t it?’ She turned round again. ‘You want to be in, don’t you? You have to know the secret.’ Her smile was lethally alluring. ‘You’ll die if you don’t.’

  Sam stared back, smitten beyond repair as far I could tell. Jez too.

  ‘Oh dear, our glittering stars are tongue-tied,’ the witch said. ‘No scriptwriters, you see. No one to put the words in their mouths.’

  ‘Shut up,’ I yelped.

  ‘Aha,’ the witch said, ‘an intervention from the loyal secretary. Did you know the word derives from the Latin secretus meaning “secret”? So, secretary, are you holding secrets, or are the secrets holding you?’

  ‘Get over yourself.’ It wasn’t a clever reply but I felt better for it.

  The witch smiled and turned to Sam. ‘You’re here because your greatest desire is to join us. There’s nothing you wouldn’t give to make it happen.’

  Sam didn’t contradict her.

  ‘Well, here’s a challenge for you, Sam Lincoln.’ She smiled, her eyes twinkling. ‘We’ll let you join the Top Table. All you have to do is work out how to do it. You have all the facts to hand. Just put the jigsaw together.’

  I didn’t think Sam was capable of speaking given how beguiled he was.

  Eventually he roused himself, but only managed to say, rather feebly, ‘You think you’re so clever, don’t you?’

  I watched as the witch deliberately moved slinkily towards Jez, giving him an übersultry smile.

  ‘I know so.’ She held Jez in her gaze while speaking to Sam. ‘The question is, are you?’

  ‘Who the hell do you think you are?’

  ‘Why, I’m all your dreams come true.’ She put her hand on Jez’s muscular arm, and his eyes sparkled with triumph.

  ‘You’re nothing special,’ Sam grunted, shuffling forward as he futilely tried to make her look at him. ‘Marlon Brando said a woman’s “honour” is half an inch from where she shits from. Don’t ever forget that.’ He flashed an angry glance at Jez.

  ‘But that half inch is everything, isn’t it, Mr Lincoln?’ the witch retorted. ‘You know as well as I do that it might as well be a thousand miles. Or infinity.’

  I was flabbergasted by how cool she was.

  Sam just gazed at her, a helpless snake fatally mesmerised by its cruel charmer.

  ‘Oh, I haven’t properly introduced myself yet, have I?’ she said teasingly. ‘My name’s Zara.’ She paused. ‘That’s Zara with a Z.’

  Chapter 17: Pictures

  The only subject I really enjoyed at school was art. It took me away from the dreary voices of the teachers and transported me to other worlds, just like my magic bus. Sometimes, I went to Sotheby’s to watch art auctions. There was something about that whole process that fascinated me – the buying and selling of beauty, of human imagination. Mostly I went to art galleries. After all the goings on of last night, I was in need of an art overdose, so I headed for one of London’s finest art havens – the National Portrait Gallery off Trafalgar Square.

  After our encounter with Zara – the supreme bitch of the worldwide grand bitches’ coven as far as I was concerned – everything had gone crazy. Jez had crowed gleefully about Alphabet Love. The winner would be the one who slept with Zara, and that was obviously going to be him.

  ‘Did you see the way she touched my muscles?’ he had bragged. ‘Man, that babe’s so hot the frigging sun can’t keep up.’

  Sam was having none of it and insisted Zara was interested only in him. That’s why she’d given him the challenge and not Jez. If he succeeded, she’d sleep with him, he was certain. I felt so small when he said that. I pretended not to care but I was miserable. There was no chance of him coming back to me now – not unless I could get Zara out of the picture just as fast as she’d entered it.

  I couldn’t believe how a brief encounter with this woman had got both men so frothed up. They were more like teenagers than world famous seducers. I read somewhere that it takes us just four or five minutes to form an e
nduring opinion of any new person we meet. With Zara, apparently, it took less than a second to turn Sam and Jez into her dribbling slaves.

  I was disgusted with the whole thing. OK, jealous too. Who wouldn’t want to look like Zara? Not just the looks either. So well bred, so smart, so sassy. Above all, she had a kind of aloof coolness, or was it cool aloofness, that, annoyingly, intrigued even me.

