by Fiona Walker
‘I haven’t got there yet.’ She slid to a halt, looking urgently at Francis who was folding something into his pocket.
‘You are a slow reader,’ Poppy exclaimed, hooking her arm through Legs’ and towing her towards the sound of guests gathering. ‘I was most disappointed, but I won’t spoil it for you. I only read it as an academic exercise, after all,’ she added with a sharp smile, aware that she was about to be surrounded by the festival faithful who hadn’t read a book with a print run longer than that its page count in their entire adult lives.
Legs looked around for Francis, but he had shot off through the baize door into the back rooms and she was forced to accompany Poppy to her pre-dinner drinks, cast as reluctant co-host.
‘I need to talk to you about the letters,’ she whispered desperately as they climbed the little-used marble staircase leading to the east wing.
‘Not a word,’ Poppy hissed back, hostess smile already in place. ‘This is an important night for the festival. We must put on a united front. Not a word about the letters.’
‘But they were addressed to me!’ Legs was still struggling to take this in, aghast that Francis and the rest of the Protheroes had kept it from her. She no longer even worked for the agency that represented Gordon. If this was a crackpot fan, they needed to see her P45. But she couldn’t stop a mounting fear that this was far more personal.
Poppy ignored her, beaming out largesse short-sightedly, even though there were very few people there yet.
The guests were being gathered for drinks in the hall’s long gallery which ran the length of the first floor above the cloisters, and was by far the most formal of its reception spaces, a Victorian Gothic concoction of dark wood panelling embossed with coats of arms, flamboyantly carved stone fireplaces, ornate plaster ceiling and polished elm floor which the Protheroes had typically challenged with a riot of technicolour rugs, along with modern glass chandeliers shaped like thousands of rainbow fingers that pointed down from above. Poppy’s blobby stone statues predictably outnumbered the guests. The furniture was modern, minimal and uncomfortable.
Dosed up with drugs, but still feeling weak as a marathon runner hitting ‘the wall’, Legs sank onto a lounger made from Perspex while Poppy eyed her critically from beneath her own particularly ornate, jewelled turban. ‘I’m amazed you fit into my clothes. You have lost weight. You must be thrilled. Good rest today? All better now?’ She had no sympathy for the ill.
Legs nodded wanly. With no make-up to hand, her face was a white mask. The only colour in her pallid skin was a spot sprouting between her eyebrows like a bindi. Matched with the turban, it was a very odd, cross-dressing anaemic maharajah look. She knew it as far from Merchant-Ivory flattering, although when finally Francis reappeared, discreetly slipping through the panelling door from the back stairs, he seemed happy to be cast as the devoted lover.
‘Glass of water, darling.’ He limped up with his crutch and bestowed it like a Holy draft. ‘I brought you still up from the kitchen especially because sparkling might be too much for you.’ He sat down heavily beside her, propping his walking stick against his knee.
‘Thanks.’ How she longed for a Dark and Stormy Night. But her mouth tasted like battery acid and her stomach felt far too delicate to risk drinking alcohol.
‘Poppy’s right; coral really isn’t your colour.’ He seemed to prefer her publicly unappetising. She half suspected he’d like her best in full burqa.
But then he surprised her totally by pulling a heavy velvet-covered box from his pocket. Inside was an exquisite five-string pearl choker. ‘It was my mother’s,’ his voice cracked with emotion. ‘I thought it would set off that frock rather well.’ Before Legs could say anything, he was putting it on her. Ella Protheroe must have had a neck like a swan because when Francis did up the clasp, it almost garrotted her.
‘That looks lovely.’ He leant back and admired the hundreds of pearls strangling her. ‘You’re terribly pale, darling.’
‘I’ve had a real fright,’ she whispered, worried she’d break the necklace if she spoke any louder. ‘I know Poppy says I’m not allowed to talk about the letters tonight but—’
‘That’s right, darling,’ he snapped, patting her knee and turning to watch as Poppy issued Imee with instructions about the champagne cocktails. ‘Lips absolutely sealed.’
Eyes narrowing, Legs wondered what else he was keeping from her for the sake of the guests. ‘That was another one you were reading when I came down, wasn’t it?’
‘Let’s not talk about it.’
