A Winter Flame

by Milly Johnson

  Chapter 49

  Effin’s men lifted the Portakabin off-site the next morning, and Eve watched it being loaded onto the back of a truck with mixed feelings. Aunt Evelyn had worked from there and Nobby Scuttle had sweated in there. The coffee machine had spat in there and Jacques Glace had sung and been noisy in there. Now he wasn’t in the park because he was ‘taking a break’ and she was finally at the helm of Winterworld as its sole driver.

  Eve felt like a newlywed as she stood outside the pristine cabin office. At best she should have been carried over the threshold, at worst there should have been a ribbon to cut. But there was just her and a door, which she opened to reveal a lovely rustic space. She wanted to dance around it. She wanted to shout ‘It’s mine, all mine!’ and put her arms around it all.

  Eve sat on her chair trying not to imagine it was a throne. A throne fit for a captain. She celebrated by having the first coffee out of the swanky new machine that wouldn’t answer back or spit, just obediently pumped water through a pod. It even came complete with milk and a layer of crema on the top.

  ‘Oh, this is the life,’ said Eve, taking her diary out of her desk and checking her jobs for the day. There was a crockery order to chase, and more toys were needed in Santa’s workshop, and one of the tills at the entrance kiosk wasn’t working properly. It was all grist to the mill for Eve though. She picked up the phone and made the first call. She needed a PA, too. Someone who would call her ‘Captain’ behind her back. Eve laughed to herself. The PA would sit at Jacques’ old desk; it would be a great job for a school-leaver. A nice, quiet girl, who didn’t disturb her with big boots and hummed tunes and a whisper as loud as a foghorn.

  By half-past eleven, Eve decided she didn’t like the new coffee machine. It didn’t pervade the office with a rich roast smell and it was so quiet. It was a shiny, characterless piece of metal that delivered a perfect drink that was as boring as the silence which it was apparently famous for. She couldn’t hear any workmen in this corner of the park either, no Effin shrieking at his men how incompetent they were. It was all very plush and fabulous and state of the art . . . and boring. There was no Jacques annoyingly tapping his Spiderman pen on the desk as he concentrated, or his ridiculous Daily Trumpet to borrow and read the latest apology. Apparently more people bought the paper for the retractions than they did for the news. There were even Facebook pages to share them with the rest of the world.

  The little Christmas tree now stood in the corner with Jacques’ present underneath it. A couple of baubles must have fallen off in transit and the builders had put them back in the wrong place. Eve walked over and re-hung them, adjusting the tinsel and stabbing herself on a needle in the process. Again she picked up the envelope and wondered what it was. She was more than tempted to open it, but instead put it back. There wasn’t long to wait until the 16th. She could manage to hold out until then.

  Mr Mead rang just after lunch asking for Jacques.

  ‘He’s not around at the moment,’ said Eve. ‘Can I help?’

  ‘No,’ replied the old solicitor. ‘I’m afraid you can’t in this instance.’

  ‘Can I pass on a message?’

  ‘If you could just ask him to ring me please,’ replied Mr Mead. ‘If I’m not around, would he either leave a message for myself or Mrs Cawthorne.’

  Eve recognized the name. She dealt with property. She had acted as solicitor when she and Jonathan bought their house. What was Jacques up to?

  Eve decided to take a little drive to Outer Hoodley, and discovered a man erecting a ‘For Sale’ sign outside Jacques’ cottage.

  Chapter 50

  Eve sat in the car and hurriedly stabbed the number of the estate agent into her phone.

  Eventually a young woman’s voice answered. She only sounded about twelve.

  ‘Hello Watson and . . . er, Wilson and Hughes estate agents. First day nerves, sorry about that. Tiffany speaking, how may I help you?’

  ‘Hi,’ began Eve, brightly and casually. ‘You have a cottage in Outer Hoodley for sale. I haven’t seen it advertised before, has it been up long?’

  ‘Er, let me just check.’ There followed a few clicky keyboard noises. ‘No, it’s only been on the market since yesterday.’

  ‘Ah, that’s why I haven’t seen it before,’ Eve forced a smile into her voice. ‘Is . . . er . . . is it a definite sale? I mean the owner isn’t going to pull the house off the market?’

  By her own admission that sounded a bit weird.

  ‘That’s what happened to me last time,’ Eve added quickly. ‘You get a bit cautious.’

  ‘Can you just bear with me?’ said Tiffany. Eve had visions of her telling her co-workers that she had a right twat on the phone, and them miming at her to put the phone down and slowly back away. But Tiffany surprised her.

  ‘It’s definitely on the market. The owner’s looking for a quick sale, hence the price, because he’s going to live abroad.’

  ‘Going abroad?’ echoed Eve. Why, where, and when?

  ‘Do you want to know the price?’ asked Tiffany, anxiety flagging up in her voice now.