  So, what now? I needed Mencken’s fifty grand to relieve my financial worries. That meant getting NexS from the Top Table. If Sam did pass Zara’s test and was allowed to join the Top Table, maybe they’d give it to him free. Then Mencken wouldn’t pay me a penny. But somehow I felt membership of the Top Table wasn’t the whole story. I was convinced there was another, deeper layer – the Millionaires’ Death Club.

  Whatever the case, I couldn’t believe that only a small group of Oxford students had access to NexS. Others had to know about it.

  Occasionally, some of my clients asked if I could get them designer drugs and I’d discovered that almost anything could be had in Brixton or Camden Town, for the right price. Could my contacts help me now in my hour of need?

  That morning I’d gone south of the Thames to Brixton, but none of the dealers had ever heard of NexS. Some thought I was playing a dumb joke and one just about threatened me for wasting his time.

  Then things took a distinctly weird turn. Big Pat, a major drug dealer originally from Glasgow, called me on my mobile when he heard I’d been asking about NexS. I’d done business with him on a couple of occasions, but he had one of those scary Scottish accents that made me anxious to stay out of his way. In ten minutes, he was there in front of me. Wearing his trademark green-and-white-hooped Celtic football strip, he took me into an Irish bar, sat me down and bought me a double Glenfiddich. Like Mencken, he wasn’t the sort who wasted time asking me to choose what I’d like to drink. The whisky was so strong it made my whole body shake. Yukeo max.

  He said that if I discovered anything about NexS I was to pass on the info to him immediately. This was becoming surreal. Not only did I know nothing about NexS, I was now being asked by others to pass my non-information on to them.

  Big Pat claimed NexS was the Holy Grail of drugs, describing it as one of the Four Riders. I wasn’t wrong in thinking that he was referring to the Four Riders of the Apocalypse.

  Big Pat said that a Nazi scientist in the Second World War had discovered a set of four extraordinary linked drugs. They belonged to a new class of drugs called transpathics that apparently allowed users to have direct access to others’ feelings. The Nazi scientist hadn’t been able to manufacture them in any significant quantities and it was thought that none of these experimental drugs had survived the war.

  Big Pat admitted he didn’t know whether the whole thing was an urban myth. What he did know was that if NexS were real then whoever supplied it would become rich beyond dreams. And he intended to become that person.

  I told him that if I heard anything, he’d be next in line. Secretly, I thought his story was bonkers. Surely NexS, if it actually existed, was a brand new designer drug, not something from the dark ages. It was hard to believe Big Pat had swallowed such a whopper, but I guess anyone can be suckered.

  So, back to the drawing board. Maybe I should seek out chemistry students at UCL; see if they’d heard anything about a miraculous new drug. What about consulting a private investigator? Man, I was getting desperate.

  Around lunchtime, Sergeant McCann phoned me to say that autopsies on both suicide victims had revealed no signs of anything indicating foul play. Both had died from heart failure after swallowing a capsule of atropine. There were no marks on the bodies, no traces of illicit substances other than the seemingly self-administered poison that killed them. McCann explained that atropine was a commonly used poison centuries ago, but was hardly seen nowadays. Apparently it could cause delirium and maybe that could account for the tone and intensity of the suicide notes. The police had interviewed every member of the Top Table and there was no evidence of anyone else being involved. As far as the authorities were concerned, the case was closed.

  Was there really no trace of anything unusual in the bodies? What about the reference to the Substance in the Fourth Protocol? But if they didn’t have a test for something then they weren’t likely to find it, right?

  I needed to take my mind off the whole puzzle for a while, and wandering around an art gallery was the closest I ever got to meditation. I pushed through the revolving doors of the National Portrait Gallery and picked up a brochure from the desk.

  I always found it relaxing to stare at people’s faces in paintings and wonder what quality the artist was trying to capture or the image the subject was hoping to project.

  As I walked through one of the rooms, lost in my own little world, I abruptly froze. The breath left my lungs and I wondered if I was seeing things. I hurried over and stared at one of the pictures. Not possible. But there was no mistake: looking back at me was a face I recognised instantly.

  Wearing a breathtaking blood-red dress and a black choker was none other than the grand witch herself, her head crowned by a dazzling diamond-studded tiara. Underneath the portrait, it said: ‘Lady Zara Hamilton, painted on the occasion of her twenty-first birthday.’

  I stared at it, flabbergasted. Lady Zara Hamilton?

