by Jemma Harvey
‘Can I see it?’ he demanded. ‘Does it look, like, all greenish and manky?’
‘It’s a she,’ Delphi snapped.
‘Brown, not green,’ HG said. ‘And not manky. More dry and shrivelled. It’s in the laboratory at the moment. The forensics people have to do a lot of tests.’
‘When they’ve finished with her,’ Delphi said, ‘we should see she gets a proper burial. With a vicar and everything. She was bound to be a Christian; people were in those days. If we could do that, and solve the mystery, maybe her spirit could move on. Don’t you think so?’
The question was addressed to Ash, who came down from whatever plateau he was on to look faintly intrigued.
‘Possibly,’ he said. ‘Religion was very important to the Victorians. It’s something she would have wanted, I suppose.’
‘Can’t you – er – commune with her spirit?’ Morty suggested with a sarcasm that was presumably meant to be subtle. ‘You’re the psychic, aren’t you?’
‘I’m a researcher, not a medium,’ Ash said, failing to rise to the taunt.
Delphi, who thought any communing with Elizabeth should be done by her, said: ‘Will they give us back the body?’
‘Good question,’ said HG. ‘Who does it belong to – apart from its original owner? As it’s on my land, it might be me, or so I imagine. Unless any of her sister’s descendants want to claim it. Formal burial is an idea, but I’m not sure where.’
‘The local churchyard?’ Russell said.
‘Iona Craig, later McGoogle, is interred there in the family vault,’ Nigel pointed out. ‘If she was involved in Elizabeth’s death, I doubt her victim would want to spend eternity lying beside her.’
‘Bloody right,’ Delphi said warmly. She and Nigel were showing dangerous signs of bonding over this. ‘Maybe we could boot Iona out.’
‘We have to prove she dunnit first,’ I said.
After dinner I hung around, hoping for a chance to talk to Ash, but other people monopolised him and when I did get the opportunity I couldn’t think of a conversation starter. He left without so much as a goodnight, and I found myself thrown together with HG, who wrinkled his eyes at me.
‘Sorry about the row the other night,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean anyone else to get caught in the crossfire. At least you’ve been left out of the publicity. I had someone drop a hint to the press – off the record – about Delphinium and me. Under the circumstances it probably wasn’t necessary, but it doesn’t hurt to give them a nudge.’
‘Did you ask her?’ I said.
‘No.’ He lifted an eyebrow. ‘She’s a bright girl on the make. It can only be good for her image.’
‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘but you should have asked.’ I still liked him – I couldn’t help it – but he had the classic arrogance of the megastar and the slight contempt the ultra-famous feel, not so much for the fan in the street, as for those rather less famous than themselves.
‘In that case, I must apologise,’ he said, with a trace element of irony.
‘Not to me,’ I responded. ‘To Delphi.’
I turned my shoulder and moved away, and it was only on the way up to bed that it occurred to me I’d just snubbed Hot God, one of the biggest rock icons of all time. Would he mind? Would he cancel the show? Would he be amused/offended/disgusted/enraged? I lay awake worrying about it for what seemed like an age.
It was only the next day that I realised from his attitude, which hadn’t changed, that snubs were plainly so rare in his life he hadn’t even noticed it.
Delphinium
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman, whatever her income, is sad, sad, sad. I think it was Jane Austen who said something of the kind, ages ago (people are always quoting it), but although this is the twenty-first century and we’ve emancipated ourselves out of the kitchen and into the office, the studio and the boardroom, it’s still true. To get away with being single you’ve got to be frightfully eccentric, or Germaine Greer, or both. Otherwise, to be thirtysomething and single, no matter how glamorous you are, is just to look as if you can’t get a man. The coolest women are the ones who are married to one husband and then pinch someone else’s before they’ve finished with the first one. It’s the kind of thing that soft-hearted, principled girls, like Roo, would never do, but society doesn’t admire soft hearts and principles. Society admires success – man-grabbing, man-holding success. And the worst of it is, it isn’t the men who are doing the admiring – men like soft-hearted singles: it gives them a better chance of a shag – it’s the other women. It’s women who eye their single girlfriends askance, and talk of them in pitying murmurs, and don’t invite them to dinner parties (unless there’s someone really boring to pair them off with). That’s where all our emancipation has got us. We aren’t in contention with the male sex any more – we’re too busy being our own worst enemies.
