The Snow Angel Read online

  To James Crawford

  Contents

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  PART TWO

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  PART THREE

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  PART FOUR

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  By Lulu Taylor

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  Present day

  ‘Are you listening, Emily?’

  ‘Yes, yes . . . of course.’ But she wasn’t, even though she knew she should be. Will was talking as he drove and she was sitting next to him, thinking about Carrie.

  She’ll be fine, she thought, trying to quell the uneasiness she felt. The babysitter seemed very nice and she promised to give her another dose of Calpol if she couldn’t sleep. I wish Paula had been free, though. She’s so good with Carrie.

  Emily shivered a little and glanced down at her evening dress: a short black sleeveless silk number with a flattering low-cut neckline. It had already seen her through a least half a dozen of Will’s work functions, a charity gala and her birthday dinner at the Savoy.

  But it’s too chilly for this evening. I should have put on a jacket. I’ll freeze. Oh dear. Poor Carrie, she did look pale. Perhaps I should have stayed at home.

  But Will wouldn’t hear of it, and it was too late now. The car was making its stop-start progress towards the motorway, the traffic lights adding their own red, green and amber to the light display. London sparkled, its lamp posts festooned with shimmering lights in red, green, blue and white: bells, stars and angel wings twinkling in the darkness above the slowly snaking traffic pushing its way along the city’s arterial roads, slushy with grey-streaked remnants of the snowfall two days ago.

  She imagined the evening ahead at Sophie and Alex’s party. They always threw lavish dos: cocktails and canapés handed round by waiting staff, a dinner catered for the thirty or so guests, lots of wine liberally poured, some dancing afterwards before taxis came to take them home. It would be fun to let her hair down a little.

  I haven’t been to a good party in ages. But I’ll call the sitter first, to check on Carrie. I won’t be able to relax till then.

  Life had been dull lately. Evening after evening spent putting the children to bed, waiting for Will to come home from work, then the two of them eating a late supper in front of the television, Will too tired to talk much. He’d been so preoccupied recently, veering between a kind of repressed excitement and a black irritability.

  They’d all been tiptoeing more than ever around his moods. The children seemed to know that one spilled glass could set off a fearsome tirade, and they were quiet and wide-eyed around him. Emily knew it was often like this in the run-up to the end of the year but even so, he was touchier than ever. It took all her energy to soothe first him and then the children, trying to absorb as much of his tension as she could. Sometimes she’d wake in the night and sense him wide awake beside her, the whirrings of his mind almost audible. She’d roll over and hug him, hoping that her nearness might calm him. Sometimes it would, but mostly he’d turn over with an irritated sigh and she’d have to leave him to it, blinking in the darkness while she slept.

  It’ll do us good to have fun, have a drink. She glanced at her husband, who had stopped talking as he negotiated a junction. I wonder why Will decided to drive tonight. He won’t be able to drink much Perhaps he was afraid we’d have to share a cab back with the Watsons.

  As soon as they were clear of the junction, Will said, ‘Please, Emily, this is important.’

  ‘I’m listening,’ she promised.

  A driver in the lane beside them signalled his intention to push in just ahead and Will muttered a sarcastic comment, his expression thunderous. The way the orange glow from the street lights fell on him gave him unexpectedly cavernous cheeks and hooded eyes, and for a moment he looked almost like a stranger and not like her Will at all. His face had been thinner lately, now she came to think of it. But of course he wasn’t the same as when they’d married six years ago, or when they’d got together four years before that.

  Ten years, she marvelled. How can it be so long? Where did the time go? She knew where, of course: on producing two children, on moving house twice, on living their lives without noticing that every day changed them just a little more. Will’s hair had been a burnished red-gold when she’d met him but now, without her ever seeing the change, it had faded to brown flecked with grey, and he kept it very short to hide its growing sparseness. The lines on his face were deeper and he had a permanent crease between his brows. But he looks good on it. He still looks young – at least, he does to me.

  She gazed for a moment at her husband’s profile with its long, straight nose and firm, round chin. A strong, decided face. From the start, Will had always seemed to know where he was going and what he was doing. He always had a plan, an idea of where he would be in a few years’ time. She’d let him lead the way, making the decisions about what was best, steering their course unhesitatingly to wherever it was they were going. After all, it was Will’s career as the chief financial officer of a hedge fund that paid all their bills, bought the house, and provided the comforts they needed. It was only right that it took priority. Her part of the bargain was raising the family, taking care of the home, running their domestic lives as well as she could, with the idea that she would return to work when the children were older.

  ‘Did you hear what I said, Emily?’ Will asked tetchily. She realised he had been talking again and she had not been listening properly. They had made the break at last, the slow dual carriageway opening up into the three lanes of motorway. The lights of the city were behind them as the car accelerated into the relative darkness ahead. Huge street lamps bent over the motorway at intervals, like strange bowing giants, while red tail lights flickered ahead and white headlights glared and spun behind. Emily was glad Will was driving. She always felt bewildered by the flashing, moving beams, and intimidated by the way they approached remorselessly from behind, dazzling in the rear-view mirror. Driving at night seemed to be about understanding the rays and beams, the starbursts of white light that cut through the dark.

