by Fiona Walker
‘You left this in the office, Legs. It seems Gordon has found his bat phone. Read on.’
She fumbled through the screens to read his response to the message she’d sent earlier asking where he was.
Am in a huis clos, or should that be a cliché? Second thoughts are never as original as first ones. GL
P.s. Agree about slimeball. Would you like me to fire him too?
She chewed her lip, where a small smile was forming. She was so relieved that he was OK. And sometimes she just loved his obstreperousness.
‘You must keep him talking,’ Conrad ordered.
‘You make it sound like a hostage situation.’
‘Tell him we’ll send a car for him wherever he is, or a helicopter. A private jet if he wants one. And who is this “slimeball”?’
‘Just a shared Ptolemy Finch joke,’ she fudged.
‘Good girl. He loves you. Keep it up.’ Conrad was over-effusive because he was trying to make it up to her. The overheard phonecall to his ex-wife made him artificially smiley, along with the Lily Cole lookalike at the table who was pouting up at him like jail-bait.
‘Remember me?’ Kizzy stared up at Conrad, big green eyes sparkling like cloned Gachala emeralds as she batted her long lashes.
She was certainly quick to drop the little girl act when needed, Legs noticed.
‘Of course!’ He beamed back at her reassuringly, just a nudge of the eye towards Legs indicating doubt.
‘Sorry, I should have reintroduced you two—’ she started, but Conrad was already moving away.
‘Later. I have an urgent meeting with Piers Fox. I want Gordon mollified by the time I return.’ He looked over his shoulder at Kizzy, ‘Come back for a tour of the office!’ Then he waved his phone at Legs. ‘Text me.’
A guided tour of Fellows Howlett in a crisis? Legs watched his departing back, broad shoulders swinging, butt cheeks taut. He was clearly either trying to avoid being left alone with her or up to something even more calculating. With Conrad, everything was deliberate.
It’s over, she breathed out with silent relief, reaching for her water glass. Across the table, Kizzy was surreptitiously checking her reflection in her knife and smirking. Not so pathetic at all, Legs realised. She had a sudden and unpleasant feeling that she was being used. Yet strangely, it hardly bothered her. Such was the maelstrom of emotions coursing through her, she was immune to further pain. And she couldn’t help feeling a begrudging admiration for Kizzy in spite of all her twisting and turning. She was terribly like Poppy – over-bright, over-critical, attention seeking and gushy, but internally in shreds of self-doubt. By comparison, Poppy’s rival heir apparent Byrne was like an avenging angel.
Her phone vibrated with a text from Conrad. Who is the redhead?
Feeling slightly mollified, Legs replied: Kizzy de la Mere. You interviewed her for my job. I was better. Conrad rarely forgot a name, and certainly not one as distinctive as that.
To her consternation, he didn’t reply.
Kizzy’s sashimi had arrived and she was making a big fuss about needing low salt soy and extra wasabi. The waiter fell over himself to help her. When she finally fell on her raw fish like a hungry seal, Legs surreptitiously emailed Gordon, deliberately playing dumb to elicit a response. Are you in France?
Looking up, she realised Kizzy had donned a very fifties pair of dark glasses and was talking about her childhood again. ‘I always knew I’d make something of myself. When you’re born with a birthright like mine, you have to chose between self-doubt and self-fulfilling prophecy.’
‘Or self-obsession,’ Legs muttered, deciding she could only take Kizzy in small doses.
‘Exactly! It would be so easy to fall into that trap, but I’ll never let it happen. You are going to be such a good friend, Legs, I know it.’ Her positive outlook today was as unrelenting as the sun burning overhead.
Talking seemed to have liberated her, whereas Legs found that unpicking the lock to Kizzy’s secrets now caged her in worry. Had Byrne returned to North Devon for revenge, she wondered. He was already picking fights with Hector. How much further was he willing to go to punish the man he’d always thought of as the Devil?
‘You and Francis are such a team,’ Kizzy was saying. ‘He needs someone who truly loves and understands him, and who finds him interesting.’
‘He is interesting,’ Legs snapped, watching unenthusiastically as her goat’s cheese salad was delivered. It was far too hot to eat anything.
