Chapter Nineteen The Stag Do
The private jet belonged to Tariq and was Tariq’s contribution to the wedding festivities: the jet, plus the use of his family’s chalet in Verbier and what he described as ‘a few bottles from the cellar’ that turned out to be over three thousand pounds worth of vintage champagne.
Tariq came from the kind of money that made James’s family look positively middle-class, though you would never know it from his manner, which was unfailingly modest and slightly apologetic, as if he found his own wealth vaguely embarrassing.
‘It’s nothing, really,’ he said, as they boarded the Gulfstream at Farnborough. ‘Just sitting there most of the time. Might as well get some use out of it.’
Viktor, settling into a leather seat with professional detachment, watched the others come on board.
James was next on board, looking slightly nervous and excited at the same time, flanked closely by me, ensuring he did not miss his flight.
Rupert, a rugby player of considerable size, who had introduced himself by accidentally breaking the handle off his carry-on bag.
Archie, who worked in finance and had spent the drive to the airport on three separate phone calls, each more incomprehensible than the last. Last on was Freddie, who had brought his idea of hand luggage: a cool box containing champagne, vodka ‘for Viktor, to make him feel at home,’ and something called Freddie’s Famous Exploding Shots.
These involved tequila, tabasco and actual gunpowder, rigged to spark when you drank them.
Real flames, real bangs and real danger, Freddie rarely left home without them.
‘Is that legal?’ Viktor asked, staring at the mechanism.
‘Probably not,’ Freddie admitted cheerfully. ‘But it’s tradition. Archie lost an eyebrow last time.’
‘Eventually it grew back,’ Archie added, touching his slightly patchy right brow.
Tariq immediately banned Freddie’s shots on the plane after ‘last time’; the details of which remained mercifully vague and pointed out that the pilot now insisted on carrying parachutes.
Last on the list was Ben, who wasn’t actually present but had sent seventeen text messages in the past hour explaining why he was running late and how he would definitely, absolutely, certainly meet them in Verbier.
‘He’s not going to make it, is he?’ Viktor asked.
‘Ben never makes it,’ James said cheerfully.
‘It’s sort of his thing. Last year he missed Freddie’s birthday because he got on a train to Brighton instead of Bristol.
Before that he turned up three days late to a friend's wedding because he’d written the date down wrong.
We’ve stopped expecting him, really. The messages are just tradition at this point. ’
‘He once sent updates for an entire weekend from various points along the M4,’ Freddie added. ‘Very detailed. Traffic conditions, service station ratings, that sort of thing. Turned out he’d taken a wrong turn at Reading and ended up in Wales.’
Viktor filed this information away. These people were not serious.
They were overgrown children playing at life, insulated from consequences by wealth and privilege and the peculiar British conviction that everything would probably work out in the end.
It was unfair that people like this had so much.
He spent the flight getting more and more angry. Why should James have it all. They were virtually family and he was reduced to blackmailing Anastasia to keep the worst of the debt collectors off his back. He needed more, he wanted more, he deserved more.
He sank another vodka to the cheers of the stag party.
As he smiled wolfishly, an idea had formed.
He was family and family could inherit. If Anastasia was married and James had an unfortunate accident, she would be very wealthy indeed and god forbid, if something happened to her, then it would all be his.
The lack of will was not a problem, he knew a man who could make one appear in her exact handwriting.
There was probate, but lawyers could be managed and the familial documents were excellent.
They would stand up long enough for him to get his hands on the money and then he would be gone.
Much as he hated James and everything he stood for, Viktor was going to have to keep him alive for three more weeks, until he was married. Looking at the chaos already unfolding around him; Freddie was attempting to open one of his exploding shots without Tariq noticing, that would be no easy task.
???
The first near-death experience occurred approximately four hours after landing.
They had checked into the chalet, unpacked; or in Freddie’s case, upended a bag onto the floor and declared himself ‘settled’, then headed for the slopes.
Viktor had skied before, it was a useful skill in his line of work, but he had never skied with people who approached the sport with such cheerful disregard for self-preservation.
