A Winter Flame

by Milly Johnson

  ‘You both have three months to either undertake the project or all rights will revert to the other. If both of you resign your rights, then ownership will pass to the Maud Haworth Home for Cats—’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ Eve interrupted, holding her hand up in a gesture of shush. That’s what was nipping at the edge of her thoughts – that name. ‘Who the heck is Mr Glass?’

  ‘Mr Jacques Glace is the joint beneficiary.’

  ‘Jack Glass? Who is he? I’ve never heard of him.’

  ‘All I can tell you is that he is the joint beneficiary of the estate and the person to whom your aunt bequeathed the care of Fancy’s and Kringle’s ashes.’

  Blimey, thought Eve. She must have thought a lot of this Mr Glass to leave her precious ‘children’s’ ashes to him. But that still didn’t explain who he was.

  Mr Mead shrugged. He would offer no more information on the man other than that he was an associate of Evelyn’s, lived in Outer Hoodley and was very tall. And he, apparently, was as gobsmacked as Eve about being left a theme park. Mr Mead had seen him that morning and given him the news. He was going to give both parties a week to study the files to decide if they wanted to take the project forward or resign their rights before meeting again in his office. Eve looked up at the ceiling to see if there were any candid cameras recording her reaction to all this.

  ‘So, let me just get this straight in my brain,’ Eve said, tapping both sides of her head simultaneously. ‘My aunt Evelyn wants me – and this Jack Glass – to finish off a theme park which she started to build and then run it as a business concern.’

  ‘Correct.’

  Eve laughed. ‘Well, I presume she’s left us a fortune to be able to do that.’

  ‘Yes, that’s also correct.’

  Eve nearly fainted.

  ‘Subject to all the expenses being approved by you and Mr Glace and myself,’ went on Mr Mead. ‘Obviously you won’t be able to take the monies and spend them on cruises and fine wines.’

  ‘How much did she leave?’ said Eve in a voice shocked into temporary laryngitis.

  ‘A very considerable sum,’ said Mr Mead. ‘I don’t have the exact figure in front of me because interest accrues at a daily rate, but I will have for our next meeting. It’s quite a few million pounds.’

  ‘A few mill . . .’ Eve couldn’t even finish the word. This is what lottery winners must feel like – seeing all those numbers on the screen that matched their own and yet there was a membrane as thick as a plank of wood over the part of their brain that let them absorb the information. ‘Mr Mead, you cannot be serious,’ she gulped, like a bustier, Yorkshire version of John McEnroe. For a moment she thought her life had been hijacked by a computer game – ‘Zoo Tycoon’ or the equivalent ‘Christmas Park Tycoon’. People inherited jewellery and nick-nacks from old aunts, not ‘quite a few million pounds’ and future expenses for reindeers.

  ‘A fifth percentage of the revenue earned by your venture will be split between your aunt’s affiliated charities: The Maud Haworth Home for Cats and the Yorkshire Fund for Disabled Servicemen. Any remaining profit, of course, will be equally divided between yourself and Mr Glace.’

  It was sinking in, slowly but surely, that Mr Mead was not as barmy as Aunt Evelyn. Not that it mattered. Eve had little interest in being part of such a ridiculous scheme. She was happy as she was, with a good, profitable events-organizing business, and didn’t need or want to change professions and work alongside a total stranger. She was a lone wolf in business and always would be. Jack Glass, whoever he was, could have the bloody thing. It all sounded far too good to be true – and that was a sure sign that there must be catches as big as man-traps waiting for her. Little old ladies who bought stuffed elks from the internet did not know the first thing about building theme parks – how could they? She had obviously just flung her money at a ludicrous self-indulgent project – what a total waste of a fortune.

  ‘I’ll think about it, of course,’ said Eve. She wasn’t that daft to dismiss it all out of hand without looking through the paperwork, but really it was madness. A theme park in Barnsley wouldn’t work. People would laugh their socks off at the incredulity of it. A seasonal theme park was especially dodgy – who would want to see Santa in August?

  She left Mr Mead’s office determined to let the mysterious ‘Jack Glass’ take the helm and go bankrupt after three months – because that is surely what would happen. But by the time she had got to her car, Eve Douglas’s brain was fast at work and a sea change of mind had already happened.

