by Della Galton
Once they were all gathered, Clara and Phil stood up at the front of the room and she banged her coffee mug on the table to get their attention and cleared her throat. ‘Thank you so much for coming in – those of you who weren’t here already – I’m sorry for the inconvenience and you’ll be paid for your time, of course. But something has happened that you need to know about.’
She and Phil had decided that the best thing to do would be to play them the video. But first she wanted to remind them why they were all here. She flicked a switch and the Bluebell’s Mission Statement popped up onto the screen.
Our mission is to provide the venue and facilities that will enable every guest to step towards the realisation of their dream.
Clara scrolled down to the text below it. The text was on a brochure that she had blown up to full size.
The Bluebell Cliff Hotel is a place where a person can come to fulfil their dream. We cater for everyone – the artistic, the quirky, the conventional, and even just the plain daft. If you can dream it, we can help you turn it into a reality. Call us for a no-obligation chat and take the first step to fulfilling your dream.
She could feel her heart hammering as she pressed play. She scanned their faces as they watched it. There were a variety of reactions.
Mr B looked outraged, no change there.
Zoe looked worried. But then she and Clara had already spoken about it and she knew what was coming.
Ellie May Taylor, the youngest waitress, clapped her hand over her mouth and widened her eyes.
Janet Brown, the remaining chambermaid, looked at her Fitbit and frowned. She was probably wondering how long it would be before she was able to get on with bed changing, which may take longer with agency staff, who weren’t as used to the routine.
A couple of other people looked amused.
But by the time the video had reached the end and the damning lines of text were scrolling across the screen not a single one of them was smiling. They were all clued up enough to know that something like this could be a serious threat to the future of the hotel and, in turn, to their jobs.
Clara pressed pause. There was a murmur of reaction, but one voice did carry clearly across the room and, by its vehemence, the message wasn’t polite.
‘Kurva,’ said Jakob Novak. ‘Is this video hoax?’
There were murmurs of dissent. Clearly some of them had already seen it. News travelled fast.
‘No, I’m afraid it’s not.’ Clara looked at him. ‘This did actually happen. It was two weeks ago. A couple booked the lighthouse for a minibreak with the proviso that he would propose to his partner by doing exactly what you saw. We kept it low-key because he wasn’t sure whether he’d be able to go through with it and he didn’t want her alerted in case it spoiled the surprise.’
‘That went well then,’ Ellie May said.
There were various mutterings and Clara explained that it wasn’t as bad as it looked. ‘It was a panic attack, not a heart attack. Everything was absolutely fine in the end. I went to the hospital with them.’
‘But then he decided to cash in and sell the video,’ someone else said. ‘YouTube can be quite profitable if you get enough hits.’
‘It’s more than that,’ Mr B pointed out, straightening up in his chair. ‘He’s not just uploaded a funny video, has he? He’s annotated it. It’s a direct attack on us. Chances are he didn’t even do it. Would you seriously want to invite public humiliation for ever after? You can see his face. It’s almost impossible to remove stuff like that permanently from the internet.’
‘You’re not helping,’ Clara snapped and he shut up swiftly. ‘But I do think you’re right about the fact that he probably didn’t instigate this. I spoke to him just before this meeting. He’s as shocked as we are.’
Arnold Fairweather had been furious as well as shocked. She’d had to hold the phone away from her ear while he ranted about his ex for several seconds. It turned out that Maureen Grey had ditched him the second they’d got home and she was now on holiday in Antigua with the cameraman he’d hired to film his big proposal.
Clara told them about Maureen’s defection now. ‘The phone number he gave me for her no longer works,’ she added. She knew she hadn’t written it down wrong. She’d got him to repeat it twice.
‘Who was the cameraman?’ Phil asked. ‘Was it someone we know?’
‘Yes, it’s someone whose link we put on our website. Kate doesn’t do that lightly. So it will be someone who she has already vetted. Someone who should be professional. I’ve left a message on his voicemail – he’s obviously away at the moment – and he hasn’t yet got back to me.’
‘Did Arnold employ him directly or did we set it up?’ Phil asked.
‘Arnold spoke to him after I gave him the link. They sorted out the details between themselves.’
‘Whoever did it must have got the original recording from the cameraman,’ Mr B said. ‘Flagitious bastards.’
There were more mutterings. Clara wondered idly if anyone besides Mr B knew what flagitious meant. The more traditional F word was banned in his kitchen, but he wasn’t averse to using profanities that no one else understood. Well, not unless they’d studied Latin, which Mr B had done for fun, he had once told her.
But it was the quietest voice in the room that made the most impact on Clara. ‘It’s got 8,000 views already,’ Ellie May said in awe. ‘It must have gone viral.’
‘No that’s not enough. You need more than a million views to go viral, these days,’ someone else helpfully pointed out.
There was an angry buzz of conversation as they argued over how many views qualified as viral.
Phil banged the table with the mug and the room hushed again. ‘Never mind how many views it’s got,’ he said in his clear authoritative voice. ‘What’s important is what we do next. That’s why we called you in. We need to have a unified front. Has anyone already been asked about this?’
