Joker in the Pack

by Elise Noble

  “Where’s all your furniture? Have you just moved in?” Mickey asked.

  “No, I’m in the process of moving out.”

  “Good thing I caught you, then. It could have taken me months to track you down at your new place. Are you going far?”

  We’d made it to the kitchen by then, and I leaned against the counter and sighed. “I don’t know yet. I haven’t been able to find anywhere suitable nearby. Every place I’ve looked at has been awful in one way or another.”

  Mickey bobbed his head. “That happened to me too. It took weeks to find my current flat, and even then, I ended up with a bedroom the size of a matchbox.”

  Tears pricked at the corners of my eyes, and I gave an involuntary sniff. My search was hopeless, wasn’t it?

  “Uh, don’t cry.” Mickey glanced towards the door as if he wanted to run out of it. “What about Eleanor’s house? If we get the paperwork done quickly, you could live there until you find somewhere better.”

  I gripped the edge of the counter as my knees threatened to give way. “Did you just say ‘house’?”

  “Well, it’s more of a cottage from what I understand.”

  When he referred to Eleanor’s estate, I’d imagined some rickety furniture and a few china ornaments sitting in a storage unit somewhere. A house? I gave up trying to stay upright and slid down the kitchen unit until my bottom hit the floor. “But a whole building?”

  “Are you all right?” Mickey asked. “Shall I make a cup of tea?”

  I nodded.

  “Which is that? Yes, you’re all right, or yes, you want tea?”

  “Both, I think. I can’t quite believe this.”

  He chuckled. “It’s not the first time I’ve seen that reaction. I’ll put the kettle on.”

  Mickey bustled around while I stared at a smudge of dirt on the wall opposite, numb, half expecting a camera crew to pop out of thin air and announce this was all a joke. Try as I might, I couldn’t remember much about Aunt Ellie. She’d never paid me much attention. Apart from my birthday party and the argument, the only solid recollection I had was a visit to the Natural History Museum one rainy Saturday, when she’d tagged along with Mother and me and spent most of the time yawning.

  “Where’s the milk?” Mickey asked.

  “Sorry, there isn’t any. Cutbacks.”

  “Black it is, then.”

  He sat opposite me, cross-legged, and I took a sip from the mug he handed over. He may not have put any milk in, but he’d certainly found the sugar.

  “So, what now? You mentioned a fee, but I don’t have any money. The website design business hasn’t been too lucrative lately.”

  “You’re a web designer?” He scratched his chin, looking thoughtful. “Maybe we could come to an agreement?”

  Two hours later, we’d got through several gallons of tea and a packet of chocolate digestives Mickey found hidden behind the baked beans—slightly elderly but still edible—and he’d become my second-best friend.

  Not only was Mickey a researcher extraordinaire, he part-owned Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow with a friend he’d met at university. While they shared a love of history and family trees, neither was particularly proficient with computers. The company had only been going for a few weeks and was in dire need of a decent website.

  “I’m not so great at the business side of things,” Mickey confessed. “My partner was doing that part, but his wife’s just had a baby and the lack of sleep’s getting to him.”

  “Well, I can build you a website, design you a logo, organise flyers—anything you like—if you’ll help me with my forms.”

  “Deal.”

  A handshake sealed the arrangement, and that was how, two weeks later on the thirty-first of December, Maddie, Mickey, and I found ourselves standing outside a rather shabby-looking cottage in the quaint little village of Upper Foxford.

  CHAPTER 8

  “ARE YOU SURE this is the right place?” I asked Maddie. “It’s bigger than I thought.”

  And a whole lot uglier.

  Mickey held out the piece of paper with the address on it, and Maddie compared it to the map she’d printed out from the internet.

  “Yep. Lilac Cottage. This is it.”

  The bottom of the rickety wooden gate scraped over the path as Maddie pushed it open, and we followed her towards the house. And when I say followed, I mean we shoved our way through overgrown bushes and stepped over the tendrils of ivy that criss-crossed the path like mutant spaghetti.

  “Imagine what a mess this’ll be in the summer,” Maddie muttered.

