Sunshine Over Bluebell Cliff

by Della Galton

  It was a very short walk around the corner of the hotel to the entrance of the music room cum wedding venue, so they were getting into procession early – Mrs Scargill, followed by the bride and her dad, followed by the chief bridesmaid and the flower girls and the photographer snapping happily away.

  Phil strode ahead to warn the ushers of the imminent arrival and they had just set off after him around the corner of the hotel when Clara heard a shriek. For a moment she thought she’d imagined it – that she must have mistaken the calls of the ever-present seagulls for a human scream, but before she had time to even process this, she saw a figure in full flight, hurtling across the lawn at the back of the hotel towards the clifftop.

  It was Elliot, and he was running as though his life depended on it. He was carrying a large square pink box. How he could run so fast without dropping it was a mystery. Only then did Clara realise he was not alone. Hot on his heels were a pair of kunekune pigs.

  One of the flower girls was pointing. ‘What’s that man doing, Granny?’ Her clear voice carried across the freshness of the October midday air. ‘Is he going jogging?’

  ‘Are those pigs?’ In any other circumstances, the amazement in John Scargill’s voice would have made Clara smile. But at this second all she felt was a cold dart of horror.

  Elliot had just reached the back fence. Any moment now he was going to have to make a decision. Would he save himself or the cake? In order to save the latter, he’d have to stop running and turn around to confront his nemesis.

  Clara knew with a sickening realisation what he was going to do, just before he did it. There was a part of her that didn’t blame him – she had seen the terror on his face as he’d hurtled by.

  He threw the cake box at the pigs and it burst apart in a cloud of white icing and dark chunks before he dove head first over the fence. This tactic worked in the sense that it temporarily diverted the pigs. Unfortunately, it also completely diverted the bridal party, who were now all staring open-mouthed at the spectacle.

  ‘Is that my cake?’ Isobel Scargill asked, lifting her veil to see better, her eyes very wide.

  ‘It better not be,’ John Scargill snapped, staring at Clara.

  ‘Of course it isn’t,’ she said. ‘Your cake is safely inside the hotel. I am so sorry you had to see that.’

  The chief bridesmaid giggled.

  Isobel’s mother, Peggy, who clearly hadn’t caught all of what had just happened, adjusted her glasses on her nose and smiled at everyone. ‘Are we all ready then?’

  ‘We are if you are.’ Phil took charge, even though he’d gone several shades whiter than usual, Clara noticed, and he brought the wedding party to a halt about twelve feet away from the open French doors.

  Clara glanced at him gratefully. Her head was a mad jumble of emotions. If only they’d arrived thirty seconds later. If only she and Zoe had brought the cake in earlier. How the hell had those kunekune pigs escaped anyway? She was going to kill Mr B when she caught up with him. But the main thing in her head was how on earth was she going to be able to conjure up another wedding cake in just over ninety minutes?

  26

  After a brief, frantic confab with Phil, Clara left the wedding party and the pigs that were now happily snuffling about in the wedding cake at the end of the gardens, in his capable hands and rushed off to see what she could do about salvaging the situation.

  She was striding back through the hotel towards the restaurant when she bumped into a panic-stricken Zoe.

  ‘Oh my God, have you seen Elliott?’ Zoe asked.

  ‘Elliott’s fine.’ She hoped that were true. ‘But the wedding cake isn’t.’ Clara could hear her own voice brittle with tension.

  ‘Most of it is.’ Zoe beckoned her urgently through the restaurant, which looked beautiful: serene and expectant, as it waited for its guests, silver cutlery gleaming in the sunshine streaming through the windows and autumn posies adorning every table.

  At the back, on the table set up especially for the purpose and displayed on a silver stand, stood a stunning three-tier white wedding cake, complete with a cascade of exquisitely fashioned, sugar roses, in peach gold and red, artlessly trailing down one side. The roses had diamanté centres and they sparkled as they caught the light.

  Clara stared at it in amazement.

  ‘That looks fantastic, but how…? Didn’t Elliot have one of the tiers?’

