Kissing Toads

by Jemma Harvey

  As an afterthought, or so it seemed, he added the part that really chilled me.

  ‘Don’t mention you’ve seen us, will you? We’d like to give him a surprise.’

  Chapter 11:

  Laying the Ghosts

  Delphinium

  With my chaperone out, I retreated to my room to watch TV and paint my toenails. I usually have a pedicurist, but when I’m uptight I find it therapeutic to do it myself. I should have locked the door, but that seemed needlessly paranoid. Harry knocked and came in, uninvited, when I was halfway through my right foot.

  ‘I didn’t ring,’ I said. ‘You’re not supposed to be here.’

  I was determined to keep my cool, although I had a sneaking suspicion my subconscious had left the door unlocked, for reasons too disturbing to think about.

  ‘I thought we should talk,’ he said.

  ‘We have nothing to talk about. And I didn’t say you could sit on my bed!’

  ‘I didn’t ask permission.’ He sighed – not a wistful sigh, more like exasperation. ‘Come down off your high horse for a minute, will you?’

  I didn’t deign to answer. When I had finished applying gold spangles on to a base-coat of rosy bronze I sat back to admire the effect.

  ‘Very pretty,’ Harry said. ‘Fortunately, I’m not a foot fetishist. In fact, your feet are the only part of your anatomy I can look at without getting a hard-on.’

  ‘What’s wrong with my feet?’ I demanded with a show of indignation.

  But Harry wasn’t fooled. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘They round off your ankles very nicely. But I’m more interested in what’s at the other end of your legs.’

  Damn. I’d walked into that one and I knew it, but I realised I didn’t much care. If you allow a breach in your defences, even for just one night, you know the enemy is going to get through again sooner or later, whatever you do. It was a dull afternoon; it would pass the time. I might as well surrender to superior force . . .

  (This was your fault, Roo. You should never have abandoned me.)

  Harry bent over and kissed my cheek, the tip of my nose, my lips, brushed my nipple very lightly with his finger. It stiffened in response so that the lace of my bra chafed against it. Then he took my hand and carried it to his crotch, where there was already a pronounced bulge. And suddenly I wanted him in my mouth, all the bigness and the hardness of him – I wanted the power and control that you can only get with fellatio – I wanted him gasping and groaning and helpless with pleasure. The want went down between my legs with a stabbing sensation so sharp it almost hurt. Harry undid his zip and I pulled down the front of his boxers and began to suck. Happily, I’m good at multitasking. I could concentrate on sucking his dick and the growing tension in my X-spot and still remember to keep my feet off the bed so I didn’t smudge my newly-applied varnish.

  After a while I forgot all about that, but by then my gold spangles were dry.

  Thank God for quick-drying nail polish.

  ‘You said you wanted to talk,’ I reminded him some time later. ‘Or was that just an excuse?’

  ‘No. There are things I need to— Bugger.’ On the bedside table his mobile was ringing. He answered it, said ‘yes’ a couple of times and ‘With you in a few minutes’, and hung up. ‘Sorry, I have to go. Technically, I’m working. I’ll come back tonight . . . if you like.’

  ‘If I don’t like,’ I said, ‘you’ll come anyway, right?’

  ‘D’you want to be sure of that before you say no?’

  I was silent, trying to find an answer that would be both witty and scathing, but would also carry the underlying message that I might not object if he were to force his attentions on me again. I was still groping for the right words when Harry gave me a quick kiss, tugged on his sweatshirt and left, with a final murmur of ‘See you later’.

  I got dressed again rather more slowly and went downstairs, feeling relaxed, or restored, or resigned – or a comfortable mixture of all three. So I was into rough trade. What the hell.

  In the entrance hall I ran into HG.

  ‘Tell me,’ I said, remembering something I’d been meaning to ask, ‘who moved that picture?’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘The portrait of Elizabeth Courtney. It used to hang more to the right, but it’s been moved. Now, in the late afternoon the sun falls straight on it.’

  ‘I don’t think anyone moved it,’ HG said. ‘Surely it was always there.’

  ‘No – I noticed particularly. I’ve looked at it lots of times.’

  ‘You must be mistaken,’ HG assured me. ‘No one would move it without my permission. Anyway, it’s too difficult to reach.’

