Bad Heir Day (28 page)

“Who wrote it?” squeaked Mrs. McLeod timidly, dabbing at her eyes with an embroidered handkerchief.

There was a silence. Anna, puce with embarrassment, looked stonily downwards as Robbie darted a glance at her. Was he waiting for her to admit it? She hesitated.

Then came the interruption.

“I shay,” demanded a loud, unsteady, shrilly patrician voice at the back of the hall, “ish thish Mishter Robbie MacAshkill’s creative writing clash? I was told I’d find him here.”

Robbie, his eyes
fixed on whatever apparition had presented itself in the doorway, nodded in astonishment. Anna froze to the spot.
Those horribly familiar tones
.
It could not be
.
Surely
.

It was. “Eckshellent,” pronounced Cassandra, eyes
rolling, and swaying wildly as she advanced through the hall.

Anna leapt to her feet. The chair crashed to the floor behind her. “
Cassandra
.
What on earth are you doing here?”

Cassandra clomped up, gyrated wildly to keep her balance, buckled suddenly on her leopardskin heels, and collapsed on the floor.

“I want to talk to someone about penishes.”

“Friend of yours?”

As Cassandra lay crumpled and comatose at their feet, Robbie raised an ironic eyebrow at Anna.

“Not exactly. I was rather hoping I’d never see her again.”

“Well, you probably won’t from the look of her. I’d better call an ambulance.”

“Och, there’s no need to do that,” piped up Mrs. McLeod. Anna and Robbie watched in astonishment as, with surprising strength, she dragged Cassandra’s prone body across the dusty floorboards and deftly manipulated it into an upright position against one of the radiators. Propping the lolling head up straight, she began to slap Cassandra’s cheeks. “Mr. McLeod comes home from the pub like this all the time.”

Anna grinned to herself. This, at any rate, completely scuppered the theory that Mrs. McLeod’s sexual fantasies were autobiographical. Or at least, that they were inspired by her husband.

Through gritted teeth, Anna offered to put Cassandra up at the castle. If nothing else, it would annoy Nanny. It was decided, however, that the rough roads up to Dampie might well finish Cassandra off altogether, and in the first instance she should go to Mrs. McLeod’s cottage, conveniently just round the corner from the village hall. Once the long, slow process of moving Cassandra was completed, Robbie was dispatched to track down Zak. Cassandra, slipping in and out of lucidity thanks to Mrs. McLeod’s face-slapping, had rather mysteriously revealed him to be in a Disco somewhere in the area.

“But there isn’t a disco anywhere on the island,” Robbie said, puzzled.

As they left Mrs. McLeod’s cottage—a pin-neat, shining haven of order that could not have been less suggestive of her blatantly erotic prose style—Robbie brushed against Anna. She shuddered at the charge of desire that suddenly swept through her whilst trying to tell herself that the contact might have been accidental. The cottage was, after all, so tiny that only dwarf anorexics could have negotiated each other without colliding.

Listening to Mrs. McLeod sluicing down Cassandra in the bathroom, murmuring sympathetically as she did so, Anna tried to make sense of the afternoon’s events. Neither Cassandra’s sudden appearance, nor the means by which Robbie had got hold of her diary seemed to have any explanation whatsoever.

***

“I eventually tracked him down at the police station,” Robbie reported, returning half an hour later dragging a thunderous-looking Zak who, once inside the cottage, immediately started to pick up and look at Mrs. McLeod’s large, immaculately dusted collection of ornaments.

Anna tried, like a victim at a human rights trial, not to flinch at the sight of her former torturer. For Zak looked more evil than ever. His prep-school-perfect basin cut looked straggly and wild, its former white-blondness noticeably darker. It occurred to Anna to wonder whether Zak’s platinum locks were in fact no more natural than his mother’s; could Cassandra have really had her son’s hair coloured to match her own? Could she really be so vain? Was the Pope Catholic?

“What was Zak doing?” she asked.

“Sitting in a cell. He’d tried to drive the car—called a Disco, by the way, so that explains that—but ended up smashing it into the postbox. Car’s a write-off.”

“The postbox? So at least he hadn’t got very far then. The postbox next to the village hall, you mean?”

“No, the one on the other side of the island.” Robbie passed a rueful palm through his hair. “The police were alerted after someone coming out of the pub saw a small boy driving a car at a speed in excess of one hundred miles per hour through the village. They would have got him sooner, only the person coming out of the pub was MacLoggie and, given his condition, his evidence was considered unsafe.”

“I see.”

“When they caught up with Zak, he was apparently sitting in the front seat listening to a woman talking dirty on a cassette recorder. Turned up full blast.”