  ‘There were four,’ Zoe said. ‘They ordered a spare. Do you remember – way back when it was ordered they had a choice to have an extra top tier – just in case? We suggested that it might be a good idea. Curtis Dean said at the time that it was amazing how often people were glad they’d gone for the extra tier and that even if they didn’t want it for the wedding, it could be set aside to use as a christening cake.’

  ‘That rings a bell. Yes.’ Clara could have kissed Zoe. ‘Oh thank goodness. And thanks goodness it was the spare tier Elliot was carrying.’

  Zoe tapped her nose. She must have got that from Mr B. ‘Not just a pretty face. I made sure he had the spare tier. I didn’t want to be responsible for anyone but me dropping that cake. I figured we could always order another spare tier if we needed one.’

  ‘You are a superstar.’

  ‘Actually, I’ve learned everything I know about events management from you. You’ve taught me to cross every t and dot every i.’ She was flushed and beaming. ‘Especially in view of the fact there may be a saboteur on the loose.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Clara said. ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you. But I don’t think that little incident had much to do with our saboteur. Unless it was him who let the pigs out, I guess.’

  In the kitchen, a stressed Mr B said that she shouldn’t be too sure that it wasn’t. ‘They were perfectly secure in the kennels. They couldn’t have escaped.’

  ‘Well, they bloody well did. And they need to be under lock and key again before that wedding finishes.’ It was the nearest she had ever come to losing her temper, Clara realised as Mr B’s gaze lowered and a muscle twitched in his cheek. ‘We cannot afford to muck up anything else today,’ she added more softly. ‘Or none of us will have a job.’

  He gave the tiniest of nods. ‘Message received and understood.’

  Everyone else in the vicinity was pretending not to listen, but Clara was aware as she left the kitchen of how close to the surface all of their emotions were. They knew their jobs were on the line. They were a brilliant team and they worked damned hard and her management style had always been to use the carrot not the stick. But today was massively important to them and she felt as though she was right on the edge. She knew she needed to take five minutes to calm down.

  She fled to the manager’s office and shut the door behind her. She stood with her back to it, taking deep breaths. Her phone beeped in her bag and, a few seconds later, when she checked it, she found a message from Rosanna saying that Gran had just been in to see Grandad and he was looking a whole lot better today and they were confident that he would be able to go home either later today or tomorrow. After the word ‘home’ she had put the words ‘his proper home’ in brackets, followed by a couple of exclamation marks.

  Clara let out a sigh of relief as she put her phone back. At least Grandad was OK. In all the pandemonium, she’d temporarily forgotten him. A measure of how stressed she was. She just needed to make sure there were no more hitches today. In a week, Kate would be back and the responsibility for the success of the Bluebell would no longer feel as though it rested quite so heavily on her narrow shoulders.

  Three months ago, she had welcomed that responsibility. She had thought that this was her dream job. But lately she had begun to doubt that she was up to it at all.

  ‘I’ll take you out in a bit,’ she told Foxy, and the little dog, who was asleep in her basket, twitched an ear and opened her eyes but didn’t stir.

  From her bag under her desk, Clara’s phone beeped with another text. To her surprise this one was from Adam and it just said,


  Hi Clara, hope all is well. Could you phone when you have a minute?

  She felt a frisson of pleasure. She would have liked nothing better than to talk to Adam. To hear his warm, grounded voice. But the time certainly wasn’t now.

  Clara tucked her bag back under the table, locked the office door, just to be on the safe side, and headed out once more to the hotel gardens.

  Neither Phil nor Mr B was in sight and neither, to her relief, were the kunekunes. There wasn’t much evidence left of the cake either. That had clearly been dealt with, either by her staff or by the pigs. The only thing remaining of ‘my only daughter’s only wedding cake’ was a stray piece of pink cardboard with tooth marks on one side.

  Clara glanced at her watch. It was a quarter to one. The wedding service would be halfway through. Please God don’t let anything else go wrong.