  He continued on upstairs and I stood staring at the picture, certain I was right. I was still there when Roo and Ash came back.

  I said, ‘Hi,’ exuding relaxability and giving Fenny a hug, but Roo didn’t respond.

  ‘Where’s Harry?’

  I went slightly pink – I could feel it – but neither of them seemed to notice. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘We need a word with him,’ Roo explained.

  In the drawing room, she picked up the in-house phone and called him.

  ‘What’s happened?’ I asked. ‘You look worried.’

  ‘A bit,’ Roo said. ‘I’ll tell you when . . . Harry!’

  ‘What’s the problem?’ Harry came in, flicking me a quick glance. I felt instantly warm all over, which was ridiculous – he was having the most devastating physical effect on me, and he wasn’t even really good-looking.

  ‘There are these three men staying in the village,’ Roo began. ‘Dirk’s sinister strangers. We saw them in the pub. They’re not journalists – we didn’t like the look of them at all.’

  ‘I don’t like the look of journalists,’ I remarked.

  ‘This lot look more like thugs,’ Ash said. ‘The worst kind.’

  ‘One of them smarmed up to us,’ Roo said, ‘only he wasn’t smarmy. It was like watching someone smarm who’s read about it and knows what to do but doesn’t . . . doesn’t smarm from the heart.’

  ‘Can you smarm from the heart?’ Harry speculated.

  ‘The thing is,’ Roo said, ‘he asked for you.’

  Suddenly, Harry went absolutely quiet.

  ‘Dirk told us the other two called him Attila,’ Ash said. ‘He didn’t have the tache, but I’m afraid it suited him.’

  ‘He had a suit,’ Roo added, ‘but that didn’t suit him.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I said. My warm feeling had been replaced by a sort of coldness, not exactly fear but the chill that comes when fear is on its way.

  Harry said: ‘Fuck,’ and then, ‘Did he say how they knew I was here?’

  ‘They saw your picture in the paper after our search party the other night,’ Ash explained.

  ‘The Attila guy said not to tell you he’d asked about you,’ Roo went on. ‘He said he wanted to give you a surprise.’

  ‘I’ll bet he did.’ Harry’s face had a kind of tight, closed-in look which I’d never seen before.

  ‘Are you in trouble?’ Roo asked.

  ‘You could say so.’ He gazed directly at me. ‘I didn’t want you to find out like this,’ he said. ‘I wanted to tell you in my own time. I was going to earlier on, but I got . . . distracted.’

  ‘Tell me what?’ I said in a voice that came out small and scared, like a child. Had I been cheated again? had I been gullible and stupid twice in one week? Had I been fooled by the butler? Only somehow that part didn’t matter. All that mattered was the look on Harry’s face.

  ‘You were right,’ he said. ‘I’m not a real butler.’

  I couldn’t speak. I just stared at him.

  ‘But,’ Roo said, ‘but . . . how could you get this job? How could you do this job? For months and months . . . with nobody guessing?’

  ‘Jim Winkworth is an old friend,’ Harry said, still looking at me. ‘I’ve stayed with him and Carrie when he was working for Gordon Chisholm. I wanted to learn about
the job – it’s unusual, and I’m naturally curious. All the same, I couldn’t have got away with it if the regime here hadn’t been so laid-back.’

  ‘Carrie?’ I said, latching on to irrelevancies.

  ‘Jim’s wife.’

  The house in Kensington, the wife and kids . . .

  ‘But why?’ Roo said. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I needed a cover,’ Harry said. ‘A place to hide out. Jim had two jobs on offer – this one, and one in the States through an international agency. He was going for California – better climate than Scotland – so I took this one. On paper, I fit his description: similar height, similar colouring, no distinguishing features. It was almost a joke at first – I never thought I’d get away with it – but I suppose I got to like it, and no one found me out, so I stayed on. I knew getting sucked into your PR opportunity was a mistake.’ He gave me a faint shadow of his normal grin.

  ‘Why did you need a cover?’ Roo persisted. ‘What’s your real job?’

  Ash was frowning slightly as if struck by a new idea. ‘He’s a journalist,’ he said. ‘Aren’t you?’

