Bad Heir Day (23 page)

“Well, and
will
there be, do yereckon?”

“Well, not if ye’re judging by the bed,” Nanny cackled. Anna’s stomach hit the flagstones. “I’ve looked every morn and there’s ne’er anything on the sheets.”
Squelch
.

Anna ground her teeth, her fury now overtaking her surprise. The thought of Nanny on the loose in their bedroom—as, to judge by the rigidly tucked-under sheets, she was on a daily basis—had never been a comfortable one. But never in her worst, most paranoid moments had Anna imagined Nanny checking the bed for stains of activity.

“Aye, bu’ that might not be the lassie’s fault,” cackled MacLoggie. “There’ve always been a few question marks over the maister in that department. That’s wha’ comes o’ sendin’ him to public school in England.”

Anna decided she had heard enough. She gave a loud cough and stepped forward. As she entered the outbuilding, the far door was still swinging in the wake of MacLoggie’s sudden departure. The slapping noise continued and was explained by the fact that Nanny was noisily rinsing something wobbly and bloody in a shallow stone sink. She turned her heavy face to Anna. “Can I help you?”

Anna boiled at Nanny’s level tones, salted with just a hint of insolence. To think that Jamie had wanted her to discuss a wedding with this termagant. Well, the old battleaxe had asked for it. She’d make her squirm. Anna took a deep breath. “I couldn’t help overhearing…” Yet, somewhere along the lines the words came out differently. “I’d like you to get the best room in the castle ready please, Nanny.”

The slapping continued. Looking around her, Anna saw that a deer carcass hung from one of the hooks in the stark white walls. Near the sink, a vast wooden block on which lay a hatchet, several knives, and a considerable quantity of blood confirmed that Nanny had recently been indulging in a little light butchery.

“Did you hear me, Nanny?” Anna was aware that her voice had gone up an octave or two.

“Aye.”

Suddenly, Anna realised that the bunch of unidentified organs hanging from a hook on the wall were the bowels of some unfortunate deer. She knew this because she could see a passage protruding from the organ mass in which small, round black pellets of deer poo were held in their own separate sacs, like the French sweets sold in long ropes of individual plastic packets. Looking at the unexpunged faeces, Anna had an overwhelming sense of life and all its natural rhythms suspended.

“I’d be grateful if you could do it immediately,” Anna said tightly. “I have a friend coming to stay.”

Geri’s eyes
flicked open. Something strange was going on. It wasn’t
just
that she was slammed into the nasty-smelling grey carpet wall of her bunk every time the train rounded a bend, or grappled with the wrong sort of leaves, snow, or, more probably, rail. It wasn’t even that the lid of the cabin’s tiny sink, theoretically held up by a catch on the wall, kept being loosened from its moorings by the locomotive’s wilder lurches and slamming down with the force and violence of a maniac’s fist. Nor was it that the cabin was so airless she could barely breathe, and small enough to satisfy the most rampant agoraphobic. She could barely turn round standing up; lying down, on the other hand, had involved a different set of challenges altogether. When first entering the sleeper, Geri had laughed aloud at the size of it. Now, in the shaking, rattling watches of the night, it didn’t seem nearly so amusing. Anna, she thought. The things I do for you. The opportunities I set you up with, and the minute I take my eye off the ball…Fancy not even having managed a
wedding date
yet. Still, hopefully it wouldn’t take long to get everything back on track. After all, she hadn’t bought that Gucci dress for nothing.

Irritating though her inability to get on a flight to Scotland had been—when
was
she going to use all those air miles?—the news that the quickest way up had been by sleeper had not worried Geri unduly. There was, after all, something very romantic about spending the night on a train. Geri’s fond visions of walnut panelling, lamplit buffet cars, and steam trains puffing gracefully across northern uplands in the sunset had, however, reached the end of the line rather sooner than she had anticipated. At Euston, in fact. Before the train had even set off.

For Geri, any romance the journey might have held was quickly obliterated by the sound of the couple next door going at it hammer and tongs before the rear engine even pulled away from the buffers. “Didn’t even
bother
putting my knickers on this morning,” gasped a woman’s voice. “Didn’t see the point—you
always
want it the
minute
we get on.” Brief encounter, thought Geri, it wasn’t. Literally.

The rest of Geri’s Orient Express–inspired expectations met with much the same disappointments. There was no walnut panelling; the only thing in sight even coming close to resembling a walnut was the short and intensely wrinkled old steward who asked her if she wanted tea or coffee in the morning (and quickly gave up on his attempts to elicit the same information from her neighbours). The lamplit buffet car had turned out to be an ordinary carriage filled with the sort of drunken, disappointed, rootless, and downright strange human flotsam and jetsam one might expect to find in a sleeper bar on a weekday evening.

