Bad Angels Page 4

  Licking her wounds, her career in tatters, she’d fled back home to the UK. Nobody knew where she was; she’d told her family and friends she’d gone to be alone in Mexico for a while.

  The decision to have her surgery pre-Christmas had been absolutely deliberate; this way, I can hole up in total privacy and try to fix the damage I’ve done.

  And now she found herself thinking of the nurse who had just left her, who was neither pretty nor slim, but who clearly was completely comfortable in her body. Aniela didn’t have

  Melody’s beauty, her fame, or the money that would allow her to pay for Dr Nassri and the Canary Clinic, to hole up in five star luxury while she recovered, and yet Melody found herself envying Aniela with every fibre of her being.

  Aniela has a job she knows she’s good at, a proper profession which isn’t based on how she looks or how much she weighs.

  Aniela would never be stupid enough to get plastic surgery done, to mess up her face and body so she barely looked like herself any more...

  Melody heaved a deep sigh. She’d taken a very wrong turn; she’d been too stubborn and headstrong to listen to the man she loved, and now she was paying for it, literally and physically. Please God, I end up with my imperfect face and my small boobs – and my old career, and James back with me. Please God, I get the chance to start all over again.

  Aniela

  Rich people and their problems, Aniela couldn’t help thinking as she left Melody’s apartment. The front door shut behind her with a quiet little click, perfectly calibrated, as everything was in Limehouse Reach. Well, it should be perfect, she thought dryly; the rich people pay enough for it.

  Before this appointment, from a careful reading of Melody’s notes, Aniela had been expecting Melody to be unsympathetic, and had braced herself accordingly. She had anticipated a spoilt, whiny rich girl, unable to make her mind up about how she wanted to look, using plastic surgery as a toy, the surgeon’s scalpel something to be played with as she adjusted her appearance on a whim.

  And yes, her problems are ones only people with too much money have. Too much money and too much time. But actually, she’s very sweet. Very nice. It was generous of her to think about me, wonder if I would mind being by myself over the holidays.

  Aniela felt her mouth crease into an ironic smile: Melody could have no idea how grateful she was to be alone, how much she enjoyed her daily visits to this insulated, utterly silent building. The dark veneered walls of the corridor, its slate-tiled floors, seemed to absorb any noise; the lighting was subtle and discreet, filtering out from recesses, bathing the interior of the apartment block in a gentle amber glow. If Aniela had been at all sensitive, of a nervous disposition, the absolute quiet of the nearly uninhabited building could have been positively eerie. A more feeble-minded woman, one who watched horror films where no sooner did a blonde in a nurse’s uniform step into a lift than she’d be attacked by a serial killer, a vengeful ghost – or possibly even the vengeful ghost of a serial killer – would have loathed moving around the hushed, unoccupied floors of the sixty-storey building.

  The apartments, which were built to the highest specifications, with a spa, ozone swimming pool, squash courts and gym, a library, private cinema, temperature-controlled wine cellars, a car elevator to take vehicles down to the garage, and an underground tunnel linking the skyscraper to the Four Seasons, next door, for twenty-four-hour room service, had some of the highest purchase prices in London. Apartments started at three million pounds; the penthouse that topped the building, three floors with wraparound terraces, had cost the oligarch who bought it a cool hundred and twenty million pounds.

  But Limehouse Reach was one of the most expensive ghost towns in London. Not a single apartment was the sole residence of its owners; most had not only multiple homes, but luxury yachts as well. They summered aboard in Cannes and Sardinia, wintered in ski chalets in Verbier or Aspen, and divided the rest of their time between their palaces in the Middle East, dachas in Russia, Manhattan town houses and the European tax havens of Monaco and San Marino. There were over twenty nationalities who owned property at Limehouse Reach, and barely any of the proprietors were British. They dropped into London for meetings and to shop at Harrods and Harvey Nichols, or they bought the apartments to put up their children, who were studying at the LSE or SOAS. The university students gave some life and movement to the building in term time, but over the holidays they inevitably went to visit their families, deserting Limehouse Reach.

