by Daisy Waugh
Too late. They had arrived at Africa Folly at last. He was quite relieved, now, that she hadn’t been listening. It had been most inappropriate of him to be discussing it at all…
‘Right then!’ he said, pulling up. ‘Heart to heart over, you’ll be relieved to hear. Let’s get this stuff unloaded shall we? And I’ll pop back to fetch Mrs Carfizzi and the lunch. Alice I really cannot thank you enough for giving up your time…’
CHAPTER 47
India visited the gift shop first, and helped herself to another box of chocolates, similar to the ones she had left for him the previous night, and while Mrs Carfizzi was busy in the kitchen, preparing the lunch that would be taken up to the Folly, she slipped into the pantry to pick up a set of keys, tiptoed down the back stairs and softly, softly let herself into the basement flat.
It was the first time she had been inside the Carfizzi residence, and she was astounded by its luxury: though humble in proportions, and with a view looking directly onto a wall, the little sitting room might have been the plushest in the entire house.
India was not an excessively educated woman. On leaving school, she’d attended an art foundation course in London and then a history of art course in Florence. She wasn’t a reader, and didn’t care for politics. Maths had never been her thing, and she’d been given a special dispensation from studying sciences because her mother told the school they made India’s brain ache. But that didn’t mean she was stupid. And it certainly didn’t stop her from recognising top quality Italian design when she saw it. In all its smoked glass, leather and gilt, the place looked like a Versace Home show room.
As she stood there with her chocolates, wondering which of the three doors before her would lead to Carfizzi’s sickroom, she calculated the value of what was laid out before her. There was no way they could have created a room like this from what the Tode Estates paid them. It must have cost her caretaker and his wife a minimum of £200,000 to decorate the place to this standard.
‘Thieving bastards!’ she muttered gleefully.
She found Carfizzi’s bedroom behind the second door she opened. Even plusher than the sitting room, it was clad from floor to ceiling in dark brown leather and dominated by a bed shaped like a giant gilt-winged swan. She found Carfizzi sleeping peacefully, his bald head nestling between the swan’s withers, amid an overpowering smell of high quality leather, mustard and vomit. Above him soared the arch of the swan’s golden neck. On either side of him, on the matching tables, were two plastic bowls, brimming with bright yellow sick.
‘Oh my God, Carfizzi!’ India burst out laughing.
He woke up with a jolt. Glimpsed her, looming above him.
‘You look a bit peely-wally, as they say in Scotland. What’s up?’ She indicated the two bowls, and sniffed. ‘Is that what I think it is?’
He groaned, and turned away.
‘Don’t turn away!’ she said. She sat on the edge of the bed. ‘Look at me, Carfizzi.’ He didn’t. ‘Look at me,’ she said again.
Slowly, he turned to face her. He looked sick and afraid. After a while, India smiled. She waved the chocolate box under his nose. ‘I brought you chocolates,’ she said. ‘I know how much you like them. But perhaps this isn’t the moment?’
‘Take them away!’ he said.
‘Certainly not!’ she replied. ‘Don’t be silly! You’ll love them when you’re better. I’ll put them here, by the sick bowl, all right? And then you can gobble them all up the moment you feel better!’
He groaned and again turned his head away.
‘Please look at me, Mr Carfizzi,’ she said politely. ‘We need to talk… Seriously… I’m deadly serious, Carfizzi. We can’t carry on like this. We need to sort out a better way of working together.’
‘You poisoned me,’ he whispered. ‘You tried to k—’ But it was too much for him. He began to gag on the word. India had to wait while he reached for the bowl beside the chocolates, and coughed and spluttered and emptied what stringy mucus remained in his stomach. He wiped his mouth. Put the bowl back. ‘You tried to kill me,’ he said.
India laughed. ‘God, you’re such a drama queen! Of course I didn’t try to “kill” you! It was a joke. J-O-K-E, geddit? I just got a teeny bit fed up with you sending me hate vibes, day after day after day. Can you blame me? So finally I thought, why not? I might as well actually do something to deserve it!’