‘I find him limiting,’ Kizzy said unapologetically then started to wolf back her rib-eye, carrying on between mouthfuls, ‘he thinks Eliot’s lyricism can’t be bettered.’
‘Better than thinking Cats lyrics can’t be bettered.’
‘He’s has inherited his father’s blinkers. At least Édith was spared that; Poppy adores Édith.’
‘Bully for Édith,’ Legs said distractedly, picking up her phone to email Gordon again, simply asking: Can I come back on Team GL?
Byron was noisily scratching beneath her chair, his collar spinning round and round with a tinkle of identity tag.
‘Francis could learn a lot from Édith,’ Kizzy droned on between mouthfuls of steak. ‘He lacks her sangfroid. He’s always seen Poppy as a direct threat to his mother, Ella, but who in life can really threaten a perfect memory?’
‘Memory,’ Legs sang quietly, ‘all alone in the moonlight.’ She thought about Byrne as a boy coping with his father’s rages and the tales of corruption behind his injuries, and suddenly found her chest full of hot ashes, tears dangerously close to erupting.
Her phone chimed.
You’re still fired, Gordon replied, Will only hire you again if you can find me, click your heels and say … ?
Legs stared at the message for a long time, certain she recognised the phrase. But her head was full of Byrne, Lloyd Webber, and Kizzy’s incessant yakking: ‘Francis and his father, both live predominantly in the past.’
‘I remember the time I knew what happiness was.’
‘What?’ Kizzy looked at her quizzically.
‘Nothing – sorry.’ She stopped singing and started to compose a reply to Gordon, soon distractedly humming ‘has the moon lost her memory …’
What’s the difference between a raven and a writing desk? she typed. That should fox him.
‘Francis never let me text when we were eating together,’ Kizzy speared an inch of pink meat as Legs threw her phone down on the table. ‘He says it’s bad manners.’
‘Mine are mostly just bad spelling,’ Legs apologised. ‘Now you have my full attention.’
Kizzy’s green gaze was challenging, ‘You know, I never understood why you could leave someone like Francis for an old man like Conrad—’
‘He’s only forty seven,’
‘—but seeing him again, he is so inspiring.’
‘Do you think so?’ She was just finding him maddening right now. It’s over, it’s over, her heart intoned.
‘Absolutely.’ She laid down her knife and levelled her green gaze like shotgun barrels aimed between Legs eyes. ‘I can so see why the thought of life in Farcombe suffocated you. I think my future lies here in London too. It’s my home town.’ The trigger was pulled. ‘And I w-w-and t-to c-come h-home!’ Teardrop shots started to spout.
Not at her most sensitive, Legs let out a sudden shriek of recognition. ‘There’s no place like home!’
‘Exactly,’ Kizzy’s eyes gleamed like wet jade, tears still spilling.
But Legs wasn’t listening as she reached for her phone, laughing. ‘Gordon, you old wizard, you!’
She wrote There’s no place like home! and sent it to Gordon three times. When she looked up, she found Kizzy staring at her, wide-eyed and tearful.
‘The rest of my life starts right here right now,’ Kizzy breathed in a dramatic vibrato.
‘Good for you,’ Legs humoured distractedly, throwing her phone in her bag and wondering where exactly Gordon was if he wasn’t at home. ‘I have to get bac
k to the office.’
‘I’m coming too!’
As Conrad Knight had offered her a personal tour, Legs could hardly say no.
‘I’ll just pop to the loo first.’ Kizzy picked up her chunky duffel bag and fled inside so fast that her chair upended and liberated Byron who’d been tethered beneath it, his lead attached to an aluminium leg.
Another inordinate wait ensued. Kizzy spent longer in the loo than your average drug dealer, Legs thought tetchily, knowing she’d run well over her lunch hour. She’d have to work seriously late. She hoped she had enough paracetamol in her desk; her head and throat were battling it out for pain threshold bashing. At least she had the excuse of supper with her father to flee to and avoid any more confrontations with Conrad. She didn’t want to get stuck alone in the office with him. They owed it to one another to part more nobly than with a slanging match over the water cooler, where it had all begun. Conrad, she knew, would try to win himself back into her favour with power games and seduction first. He hated to lose at anything. And she needed her anger to simmer down before she could turn the ‘it’s over’ mantra into anything other than a hysterical rant.
