by Wendy Holden
Beside him, Flora MacDonald was looking none too pleased. Presumably, like her historical alter ego (the film version, anyway), she had her sights set on Caspar.
‘This is Ruby,’ Caspar muttered.
Rude Ruby, Laura decided. Rude Ruby who deserved to be teased. She beamed at the actress before flicking Caspar a smouldering look. ‘Oh, I’m just an old friend,’ she purred, placing a hand on his brocaded arm.
‘Oh yeah? What sort of old friend?’
‘That sort,’ Laura returned, still beaming.
A wild desperation flickered in Caspar’s eyes. ‘Erm,’ he protested. ‘Um.’
But it was too late. Ruby stormed off across the flagstones, flicking her tartan skirts as she went. Caspar watched her go regretfully, before turning reproachfully to Laura. ‘Well, thanks, Lake. I was counting on her for a shag later.’
Laura rolled her eyes. ‘Hashtag Creepy Caspar. Come on, Honeyman. You can’t treat your co-stars like that any more.’
Caspar dragged hard on his e-cigarette. ‘Co-stars?’ he said bitterly. ‘More like co-failures.’
Laura now learnt that Caspar had fallen so far from grace in Hollywood that he was off every director’s list, had been dropped by his agent, was no longer asked to parties and was reduced to doing voice-overs and shooting straight-to-video films of which this was the worst yet.
‘It’s called Passionate Prince,’ he groaned. ‘It’s for the Scandinavian market. I’m being dubbed in Finnish. Appropriately enough, as it’s the finish of my career.’
It felt like a long time since Laura had laughed this much. It really was the best medicine. All her worries, disappointments and resentments melted away in a great wave of mirth. They seemed, anyway, positively minor compared to the epic disasters that had beset Caspar.
‘I’m glad someone thinks it’s funny,’ Caspar said, affronted.
Laura nudged him. He looked very handsome with his brows drawn broodingly and his full lips protruding in a sulk. She felt a stir of desire. It had been a long time, after all.
‘Come on, bonnie Prince,’ she said. ‘Never mind Flora. How about we discuss your Jacobite uprising in the privacy of my room?’
*
Laura woke next morning to find the sun streaming through the deep-set window onto the white and empty sheet beside her. A badly spelt note from Caspar informed her that the film unit were moving on and he would see her when he saw her. She was welcome in Tinseltown any time, which was more than he could say for himself.
She read it with a wry smile, then scrunched it up. She felt regretful, but knew that it was par for the course. Caspar was a rolling stone, utterly fickle and stratospherically selfish. Depending on him would only end in heartbreak, as it had many times before.
On the other hand, depending on the supposedly responsible Harry hadn’t been any less disastrous. Maybe it’s just me, Laura thought with a sigh. Oh well. She reminded herself that she didn’t need anyone else to be happy, that she could get by on her own that she was a strong and independent woman.
But just sometimes, all the same, it was better with a man!
She stretched out under the lavender-scented sheets, now additionally scented with Caspar. Their lovemaking had gone on until dawn and he had introduced her to some of the latest Hollywood positions, of which the Clapperboard had been her favourite.
Laura loved to experiment and was not in the least bit body shy. Caspar shared her Gallic abandonment. While in every other respect Laura found him a flake and a let-down, on this level, at least, they were in perfect harmony.
But now he had moved on, to the mountains that were the location for the next scenes. They were filming the Prince and Flora’s first meeting, Caspar said.
‘How did it happen?’ Laura asked.
Caspar groaned and rolled his eyes. ‘So Flora’s in this hilltop hut, minding a herd of cows. Charlie boy appears in the doorway, tousled, tired but powerfully attractive. Shy, doubtful Flora soon allows herself to be persuaded.’
Laura was impressed. ‘It sounds so bad it’s good.’
‘Trust me, it’s just bad. And they’re blasting for that caledonium stuff in the mountains where we’re filming…’
‘Oh yes. That stuff they use in ecotechnology.’
‘… so we’ll probably get hit by falling rocks. Sometimes I almost wish I was back with Amy Bender.’
‘No you don’t!’ Laura patted his bicep, which was impressive, but not quite as rock-hard as when he had played 007. ‘I’m sure you’ll be back in the big time soon. In the meantime, enjoy being below the radar.’
