by Wendy Holden
‘Yay, a week in a honeymoon suite,’ Rachel was saying. ‘Whirlpool baths. Fancy bath things. Huge, comfortable bed. Piles of fluffy white towels. What could be nicer?’
‘Almost anything,’ said Nell tightly, turning on her white-PVC-booted heel and pushing through the pressing crowd now roaring along to ‘Mustang Sally’.
Outside in the cool fresh air she sat under one of Larry’s parasols and searched for the number of the pub with shaking hands. She had no idea what it was called but the name of the village stuck in her mind: Edenville. At the time, when Joey first mentioned it, it had seemed blissfully appropriate. Now it seemed horribly ironic and yet another good reason not to go.
There seemed to be only one pub in Edenville, the Edenville Arms. Much as she wanted to get the call over and done, Nell could not help stopping to examine the image that bloomed on her screen. It was of a small stone inn with roses round the door and white umbrellas outside. Tiny, ancient, diamond-paned windows winked in the sun, their frames painted a tasteful sage green and surrounded with clipped ivy. The ones on the upper storey were tucked away under little pointed gables whose edges were decorated with carved wood, like a Swiss chalet.
Nell felt the tears rushing to her eyes again. It would have been so nice. Paradise, in fact. As luxury country pubs went, it looked about the most luxurious, countrified and pubbish imaginable.
She took in a deep, galvanising breath and determinedly stabbed in the numbers.
‘Good afternoon, the Edenville Arms,’ answered a high-pitched, slightly nasal male voice.
Five minutes later, a disappointed and angry Nell threaded her way back through a bouncing crowd now bellowing along to ‘Gimme Shelter’.
Rachel and Juno were still where she had left them. Rachel, smiling, was watching the increasingly silly dancing while Juno, demonstrating terrifying powers of concentration and a breathtaking capacity to block out all extraneous distraction, was reading Death on the Nile.
‘All done?’ Rachel greeted her.
Nell sighed. ‘Not exactly. Basically I can’t cancel the booking as it’s less than twenty-four hours’ notice.’
Rachel widened her eyes. ‘So you have to pay for the whole week?’
‘Dinner, bed and breakfast, every night,’ Nell gloomily confirmed. The manager had been extremely polite about it, but also extremely firm.
‘But my circumstances—’ Nell had begun.
The manager had cut in. ‘I’m afraid the circumstances make no difference, madam. I’m terribly sorry, but there it is. It was on the terms and conditions box you ticked when you made the online booking.’
‘It’s going to cost me over two thousand pounds,’ she groaned to Rachel. That Joey had landed her with this bill as well as all the psychological pain he had inflicted made Nell feel that she actually hated him. He could have easily made the booking and cancelled it. Unlike her, he knew what was about to happen.
She swigged the champagne in her glass. It tasted as sour as she felt. What was it about her that made men want to humiliate her? Fake OutdoorsGuy in the station, now Joey.
‘But that’s great news!’ Rachel was exclaiming, clapping her hands.
Nell looked at her. ‘How do you figure that out?’
Rachel was smiling brightly. ‘Because you have to go now. On honeymoon. Waste not, want not.’
‘Want not. Definitely.’
Rachel raised her fine eyebrows. ‘So what’s the alternative? Moping around London?’
‘Guess so.’
‘And where, exactly, will you mope?’
Nell opened her mouth to snap that she’d mope at home, of course. In her flat. Then it hit her. She didn’t have a home any more. Or a flat. Gardiner Road had been sold, or as good as. Her furniture was in storage. And Joey had moved out of the flat she had expected to be living in. Which had never belonged to him anyway.
She stared, shocked, at Rachel. ‘I’m homeless.’
‘Not quite,’ Rachel pointed out. ‘You’ve a week’s worth of paid-for luxury roof over your head in Leicestershire.’
She had no clothes either, Nell was thinking, except for her pyjamas and the jeans and T-shirt she’d worn the day before. Expecting to return to Joey’s flat, she had taken only her wedding outfit and sponge bag to the hotel.
‘I don’t want to be by myself in Leicestershire for a week!’ Nell exclaimed. ‘I’ve never been there. I don’t even know where it is.’
