Kissing Toads

by Jemma Harvey

  The next step, obviously, was to search his room. That’s what heroines always do in thrillers. But I didn’t know where his room was, it was almost certain to be locked, and even if I could get in, supposing he found me there? What on earth would I say? The thought of it made my blood run cold – or rather hot, anticipating embarrassment. I’d need to steal a key (there must be master keys somewhere) and take someone to act as a lookout. In short, I’d need Roo.

  ‘You have to be joking,’ she said.

  ‘He’s a fraud,’ I reiterated. ‘I know he is. My agency contact says he has a wife and two kids, but if so, where are they? Besides, Winkworth’s never been married – whoever he is.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘He doesn’t have that stressed look that men get when they’re worrying about teenage daughters and school grades and paying the maintenance and all that. Anyhow, I just know.’

  ‘Did your contact get you another address for him – apart from here, I mean?’ Roo said.

  ‘Kensington. I wrote it down somewhere.’

  ‘You could ask someone to go round there, I suppose. If you must go on with this. It’s becoming an obsession with you – a sort of paranoia. You’ve got to stop . . . well, fantasising about Harry. He’s a nice guy, he’s a butler. That’s all.’

  ‘I’m not fantasising about him! He could be a crook, in with some gang planning a robbery – the man on the inside. He could be—’

  ‘He could be the Akond of Swat. Listen, Delphi, I’m not going to start playing detective with you and get caught snooping in Harry’s underwear drawers. You can’t do things like that. I think the atmosphere of this place is getting to you – all those mysterious disappearances and murders and things. Your imagination’s doing overtime.’

  ‘Winkworth’s attitude isn’t a figment of my imagination! All we have to do is steal – borrow – the key, and then you keep watch while I—’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You can’t let me down,’ I said, shocked. ‘When we were kids, you always helped – whatever I planned.’

  ‘We’re not kids any more,’ Roo said unhappily.

  Since she was being so stubborn, I decided I should take her advice and get someone to go round to Winkworth’s Kensington address. I wasn’t sure whom I could trust, but in the end I asked Anna Maria, telling her I was trying to trace the wife of a friend and assuming an air of dismissive hauteur when she questioned me. ‘Be discreet,’ I ordered. ‘I can’t tell you what’s going on; I just need to know if Mrs Winkworth’s there.’

  But she wasn’t. Anna Maria reported back that the house was let but the lessee was unresponsive to her enquiries and would say little about the owners except that they were away. All of which did nothing to allay my suspicions.

  And every time I saw Winkworth, which was much too often, even the hint of his grin set my nerves tingling with remembered indignation.

  We were shooting the scenes with HG over the next couple of days. Wardrobe had pulled out all the stops and he looked spectacular in an outfit patched together from bits of animal pelt and the McGoogle tartan, festooned with assorted weapons, stained with stage blood, his long hair gelled into wildness and his piratical features enhanced with greasepaint versions of sweat and grime. The effect was sort of Braveheart meets Conan the Barbarian. HG’s short and fairly skinny, but somehow, once in costume and in front of the camera, he seemed to grow, in some intangible way, switching on his aura, becoming larger than life. It wasn’t that he was a great actor – he was just the only person you wanted to look at in the whole room. I don’t know what they call that quality; it isn’t charisma, because if you’ve got that, you’ve got it all the time. More like presence, if presence is something you can activate at the touch of a button in your subconscious. It went away as soon as the camera stopped rolling, and suddenly he looked shrunken and tired, just an elderly guy in bizarre fancy dress. Maybe that’s what aged him, I thought: not the drugs and the drink but the presence, that magical energy that possesses and expands and surrounds him, a magnetic field that, in a concert, could knock out a crowd of thousands.

  Like the Force in Star Wars. If he wanted to, I bet HG could use his presence to control people’s thoughts, when he’s on stage anyway. After all, he’s made audiences think he’s a star for more than forty years.

  That evening he sat down to dinner with us, looking haggard and wrinkly but still sort of lit up, more alive than usual in the aftermath of performance. The Force wasn’t with him any more, I concluded, but there was a little bit of glitter left over, in his eyes, his voice, his manner. In his heyday he must have been amazing, not just a megastar but a real god: the übergod of rock superfame. Like Elvis and Bacchus and the Pope all rolled into one.