  ‘No, thank you, it’s fine, I’ve changed my mind,’ said Eve, quickly clicking off her phone. Going abroad, the estate agent said. It was all too fast and smelt of intrigue. He was doing a runner for some reason – and people didn’t do runners for good reasons.

  She sped back to the office, breaking the speed limit and hoping a covert camera didn’t pick her up. Her head was spinning. She needed to find out once and for all what and who the mysterious Jacques Glace was. She was going to ring Mr Mead back and make him tell her everything he knew about the man, however small the detail. Then her phone rumbled in her pocket and the screen showed that it was Violet.

  ‘Hi there, how are you?’ Eve injected some fake jollity into her voice.

  ‘Eve, my signal is pretty weak, can you hear me okay?’ Violet sounded a little breathless.

  ‘Yes, you’re quite quiet but I can hear you.’

  ‘Listen, we bought a Daily Trumpet to read on the plane but we didn’t get round to it.’

  ‘You rang me to tell me that?’

  ‘Listen. Are you near a computer? I’ve just read it in the Ice Hotel bar and I’ve taken a picture of one of the pages. You need to view it on a big screen.’

  Eve’s eyebrows dipped in puzzlement. ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s urgent, that’s what it is. Let me send it before I lose my signal.’

  ‘Okay. Is everyth—’ but Violet had gone. Eve waited for the text, refreshing the screen impatiently over and over again. Eventually it arrived, and Eve opened up the attachment but it was too small to read. She could only make out that it was one of the bloody Trumpet’s apologies. She didn’t know where this was going but she forwarded it to her email and then opened the file and zoomed in.

  The Daily Trumpet would like to apologize to the family of Sharon Wilkinson for the erroneous reporting of her funeral recently.

  Oh God, said Eve to herself. Of all the stories to cock up. Though why Violet had forwarded it on during her honeymoon was anyone’s guess.

  The commanding officer who read the eulogy was not, as reported, Lieutenant Jean Jackson, but Lieutenant Colonel Jean-Jacques Glace, holder of the Military Cross medal for gallantry and founder of the Yorkshire Fund for Disabled Soldiers . . .

  Eve was reading the words but they weren’t being absorbed. Jean-Jacques Glace. Where had that name cropped up before?

  She googled the name. Amongst the references to Glace Bay and French language entries, she found the entries relating to the army officer Jean-Jacques Glace. The army officer who saved the lives of three of his men, shielding them from Iraqi gunmen and losing his right leg below the knee in the process. Jean-Jacques Glace, a brilliant soldier who had quickly risen through the ranks only to be invalided out of the army aged thirty-six, twenty months ago. There was a single picture when she pressed ‘Images’, a grainy newspaper head-and-shoulders portrait of a soldier in a helm
et and ‘camo’ uniform. There was no mistaking those eyes though, bright and shiny and blue.

  Eve caught sight of that parcel under the tree and no force in hell would have stopped her fingers pulling off the wrapping now. It contained a single sheet of paper – a letter. She stared at the words, trying to absorb the enormity of what they said. Then she unlooped her bag from her chair and drove into town, fingers clamped onto the steering wheel to keep her shaking hands steady.

  Chapter 51

  ‘I need to see Mr Mead. Urgently,’ said Eve, breathlessly, because she’d had to park quite a long walk away from the solicitor’s office and ran all the way from there.

  ‘He’s in a meeting,’ said Barbara. ‘I can get him to phone—’

  ‘No,’ said Eve adamantly. ‘I have to see him. Today. I am not leaving here without speaking to him.’

  Barbara shrugged. The young lady was in for a long wait then.

  ‘Well, there’s some coffee over there, but I have to warn you that he will be quite a while.’

  As if it had heard mention of itself, the old coffee machine – which could have been the sister of the old one in the Portakabin – belched.

  ‘I’ll sit here until he can see me,’ said Eve, lifting up a magazine from the table in the corner. She read it from cover to cover, read every word of another two, went to the loo twice, had five cups of coffee and was on a twelfth game of ‘Word Mole’ on her Blackberry, when Barbara popped her head around the door.

  ‘He can see you for five minutes if that’s enough,’ she said.

  ‘It’ll be enough,’ replied Eve, getting to her feet and stretching her back. And if it wasn’t, well, there was no way that Mr Mead was going to get her out of his office until she was satisfied with the information given.

  Eve walked into the office, not knowing if the slightly fusty smell was the building or the man himself. He looked as if he could be a user of mothballs.

  ‘I’m sorry you’ve had a long wait,’ he apologized, ‘but without an appointment, I’m afraid—’

  ‘It’s okay, I know,’ Eve cut him off. ‘But I need to talk to you urgently, Mr Mead. About this for a start,’ and she foraged in her bag and put Jacques’ present down on his desk.

