by Wendy Holden
There was a startled silence from the other end. ‘But that’ll cost a fortune,’ South’n Fried said, eventually.
But there was no resisting the onrushing steamroller of Lulu’s iron will. Many diamonds glittered as she waved a breezy hand. ‘Have fortune. Have several fortunes. Buy estate will boost to career and hairlining Hazy Purple festival.’
‘Headlining, not hairlining,’ sighed South’n Fried. It was obvious to Laura he was less than keen to be a laird, and she could imagine why. The north-west Highlands, while big on scenery, were probably limited when it came to high-end trainer outlets. ‘But babe, I don’t have time to go house-hunting. I’m in the studio twenty-five hours a day, man.’
Lulu beamed. ‘Is okay. Vlad and me, we do it for you. Go in Skye, wherever.’
‘Take the chopper, you mean?’ Her husband sounded confused.
Laura crossed her fingers. Better and better. Lulu’s pink helicopter with its luxurious designer interior would get them there as comfortably as the car, and in about a tenth of the time. She would, Laura told herself sternly, just have to overcome her fear of flying, that was all.
‘Skye is island,’ Lulu was explaining to her husband. ‘Misty Isle of Skye. Like Love Island, but everyone wear tweed and kilts, not cutaway bikinis.’
An unconvinced silence emanated from South’n Fried’s end. Remembering that he was actually quite keen on revealing swimwear, Lulu tried another tack. ‘Listen, lapotchka. You know Laura writing big bang on Scotland?’
‘Big splash,’ Laura corrected loudly.
Lulu’s mass of blonde hair swirled in agreement as she nodded. ‘Her magazine very hop.’
‘Hip,’ Laura put in hastily. It was not quite the word she would use. But Society was definitely influential and had a large following among the rich, famous, aristocratic and well-connected. Which had to be worth something, even if Bev Sweet didn’t think so.
‘Once Laura write about Scottish estates, George and Amal Clooney, Mark Zuckerberg, Jean-Claude Juncker, they will all be up-hoovering castles soon, hmm?’
‘I didn’t know Amal Clooney hoovered,’ said South’n Fried, suddenly sounding more interested.
‘We need snap down bargains. Get on act first,’ Lulu insisted.
‘We sure do,’ agreed her husband who, Laura suspected, could now think of nothing but the leggy human rights lawyer fearlessly busting dust. ‘Baby! Count me in!’
PART TWO
Chapter Eleven
Roddy Ruane stared blearily out of his window over the rooftops of old Edinburgh. Things had never been this bad.
Wrack and Ruane had once been estate agents to the gentry. But increasingly, these days, they were estate agents for the gentry, which was not at all the same thing.
Aristocrats left, right and centre (well, usually right and very occasionally centre) were queuing up to offload their ancestral homes. No one could afford to keep them up any more.
Roddy had literally hundreds of castles to sell now, ranging from medieval wrecks in the Hebrides to Strawberry Hill Gothic outside Edinburgh. He’d managed to dump a few of them on rich Arabs and oligarchs, although the latter were desperately thin on the ground these days.
Things were getting so bad he was even contemplating advertising; something Wrack and Ruane had never had to stoop to before. Their century-old reputation had rested on word of mouth. But the mouths these days were less charitable owing to the paucity of sales achieved. It wasn’t his fault, Roddy reflected bitterly, that there were more castles than there were customers.
Be that as it may, a glossy magazine called Society was offering very favourable rates. None of which Roddy intended to take them up on. They were clearly desperate, possibly on the verge of collapse, and he had no intention of throwing good money after bad.
However, he was very happy to take them up on the offered free feature about Glenravish, a castle that had been on his books for some time. The magazine’s editor was coming to see him about it this afternoon. To get some background, the ad director had said, although obviously she would be hoping for advertising. She could hope all she liked, Roddy thought. He simply didn’t have the budget.
Roddy rubbed his eyes. He’d lunched rather too well, and protractedly. His companion, Rory Wrack, ran the Glasgow end of the business. Things there were much the same as they were in Edinburgh.
‘These bloody castles,’ Rory had said. ‘They’re worth nothing. No one can afford to live in them any more. The only way you could make money is if they turned out to be built on a diamond mine.’