  ‘Emily?’ Will’s voice was low and intense.

  ‘Sorry . . .’ Why am I so distracted? I need to concentrate. What was he saying? Something about work . . . She remembered an echo of something he’d said before. ‘Is Vlady still giving you hell?’ She tried to pretend she’d heard. ‘What does Helen say?’

  There was a strained pause. Will stared straight ahead through the dark windscreen, his gaze hardening. ‘Do you ever listen to me, Emily?’ he asked in a gritted voice.

  ‘Of course I do!’ she said, repentant at once. ‘I’m sorry, I’ve had so muc
h on my mind lately. Christmas is so close, I’ve still got a million things to do. The school’s carol concert’s coming up and for some crazy reason I promised to run the mince pie and mulled wine stall.’

  ‘Christmas,’ said Will, his voice strangely hollow. ‘I’d almost forgotten.’

  ‘Forgotten?’ Emily laughed in disbelief. ‘How could you? It’s everywhere.’

  And yet, she realised, it wasn’t here. Christmas had suddenly vanished. There were no decorations on the motorway, no strings of lights or dangling baubles. No background of carols or Yuletide pop tunes. No scent of cinnamon and spice. Just the seriousness of the high-speed journey.

  ‘So,’ she ventured almost timidly. ‘Is it Vlady?’

  Vlady was the Russian businessman who owned the hedge fund Will worked for, notoriously temperamental and prone to outbursts of autocratic behaviour. They were grateful to him for giving Will a job and elevating him up that all important step to CFO, but his mercurial nature and refusal to accept that he had to comply with the way things were done led to conflict and exasperation in his team.

  ‘In a way.’ Will’s knuckles tightened round the steering wheel. The traffic had thinned out and they were speeding along in the fast lane, flying by the slower cars in the middle.

  ‘What’s he up to? Arguments with Natalia again?’ Emily said, trying to lighten the atmosphere; she and Will had often laughed about the state of his boss’s relationship with his wife, which had an operatic intensity, full of rifts, threats and magnificent reconciliations.

  ‘If you’d been listening, you’d know,’ Will replied briefly. His voice was growing flatter, losing its expression. ‘I was saying that Vlady hasn’t been himself lately. In fact, we haven’t seen him for days.’

  ‘Has he gone away for the holidays?’ Emily suggested. ‘Skiing or something?’

  ‘I don’t know. We don’t know where he’s gone. That’s the point. I was telling you that the last time I saw Vlad was when he came in and gave me that rocket over the figures for the Kommer deal. He said I’d made a mistake. But I hadn’t. I couldn’t convince him.’

  ‘That’s odd, isn’t it?’ Emily looked over at him, worried for Will. He prided himself on handling Vlady’s volatility and on always being on top of his brief. ‘You can usually talk him round. Show him where he’s gone wrong.’

  ‘I know. Not this time.’

  ‘So?’ Anxiety curled in the pit of her stomach. Is he trying to prepare me for something?

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Emily.’ He closed his eyes for a moment and she realised that they were flying along the road at over eighty miles an hour.

  Oh God, she thought, her anxiety growing. He’s going too fast. ‘Slow down a little, sweetie,’ she said, trying to sound calm. This is why he’s been so on edge lately. What’s wrong? Has he been sacked? A whole future flashed through her mind: Will out of work, no money coming in, new jobs hard to find. There would be bills to be paid, arguments over money, the shopping put on credit cards. Perhaps she’d have to go back to work as a primary school teacher while Will looked after the children, workless and hopeless, spending long hours on the internet searching for jobs. But we could get through that, she thought, we’d be fine. It’d be tough but we could do it. At least some of the awful pressure we live with now would be gone.

  In the second that it had taken her to envisage this future, Will opened his eyes and took the speed of the car back down. The needle had been nudging ninety. Now she saw with relief that it was trembling over eighty again.

  ‘So,’ he said, his voice calmer, ‘we haven’t heard from Vlady for four days now. Nothing. No contact. His phone dead. His emails unanswered. No reply from his houses, or his driver, or his pilot, or anyone.’

  ‘Oh.’ Emily stared at her husband’s profile again, as if she could read some answers in its firm lines. ‘Have you tried to reach Natalia?’

  ‘Yes. Of course. But she’s vanished as well.’

  ‘Oh.’ Emily turned to look at the dark road ahead, the white lines on either side of the lane converging in the far distance as they disappeared into the night. ‘So . . . what are you going to do?’

  ‘Today, Helen decided that we had to start investigating. She said that with no contact for so long from the CEO, we had to assume control of what was happening. She said it could be a worst-case scenario and that we can’t sit and wait and let the ship go down because the captain had gone overboard. But she’s only been on the team six months, she doesn’t know Vlady like we do. You and I know that he’s a bit of a drama queen. He and Natalia could have had a screaming row followed by a huge make-up session and flown off to some Bali resort and turned off their phones.’ Will’s jaw tightened. ‘That’s what I wanted to believe.’