‘You won’t be by yourself. Juno and I can come with you.’
‘But . . . but . . .’ Nell gasped. ‘Juno’s got school. You’ve got work.’
‘Sure, but we’ll just come for the weekend. I can get up early on Monday. If we set off now we’ll be up there for teatime.’
How, Nell thought, could she possibly mean it? But the expression on Rachel’s pixie face was utterly serious.
‘But . . . how will we get there?’ Nell flailed about for counter-arguments. ‘I don’t have a car.’
‘We’ll go in the Red Baron,’ Rachel said decidedly.
Now she really was joking, Nell thought. While the vehicle was more or less red – in between the rust patches – it didn’t look as if it would reach the end of the street.
She would not, Nell realised, win this argument with mere practical objections. A heartfelt emotional appeal was the only possibility. ‘I can’t go on honeymoon,’ she wailed from the depths of her wounded soul. ‘I didn’t get married.’
‘Thank goodness,’ Rachel said briskly, signalling to the waitress struggling past for the bill.
‘But . . . aren’t you over the limit?’ Nell gestured at the empty champagne bottle.
‘Me?’ Rachel cackled. ‘I’ve had a glass and a half, at the most.’
Meaning I’ve drunk the rest, Nell thought, the tight feeling in her head increasing. Seeing Rachel entering her pin number into the waitress’s handset, she tried to intervene.
‘I’m getting this,’ Rachel stated calmly. ‘Come on, Juno.’
She really didn’t, Nell saw, know the meaning of the word ‘no’. There was clearly nothing else for it. They were going to Leicestershire and that was that.
CHAPTER 15
Nell was still objecting as they drove up the Euston Road in the Land Rover. They’d made a swift detour to Gardiner Road to pick up spare clothes for Rachel and Juno, and now they were on their way. ‘But the honeymoon suite will be for two!’ Nell complained. ‘There won’t be room for three of us.’
Rachel, handling the vehicle’s big steering wheel with confidence, despite her diminutive size, shot this down immediately. ‘Of course there will. This is 2016. Children from a previous relationship and all that. They’ll have put-up beds.’
Nell subsided and looked out of the window. It being Saturday afternoon it was pretty busy: vans, trucks, cars, cyclists, taxis and buses all jostled for space. Some stared curiously in at them and Nell tried not to catch anyone’s eye. She could imagine how strange they must look: the rusty, shabby Land Rover driven by a tiny woman in vintage Dior with another woman in a Sixties minidress and flowers in her hair in the passenger seat. Not to mention the ten-year-old girl in the back looking like an infant headmistress.
Instead, Nell tried to think about where all these other people might be going, and why. However bizarre a destination, and for however strange a reason, it could not possibly be as odd as what she was doing. Going on honeymoon without even being married.
‘Can we have an Agatha Christie CD on?’ Juno piped up now from the back, over the roar of the Land Rover engine.
Rachel tilted her Titian locks to survey her daughter in the driving mirror. ‘Sure. Which one would you like?’
‘The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, please.’
Rachel grinned at Nell from the steering wheel. ‘That OK with you?’
‘Sure,’ Nell shrugged. She wondered, privately, whether exposure to all this murder was entirely healthy for someone Juno’s age.
Rachel seemed to sense this. ‘The stories are well written,’ she said. ‘And a lot less gory than anything you’d see on telly. Good for her vocabulary too.’
‘I wrote a murder mystery the other day,’ Juno put in from the back. ‘For a school assignment.’
Nell turned her head to meet the clear, unfaltering gaze of the child. ‘What happened in it?’
‘All the school bullies died,’ said Juno with relish.
Rachel cackled. ‘Certain amount of wish fulfilment there. June has a hard time at school. She’s a bit different, one could say.’
‘What’s so different?’ Nell asked kindly, adding, untruthfully, ‘You don’t seem all that different to me.’
It was obviously the wrong thing to say. Above her glasses, Juno’s dark brows scrunched together. ‘I am different,’ she said emphatically. ‘I want to be. I don’t want to be like them. Glittery nails. Long, messy, tossy hair.’ She patted her smooth side-parted bob with bitten fingers.