  “I don’t think I want to.”

  Mickey reached out and rubbed the fragrant leaves of a rosemary bush between his fingers. “You enjoy cooking, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “At least you’ve got garnish.”

  To me, rosemary came in a plastic bag from Waitrose rather than in tree format. Living in London my whole life, I’d never had more than a cluster of decorative pots and a barbecue area outside, even when I lived with my parents, and I couldn’t deny my feeling of panic as I gazed around the jungle I was about to call home.

  “Where do I start?” I spotted two beady eyes glaring at me from next to a tree. “Is that a fox?”

  Maddie took my arm and led me towards the cottage. “One step at a time, Liv. Tackle the house first.” She looked towards the roofline and back to the ground floor. “That might take a while.”

  “Why is the door made from plywood?”

  The cottage may have seen better days, but plywood and a padlock rather than a proper front door? Even in my worst nightmares, I hadn’t imagined that.

  Mickey grimaced. “I didn’t want to say anything…”

  “What? What is it?”

  “The ambulance crew had to break into the house to help Eleanor.”

  “She took ill in there?” I’d been so busy worrying about packing, and my landlord, and the endless paperwork, that I’d barely thought about how she died. A heart attack, according to her death certificate, but I’d assumed she’d passed peacefully in hospital. “Poor, poor Ellie.”

  Flowers. I should take flowers to her grave. Presumably, she’d been buried in the local churchyard, and in a village the size of Upper Foxford, that shouldn’t be too difficult to find.

  It would have to be a small bunch of flowers, though, at least for now. Without the need to pay rent, I could afford to live now, but things promised to be tight. Lilac Cottage would cost more to heat than my old flat, and I’d learned my lesson over the burst pipe.

  Mickey held out the key. “Do you want to do the honours?”

  As I took it, a flutter of excitement stirred in my belly. Would the inside be nicer? Until the paperwork was finalised yesterday afternoon, I’d barely allowed myself to think about the house, too afraid that the place would be snatched away from me by some administrative glitch at the eleventh hour.

  But my luck had finally changed.

  As we’d driven up from London, the three of us squashed into Maddie’s Ford Fiesta, we’d tried to guess what Lilac Cottage would be like. Lilac… Even the name sounded pretty.

  “My money’s on seventies wallpaper,” Maddie had said. “You know, with the big flowers.”

  Mickey grinned at us in the rear-view mirror. “That’s making a comeback at the moment. My sister just used it in her lounge. But I reckon it’ll have an avocado bathroom suite, dodgy carpet, and one of those old CRT televisions.”

  “And it’ll be all musty and stink of mothballs. I stood next to a guy on the Tube yesterday who smelled of mothballs.” Maddie wrinkled her nose. “I didn’t even realise people still used them.”

  “Me neither,” Mickey said. “Let’s hope it doesn’t have damp. That can play havoc with your furniture.”

  Good thing I’d sold most of mine then, wasn’t it?

  “Guys, it’s bad enough that I’m moving to the middle of nowhere, without the thought of having to live in a time warp.”

  Maddie patted
me on the hand. “Only trying to be realistic. It’s hardly going to be a palace, is it?”

  I laid my head against the car window and groaned. Yes, she was right. But at least it came at the right price.

  When Mickey said “cottage,” my imagination had run wild, thinking of one of those chocolate-box affairs with white walls and a cute thatched roof. A couple of overstuffed armchairs in the lounge, some chintzy curtains, and a bedroom where you had to duck under a quaint wooden beam to go inside. I could visualise myself living somewhere like that, even if it was clinging to the edge of civilisation by the ivy twisted artfully over its front porch.

  But I could already see from the outside that my daydreams had been wide of the mark. In the next county, most likely.

  Brown. That was the overriding theme of Lilac Cottage. Drab brick walls, paint peeling from once-beige window frames, the makeshift front door. The only hint of colour on the cottage itself was the green moss growing all over the roof.

  Mickey winced as he poked at the window frame nearest the front door. “These need replacing. Painted at least.”

  The whole cottage needed replacing. Preferably with a tidy apartment near shops and a Tube station. Butterflies battered my stomach with heavy wings as I reached for the padlock. How bad would the inside be?