  I was sitting next to him. Brie tried to muscle in, but I was determined and I’m bigger than she is. Mindful of Russell’s comment, I thought I’d try being a good listener, as a result of which dinner took longer than usual, or at any rate felt longer, though of course it was a big thrill to have HG beside me talking about the old days and so on. It was rather less of a thrill when Morty, who was opposite, began to go on about his youth, when he’d played bass guitar in a band called the Weeds (or something like that). This is what it’s like to be Roo, I told myself, smiling and saying, ‘How fascinating,’ in all the right places. By the time Morty had finished the saga of his (brief) musical career, I’d decided it was just too much hassle. Being a good listener may make you irresistible, but it simply isn’t worth it. In future, I was going to stick to a push-up bra.

  We’d just finished dessert when it happened. Footsteps outside – clinky footsteps, the unmistakable sound of very high heels on an echoing floor. The door was flung open the way someone flings a door open when they are going to make an Entrance, rather than merely coming in. An icy blast invaded the room, the sort you get with the arrival of Banquo’s ghost or Jacob Marley, except in this case it was because the three doors through to the front had all been flung wide and left that way. The woman who entered so dramatically didn’t look at all ghostly. She wore embossed silver thigh boots and a pink mink jacket, with bits of brown flesh showing in between. She was at least five foot ten (plus four inches for the boots), with the kind of good looks that seem to have been soused in preservative just a little too long: plumped-up pout, complexion of moisturised leather, eyes a fraction too small, cheekbones a fraction too large. And big hair. Enormous hair. Once it might have been dark, but now it was coffee beige with vanilla streaks, moussed out into a mane worthy of a fashion-conscious lion, with waves and curls and shaggy bits over her forehead. As she must have been travelling all day, she had either brought a portable hairdresser or was wearing enough hairspray to hold the style in a tornado.

  She could only be Basilisa Ramón.

  The mere sight of her explained the magenta sheepskin, the devil-mask, the fertility goddess bedposts. Everyone stared at her in glazed horror, pretty much as if she was Jacob Marley. Except HG, who appeared inscrutable. He must, I thought, have a skin of rhinoceros hide and balls of reinforced concrete. I mean, when your wife looks like a cross between Ivana Trump and a high-class drag act, how many men could remain inscrutable about it?

  ‘Who are these people?’ she demanded. ‘They are from television, no? Why you not tell me you make television here? You are mi marido, you make television, but I have to read about it in la prensa amarilla. It is asqueroso! If there is television, of course they will want me. I am big star of television, I have many fans—’

  ‘I did tell you,’ HG said quietly. ‘I told you we were redoing the garden. You’ve never been very interested in gardening.’

  How he said that with a straight face I don’t know. Behind Basilisa, I saw Harry, who caught my eye and rolled his. For once, I bit back a smile.

  ‘You tell me about garden but not about la televisión,’ Basilisa reiterated. ‘You know I—’

  ‘I told you there might be a feature. I didn’t know how things would deve
lop.’ To his credit, HG managed to interrupt her without sounding as if he was interrupting – a major diplomatic achievement. And he lied so well even I almost believed him. ‘Why don’t you join us for a drink, meet everybody, then we can talk about it.’

  Everybody blenched in anticipation.

  ‘I go to my room,’ Basilisa announced, retrieving the initiative. ‘I get changed. Then I have a drink and then we talk.’

  She swept from the room in triumph, though there was nothing in particular to be triumphant about. But she was clearly the sort of person who favoured the triumphant exit as much as the dramatic entrance. I wondered if she ever went in or out of a room normally.

  As she retreated, I could hear her tossing orders over her shoulder. Harry – Winkworth – followed her, presumably picking them up. I bet he behaves like a proper butler with her, I thought. It should have annoyed me, but it didn’t.

  Ruth

  The arrival of Basilisa was the one thing that could have made everyone appreciate Alex and Brie. Alex might be a spoiled child who had never grown up, but, bar the practical jokes, he was quite a nice spoilt child, who responded well to threats of being horribly murdered if he didn’t behave himself. Brie was a bad actress but at least she wasn’t trying to hog the limelight.

  Basilisa was a nightmare.