Having secured herself a paper bag containing two miniature bottles of gin and two tins of tonic, Geri headed back to her telephone-box-sized compartment and locked the door, intending not to emerge until the train reached Inverness. She did not even intend to make the long, cold trek in her nightclothes to the loo, having decided on an impromptu but, she suspected, by no means infrequently employed system involving an empty plastic cup and the sink.

One blessing at least was that the couple next door had temporarily ceased their activities, having reached something of a crescendo at Stevenage. Geri downed her second gin and tonic and, having prised apart sheets so firmly tucked together they made opening an oyster with bare hands look easy, made a determined attempt to sleep.

Something in the compartment on the
other
side, however, seemed just as determined to stop her. Something that shouted, screeched, and banged itself periodically against the very wall—against the very section of the very wall, in fact—that Geri’s face lay closest to in quest of slumber. As the noises increased in volume and the thuds in violence, she half expected the interconnecting door between the compartments to open and a madman with a carving knife to loom above her. The madman, however, did not seem to be the only person in the cabin. Someone else was shrieking as well.
Two nutters
.
Finally, Geri stuffed tissue paper from the complementary toilet bag in her ears and pulled the blanket over her head.

But now something had woken her. Not a noise, but a smell. Geri sniffed hard. Something was burning. She gasped and sat up, visions of a rolling fireball filling the corridor outside springing terrifyingly and irrepressibly to mind. There was another scent besides, something heavy, slightly acrid. Geri had never smelt burning flesh before, but…

Flinging the compartment door open, Geri stuck her head out into the corridor. No fireball in sight, no nothing, in fact. But the smell here was definitely stronger and coming from the compartment next door, the one with the nutters in it. Geri hesitated for a nanosecond before rapping hard on the door. As shouts within greeted her knock and the door eventually opened to allow the throat-punching fumes within to escape, Geri saw she had not been wrong about the inmates. The person standing before her was, without a doubt, the most insane she’d ever seen.

“
Cassandra
! What the hell are you doing here? And
what on earth
is that stink?”

Cassandra gasped. Her eyes boggled and her mouth fell open.
Was there no escape
?
Here she was, trying to leave everything behind her. Trying to forget the theatres of humiliation and degradation otherwise known as Kensington, Jett, St. Midas’s, Mrs. Gosschalk, and most of all the Tressells’
wretched party
which had started it all. And who should be in the carriage next to her but the Tressells’ ghastly nanny whom she had last encountered whilst in a very compromising position on the Tressells’ bathroom floor.

“Got a body in there or something?”

“As it happens, I’ve got Zak in here.” Cassandra spoke with as much hauteur as she could muster. Was the creature
spying
on her? Would the shameful truth—that she had been reduced to travelling in a second-class sleeper, and a pre-booked, reduced-price Apex one at that—filter back to W8? But now that the divorce was underway and the mortgage payments had fallen behind, did it much matter if it did? The Mrs. Curtaintwitchers down the road had had a field day as it was; Cassandra knew she would never be able to hold her head up in Kensington again. Or her hand up either; taxis were, temporarily at least, a thing of the past. She and Zak had suffered the ultimate indignity of coming to Euston on the Tube, a shattering experience for both of them. Having to actually
hold
those
disgusting
yellow poles that a million filthy commuter hands had gripped before her had turned Cassandra’s stomach like a skipping rope.

“So what’s the smell?” asked Geri. “I thought the carriage was on fire.”

“South American Sage Stressbuster, since you ask,” said Cassandra, as haughtily as she could. For she had salvaged one item from the wreck of the luxury liner of her life. The last of her scented candles. Not only did the smell remind her of happier—well,
wealthier—
times, it also reminded her of the joyous fact that Fenella Greatorex had recently burned her entire house down by leaving a scented candle alight while out at a parents’ meeting.

“Oh, I see. Well, I am surprised to find you here, Cassandra,” Geri said. “Didn’t have you down as a user of public transport. Unless it’s the sort that flies.”

Cassandra swallowed. “Yes, well, it’s really for Zak’s benefit, of course.” Over Cassandra’s bony shoulder Geri could see him lurking on the top bunk, computer game in hand, watching her malevolently.

“How do you mean?”

“Well, as he’ll be going to a Scottish boarding school and they’re supposed to be
terribly
basic, I thought it best he got used to travelling rough straightaway. As a matter of fact,” Cassandra tittered hysterically, “I took him to Euston on the
Underground
!”

“Heavens above,” drawled Geri. “You’ll be throwing caution to the winds and going on a bus next. So which school is Zak going to? Excuse me for saying this, but I thought he hadn’t got a place
anywhere
.”

“Of course he had,” Cassandra snapped. “There were plenty of offers.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear it,” said Geri, unable to resist turning the knife. “I’ve obviously been getting the wrong information. Last I heard, you were looking into Christ’s Hospital.”

Cassandra’s lip curled in a snarl. “Yes, well, I wouldn’t have sent Zak there anyway.”