  Harry nodded.

  ‘No,’ I whispered. Suddenly, shagging the butler was fine – the butler, the plumber, a leather-clad courier with throbbing motorbike. Anything but a journalist.

  ‘Sorry,’ Harry said. ‘I was going to tell you.’

  Roo had turned to Ash. ‘How did you . . . ?’

  ‘Attila 33,’ Ash said. ‘That’s who that guy was. It’s only just hit me.’

  ‘Attila 33 . . .’ Roo seemed to be chasing an obscure recollection.

  ‘They’re a far-right neo-Nazi group,’ Ash explained. ‘Named after the Hun, obviously, and . . . 1933 was when Hitler came to power, I think. Someone went undercover to investigate them, managed to join up – a year or two ago. There was an exposé, in the Independent as far as I recall. A couple of them were tried for murder – beating an Asian student to death. The journalist was a witness for the prosecution. He had them talking about it on tape.’ He looked at Harry.

  ‘Yep,’ Harry said.

  ‘The leader got off on a technicality. He’s the one they call Attila. I’d forgotten – it’s only just come back to me.’

  ‘He had a good lawyer,’ Harry said. ‘Expensive. A lot of important people support these groups on the quiet.’

  ‘And then?’ Roo prompted.

  ‘He said they’d get me. The police offered me some sort of witness protection scheme, but I didn’t fancy it. I preferred to look out for myself. This –’ he glanced round, shrugged – ‘seemed like a good idea at the time.’

  ‘Were you planning to do an undercover exposé on me?’ HG was standing in the hall doorway. He must have been there a little while, but we hadn’t noticed.

  ‘Probably,’ Harry said bluntly. ‘It’s not really my thing, but at least it meant I was still doing my job.’

  ‘I read your piece in the Indy,’ Ash said. ‘They ran it over three or four days, didn’t they? It was very good.’

  ‘Peak of my career,’ said Harry. ‘Unfortunately, it nearly finished me too. In more ways than one.’

  ‘That isn’t my problem,’ HG said. ‘You can leave now. Give me a forwarding address and I’ll see to it you get your final pay cheque. I guess you’ve earned it.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Before you write your story, I should warn you I’ll be consulting my lawyers. Journalist or not, when you came to work for me you signed a confidentiality agreement that guaranteed your loyalty and discretion—’

  ‘Oh, shut up,’ I said. Suddenly, HG didn’t look like an icon any more, just an ordinary small-minded egoist who thought the world revolved around him. ‘This isn’t about you. I may be only a B-list celeb, but I’m the one who spent last night and . . . and part of this afternoon shagging him, and that’s a much better story than anything he’s got on you, so I’m first in the queue for injunctions and so on. If I’m not mad, why should you be?’

  ‘You were the only one who suspected me,’ Harry said. His face had lightened at my outburst. ‘I took the piss, but you gave me a few bad moments.’

  ‘I searched your room,’ I said. ‘I knew it was fishy there was no personal stuff – no family photos or anything – and your laptop was locked away. Nobody locks up their laptop unless they’ve got something to hide. I even had someone check out your London address.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Harry said appreciatively. ‘You’re in the wrong job. Have mine.’

  I caught a glimpse of HG’s face, which wore an expression that combined anger, intrigue and reluctant amusement. When you’ve got that many lines, you can do several expressions at once. But I wasn’t worrying about him just then.

  ‘These people,’ I said, ‘are they . . . would they try to kill you?’

  ‘Possibly. Attila dropped a hint to that effect when he left court.’

  I stared at him. TV is a cut-throat business, but people don’t actually kill each other, though they’ve been known to tear up contracts, sue, throw the occasional punch, and even bite colleagues in the jugular. But a world where people threatened to kill you, and meant it, was outside my experience.

  Until now.

  ‘We’ll call the police,’ I said.

  ‘You’ll have a long wait,’ said HG. ‘They took at least an hour after we reported finding the skeleton.’

  ‘I’ll have to get out,’ Harry said. ‘It means driving through the village, but with luck they’ll miss me.’

  ‘Was that in one of my cars?’ HG drawled.

