by Fiona Walker
Instead, she heard a lot of loving cooing noises, some slurping and ‘my darling!’
It was just as Byrne had said, she realised. Poppy had covered the grotesque with a fibreglass blob like all her other shapeless artworks, veiling her acerbic critique in gentle soft focus.
Amazed, but no less desperate to get away from the house, she edged back toward the passageway entrance, knowing it was out of the line of sight from Poppy’s studio.
But the key had gone, the padlock pushed fast shut again.
She stared at it, disbelief and terror mingling in her blood like ice and fire as she tried to tell herself that there was a perfectly logical explanation. But the only one she could come up with was that somebody else was in the cellar besides herself and the canoodling Protheroes, and she had no intention of hanging about long enough to find out who.
Poppy and Hector appeared to be enjoying a very passionate reunion in the studio beyond the boiler room.
‘Oh, my big honey bear.’
‘Oh honeybee, little honeybee. Drink my nectar.’
With the sea passage now locked, Legs had no choice but to head back up to the house. As she crept hurriedly towards the cellar stairs again, she was certain she saw a shadow crossing behind her out of the corner of her eye. She swung around, but there was nothing to see.
The slurping noises were increasing, joined by grunting now. ‘Oh my darling, don’t stop!’
‘What about our guests?’
‘Let’s make them go away.’
Legs started tip-toeing quickly up the stairs, her plastic clogs making sympathetic sucking noises to match those she was leaving behind.
‘How can we make them go?’ Poppy was asking plaintively. ‘They’ll be here for hours.’
‘Not if we kill the lights.’
‘We can’t. Francis will be straight down here.’
‘No he won’t. Look – the cellar door key. I’ve locked it from the inside.’
Legs stifled a terrified bleat as she heard him striding loftily to the fuse cupboard, size thirteen footsteps hollow on the flagstones. A moment later the lights went off.
‘Oh, Poppy.’
‘Oh, Hector.’
Legs started cautiously down the steps again, wringing her sweaty hands together. She heard a metallic clink and Byrne’s ring fell off again, skittling away in the darkness, and she closed her eyes in dismay. It was absolutely pitch dark. He ears were on elastic. Even though her heartbeat was becoming too thunderous to hear much, she distinctly made out light footsteps crossing the room in front of her.
She was now quite certain there was somebody else in the cellars alongside herself and the ageing lovers.
The door at the top of the stairs was rattled furiously: ‘What’s going on? Hey! Open up.’ It was Édith, her drawling voice torn between amusement and irritation. ‘It’s dark up here, you know.’
Legs let out a little sob of relief.
‘I warn you, we have a gun out here and we’ll blow out the bloody lock!’ Kizzy shouted, sounding frenzied.
The sound of a barrel cocking just above her head made Legs dive forwards, groping wildly for the wall, trying to picture the cellar’s layout in her mind and plot the best place to take cover. But as she did so, she suddenly she remembered that there was another way out. The big doors at the far end of the studio were simply bolted from the inside as far as she recalled. She started to sneak towards Poppy and Hector, who seemed oblivious to the guntoting on the other side of the cellar door,
‘Oh yes, darling …’
‘My big, big man …’
Legs was now so drenched in nervous sweat that her plastic shoes squelched as she made it past the boiler room and started to edge across the huge space. Here, a faint light filtered in through the high windows. She was almost at the doors, able to make out their big square bulk, the black smudges of the bolts.
Then, as she reached out towards them, she felt a cold, claw-fingered hand on her arm and a strange Gollum voice whispered ‘Ring’.
Looking round, she found her face full of familiar curls and caught a glint of white-eyed zeal. Not stopping to think how Kizzy could be both here and at the top of the stairs behind a locked door simultaneously, she let out a scream that even threatened to pierce her own eardrums. Pure reflex made her lash back with her foot, plastic gardening shoe making contact with a shin. She heard a grunt of pain behind her as she threw herself at the doors and started pulling at the bolts.
Poppy was screaming now too, Hector bellowing. Above their heads, Francis joined in the fray yelling ever-louder for attention behind the cellar door.