  Chapter 2

  Try as she might, she could not sleep that night. As if she were in a courtroom, a defence barrister popped up in her head, in full wig and silk ensemble, and presented his case.

  ‘If a ninety-three-year-old woman can do most of the hard graft of planning and starting off such extensive building work, I put it to you, Eve Douglas, that you could not possibly reject the challenge of finishing off what your aunt had begun and make yourself a zillionaire in the process. This is the chance of a lifetime. It is the greatest challenge of your career. Can you tell the court that you could honestly turn your back on that magic word “challenge”, Miss D?’

  That damned barrister knew that the word ‘challenge’ was like a red rag to a bull to Eve. That barrister sounded a lot like Aunt Evelyn as well. He was even accompanied by a scent of yellow French Fancies.

  Eve abandoned her goose-down quilt, slid her feet into her slippers and headed for the kettle to make some strong coffee. She knew there was no way she would get a wink of sleep until she had taken those files apart and read every word. So she did. Then she checked out the competition on the internet. Then she made a note to ring her friend in the morning and borrow her secret weapon – Phoebe May Tinker.

  ‘I didn’t get you up, did I?’ asked Eve, with the hint of a yawn. After all, she’d only had four hours’ sleep.

  ‘Are you joking?’ returned a jolly voice. ‘I’m up sorting out her ladyship’s Crunchy Nut Cornflakes. You’re ringing early. Are you okay?’

  ‘Sort of,’ said Eve.

  ‘You don’t sound so sure.’

  ‘Alison. Aunt Evelyn left me her locket.’ Eve thought she’d build up to this one slowly. Alison was six months pregnant and she didn’t want to shock her too much.

  ‘Aw, bless.’

  ‘And a theme park.’

  Alison laughed. ‘Alton Towers or Pleasure Island?’

  ‘Neither – Winterworld. And I’m not kidding.’

  Now there was a shocked silence on the other end of the phone.

  ‘Winterworld is a one-hundred-and-fifty-acre plot just outside Higher Hoppleton. Aunt Evelyn bought the land in the sixties as an investment and then last year went mad and starting building log cabins on it, apparently.’

  ‘Dear God, you aren’t joking,’ said Alison, half laughing, half breathless with amazement.

  ‘Nope. That is as much as I know for now. I’ll fill you in with more when I’ve got my brain around it all. Anyway, why I’m ringing you is because I want to borrow Phoebe to come with me to Birmingham on Saturday. There’s a place called “White Christmas” that I want to check out. I thought she could help me spy.’

  ‘I’m sure she’d be delighted,’ said Alison.

  ‘Wonderful. I’ll pick her up at nine.’

  ‘She’ll be ready,’ said Alison. ‘Blimey, Eve. You really do know how to start my day off with a bang. I’ll have to ring Rupert and tell him. It’s not every day your oldest friend has news like that.’

  Eve put down the phone and wished her life was more like Alison’s. A smooth ride instead of a roller coaster of white-knuckle dips and rises. Especially as there had been more dips in the past five years than she cared to think about.

  Chapter 3

  ‘Auntie Eve, why is that elf smoking?’ Phoebe pulled down on her honorary aunt’s sleeve as she asked the question at 43,000 decibels. The said elf gave the small red-haired child a resentful sideways sneer that
would have put Elvis to shame, before placing the cigarette to her lips once last time, then dropping it on the floor and twisting the ball of her foot on it. Eve was itching to respond to the seven-year-old with the same volume.

  ‘I don’t know, sweetheart. I think Santa should kick that elf’s backside because she’s not exactly doing a great PR job for him.’ But the elf looked very big, very butch and that short cropped hairdo said ‘New Hall prison’ more than ‘North Pole’.

  ‘Santa will be back in a minute,’ said the elf grumpily when the little boy at the front of the queue asked where he was. Eve half expected the elf to go on to explain that he had gone for a piss. She wouldn’t be surprised at anything after what she had seen so far. It was all so fantastically, brilliantly awful and super-tacky.

  ‘Let’s go for a look around and come back later,’ said Eve, taking Phoebe’s hand. ‘And let Father Christmas get on with his jacking up,’ she added under her breath.

