“You know what I mean. I mean a real problem. Something you can’t handle.”
“I’m fine, darling, honestly. Try and go back to sleep.”
Soon Charlotte Whitman was slumbering soundly. Henry watched her, her words ringing in his ears. Something you can’t handle&
Thanks to him, Alexia De Vere’s face was on the front page of every newspaper. Speculation about her appointment was rife, but no one knew anything. No one except Henry Whitman. And he intended to take the secret to his grave.
Was Alexia De Vere a problem that he couldn’t handle? Henry Whitman sincerely hoped not. Either way it was too late now. The appointment was made. The deed was done.
Britain’s new Prime Minister lay awake until dawn, just as he knew he would.
No rest for the wicked.
Chapter One
Kennebunkport, Maine. 1973.
Billy Hamlin watched seven little boys in swim shorts run squealing towards the water and felt a surge of happiness. The kids weren’t the only ones who loved summer at Camp Williams.
Billy had been lucky to get this job. Most of the Camp Counselors were Ivy League kids. Tuckers and Mortimers and Sandford-Riley-the-thirds on a ‘break’ between Harvard College and Harvard Business School. Or the female equivalent, Buffys and Virginias passing the time between graduation and marriage by teaching swim class to the cute sons of the New York elite. Billy Hamlin didn’t fit the mould. His dad was a carpenter who’d built some new cabins at Camp Williams last fall, earning enough goodwill to land his boy a summer job.
“You’ll meet some interesting people up there,” Jeff Hamlin told Billy. “Rich people. People who can help you. You gotta network.”
Billy’s dad was a great believer in networking. Quite why, or how he thought a summer spent rubbing shoulders with spoiled bankers’ sons was going to help his charming, unqualified and utterly unambitious boy get ahead in life remained a mystery. Not that Billy was complaining. By day he got to hang around on the beach playing the fool with a bunch of sweet little kids. And by night Camp Williams had more freely available drugs, booze and what his grandma would have called ‘fast’ women than a New Orleans whorehouse. At eighteen years old, Billy Hamlin didn’t have many skills. But he did know how to party.
“Billy! Billy! Come play pothum in the middle with uth!”
Graydon Hammond, a knock-kneed seven year old with a lisp brought on by at least five missing upper teeth, waved for Billy to come into the shallows. Graydon would grow up to inherit a majority of shares in Hammond Black, a boutique investment bank worth more than most small African countries. Waving people over to do his bidding would be a big part of Graydon’s future. But right now he was so sweet natured and lovable, he was tough to resist.
“Graydon, leave Billy alone. It’s his afternoon off. I’ll play possum with you.”
Toni Gilletti, unquestionably the sexiest of all The Camp Williams counselors, was supervising Graydon’s group. Watching Toni run into the surf, her Playboy Bunny body barely contained by her white string bikini, Billy was mortified to feel the beginnings of an erection start to stir in his Fred Perry swim shorts. There was nothing for it but to dive in himself and use the ocean as a fig-leaf.
Like all the other boys at camp, Billy lusted wildly after Toni Giletti. Unlike the other boys, he also liked her. They’d slept together once, on the very first night at camp, and although Billy had been unable to persuade Toni to repeat the experience, he knew she’d enjoyed it and that she liked him too. Like him, Toni was something of an outsider. She was no laborer’s daughter. Toni’s old man owned a string of thriving electronics outlets along the Eastern Seaboard. But neither was she a prissy freshman from Wellesley or Vassar. Toni Giletti was a wild child, a thrill seeking troublemaker with a taste for cocaine and unsuitable lovers that had gotten her in deep shit back home in Connecticut. Rumor had it she’d only avoided a prison sentence for credit card fraud because her father, Theodore Gilletti, paid off the judge and donated a seven figure sum to pay for a new bar and wet-room at the local country club. Apparently Toni had stolen the gold Amex from a neighbor to keep her latest dealer boyfriend in the style he’d become accustomed to. The Gillettis had packed their daughter off to Camp Williams as a last resort, no doubt hoping, like Billy’s dad, that Toni might ‘network’ her way to a better future; in her case, marriage to a decent, well-bred white boy – ideally one with a Harvard degree.