  At the moment there was barely anyone staying in the entire building, according to the very bored doormen and security guards with whom Aniela had checked in that morning. Two patients from the Canary Clinic, and the oligarch, Grigor Khalovsky, who, of all the owners, was in residence most often: he was an exile from Russia due to an ongoing feud with President Putin which meant that if he set foot in his homeland, he would be unceremoniously thrown into prison. A Japanese family, here to show the Christmas sales no mercy, and a Middle Eastern one, ditto. Apart from that, the building was empty: there was practically nobody to enjoy the gigantic Christmas tree that Andy, the concierge, had painstakingly decorated in the atrium.

  Aniela couldn’t have been happier. The silence, the peace, the emptiness. The cocooned luxury. It was the opposite of the grind and hustle of her normal life, the crammed Tube and buses on which she travelled to the dirty, disorganised, understaffed and over-crowded NHS hospital in which she worked, perpetually frustrated by not having enough time for her patients and by the bad humour of her equally stressed colleagues. She had been working non-stop for five years now, ever since she came to London; a full-time NHS day job, plus any private hospital shifts she could pick up to supplement her income.

  She sighed as she stepped into the lift, grateful that there was a slab of Carrara marble, white-veined with peach and grey, framed on the back wall, instead of the expected mirror panel. The last thing she wanted to see was the expression on her face, her mouth dragged down bitterly at the corners, as she thought about what had happened to the fruits of those five years of constant hard work. Every spare penny had been sent back home to her family in Poland, to help them build the house they had always wanted, tearing down a tumbledown old ruin on a plot of land belonging to her father’s family, outside the city, and putting a modern farmhouse in its place.

  It would be somewhere her parents could retire to, somewhere Aniela dreamt of living one day. She hated towns, had only come to London because the money was so much better here; her plan was to live in the countryside, to have her own farm. Most farms in Poland were small and privately owned, just eight hectares or so, enough to feed a family, but not to sell commercially; young people were drifting inexorably towards the cities, and older farmers were eager to sell land they could no longer work on their own. Aniela wanted to buy up the land adjoining her parents’, to build up a beet and potato farm. Her two brothers weren’t interested in joining her, but that didn’t bother her: she wasn’t afraid of hard work, and she would infinitely prefer to work her fingers to the bone in the comparative solitude of the countryside, with just some animals for company, than on a crowded ward in a London hospital, with ten people trying to talk to her at once.

  She’d gone home every Christmas, every summer, eager to see the house take shape; plans were drawn up and discussed over much vodka, the foundations had even been laid. This year she hadn’t been able to get back at all. She’d been so determined to slave away in London, salting away money, that she’d forgone a summer holiday.

  And then, doubts had begun to creep in. The house was due to be built this year, but despite increasingly frequent emails from her asking for photographs of the construction as it took shape, none had been sent. Her emails had been either ignored, or replied to with short, cryptic sentences. On the phone her mother was always too busy to talk for any length of time. Aniela had had her ticket to go home for Christmas booked months ahead, to take advantage of low advance fares: but, on a sudden impulse, in mid-November
she’d found herself clicking onto the Ryanair website and booking a last-minute weekend offer, getting a crack-of-dawn flight to Łódź, the closest airport, taking a train, another train, and then a long, slow bus ride, deliberately turning up on her parents’ doorstep without giving them any notice whatsoever...

  Aniela had wanted to take them by surprise, but it was she who received the worst shock of her life. Her doubts had only been nebulous, a sense that something wasn’t quite right: what she found was confirmation that everything was completely and utterly wrong. Her parents, her brothers, must have organised major clean-ups of their flat whenever she was due to come back, because, with them unaware that she was due to arrive, it was a pigsty. Rubbish bags on the floor, cigarette ash everywhere, and, littering the narrow hallway, crates and crates of empty bottles of beer, dirt-cheap vodka, and the two-litre bottles of Sprite that so many Poles used to mix with their spirit of choice. Her parents and brothers should have been at work; it was Friday afternoon. Instead, they were in the middle of a bender that had clearly been going on for days, with most of the worst slackers from the neighbourhood in residence too.