‘Absolutely,’ said Nell, scrabbling to make amends. ‘Much better to be your own person. To know what you believe in and not care what anyone else thinks. Be independent and live your life your way . . .’ She stopped. Certainly, she had always believed all this and tried to live by these lights. But just where, exactly, had it got her?
‘Right on, sister!’ exclaimed Rachel, lifting one small fist off the steering wheel. ‘Now, have a look in the box, will you? The one on the floor. See if Roger’s there.’
Nell peered doubtfully down to the Land Rover’s floor. The battered cardboard box with the CDs in it looked very far away. As she bent slowly forward her head started to pound and her stomach lurched nauseously.
‘I can see Lord Edgware Dies,’ she offered.
‘I quite like that,’ Juno said doubtfully. ‘But Roger Ackroyd’s better. The denouement’s amazing.’
Nell blinked. Juno was ten, and she knew words like denouement? Rachel was obviously right about Agatha Christie and vocabulary. Perhaps she should be taught in every school. ‘Here it is,’ she said, reaching for a cracked and obviously much-used CD case.
The engine was unbelievably noisy. Roger Ackroyd was going to have to be murdered very loudly.
They were going round the Outer Circle now. Nell looked out at the sunny green of the park: the grass and trees, the creamy-white Nash terraces topped with Classical figures. She thought about the park’s beautiful rose garden, and the flower-heavy bowers where she had occasionally sat with Joey. She felt speared by a great javelin-thrust of misery.
They ground past the zoo, Rachel pointing out the giraffes excitedly.
‘Shush, Mum,’ admonished Juno. ‘Poirot’s talking.’
‘The funny thing,’ Rachel hissed to Nell, ‘is that I’ve heard this CD loads of times. But I still couldn’t tell you what happens in it. My attention drifts.’
‘Mu-um!’ exclaimed the rear, appalled. Juno’s attention, Nell guessed, rarely drifted.
‘But,’ Rachel added, changing lanes as they chugged up Finchley Road, ‘it’s quite nice to drive along and have all these words just wash over you.’
‘Can you turn it up a bit, please?’ asked the back, pointedly.
It was Nell’s first time following the demise of Roger Ackroyd and she meant to listen carefully, especially as conversation was so obviously discouraged. But there were strong indicators in favour of sleep. For one thing, she had drunk an awful lot of champagne. For another, they had reached the tangle of roads, signs and concrete that marked the bottom of the M1; visual interest would be in short supply from now on. There was, in addition, something surprisingly comforting about the fruity roar of the Land Rover engine.
As the Defender ground determinedly up the fast lane, doggedly overtaking a middle-lane-hogging Yaris and magnificently ignoring the flashing headlights of a Ferrari at the rear, Nell was overwhelmed by an almost painful urge to doze. Her last waking thought was that the ‘Superb Offices To Let’ sign strapped to a brown concrete block in Hendon looked like something of an overstatement.
She awoke to find that the signs had changed. Last time she looked, Hemel Hempstead, St Albans and Northampton had all been up ahead. Now the signs were reading Leicester.
‘Welcome back,’ said Rachel. ‘You’ve been very asleep. You were snoring.’
Nell reddened. ‘Loudly?’
Rachel grinned. ‘Ish. But Juno poked you whenever it got too much for her to hear Roger Ackroyd.’
‘Hasn’t he been murdered yet?’ Nell grumbled.
‘Ages ago. But that’s not the point, it’s all about who did it. We don’t know yet. Well, Juno probably does, but like I said, I never have the foggiest idea.’
‘Shush!’ warned the back.
She felt much better, Nell realised, as she completed checks on her physical state. Her headache had gone, and with it the sick feeling. The beginnings of hunger were now gnawing within her and visions of bacon sandwiches glowed in her mind. Would Rachel mind stopping at a service station?
Rachel would not, especially as Roger Ackroyd’s assailant had now been revealed and Juno, big-eyed from following each twist and turn, declared herself hungry too.
‘It doesn’t spoil it a bit knowing the ending,’ she told Nell over a ham and cheese panini in Costa Coffee. ‘Because the characters are so interesting. Agatha Christie’s all about character, you see. In The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Poirot straightens up a vase because he’s such a tidy person. And then he notices something that helps him find out who the murderer is. I love that.’
