Friend of the Family

by Tasmina Perry

  There was more shouting, questions, general hubbub, but Amy could tell the panic had subsided. Clearly the VIPs had bought David’s bluff, and as she helped Jasmine Craig, the supermodel, to her feet, she could hear him already moving through the next carriage spreading his message of authority and calm.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ said Jasmine, her big eyes wide. ‘That was pretty intense, wasn’t it?’ The girl next to her, a celebrity chef, echoed the sentiment, and nervous laughter began to bubble up as people suddenly began discussing what had happened. It was quickly apparent that no one had suffered any lasting injuries, and relief turned to amusement, then a sort of jovial Blitz spirit of shared adventure. It was almost as if they were treating the accident as part of the entertainment.

  Amy was just reassuring Gerard Harper, star of the West End, that the train would still arrive on time when she saw David in the doorway beckoning to her.

  His face was set and serious. ‘Look, I’ve just spoken to the driver – for real, this time. There was an abandoned car on a level crossing; he only just spotted it in time.’

  ‘You’re kidding?’

  David shook his head. ‘Can you imagine if we’d hit it? The whole train would have derailed for sure.’

  Amy shivered just thinking about the tragedy that had been narrowly averted.

  ‘So can we get moving now?’

  David shook his head. ‘Procedures. Apparently they have to wait for the police to make an assessment as to whether it’s safe to proceed.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘How long’s a piece of string?’

  Amy ducked down to peer out of the window. It was dark, no houses or buildings anywhere near – certainly no stations close enough to unload their precious cargo.

  ‘Is anyone hurt?’

  ‘I think everyone’s okay,’ said David. ‘Shaken up, but nothing beyond a few bruises – apart from one woman who was in the bathroom at the time and hit her head pretty hard. I think you’d better come and see.’

  She followed him down through two carriages, stopping briefly to check on guests with the odd word of sympathy and encouragement, to where a uniformed guard was sitting with an elderly lady she immediately recognised as Louisa Bourne, grande dame of the fashion world.

  ‘I seem to have had a bump,’ she said, holding a wet towel to her head. ‘Sorry to be such a bore.’

  ‘No, no, I just want to make sure you’re all right.’

  ‘I’ve already asked someone to bring me a glass of bubbly, if it hasn’t all been too shaken up.’ She gave a whisper of a smile and then lolled back on her seat, her eyes rolling back into her head.

  ‘Louisa?’ said Amy urgently.

  The woman didn’t respond, and Amy touched her cheek to try and get a reaction. She had no medical training but she could tell that Louisa’s head wound was serious, blood already beginning to congeal around a wide gash in her scalp.

  ‘David,’ she shouted, knowing that she needed help.

  Her husband came running.

  ‘I think she’s fainted.’

  They both knew it was more serious than that.

  ‘We need a doctor,’ Amy said. ‘We need to get her to hospital.’

  ‘But we’re in the middle of nowhere.’

  ‘A level crossing means a road.’ Amy was trying to think. ‘Which means an ambulance can get to us.’

  David came round behind Louisa to prop her up while Amy felt her pulse. It throbbed underneath her fingertips but the old lady’s eyes were still closed.

  As David pulled his mobile out of his pocket to call for help, Amy moved back through the train. Everyone seemed to be talking at once, laughter and jabbering voices coming from all directions: a holiday atmosphere was prevailing for now at least. That was something.

  She found Janice and Juliet deep in conversation.

  ‘Ladies, thank God I’ve got you both.’ She filled them in on the situation and the need to get Louisa to hospital.

  ‘You must go with her,’ said Juliet immediately. ‘We’re more than capable of keeping people happy until the train’s moving again.’

  Janice nodded. ‘We have about fifty cases of champagne in the guard’s van. That’ll keep them going. And I’ll speak to Cody about bringing the entertainment forward.’

  Their can-do spirit was exactly what Amy needed, and she felt a little of the weight lift from her.

  The guard came and introduced himself. ‘I’ve checked all the carriages, ma’am.’

  ‘No one else is hurt, are they?’

