Chapter Eighteen The Wedding Planner
Sebastian Wilde; Seb to his clients, Mr Wilde to tradespeople and ‘that insufferable man’ to anyone who had ever tried to negotiate his fees arrived at the Ashworth-Pemberton residence precisely seven minutes late.
This was deliberate. Seb had learned, over fifteen years of planning weddings for people with more money than sense, that arriving exactly on time suggested desperation.
Arriving early suggested neediness. But arriving seven to ten minutes late with profound apologies, a charming excuse involving traffic or a previous client who simply couldn’t bear to let him go, suggested that one was in demand.
That one’s time was precious, that one was, in the particular parlance of the industry, worth every penny of one’s eye-watering fee.
‘Mrs Ashworth-Pemberton!’ He swept into the drawing room with arms outstretched, as if greeting a long-lost relative rather than a client he’d met only twice before.
‘You look absolutely radiant. Is that Chanel? It is, isn’t it?
I’d know that cut anywhere. Spring collection, if I’m not mistaken. Divine.’
Elizabeth, who was indeed wearing Chanel, which he had correctly identified as the spring collection, thawed approximately two degrees, more than she had last time she was in the Bahamas. ‘Mr Wilde. How lovely.’
‘Seb, please. We’re going to be spending so much time together over the coming weeks, we will practically be family by the end.’ He settled into the offered chair with the easy grace of a man who had sat in a thousand drawing rooms and found them all wanting. ‘Now. Shall we discuss the vision?’
Anastasia was seated by the window, as far as possible from Elizabeth without causing obvious offence, watched the performance with something approaching admiration. Seb Wilde was, she had to admit, very good at what he did. Whether what he did had any actual value was another question entirely.
He was perhaps fifty, though he worked hard to suggest forty-five.
Immaculately dressed in a suit that managed to be both conservative and flamboyant (charcoal grey, but with a lining that flashed lime green when he moved).
His hair was silver at the temples in a way that suggested distinguished rather than aged and his hands moved constantly as he spoke, conducting an invisible orchestra of taste and refinement.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ Elizabeth said, in a tone that suggested she had been thinking of nothing else for weeks, ‘about the flowers.’
‘The flowers!’ Seb clasped his hands together as if she had just revealed the secret of eternal youth. ‘Tell me everything.’
What followed was forty-five minutes of discussion about arrangements, colours, seasonal availability and the critical importance of having the right variety of white rose.
Seb lectured: ‘There are seventeen shades of white, Mrs Ashworth-Pemberton and only three of them are acceptable for a December wedding’.
Anastasia contributed nothing. Her opinions had not been requested.
She suspected they would not be welcomed.
This was, she had come to understand, how it was going to be. This was Elizabeth’s wedding. Elizabeth’s vision. Elizabeth’s triumph. Anastasia was merely the necessary component, the bride-shaped object required to make the whole production correct.
She didn’t mind. Not really. She had survived worse than being ignored in a drawing room. And every moment Elizabeth spent obsessing over flower arrangements was a moment she wasn’t probing into Anastasia’s past, her family, her ‘people.’
‘Now,’ Seb said, producing a leather-bound notebook with a flourish, ‘shall we review the timeline? I find that the timeline is the skeleton upon which the wedding hangs. Get the skeleton right and everything else falls into place. Get it wrong and...’ He shuddered delicately. ‘Well. We won’t get it wrong.’
He flipped open the notebook to reveal pages dense with handwritten notes, colour-coded tabs and what appeared to be a small floor plan.
‘The ceremony at four, as discussed. The chapel is simply perfect for a winter wedding: all that candlelight against the stone. We’ll have the guests seated by three forty-five, processional music beginning at three fifty-five.
The bride arrives...’ he nodded at Anastasia with the air of someone acknowledging a useful piece of furniture, at four precisely.
Fashionably on time. The ceremony itself runs approximately forty-five minutes, including the signing of the register in the vestry. ’
He turned a page.
‘Following the ceremony, the wedding party moves to the terrace for photographs (weather permitting, of course, though I’ve arranged for a marquee backup) while guests enjoy champagne in the Long Gallery.
At five-thirty, we begin the drinks reception proper.
Canapés, more champagne, general mingling.
The wedding breakfast is called at seven.
Speeches between courses: father of the bride after the starter, groom after the main, best man with the dessert.