Caspar sighed. ‘That’s what my shrink says. I’m to think of it as a fame holiday.’
Laura was off laughing again.
Now that she was alone, she realised neither of them had spoken about Lulu. According to Caspar, the film unit had been in situ for several days. It seemed odd, given Lulu’s lively interest in everyone and everything, that they had not met before she went to Australia.
Perhaps she had been very busy directing the new arrangement of her guns on the Great Hall wall. And, given that the film unit were apparently occupying some rundown holiday cottages at the far end of the estate, it was understandable that she hadn’t yet made her way up there.
Mrs MacRae hadn’t mentioned the film unit either, of course. But that was less strange. The castle did not belong to Laura; there was no need to inform her about everything that was going on. Moreover, as the scene had been filmed in the night, the housekeeper would assume she was asleep.
*
‘Do you know when Lulu will be back?’ Laura asked Mrs MacRae over breakfast. This, as before, was porridge eaten from wooden bowls, standing up in the kitchen with Fat Oonagh, Wee Archie and the rest of the estate staff. Laura had learnt that this practice dated back to ancient times, so tenants could rush out of the door at a moment’s notice and set about marauders from rival clans.
Mrs MacRae, who was stirring something delicious-smelling in a large pot on the Aga, looked round with a smile. ‘Och, the mistress’ll be back when she’s ready,’ she said comfortably.
Laura frowned. ‘It’s just that she’s not answering her phone, which is quite unusual for Lulu. You don’t know where in Australia she’s staying, do you?’
‘She didn’t say,’ smiled the housekeeper. She paused, then added, ‘But you’ve found a phone signal, have ye?’
Laura had, in fact, had a brainwave about that. While the landline seemed permanently unavailable and the estate might be a Wi-Fi-free zone, it had occurred to her that the station might be connected. It was only the tiniest of branch lines, the merest twig on a branch line in fact, but it was still worth a punt.
Before breakfast she had hurried to the gate, shinned over it and crossed the road to the tiny platform. She had stared at her phone. ‘Come on, come on,’ she had muttered. And then, magic. One bar. Two bars. Three, four, five whole bars!
Sandy could have done this all along, Laura thought. But living in the mid-eighties meant she probably didn’t even know what a smartphone was and had never heard of Wi-Fi.
Lulu didn’t seem to be making the fullest use of it either. Her phone remained unanswered. Incommunicado.
‘I’ve got an idea,’ Mrs MacRae suggested.
Laura brightened, and readied her phone to take the details.
‘She might have gone to somewhere… now what’s the word for it?’ Mrs MacRae paused, stirred thoughtfully.
‘Edgy? Trendy?’ It wasn’t impossible. Lulu was crazy about new places.
‘Noo, noo. Och, I have it!’ The housekeeper turned with a beaming smile. ‘Off grid!’
‘And hot,’ Laura guessed. Yes, that probably did explain it. Lulu hated cold weather. Prolonged exposure to Scotland, even summer Scotland, probably demanded some countermeasures.
‘Och, I don’t think it’s that hot at the moment, Down Under,’ Mrs MacRae replied with a smile. ‘Matter of fact, I believe it’s quite gloomy.’
There w
as an appreciative snort from the assembled estate staff, who probably didn’t like to think of their mistress roasting in the sunshine while they toiled in the not-infrequently bad Highland weather. Laura had to admire the housekeeper’s tact. No one in the kitchen mentioned the filming and she didn’t like to bring it up, particularly given how the interlude had ended for her. Mrs MacRae had sharp eyes and she feared betraying herself with a blush.
After breakfast, no marauding rival clans having appeared, Laura put her bowl by the sink with the others and headed back up to her room. It had begun to drizzle outside and she felt for Caspar, out on some hill being devoured by midges while seducing Flora MacDonald. She stared out of the window, admiring Sandy’s immaculate garden. The morning with Harry threatened to come back to her in all its brief perfection and she pushed the thought away. Someone else who’d disappeared into thin air. It was getting to be a habit with her, Laura thought.
She paced up and down her room feeling restless. The rain spattering the windows reinforced her anxiety and she longed for an outlet.
