by Fiona Walker
‘That’s awful. It’s so duplicitous! I loathe duplicitousness.’
‘I think you’ll find that’s “duplicity” not “duplicitousness”.’ Conrad had an annoying habit of correcting her grammar just when she was at her most passionately heated. His mental red pen was constantly poised over the contents of her conversations. He’d even done it in bed a few times. It inevitably threw her off stroke and made her feel stupid.
It’s over, her aching head screamed. OVER!
‘Well I’m glad Gordon fired me,’ she said hotly. ‘I’d had enough of his ego, and his alter ego come to that. The man is a monster. No wonder he has to have a pretend PA – no real one worth her salt would go near him. He messes with people’s heads and hearts and expects way too much.’
Conrad narrowed his olive green eyes. ‘Legs, why precisely did Gordon sack you?’
‘I have no idea! I guess wasn’t a very good research assistant; I didn’t get in nearly enough life-threatening situations, although the sexual tension was pretty heated at times.’
‘What?’
‘I muddled up an email meant for you and sent it to Kelly when I was in Farcombe,’ she hurried on. ‘Then Gordon sent me a long email I didn’t handle very well because it made me cry and I didn’t know what to say to him. And I’ve stopped wishing him goodnight on live messenger which might have pissed him off.’
‘You wish Gordon Lapis goodnight?’
‘He started it!’ Her face flamed. ‘He’s basing a character on me, Julie Ocean.’
Suddenly Conrad slammed his fists on his desk, making his laptop screen flicker.
Is he jealous? She wondered wildly, the drumrolls of ‘it’s over’ starting to fade in her head.
But Conrad was laughing with relief.
‘Legs, you must deal with this!’ he demanded. ‘He trusts you. You “understand” him, so he says. You can track him down, Constable Ocean.’ He indicated the door, his tone adamant.
She hesitated. ‘He fired me. And it’s Detective Sergeant Ocean, actually.’
Conrad was already lifting his phone to make a call. ‘I’m the boss, I’ll fire you if you don’t do as I’m asking. Pretend to be me. Email, text and hire a psychic for all I care. Get the stroppy bastard back to us.’ He dismissed her from his office once more with an impatient wave, already spinning his big leather chair away and dialling out.
Legs stood her ground.
‘It’s over!’ she said through gritted teeth, mortified that it came out as little more than a hiss of hot air.
Conrad didn’t even hear. Thinking that she’d gone, he had his big back turned to her and was already talking into the receiver: ‘Darling, there’s a crisis on at the office. I might not make tonight. Can we reschedule?’
Legs froze. Who was ‘darling’? One of the children, perhaps …
‘Of course I’m committed to these sessions; I want our marriage to work as much as anybody, but one cancelled appointment in six months is surely not bad going?’
Legs caught her breath.
As he swung around in his chair, he saw her still standing in the room and had the grace to look abashed.
She shrank away.
Returning to her desk, feeling absolutely washed out, Legs contemplated her inbox. It was no wonder Gordon hadn’t replied to her message about Julie Ocean. He probably wasn’t in a compatible timezone. She envied him. What she wouldn’t give to run away from life right now.
Then she suddenly remembered Kelly replying within seconds of receiving the accidental cc, reminding her that she was fired.
Feeling like Morse interfering after he’s been laid off a case, she wrote one paltry line: Where are you?
Her fingers hovered over the keyboard before adding. P.s. Your agent is a slimeball.
She glanced up to see Conrad was still on the phone. He didn’t look at her, but she sensed he knew that she was watching him because he backed towards his office door and shut it.
She wanted to compose an email full of fury and vitriol telling him it was over, but stupid tears kept welling up.
‘It’s over,’ she began.
A skinny latte landed on her desk.
‘I thought I said devil?’ She looked up to see her colleague reading her screen over her shoulder.
She quickly minimised the window.
‘Oops! Sorry. My mistake.’ The colleague skipped off, saying ‘You’re just too nice to be a devil, Legs.’
Legs rubbed her forehead, knowing that nice girls didn’t dump their lovers by email.