Take Tasha Blaggard (known in the trade as Trasha), queen of the crap-show hostesses. I met her once at an awards ceremony. When she wants to put down the competition, the clincher she utters about her rivals is always that they aren’t married. And she’s supposed to be a classic example of successful modern womanhood. Or Princess Di, the ultimate end-of-twentieth-century heroine. She made a career of being single and having unhappy affairs and making everyone sorry for her, but she was married to a prince. If she’d been single and unmarried, no one would have paid any attention.
And now here I was. Single. Totally, devastatingly single. With not even the glimmer of a suitable man on the horizon. Roo was breaking up superstar marriages and being pursued by half the men in the place, and I was going to bed alone, unloved, unlusted-after. I wasn’t jealous of Roo because I love her so much and I want men to pursue and appreciate her, but I couldn’t help minding a bit. I mean, I’d always been the beautiful one with a string of guys in pursuit, and now we’d swapped roles. I minded, and I didn’t like myself for minding. I knew it was nasty and mean-spirited, so the end of it was I felt worse than ever.
And in bed there was no Alex to cuddle up to, which was . . . well, bearable. After all, I had Fenny. And the great thing about Fenny was that I didn’t have to deal with his little moods, or put up with his tiresome friends (vide Darius Fitzlightly), or feel anxious because I wasn’t having sex with him. Of course, he didn’t have a gorgeous mews house, and a high-society profile, and . . . But there was no point in dwelling on all that. The catch was, I’d been madly in love with Alex, we were supposed to be getting married, and now my heart was broken and what I really needed was someone to pick up the pieces and stick them back together again. But this was Dunblair, and though the castle was full of men, there was nobody who fitted my requirements.
Besides, far too many of them were Scottish.
So there we were. The paparazzi were besieging the castle. The press were having a field day. And then, on top of everything else, we found the skeleton.
I knew at once it was Elizabeth Courtney.
Roo was right: even if she’d lived to be old she’d still have died nearly a century ago; but I cared about that, too, really cared, with a sort of sharp angry pain at the thought of her. The pathologists took lots of photographs and then had to bring the skeleton out in pieces because the trapdoor was too small to lift it through intact. They reassembled it on a board like a kind of stretcher before taking it to the laboratory for an autopsy. I was impressed you had to have an autopsy, even after so long. That made it sound as if her murder mattered, even though a hundred and thirty years had gone by: she was still a victim and someone would be held to account for what had been done to her.
I thought the bones would be white, but they were brown, with shrunken brown stuff clinging to them which the woman from forensics said was skin. The dress, too, was brown and papery round the edges, but in places you could see the original pattern, embroidered flowers on a background that might have been cream or white. She was a bride, I thought; it was her bridal gown. It reminded me, spookily, of my own unworn
wedding dress.
Because Elizabeth was lying on her back, her mouth had fallen open – death, apparently, would have slackened her jaw muscles – but it looked horribly like she was screaming. A brownish skull with empty eye sockets and lipless jaws, screaming and screaming in its underground prison . . .
I shivered. Nigel, who was beside me, said, ‘I can see this has really gripped your imagination. That’s great: I’m going to need your input.’
He was being patronising again, but I ignored it. Maybe it was just his unfortunate manner.
‘We have to find out who did this,’ I said.
‘Forensic analysis should give us some idea of the cause of death,’ Nigel offered.
‘They didn’t . . .’ I stammered in sudden horror . . . ‘they didn’t put her in there – alive?’
‘I don’t think so. Her position looked fairly relaxed. If she’d been trapped in there she would have attempted to get out, there would have been indications . . .’
I breathed again. It was bad enough to see that hideous skull, thinking of the woman in the portrait, vital and glowing with the sunset golden on her face. Worse still if she had died in abject terror, struggling to escape her subterranean prison . . .