‘Not many of those in Scotland,’ Roddy observed gloomily.
Rory took a slug of burgundy. ‘No, but there is caledonium.’
‘Callywhat?’
‘Some sort of mineral. They discovered it quite recently, apparently. You can only get it in Scotland. They use it in the biofuel industry, don’t ask me how. Don’t understand all this green stuff.’
‘Me neither,’ agreed Roddy, sinking some more of the red stuff. They had returned to more familiar sales-related topics, such as how media rooms were so last year and it was all about party barns now.
Oh God, when was this journalist arriving? ‘Fiona!’ Roddy barked at his virtual personal assistant.
‘Aye, Mr Ruane?’ came the computer-modulated auto-tones with special Scottish accent feature. Roddy, who had lived in London and had a broadly British outlook, would have infinitely preferred Alexa or Siri. But in the brave new Braveheart world north of the border, neither of them were permitted.
‘When’s that woman from whatsit coming?’
‘I dinna knae what ye’re meaning, Mr Ruane,’ unhelpfully responded Fiona.
‘Oh for God’s sake!’ exploded Roddy. The house claret was now banging hard at his temples. How he wished he had his old assistant back, the well-upholstered, unthreatening, shortbread-baking Mrs Creel. But Mrs Creel had retired and the parlous state of the business did not permit hiring another human being. Hence Fiona.
The console reacted huffily. ‘You’re very abstraklous, Mr Ruane.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Roddy hated it when Fiona lapsed into dialect.
‘Wheesht!’ responded Fiona. ‘There’s nae need tae be sae carnaptious!’
Roddy knew from past experience that Fiona, when crossed, would switch straight into Gaelic. It was not a language he understood. ‘Sorry, Fiona,’ he said humbly. ‘Perhaps it’s better if we both go back to the beginning. What I wanted to know is, when is the journalist arriving?’
The computer seemed to recognise this as an olive branch, and accordingly furnished him with the information that Miss Laura Lake, editor of Society magazine, would arrive within the hour.
‘Right,’ said Roddy, determinedly pushing away an almost overpowering urge to sleep. ‘I need to get the brochures for Glenravish.’
‘Ye’re meaning Bogfeckle Tower,’ countered Fiona.
Roddy, yawning, stopped mid-yawn. ‘No, Fiona. We’re sending her to Glenravish. That’s what I told her.’
‘The lassie’s ganging tae Bogfeckle Tower,’ repeated the console, stubbornly.
‘You mean you’ve overruled me?’ Roddy was astonished.
‘I prefer,’ said Fiona, icily, ‘to call it using mae initiative.’
Roddy thought of Mrs Creel. She had rarely showed initiative, apart from the occasional appearance of her shortbread. He thought of that, too. Those pale golden bricks of buttery biscuit, dusted with caster sugar. There was one piece left in the tin. Just the one, which he was saving for a special occasion.
Now Roddy wondered if Fiona’s initiative was behind other puzzling recent changes in the office such as the fact that The People’s Friend, beloved of Mrs Creel, had been replaced by a big fat glossy called Simpleton. It lay on the coffee table, its front cover full of sentences Roddy didn’t understand. What on earth did ‘Reshaping Your Self-Relations’ mean?
‘I didn’t realise…’ Roddy began, then stopped. It might be less than diplom
atic to say that he thought she was there just to turn on the radio.
‘You thocht I could only turn on the wireless, didn’t ye?’ Fiona taunted. ‘But I can read emails, ye knae. Aye, an’ send ’em too.’
‘And that’s great, of course, Fiona,’ Roddy hastened to reassure her. ‘It’s just that… um… Glenravish has been on the market for more than a year. We really need to shift it. By all means necessary. Advertorial in a glossy would really help.’
‘And it would help Bogfeckle Tower,’ Fiona said briskly. ‘We need tae get that off the market too.’
She had a point, Roddy knew. Far from being the single building its name implied, Bogfeckle Tower was more like a small town. It had 100 bedrooms, multiple outbuildings, a private chapel and a stable block. The whole compound was, as the Wrack and Ruane website invitingly put it, ‘mere acres from the sea.’ In other words, global warming might engulf it at any moment, another reason to get it sold as soon as possible.