They shook their heads.
Clara was both relieved and surprised. Surely the fastest way of discrediting them would be to send it straight to the press. Although, she supposed, it was still possible that someone had. The video on YouTube had barely been up for twelve hours.
‘Do you want us to say “No Comment”?’ asked Janet, widening her eyes. She was a big fan of crime dramas.
‘What we would like you to say,’ Clara said, glancing at Phil because they’d already discussed it, ‘is as little as possible. If anyone asks you anything – however obliquely and that means whether they approach you here, or in the pub, or if you’re out and about – you just tell them you have no idea why anyone would post a video like that, you don’t know anything about it and you refer them to myself or Phil.’
Phil took over again. ‘We don’t need to tell you that this could severely damage the good reputation that we’ve all worked extremely hard to build.’
There were more mutterings, but again one voice rose above the others. ‘We vill be silent as squirrels. Do not worry.’ It was Jakob again. He was standing up on one side of the room, leaning against the wall, with his hands in his pockets, and the staff around him all nodded.
Jakob was almost as respected as Mr B amongst his peers. He was hard-working but also intensely social and kind and he believed in giving people second chances.
‘I have had very many chances for myself. So I must give chance to others,’ he had told Clara once after a discussion about his family, who weren’t rich but who had subsidised his passage to England, where they believed he would have a better life. He still sent regular money back to his parents in the Czech Republic, even though he was now married to an English girl.
‘Thank you,’ Clara said, nodding to Jakob and then to the room in general. ‘Thank you, everyone. We will do our best to get to the bottom of this as soon as we can, and I will keep you all posted. But, in the meantime, please say as little as possible.’
Mr B stayed behind, filling the doorway with his tall frame.
‘I
think this might have something to do with the Manor House,’ he told Phil and Clara. ‘Relations between us have become… strained.’ He was obviously picking his words carefully. For a conspiracy theorist, Mr B could also be a master of understatement.
Clara felt a twinge of trepidation. ‘What do you mean strained? What’s happened exactly?’
‘I had an altercation with the Brothers Grim.’
‘Sorry. Who?’
‘Adam and Nick Greenwood. They’re known in the trade as the Brothers Grim.’ He tapped his nose. ‘They co-own the Manor House. Adam’s front of house and Nick’s the chef. Although Nick’s all right. Adam’s the nasty one.’
‘You had an altercation with both of them? How?’
Mr B was looking slightly uncomfortable now. ‘All I did was mention to Nick that I was on to him. After the watercress fiasco. I told you about that.’
‘Yes, I remember. But I thought that had all been resolved. So how did Adam get involved?’
‘Nick must have told him.’ He waved a hand. ‘We were all at the wholesalers. Words were exchanged.’
‘Just words.’
‘Of course.’ Mr B looked shocked. ‘I don’t do physical violence.’
‘When did this happen?’
‘The Wednesday before last. I apologise if I’ve caused any unnecessary disruption. I never expected…’ He gestured back to the laptop still set up on the table of the meeting room. ‘I never expected they would do anything litigious…’
‘They may not have done,’ Phil said swiftly. ‘This still could be Arnold. He’s obviously pretty pissed off about how things turned out. Maybe he blames us for it.’
Clara nodded, but she added The Manor House to her list of things to check. She couldn’t quite believe they would go as far as to try and discredit the Bluebell, but it definitely wouldn’t hurt to go and introduce herself. She should have done it before. Talking and diplomacy solved most things, in her experience.
When Clara got back downstairs to the unmanned reception, she bumped into an anxious Zoe. She had clearly only just got back too. There was a ferrety-faced man in jeans and a canvas jacket leaning against the counter, his finger poised, in a staged pose, above the bell.
‘Ah, so the place isn’t totally deserted,’ he said, flashing a snide smile at Zoe. ‘I’d like to book your lighthouse for a special occasion. I plan to propose to my girlfriend.’
‘I can deal with that for you, sir,’ Clara butted in smoothly, which gave Zoe, who looked terrified, the chance to escape.
The snidey man introduced himself as Simon Tomlinson, a reporter from The Purbeck Gazette, which was a free paper with a distribution area of several thousand properties.
They were certainly on the ball, Clara thought, taking him into the office. Having established that he had no intention of proposing to his girlfriend, either in a lighthouse or anywhere else, but actually just wanted a human-interest piece for his paper, she set about persuading him to leave the Bluebell’s name out of it. This was not easy and involved all of her not inconsiderable charm and diplomacy, not to mention a very large slab of good fruit cake.
She also made it crystal clear that his editor would have a court case on her hands if she printed anything about them that was in any way defamatory.
He went away eventually, grumbling about the gagging of free speech, but Clara was pretty sure he wouldn’t be writing anything too controversial. Never mind free speech. Free newspapers relied on advertisers to survive. The Bluebell advertised in The Purbeck Gazette regularly. As did all their local suppliers. They weren’t likely to want to rock the boat too much. She’d just have to keep her fingers crossed that Simon Tomlinson kept his piece benign.