Cake cutting at eight-thirty, first dance at nine and then we’re into the evening reception proper. ’
‘And the departure?’ Elizabeth asked.
‘Midnight. Traditional. The happy couple depart from the grand staircase while guests line the drive. Very romantic. Very photogenic.’ Seb smiled the smile of a man who had orchestrated a thousand such departures and found them all satisfactory. ‘I understand there’s a hot air balloon involved?’
‘James’s idea,’ Elizabeth said, in a tone that conveyed precisely what she thought of James’s ideas. ‘He saw it in a film.’
‘How whimsical. We’ll make it work.’ Seb made a note. ‘Now, shall we discuss the seating plan? I find seating plans are where weddings are truly won or lost...’
???
Granny’s enquiries, when I finally learned about them, turned out to have been rather more thorough than anyone might have expected from an eighty-seven-year-old woman old enough for a free bus pass (not that she took one) and a fondness for champagne.
But then, Granny had never been what she appeared.
The enquiries began, as they always did, at Carlton’s Club.
This was not the Carlton Club: that august Tory institution, that Granny felt had rather let its standards slip.
But rather a smaller, more discreet establishment in a townhouse near Berkeley Square.
It had no name, no sign and no indication from the street that it was anything other than a private residence.
Its membership was extremely limited and obsessively selective.
It was not founded by or associated with anyone called Carlton, but that was rather the point.
Granny had been a member since 1979, when she had performed a service for someone whose gratitude took lasting forms.
She lunched there with a man known only as Teddy.
Teddy was eighty-seven years old and looked like a retired accountant: mild-mannered, slightly rumpled, the kind of man you would forget meeting five minutes after the conversation ended.
This was, Granny knew, entirely deliberate.
Teddy had spent fifty years being forgettable in places where being remembered could get you killed.
‘Anastasia Kovalenko,’ Teddy repeated, rolling the name around his mouth like wine. ‘Ukrainian. Tech entrepreneur. Arrived in the UK two years ago. Founded a cybersecurity company.’
‘There are records of her, of course. Educational history, employment history, immigration documentation. All quite proper. All quite complete.’ Teddy dabbed his lips with a napkin. ‘Perhaps too complete.’
‘Go on.’
‘Records that complete usually aren’t. Real lives are messy: gaps, inconsistencies, the normal detritus of human existence. Hers are… tidy. As if someone went through with a broom and swept up anything inconvenient.’
‘Can you find what was swept?’
‘I can try. I still have friends in Kyiv. Or what’s left of Kyiv.’
‘The wedding is in December.’
Teddy nodded slowly. ‘You think she’s operational?’
‘I think she was operational. The question is whether she still is. And if so, for whom.’
‘And if I find something… unpleasant?’
Granny thought about James, her grandson, who had all the survival instincts of a particularly naive golden retriever. She thought about the way he looked at Anastasia; that besotted, vulnerable, entirely unguarded way.
‘Then I’ll deal with it,’ she said. ‘But I need to know first.’
???
Three weeks later, Teddy’s findings arrived and with them, a meeting.
The findings were what Granny had expected.
Anastasia’s educational records checked out, but were suspiciously excellent for someone from her background.
They were the kind of institutions that didn’t admit students without government sponsorship.
After university, a gap of several years where she appeared in no records at all.
Then a sudden reappearance with a tech company and a business visa and an entirely plausible cover story.
‘She was intelligence,’ Granny said, when Teddy told her.
‘Almost certainly. Ukrainian, at a guess. I have a contact who can tell you more. Someone who worked the Eastern European desk in the old days.’
???
The contact arrived at Granny’s Knightsbridge flat on a Tuesday afternoon.
She was elegant, grey-haired and entirely unmemorable, which meant, Granny understood, that she was probably extremely dangerous.
She introduced herself only as ‘a friend of Teddy’s’ and accepted tea with the grace of someone who had accepted far more perilous offerings in far less comfortable surroundings.
‘You’re enquiring about Anastasia Kovalenko,’ the woman said, without preamble. ‘May I ask why?’
‘She’s engaged to my grandson.’
‘Ah.’ The woman nodded, as if this explained everything. ‘And you want to know if she’ll kill him in his sleep.’
‘I want to know what she is, what she was and more importantly, what she might become.’