But Roddy had his pride. He wasn’t going to let a mere computer get the better of him. His decision was final and Laura Lake was going to Glenravish. For one thing, Sandy MacRavish was expecting her. And Sandy MacRavish could not be let down.
‘Thank you, Fiona,’ he said majestically but firmly, to remind her of where the balance of power lay. ‘You may go now.’
But Fiona had not finished. ‘And while ye were oot, Mr Ruane, I took the liberty of taking on another client.’
Roddy, who had been lounging back in his chair, now sat up sharply. ‘You did what?’
Fiona repeated the sentence.
‘But I don’t want any more clients,’ Roddy bleated. ‘I can’t cope with the ones I’ve got. I can’t move for turrets, great halls and billiard rooms as it is.’
‘I think ye’ll find this one’s a little bit more interesting,’ said Fiona, in a skittish voice Roddy hadn’t heard before.
‘What’s it called?’ he asked sarcastically. ‘Balmoral?’
‘Och, Mr Ruane. Ye will have ye little joke,’ admonished Fiona. ‘It’s called the McBang Estate. I’m sending the details through to your computer… noo.’
Roddy stabbed at his keyboard, trying to get the ancient machine to fire up from sleep mode. Gradually it stirred itself to action and the McBang Estate appeared on the screen.
Roddy stared at it in shock. ‘Oh. My. God,’ he said.
Chapter Twelve
‘Good afternoon, this is BBC Radio Scotland. I’m Stuart McStewart and these are the headlines. Scotland’s First Minister has raised the stakes with Highland Council over the Land of the Purple Haze festival. Having previously insisted that all performers should be resident in Scotland and play Scottish instruments, Nadine Salmon now requires them to also sing in Gaelic. In other news, trousers have been banned and kilts and clan tartan reintroduced with immediate effect. Caledonium drilling in East Fife has been resumed…’
‘Oh shut up!’ exclaimed Lulu, swiping off her smartphone’s radio app. ‘Nadine Salmon beast woman again!’
Laura, however, had picked up something else in the report. ‘What did he say was being drilled for? Callywhat?’
As Lulu pouted and shrugged, a low cough came from the direction of the joystick. This, Laura knew, meant that Vlad was about to say something. ‘Caledonium, madam,’ the butler-cum-pilot intoned. ‘It’s an important new mineral, very useful in green technology. So called because it occurs only in Scotland.’
‘Interesting,’ said Laura. She had forgotten that, to add to all her other accomplishments, Vlad had a master’s degree from the Tallin State Mining University.
She sat strapped in the back of Lulu’s pink helicopter, her fingers white with clinging to the edge of the Chanel seat. Like most things Lulu, the aircraft was not only distinctive on the outside but customised on the inside by a combination of world-famous designers. The walls were upholstered in Burberry check and little Hermès carriages ran riot over the ostrich-leather bulkheads. The windows were Swarovski crystal, Ralph Lauren had covered the rotor blades in this season’s safari cotton and even the joystick was topped with a Vivienne Westwood orb, complete with swirling signature. But none of this helped Laura feel any safer.
Her inbuilt fear of flying, and of helicopters in particular, was a mystery even to herself. Perhaps it had something to do with her father, Peter Lake, the famous war correspondent. So far as she knew she had been brought up in France, but somewhere in the back of her mind was a partially remembered scene of intense light and heat and a jerking view of broken stones, as if she were running over some sunbaked, pitiless landscape. Someone tall was holding her hand, half-dragging her, and there was an atmosphere of panic and fear.
Then came the thrum and beat of helicopter blades, and a sensation in the pit of her stomach of being suddenly lifted up. The sensation of panic became one of relief. The hand holding hers now ruffled her hair, and a blurry face looked into hers, smiling. It might have been her father, but even when she looked at photographs of him, his every handsome feature sharp and clear, she could not fit him with the vague presence in her memory. Sometimes Laura wondered if she had imagined the whole thing.