  ‘Well, well,’ a voice whispered in my ear. I spun round and there was the student who’d first opened the door to us at the mansion last night.

  ‘Christ, you startled me.’ I used my hand to fan my face, sure I was turning red.

  ‘I didn’t introduce myself yesterday. I’m Marcus Gorman. You’re Sophie York, of course. I saw you on that charming TV show a while back.’ He was several inches taller than me and was almost literally looking down his nose at me.

  My forced smile was so half-hearted it was probably dribbling off the side of my face.

  ‘You took us by surprise turning up on our doorstep like that,’ he said.

  ‘Did you have to be quite so rude?’

  ‘It’s part of the game.’

  ‘The game?’

  He smiled and took a step towards Zara’s picture. ‘The mansion belongs to her, of course. It’s been in the family for generations. We stay with her for a few weeks each summer.’

  ‘Are you going to explain this Lady Hamilton thing?’

  ‘She intrigues you, doesn’t she? Everyone falls under her spell. I guess it’s in her genes.’

  ‘What is?’ I sniffed.

  ‘Come off it. You can see her natural authority, the way people are willing to follow her. It’s all there in the portrait, isn’t it?’

  ‘Where do genes come in?’

  ‘Zara’s father is Earl Brigham and her grandfather Viscount Catesby. She can trace her family tree all the way back to James II. She’s the rightful heir to the throne if you ignore the so-called Glorious Revolution.’

  ‘The rightful heir to the throne?’ I blurted. No, Marcus was spinning a yarn. Hadn’t he just told me that he and his friends were playing a game?

  ‘Very clever,’ I said, smiling. ‘This is one of your scams. You planted this picture, didn’t you?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘You put this portrait on the wall yourself. The attendant’s probably in on it with you. Did you slip him fifty?’

  Marcus stared down at me. ‘I don’t care for your opinions. If you think this is a fake why don’t you try removing it and see what happens?’

  When I did nothing, he sneered.

  ‘Zara’s a remarkable woman,’ he said after a moment. ‘Every man who meets her falls for her. Even your Hollywood friends.’

  There was a telltale wistfulness in his voice.

  ‘And what about you?’ I asked.

  ‘I got over it.’ He glanced away. ‘There was no chance she was ever going to be interested in me. She only goes for…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Hyperanthropos,’ he said at last.

  ‘And they are
…?’

  ‘I suppose “supermen” would be the more familiar term.’

  ‘Like Sam and Jez?’

  ‘They’re pathetic little men,’ he snorted. ‘The only surprise about them is that they occasionally dare to venture out without their protective carapace of helpers. I assume they’re normally surrounded by an entourage of long-tongued cheerleaders, personal assistants and arse-wipers, not to mention the back-slappers, assorted flunkies and ego massagers.’

  Whoa, bitter or what? ‘But Zara rates them, doesn’t she?’ I said. ‘Or at least she sees them as more worthy suitors than most.’

  No response.

  ‘So, why is she giving them a hard time?’ I tried again.

  Gazing at her portrait, Marcus mumbled, ‘A terrible beauty is born.’ He walked away then turned and gestured to me to follow him. I hesitated.

  ‘Don’t you want to see Zara’s favourite painting?’ he asked.

  My curiosity got the better of me and I set off to follow. What sort of painting would someone like that enjoy? We left the National Portrait Gallery and went round the corner to the National Gallery. In silence, we walked through several rooms before Marcus came to a halt.

  ‘Voila.’ He indicated a large canvas.

  It was a famous Titian entitled Bacchus and Ariadne. I’d seen it several times, but it had never done much for me and still didn’t.

  ‘I believe it’s the subject matter rather than the artistry that interests her,’ Marcus said.

  I couldn’t remember much about the story of Ariadne, but Marcus promptly obliged. Ariadne was the princess in the story about Theseus slaying the Minotaur in the Labyrinth. She gave him the golden thread that let him find his way out. She thought they were in love, but having taken her to the island of Naxos, Theseus seduced her before callously dumping her. The god Bacchus found her there, fell in love and wed her.

  I wondered what personal resonance it had for Zara. Did some guy ditch her, leaving her heartbroken until she found someone much better, or did she have no interest in mortals, only in gods? Frankly, I couldn’t imagine Zara with a broken heart. She’d be the one who did any breaking.