He stared at her. ‘You think I’m stupid,’ he said. ‘But I know. I know all about it, India. Dominic told me.’
A long pause.
‘What did Dominic tell you?’ she asked at last.
Carfizzi started crying. ‘You disgust me. Get out of my home. Get out or I will call the police.’
India stood up. She bent over the bed, so that their faces were only centimetres apart. The smell of vomit on his breath would, normally, have been enough to make her recoil, but at that instant, her anger superseded everything.
She detested him, the sight of him, the smell of his breath. Above all, she hated how much he hated her. Egbert was right. She liked to think she could cope with almost anything in life. But she could not cope with dislike. It was Carfizzi’s rejection of her; the look of disdain on his face that made her want to squeeze the life out of him. Her two hands hovered, just above his throat. He stared at them. He whimpered – and it broke the spell. The helplessness of the sound made her laugh. She took his nose between finger and thumb and pinched as hard as she could.
Mr Carfizzi yelped in pain.
She released it, and headed for the exit.
‘You hurry and get well now, Mr Carfizzi,’ she called back to him from the sitting room, in quite a different voice. ‘Poor Mrs Carfizzi is worried sick about you!’ She pulled back the door that opened into the main house, and stepped slap into Mad Ecgbert.
‘India!’
‘Oh. Hello Ecgbert.’
‘We have to talk. I have something of the utmost urgency—’
‘I thought you’d gone to Todeister with Egg?’
‘I’m going in a sec. Just one sec. Mrs Carfizzi has ordered me a cab but I needed to speak to you first. I wanted to discuss it with Carfizzi but now I’ve found you obviously I should tell you, instead. I’ve already spoken to Mellors…’
‘Mellors?’ she said vaguely.
‘It’s spectacularly important-—’
India grasped both his shoulders and gave them an affectionate shake. Warmly, she smiled up into his wild (but handsome) face. ‘Not now, Ecgbert,’ she said.
‘What? No, wait! India, I’m serious. I’ve got emails. Off Ma’s computer. I’ve got evidence.’ He waved something in her face – a piece of plastic. A memory stick. ‘I just need to print them out. That’s all.’
The smile died. In a flash she had snatched the memory stick and shoved it into her jeans pocket.
‘Hey! Give that back!’
‘No.’
‘Give it back!’
‘Nobody cares, you crazy fuck,’ she said. ‘Can’t you get that into your stupid skull? Nobody cares about your horrible mother. Just – do us all a favour. Just this once. Shut the fuck up, and go home.’
He stepped back, shell shocked, and she swept past.
He didn’t follow her. If she wouldn’t speak to him, he would speak to Carfizzi. Fine. After that, he would take the taxi that was waiting for him and head home. There was a back-up memory stick on his bedside table. Actually there were about ten of them. Not to mention a back-up portable hard drive. And a printer too of course. He would print out the salient messages – several times, to be sure that everyone got to see them. And then he’d come back to the Hall and explain to the assembled company – a bit like Hercule Poirot – who killed his mother. India couldn’t silence him so easily. Certainly not. He chuckled.
‘Crazy bitch,’ he muttered. ‘You’re the crazy one.’
India shouted back at him: ‘I heard that!’
‘Yeah, you were meant to,’ he replied (nervously). It wasn’t true.
CHAPTER 48
Most of the guests skipped breakfast altogether. Just after noon, the small English actor whose name no one could remember, and his anorexic heiress girlfriend, Poppy Rockefeller, slopped into the dining room together. They sat side by side at the table, sipped coffee, and sent silent hate vibes to one another, to the world, and above all, to Hamish who, two hours and twenty minutes after he’d first sat down to breakfast, was still at his place at the table, munching his way through the controversial kedgeree.
Poppy Rockefeller lit a cigarette and asked if her small actor boyfriend couldn’t organise for someone to remove the smell of kedgeree from around her nostrils.
He said he couldn’t.
Hamish munched on.
India breezed in. She was annoyed by the sight of them all, sitting there relaxing, when the morning was going so badly for her, and immediately rang the bell for Mrs Carfizzi to come in and clear. She told them breakfast was over, and that the important challenge at this point was to get the rest of the guests out of bed in time for lunch.