She would, she decided, explore the castle. All the steps would provide some stress-relieving exercise. There were hundreds leading down to the dungeons especially. She could walk up and down those a few times, then she would return to the station and try Lulu again. Maybe even call South’n Fried’s company, Motherf****r Records. They might know where he and Lulu were.
Where was the way to the dungeon? Laura had a vague memory of following Sandy’s pixie boots to a door in a corner of the Great Hall. She hurried across it now, impressed how completely all evidence of the filming had been cleared away. Only an empty plastic bottle, rolled against the toe-piece of a suit of armour, suggested that it had taken place at all. Perhaps, too, still hanging in the air, was the faint suggestion of Caspar’s cherry vape fumes.
The way had been unimpeded when Sandy led through it, Laura remembered. But now an iron door, criss-crossed like a cage, was bolted firmly across it.
All was darkness beyond. She weighed up the possibility of asking Mrs MacRae to open it, but decided against it. The less the housekeeper knew of her business the better. She would head upstairs instead. There was at least one other floor above hers. It took some time to find the way up, via a narrow staircase behind a door. At the top was another door which led into a large and gloomy sequence of rooms. Perhaps they had once been nurseries, or a dormitory for maids. No one, clearly, had been here for some time. The windows were dusty and festooned with cobwebs, dried-out bluebottle husks piled up on the sills. There was a smell of damp and rot.
The last of the rooms seemed to be used to store junk. There were iron bed-frames up against the wall, wooden boxes stencilled with the names of long-defunct London stores, battered suitcases, piles of books, broken chairs, lopsided stools, listing hatstands, lamps, bowls, chamber pots with cracks in them, heaps of clothes, a top hat, and an old gramophone complete with a His Master’s Voice brass horn. It was, Laura thought, just like being in the Sunday markets of Shoreditch, only without the street food.
She picked up the top hat, put it on and peered at herself in a mould-spotted mirror. The reflection gave a view down the room to the door at the end. A movement caught her eye, or seemed to. A trick of the light, Laura decided, tracing her hand along the sleeve of a moth-eaten fur coat. A cloud of dust came out and made her cough.
A trunk stood in the middle of the room, its leather covering cracked and splitting. A large, open padlock hung at a crazy angle. Treasure, Laura wondered. Pieces of eight? A map marked with an X?
It beckoned to her irresistibly; she picked her way over the gritty floorboards and tried the lid. It was heavy, made of solid wood and took great effort to open; eventually, however, she heaved it aloft.
There was disappointingly little inside. A dusty interior with a peeling printed-paper lining. Laura was about to lower the lid back down when she sensed something.
The hairs on her neck stood on end.
She had the sudden and unmistakeable feeling that she was not alone. Someone else was in the room. Now, they were approaching. She could hear soft footsteps, getting closer all the time.
Was it Ruby? Peeled off from the film unit and returned with jealous fury in her heart? Struan back for a second go? Mordor? Laura’s heart began to thump. Nausea rose in her throat. Her hands shook.
She forced her rigid body to turn but before she could move, her shoulders were seized by two strong hands. Her arms were twisted up painfully behind her back ‘Ow!’ cried Laura as her head was forced down into the trunk. The rest of her was shoved in roughly after it, head over heels. She crouched with her bum in the air, her face on the trunk’s gritty bottom, as the heavy lid was banged down. There came the snap of a padlock.
Laura brayed the unyielding wood with her feet. ‘Hey! Let me out! DO YOU HEAR ME? LET ME OUT!’
But as her screams died away, she could hear only the distant, quiet closing of a door, followed by a key turning.
Laura forced down her panic. She must remain calm. She thought of her father and tried to channel his dauntless spirit. All the same, it was hard to think what he would have done in the circumstances. He was a reporter, not Houdini.
She thought of her grandmother, whose wartime heroism must have encompassed worse than this. But Mimi, who had shown her so much about creeping through alien territory, had never actually demonstrated how to escape from a locked chest.
Thinking of Mimi made Laura want to cry. She was somewhere out in the world, cruising the Seven Seas with the Fat Four. Had she seen Beyoncé at Coachella, Laura wondered. Would that be the last she ever heard from the nonagenarian late-onset hedonist and her merry band of sybarites?