As Legs slid the second of three bolts, the claw-like hand made a grab for her shoulder and a voice again gasped, ‘Ring!’
‘This is just too much!’ She jabbed an elbow back, feeling the fingers lose their grip, then pulled the final bolt and wretched the big sliding doors open just as a gun went off overhead. The wind almost knocked her back in as it hit her with a smack in the face. She ducked her head and slip-slapped her way out into it, plastic shoes making obscene raspberries as she tore away towards the cover of the rose garden, diving in and out of the thorny arms, dress ripping, towards the tall rhododendrons and the gap she knew from childhood, three trunks along. Ducking through the low arch, she reached the back driveway not far from the gatepost with the secret cut-through to the coast lane.
Already she could hear feet hammering along the tarmac behind her.
‘Ring! Ring!’ called a breathless voice, making her think illogically of Abba.
Head now full of seventies pop that matched the beat of her own rushing blood, she crashed her hands against the stone wildly in search of the catch before finally feeling it yield so that she could push through and out onto the village lane, slamming the hinges hastily behind her before diving out of sight beneath the churchyard wall.
A long shadow appeared in the light cast from the house security lights, falling across the lane and sweeping left then right. Nobody could mistake that silhouette of untamed Pre-Raphaelite hair.
Kizzy clearly didn’t know about the gatepost trick. Feet stamped and turned, the gate rattled on its hinges and then Legs heard the footsteps retreating.
She fought for breath for a moment, her weakened lungs already flayed to shreds. An owl shrieking overhead almost finished her off.
Flinching at every squeak and hiss from her plastic shoes, she crept along the lane beneath the church wall until she was safely behind the veil of weeping willows that marked the point where the little stream gurgled under its bridge from the village side and chased its way down to the sea. The wind was far too loud to hear it bubbling, the willow’s branches thrashing like Medusa’s snakes.
But one noise was clearly audible above the gale as, behind her, the church gate slammed with a whipcrack.
Legs ran, heedless of the stones and twigs gathering in her clogs and bruising her soles, almost blind with fear as she navigated by instinct along the sea lane, left at the ford, over the bridge and up towards the woods. Her legs were cramped with lactic acid, her body leaden with exhaustion, but sharp spikes of adrenalin still prodded her on.
At Gull Point she forked right towards the cliff path, tripping through bracken and gorse as she lost the track in the darkness, then fighting her way back onto rough packed stone again.
She could hear a car engine in the far distance, grinding and groaning as it careered over the bumps. Still she ran on, looking frantically around for the natural rock steps that led down to Eascombe Cove, certain they would appear behind a patch of heather at any moment. But then she reached the dogleg where the public path turned into the woods and she realised that she must have overshot them by a hundred metres or more. Ahead of her, the narrow half-hidden path along the cliff’s top only led to the Lookout.
Not pausing to doubt her decision, she forged straight ahead and stumbled through the heather onto the Lookout path, ducking behind the gorses, thoughts accelerated by fear. She
could seek refuge in the Lookout, she realised. Nobody knew it existed apart from her closest allies.
But even as she tripped along the half-buried path, wind threatening to batter her against the rocks, she heard the bracken breaking behind her.
The route to the Lookout was one way. Beyond it was nothing but sheer rock. The sea crashed mercilessly below, the cliff path beneath her feet was becoming ever more narrow and crumbly. The only way out would be to lure her assailant over the cliff first, gun or no gun.
Then a voice cried out behind her, ‘Wait! My flip-flop’s broken!’
Legs stalled.
‘Your what?’ she howled, swinging around to face her pursuer, prey to hunter.
The long red hair danced in the wind, cast pewter by the moon darting in and out of scudding clouds, pale face grey in the half light, whites of eyes glinting. She was wearing a bold print tunic dress Legs recognised from Next, matched with broken flip-flops. It was hardly Ninja.
‘I just want to give you your ring back,’ a strange voice pleaded. Part Joanna Lumley, part Diana Rigg, frightfully posh and wholly unexpected. ‘And talk to you about my book.’
Legs gaped at Kizzy. Only this wasn’t Kizzy. There was that chipped toothed smile again. There was no tight bandage dress. She’d matched the tunic with leggings and a crocheted shrug.