‘It’s an early lunch,’ India said, ‘because I’m sure you’ll all be wanting to head back to town before the afternoon rush. In my experience,’ she added, ‘you’re best setting off not much later than three p.m. That way you’ll avoid the Sunday night tailbacks. So…’ India glanced at the skinny heiress, and realised she couldn’t remember her name, either. It was awkward. ‘I’ll see you all up at the Folly. And I warn you – it’s a good fifteen-minute walk.’
The small actor muttered something surly under his breath.
India beamed at him. Sunlight and roses. ‘But I absolutely promise you it’ll be worth it! It’s a wonderful view. Plus this Yorkshire air is very good for hangovers.’
She breezed back out into the hall again, bored with the dining room and feeling very unhappy, really, about the way the weekend was unfolding. Not at all as she’d planned. She was bored with her guests and couldn’t wait for them to leave. She couldn’t stand the sight of Hamish, with his stupid bruised face, and she hated Dominic, who – so far as she could see – was indirectly responsible for everything. The whole debacle. She’d only dreamed up the stupid weekend in the first place as a way to help him relaunch his useless career… This was how he thought he could repay her. No.
She was saved from any more brooding by the vision of handsome Oliver Mellors, looking quite angry, and advancing on her with an envelope. His appearance confused her: he didn’t normally come into the house, and he never normally looked angry. Then she remembered – in all the upheaval last night, they had abandoned the murder mystery walkabout. She’d completely forgotten about him, playing dead, in the Lady Laverty Suite.
‘Mellors!’ she cried. ‘We never found the corpse! Oh my God, I am so sorry!… What did you do?’
He brushed aside that question. His corpse-like slumber had been interrupted at 4 a.m. by James O’Shea, the bearded talkshow host, and his girlfriend the American-born magazine editor, stumbling into their bed. What the three of them did next was none of his boss’s business.
However the letter he was carrying, most definitely was.
‘I’ve been trying to give this to your husband since yesterday,’ he said. ‘But I can’t find him. I’m tired and I want to go home.’ He shoved it into her hand. ‘Lady Tode gave it me before she died. I forgot about it, ’til I saw it peeping out the secret pocket yesterday.’
‘Peeping out the secret pocket, Mellors? Not sure I fully comprendi…’
‘Well it doesn’t matter, does it?’ he said shortly. ‘You’ve got it now, haven’t you? Safely received. Do what you like with it. It’s not my problem.’
Emma Tode had always been giving him things: little treasures that he generally soon lost; boring little cards and newspaper cuttings that she thought he might find interesting. He often didn’t bother to look at them. This one had fallen out of the lining of his hat yesterday morning (a place he often put annoying paperwork). He thought, having finally opened it and read it through, that he should pass it on before the inquest. Just in case anyone decided it was important. Now that he’d finally delivered it he could go home and watch Game of Thrones with his wife. He left India standing by the fireplace with the envelope in her hands. She could throw it in the fire, for all he cared. He had done his bit.
She didn’t throw it in the fire. She opened and read it – of course – and then she read it a second time, to reconfirm her initial and every following impression. Emma Tode had been an unusually nasty woman. She deserved everything she got.
India laughed. An unusually nasty laugh. Now she only needed to find Dominic.
CHAPTER 49
One-twenty p.m. at the Africa Folly. Blustering wind, dark clouds, drizzling, miserable rain. A hell of a lot of low level disgruntlement in the air. And still only half the guests had turned up.
Alice and James O’Shea the talkshow host found themselves standing opposite one another while they were waiting for more people to arrive for lunch. Alice offered him a bland smile/grimace at the general state of affairs.
‘Bit chaotic, isn’t it?’ she said.
He replied: ‘I’m not actually clear. Are you guest or staff?’
‘Staff,’ Alice said.
‘Oh, right.’ Mr O’Shea believed passionately in equality, diversity, fairness, tolerance etc, and ‘had a lot of time’ for gender fluidity… but he hadn’t come to Tode Hall to talk to a middle-aged housekeeper/secretary or whatever the hell she was. Not with a hangover. He turned away.