  She wanted to star in the historical scenes, she wanted to pose in the reconstructed maze, she wanted us to film her efforts at interior design. ‘This is makeover show, no? I know all about makeover. When I come to Dunblair it is – how you say? – andrajoso, old-fashioned, boring, boring. Furniture, curtains, carpets – all dark, all dull. I change everything. I bring colour, vitalidad. You will make film of my transformación, you will show everyone I am not just a beautiful woman, I am great artist, great imagination. What you mean, your show is just about garden? Estúpida, who wants to go outside in Scotland? Is cold, is grey, is rain all the time. Who cares about garden? You want to film here, you film my rooms. Garden not important. You film what I say, or you leave.’

  The manure was flying – it was time to call Crusty. But I didn’t. I’ve been shot at in Kosovo, I told myself (even if the sniper had been aiming elsewhere); I’ve been haunted in Surrey; if I can’t handle this, I can’t handle anything. I had a private conversation with HG and then deployed the crew to spend a day shooting Basilisa in her various interiors.

  ‘We’re wasting time,’ Russell muttered, his rather lugubrious face becoming actively moribund. ‘Not to mention the cost.’

  ‘HG’s covering it,’ I whispered. ‘I arranged it with him.’

  ‘Clever girl. All the same—’

  ‘It’s a nuisance, but it’s not as if we’re going to use it. HG asked to keep the film afterwards. I suppose he doesn’t want it turning up on one of those celebrity hatchet-jobs on ITV Scandal.’

  ‘Probably needs it for his divorce,’ Russell said.

  The real trouble started with Basilisa’s determination to appear in the historical scenes. Initially she elected to play the murdered wife of HG’s laird, a choice many of us thought deeply significant. (‘Perhaps he’ll take the hint,’ Russell said.) We were forced to remove the actress who had been given the role, causing issues with the union and a threatened strike by all the minor roles. We then had to re-employ the actress in question on the realisation that Basilisa couldn’t do an English accent, let alone a Scots one, and we would therefore need another vocal stand-in. Like Brie, Basilisa was not informed of this. Meanwhile those of the cast who had actually struck had to be routed out of the Dirk and Sporran, along with several crew members who had come out in sympathy. The electrician, Mick, was found to be, as Russell put it, spark out, after an excess of sympathetic Laphroaig, and the cameraman, Dick – all too well named – had got his hands on some quality Leb and was useless for the rest of the day. By the time I had calmed everyone who needed calming and Russell had rallied the troops, we all wound up back in the pub – even Alex, Brie, Delphi and Ash – in a rare display of team spirit, the spirit in question being mostly single malt.

  There’s nothing like a common enemy to turn lesser enemies into bosom friends.

  ‘If you try to fob the Basilisk off on me,’ Ash said with uncharacteristic heat, ‘there will be another ghost on the castle roster. A Spanish one.’

  ‘Couldn’t you arrange for her to be haunted?’ I said wistfully.

  ‘She wouldn’t notice. There are some people who are so self-centred, so oblivious to everything around them, that phantoms simply bounce off them. The only atmosphere Basilisa’s aware of is the one inside her head.’

  ‘No intuition,’ said Brie. ‘I can tell.’

  ‘She’s an Insensitive,’ I supplied.

  ‘You said it,’ murmured Ash. Under stress, he was becoming a lot more human. He was even drinking beer, an improbable drink for an elf.

  The pub was named after the landlord and barman, Angus McSporran and Dirk McTeith, who had been on a roll ever since the TV crowd hit town. Now, they were more than ready to join in the fun, relating tales of the Basilisk’s unpopularity in the village, through which she was prone to drive, much too fast, in the Ferrari, splashing old ladies with mud, flattening sheep, and narrowly missing innocent children. Apparently she had once had a run-in with a bull (no doubt her Spanish blood taking over), where both sides had threatened legal action after the bull was severely bruised and the Ferrari gored. Maids working at the castle had been terrorised or summarily dismissed for trivial offences; even Dougal McDougall had been fired for aggressive dourness, though reinstated later the same day after HG made it clear he was outside Basilisa’s jurisdiction. Local opinion was largely in HG’s favour – ‘We call him the Laird noo, though only tae his face,’ Angus said. ‘He dinna say so, but he’s muckle keen on it’ – but his wife, it was felt, was suitable material for the ducking stool and burning at the stake. (The Scots are old-fashioned, and don’t really believe in divorce.)