  Judging by the creak, nobody had oiled the hinges in years, and as I stepped over the threshold into the dim hallway, I found Maddie had been right about the mustiness. Ick. I reached out for the light switch and clicked it.

  “Why is nothing happening?” I hissed.

  “The electricity’s probably been cut off,” Mickey said. “Eleanor wasn’t around to pay the bill, was she?”

  Another job for tomorrow, or rather, the day after, what with the first of January being a bank holiday. Good thing I’d brought a torch.

  Mickey peered down at a set of shelves next to the front door, the only furniture in the otherwise empty hallway.

  “What are you looking for?” I asked.

  “Her face.”

  “Huh?”

  “Eleanor’s face. You know, like in the Beatles’ song, where the old lady kept her face by the door in a jar. Always thought that sounded like a horror film.”

  “I’m pretty sure Paul McCartney didn’t mean a real face.”

  “I guess.”

  But that didn’t stop Mickey from singing a few off-key lines as I picked up the chunky phone sitting on the top shelf. No dial tone. It was as dead as its owner. Next to it, Aunt Ellie had started a shopping list she’d never complete.

  Microwave chips.

  Pizza.

  Dairy Milk chocolate.

  Lottery scratch card.

  Hmm… Looked as if she hadn’t been much of a chef.

  A flight of stairs ran up the wall to my right and disappeared into the gloom above. On the ground floor, four doors led off the hallway, three at the far end and one next to me. I pushed it open and immediately regretted that decision.

  “Eeuch! Who does that?” I screwed my eyes shut, wishing it would go away.

  “What? What’s wrong?” Maddie asked.

  I shuffled to the side so she could look into the downstairs toilet. The orange downstairs toilet. And not a muted shade of peach or a subtle tint. No, bright, in-your-face tangerine, the love child of a can of Tango and a bottle of Tropicana.

  “Ouch. Did your Aunt Ellie have impaired vision?”

  “I don’t think so. Just incredibly bad taste.”

  “At least it’s not avocado,” Mickey said.

  “No, that’s probably upstairs.”

  I pulled the toilet door shut, wishing I hadn’t sold my Gucci sunglasses on eBay. I’d need them every time I got the urge to pee.

  “Wonder what’s behind door number two?” Maddie muttered as I followed her along the hallway.

  Mickey had been spot on about the carpet. Grimy and threadbare underfoot, I’d certainly never walk on it without slippers.

  “Do you want me to open it?” Mickey asked, his hand hovering above the door handle.

  “Yes, go on.”

  Light coming in through the grimy window of the lounge revealed an oversized velvet sofa, the antithesis of the bathroom with its drab brown swirls. It sat opposite the biggest plasma TV I’d ever seen.

  Mickey let out a low whistle. “Well, I guess we know where her pension went.”

  We sure did. Edward had spent a fortune on his fifty-inch flat screen, but Aunt Ellie’s looked bigger.

  “I guess she must have really enjoyed her soaps.”

  The TV was the focal point of the room, but clutter dominated the rest of the space. A cheap-looking veneered shelving unit spanned one wall, full to bursting with nicknacks. China figurines, decorative plates, candles, teacups and matching saucers. How on earth did she dust? I ran a finger across one ornamental jug and studied the grey layer on my finger. Guess I’d answered that question.

  Out in the hallway again, I hoped it would be third time lucky. Maddie opened the door this time, revealing a kitchen with stained Formica countertops and a lingering odour of cigarette smoke. The ceiling was stained yellow from old tobacco, made worse by the clash with the beige walls. I couldn’t help shuddering.

  “It needs a bit of modernising,” Maddie said.

  “Congratulations. You just won the prize for understatement of the year.”

  A newish microwave sat in one corner, but the kettle, the stove, and everything else could have come from the Ark. In fact, I wasn’t sure I’d dare to turn the cooker on. The only thing worse than having to live in Lilac Cottage would be burning it down.

  “Guys! You have to look at this.” Mickey’s voice drifted through the open door.

  “Look at what?” I asked.