  ‘Young lady in the bar. I think it’s only whiplash, but better safe than sorry.’

  Amy’s mind was full of imaginary headlines: ‘Fashion Sweetheart Dies in Rail Smash, Magazine Editor to Blame for Everything’. ‘Why is this happening to me?’ she whispered under her breath. Her rational mind was trying to tell her that it was all just bad luck and could have happened to anyone, but Amy wasn’t really listening.

  It was another twenty minutes before the ambulance arrived. The blue lights and the siren sent another wave of panic through the guests, with some of them asking if they could get off the train. The guard made several announcements keeping everyone up to date with what was happening; the police had also arrived and were attempting to remove the vehicle from the crossing, but no one knew how long it would be before they were allowed to continue their journey.

  ‘I’ve contacted the coach firm who were supposed to be picking us up in Oxford,’ he told Amy. ‘They reckon they can be here within an hour.’

  ‘That’s something,’ said Amy, glancing at her watch. The event was due to start at any moment. There were a few dozen guests who had chosen to go straight to the venue, and who would now be rattling around in the grandeur of Blenheim with nothing but a plateful of canapés for company. Douglas Proctor was one of those going by car, thanks to the proximity of his weekend retreat to Blenheim; she could only imagine his face when nobody showed up.

  Ahead of her, Louisa was being stretchered into the ambulance. Amy could see the front of the train, its buffers barely feet away from a Volvo estate, still diagonal across the tracks.

  ‘God, that was close,’ she whispered, and David nodded, his eyebrows raised, clearly imagining his own headlines.

  Amy approached the ambulance and peered inside. Louisa’s eyes were open, and she managed a weak smile.

  ‘You gave us a fright,’ said Amy, touching her hand.

  ‘Are you coming to the hospital, miss?’ asked the paramedic.

  She glanced towards the train and the guests inside, then back to Louisa, frail and alone. She had no choice.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ said David.

  Chapter 30

  Louisa needed stitches and a night in hospital for observation. By the time Amy and David got back to Notting Hill, grey light was creeping into the sky and the birds were beginning to sing. David dropped his jacket on the banister and zombied his way into the bedroom, where Amy heard the whoomph as he fell onto the mattress.

  She herself knew she couldn’t sleep. She kept running the night over and over in her head, wondering if she had done the right thing abandoning the party to take care of Louisa. She knew the older woman was grateful for everything she and David had done, keeping her company in A&E until her daughter, who lived in Devon, had been able to get to the hospital. Morally it had been the right decision; she only hoped Douglas Proctor would see it that way. Louisa was one of the most powerful women in the fashion industry, a former president of the Fashion Council and founder of the Exmoor chain of boutiques, which had started in the sixties with a single shop on Bond Street but was now one of the biggest fashion e-retailer powerhouses in the world. That alone should have been enough to excuse Amy from the party, but you never could tell with the MD of Genesis Media.

  She walked through to the kitchen, flicking on the li
ghts and firing up the coffee machine. There was little point sleeping now anyway: she’d have to go straight into the office and begin the mop-up operation. Flowers to be sent, sponsors to be reassured, bills to pay.

  ‘Hell to pay, more like,’ she muttered, picking up her phone as it buzzed.

  ‘Amy Shepherd?’ asked a male voice, unbearably perky at this time of the morning. ‘Derek Morgan at the Chronicle.’

  Amy’s heart fell. She had been expecting Juliet or Janice with sisterly words of support. She fought the urge to just hang up. She knew she’d have to face up to it sooner or later.

  ‘Derek, how can I help?’ she said, not even questioning how he had her number.

  ‘We’re running a piece on the biggest party that never was,’ he replied.

  Amy considered a terse ‘no comment’, or even better, ‘bugger off’, but knew she needed to do her best to spin the story in her favour.

  ‘I’m not sure that’s quite accurate, Derek. It was just smaller than we expected. Getting Louisa Bourne, one of Britain’s most important exporters, to hospital was more than worth compromising the scale of the event for. She’s fine, by the way, if you’re asking.’