James’s technique, such as it was, appeared to involve pointing himself downhill and hoping for the best. He skied with confidence but no control, his poles windmilling, his weight shifting unpredictably, his trajectory governed more by gravity than intention.
‘Wonderful snow!’ he shouted, as he carved an erratic path down a red run. ‘Bit icy in patches, but that’s half the fun!’
Viktor watched him approach a dangerously steep section with growing concern. The run curved sharply to the left here, bordered by a low fence and then nothing: a fifty-metre drop to the rocks below.
James hit the ice patch at speed. His skis went sideways. His arms went up. His trajectory shifted from ‘down the slope’ to ‘toward the cliff.’
Viktor moved without thinking. Professional instinct, honed over decades, overriding the part of his brain that was covering off the difficult parts of inheritance law. He carved across the slope, intercepted James at full speed and tackled him into a snowbank just before the edge.
They lay there for a moment, tangled together, snow covering them.
‘Bloody hell!’ James’s face was flushed with adrenaline and delight. ‘That was close!’
‘Yes,’ Viktor managed. ‘It was.’
‘That was awesome!’
Viktor, lying in the snow with this idiot, seriously considered just pushing him off the cliff now and finding another plan. But no. The inheritance didn’t work if James died before the wedding.
‘Perhaps we stick to the easier runs today,’ he said.
‘Probably wise. Thanks, Viktor. I owe you one!’
???
The second near-death experience occurred after lunch.
Lunch had been at a mountain restaurant with spectacular views and an even more spectacular wine list. The group had consumed what Freddie described as ‘just a couple of bottles’.
The bottles in question being salmanazars, each containing nine litres, which is to say a full case of twelve normal bottles imprisoned in a single vessel of terrifying proportions.
Two staff members were required to pour from each one and even then it looked less like wine service and more like a religious ceremony involving human sacrifice.
One salmanazar contained champagne, the other held old-school Bordeaux. Both contained enough alcohol to knock out a small elephant, or, more relevantly, to render a group of English public schoolboys entirely incapable of rational decision-making.
To match the wine, the food was similarly excessive.
The restaurant had laid on an actual bath of cheese fondue, a copper vessel the size of a small sarcophagus, bubbling gently over a flame, surrounded by lumps of bread speared on stainless steel ski poles.
The poles, naturally, became jousting equipment within minutes.
The bread became ammunition shortly thereafter.
In honour of the ski-equipment cutlery, glasses had been swapped out for ski boots, a tricky drinking vessel that required a technique that none of them quite mastered. It was a very good thing the whole affair was in a private room.
The behaviour took its lead from the oversized meal, escalating with the inevitable momentum of an avalanche. It was not long before James had been flung bodily into the fondue bath.
He emerged looking like a creature from an avant-garde horror film, cheese dripping from his hair, his jacket, his eyebrows.
The fire beneath the bath, which had been burning merrily throughout, suddenly found itself confronted with James’s flying boot of wine (a mixture of red and champagne by this point, the colour of watered-down blood) which doused the flames with a dramatic hiss.
‘I can’t ski in this,’ James said, gesturing at his cheese-encrusted person. ‘I look a bloody mess.’
‘Quite right,’ I said, with the air of a man who had been waiting for precisely this moment. ‘Luckily I brought this along.’
From a bag that had been sitting innocuously in the corner, I produced a pair of lederhosen in a shade of fuchsia so aggressive they seemed to vibrate.
Out of the bag followed the rest of the Tracht in various hideous clashing colours.
The neon green shirt was fairly thin, but the colour and the high level of alcohol in James’s blood would keep him warm on the way down.
The leather and nylon gleamed with the oily glare of something that had been purchased specifically to humiliate. It had.
James stared at it. The group stared at it. Even the waitstaff, who had seen everything in their years of catering to wealthy idiots, paused to take in the magnificence of the garment.
‘Well,’ James said finally, accepting his fate with the resignation of a man who understood that resistance was futile, ‘at least it doesn’t smell of cheese.’