Over the next few hours, she and Zoe fielded several emails, phone calls and tweets on the Bluebell Cliff hash tag. Phil had stayed and helped for a while, but in the end he’d agreed to go home. They may both have to do more hours over the next few days, but they couldn’t both be here permanently.
‘It’ll blow over quicker than you think,’ she kept telling Zoe.
‘I know,’ Zoe kept agreeing.
Privately, Clara wasn’t so sure. The internet was such a vastly anonymous place. YouTube could take the video down, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t be out there somewhere else. On twitter, on Facebook, hosted by some anonymous website somewhere.
The only saving grace was that so far it didn’t seem to have affected them in a business sense. No one cancelled a booking. If anything, they were getting more enquiries about their services than usual. Maybe it was true about there being no such thing as bad publicity.
By five o’clock, Clara was feeling frazzled with stress and too much coffee. There hadn’t been time to eat. There hadn’t even been time to take Foxy for more than a cursory walk. And she didn’t anticipate a particularly peaceful evening either.
On her way home she planned to pay a visit to the Manor House and diplomatically check out whether they knew anything, without upsetting or accusing anyone.
She had also decided it would be a good idea to speak to Will, just to rule him out of the equation. After yesterday’s meeting, she was not looking forward to doing that one bit.
6
The Manor House didn’t look busy for a peak-season Saturday in July. Their car park was half empty.
Clara had checked out their TripAdvisor reviews before she’d come and had discovered that most people were complimentary about their stay, although a few had commented on the fact that the hotel could do with a lick of paint, and one person had said his bedroom needed a makeover.
She had to admit, after giving it a brief appraisal from her car, that the front of the building also looked in need of some TLC. The grounds were nicely kept though.
She remembered the gardener with his secateurs. He’d looked as though he was part of the fixtures and fittings of the place. But then it was a lot cheaper to maintain gardens than big hotels.
She walked up the steps to the main entrance and the glass doors opened automatically to greet her. Her first impressions were of red carpet, good quality, but old, a couple of brown chesterfields, same story, and several framed seascapes on the walls. The foyer smelled of citrus air freshener. Stairs led up to the first floor.
There was no one manning reception. Clara tinged the bell and waited. Behind the wooden counter was a door with a mirrored glass panel, which she guessed would be a one-way window. If there were anyone in the back office, they would know she was there. After a couple more moments, she heard movement and the door opened.
‘I do apologise for keeping you waiting.’ The man who appeared was familiar. He was tall and tanned, but it still took her a couple of seconds to recognise him as the man she had seen in the gardens: no longer in khaki shorts but an open-necked white shirt and trousers. Not the gardener then. Unless they were doubling up on roles.
Today he was wearing a rectangular brass badge that said Manager and he looked every bit as grumpy as he’d looked the first time she’d seen him.
He must have recognised her at about the same moment, and having established she wasn’t a customer, his veneer of friendliness vanished.
‘I wondered if it was possible to speak to Nick Greenwood please?’ At the same moment, she heard movement behind her and an elderly couple dressed for dinner greeted him.
He smiled at them. The transformation was amazing: from grumpy to gracious in one swift movement. He wasn’t bad-looking when he wasn’t being angry. A teeny bit Orlando Bloom. Then he turned back to her and the impression was gone.
‘Nick isn’t available. You’ll have to make do with me. I’m Adam.’
‘You’re Adam Greenwood?’ She felt almost as wrong-footed as she had when Foxy had been running around his legs. ‘Oh, I didn’t realise. I’m Clara King, the manager of The Bluebell Cliff.’
‘I know who you are.’ The slightest of frowns reached his eyes. ‘So you decided to use the front entrance this time, did you? No mutt with you today?’
‘She’s in the car in the shade with the windows down,’ she said, feeling the heat of remembered embarrassment flooding her cheeks. That was below the belt. Unless he was being ironic. She was half expecting him to soften his words with a smile. He didn’t.
‘I assume you’re here to apologise for your lunatic chef?’
At a different time, talking to a different person, she might have laughed and agreed with him that, yes, Mr B was slightly eccentric, if a not a full-on fruit cake, but not today. She was tired and he’d already rubbed her up the wrong way. She stiffened.
‘I did hear there was some friction.’
His eyes darkened. ‘The man is a conspiracy theorist. He is rude, condescending and arrogant and I’d appreciate it greatly if you could tell him to keep his ridiculous allegations about myself and my staff to himself.’
Actually, his description of Mr B, with the exception of the rude bit, was pretty much spot on, but Clara was not in the mood for this full-on attack and she sprang fiercely to her chef’s defence.
‘Mr B is a very good chef. One of the best I have ever worked with. He is kind and considerate and he is courteous and he inspires great loyalty.’
This time, Adam’s reply was the merest raise of an eyebrow.
Clara went on swiftly, ‘I’m sure there has just been a simple misunderstanding that we can sort out if we discuss it like adults.’
‘I’m not convinced there has.’ He looked bored. He drummed his fingers on the reception desk.
She had an urge to lean across it and slap him. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt so riled. He wasn’t even looking at her now. He was writing something on a notebook on the desk.