  Wanted to believe? Wanted?

  ‘So what did Helen do?’ Emily ventured. Her hands, she realised, were clutched tightly together in her lap, hot and tense on the black silk.

  ‘She went into Vlady’s office. She called the techy boys and made them open up the system so we could see what’s going on. She broke open the whole thing.’

  ‘Did you find out what’s happened to Vlady?’ The anxiety was back, flickering and hot in her stomach. She was completely focused on Will now.

  ‘We don’t need to know now. It’s kind of irrelevant, in fact. I’ll probably never see him again.’

  A nasty coldness spread across her skin. When she spoke, her voice came out almost as a whisper. ‘Why?’

  For the first time, Will flicked his gaze round to look at her. Those eyes – soft hazel when he was happy, a hard green when he was angry or miserable. She couldn’t see them here in the darkness. How many times had he looked at her, and she’d marvelled at how beautiful they were, with their fine almond shape and frame of dark lashes? Now she came to think of it, they’d been green all the time lately.

  Will turned back to the road and when he spoke, his voice was heavy and leaden. ‘Vlady’s been running the fund on empty for a month or two now. He’s managed to keep the truth hidden from all of us, even me.’ He gave a hollow laugh. ‘You can imagine what that does to my credentials as the CFO. What kind of buffoon doesn’t realise his fund doesn’t exist?’ There was a tiny pause, a breath, when, for Emily, the world teetered on a brink – on one side was normality and on the other, something awful waited. She wanted to stop him speaking, as though that would make it all right, but before she could draw the breath or open her mouth, he went on implacably. ‘It’s over. Everything’s gone. The whole damn lot. He’s made some spectacular blunders – I mean crazy, rookie stuff, like the trader boys who throw billions away trying to hide a loss of millions. I don’t even know how he did it, or what possessed him to throw everything away after the years we’ve put in building the fund, getting the clients, the investors, and when we were just on the verge of pulling in some really big fish—’

  ‘Wait. I don’t understand. So . . .’ Emily tried to take it in. It seemed too much to comprehend, too big a leap from her life as it had been ten minutes ago to what it might be now. ‘You mean . . . Vlady’s done something criminal?’

  Will considered this and then said in a bitterly amused voice, ‘You know, I’ve not even thought about that. Yeah. I imagine there’ll be grounds for quite a lot of legal action but it will all be pointless. He’ll end up in jail – if anyone ever finds him – but they’ll never see their money again. No one will.’

  The dark road outside flew by in a blur and ahead of them red lights glowed like danger beacons in the distance. Emily knew she ought to feel something but she was numb. Her anxiety had turned to a kind of stillness, as if she wouldn’t let herself react until she had a full knowledge of the facts and their implication. There was only a small fluttering sense of horror somewhere just outside herself, waiting to swoop in and take possession.

  Fear began to crawl under her skin. ‘And you? Can you be made responsible for any of this?’

  ‘I have no idea what Vlad did to cover his tracks. But
I do know that I am responsible. For more than you know.’

  ‘Of course you feel responsible, but it’s not your fault! How could it be? You had no idea what Vlady was doing.’

  ‘I should have known.’

  ‘He pulled the wool over your eyes. He deceived you. You trusted him. That’s not a crime.’ She spoke quickly, urgently, desperate to convince him. She knew what Will was like once an idea had taken a firm hold in his mind. Her old uncle used to talk about the painful effort of uprooting the mangels on his land. It was like that, trying to unplant one of Will’s notions. ‘You can’t be to blame for that, Will. Helen knows. Everyone will know. Vlady’s to blame. They’ll find him and he’ll take the consequences. He was always a loose cannon but I had no idea he’d be capable of something like this.’ She reached out a hand and put it on his thigh. It was hard and muscled from the hours he spent in the gym. ‘We’ll be okay. We’ve got savings. We’ve got the house. You’ll find another job and I can go back to work if that makes sense – if the childcare cost isn’t too much.’

  ‘Oh Emily.’

  His voice was so freighted with sadness, it frightened her. ‘What is it? I know it’s awful, but we’re still us, we’ve still got the kids . . .’

  ‘You don’t understand. He duped me. He told me everything was great. More than great. He said if I invested now, I’d get a return on my money that I would hardly believe possible. He took me out for dinner, showed me the paperwork, painted great glorious pictures of what was waiting for us both. It seems so stupid to think about it now – sitting in one of those crazily expensive City restaurants, ordering Pol Roger and beluga caviar, toasting how much richer we were going to be.’ Will’s voice dropped lower and grew more monotonous. ‘I believed him. Completely believed him.’

  ‘What did you do?’ she asked, fear gradually breaking through the numbness. Her heart began thumping hard in her chest. She sensed that the nub of the matter was close.

  ‘I took it all – everything. I emptied the savings accounts, the ISAs. I cashed in the pension, the shares, everything I could get my hands on. I remortgaged the house as much as they would let me. I got everything together . . . and I gave it all to Vlad.’