Juno’s pale face was glowing; her eyes shone through her glasses. Rachel ruffled her daughter’s hair fondly. ‘Juno wants to be a detective when she grows up. Don’t you, darling?’
Juno nodded and scooped another teaspoonful of squirty cream from the top of her hot chocolate. ‘Will Edenville be like St Mary Mead?’
‘Where?’ asked Nell.
The grey eyes turned on her, surprised. ‘Where Miss Marple lives, of course.’
‘Oh, right, the village where the vicar poisons everyone with his seed cake,’ Nell joked.
‘The murderer’s hardly ever the vicar,’ Juno corrected. ‘Although sometimes it’s the doctor. But mostly it’s people who’ve been deceived and crossed in love, that sort of thing. Seeking revenge.’
‘Is that so,’ Nell said thoughtfully.
Juno was looking at her consideringly. ‘You know, you’d make a great Agatha Christie character, Nell. You’ve got the motive for a really interesting murder.’
CHAPTER 16
Once upon a time, Pemberton Hall, Leicestershire had been a private fiefdom, over which a succession of Earls had held feudal sway. Their huge incomes from landholdings and mining minerals had once comfortably supported the vast estate with its hundreds of servants, but those days were long over. In line with other great estates the length and breadth of the country, Pemberton and its Earl had had to devise other ways of making money to survive.
This meant appealing to the visitor class that had replaced the servant one. Pemberton accordingly flung open the doors of the Hall to the tourist trade, installed room guides and shops and opened the stable yard to cafés and restaurants and yet more shops. As the years had gone by, the Big House had added more attractions and this year, in a bid to pull ahead of its competitors, Pemberton Hall was pioneering a new ‘insider’ tour in which former estate employees took visitors round and gave their own unique and frank perspective on the place.
There were other initiatives. A farm shop opened selling everything from apricot-stuffed chicken to designer chocolates. A wedding planning arm was launched, offering the house as a backdrop to ‘that most special day of your life’. A catering arm
was added to supplement the wedding arm.
Meanwhile, out in the great park surrounding the house, further income streams were tapped by converting buildings that had once been laundries, dairies and coal stores into tasteful holiday cottages. In Edenville, the ‘model’ estate village built at the edge of the park to house the workers of one of the Victorian Earls as well as to provide an opportunity for His Lordship to try out his fanciful architectural ideas, the former quite basic pub had been upgraded to within an inch of its life.
The Edenville Arms, designed to slake the thirst of estate labourers, had received a thorough makeover and had recently reopened. No stone had been left un-repointed, no inch of wood un-eggshell-painted, in its quest to attract as many punters as possible and put them up in a modish splendour for which quite eye-widening rates could be charged.
The new manager, Jason Twistle, had formerly been deputy manager of Ogthorpe’s, a successful restaurant-with-rooms in a village on the outskirts of Melton Mowbray. The press release sent out on his arrival a month ago had described him as ‘chief leisure experience curator in the ongoing hospitality journey of the Edenville Arms’.
All of which was bad enough. But Jason was now realising that Ros Downer, the Pemberton Estate’s Director of Marketing and author of this gobbledegook, had perpetrated even worse crimes against good English in general and his establishment in particular in the latest brochure advertising, as it chose to put it, the Pemberton Estate’s ‘hospitality offer’. In other words, the estate hotels, holiday cottages, restaurants, cafés and pubs, including the Edenville Arms.
Jason had positively leapt at the bundle of brochures when they arrived from the Marketing Department, so desperate had he been to see his newly furbished fiefdom in print. As he read through, a horrid, cold feeling had increased its grip. The dead hand of Ros Downer was everywhere.
It wasn’t just that the spelling was appalling and the words made no sense (his position as ‘chief leisure experience curator’ was reiterated). The pictures were uninspired too. Of the newly created rooms in particular. Was that really the most flattering angle of Spigots, the downstairs suite? Or Barrels, converted from a former beer store in the yard? The brochure’s invitations to ‘sleep in barrels and spigots’ seemed directed to some drunk collapsing in the cellar.