  She crossed the lawn towards the French doors and stood a discreet distance away. She could see the backs of the heads of the guests closest to the doors, dressed in a selection of beribboned hats and extravagant feather and lace fascinators, and she could see the bride and groom at the far end of the room, facing each other at the pulpit. The bride’s veil was still over her face. The registrar was speaking, although Clara couldn’t quite catch his words.

  She was about to take a step forward so she could properly hear when a wailing banshee screech cut through the air.

  It was the fire alarm. They tested the alarms every Monday morning at eleven, but they certainly hadn’t scheduled a drill for today. The voice of the registrar echoed in her head: ‘It’s the one thing we all dread – a fire alarm in the middle of the service. It wrecks everything. So please make sure that doesn’t happen.’

  Clara closed her eyes. It wasn’t a drill, so it must be real. Something must have set it off inside the hotel. That something could have been smoke. Or it could have been a person. She didn’t know. But what she did know was that she couldn’t risk the consequences of not evacuating.

  With her heart sinking faster than a leaden weight dropped into an abyss, she hurried the last few metres to the French doors. The siren sounded even louder inside than it did from the gardens. People were stirring in their seats.

  ‘Do you think we should be moving?’

  ‘Is it a drill?’

  ‘It’s not a drill.’ Clara stood in the doorway. She had spoken as loud as she could, but no one was listening. Or possibly no one could hear her.

  She picked up the nearest thing to hand, which was the white metal ‘order of service’ holder from the table and rapped it loudly on the wood.

  ‘This isn’t a drill,’ she announced in her most authoritative voice. ‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to evacuate the building now. So, without stopping to collect personal possessions, please could you follow me? Our assembly point is just out here.’

  They picked up on her body language, even if they didn’t hear her words. Just as she picked up on theirs: distress, excitement, anxiety, and curiosity, all of these emotions flickered across the faces of the wedding party, but Clara was most aware of the expression on John Scargill’s ruddy face even from across the ten or so metres that separated them. He looked absolutely furious.

  She didn’t blame him. It was the worst of luck. If it even was bad luck.

  As she herded them outside, she saw the registrar gathering up the big old book from the table up on the stage. He clearly wasn’t leaving the precious records to burn in a fire. He clutched it tightly to his chest. Isobel had picked up her bouquet too and she and James were holding hands as they came down the aisle, rather sooner than they had expected to be doing, their progress hindered slightly by flower girls, one of whom was crying for her mum.

  Clara didn’t know whether the couple were married or not. It had looked as if the ceremony wasn’t finished. Presumably they could finish it off, once they had sorted out the alarm situation, but she knew time was against them. The registrar needed to be away by two.

  She could see a selection of waiting and kitchen staff flowing around from the back doors of the hotel next to the kitchens to the fire assembly point on the lawn. Some of them were coming round the side of the building from the front entrance too, their distinctive bluebell uniforms marking them out from the posh wedding finery of the guests.

  In a moment, she would go and check the state of play with Phil, who she knew would be checking the fire panel box, as per procedure, but in the meantime Clara was doing her best to reassure people.

  The bride and groom were fine. It turned out that they weren’t quite married – but they had been just minutes away from exchanging their vows and were happy to finish the ceremony as soon as Clara gave them the all-clear. They were now chatting animatedly to the best man and chief bridesmaid. Isobel’s tiara sparkled and flashed as she turned her head and its jewelled edging caught the sunlight. James’ tuxedo was slightly awry, but they were smiling. There was even the occasional burst of laughter from their group.

  ‘They won’t be forgetting their wedding day in a hurry,’ someone said.

  ‘At least it’s not boring like most of the ones you go to,’ someone else interjected and there was another burst of laughter.

  Peggy Scargill, who was only a short distance from the French doors, didn’t look anywhere near as relaxed as her daughter. She was standing close to her husband and he was shaking his head.

  That beat shaking his fist, Clara thought, feeling her heels sink into the soft lawn and wishing the rest of her could follow. John and Peggy Scargill were next on her list before she went to find Phil. Or maybe she should find him first, then at least she could establish what exactly was going on.