She summoned up the beloved wrinkled face with its bright, sharp eyes and its surrounding grey bob; short, side-parted and cut with razor precision. It was a deliberate contrast: ‘The messier the face gets,’ her grandmother liked to say, ‘the neater the hair has to be.’
Laura squeezed her eyes hard to stop the tears. ‘Oh, Mimi. Where are you now? Will I ever see you again?’
Chapter Thirty-two
‘How much longer you think we stay here, hmm?’ whispered Lulu across the darkness. She was, as Mrs MacRae had said, Down Under. But not in the sunny Antipodes. Rather, in the dungeons under the castle.
‘That would seem to depend, madam,’ replied her butler in low, measured tones. Vlad did not whisper. It was beneath her dignity. Even when her dignity was, as at the moment, severely compromised by lying in a medieval passage in the dark. For the second time in as many weeks. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, of whom Vlad was a big fan, it looked like carelessness.
‘On what depend?’
‘On how long it takes Mr Fried to return from New York. He will then presumably notice madam’s absence and commence a search.’
‘Wouldn’t count on it,’ Lulu hissed back. ‘South’n Fried care only about career, hmm? Motherf****r.’
‘Indeed, madam.’
‘I mean record company, hmm?’
‘Oh… indeed, madam.’
Lulu sighed and shifted in the straw. ‘This floor ruin my white suede trousers,’ she remarked despondently.
Vlad did not reply. If she thought Lulu’s outfit the least of their worries, she was diplomatic enough not to say so. Possibly she was reflecting on her lapse of judgement in allowing Lulu to explore the dungeons alone. But her mistress had been unstoppable, keen to assess the area’s spa potential.
When she failed to return after an hour, Vlad went down herself. The door Lulu had used, previously open at the end of the hall, had been locked, which the butler assumed explained her mistress’s absence.
It seemed so. The housekeeper had appeared horrified to realise she had – apparently inadvertently – incarcerated Lulu in the castle’s dread nether regions, and had hastened to the door with a key. Vlad had then descended into the living rock to find Lulu at the bottom of a dank, damp pit.
The butler’s initial alarm had given w
ay to relief when her mistress, who seemed perfectly relaxed, explained that she had removed the grille from across the hole to climb down and investigate its potential as a plunge pool.
Vlad had suggested that Lulu come back up now, and had stood over the hole to extend a hand down. All the lights in the cave had subsequently gone out and even Vlad’s lightning reflexes had been unable to react before a sudden powerful thump between her shoulder blades and nothing but air beneath her feet. She had landed, as per her training, in the brace position, right on top of Lulu.
‘Ow!’
‘I do apologise, madam.’
Two days, Vlad calculated, had passed since then, days without food or water. Her army experience, however, had included intensive survival training and they had the additional resources of some chocolate Lulu had stashed about her person in case of emergency.
Ever one to look on the bright side, the billionheiress had chosen to view the sudden food shortage as a crash diet and had listed, for Vlad’s benefit, all the items in her wardrobe that had previously been too tight, but into which she would now fit in with ease.
‘Givenchy bubblewrap bustier, Stella McCartney coconut-matting catsuit, Tom Ford fur shorts.’
Lulu had also insisted on teaching her butler Pilates to pass the time. Vlad was now even better than her mistress at planks, downward dogs and teaser positions.
Throughout their ordeal, Lulu had maintained a touching faith that the corsets she had escaped in from Bangers, formerly the property of Flora MacDonald, were magic and would arrange their rescue. Vlad, less sure about the power of underwear, however historic, could only admire her certainty.
Lulu was, even so, disappointed that imprisonment had caused her to miss the film unit. South’n Fried’s career needs aside, it was one of the main reasons she had bought the place. Roddy Ruan had assured her that the castle was so regularly used as a movie location that anyone lucky enough to own it would meet Hollywood’s finest every other week.
‘Why South’n Fried not come?’ Lulu wailed.
Vlad could think of any number of reasons, mostly related to trainers. However, she diplomatically kept them to herself. She sat against the damp wall, staring into the gloom and wondered if this, really, was it.