‘Yes, let’s!’ She didn’t care that her voice was climbing scales. ‘It was addressed to me, after all!’
‘I can assure you, it wasn’t.’ He turned to her with a pacifying smile. ‘It was in fact a very large banker’s draft. I’ve just put it in the safe, hence I saw my mother’s necklace and thought it deserved an outing. We want to keep a lid on it for now, but let’s just say that Farcombe’s liability shortfall is no longer an issue. Not that it was ever going to stand in the way of the festival; Poppy blew it out of all proportion when she found out.’
Legs took a moment to understand what he was saying, her head still full of death threats. Then she recalled his meeting with Vin Keiller-Myles and talk of a rescue package. He must have sold him the Freud. Hector would be livid.
‘How pleasant to receive a very large draft for such a small shortfall,’ she muttered, eyeing him mistrustfully. ‘Just the mad stalker to worry about now.’ Her mind kept drifting back to Ptolemy Finch, who she’d left on the brink of plunging to certain doom, his wings clipped as he and Purple dangled above the Pit of Pi, edging along balance ropes that were being nibbled by fire rats at either end.
Francis was speaking again, eager to steer her to safer conversational topics: ‘The festival press launch has gone very well,’ he enunciated pointedly, as though talking to a dimwit.
‘Oh yes?’
‘I was in too much pain to stay for Dad’s speech, not that you’ve noticed how much agony I’m in.’ He slung his injured foot onto a stool with a martyred sigh. ‘It’s excruciating. Your turn to look after me next week, I think.’
She was spared answering as there was a commotion at the door and Gordon Lapis’s London publishing contingent entered the room noisily and glamorously.
Conrad led the way, richly upholstered in a new Boateng suit the same deep, ecclesiastical purple as Gordon’s latest book jacket. Seeing him again made Legs even more nervous, remembering her glass ceiling umbrella-poking departure. It felt like a lifetime ago now, as did her love affair with Conrad himself, who tonight was just another beefy, flamboyant suit among many.
Alongside him was super-slick PR man Piers Fox in wide pinstripes, Gordon’s ultra-protective editor Wendy in even wider pinstripes, two very corporate men Legs didn’t recognise in shiny three-pieces and – horrors – Kizzy playing the dutiful new PA. She was predictably ravishing in a lime green bandage dress that clashed fantastically with her hair and created unfeasible curves on her whip-thin body.
‘Are you OK with this?’ Legs muttered to Francis under her breath, looking from him to Conrad to Kizzy, who was trapped amongst the suits, but turned to look at her now with huge, haunted eyes as though desperately trying to convey a message.
‘Of course,’ he breathed smoothly, reaching out for her hand. ‘I have you back, darling.’ His fingers closed over the rampant lions ring still stuck there, twisting so that it pinched. ‘It’s all about Farcombe,’ he said quietly. ‘That’s why I need you by my side. Think of Farcombe.’
‘Yes, Farcombe,’ she hissed under her breath, playing on the mispronunciation that they had delighted in hearing from tourists and repeating as children. ‘Farcombe Hall. Farcombe bloody all.’
Individually marked by charming and comely members of the Farcombe Festival team, Conrad, Piers and Gordon’s editor Wendy were being fêted as though Ptolemy’s great creator himself was amongst them. The two shiny suits sipped mineral water and eyed
the windows.
‘Bodyguards,’ Francis explained to Legs in an undertone.
‘Hired in for Gordon?’ She felt relieved; they were butch as hell now she looked more closely.
‘No, they’re Conrad’s personal entourage. Ladbrokes have him as three to one for the real Gordon Lapis now.’ He raised his eyebrows smugly. ‘I hear he’s already getting fan mail, not all of it very lovely. He’s scared stiff.’
‘He’s getting threatening letters too?’ she squeaked.
‘Lips sealed,’ he reminded her, flashing his pacifying smile again.
At that moment a champagne cork went off with a bang and Francis betrayed his nerves by jumping out of his skin, burying his face in Legs’ armpit.
He quickly withdrew it, composure recovered sufficiently to criticise. ‘Do I detect a lack of depilation?’
‘I didn’t have a razor,’ she snapped. ‘You clearly think I’m far too much of a suicide threat.’