  ‘Great, great. And any comment on the rumour that it cost the company five million pounds?’

  Amy gave a polite laugh. ‘I think you’ve been misinformed. We didn’t take over Blenheim Palace in its entirety.’

  ‘Ah, that’s not what it looks like from here. I don’t think it will look like that to the readers either.’

  She held her breath and the hack filled the silence.

  ‘Do you want me to send you the footage? One of our reporters went along last night . . . Hang on, I’m sending it now . . .’

  Amy closed her eyes and silently swore. How many times had she spoken to the event’s security team about keeping the press away? Obviously her concern had been for different reasons: keeping their own shots of the party exclusive and protecting the privacy of the VIPs, allowing them to let their hair down without worrying about embarrassing drunken antics appearing in the Chronicle the next day. But the principle was the same, and she made a mental note to speak to the man in charge of manning the cordon.

  Her phone beeped and she thumbed open the email, clicking on the attachment, an MPG movie. Oh crap, she thought as it rolled. It was obvious the angle the piece was going to take. The reporter had clearly just walked straight into the party, his camera recording everything. The grand entrance of the palace, the flaming torches either side of the doors, the vast flower arrangements, the trays and trays of untouched champagne and expensive canapés, the brightly lit stage crammed with instruments and nothing else. The camera panned around. It wasn’t just the stage that was empty; it was the whole party. It looked like the first reel of a zombie movie where the hero wakes to find everyone dead. The biggest party that never was: that was exactly what it looked like. A five-million-pound folly. It didn’t matter that after sponsorship, the party had cost Genesis almost nothing; recent experience told Amy that the truth never got in the way of a good headline.

  ‘Any comment?’ said Derek.

  The newspapers all went big on the empty party story. Amy couldn’t really blame them. She was shuffling through the papers strewn across the kitchen table as David came downstairs, looking bleary-eyed. As he headed for the coffee machine, he caught sight of the headlines over her shoulder.

  ‘Oh shit,’ he said. He picked up the Daily News and scanned the story. ‘At least the News have run the human interest angle on Louisa,’ he said. ‘“Glamorous Verve editor Amy Shepherd, 43, personally took the fashion legend to the hospital”,’ he read out.

  ‘They’ve got my age wrong, but it’s something,’ she said.

  ‘Let’s hope Douglas Proctor is a News reader, hey?’

  Amy gave a soft snort. Even if the party had actually cost the magazine – and the company – less than William Bentley’s leaving party, the headlines were going to stick, she knew. In an economic downturn, people liked a bit of escapism; they loved to see pictures of celebrities in fancy dresses, but they certainly didn’t like to hear about money being poured down the drain, money they could have used for food or rent or a holiday to Spain. No one liked to hear about overprivileged idiots making fools of themselves.

  ‘It doesn’t matter, you know,’ said David, sitting down opposite her. ‘I know you’re panicking that this is going to lose you the Mode job, but if they judge you on this, if they mark you down because you did the decent thing and stayed with Louisa, then they’re not worth it.’

  She mulled over her husband’s words on the way into the office. There were certainly some people who would be happy to hear about her misfortune: any of the other candidates for the Mode job, for starters. Because Amy knew that the chances of her landing the post were now somewhere between ‘bugger all’ and ‘none’. The fact that Marv Schultz was due to fly into London any day was little consolation. Once he’d had Douglas whispering in his ear, her off-piste meeting with him was as good as dead.

  As she approached the front of the Genesis building, Amy half expected to see reporters waiting there, barking questions, looking for a follow-up from the woman who’d single-handedly screwed up the party of the decade, but there was no one, just a girl she recognised from Verve’s fashion department puffing on a cigarette. Seeing Amy climb out of the car, she looked panicked and quickly threw her butt away.

  ‘Sorry, Amy,’ she said. ‘Been trying to quit, I’m down to one in the morning and one at night, honestly.’

  Amy gave a weak smile. ‘Good for you . . .’ she tilted her head to the side, ‘Jo, isn’t it? Sorry, terrible with names.’