‘Wh-what book?’ Legs bleated.
‘The Girl Who Checked Out.’
Legs racked her brains, which wasn’t easy while balancing on a gale-lashed clifftop in a coral tutu dress that was threatening to billow her up into orbit, her lacerated lungs so starved of oxygen that five Kizzy lookalikes in Next tunics were dancing in front of her now.
Delia Meare, Legs realised, her adrenalin-filled head working at speed. Byrne had warned her that the author of The Girl Who Checked Out was quite potty but absurdly talented. When Legs had encouraged her to smarten up her submission for Conrad, Delia had offered to stage a ‘live happening’. This must be it.
She was closing in. ‘So you really liked my book?’
Legs stepped back. ‘Yes. There’s lots to like. I marked it for Conrad’s attention before I – ah …’ Even this dizzy from running too fast, she realised it was important not to let on she’d lost her job. ‘Before I came here.’
‘Clarissa’s got all her talent from me, you know,’ she was saying. ‘Of course, you call her Kizzy. She’s very like me, I think.’
‘Doppelgangers.’ Legs was far too stressed for detective-fast lateral thinking, yet rag-legged and buffeted on a clifftop, she couldn’t stop her mind adding facts up like a windblown Jessica Fletcher. Delia Meare was a pen name for Liz Delamere. Kizzy had tried to warn her, but Legs had misunderstood her. It all made horrible sense. This was Kizzy’s birth mother, Liz.
Just as she made this connection and remembered just how extraordinary she had found the manuscript with the supermarket trolleys full of dead redheads, she realised the multiple Kizzy lookalikes were disappearing into blackness.
‘I say, are you OK?’ asked the Joanna Lumley voice.
‘Oh fuck, I’m fainting,’ she realised, pitching sideways over the cliff edge.
Chapter 42
‘Ohhhhhhhhhhhh fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu …’ The wind whipped away her words.
Staring at the black swell of angry sea lashing its tongues around below, Legs knew it could be worse. She could be in there already, smashed against the rocks. Instead she was hanging upside-down over the cliff edge, hugging onto a rock for dear life while a mad stalker woman held her ankles.
‘Nice underpants,’ said the Joanna Lumley/Diana Rigg voice chattily, trying to keep her spirits up, although her grip was weakening by the second.
Legs told herself that was another thing to be grateful for. She may not have got to love Byrne with her body in this tragically foreshortened life, but at least he had saved her dying quite so ignobly by covering up her ladyhood in its last moments. And he was right; it was windy out. Her face was stripped bare, the sea spray salty on her lips even a hundred feet above the waves.
‘Can you really not pull me up?’ she pleaded with Joanna Lumley.
‘I haven’t the strength right now,’ she panted, sweaty hands having already slipped their grip from knee to ankle. ‘Spot of sciatica, you see. Help will come soon. It’s bound to. I’ve got a good hold here now.’ She tightened her manacle grip. ‘I really didn’t mean to scare you,’ she apologised in her lovely, reassuring voice.
‘Chasing me all this way in the dark was a bit extreme,’ she said faintly. ‘This is a bit extreme.’ She peered down at the sea again and hurriedly closed her eyes as her head went giddy, nausea rising.
‘You dropped your ring in the cellars,’ Liz explained kindly, then suddenly shifted, loosening her grip as she said, ‘I’ve got it right here in my bum bag.’
‘Don’t let go! Really! It can wait!’
The ring appeared briefly in her eye line before landing hard against her shin as Liz grabbed at her legs again to stop her plummeting down.
‘Clarissa has one just the same.’
‘I know.’ Legs could feel the ring edging down between Liz’s hand and her leg.
‘The Kelly crest.’
‘Yes.’ It was at the tips of Liz’s fingers now, and she scrabbled to try to hold onto it.
‘Her father is a Kelly.’
‘You don’t say?’
The ring was finally released and ricocheted down off Legs’ knee to her tutu before spinning away to the sea far below.
‘Oh God, I dropped it!’ Liz howled, grip loosening dramatically.
