by Wendy Holden
‘You never get out?’
A blaze of exasperated blue mascara was her reward for this. ‘Well, how can I?’ demanded Sandy. ‘There’s no way to get around except cadging lifts in the post van. Or that sodding train – and you know what that’s like.’
Laura looked at her musingly. Up until now she had thought Sandy rather ridiculous, an eighties eccentric who, along with the themed-gardens article, would make another great piece about Glenravish. She had even started to plan the pictures: Sandy in a variety of outlandish outfits from forty years ago, perhaps with sidebars about How To Look Eighties, Great Eighties Icons and Fashion Labels We Have Loved And Lost. But now, listening to Sandy lament her disappointments and frustrations, always with a top layer of spirit and self-deprecating humour, Laura found herself thinking that to use her in this way would be unfair.
Sandy might be OTT, but there was something indomitable and admirable about her. She might be a period piece, set in finest Prue Leith aspic, but she retained the principled defiance of a more rigorous age before all the crap on social media and the internet. She was solid and real, with emotional depth, and a true backstory.
Unware of her companion’s guilty cogitations, Sandy was unsteadily uncorking the Petrus. Laura watched nervously as a however-many-hundred-quid-a-bottle slipped and slid between her hands. ‘I mean,’ she went on, ‘I’ve tried to get this place off the ground as a business. But frankly, given the gene pool around here, you’ve got as much chance of opening a branch of Harrods as turning this pile of cold stones into a tourist attraction. It drives me mad.’
Coincidentally, Spandau Ballet frontman Tony Hadley was now bawling about losing his mind, ‘To Cut A Long Story Short’ being the latest hit offering from the ghetto blaster.
Sandy’s white lipsticked lips were quivering as she sloshed the Petrus into their glasses, filling them up to the top. ‘I miss London like mad,’ she burst out, although Laura hardly needed to hear it. Longing for the capital radiated from Sandy’s every pore.
Her hostess took a big slug of the legendary wine. ‘I was having so much fun in SW3. The 22 bus, the Admiral Cod pub, a small flat-ette furnished entirely from the GTC. My every move recorded in The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook.’
Laura held back from telling her that the General Trading Company was long since closed and that the once-indispensable compendium of eighties upper-class tropes was now mostly to be found in charity shops. She was starting to feel very protective towards Sandy.
Sandy shook a head of hair solid with Supreme Hold hairspray. ‘I swear Peter York copied it all from me and my Chelsea set’s lifestyle. Happy days…’
Laura put a sympathetic hand on her arm, but missed and almost knocked the precious bottle over. Fortunately, with unexpected lightning reflexes, Sandy saved it in time. ‘Oh God!’ she exclaimed.
‘Sorry,’ said Laura.
‘Not the wine! This dump! I’d just love to sell it and get back to Chelsea. Get back to where the action is. The nightclubs, the dinner parties, the pubs. But the market’s just not right, you see.’
Laura was puzzled. Glenravish was with Roddy Ruane, who she had seen with her own eyes to be the most successful estate agent on the planet. He had produced a tempting brochure; tempting enough, out of all the castles for sale in Scotland, to have caught Harriet’s eye. Which was why she was here.
‘Don’t you get many viewers?’ she asked.
Sandy took another swig. ‘We get loads,’ she said, unexpectedly.
Laura brightened. ‘But isn’t that good?’
The hairspray wings juddered with the force of Sandy’s headshake. ‘Roddy rings up all the time – when the phone’s working, that is – and tells us someone’s coming. But then for some reason they all change their mind and never show. I suppose,’ Sandy concluded, ‘they take a closer look at the brochure and realise the upkeep’s just too much for them. Which it is, frankly. It’s all I can do to keep the garden going.’
‘Or maybe they’ve heard about the ghosts,’ Laura suggested. She wasn’t trying to be unhelpful. On the contrary, her ever-fertile editor’s mind had been considering how they could be turned into a plus. People liked being scared these days, all those tense TV dramas with heavy breathing and lots of guns. And that whole ‘escape room’ craze. You never knew, Glenravish might even attract the Most Haunted brigade.