  The ‘White Christmas’ theme park had made all the national papers recently for being a total and utter rip-off, earning it the nickname ‘Shite Christmas’. So, in Eve’s opinion, there was no better place to do some market research than here, especially with the aid of Phoebe May Tinker, who was a cross between Simon Cowell and Hedda Hopper in judging children’s entertainment attempts. A half-dead pilot light inside Eve coughed into certain life when she read about Shite Christmas on the internet. She knew it was going to be awful but never anticipated it could be quite this bad.

  Young Phoebe May Tinker was seven going on forty-five. She was an intense child with the big, wide inquisitive eyes of an old wise owl and nothing got past her. She was a mini-me of her ridiculously intelligent father, Rupert, whom Alison had met at Oxford University when she was studying classics and Rupert was studying something scientificky and genius-sounding like ‘advanced nuclear physics and chemical extra science’. Alison was now expecting a boy and Eve had no doubt that he would emerge into the world as flame-haired as his parents and correcting Einstein’s theories.

  But Phoebe, funny little dot that she was, was also a darling of the highest order, and she was one of the very few people that always managed to make Eve smile. Eve loved the feel of her little hand seeking out her larger one and finding security there. She had always wanted children one day. Phoebe, along with Alison’s unborn son, were going to be the closest she ever got to that ambition being fulfilled.

  Not many of the parents were smiling much, having paid out forty pounds per head for the ‘Lapland Experience’. Well, if this was anything like Lapland, no wonder Santa disappeared for 364 days of the year; he was probably in therapy. Eve was now panicking that she might have scarred Phoebe for life with this day out.

  The ticket man at the front door couldn’t have smiled less if he’d tried. His ‘Welcome to White Christmas’ was delivered with as much cheer as a funeral director commiserating with relatives of the deceased. He would have been superb had this been ‘Halloween World’ with his gaunt, pale, Hammer Horror face.

  The ‘snow-covered paths’ were grey-white painted concrete. A very noisy snow machine was spitting out snowflakes from behind the tallest tree in a copse of plastic fir trees. At least they were supposed to be snowflakes – but in actual fact were a 50/50 split between ice shrapnel and splashes of water. An engineer in a bright orange suit could clearly be seen trying to adjust it, and had been heard issuing profanities until one of the elves – a six-foot youth whose green trouser hems had long divorced from his ankles – disappeared behind the tree and was heard telling old Tango-suit to watch his fucking language.

  ‘Rudolf’s pen’ housed a reindeer with a red flashing nose who was turning his head mechanically from side to side as if in disbelief. Even he was embarrassed to be there and was going to have serious talks with his agent – and he was plastic.

  Eve and Phoebe pootled off for an early lunch. The ‘Elf Café’ made the refectory from Oliver Twist look like The Ivy. The look aimed for was ‘rustic’, the look achieved was ‘workhouse’. The menu was ‘alternative-delicious’, Eve thought with a delighted smirk: chicken nuggets, chips, hotdogs, cheap-quality beef burgers with or without cheese . . . Rubbish. There wasn’t a bit of thought or imagination which had been put into it – and yet it was heaving at the gills – even after the slating it had received in the nationals. Eve’s palms started itching with the anticipation of heavy amounts of profit touching them.

  Phoebe bit down on a chicken nugget and chewed it delicately.

  ‘What do you think?’ asked Eve, giving her a nudge.

  ‘Do elves really eat chicken nuggets?’ asked Phoebe, her forehead creased with thought. ‘I’d like to think that they do.’

  ‘I think some of them eat rather a lot of chicken nuggets,’ thought Eve, looking at the gigantically fat elf operating the till. He had fingers like thick pork sausages and a selection of chins on display.

  ‘What would you imagine elves eat, Phoebe?’ asked Eve, biting down on a chip.

  Phoebe considered the question and Eve could almost hear the cogs turning in the big brain inhabiting that little head.

  ‘I think lots of soup and nice bread,’ said Phoebe eventually. ‘And Polar Bear pie.’

  Eve coughed and nearly choked.

  ‘Not sure I’d like to eat a nice fluffy polar bear,’ said Eve, hoping to implant some environmental friendliness into the small girl.

  ‘It wouldn’t be made of polar bears, silly,’ tutted Phoebe. ‘It would be called Polar Bear Pie because it was their favourite.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Eve. And phew.