  ‘Mebbe, when the accurrsed maze is replanted, ye could lose her in it,’ Dirk said.

  ‘No chance,’ said Delphi. ‘She’d be too busy carpeting it in lilac fur and installing decorative totem poles at every intersection.’ Although Alex was to hand in fiancé mode, she appeared to be hitting it off unexpectedly well with Dirk, who was rather good-looking in a brawny, Scottish way.

  The evening slid comfortably downhill. We missed dinner, dining off crisps and sandwiches stuffed with what might have been haggis, none of which did much to soak up the alcohol. By closing time, we were on the toasts, drinking not just to the downfall of the Basilisk – ‘Anyone got a magic sword?’: Russell – but anything else that came to mind. Alex and Delphi’s marriage, Brie’s breast implants, the Atkins Diet, the F-you Diet, independence for Scotland, the success of the local football team (Dinnaguigle), the failure of the rival team (Midloathsome), Shakespeare, Robbie Burrns, Robbie Williams, and Fenris the bichon.

  (As far as I can recall, the proposers of the toasts were, in order: Dirk’s girlfriend, Nick the sound recordist, Brie, Russell, Dougal McDougall, assorted locals, more assorted locals, the reinstated actress, Angus McSporran, Brie again, and Alex.)

  Afterwards, I remember noticing that two of the villagers (I assumed they were villagers) had accents which didn’t quite match and joined in rather too fervently with all the wrong toasts, but we were all too far gone to pay any attention.

  By the time those of us based at Dunblair came to stagger the mile and a half homewards, the problem of Basilisa Ramón had dwindled to a mere joke, to be laughed over and forgotten. We had that group high that you can only get after confronting trouble together and overcoming it, a feeling normally associated with wartime scenarios like the Resistance and the Blitz. The enemy had been outfaced and outjockeyed; we were the tops.

  Which goes to show how wrong you can be.

  The first intimation of disaster came when I tottered down to the dining room the following day, half an hour after shooting was due to start, feeble apology
at the ready. But there was no one to apologise to. The only occupant of the room was the Basilisk herself, sitting at the table, simultaneously drinking black coffee, smoking a black cheroot, and painting her nails black. Well, crimson-black anyway. She wore an eau de Nil negligee trimmed in pink swansdown, the sort of thing Ginger Rogers might have carried off in a thirties film, provided it was in monochrome. First thing in the morning on top of a bad hangover it was not a pleasant sight. I sank into a chair, feeling slightly queasy. Harry, who had evidently been hovering in the vicinity, looked me over thoughtfully and said, ‘Don’t touch the coffee: I’ll bring another pot. Time for the really strong stuff, I think.’

  ‘It is good you are here,’ Basilisa said, surveying me with a distaste which was almost certainly unfair. My complexion might be pale green (I could feel it), but at least it matched the negligee. ‘I have an announcement to make.’

  I mumbled something which she took for encouragement. Not that she needed any.

  ‘Last night, I read the script. El papel I play, it is not enough important. I think I play someone else.’ My stomach shrank in horror. ‘The big part, it is Eleezabet Courtnee. I am going to play that.’

  If I had had the forethought to eat more the previous evening, I would have thrown up on the spot.

  Wild ideas spun through my lurching brain. We could film Basilisa as Elizabeth secretly, without Delphi knowing, then bin the lot afterwards. But it would never work, even if HG agreed to pay for it: it would take far too long. We had the garden to get on with, and the chances of keeping it from Delphi were nil. Oh de nil. Or Russell and I could try to find a way to convey to Basilisa, tactfully, that she was completely unsuited to playing a nineteenth-century English heiress. Or . . .

  At that moment Morty came in, wearing a glow of good health that made me suspect he’d been at the make-up long before shooting. He gave me a rather familiar pat on the shoulder and greeted Basilisa with an enthusiasm which might or might not have been insincere. He’d been in the pub the previous night with the rest of us, drinking to her undoing, but instinct told me he was a sail-trimmer who would go with the prevailing wind. Or hurricane.