Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter
Twenty-Two
I’m glad to see that Leo’s TV crew has cleared out for the day as we pull over the drawbridge at Maplemead.
Fletch’s dark blue Saab is also absent and I find myself relieved about that too.
Taking a break away to review the case has pressed home the fact we’re short on time and I’d much rather get on with the job without constantly wondering what he thinks of me.
I can’t censor myself and do the job justice, and at the end of the day, I’m on the clock here and trying to build up my professional business reputation.
Leo’s blacked-out sedan is over by the turret.
Even his car is attention seeking. I think that’s possibly the first requirement he asks of the things he surrounds himself with; they have to gild his life and add to his public image.
I realize now that he applies the same criteria to the people he surrounds himself with too; perhaps that’s why I didn’t make the final cut.
Not flashy enough, not quite eye-catching enough.
It’s a disquieting thought, and one I’m pissed at myself for allowing to creep in, because if there’s one emotion I don’t do well, it’s self-pity.
Given my quirks, it would be all too easy to allow doubt to settle in, to tell myself that I’m odd, and weird, and different, that I’ll never quite be mainstream enough to be anyone’s first choice.
For the most part though, I don’t feel that way and that’s entirely down to the women in my life.
Leo might surround himself with people who blow smoke up his backside and tell him that he’s marvelous, but my cheerleading team is every bit as loud and they wave their pompoms just as fiercely.
My mother. My gran. Glenda Jackson. Marina.
They are my people and their hard line on self-pity has made sure I’ve grown up walking as tall as a five-foot-three woman who sees dead people possibly can.
“Right then,” I say, determined as I look up at the castle facade.
It’s overcast this afternoon and the sandstone walls soar up and touch the troubled skies overhead.
It looks like a different place without sunlight glinting off its leaded windows.
Less welcoming. Not forbidding, exactly, but cold and hard.
I’m really quite glad that one way or another, this will be my last night alone under Maplemead’s castellated roof.
“Hang on, my phone’s buzzing.” I reach into the back pocket of my jeans as I slide out of Babs. “Crap, missed it.” My screen tells me it was Lois, and a second later, a voicemail pops in.
Her voice belts out of my phone. “Just checking up on how things are going, doll! Call me and wow me with good news!”
“Someone’s turning the thumbscrews,” Marina says, tying her hair back with a band from around her wrist and sliding her sunglasses up her nose.
My nerves jangle louder than the car keys in my hand as we walk briskly across the gravel and jog up the stone steps.
Lestat is with us, moseying along at his own pace, although he sticks close as soon as we go inside the castle.
Once bitten, twice shy. Or, in his case, once mauled, twice terrified.
A party-rental company rolls through the drawbridge and parks next to two black-and-white catering vans, workers jumping out and throwing their back doors open like a military SWAT team.
It’s obviously all systems go today with ball preparations.
It’s as busy inside the castle as it is outside when we walk through the propped-open front doors into the cool reception hall.
“Mind your backs please, fragile incoming!” someone shouts behind us, and we move aside to allow a guy carrying a huge, precariously balanced, box of champagne flutes through.
“Looks like we’re going to struggle to find some peace to talk to the ghosts around here today,” Marina says. “It’s like Grand Central.”
Artie scoops Lestat up as we pick our way around hulking great amplifiers and crates of champagne and head toward the kitchen.
It’s thankfully quieter in there and Hells Bells and Artie lock gazes and both flush the same shade as the massive summer pudding Cook is assembling on the scrubbed pine table.
“The posey one was looking for you.”
I’m guessing “the posey one” must be Leo. He got off quite lightly there in my opinion. I might have gone with the narcissistic, egotistical, self-centered, floppy-haired twattish one, myself. It has a more truthful ring about it.
“Do you know where he is now?” I ask. I’m worried he wants to offload the fact that Britannia managed to successfully achieve physical form in my absence and that they’ve had filthy sex behind the giant rhubarb, seeing as that seems to be the clandestine meeting place du jour.
Is it possible for a ghost to get pregnant?
Maybe I should slip Leo Glenda’s emergency condom.
Cook shakes her head. “No idea, but he had the strange ones with him.”
Now there’s a nickname I don’t feel the need to correct. I change tack. “Are Lois and Barty around somewhere?”
“They were, but now they ain’t.” Hells Bells’s words rush out all on one breath. “M’lady said she was going to have her eyebrows plucked, her hair styled, her nails painted, her tan sprayed…” She ticks them off on her fingers, then pauses and frowns in concentration. “There was one more.”
“Spot of lasering around the old hoochie-coochie-hoo-haa?” Marina wiggles her backside and I give her a sharp elbow in the ribs.
“And Barty?” I ask, mostly to stop Marina from saying anything else.
Cook looks up from her mound of blackberries, and in unison, she and Bells both say “playing tennis.”
The amount of tennis that man supposedly plays, he should be better than Carlos sodding Alcaraz.
Given his robust frame, I’d say his arm gets more action lifting a pint of beer than it does lifting a tennis racket.
Marriage is a bit like that though, isn’t it?
Little lies to keep the peace, and sometimes big ones.
Right. So the owners have done their usual vanishing trick, the castle is teeming with strangers who are going to get in our way, and Leo might be about to tell me he’s bonked Britannia.
This job is never, ever straightforward.
We need to get out of the way of everyone to do our stuff, and the only way to do that around here today is to head either down to the dungeon or upward to the bedrooms. I don’t have to debate those two options for long, because I’m not a psychotic sadomasochist.
“Artie, could you settle Lestat down here in the kitchen and then meet us upstairs in the Princess Suite please?”