Hoovering up some dropped chips en route, Byron limped disconsolately up to Legs and cocked his lame leg on her handbag which didn’t improve her temper.
A total vamp was undulating towards her table dressed in a wisp of translucent tunic made up from the lightest layers of green silk, long red hair falling in a single seductive twist over one shoulder, slender legs propped up on five-inch orange heels.
From below, Byron let out a welcoming whine.
Legs’ jaw fell. ‘You look … amazing.’
‘I want to be as glamorous as you, Legs. I just love your life!’
Legs picked up her handbag and shook the dog pee off it. ‘You know what, Kizzy? Right now, you’re welcome to it. Walk this way.’
Chapter 29
Kizzy spent all afternoon at Fellows Howlett, enchanting everyone and passing on valuable Farcombe Festival lowdown to Team GL while the dog with the bladder of a camel nosed around the office waste paper baskets and lifted his leg repeatedly against a three foot cardboard cut-out of Cuthbert the Cat.
When Conrad returned from a very successful meeting with Piers Fox much later that afternoon, he was even more artificially smiley than before, sitting on the edge of Legs’ desk, muscular thighs bulging through his expensive linen suit trousers. Although his stress level had been numbed by several glasses of Prosecco, his forehead remained veined like a Derby runner’s neck.
‘What progress with our missing star?’
He was asserting sexual power as she’d known he would, believing that if he puffed his feathers out wide enough, she wouldn’t notice his head buried in the sand. A slight delay in his pupils focusing betrayed a long, liquid crisis meeting with his favourite publicity guru. Piers Fox was an old-fashioned, private-club-loving PR man who Conrad had long had in his sights to handle his biggest star. Legs was certain Gordon would hate him.
‘He says I’m still fired, and that there’s no place like home.’
‘You darling! I knew he’d trust you enough to tell you where he is,’ Conrad disappeared into his office to make a call, but quickly reappeared, brows lowered. ‘You’re wrong. He’s not at home. Keep on the case.’ His eyes were already trailing towards Kizzy again, unconscious male response to a belisha beacon in his peripheral vision, as though the office plasma screen which normally showed cricket had been tuned to hardcore porn, or a Christmas tree had just been brought into the office in the midsummer heatwave.
Bracing herself, Legs observed Conrad’s focus run the length of the redhead’s long, slender legs and very high heels.
It’s oh-vah, she reminded herself, noticing critically that those moss green eyes were really very close together and his forehead far too low.
Pulling her chair forward to hide her own tree-trunk legs, she hammered away on her computer keyboard, pretending to be busy.
‘Helps if you enter your password first,’ Conrad said smugly, wandering away to chat up Kizzy. ‘So you went on to work for Farcombe Festival once you slipped through our fingers?’
Actually I’m looking for a new job right now …’ Kizzy said in her coyest Scottish burr, eyeing him through her lashes.
Legs glared at her screen which was now covered in error messages telling her to log on.
When she did, she found Delia Meare had sent another email from her Gmail account, this one distinctly more bonkers than the last: I am in the midst of preparing a live happening to enhance The Girl Who Checked Out. Terror must be felt to be understood. You will feel it.
Legs had no idea what a ‘live happening’ was, but she was certain Conrad wouldn’t appreciate it. For a moment she was quite tempted to reply ‘go right ahead and scare the bastard,’ but she managed to temper herself and suggest that Delia ran any details past her first.
She sent this and then started cross checking locations that might be construed as ‘home’ in the Ptolemy Finch books, but given that most of the action was set in another universe and time continuum, there wasn’t much to go on.
‘I always think Ptolemy will be sex on legs when he grows up,’ a voice giggled behind her.
Legs stiffened as a curtain of red hair cut off all the light to her right and Kizzy stretched across to pluck up one of the framed photographs from her desk. ‘And this one is mighty preddy too.’
‘My nephew.’ She snatched back the shot of Nico at his tenth birthday party striking a Ptolemy pose complete with the beautiful silver wings that Ros had spent weeks making. ‘An ardent Finch fan, and a hater of girls. I thought Lapis was far too mainstream for your tastes?’