Francis was looking anxiously around the gallery. ‘Where the hell is Dad? He promised we’d have a conversation about private armed response companies before we went through. He finished the press talk ages ago and went to fetch his bassoon. He should be here by now.’
‘Depends where he left his bassoon,’ Legs said idly, deciding not to mention the fact Hector had been wandering furtively around the bedrooms when she spotted him earlier.
Chewing at a corner of broken nail, she suddenly felt anxious for her mother; Legs didn’t like to think of her alone in Spywood cottage with the author of the poison-pen letters on the loose, especially now that she knew at least one of them had been addressed to her.
Francis reached for his stick, ‘I suppose I’d better start working the room. You stay here; you’re still weak. Can’t have you fainting over a canapé.’
Or talking about stalkers, Legs thought bleakly as he stood up with a self-conscious groan of pain, the walking cane making him look more than ever as though he’d wandered in from the wrong century. She watched more guests arriving, amazed at the way being ill for two weeks had made her feel as though she was set behind glass, separate from the world, watching it through a fish tank.
The publishing suits were being very loud in one corner, although Kizzy had predictably cleaved to Poppy’s side and was hugging her tightly. Then she seemed to freeze, eyes widening as she watched someone coming up the marble stairs. Following her gaze, Legs spotted a wan-looking Édith arriving alone and immediately laying claim to the champagne table, looking unusually understated in drab black.
Then Hector appeared through the doors behind her making a far grander entrance, bassoon aloft and his pale hair on end. ‘Welcome all!’ he boomed. ‘Where is my beautiful wife?’
Breathless and overexcited, he made a beeline for Poppy and, brushing Kizzy aside, kissed her so effusively that her jewelled turban fell off to reveal a little stocking skullcap. Stooping hurriedly to retrieve it from Byron the terrier’s head, he crammed the turban back on a positively red-faced Poppy and announced. ‘I am back, my darling! What a night of celebration we shall have!’
‘At last.’ Francis limped across the room to corner him about a hired protection team.
But Hector was clearly in no mood for talk of safety and precautions, particularly once he learned that a fat banker’s draft was now stashed in the safe to amply cover any liability for Farcombe’s six life-threatening dangers to the public. His press speech that afternoon had been a triumph. Raspberry-cheeked and swaying, he was still tight as a tick from chatting up arts editors for two hours with nothing but champagne for sustenance before his dash to Spywood to fetch his trusty instrument.
‘Half the press are still partying down there in the library,’ he boomed in his too-loud voice to his wife and son. ‘I wanted to invite them through to eat with us, but Imee insists it would ruin her numbers, and woe betide her chilled almond soup gets spread too thinly. It is pure elixir. I asked for it especially.’
Legs recognised the coded message and looked quickly to Poppy. Imee’s almond soup was her absolute favourite, and one of the very few dishes that actually tempted her enough to ingest food. Her huge, baleful eyes were blinking tearfully, but she still pushed Hector away when he dived in for another kiss, not ready to swallow his lines just yet, nor threaten the stability of her turban.
Unrelenting, he lifted his bassoon and started serenading her and the rest of the guests with a taster of the music by Iranian composer Mehdi Hosseini that he was featuring at the festival along with his customary jazz. To Legs’ untrained ear it sounded like horror film music just before the frenzied stabbing takes place. It did nothing for her nerves.
Trying to insert a finger beneath the pearl choker to alleviate the pressure on her windpipe, she itched to make a run for it. But as she plotted her exit strategy, measuring up the dash to the door, Conrad slid in beside her on the Perspex chair. His voice bore its customary touch-line tyranny as they spoke facing forwards like two spies liaising at a public gathering.
‘Legs.’
‘Conrad.’
‘You well?’
‘Fine.
‘Don’t look it. Take a holiday.’
‘Will do.’
‘Know where Gordon is?’
‘You mean you don’t?’ She turned to him in surprise.
He kept his eyes out front, sinews at high strain on his broad neck. ‘Not heard much. You?’
‘I know where he is.’
‘He well?’
‘Fine.’
‘Is he still on for next week?’
‘Last I heard.’
‘He’d better be. Tell him I must speak with him. The book’s outselling all the others, but the Americans are up in arms, demanding a new end. Piers Morgan’s team are so hungry for him they’ll pay double what anybody else are offering. The tabloids are baying for blood, and crackpot fans are really coming out of the woodwork now. It’s not just my problem.’