I’m not sure how many opportunities I can naturally create for him to ask Hells Bells to the ball. If he doesn’t get the nerve up soon I’m going to give up and do it for him.
Upstairs, Marina and I drop down flat on our backs on the huge bed in the Princess Suite.
“You’re not going to tell me if you were swinging from that chandelier last night, are you?”
I laugh under my breath and study the ceiling. “It’s complicated.”
“I didn’t ask for your Facebook status,” she grumbles.
“We didn’t swing from the chandelier, okay?
” I relent because Marina and I are so close I don’t like not being able to confide in her.
“He came by and we talked a bit. He’d had a bad day so I sat on his lap to make him feel better, and one thing led to another because I was wearing Britannia Lovell’s wedding nightie and we were in a castle and you’d already told me to have sex with him so don’t judge me, then we fell asleep in the chair. ”
She thinks this over. “Together?”
“Yes.”
“Right.”
“Why did you say it like that?”
“Like what?”
“Slowly, like you don’t approve.”
She lifts her hands up off the mattress. “What am I, your mother? You don’t need my approval.”
“Marina, you were the one encouraging me to jump into bed with him yesterday, remember?”
“Yes. For wild donkey sex up here in the Princess Suite,” she says. “Not for talking, and climbing into laps to soothe troubled brows, and definitely not for falling asleep in his arms afterward. That wasn’t what I meant at all.”
I stay silent and she groans under her breath.
“Okay, okay,” I say, trying to make up ground. “He buttoned my nightdress again afterward, tiny awkward little shell buttons.”
She groans louder. “That’s worse.”
“How can it be?”
“Because it’s romantic, Melody. I didn’t realize that I needed to be so specific with my instructions. There isn’t supposed to be slow kisses and shared secrets.”
I pretend that I don’t know what she’s getting at, because I do know what she’s getting at and she’s right. “So what you’re saying is I should have wild-donkey sex with Fletch but not let him kiss me or speak to me? Is that it? Shall I charge him twenty quid while I’m on?”
“Twenty quid? Jesus, Melody. Have some pride. Add a zero.” We both laugh a bit and carry on staring at the ceiling.
“Just let him do anything he likes to your body, but don’t let him into your head or your heart. That’s all I’m saying.”
“He’s not all bad,” I say, thinking back to the vulnerable, emotionally battered man I held in my arms last night.
“I like your handsome reporter. He’s sexy.”
I didn’t say that, and neither did Marina. I prop myself up on my elbows and find Britannia sitting at the dressing table rearranging her hair in the mirror.
“Britannia,” I say, both as greeting and to let Marina know to button it.
“Ladies,” she says, getting up from the stool. “I hear talk of a ball on Saturday.” She catches my eye in the mirror. “I’ve come to be your fairy godmother.”
“I need to talk to you,” I say, rolling off the bed and standing up.
Britannia wafts over to the wardrobe and opens the door. “Take your pick.”
“She did that, right?” Marina murmurs, and I nod. Then Marina catches sight of all the beautiful clothes hanging in there and bolts off the bed lightning fast.
“Oh my God, these things!” she says, awed. “Can I touch?” Her hand hovers in the air, ready.
Britannia nods, so I do too. Britannia walks around Marina, assessing, and then tells me to suggest the silver dress. I pass the message on and Marina trails her fingertips over the padded hangers until she finds a silvery floor-length mermaid-like gown and pulls it out carefully.
She hangs it on the open door and we all gaze at it.
Marina clutches her neck. The dress oozes vintage glamour; its dull-silver velvet bodice nips in at the waist, and the gunmetal silk skirt, overlaid with a filmy mesh, flares to sweep the floor.
A braid of embroidered flowers trails over one shoulder and around the bustline, wrapping around the waist to form a delicate belt.
“That one wasn’t mine.” Britannia sighs, wistful. “It belonged to Aunt Eleanor. She kept most of my things in here after I…”
Even after all of the intervening years, Britannia still struggles to speak of her own death. I jump in to save her from the need to elaborate.
“She must have been very proud of you.”
Britannia looks more downcast than I think I’ve ever seen her. “I hope so. My mother was her younger sister, the family rebel. It’s such a cliché to run away and join the circus, isn’t it? But that’s what she did, and by seventeen she was pregnant with me.”
“So that’s how you ended up performing,” I say, piecing together the jigsaw of her life bit by bit. Marina has fished her phone from inside her bra and is recording me as I speak in the hope that I’ll be able to string the one-sided conversation back together again when we study it afterward.
“Yes. I grew up traveling. My mother always said I flew before I walked.”
I smile, because right now Britannia isn’t a troublesome, sexy harlot. She’s a wild-haired, tiny child flying like a rare bird on a trapeze in those little ballerina slippers in her blanket box, and she’s a willful teenager who called this place home because she’d grown up on the road.
These insights help me shade in the colors of the broad-stroke image I hold of her in my mind, but they hinder me too, because the more real she becomes, the harder it is to detach myself and do what I need to do.
I can see why Leo is struggling; I’m dazzled by her too and enjoy her company.
God knows what it’s like for him when you throw in the element of mutual desire.
Jeez, they’re both so charismatic. A relationship would never have survived between them in real life; they’re the kind of people who need to be feted and adored.
Plus they’d kill each other in a battle for control of the heated rollers.
“I know it’s difficult, Britannia, but could we please talk about the accident?”
Her face clouds and the light of nostalgia in her eyes dulls, as if someone has just blown out a birthday candle.
“It wasn’t an accident.” She studies the contents of the wardrobe. “You should try the purple.”
“How can you be so sure it wasn’t an accident?” I catch my breath.
“Because I know who cut the rope.”