“Ugh.” Anna tried not to remember the knicker-sniffing incident on her second day at Liv.

“How did you get him out of the police station?”

“They didn’t seem too sad to see the back of him. They’ll want a word with Cassandra when she comes round. Fortunately—for him at least—Zak’s too young to have a criminal record.”

“A record?” Zak’s voice was scornful. “As if I’d want one anyway. No one has vinyl these days.”

“Shut up,” Robbie snapped at him. There was a smash as one of Mrs. McLeod’s china shepherdesses collided with the tiles of the fireplace.

“
I
want to be a policeman,” Zak announced defiantly, making no move to pick up the pieces. “
I
want to put people in prison.”

***

Driving back to the castle in Robbie’s rattling old Land Rover, Anna tried to stop her thighs shooting across the metal seat and cannoning into Robbie’s every time they rounded a corner, which was often, sudden, and hair-raising. Either Robbie was a very bad driver, Anna thought, as her legs slammed into his rock-hard thighs, or…

“Hope Mrs. McLeod can cope with both Cassandra and Zak,” she remarked, looking out of the Land Rover’s broken window across the camouflage-coloured landscape. “But she did insist she’d have them until Cassandra gets…um…better.”

“Mrs. M’s a tough old bird,” Robbie said. “We’ll pick them both up tomorrow in any case. She probably wants them for material. Maybe her next chapter has a child in it.”

“Talking of material”—Anna turned her head away to disguise the deepening vermilion of her face and unenthusiastically regarded the sodden, rendered walls of Dampie Castle as they jerked into view across the windscreen—“How
did
you get hold of my diary?”

“Oh, so you’re admitting it was yours?” Robbie threw her an amused glance as the Land Rover plunged up the Dampie drive. “I wasn’t sure if you wanted to. As it happens, I found it in the castle dustbin only this morning.”

“
Dustbin
?”
She remembered putting it there, of course, but what was
Robbie
doing rummaging in the castle refuse? Poetry paid badly, she was sure, but all the same…

“Yes. One of my jobs is to collect the local rubbish. You don’t think I make a living being a poet, do you? Or through my creative writing classes, although I must admit that if I were a literary agent I’d probably be retiring on Mrs. McLeod.”

“Are you
really
a poet?” Suddenly, the idea of a dustman who gave creative writing classes and was a poet into the bargain struck Anna as rather strange.

There was a silence. Robbie looked at her with a set face, then looked hastily back at the windscreen as the Land Rover lurched over another pothole. Then, to her relief, he laughed.

“No, of course I’m not a poet,” he confessed easily. “As a matter of fact, I’m a novelist. Trying to be, at any rate. I’m writing a comic murder mystery set on a Scottish island.”

“Oh.” Was anything on Skul, Anna wondered, what it seemed?

“I’m here researching my characters, and being a poet was the only thing I could think of that wouldn’t attract too much suspicion. Islands like this are packed with hawk-eyed old bards with beards. I managed the beard, as you saw, only I never felt it was quite me.”

“It wasn’t. It was a personality in its own right.” Anna furrowed her brow. “But I don’t understand why you felt you had to give creative writing classes.”

“They were supposed to help convince people I was a poet. I never expected people to actually
come
to them. When, one night, the village hall door opened and Mrs. McLeod trotted in, I almost fell over with shock. When I heard what she’d brought with her, I almost died of it. Having said that, I think she’ll have a great future as an erotic novelist once she’s got a bit more, er,
front
.”
As his glance flickered,
possibly
involuntarily, towards her breasts, Anna’s stomach lurched, in perfect synchronity with the Land Rover, in excitement.

There was a silence, punctuated only by the grinding of the Land Rover’s engine.

“Yes. My character research has been rather more, er,
interesting
than I imagined.” Their eyes met, briefly, before Robbie’s swung suddenly back to the windscreen just in time to stop them smashing into a tree.

“Especially if you go through their rubbish,” said Anna. “I suppose that was part of your research as well.”

“Oh yes. There’s a pivotal scene in my book where the maverick detective—”

“Unhappily divorced?”

“Yes, and with a drink problem of course.”

“Of course. Smokes too much? Loves classical music?”

“Absolutely. Anyway, in this pivotal scene he’s going through the dustbins in search of the murder weapon, so of course I had to know what the average islander puts out for the rubbish. You wouldn’t believe some of the things I found.”

“Like my diary.”

“Yes. I hope you didn’t mind me looking at it, but once I’d started reading it, I couldn’t stop. It was so well written…”

Anna blushed again. It occurred to her that, although she knew next to nothing about Robbie, he was now familiar with her entire recent history. The humiliation of life with Seb, the near slavery of life with Cassandra, the boredom and disappointment of life with Jamie, he knew it all. Leaning very close to her, close enough for her to smell his aftershave and the faint mint of his breath, Robbie said softly, “You’re not very lucky in love, are you?”