  ‘And lots of ice cream,’ added Phoebe, after some more thought. ‘I think elves would like lots of different flavours of ice cream.’

  ‘Oh yes, they would, wouldn’t they?’ nodded Eve, thinking, Bless you Phoebe, you’re saying all the right things. Who needed to pay marketing consultants when you had Phoebe May Tinker in your corner? Seeing a theme park through the eyes of a child was the best way forward.

  ‘And they’d drink snowberry juice,’ said Phoebe, reaching for the tomato ketchup in the sauce-covered plastic bottle.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Eve.

  ‘It’s very cold and white,’ whispered Phoebe, as if imparting a great secret.

  Snowberry juice. Eve liked the sound of snowberry juice. She envisaged something sweet and slushy and – as Phoebe had said – icy cold.

  The only ice creams available in the Elf Café were Magnums and Cornettos. Eve thought of her cousin Violet who owned a beautiful little ice-cream parlour in Maltstone. Violet, whom she hadn’t seen half as much as she should have liked and was going to make up for that. ‘White Christmas’ might have been a disaster, although it pulled in visitors because it had a certain novelty value, but it really wouldn’t take much to trump it.

  Eve’s head was churning with ideas. The theme park didn’t have to be all about Christmas – there was so much more to winter than Santa and elves. And thank goodness for that, too, because Eve’s brain wouldn’t have been whirring that much over a park full of all that sort of twinkly tat.

  The husky ride was closed until further notice, much to Phoebe’s disappointment. They did, however, go into the doggy stables to look at the huskies, two of which were snarling German Shepherds and vicious enough to have Santa’s leg off as soon as look at him.

  ‘Let’s go and try Santa again,’ said Eve, hoping to cheer Phoebe up. She had been so looking forward to having a husky ride.

  The Prisoner: Cell Block H elf was still on sentry duty outside Santa’s grotto – or rather his B&Q shed with some cotton wool balanced precariously on top of it. The queue was long, but Eve noticed that it was going down quite quickly. As she neared the front, she saw that the shed was divided into two – two Santas. How the heck was she going to explain that one away? Luckily this was Phoebe.

  ‘I don’t think either of these are the real Santa,’ whispered the little girl, as one of the Santa’s heads popped out of the front door t
o see how long the queue was. Underneath the very bad beard and wig ensemble, his dark-brown hair could clearly be seen, and his youthful unlined face.

  Blimey, chuckled Eve to herself. I must be getting old if Santa looks young.

  The convict-elf eventually directed Phoebe and Eve into the right-hand side of the shed with a flick of her head. Their Santa had a big red nose and make-up on his hands, which didn’t quite cover up the LOVE and HATE tattoos.

  ‘Ho ho ho,’ he said, doing the fakest laugh in the world. ‘And what’s your name, little girl?’

  Phoebe’s eyes were glued to his nose.

  ‘My name is Phoebe May Tinker,’ she said. ‘Is your nose real? Do you have high blood pressure?’

  Santa spluttered and moved swiftly on. ‘And what am I going to bring you on Christmas Eve?’

  Still staring at his veined conk, Phoebe replied, ‘Well, you won’t be bringing me anything, because you’re not Santa, are you? The real one will be bringing me a bike with a basket and a Snow White princess costume.’

  Santa looked mightily relieved to be rescued by another elf making an entrance through the door at the back of his half of the shed holding a camera. This poor elf was plagued with acne and Eve just hoped that Phoebe didn’t draw attention to it.

  ‘Your ear’s just fallen off,’ said Phoebe, reaching down to pick up a plastic pointed ear.

  ‘Cheers,’ said the spotty elf with a heavy sigh. ‘Elves’ ears are always doing that.’

  ‘Your ear can’t fall off if it’s real. And this one is quite obviously plastic,’ humphed Phoebe, and her unimpressed face showed as she posed for a snap with Santa. The elf disappeared again to process the photo whilst Santa delved into his sack and pulled out a pink package with ‘Girl – under 10’ written on it. It didn’t take an idiot to see it was a book, but that was okay because Phoebe loved books. She had ripped off the paper before Santa had even started to say, ‘Put it under your tree at home.’ Her lip curled over to see that the book was Thirty Facts You Always Wanted To Know About Aircraft.