‘I don’t work for you any more, Conrad.’
‘If Gordon wants to live to tell the tale,’ his voice was dark with menace, ‘get him to call me. I know who he is, remember.’
‘You’ve had threatening letters at the agency too, haven’t you?’
He looked at her sharply. ‘That’s confidential. As you say, you no longer work for us. Your business mail is the agency’s property now. Kizzy is dealing with it.’
‘You mean those were addressed to me, too?’
Just for a second, as he glanced across at her, those green marble eyes betrayed a flicker of worry before narrowing and scanning the room once more. ‘The Protheroes are looking after you now, Legs. Let’s you and I keep the focus on Gordon, shall we? I need that call.’
He stood up smoothly to join Poppy, who was eager to introduce the local MP, leaving Legs wondering whether Byrne’s life was in danger from a stalker or just Conrad.
She eyed the doors again, but her escape route was blocked as more and more festival high-flyers arrived to be plied with champagne and canapés.
It was a seriously corporate affair, Legs realised. The Keiller-Myleses were in evidence, plus Kizzy’s boorish parents in a replay of the murder-that-never-was mystery night. Mixed in with festival stalwarts, village hierarchy, local landowners and boho Devonians, there were over twenty to supper.
‘Thank God you’re here,’ Édith flopped down gratefully in the vacant spot beside her now, champagne flute askew. ‘That turban is hilarious – you always had such a wicked sense of humour. Thankfully Poppy is taking it as a compliment. Isn’t this dullsville? I can count eight suits, not all of them sartorial. We’ll be sued to hell if Gordon Lapis backs out now. Nobody knows if he’s actually going to be here next week, do they?’
Close to, she looked deathly pale and red-eyed.
‘How are you?’ she asked carefully.
‘So so. Jax has left me.’
‘God, I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. We’ve been at each other’s throats for months. I’m madly i
n love with somebody else.’
‘Well that’s a blessing.’
‘Isn’t it? I should be grateful, really, but Jax was so practical, I’m at a bit of a loss. I had to call out a plumber yesterday to show me how to use the washing machine. Come through to the dining room.’
The Farcombe Hall dining room was among its most flamboyant creations with its gold columns, deep crimson panels, ornate plaster ceiling and vast chandelier.
Imee had been in overdrive. The huge table, as long as a cricket wicket, was laid for a banquet, glittering with finest crystal and polished silver, vases bursting with vibrant pink zinnias that clashed fantastically with the red walls, deep orange tablecloth and emerald napkins. Guest names and menus were fashioned like little bookmarks propped up in miniature Poppy Protheroe sculptures.
Édith trailed around the table looking at the place cards. ‘I’m so thrilled you and Francis are back together. You’re soulmates.’
Legs made a non-committal humming sound, but thankfully Édith wasn’t really interested in her brother’s love-life when her stepmother was misbehaving: ‘I see Poppy has Kizzy back in her spell again. She’s so evil with her, moving her around like a pawn.’
‘I think Conrad Knight’s trying for checkmate.’
‘Horrible man; Kizzy will tire of him even faster than you did. And she’ll never sleep with him, whatever he hopes.’ She plucked up her own name card and prowled around the table deciding where to move it. Then a wicked smile crossed her face as her eyes alighted on a place setting in the shadow of a Taj Mahal of silverware. ‘Have you got a pen?’
‘Not even a lipstick,’ Legs apologised.
‘Shame. I was going to change “Howard Hawkes” to “Jean Poole”,’ Édith sighed, prowling on. ‘Isn’t tonight such a joke, and so typically Poppy? She’s probably spent as much as she stands to recoup here, but that’s my stepmother; completely devoid of logic. She probably won’t summon the nerve to cross the gravel to the marquees next week, but an impromptu party is fine, just so long as everybody writes fat cheques and nobody mentions the insurance fuck-up. Francis says it’s all under control now and Hiscox will underwrite the entire thing with a few exclusions, but Poppy never really cared about that anyway.’ She plucked a few more place cards out of their holders and swapped them around. ‘There! Now I’ve got a camp Goldwin twin to either side to keep me entertained, and you’re sitting between lovely Frank Parish and Jamie-go.’