  ‘Oh no, that’s fine,’ said the girl, falling into step with Amy as they pushed through the doors and across the foyer to the lifts. ‘I’ve only been here six weeks. Janice brought me in straight from college, pretty much. I’m loving it.’

  They stepped into the lift and Amy pressed the button.

  ‘Were you at the venue last night?’ she asked. The most senior members of the team had been on the train to look after the VIP guests, but the rest of the staff had gone straight to Blenheim.

  Jo nodded sympathetically. ‘I was supposed to be on hand for any fashion emergencies: you know, ripped gowns, pinching shoes, false-eyelash slip . . . Wish I’d been on the train, though. It looked like brilliant fun. People are going to be talking about it for years.’

  Amy frowned. ‘I think the sooner we all forget about it, the better, don’t you?’

  ‘Really?’ said Jo, puzzled. ‘It looked a right laugh.’

  Amy shook her head, utterly confused now. ‘Look, Jo, I have to confess I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about. What do you mean about the train?’

  ‘You mean you haven’t seen it?’ Jo scrabbled in her shoulder bag and brought out her phone, thumbing through the apps with a speed only a digital native could achieve before holding it out to Amy. ‘Look, it’s all over the net.’

  Baffled, Amy clicked the play button on the phone’s screen, expecting to see more tumbleweed footage of the empty corridors in Blenheim. Instead she was greeted with the interior of a train carriage. Warm orange light shone out from the wall lamps as a group of beautiful people in shimmering gowns leaned over a table covered in crisp white linen. ‘Now put the card face down on the table,’ said a male voice, strangely familiar, off camera. There was a hushed pause as a tattooed hand slid forward and flipped a playing card over: the ace of diamonds. Amy flinched as a roar came from the phone, delighted laughter and hoots of ‘No way!’ and ‘How did you do that?’ The camera pulled back to reveal that the conjuror was none other than Evan Ridley, the drop-dead-gorgeous American actor currently breaking box office records as the star of the latest superhero franchise.

  Amy looked up at Jo and the girl nodded happily. ‘There’s loads of them on there,’ she said. ‘I
think there must have been a camera crew on the train.’

  Amy nodded dumbly as Jo cued up another clip, this time of two soap actors in fits of hysterics as Ginny Hough, the famously dour BBC arts presenter, took her turn at charades, eventually giving up in frustration and protesting to further hilarity that she had been doing Jay-Z’s ‘99 Problems’.

  The lift had arrived at the office floor, but Amy held the door as Jo showed her another clip, of Cody Cole leading the entire carriage in a chorus of ‘Live Forever’: actors, singers, models, everyone singing their hearts out. It did indeed look like it had been the party of the year after all.

  ‘And this is all over the net?’ asked Amy, stepping out of the lift and handing the phone back.

  Jo nodded. ‘It’s the big news this morning. Everyone’s talking about it.’ She pointed at the papers wedged under Amy’s arm. ‘Everyone except them. They missed it – they always do.’

  Amy nodded her thanks and walked into her office, her head in a whirl. Sitting down at her desk, she fired up her computer and clicked onto her browser. Before she’d even typed in the address of a gossip site, she saw that Jo was right. In the ‘Trending Now’ sidebar, there were at least half a dozen references to it. ‘Party on wheels’, ‘Steam-powered fun on Verve train’, ‘See that Cody Cole singalong here’.

  She rubbed a hand over her mouth. Could it really have turned around so quickly? Hope flared in her heart until her gaze fell on the newspapers she’d tossed onto her desk and it blinked out again. Jo from the fashion department might have seen the ‘party on wheels’ clips, as might millions of others hooked up to the web via their phones. But Douglas, Denton Scoles and Marv Schultz would be reading the Mail and the Sun and the Chronicle. That was their reality, whatever lip service they paid to the onward march of the new digital order.

  She began scrolling through her emails, but didn’t get very far. The first one her eye fell on was marked with a red exclamation mark: urgent. And it was from josie.price @genesis.inc, subject title: Douglas Meeting Today. She barely needed to open it to know what it would say.