‘I find him rather prosaic, but I’ve persevered for Poppy’s sake. She’s beyond excited that he’s coming to Farcombe.’
‘Don’t tell me she’ll be taking Gordon’s canon out of Mrs Dalloway’s dust jacket for the occasion?’
‘Gordon isn’t afraid of Virginia Woolf!’ boomed a voice.
Kizzy honked and peeled with laughter, hooking her burnished curtain of hair behind her tiny ear to reveal that Conrad was standing at her shoulder, looking delighted.
Legs didn’t find it particularly funny, but plastered a smile to her face for professional damage limitation.
‘Why exactly has Gordon chosen Farcombe?’ asked Kizzy. ‘It does seem a very odd choice given the festival’s reputation.
‘The chair of the selection committee is a huge fan of Ptolemy,’ Legs reminded her.
‘Yes, but Gordon can’t have known that Poppy Protheroe devours his work in secret, can he?’ Kizzy queried.
‘Gordon is a very odd man,’ Conrad huffed, ‘and very, very difficult to handle.’
‘He’s a genius,’ Legs flared.
‘Poppy would agree with that,’ said Kizzy. ‘She claims his books have an Oedipal subtext and contain carnivalesque satire which is a moral map of modern society.’
‘Bloody good reads, too,’ Legs muttered.
‘I like “carnivalesque satire”.’ Conrad pursed his lips, one eye closed as he committed the phrase to memory.
Legs replayed her own subtext, past, present and future. ‘It’s over; it’s over.’
When Kizzy finally left Fellows Howlett, she gave Legs a tight hug farewell. ‘You’re so lovely. Please marry Francis and have lots of babies so I can have your job.’
‘Don’t say you heard it from me,’ Legs whispered, ‘but I have it on good authority there’ll be a vacancy here very soon,’
Letting out a little shriek of excitement Kizzy rushed back into the office to press her new contact details into Conrad’s palm, cheek-pecking him ostentatiously and with so many gushing thanks for his time that Legs was half convinced she was going to drop to her knees and unbuckle his flies.
Afterwards, Conrad retreated to his tinted glass lair to make some calls. Legs could see testosterone smoking off him like petrol fumes on a start grid.
Pleas
e don’t call me through, she prayed silently, knowing that if he did she’d be tempted to wrench up the water cooler by its base and cart it into her office to hurl at him. She quickly called up Google on screen to trawl all online history of Brooke Kelly, race-fixing and Hector Protheroe’s involvement.
He called her through.
As soon as she entered, Conrad pulled her behind the big potted cheese plant and started necking her, lips sucking on her skin with clumsy urgency. Still drunk from lunch and no doubt randily excited by Kizzy, he obviously thought this was the best way to appease her.
‘No!’ She pulled away. ‘Anyone in the office could see.’
‘I’ve wanted you all day.’
‘Not here.’
It’s over, it’s over, it’s over, her head screamed.
‘The boardroom then. Ten minutes. Be tender.’ He raised an eyebrow. It was Conrad shorthand for a blow-job.
She returned to her desk for her ten-minute stay of execution, barely concentrating as she flicked up and down the Ptolemy Finch references, ‘it’s over’ screaming in her head. Then a word caught her eye, bringing the blessed silence of focus.
Never Moor.
It was the place Ptolemy had been born, a miserable hellhole the boy had only just escaped with his life. She had heard it said several times in recent days in quite a different context, but it hadn’t registered until now. She’d even been talking about it with Kizzy over lunch. The farm where Byrne had grown up with Brooke and Poppy had the same name.
She Googled ‘Never Moor Cottage’. Nothing. She changed it to ‘Nevermore Farm’.
Bingo! There it was, just a few miles from Farcombe, buried deep in the hinterland of uncultivated inland valleys.
Legs felt her palms start to sweat as the mouse raced, clicked and zoomed.
Streetview flew her down to the nearest lane, from which she spied sagging roofs, broken chimneys and derelict outhouses that made Inkpot Farm look like a new-build.
She emailed Gordon, heart racing. Nevermore Cottage.
She waited for a reply, fingernails hooked over her lower teeth. She hadn’t looked up from the screen in a quarter of an hour now. Conrad would already be waiting in the board room, she realised. It’s so over.