‘What’s that, my dear?’ Sandy was sloshing more Petrus into their glasses. ‘Can’t hear over the noise of this wine. Haunted? Don’t be so silly. Never seen a ghost in my life.’
‘Really?’ It was on the tip of Laura’s tongue to say that Mrs MacRae had told her all about them. But this might both upset Sandy and get the kindly housekeeper into trouble. On balance, Laura decided, it was best not to dob her in.
The lady laird was raising her glass. ‘Like I said, a few problems with cold draughts and the electrics, that’s all.’
‘And the telephone poles that won’t stand up,’ Laura put in.
‘Those too,’ Sandy cheerfully acknowledged. ‘And the wind and light can play tricks on your eyes after a couple of glasses of the finest. But haunted? Not at all.’
The ‘ghosts question’ was clearly ticklish. Laura supposed she couldn’t blame her. Sandy wanted to sell Glenravish, and while she was pleased to have help with publicity, that did not mean she was ready to spill all the old place’s secrets. They had only just met, after all.
Sandy was now back in eighties London. ‘Can’t wait to see a Wimpy again. Always liked a Big Bender at the end of a heavy night.’
Laura had a feeling that a Wimpy was a long-defunct chain of snack bars. She could not imagine what a Big Bender was.
‘But at this rate,’ Sandy added gloomily, ‘I won’t get to the smoke before Chas and Di become King and Queen. Enough to shatter one’s thumper, it really is.’ She put a hand over her heart.
Laura hastened to reassure her that she really wasn’t missing much. Compared to the glories of the Highlands, the capital was tame stuff indeed.
‘Believe me, Sandy, London’s changed. It’s full of people charging down the pavements, looking into their smartphones and pulling suitcases on wheels, which run over everyone else’s toes.’
Sandy looked puzzled. She had never seen a smartphone or a detonator suitcase. It was like explaining things to an alien. Laura plunged on, even so. ‘And they all expect you to get out of their way. Every second shop’s a hipster coffee bar. All the men have beards. Brexit’s torn us apart. Knife crime’s off the dial. The streets are littered with poor homeless people out of their heads on Black Mamba. Notting Hill’s full of Russian oligarchs building mega-basements and Knightsbridge is packed with Middle Eastern rich kids doing handbrake turns in gold Maseratis.’
Sandy was looking doubtful. Laura wondered if she knew what an oligarch was, even. ‘But what about the centre of town?’
‘The same. But full of the French and Chinese tourists and students. It’s lost its rebellious soul. And, Sandy,’ Laura adding the coup de grâce, ‘no one, but no one has dinner parties any more.’
Out of the entire catalogue of mayhem just laid before her, this was clearly the last straw. Sandy’s blue-mascaraed eyes widened with horror. I’ve done it, Laura was thinking, when Sandy took another swig of Petrus and put it down looking altogether more philosophical.
‘All the same, I’d rather be there than here. God knows how I’m ever going to get away, though. I’m never going to be able to sell this place.’ The white-lipsticked mouth turned despairingly downward.
‘But that’s why I’ve come,’ Laura reminded her.
The blue-mascaraed eyes widened in surprise. ‘Is it? I must say, I did rather wonder. But I was so bloody glad of the company, I didn’t ask.’
Laura stared. ‘You didn’t know I’d been sent by Roddy Ruane? To write a magazine feature?’
‘Nope.’ Sandy shrugged the shoulders of her pie-crust-collar blouse. ‘But you looked like a nice gel. A magazine, eh? How exciti
ng. Is it The Face? The Illustrated London News?’
Laura hadn’t heard of either title. She was thinking. ‘If you weren’t expecting me, that explains why the gates were all locked.’
‘Were they? They never are usually.’
‘And why Koji was roaming about with his gun.’
‘Who?’
Laura shook her head. It was all too much to explain, especially after so much wine. They could talk about it in the morning. She thought longingly of the cosy little room. Bed would be lovely.
The lights dimmed again. Sandy stood up, swaying slightly in her red needlecord knickerbockers. ‘C’mon, girl. Enough of this moping. Let me show you around the place. Show you what you can write about.’