  The only positive aspect to the situation was that they were all too drunk to beat around the bush. In half an hour, the entire sordid, miserable truth came out. None of them had had jobs since Aniela left for London: they had been living on the money she sent back. Rather than being spent on the proposed new farmhouse, her hard-earned cash had been keeping her parents, her brothers and assorted friends in vodka. There wasn’t a penny left. They had concocted some cover story to explain the lack of building work – various disasters, an architect and builder disappearing with their deposits – but had assumed they had a month more to work out the details before Aniela returned for Christmas; their feeble, inebriated attempts to lie to her were completely transparent.

  Aniela hadn’t even taken her coat off. She’d turned on her heel without another word, slung her overnight bag over her shoulder and walked out the door, knowing it would be for the very last time. To add insult to injury, her exit was followed by hysterical laughter; her family was at the advanced stage of drunkenness when everything seemed absolutely hilarious.

  They aren’t laughing now, Aniela thought bitterly. She’d had to change her phone number and her email address when the realisation that no more funds would be forthcoming sank into her family’s collective brain. Panic set in. They’d apologised, promised to start building the house straight away, sent all sorts of assurances...and begged me to start PayPal-ing them money again. But Aniela held firm. She wasn’t going to be fooled twice; from now on, she didn’t believe a word any of them said. They’d left her with nothing, and now she’d left them for good.

  Stop it! she told herself firmly, stepping out of the lift. Don’t dwell on the past, it just makes you bitter. You’re earning so much money for working over Christmas and New Year, think of how much you’ll be able to put aside when you get paid for this...

  Technically, the Canary Clinic should have had two nurses to cover its recuperating patients at Limehouse Reach. But there were only a couple of patients, and neither of them really needed a nurse at all; when Aniela had approached Dr Nassri and asked if she could take the whole Christmas and New Year period on time and a half, the Clinic, keen as any business to economise, had jumped at the offer.

  Aniela rang the bell of the second Clinic-owned apartment, and stood a little back from the door, so its inhabitant could check who she was through the peephole. Mentally, she ran over the notes of the patient she was about to meet. Neither he nor Melody had had the usual, run-of-the-mill surgery – facelifts, liposuction, breast enlargements. Both of them were, in their way, unique, and Aniela had been very interested by the completely elective surgery this one had undergone; it had definitely piqued her professional interest.

  However, as the door swung open, her mouth dropped open. Her first reaction to the man standing in front of her was completely unprofessional. His face was exactly as she had expected: as if he had gone twenty rounds with Mike Tyson. But it wasn’t his face Aniela was staring at, hypnotised. It was his body.

  My God , she thought, trying to catch her breath. I’ve never seen a more perfect physical specimen in my life.

  A light sheen of sweat coated his body, and his muscles had the swell and distinct veining that indicated they had just been worked out hard, pushed to their limits. He was wearing only a pair of grey sweatpants, hanging low on his lean hips, well below his narrow waist, revealing the whole of his torso. His muscle definition, lean and ripped, was extraordinary; he might have been a professional athlete, a gymnast, strength and balance and flexibility all combined. Nothing had been over-worked for effect; everything was in Greek-god proportion, from the split caps of his deltoids, each of the three shoulder muscles so defined that Aniela longed to run her fingers over them, down to the curves of his pectorals, smoothly moulded breastplates, and the even ripples of his abdominal muscles.

  It’s like his body is wearing its own armour, Aniela thought. And that’s not even a six-pack: it’s an eight-pack. The V directly below his abdominals was sharply defined, arrowing down the jut of his hipbones, pointing to a destination below the waistband of the sweatpants. His skin was white and lightly freckled, pale and Celtic, and smooth, with only a light dusting of reddish-gold hair; but below his belly button, a tight little recess in his washboard stomach, a trail of slightly darker hair ran down to the knotted cord that was the only thing holding up his sweatpants. It was briefly interrupted by a long, irregular scar that cut across his lower abdomen, but soon straightened out again, disappearing down behind the ribbed grey welt of the waistband, down to the bulge of...