Deleting the half-composed message to Conrad, she clicked into Explorer and looked up the latest press theories on Gordon’s identity. Stephen Fry was the current favourite; Russell Brand’s odds had shortened dramatically since joking in a television interview that it was him. Jeffrey Archer was now a rank outsider, she was relieved to note. All the tabloids were inviting readers to fill in an online suggestions box.
Why couldn’t Gordon be a woman? Legs thought indignantly. She typed ‘Kizzy de la Mere’ and submitted it to the tabloid.
She then Googled Clarissa Delamere, trailing through a few genealogy links before changing to Google Images. A familiar-looking little redhead glared out from a school photograph, with thick glasses and braces. She then Googled Kizzy de la Mere. The same redhead, after a ‘why, Miss Jones’ transformation from geek to chic, pouted in wet chiffon dresses on sea-lashed rocks alongside acres of self-indulgent poetry.
Amongst this year’s new works was a series of poems in homage to Kate Bush. One stood out, a reworking of ‘The Man with the Child in His Eyes’, its bittersweet humour counteracting any mawkishness as it spoke of abandonment and fear of loneliness. Then she spotted a footnote:
To my secret lover; we were born into the same family but shared no childhood and have no future; our couplets have no rhyme, our verses versus. You have my heart.
Reading it, Legs remembered Kizzy saying that her love was a ‘lost cause’. She now knew that it wasn’t Francis, which only left Hector amongst the Protheroe family, an unlikely candidate even in her wildest imaginings. There was another possibility, but it was one that she longed to dismiss. Kizzy and Byrne had briefly shared a family home before being separated. He’d told her he had no future. Could they have been lovers?
She cancelled the screen, wiping away the pouting images and doggerel, determined to get to the truth.
An apologetic email from Conrad was waiting in her inbox, full of contrition that he was covertly seeing his estranged wife ‘she’s been terribly depressed … need to show a united front to get Finlay through GCSEs … takes time to unpick twenty years of marriage …’ Legs speed-read it, amazed at her calmness and dispassion. It was too late. She just felt hollow.
Conrad had rescheduled his meeting with PR man Piers Fox so that they could talk over a long lunch, he explained, going on to say that he very much wanted to save what they had both personally and professionally. Cancel your friend, he begged.
Legs sent just one word back, knowing that by doing so, she was finally sounding out the overture to the end of the affair. The relief was like headrush.
Chapter 28
Leaving Conrad marching around his office with steam practically coming from his ears as he shouted at somebody about ebooks, Legs stubbornly kept her lunch date.
Byron panted beneath his mistress’s aluminium chair as they waited outside La Strada on Lansdowne Row. Even hollow-cheeked, make-up free and dressed in a very creased T-shirt and the ubiquitous baggy shorts, Kizzy was a breed apart. Sitting down on a sun-baked seat as hot as a branding iron, Legs swept aside Kizzy’s apologies about the damp patches on her flat’s seagrass.
‘How do you think Poppy feels about having her son back in her life?’ she asked with barely any preamble.
Kizzy didn’t betray any surprise at her directness. ‘Terrified. I gather he’s kicking up quite a fuss. He keeps trying to get Poppy out of the house – seems to think her agoraphobia is Hector’s fault.’
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‘How do you know all this?’ she asked suspiciously.
‘Gabs called me earlier. It’s her day off. She says there was a terrible scene at the Book Inn yesterday. All the village is talking about it. Jamie accused Hector of ruining Poppy’s life.’
‘Why would he think that?’
‘I suppose it’s the gilded cage principle. Hector indulges her and yet controls her. Francis treats women just the same; father and son are like those matching griffins on the Farcombe gateposts. Their intellects are vast, layered, fascinating; but those equally large-scale egos are as unsullied and over-suckled as they were in infancy. It takes a special person to love men like them, although they attract incredibly loyalty. Poppy still loves Hector to bits, and of course you love Francis. I don’t know how you both do it.’ She was a great deal more cocky and upbeat today, all last night’s high emotion replaced by a brittle cheerfulness. She reminded Legs of Édith. Even the way they spoke was identical, the witty, bitter tropes.
‘So why did you become Francis’s girlfriend if you knew you could never love him?’ she asked, starting to wonder if she had run into Conrad’s arms a year ago to avoid being trapped in the gilded cage with an over-suckled ego herself.