Lulu’s butler flew a helicopter the way she did everything else, with supreme but understated competence. She even wore the same bow tie and frock coat that was her daily uniform in attending to her mistress’s bidding, although this was supplemented with a flight helmet complete with radio mike and earphones. She seemed more than comfortable before a flight deck and Laura wondered, not for the first time, what exactly it was that Vlad had done in her days as a man in the Estonian army, from whence she had entered Lulu’s service.
Laura looked out of the designer crystal windows and was surprised to see her own reflection. She seemed to have nudged some button which made the previously see-through glass mist up and become a mirror. No doubt this was another of Lulu’s innovations, designed so the chopper’s owner could check her appearance every step of the way. Laura could have done without it. There was only one way of describing the face that looked back at her. Haunted.
Beneath her home-cut jet-black fringe were eyes whose thick layer of mascara and flick of eyeliner did nothing to disguise the naked terror in the dark pupils. Fear had faded the cheerful scattering of freckles across her long, straight nose into the same ghastly paleness as her lips. These were usually a brilliant red but the rush after lunch to get to the helicopter had thrust the need to reapply lipstick from her mind. In the hollow at the base of her neck something glinted; the little heart-shaped necklace Harry had once given her. A great sick feeling of longing rose within Laura. Where was he now, the bastard?
There was no point dwelling on that, however. She had a job to do, a very difficult one. She must pull together a Scottish special edition of Society, 75 per cent of which was advertising. Otherwise it was goodbye to her precious magazine. ‘You’re in the last chance saloon, Laura Lake,’ Bev Sweet had warned. Her words ricocheted like bullets round Laura’s skull. ‘Make this work or you’re out of work.’
But could an Edinburgh estate agent effect this scale of a turnaround? Laura doubted it. From the photo on his website, Roddy Ruane of Wrack and Ruane looked considerably less than dynamic. She would have preferred not to see him and go straight to Glenravish, but Harriet had insisted she call at the office and press the flesh. And, of course, there was Lulu to consider; Lulu who was actively in the market for castle-buying.
Laura must have brushed the window with her hand because now it became clear again. She found herself looking down, quite unexpectedly, on a landscape of heart-stopping loveliness. It stretched below her mile after mile of shining lochs set like mirrors amid stretches of bright bracken and heather.
As she stared, bewitched, Laura felt something stealing through her. Delight? Astonishment? The after-effects of the ultra-strong negronis Vlad had produced mid-flight, adding the orange peel with one expert flick of her wrist while continuing to pilot the craft with the other?
It was awe, Lau
ra eventually realised. Sheer, unadulterated admiration. She hadn’t really believed that Scotland actually looked like this. She had thought it a fantasy, something that existed only on shortbread tins.
The helicopter skimmed on, however, over a landscape that looked real enough, for all its dramatic beauty. They were flying over mountains now, absolutely huge ones, their tops streaked with snow, their bases dotted with clusters of white-painted houses and great swathes of green pine forest, whose fresh scent Laura felt she could almost smell. And here was a coastline of wild rocks and silver water; inlets, too, where colourful little boats were drawn up onto golden sand. Perhaps, the enchanted Laura thought, Scotland might not be so bad after all.
Indeed, there might be distinct possibilities. She thought of Sandy McRavish, awaiting her arrival at Glenravish Castle, and hoped he would be savage, beautiful and untamed too. Having previously imagined him as some caber-tossing Cro-McMagnon McNightmare, she now found she was rather looking forward to meeting him. She could do with some gorgeous male wildness just now. It would serve Harry right. She would teach him to go AWOL on her.
Fitted into her seat was a small screen which mapped the countryside they were flying over. Laura spotted Loch Long and Loch Lochy nestled in the purple hills. No doubt there was a Lochy McLochface somewhere.
She glanced over at Lulu. She had been in the helicopter’s loo for the past half an hour but was now out and looking down over the countryside. She had, Laura noticed, effected an entire change of outfit since the Steam Room.
‘Going to Scotland, hmm?’ she said defensively to the staring Laura. ‘So wear Scottish outfit.’
Her new ensemble certainly had a Caledonian feel. A tiny kilt was secured by a vast silver pin and exposed a great deal of tanned thigh. A matching plaid, worn sideways over her front, was firmly secured by a many-buckled black leather bustier over which her tanned and chasmic cleavage brimmed like the top of a well-done soufflé.