  “The… Oh, you’ve got to come in here.”

  I tried to push door number four open, but it got stuck halfway. Even a shove didn’t help. I squeezed through the gap, and my jaw dropped open.

  “What the hell is all of this stuff?”

  Maddie leaned in behind me, and judging by her sharp intake of breath, she couldn’t believe her eyes either.

  “Your aunt seems to have bought everything QVC has ever sold.”

  “Or else she was acting as a satellite warehouse for The Shopping Channel,” Mickey said.

  No kidding.

  The boxes were stacked from floor to ceiling, everything from a steam mop to slimming underwear in extra-large. A halogen oven jostled for space with a replica lightsabre, and I spotted four different hair-removal gadgets. Good grief—was that… Yes. A life-size cutout of Cliff Richard grinned at us from beside the window.

  “Bloody hell,” Maddie said. “I’ve always wondered who bought all this crap. Now I know.”

  My first instinct was to run and never look back. In fact, I’d got halfway out the door before Maddie grabbed my arm and hauled me back into my own personal hell. Even as a child, I’d arranged my books in alphabetical order and put my toys into their box at the end of each day. But this… Lilac Cottage was so far removed from my love of neatness and order that I felt the beginnings of a migraine just looking at the mess.

  Old Olivia longed to climb into Maddie’s car and go straight back to London, but new Olivia didn’t have the luxury of being fussy anymore. At least it was cheap. Those words became my new mantra.

  At least it’s cheap. At least it’s cheap. At least it’s cheap.

  “How are you going to cope with this lot?” Maddie asked. “You know, with your OCD?”

  “I do not have OCD,” I snapped.

  The expression on Maddie’s face told me she thought otherwise.

  Okay, maybe I did, just a little. “I’ll manage. I have to.”

  She poked at a box containing a steam iron. “There could be anything buried under this lot.”

  “A World War Two bomb, a dead body, a portal to a parallel universe,” Mickey added.

  I forced a laugh. It was either that or cry. “I’m going to have a field day on eBay
.”

  “Flipping heck, you will, won’t you? And now Christmas is over, you could borrow some of Santa’s elves to help you with all the packing.”

  If I’d thought the ground floor was bad, the situation only got worse as we climbed the creaking staircase.

  “I was right,” Mickey said as he pushed open the first door to the left. “Avocado. And it could do with a clean.”

  Marvellous. Still, if I was lucky, there’d be a white bathroom suite stacked in the mess downstairs. To the right, Eleanor’s bedroom had the same tired air as the lounge, from the faded velour headboard on the sagging double bed, to the tatty wardrobe, to the dressing table covered in half-empty bottles of lotions and potions.

  But the other two bedrooms?

  If only I could unsee the horrors. Jigsaw holders, TV dinner trays, garden kneelers, and ugly kaftans. Fancy toilet roll holders, foot files, garish scarves, and a machine that looked like a torture device but claimed it would give you a “Hollywood butt lift.”

  And an idea began to form in my mind…

  CHAPTER 9

  “THERE’S A LOT of stuff here from The Jewellery Channel,” Maddie said, picking up a couple of boxes. “Simulated diamond, garnet… What’s kunzite?”

  “No idea, but I hope somebody does because I’m going to sell it. Everything.”

  “Like, on eBay?”

  “Exactly that. Sell it and get a bathroom that won’t make me go blind.”

  Mickey’s grin matched my own. “Might I suggest a new kitchen as well?”

  “Good idea.” I wasn’t sure I could bring myself to touch any of the appliances downstairs. “But who knows how much this lot’ll raise?”

  Maddie picked up a paint-by-numbers picture of a boy and dog. “Someone’ll buy it. It’s all new. I mean, I know someone who sold an old carrier bag on eBay for one pound fifty.”

  “I can only hope.”

  Unbeknownst to her, Aunt Ellie had given me a second chance at life, and I intended to seize it with both hands. The eBay app on my phone was about to become my new best friend. But first I needed to get through the next few days.

  “Has anyone seen a packet of sheets or a duvet? I need to work out where I’m going to sleep tonight.”