Anna shook her head. Until now,
she thought, crossing her fingers behind her back. She was just closing her eyes and parting her lips when, with impeccable timing, Robbie’s mobile rang.
Damn
.

After several minutes’ terse conversation, Robbie snapped the mobile away. “That was Mrs. McLeod. She wants me to come and get Zak at once. Apparently he’s sprayed the fire extinguisher all over her wooden floor. Mr. McLeod’s just come in from the pub and gone flying.”

***

Cassandra hadn’t felt so dreadful in
years
.
Someone, somewhere was plunging red-hot needles into her brain. When, oh when would she remember
cheap
alcohol disagreed with her? One never felt like
this
on Bombay Sapphire. Possibly because one could only afford
one
bottle of that at a time.

She narrowed her eyes as she took in her surroundings. Where the
hell
was she? Some poky, ghastly little bedroom, by the looks of it. Was it a nightmare?
Must
be. But only in the very
worst
of nightmares, thought Cassandra, cringing with disgust as her toenails scraped against the fabric, did people have
aquamarine nylon sheets
on their beds.
Or
wear baby pink bed jackets
with ribbons
, she thought, tearing frantically at her throat. Exhausted with the effort, she lay back and tried to make sense of the fuzzy images of herself rolling past the back of her eyes.

Dancing on the tables in some appalling pub—now
that
bit was obviously a nightmare. So difficult to work out what had really happened and what hadn’t, but such, Cassandra thought, was the burden of the creative imagination. Some muscular man folding her tenderly into his arms—nothing remotely surprising about
that
.
She could have sworn that somewhere along the line, that wretched ex-nanny of hers Anna, had been in the room as well—that
must
have been a nightmare too, even though she fully intended to drop in on her for at least a week’s stay. A hideous thought suddenly struck Cassandra—perhaps this poky, chilly, ugly little room actually
was
in the castle. If so, she’d request a transfer to the master bedroom without delay.

What time was it? Cassandra raised herself on one elbow and peered at the bedside table, where she was gratified to see a number of her own paperbacks piled up. She was less delighted when her vision focused enough to reveal the plastic jackets and typewritten numbered labels of the public library—although this one said mobile library. Cassandra had not previously been aware one
could
borrow mobiles from a library. So that was what she’d been paying her bloody taxes for all these years.
Ridiculous
.

And what was
this
?
Cassandra reached out and grabbed a handful of paper by the bed. Typewritten. Story by the looks of it. Someone had left it, perhaps by mistake. Anna, no doubt; she was so obsessed with writing she probably carried manuscripts round in her knickers. Well, Cassandra thought viciously, there’d certainly be plenty of room.

She may as well give it the once over; if nothing else it would send her back to sleep. Yawning, Cassandra pressed the papers close to her nose and began to read.

Five minutes later, she was sitting bolt upright, her hangover forgotten. This stuff was
sensational
.
As she read on, Cassandra felt awe seeping slowly through her; either that, or she’d wet herself with excitement. She hated to admit it—in fact, she never had before—but there could be no doubt whatsoever that she was in the presence of a great writing talent. Someone who could knock herself, Jilly, Danielle, and even dear departed Dame Catherine into a cocked beach bag.

Damn
.
Damn
.
Damn
.
Cassandra rolled her bloodshot eyes hard at the ceiling.
What
an opportunity missed. How
could
she have been so
stupid
,
so pig-headed as to have had the girl in the house with her and have
no idea
she was capable of this? When a soft Scottish voice suddenly enquired whether she was all right, Cassandra leapt a foot into the air and looked furiuosly at the small, timid-looking woman who had appeared at the foot of her bed. Doubtless one of the castle servants. “Do you always creep up on people when they’re reading?” she snapped at Mrs. McLeod, looking in disgust at the rollers and tartan apron she was sporting. Really, Anna needed to take a firmer hand with the appearance of her domestic staff.

“I’m very sorry, Mrs. Knight. I didn’t mean to wake ye up. But ye were so
quiet
…” Mrs. McLeod touched her rollers in panic. She’d just wanted to titivate her hair; one didn’t, after all, get a great author staying every day of the week. Not that she had intended the great author to see her in her rollers; given Cassandra’s condition when she and Anna had stuffed her between the sheets, Mrs. McLeod had not expected the great author to see anything for several days, in fact. “I just wanted to leave ye a couple of notes. Your son has been taken up to the castle and you’re invited to stay there when you feel well enough to go. I’m very sorry to disturb ye…”