She yanked Laura to her feet – rather too fast it turned out. The room swam about her for a second. She held on to Sandy, who was giggling helplessly. Laura, not usually a giggler, nonetheless found herself joining in. She was pleasantly conscious of having made a new friend. A friend, moreover, with whom she had something in common. She and Sandy both had a problem: in Sandy’s case, it was the Glenravish Estate and in Laura’s it was Society magazine. If they combined forces, it all might work out fine.
‘Sisters Are Doin’ It For Themselves’ blared out of the ghetto blaster as they left the kitchen. The tape had come to an end and had started all over again.
Chapter Twenty-one
It had all been over very quickly. A couple of ju-jitsu moves was all it had taken for Lulu to grasp the wrist of the slithering creature, pitch it forward and throw it face down on the Butlins carpet.
‘I say,’ said Torquil, when he had recovered the power of speech. ‘Was that entirely necessary?’
He lay on the floor in his full McBang regalia. The slithering sound that Lulu had heard were the extra-long badger tails on his sporran. Now, with her trusty wedge-heel pressed down on his solar plexus, she blinked in the full dazzle of the ultra-bright McBang kilt tartan, and also the full dazzle of the chief’s impressive meat and two veg, which gravity and the force of his descent had brought into full view.
‘Would you mind awfully taking your foot off me?’ Torquil asked in hurt tones. ‘I was only coming to escort you to dinner.’
Lulu inclined her head graciously. She had no intention of apologising. She and Torquil were engaged in a negotiation and if she conceded anything it could cost her another couple of cottages.
Torquil, rising gracefully to his feet in a single fluid movement, noted the determined glint of her sunglasses. He was beginning to suspect that Lulu, for all her bimbo appearance, was not quite as stupid as she looked. He would, the laird realised, have to turn up his legendary charm to the max.
He’d schmooze her over dinner. She looked like a woman who appreciated good food. ‘Shall we?’ Torquil purred, extending a signet-ringed hand and leading Lulu into the Bangers dining room.
This had been furnished from the remnants of a failed insurance firm and had a distinctly corporate feel, all the more as Ruaridh had bought the strip lights as well. They shone brightly down on the display of bargain seafood Torquil had arranged on gold plastic plates. Unpacking it, he had found the mussels and squid rings vastly outnumbered the prawns, as did the whelks. But hopefully Lulu liked whelks. Exotic types like her often had unexpected tastes.
‘Very funny,’ Lulu said appreciatively, sitting at one of the office chairs at the long black ash table.
‘Yes, we call the dining room The Boardroom,’ her host smiled. ‘People find it most amusing.’
‘Don’t mean room, mean food. Is very funny.’ Lulu’s sunglasses caught the full glare of the overhead tubes. They hit the back of Torquil’s retinas like an interrogation spotlight. ‘Prawns from Madagascar and is not Scottish salmon either.’
Torquil felt his well-honed jaw part company with the rest of his mouth and drop downwards. He had not bargained for the company of a seafood version of ‘The Princess and the Pea’.
Lulu, meanwhile, waved dismissively at the spread. ‘So where is real dinner, hmm?’
The cornered clan chief seized the bottle of Dom Perignon into which he had decanted the bargain supermarket fizz. ‘Dom?’ he asked urbanely, pouring the sparkling liquid into a glass. Lulu smiled graciously and extended her hand. Bingo, thought Torquil, triumphantly.
A shrill beeping noise was filling the air, reminiscent of a smoke alarm. Lulu sprang up from her seat and backed away, pointing an accusing finger at the flute.
‘What’s the matter?’ asked the bewildered McBang of McBang. ‘What’s that awful noise?’
‘Is prosecco alarm,’ Lulu informed him haughtily. ‘My friend Laura give it to me. Detect when not being given real champagne.’ The sunglasses nodded damningly at the bottle in Torquil’s other hand.
The clan chief groaned inwardly. To use a famous phrase, here was a bloody difficult woman. But the game wasn’t over yet and at least that unnerving Gromit-like assistant seemed to have temporarily quit the field. Hopefully she wouldn’t return any time soon.
*
It certainly didn’t look as if Vlad would. At the moment she was trapped in the passageway behind the Sheep Dip changing rooms. Seconds after she had gone in, the lockers had swung back into place. There was a sickening click, and everything went dark. For the past few minutes, the butler had been pushing hard at the wall. Even her best Estonian infantry methods were having no effect.