  Aniela! Pull yourself together!

  How much time had gone by? How long had she been standing there, gawking at him? She cleared her throat and started to speak, but he said simultaneously, in a soft American accent:

  ‘Aniela, right? I’m Jon. Sorry if I’m a shock – Siobhan can’t have warned you about the face. It’s not as bad as it looks.’

  He turned, leading the way inside the apartment. His back rippled as he walked; it was like watching a leopard or a panther in motion. His bottom, tight under the loose tracksuit pants, could have belonged to a dancer or a speed skater – firm, high glutes with the minimal bounce of perfectly toned muscle. His arms—

  Aniela, stop it!

  ‘You have been doing exercise,’ she observed, and was glad that her voice sounded severe; better that than cooing with appreciation.

  ‘Yeah. Press-ups and pull-ups, mostly. Some side planks for the obliques. The doctor said no cardio.’

  He picked up a towel that had been lying on the white glass kitchen counter and started to rub it over his chest, completely unselfconscious. Praying to high heaven that she wasn’t blushing, Aniela said sternly:

  ‘You should not be working out. The doctor said no exercise, not no cardio. You must only do gentle stretches for a few more weeks.’

  His face was so bruised, so battered, so swollen, that it was impossible to read any expression at all; but she thought he briefly raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Aniela, trust me,’ he said, chucking the towel onto the counter. ‘I’ve had plenty of surgery in my time. I’m not going to strain anything.’

  ‘I will be the judge of that,’ she said firmly. ‘You must sit down now and I will see how your wounds are healing.’

  Jon pulled out a chair from the dining table, and sat. His feet were bare, she saw, and even they were attractive; strong, well-kept, only a little reddish-gold hair on their backs, the toenails cut short, the veins as strongly defined as the ones running along his biceps and forearms...

  ‘I will just quickly get a glass of water,’ she said briskly, going over to the sink. Her back safely turned, she pulled the biggest grimace that she could, stretching every muscle in her face in a brief, crazy moment of release. It was a nurse’s trick, when you needed to let off steam, a pantomiming that had always, before,
been about something horrific.

  Never before had she done it because a patient’s body was so amazing that it had sent her spinning into near-insanity.

  Over her shoulder she said curtly:

  ‘Would you like one?’

  ‘Sure,’ he said.

  She found coasters, and put the glasses down on the dining table, watching as he lifted his to his lips; everything on his face was swollen, purpled with the bruising. He drank slowly, carefully, not flinching in pain, even though the effort of swallowing must hurt him considerably.

  ‘Are you eating okay?’ she asked, looking around: there was no sign of a room service cart.

  ‘Protein shakes,’ he said efficiently. ‘And I have a bunch of vegetables and fruit in the freezer, for juicing.’

  Aniela nodded, drinking some water to steady her nerves. She couldn’t put it off any longer; she set the glass down again and stepped close to him, close enough to smell the light, fresh scent of his sweat and, below that, soap. He must have showered before his workout, she realised, and he’ll wash again after. Americans are always very clean.

  Standing over him, she looked down at his scar. It sliced through the thick, strawberry blond hair, which had been shaved in a long strip before the surgery. Dr Nassri had cut Jon’s scalp open from ear to ear, a huge incision, peeling the skin down from his face so that he could work on the entire bone structure. Whatever Jon would end up looking like, it would be completely dissimilar from the face that he had had before this surgery. His cheekbones had been filed down, his jaw restructured, his nose widened. It was a brutally invasive operation.

  Siobhan had told her Jon had been in a car accident and had had a series of procedures in America with which he’d been dissatisfied, before coming to Dr Nassri to fix him: but Siobhan’s an idiot, Aniela thought. She just believes what she’s told. She has no professional curiosity.