“Why not?” asked Geri. “The academic standards are supposed to be excellent, aren’t they?”

“Well, it can’t have been a very good
hospital
,”
Cassandra barked. “Didn’t do Christ much good, did it?”

She shifted forward into the doorway so less of the cabin behind could be seen. The last thing she wanted was for this wretched creature to see the handful of headmasters’ letters scattered over the bed behind her, grudgingly agreeing to see Cassandra and her son for five minutes despite there emphatically being no possibility of a place. “And what are you doing here?” she asked Geri. Time they got off this subject.

“Well, I’m going to see your old nanny as it happens,” Geri said, recognising another opportunity to rub Cassandra’s nose in it. “At her
castle
.”

“Oh. Yes. You must give me the address.” A light went on in Cassandra’s eyes. Or was it, Geri thought, merely the fact that they were drawing into a station? They were stopping, at any rate. Rather abruptly, as well. As the train shuddered with screeching suddenness to a halt, she turned behind her to the window and looked out.

“How bizarre,” Geri said. “We seem to be stopping in the middle of nowhere.” She grinned at Cassandra, unable to resist the urge to tease her. “Zak’s not pulled the communication cord, has he?”

Cassandra glared. “Of
course
he hasn’t. Zak would
never
do such a thing.” She darted a nervous glance over her shoulder, threw a startled look back at Geri, and disappeared inside the cabin.

Geri slipped back into her own compartment just as the train guard strode as furiously up the narrow passageway as his well-built frame would permit.

“How
dare
you say that about my son?” she heard Cassandra yelling as she fitted the tissue paper back in her ears. “He’s just
curious
.
A sign of very high intelligence. He pulled it because he thought it was something to do with the air conditioning.”

***

“But what
did
MacLoggie mean about your father’s will?” Anna was trying to get Jamie to meet her eyes,
but so far hadn’t even managed to set up an appointment. This made her angrier than ever.

“Here, have some of Nanny’s shortbread,” Jamie said quickly, proffering a plate of thick-cut brown blocks. “She’s spent all morning making it.”

Staggered by the inadequacy of the diversionary tactic, Anna took the plate anyway. As her wrist plunged floorwards, she bit back the urge to enquire whether a concrete mixer had been employed in the construction of the shortbread and if so, why didn’t Jamie prop up the crumbling curtain wall with it? She looked for the smallest piece possible. None seemed less than a foot across.

“Nice, isn’t it?” said Jamie, chewing away so violently his eyes
watered with the strain.

Thanks to Nanny’s lurking in the shadows all through dinner, it had been impossible for Anna to bring up the subject of what she had overheard in the kitchen. Her chance had, as usual, only arisen during after-dinner coffee—and shortbread—in the castle’s upstairs sitting room.

“Let me put it another way,” Anna said when Jamie’s jaws had finally stopped moving. “
Why did you ask me to marry you
?
You don’t
love
me, do you?”

Jamie did not respond immediately. “We-e-ll…” he hedged.

“Well
what
?”
A frigid calm, far more disturbing than anger, spread through Anna. She was, she knew, emotionally anaesthetising herself against what was to come.

“Well, of course I
like
you,” Jamie murmured, crossing one yellow-corduroyed leg slowly over the other. “But I’m not really sure what
love
,
such as it is, really
is
.”

“Oh
really
,”
Anna snapped. “You sound like Prince bloody Charles. You know what I mean.”

There was a pause.

“Well, love’s never really, um, been an issue in our family as far as, er, marriages are concerned,” Jamie said, still avoiding her gaze. “There’s an estate to consider. Anguses usually marry for a reason.”

“Yes, so I heard. Your father put it in his will that you had to have a wife in order to make the inheritance final.”

“Yes, um, well, there
is
that,” Jamie said.

“But why? That’s not normal, is it?” Anna felt furious, yet oddly detached. Like a cross-examining barrister. A very cross examining barrister.

“No,” Jamie admitted, turning his wide dark eyes on her almost pleadingly. “But my father realised that, after being beaten and buggered by the other boys at school, I wasn’t either. At the start of one term, I begged him not to send me back and told him what was happening. He was worried about the effect it would have on me and my future relationships with women.”

“That sounds very enlightened,” Anna remarked.

“Not really. He told me it hadn’t done him any harm, thrashed me senseless, packed me off, and went straight round to his lawyer and stuck in that clause.”

“Oh. Oh dear.” For a few moments, sympathy for the crushed little boy Jamie must have been welled up in Anna. Then she remembered what they were supposed to be talking about. “That explains why you want to get
married
,
but not why you want to get married to
me
.
I’m not remotely grand.”

“Which is why we were the perfect match.”

“Sorry? Am I missing something?”

“Simple.” Jamie darted a look at her. “You had no money and nowhere to live and were desperate to get away from that boss of yours. I needed someone to come here and marry me in order to properly inherit the estate. What better arrangement could there possibly have been?”