Giving the recalcitrant barrier a final shove with the flats of her feet, Vlad decided that, as she could not go back, she may as well go forward. Thanks to her rigorous training, not to mention one or two equally rigorous life experiences, there was little she could not manage in the darkness. She walked carefully forwards, feeling one foot in front of the other, and sensed that the passage was working its way downwards in a spiralling incline, deeper and deeper into the bowels of what had once been the ancient castle of McBang.
This, above all else, proved how old the place was, the butler thought. Really old fortresses, not just in Britain but all over Europe, had just such tunnels as this, to be used as escape routes in times of difficulty. Vlad made a mental note to add it to the list of Lulu’s estate acquisitions. It would be just like McBang to keep back the escape tunnel and subsequently attempt to charge a fortune for it.
The terrible cries and groans that had drawn her into the passage in the first place had stopped with the sound of the locker-wall swinging shut. Vlad hoped that she had imagined them, although she never imagined anything as a rule. She kept moving forward, feeling her way along the rough damp stone of the passage walls. She could see, at the end of a long stretch of blackness, a dim light. Daylight? Electric light? It was hard to tell.
She could feel a change in temperature – and atmosphere. The sense of misery was almost palpable. Vlad guessed that she was nearing the castle dungeons, the dread prison cells cut into the living rock where unfortunates had been incarcerated for hundreds of years. Another thing McBang might try and charge extra for. Vlad made another mental note.
A terrible groan now filled the passage and caused her heart, as it rarely did, to shoot up her throat. The groan was followed by a terrible chorus of muffled cries and moans. Vlad was not easily rattled, but the idea that these were the miserable spirits of the long-departed was not easily dismissed.
She approached, cautiously, her soles crunching on the stone floor of the passage. In response, it seemed, to her steps, what now sounded like agonised pleas for release got louder.
Her heart seemed to stop beneath her frock coat – still impeccable despite its travails – as, in the faint light afforded by a rough hole in the deep-set wall, she saw the outlines of prison bars. Clinging desperately on to them were four wasted-looking hands.
Scary Mary? Perhaps this was the base of what once had been her tower. Had she actually had four arms? wondered Vlad.
*
Lulu had resigned herself to the frozen bargain prawns by now and had turned off the prosecco alarm. There was a job to do
here and the quality of the food was irrelevant. In actual fact, the prawns had a good flavour and the wine was quite acceptable.
Lulu took another swig and applied herself to the business in hand, which was to buy the McBang estate for a reasonable amount. But POA – Price on Application – had proved a slippery concept to say the least. The quote that Roddy Ruane had given her was different from the higher one subsequently emailed to her by the mysterious Fiona who Lulu did not recall being present in the office when she and Laura visited. Torquil McBang’s demands were more exorbitant still.
And yet, Lulu was determined to buy it. Mountains, lochs and all. As Vlad had pointed out, McBang’s Tables would provide an excellent cover for South’n Fried’s new album.
As Vlad had pointed out…
Where was Vlad, Lulu wondered, looking round. Surely she couldn’t still be in the spa? It wasn’t like her to lounge about in towels when her help was needed.
She forced a bright smile and applied herself to the microwaved soup McBang had just produced. ‘Is sullen stink,’ she remarked, slipping her spoon into the yellow liquid.
‘Actually, it’s Cullen skink,’ McBang corrected, offended.
Lulu tossed back her pile of blonde hair. ‘Is what I say, hmm? Made with smoker’s haddock.’
‘Smoked fish and cream,’ McBang confirmed. ‘An old McBang family recipe.’
Behind the opaque lenses of her sunglasses, Lulu rolled her eyes. Even she knew that Cullen skink was a Scottish speciality no more the preserve of the McBangs than croissants were the preserve of Laura’s French granny. She decided to go along with it, however. Best to keep on his good side. After the ju-jitsu, she had some ground to make up.
It didn’t look as if she was going to have much trouble. McBang’s eyes, fuelled by prosecco, were out on stalks. Lulu had kept on the magic corsets, replacing the Jacob Marley dress over the top. Now padded as well as chainmailed, she felt ready for all eventualities.