  At that point, I lost my temper completely. ‘You selfish bastard! You want to talk about loyalty: where’s yours? Harry hasn’t just been your butler, he’s been your friend. He’s worked for you and put up with you and . . . and stood by you, and now his life is in danger, and all you can think about is whether he might just write a few words about you in one of the papers! You’ve had thousands – probably millions – of words written about you in the last four decades: what difference would a few more make? Anyway, you won’t have to lend him one of your fleet of cars because we’re going to call the police and he’s going to stay here till they come. It’s much too risky for him to leave – that’s what this Attila lot will be expecting. If the paparazzi can’t get past Jules and Sandy, then I’m sure those neo-Nazi thugs won’t manage it. And,’ I added, as HG opened his mouth to speak, ‘you can cancel the series or demand that I’m fired or whatever – I don’t care! Do your worst! I’m standing by Harry, and so’s Roo, and Ash, and—’

  ‘Calm down,’ HG said. ‘Stop turning me into the villain of the piece. I just don’t like my help being taken for granted. Of course Harry must stay until the police come. Has anyone called them?’

  ‘I’m on it,’ Roo said, telephone in hand.

  There followed a confused half-hour while Roo tried to convey to the Law the urgency of the situation, Harry went to his room to pack, HG took over on the blower to get past reception and make high-handed demands to speak to superior officers, and beyond the windows the summer sun drew the moisture out of the ground, congealing it into a thick white mist which turned the world to a blank and hid even the loch from view.

  Harry had just returned when there was a disturbance in the entrance hall – a door slamming, hasty footsteps – and Sandy walked in. In his arms was the limp bulk of one of the dogs, its cream-coloured fur damp from the mist, its head resting in the hollow of his shoulder. There was blood on Sandy’s chest, more blood on the dog. Lots of blood.

  ‘Boss,’ he said, ‘they got him. They got Elton. I didn’t think no journo would do that. They came over the wall – three of ’em. I saw one bloke raise his arm . . . He must’ve had a cosh or something. He’s dead, boss. Elton’s dead.’ His voice was hoarse and I could have sworn there were tears on his cheek.

  For a minute, no one said anything. This brought the violence home to us – all the way home. And Elton had been so beautiful, so gallant and brave . . .

  ‘
It wasn’t a journalist,’ Ash said.

  HG was bent over the dog, stroking its fur. ‘This them?’ he asked Harry.

  ‘Sounds like it,’ Harry said. ‘Look, I’d better go. I’m just bringing trouble on everyone else.’

  ‘No way.’ I said it first, but the others followed suit. Even HG. ‘This is a castle. You –’ I turned to the boss – ‘you said it yourself. We can withstand a siege. We’ve got more weapons than paint guns. There are shotguns in the gun room, and the claymore in the old hall, and some pikes, and Cedric has a couple of old-fashioned spits in the kitchen. We’ll fight. There are only three of them. They won’t get past us.’

  Everyone was staring at me in a mixture of astonishment and horror – everyone except Harry. He had a look on his face that was both rueful and surprised, with a trace of something else I couldn’t describe.

  ‘You know, Dacres,’ he said, ‘you may only be a C-list celeb, but you’re an A-list human being.’

  ‘I’m a B-list celeb!’ I retorted on a reflex.

  ‘I think . . . no shotguns,’ HG said. ‘I don’t really want to cap my career by being sent to prison for murder. However . . .’

  Sandy put the body of the dog carefully on the floor. ‘Who are these blokes,’ he demanded, ‘if they’re not journos?’

  ‘Attila 33,’ said Roo. ‘Neo-Nasties. It’s a long story, but they’re after Harry.’

  ‘We’ll get them,’ Sandy said grimly. ‘Jules and Sting are still searching the grounds. I better warn him.’ He strode back through the entrance hall and out into the fog.

  ‘Could they just walk in here?’ I wanted to know. Harry nodded. ‘How many entrances does this place have?’

  ‘Too many,’ Harry said. ‘The front door, the door from the kitchen – the garden door from HG’s private sitting room, the cellar door. Not to mention the lower windows.’

  ‘We need to make a stand somewhere,’ I declared. ‘The old hall. That’s where the weapons are.’

  HG said, ‘I’m not happy with the idea of weapons—’