‘Well don’t drop me!’ Legs howled, hugging her jutting rock tighter.
The hold on her ankles tightened. ‘Clarissa’s father was such a sweet man, and so grateful. Poppy was terribly cruel to him after his accident. Terribly cruel to me too. But she’s always been kind to Clarissa.’
Legs opened one eye: ‘Brooke Kelly is Kizzy’s father?’ Then she closed her eye again, deciding she didn’t much care in the face on imminent death. Let Byrne and Kizzy unite in sibling grief at my funeral, she thought wildly, wind-whipped tears running down through her eyebrows.
‘I’m not supposed to tell people,’ Liz pointed out. ‘Poppy made me swear not to say who fathered my baby, not even to Kizzy. My sister has never forgiven me for seducing her husband; I turned him from martyr too satyr in her mind.’ The truth was spilling out like surreal Last Rites.
Both Legs’ eye snapped open again. ‘Poppy’s your sister?’
‘I’m not allowed to talk about that either,’ she said kindly. ‘Not that anybody’s ever asked, but you must promise not to blab. All I can tell you is that Daddy preferred chaps, so Mummy sought solace elsewhere. Oh listen, somebody’s coming.’
Legs let out a sob of relief as she heard voices on the cliff path beyond her feet, a man’s shout louder than any other, calling her name. That noble, courtly voice she knew so well. Francis; her old-fashioned hero, still true and fair, however many times she broke his poor heart.
‘We’re here!’ she shrieked. ‘Here! Francis! Arghhhhhhhh!’
The grip on her ankles slipped yet further, and Joanna Lumley’s voice hissed. ‘Loathsome man. I watched him at a meeting once, sounding like a Tory MP lecturing the underclass, and it was all I could do not to hurl eggs. Don’t let him near me!’
Legs closed her eyes. ‘Please can you just let him rescue me, Liz, then you two can settle your political differences afterwards?’
But Liz was cocking her head as she listened through the wind to the urgent conversation now taking place just a few feet away.
‘Call the police. Hostage situation. Psycho. Stalker. Just found out she’s my ex-girlfriend’s mother currently holding my fiancé over a cliff. Been sectioned more than once. That’s right. Helicopters, dogs, the works. I’ll try to keep her talking, but I think we’re looking at minutes to go here.’
The blood that had rushed to Legs’ head in the time she’d been upside-down now swirled
and pounded through her brain as she visualised the moments leading up to her end caught by helicopter camera while the Sea Rescue team battled vainly to help her. It would no doubt be a huge YouTube hit. There she would be, dangling upside-down off a cliff, wearing men’s underpants and a hideous coral dress with its great ballerina’s tutu of nets now blowing inside out, her awful huge thighs and fat knees on full display to the world as the worse of legacies.
She spat out a mouthful of hair. At least the ghastly turban had fallen off when she fainted, no doubt swirling into the sea below. She peered down at the rocks forlornly, acquainting herself with her fate, and then blinked away the sea spray and wind in astonishment.
There was a figure moving about down there.
Up above, Francis was edging closer again. ‘Liz – Liz,’ his voice deepened with false affection. ‘Let’s stop all this nonsense.’
‘Back off!’ Liz screamed.
‘Agh!’ Legs felt herself slip further down, her grip slipping from the rock, hands scrabbling vainly for a hold, but she was swinging from the overhang with nothing but her net skirts within reach now. She could see the ledge below her where Byron the terrier had landed that first day she’d come back to Farcombe and he’d scrabbled after a seagull over the cliff side. The little shelf ran along the cliff beneath the overhang, just beyond her reach, but was far too narrow to hope to land upon if Liz let go, which looked increasingly likely as Francis inched towards them waving a bright torch about.
‘Liz, I can help you. We all want to help …’
The grip slipped further. ‘Horrible, bullish, boring man,’ she started muttering feverishly. ‘No good for my girl. None of them are. Bloody men. Full of lies.’
Getting dizzier by the second, Legs was watching the figure on the rocks below start to free-climb the cliff face. She quite forgot all her detective story advice to keep one’s captor talking. She just stared, lacy skirt nets billowing against her face, heart in her throat, head swirling.