At this point it struck Alice, quite forcefully, how little she would be missed if she sidled off home… It was a Sunday, after all. She’d already helped to lay up the table. And what with the face cream developments, she had a lot to think about. It seemed pointless to hang around.
She muttered something about a headache to Egbert, who was excessively sympathetic, and headed home.
* * *
‘Ah. Excellent,’ declared Geraldine when she saw Alice trudging through the door so much earlier than expected. ‘Where were we? Sit down, Alice, dear. We have so much to discuss. But first things first. We really do need to deal with Dominic Rathbone’s soi-disant “evidence” as it were. If you won’t throw it in the river, the least you could do is put it in the bin.’
Alice said (she was in a foul mood): ‘I’m not throwing anything in the bin if it’s evidence of a murder.’
* * *
By 1.45 p.m., lunch was shrivelling in the gas-powered warming trolley and tempers in the Folly were fraying. Having been dragged from their beds and forbidden any breakfast, the guests were hanging around in clothes that didn’t keep out the Yorkshire cold, feeling hard done by and hungover. The poshness novelty of staying in such a massive house had worn off, and they longed to be home in their luxurious, centrally heated metro-pads. They weren’t even being allowed to start lunch because neither India nor Hamish were yet present, and Egbert didn’t want to start without them.
He wandered outside briefly, to escape everyone. His children didn’t notice him leave, and didn’t follow, so he stood for a while and allowed himself to breathe the lovely air. It was a rare moment of solitude in his busy, dutiful life, and he tried to enjoy it. The view to the house was spectacular from here. What a fine house it is, he thought. He thought of his wife: his beautiful, lovely wife, and he felt a short stab of confusing sadness.
The fishing leases in the North Lake needed updating. There should be a waiver added to the contracts, to protect the estate against people drowning… His mind wandered back to his beautiful, lovely wife, and he felt a short stab of confusing sadness.
The loose paving outside the Old Stable Yard needed seeing to before some idiot tripped over and sued—Where the fucking hell was India? Where was that rat, Hamish? And Dominic? Where were they? Where was Dominic? Egbert felt a short stab of confusing rage, and quickly turned his mind to other matters. A meeting with the traffic chap at Todeister town council on Monday, after the inquest, to discuss the possibilit
y of shuttle buses. Could he get rid of Dominic? Could he fire him? He’d like to kill him, frankly. But firing him might be easier. Or it might not, actually. In this day and age. Impossible to fire anyone these days.
There was a car from Todeister Minicabs making its way up the drive. Egbert saw it and thought: Oh God, not Ecgbert again! Was he back already?
Tourists weren’t allowed to bring vehicles onto that part of the drive. They had to park by the Old Stable Yard, and could only enter the grounds via the courtyard with its loose paving and many retail opportunities… Which meant that whoever it was in the minicab had some sort of dispensation or family pass. Where the bloody hell was India? Why wasn’t she answering her phone?
The guests were fed up. So were the children. So was he, frankly. Perhaps they should just start lunch without her?
Except she might be furious.
Also – what if that really was Mad Ecgbert coming back up the drive? Egbert couldn’t very well leave him to roam about the house without supervision, and Carfizzi, normally so good at dealing with him, had chosen this weekend – of all weekends! – to pull a sickie.
Egbert imagined the worst. These days that was all he ever tended to do. What if the burglar alarms weren’t switched on properly? What if the insurance on the farm vehicles had accidentally been allowed to lapse? What if a tourist accidentally toppled onto a Gainsborough and ripped the canvas? What if the Socialists got in?
More to the point: what if Mad Ecgbert, seeing he had the run of the house, started taking pictures off the walls and loading them into his minicab? What if Mad Ecgbert, seeing he had the run of the house, literally decided to establish squatters rights, and move in? What if, even as Egbert stood there, admiring the view, his mad cousin was moving into his dressing room, his bathroom, his bedroom; literally, at that instant, and still with his shoes on, climbing into his marital bed? It was more than a bit much. It was much, much, much too much.