‘To be a part of the family. Seeing Liz again frightened me; I don’t want to turn into her, a lonely obsessive with a twisted imagination. When we met, she read her latest work aloud to me for five hours. I literally couldn’t get away.’
‘That’s quite intense.’
‘Especially when she’s reading non-consecutive chapters,’ Kizzy rolled her eyes. ‘We have nothing in common, for all the genetics. She just wants to take over. It’s like Jamie trying to force Poppy on random day trips.’
Legs heard the fury rattling in her voice.
‘Do you mind that he’s back in her life?’
‘I just want Poppy to be happy,’ she said earnestly. ‘I know it would never have worked out between me and Francis, but she was so desperate to make the match from the start. She even started talking about changing her will in my favour. The Protheroe family solicitors were up in arms.’
Feeling her detective skin prickling with unease, Legs eyed her sceptically. ‘Marshall and Callow?’
Kizzy looked blank. ‘Who?’ She turned to smile as their waiter arrived at their table and began listing today’s specials.
Sagging back in her aluminium chair, Legs ordered goat’s cheese salad. Kizzy took for ever to choose, changing her mind several times before settling upon the sashimi special ‘to start. Then does the ribeye steak come with chips? … Great, then I’ll have that with a side order of deep-fried zucchini, some creamed spinach, a tomato salad and a huge glass of red wine.’
Legs was amazed someone so fragile could have such a voracious appetite, especially in this heat. She was born to work in publishing, where so many movers and shakers still clung on to the two-bottle lunch. Handing her own menu up to the waiter, she asked for a jug of water.
Kizzy had let her hair loose today, and it flowed across her shoulders and back, glowing in the sunshine like a huge rippling copper curtain. Passersby caught their steps and breaths to look.
She must have some amazing genes to get bone structure like that, Legs thought suspiciously. How could Francis not love her? She was Millais’ Ophelia. So what if the initial attraction had been the prospect of merging two compatible birthrights. Wasn’t that how many great dynasties started? Between them, they could rule the Kingdom of Farcombe beautifully.
She fanned herself with the Big Issue she’d bought on the walk from the office. It was just as swelteringly close today as yesterday. Her head throbbed. Gordon was out there somewhere in possible turmoil while she was obsessing about Francis and the Protheroes. She was on the wrong case. Julie Ocean would at the very least be down to her undies by now, cutting her wrist ties loose with her teeth while a stampede of wild horses advanced on her. Yet she couldn’t resist delving for more, and her guilty heart knew it wasn’t the Protheroes she was obsessing about.
‘Are you sure you don’t remember meeting Byrne – I mean Jamie – when you were little?’
‘Not really.’
‘Did Liz talk about the time she helped at Nevermore Farm?’
‘She mentioned it in her letters sometimes,’ Kizzy fell on her red wine as it arrived. ‘It’s hard to distinguish fact from fiction with Liz, though. She has such wild imaginings, seeing ghosts and murder plots everywhere: she’s even been banned from her local Sainsbury’s because she kept throwing scenes in the frozen food aisles claiming there were mutilated dead bodies hidden amongst the chicken nuggets.
‘When she found out I was dating Francis, she wrote warning me not to get involved,’ she went on. ‘It’s about the sanest advice she’s given, although she then went on to say she thought he was an alien.’
‘So she still writes to you?’
The expression on Kizzy’s face changed, and Legs suddenly knew that she’d found the lock that she needed to pick to get at the truth. ‘She reads the Farcombe Festival blog obsessively. She even attended a talk Francis gave on coastal conservation so she could get a closer look; that’s when she came up with her alien theory.’
‘I can’t imagine he was impressed.’
‘He doesn’t know. I’ve never talked about her.’
‘Why not?’
‘If Poppy found out it would hurt her terribly. She’s tried so hard to protect me. Liz might live in an imaginary world, but it’s been grown from grains of truth.’
‘So Francis might be an alien?’
She smiled warily. ‘It’s in the genes, according to Liz. Hector’s got two faces and acid for blood, after all.’
‘Nothing Hector is capable of doing will ever surprise me.’