  She was gathering her courage when she saw Zoe signalling to her from across the grass. Saved by the bell, she thought, making a decision and hurrying across.

  ‘Someone smashed the alarm on the top floor,’ Zoe panted. ‘Phil said there’s no evidence of a fire, but the system’s already alerted the fire service. We have a monitored system, don’t we, and he thought it was best to be on the safe side and let them come.’

  ‘He’s right,’ Clara said. ‘In view of what’s been going on lately.’

  ‘Phil thinks it might be malicious – he saw a bloke go out of the fire escape at the top, but he couldn’t catch him. It’s probably just as well. I think he might have killed him if he’d caught him.’ She paused for breath.

  ‘I’d willingly have helped him,’ Clara said. ‘This is my worst nightmare. I really don’t think things could get any worse.’

  ‘I know.’ Zoe looked pained. ‘Are they married?’

  ‘Not quite.’

  ‘At least it wasn’t an actual fire,’ Zoe said brightly. ‘That’s a good thing.’

  Bless her, Clara thought nodding.

  She looked over her shoulder. She had planned everything so carefully. They all had. And it was the most beautiful of days. The skies were the clearest of blues, the lawn was a perfect green. They had been watering it for weeks to keep it that way. The sea beyond the cliffs sparkled like the world’s largest sapphire collection and the scent of autumn’s earthy woodiness filled the air. It was such a perfect place for photos, but right now the formal-suited and floral-skirted wedding guests were mingling randomly with hotel staff and a very small flower girl in a gold dress had just shot by with a great smudge of dirt on her face. Her mother was in hot pursuit.

  Then into all of this chaos walked a couple. A tall, very suntanned couple, who had just climbed out of a taxi at the front of the hotel. Clara shielded her eyes against the sun to see them more clearly and realised that one of them was on crutches.

  ‘Oh my goodness,’ she told Zoe. ‘Why did I just say that things couldn’t get any worse?’

  ‘Why? Who are they?’ Zoe asked, following her gaze. Then she too, cottoned on. ‘Oh My God, that’s our boss, isn’t it? Is that her partner?’

  ‘Yes, that’s Aiden,’ Clara said quietly, taking in the casually dressed, very upright, dark-haire
d guy beside Kate. ‘They must have decided to come home a week early.’

  27

  Kate was looking around her with an air of faint bemusement as if she couldn’t quite take in what she was seeing. Clara wasn’t surprised. Clusters of chattering staff in Bluebell uniforms were now interspersed with wedding guests in posh frocks. The registrar was standing alone by the terrace, still clutching the book to his chest and frowning over his glasses.

  Behind Kate, at the hotel’s main entrance, the noise of a diesel engine and the hiss of air brakes alerted everyone to the arrival of a fire engine in the drop-off area.

  Kate glanced over her shoulder and visibly stiffened when she saw the shiny red vehicle. Then she spotted Clara and now, armed with a sense of purpose, and with Aiden walking slowly beside her, she came hobbling across the lawn, threading her way between small groups of people.

  Clara met them halfway. ‘How are you?’

  ‘I’m getting there. Thanks for asking.’ Kate’s eyes were curious. ‘Clara, what’s going on? We thought we heard an alarm going off when we pulled in. Is everything OK?’

  ‘Um…’

  Before Clara could say another word, a deep voice boomed out from behind her. ‘No, everything is not bloody OK.’ John Scargill had appeared and his wife was beside him, clutching onto his arm like a great gold limpet. Her oversized hat had slipped slightly and was knocking against him while the sea breeze ruffled its feathers. Both of them had faces like thunder. ‘First, a pig rampages through the wedding party and writes off my wedding cake and then a bloody fire alarm goes off in the middle of the ceremony. And she…’ he pointed a finger at Clara, ‘has the audacity to lie to me.’

  ‘I haven’t lied,’ Clara objected.

  ‘You told me the cake wasn’t ours.’ He hauled something out of his pocket and held it out on the palm of his hand. It was a tiny replica of James and Isobel still half covered in icing that must have been on the spare tier.