The police cordoned off that part of the garden and that was really all we could do for the day.
‘Does this sort of thing happen often in garden makeover shows?’ Roo asked me. ‘I mean – what else have you dug up?’
‘We found some coins once,’ I said. ‘Roman, I think. And dead pets. But this is my first human skeleton.’
‘I was beginning to worry,’ said Roo. ‘I’ve worked in the Balkans in the aftermath of war, I’ve been in an earthquake zone, covered inefficiency and corruption in famine relief and checked out an environmental disaster, but I’ve never seen anything as catastrophic as everyday life at Dunblair. To think I was afraid this job would be dull.’
Up yours, Kyle Muldoon, I thought with a tiny flicker of satisfaction. Roo, like me, might still be single, but at least she was having fun.
At dinner, I had my brainwave about giving Elizabeth Christian burial when the forensic archaeologist had finished with her. I thought it was something she would want, something that might help her spirit to find peace after all those years of being shut in a kind of stone coffin in the no-man’s-land of the vanished maze. People used to think Christian burial was important; I know, I’ve seen lots of old movies. Personally, I don’t care about the Christian stuff so much, but I want a huge funeral with lots of celebrities and people crying (and absolutely amazing flowers) but not, of course, for an awfully long time.
Anyway, Roo called Crusty with a progress report and we decided to take the weekend off until we’d got more info on the skeleton. Morty made plans to go away for a couple of days (good), as did Russell, who’d hardly seen his family since we started the series. I felt depressed all over again because I couldn’t fly off to see Alex. I hadn’t even been invited to a glamorous party. Mind you, with my mobile switched off most of the time that wasn’t surprising. It cut out the nagging journos and the drip, drip of sympathy from friends who wanted to hear every detail of my plight, but if there was someone eager to ask me to a wonderful party where I would meet a wonderful guy it cut that out too.
I went up to bed around ten-thirty – far too early, but there wasn’t much night life at Dunblair, unless you counted the ghosts. I thought I was tired – I hadn’t been sleeping too well lately – but in bed I found myself thinking about Elizabeth, and the skeleton, and the whole murder mystery thing, until I was so creeped out that I had to sit up and switch on the light. Basilisa’s horrible décor surrounded me, thankfully minus the devil-mask, but I was so used to it I barely reacted any more. That’s the danger of bad taste. It’s insidious – or do I mean invidious? It sneaks up on you and takes over and in the end you don’t even notice it’s there. Working on a makeover show is a good thing because it’s supposed to be about making the world more beautiful, though I have serious doubts about Laurence Lloodwelling-Boredom. After one or two series these interior people go slightly off the rails, if you ask me.
It was nearly half-eleven now and I couldn’t sleep, so I picked up the phone – Morag answered – and ordered tea. I was more or less prepared for it to arrive with Harry, but he’d been so nice to me lately I wasn’t worrying about it.
Presently, there was a tap on the door and he came in. No tea. Just a tray with several bottles, alcoholic ones, and two brandy bubbles. Two. I was suddenly aware that I ought to be wearing a bedjacket. I’ve never owned a bedjacket in my life, naturally, but I remember my mother having one, a sort of fluffy angora thing which tied across her bosom with pink ribbon. I suspect somebody knitted it for her. Mummy will actually wear the things people knit for her, unfortunately. (First rule of fashion: never, ever wear anything anyone has made for you, no matter how much you care for the person – unless they’re a leading couturier, of course.) Anyway, all I had on was a pair of men’s pyjamas I’d bought for Alex but liked too much to give him, thank heaven. They weren’t indecent, but they were sexy.
And there was the alcohol and two glasses . . .
‘Where’s my tea?’ I demanded.
‘I thought you needed a nightcap,’ Harry said. ‘I recommend the brandy, but I brought Cointreau, Grand Marnier, or Glayva if you’d rather have something sweeter.’
It wasn’t such a bad idea, really. Except for the second glass.
‘What’s Glayva?’ I asked.
‘A Scottish liqueur. Made from whisky and honey.’