Kizzy raised a red eyebrow. ‘She says Hector had Brooke crippled so that he could woo Poppy.’
‘She thinks that?’ Legs laughed disbelievingly.
Kizzy nodded. ‘Actually, it’s one of her few theories that I think might have some substance,’ those vivid eyes were earnest. ‘She’s convinced that Hector was involved in Brooke’s accident. She has pages of cuttings as evidence. She sent them to me after we met.’
Legs abruptly stopped laughing, pennies dropping faster than a slot machine paying out. Julie Ocean was equally dumbfounded. This was it. This was the secret.
Now that she’d found somebody to confide in, Kizzy perceptibly relaxed. Gone was last night’s stuttering fear, replaced by an overwhelming eagerness to offload the dark truth she’d been carrying around so long.
‘Brooke fell in a fixed race.’ She swished her hair theatrically. ‘Big gamblers had teams they’d pay to put on cash bets in bookies all over the country, five thousand here, ten there. The cumulative pay-off for a fixed race could be a half a million or more, but it cost horses’ lives and jockeys’ careers. Nowadays punters can bet on a horse to lose a race, so it’s possible to fix it by paying a jockey to deliberately ride slow, but back then gamblers bet on a horse to win, so to guarantee a pay-out they had to ensure the opposition got nobbled, which was hugely dangerous. It was a very dark phase in racing.’
‘Hector’s name came up in the press scandal, but it was never proven,’ Legs remembered Daisy talking about it.
‘Brooke was riding the odds-on favourite in a minor little weekday hurdle. It was bread-and-butter stuff and should have been of no great consequence, but the betting pool was huge, which is a classic sign of a gambling ring at work – especially in those days. Brooke was deliberately boxed in coming into the strait, held up to scupper the win. Most jockeys would have decided it was too risky to try to fight their way out and left it to the stewards to sort out. But Brooke rode every race to win it and made a break. One of the bent jockeys pulled his horse right into his path at the last fence. Brooke never walked again.’
‘And Hector was behind that?’ Legs was struggling to take it all in.
‘After the accident, Brooke used to rant and rage, and kept scra
pbooks full of those newspaper cuttings Liz sent me, about all the dirty deals going on. The name Protheroe comes up more than once. I guess he needed to blame someone. So when Poppy began her affair with Hector, he finally had a villain.’
Legs sucked her lips uneasily. If true, it was a terrible travesty and tragedy, certainly, but it really didn’t tally with the Hector she knew. His addiction had always been driven by the desire for good luck, to beat the odds and feel the sugar rush of kismet. She could never imagine him wanting to gamble on a fixed outcome. Nor equally would he want to remove the opponent in sport, business or love. ‘Surely, even if Hector was involved, it had nothing to do with stealing Brooke’s wife? He would never have wanted a man injured for life like that. And he hadn’t even met Poppy then, had he?’
‘That’s where Liz’s theories become a little fantastical,’ Kizzy sighed, ‘or Brooke’s; it’s hard to tell. I think they egged each other on in the Nevermore days, concocting ever-wilder conspiracy theories, him drinking to self-pitying excess and her – well, Liz is just like that.’ She adopted a stoic expression. ‘But there’s truth in there somewhere.’
‘Truth enough to convince a ten-year-old boy,’ Legs breathed, suddenly realising the implications of what she’d just learned. Had Byrne grown up believing that Hector Protheroe had crippled his father and stolen away his mother? She suddenly heard his words as clearly as he had spoken them to her the night of Poppy’s ill-fated supper ‘it was no accident’ …
‘Who could blame him for thinking love is valueless when entire lives can be gambled for profit?’ she breathed aloud, not noticing that Kizzy was licking her lips and looking excitedly over her shoulder.
Legs almost jumped out of her hot skin as her iPhone was dropped onto her place setting.
‘“Profit or prophet?”,’ a deep voice rolled over them. ‘Both are music to my ears, along with “let me introduce you to my pretty friend” and “Gordon Lapis on line one”.’
She looked up to see Conrad’s silhouette eclipsing the sun, broad-shouldered and masculine. It was the sexiest shadow she knew, but now she felt chilled to the bone as it blocked out the sunlight.
