Sidney Sheldon’s Angel of the Dark: A gripping thriller full of suspense

Keying the familiar code into the intercom on the gate, Lucien wondered how long he could draw out this latest marital parting of the ways. His client had only been married to this particular wife for a matter of months, so the case wouldn’t be as lucrative as some of those from the past. If only the old goat had fathered a child with her. Then we’d really be in business. But as the gates swung open and the crystal-blue Mediterranean twinkled before him like an azure dream, Lucien reminded himself never to look a gift horse in the mouth.

The point was that Didier Anjou was getting divorced.

Again!

It was going to be a beautiful day.

THE MARRIAGE HAD BEGUN SO WELL. Which was strange, given that all of Didier Anjou’s other marriages had begun so very, very badly.

First there was Lucille. Ah, la belle Lucille! How he’d wanted her! How he’d pined! Didier was twenty at the time, and starring in his very first movie, Entre les draps (Between the Sheets), which was exactly where Didier longed to be with Lucille Camus. Lucille was forty-four, married, and played Didier’s mother in the movie. The director had begged her to take the role. He’d always had a soft spot for Lucille.

It was probably why he’d married her.

In 1951, Jean Camus was the most powerful man in French cinema. He was a Parisian Walt Disney, an old-world Louis B. Mayer, a man who could make or break a young actor’s career with a nod of his shiny bald head or a twitch of his salt-and-pepper mustache. Jean Camus had personally cast Didier Anjou as the male lead in Entre les draps, plucking the handsome boy with the black hair and blacker eyes from utter obscurity and propelling him into a fantasy world of fame and fortune, of limousines and luxury … and Lucille.

Looking back, decades later, Didier consoled himself with the fact that he’d never really had a choice. Lucille Camus was a goddess, her body a temple begging, no, demanding to be worshipped. Those swollen, matronly breasts, those obscenely full lips, always parted, always tempting, inviting … Didier Anjou could no more not seduce Lucille Camus than he could breathe through his elbows or swim through solid stone. Elle était une force de la nature!

Of course, had he stopped at seduction, things might have worked out better than they had. Unfortunately, three weeks into their affair, Didier got Lucille pregnant.

“I don’t see the problem.” A baffled Didier defended himself, dodging another hurled item of china that Lucille had propelled furiously onto a collision course with his skull. “Chérie, please. Just say it is Jean’s. Who’s to know?”

“Everyone will know, you cretin, you imbecile!” Didier ducked as another plate narrowly missed his windpipe. “Jean’s infertile!”

“Oh.”

“Yes. Oh.”

“Well then, you’ll just have to get rid of it.”

Lucille was horrified.

“An abortion? What do you think I am, a monster?”

“But, chérie, be practical.”

“Jamais! Non, Didier. There is only one solution. You must marry me.”

The Camus divorce was the talk of Cannes that year. A heavily pregnant Lucille Camus married her boy-toy lover, and for a few wonderful months, Didier was genuinely famous. But then the baby died, Jean Camus took the grief-wrecked Lucille back, and the ranks of the film community closed around them. For the next eight years, until Jean died, Didier Anjou couldn’t get so much as a laundry-detergent commercial in France. He was washed up at twenty-three.

It wasn’t until he hit thirty that things finally started to look up. Didier married his second wife, Hélène Marceau, a beautiful, innocent heiress from Toulouse. Hélène was a virgin, unwilling to sleep with Didier until they were married. This suited Didier perfectly. He fucked around throughout their courtship, all the while looking forward to the day when he would take possession of Hélène’s tight chatte and fat bank balance. Who could ask for more?

The wedding was a coup, the happiest day of Didier’s life. Until night fell and, alone at last in the marital bed, Didier discovered why his new bride had been so coy about sleeping with him. It appeared that poor Hélène had grotesquely deformed genitals, a secret she’d kept since birth. The whole innocent, scared-of-sex shtick had been a front, a ploy. The bitch had trapped him!

The union was miserable from the start, yet Didier stayed with Hélène for five years. Naturally he cheated on her constantly, siphoning off every last franc of her fortune into privately produced movies, all of them star vehicles for himself. Hélène knew what her husband was up to, but loved him helplessly anyway. Didier had this effect on women. Each day Hélène prayed fervently that Didier would see the light and come to return her love, despite her unfortunate physical affliction. But it never happened. At thirty-five, famous for the second time in his life and rich for the first, Didier Anjou finally divorced Hélène Marceau. He was back on the market.

Next came Pascale, another heiress who made Didier even richer and bore him two sons but took a regrettably inflexible view about his extramarital dalliances.

One of these dalliances, Camille, became the fourth Madame Anjou the year Didier turned fifty. Thirty years his junior and stunningly beautiful, the top fashion model of her day, Camille reminded Didier of himself at her age. Physically perfect, selfish, ambitious, insatiable. It was a match made in heaven. But after three years of marriage, Camille slept with Didier’s teenage son, Luc. With Lucien Desforges’s help, Didier cut both of them off without a penny and vowed never to marry again.

He retired to Saint-Tropez, where he became legendary for his vanity, in particular for the vast collection of toupees that he housed in a special dressing room at Villa Paradis, much to the amusement of the Russian hookers who regularly warmed his bed there. No one, least of all his lawyer, ever expected Didier Anjou to take another wife.

But four months ago, out of the blue, the old roué had done just that, secretly marrying a Russian woman whom none of his friends had ever heard of, never mind met. Her name was Irina Minchenko, and the general assumption was that she was one of the hookers and had somehow managed to bewitch Didier into wedlock.

The general assumption was wrong. In her midthirties, aristocratic and educated, Irina was wealthy in her own right. Even if she’d been poor, she was far too beautiful and smart to be a hooker. From the day they met, at a house party in Ramatouelle, Didier was besotted.

He took his new bride to Tahiti for their honeymoon, to a secluded beachside cottage. For the first time in his life, Didier Anjou did not want the media to follow him. He told Lucien, by now a friend, “Irina is too exquisite to be shared with the world. Whenever I see someone so much as look at her, man or woman, I want to kill them. It’s crazy what she does to me!”

Whatever Irina did to him, it’s over now, Lucien thought wryly, strolling around onto the villa’s private rear terrace. Just two weeks back from the honeymoon and Didier Anjou had called him, literally howling with rage and fury.

“I want a divorce!” he’d screamed into the phone. “I want to fuck that bitch over, do you hear me? I won’t give her a goddamn penny!”

That was last night. Hopefully Didier would be in a calmer mood this morning. It was too early for screaming.

Unfortunately, when Lucien Desforges stepped through the French windows into the living room, the screams were deafening. But they weren’t Didier’s.