‘I’ll stick with brandy.’ I don’t really like it all that much, but those sweet drinks all taste like medicine to me.
Harry poured my drink and one for himself.
‘I didn’t ask you to join me,’ I said tartly.
‘I won’t if you don’t want me to. I thought you might like someone to talk to, that’s all.’
He wasn’t grinning, or being impertinent, or eying up my tits. He had the kind of expression which in a guy with a different type of aura might have passed for sensitive. And he hadn’t mentioned anything about collecting on the second half of the kiss. Perhaps he didn’t fancy me any more, now I was single. Perhaps he was the sort of guy who only fancied women who were fancied by other men, and when they didn’t, he didn’t either. Perhaps no one would ever fancy me again . . .
‘Okay,’ I said.
‘Can I sit down?’
I didn’t want him looming over me.
‘Okay,’ I said again.
He moved Fenny and sat down. On the bed. I’d expected him to pull up a chair and I was disconcerted.
‘You looked pretty unhappy after finding that skeleton today,’ he said gently. ‘Of course, finding a skeleton is distressing for anybody, but you seem to mind a lot about Elizabeth Courtney.’
Suddenly, I was very very wary.
‘You’re being sensitive, aren’t you?’ I accused. ‘You’re deliberately being sensitive. Trying to get under my guard.’
The flicker of a grin returned. ‘Is it working?’
‘No – yes! You’re sitting on my bed and we’re drinking HG’s liquor. How does he feel about that?’
‘He won’t notice as long as I don’t overdo it.’
‘I think it’s a cheek.’
‘Perks of being a butler.’
I didn’t say he was a fraud. I’d done that one to death. I took a mouthful of the brandy and it slithered gently down my throat, evaporating into heat somewhere beneath my ribs. ‘Well, all right then,’ I conceded, though I wasn’t sure what I was conceding. ‘But I want you to know that I know . . .’
‘You know what?’
‘What you’re up to.’ Whatever that was. ‘You’ve been incredibly kind to me lately, but I know it’s just a sneaky attempt to . . . to . . . Look, I’m not going to start saying you’re my rock or anything like that, okay?’
Harry grimaced. ‘I have no desire to be anyone’s rock, thank you. I don’t do
rock. I’m not your butler, anyway. I wouldn’t be your butler if it was the last job in the world and you were offering me a six-figure salary.’
‘Why not?’ I said indignantly.
‘Because it’s against the Secret Code of Butlers to make a pass at your employer.’
‘Are you making a pass?’ I demanded, wanting clarity.
‘In a minute. Don’t rush me.’ He polished off his drink in one long swallow.
‘In a minute?’
‘You’re a believer in instant gratification, aren’t you?’ He took the glass from my unresisting hand and set it down on the table. ‘When you want something, you want it now.’
Belatedly, I tried to summon up some coolth. Failed. ‘If what you’re after is the half-kiss I owe you . . .’
‘I was going to start with that.’
And then he was kissing me, really thorough kissing, deep and hungry – his tongue in my mouth, his hand on my breast – sliding under my pyjama top, cupping the curve of my flesh, massaging my nipple between finger and thumb. His touch sent a lance of feeling right down between my legs and I was melting again, my whole body melting, dissolving towards a single knot of exquisite tension. The spot marked X . . .
I was in serious trouble. I was on a bobsleigh-ride careering downhill to destruction – but I didn’t care.
Then Harry drew back and started pulling off his clothes. He was much bigger than Alex, not taller but bigger, probably a few pounds overweight, with rolling muscles and sandy hair on his arms and a diamond-shaped patch of hair beneath his pecs. Alex had been slim and willowy, with slim willowy muscles, hairless as a baby, always lightly tanned from the aftermath of some expensive holiday. Harry looked as if tans were for wimps who had nothing better to do with their time. His skin was skin-coloured, his body big – big was the word that got stuck in my head – big and powerful and intensely masculine.
‘I can’t . . .’ I began. ‘I mean, I won’t . . .’
He was unzipping his fly; his boxers bulged with more bigness. Then he had kicked off both trousers and pants.