  ‘Oh. I rather had the impression that you shouldn’t have seen this yet,’ said Mr Mead, his huge shaggy eyebrows hooding his eyes.

  ‘There was a note saying not to open it until the sixteenth, but I disobeyed it.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘When certain information came to light about Jacques Glace. Or should I say Lieutenant Colonel Jean-Jacques Glace.’

  ‘Ah,’ said the old man again, his expression even more pained this time.

  ‘You have to tell me, Mr Mead. You have to tell me what’s going on now.’

  ‘The Lieutenant Colonel was most specific that his rank and background weren’t to be mentioned,’ said Mr Mead.

  ‘Why?’ said Eve. ‘I don’t get it. Why?’

  Mr Mead took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. ‘You should really ask him . . .’

  ‘His house is up for sale, he won’t answer his mobile, he’s going abroad apparently and’ – she stabbed the papers with her finger – ‘he’s signed over his half of the park to me.’

  ‘That is correct,’ said Mr Mead.

  ‘Is he a secret billionaire that he can afford to do that?’

  ‘Not at all,’ replied Mr Mead. ‘Just a very honourable man who thought that maybe your aunt had been a little reckless in leaving such a fortune to him after a relatively short acquaintance.’

  ‘He was a hospital visitor, wasn’t he? That’s how he met Aunt Evelyn?’

  ‘No,’ said Mr Mead. ‘It was your aunt who was doing the hospital visiting. That’s how she met a lot of the people who now work in the park. From what I understand, Evelyn was there for him when he was having trouble adjusting to the loss of his limb and subsequently his military career.’ And he coughed, fearing he had breached a confidence.

  ‘Aunt Evelyn was visiting him?’ Boy, she really had got all this the wrong way round.

  ‘She wasn’t well herself, of course, just having had that stroke, but hospital visiting perked her up no end. And, her acquaintance with the Lieutenant Colonel led to her building Winterworld.’

  ‘Thank you for telling me, Mr Mead,’ said Eve. ‘Just one more thing.’ She picked up Jacques’ handwritten intention to assign the deeds to her and tore it in half. ‘If Aunt Evelyn wanted the Captain to have half the park, then I’m not going to go against her wishes.’

  Chapter 52

  It was very late when Jacques got home and parked his car in the hamlet car park. He squinted because it looked like Eve’s BMW in the bay across. Then she got out, dressed in a thin coat, hands tucked under her arms and voice shivering as much as her body.

  ‘Where the hell have you been? Have you any idea how much waiting around I’ve done today. And I hope there are no CCTV cameras because I had to have a wee in a bush over there.’

  He had one of his ridiculously big coats on and a daft hat with a pom pom.

  ‘Eve. Why are you here?’

  ‘I opened your present.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have.’

  ‘Can we talk inside? I’m so cold, I’m turning blue.’

  He gestured that she walk forward. ‘You know, of course, which house I live in.’

  Eve’s cheeks attempted to blush at that but her blood vessels had all hibernated.

  Mrs Cerberus’s curtains gave a tiny twitch, but satisfied that Jacques was accompanying the stranger-to-these-parts woman, she returned to her sofa and the TV. Jacques opened the door to a warm kitchen; a slow-cooker was flavouring the air with the smell of beef stew. Eve’s stomach keened as the scent of it hit her nostrils. It sounded like someone had kicked a wolf at full-moon.

  ‘Coffee?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes please,’ said Eve.

  ‘Take a seat,’ Jacques invited, gesturing towards the sofa in the lounge. Everything except that sofa and the coffee table was packed up in boxes.

  ‘You’re going abroad, I hear,’ she said, as he busied himself with getting cups out and boiling the kettle.

  ‘You’ve done your homework. Yes, I’ve booked a flight.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘I fly out in the morning.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Australia.’

  ‘Couldn’t you get any further away?’

  He smiled. ‘I have friends out there. I’ve never visited them. I thought it was about time I did.’

  ‘You didn’t even stay here long enough to unpack, and now you’ve packed up again and are leaving.

  ‘I’ve been used to moving around a lot.’

  ‘What about Winterworld?’

  ‘It’s all yours.’

  ‘Why?’ She gulped down the rise of emotion in her throat.

  He walked into the lounge with two cups of coffee and almost filled the doorway.

  ‘As you said,’ he replied, setting the cups down on the coffee table, ‘I have no right to your family’s fortune. Or this.’ He reached over behind Eve to lift something off the shelf and gave it to her. Stanley’s medal.

  ‘My aunt gave it to you,’ said Eve. ‘You’d appreciate it more than I would.’ And she handed it back. ‘I won’t take it. Please.’

  His hands stayed down at his side, so she put it on the chair arm. ‘I won’t be leaving with it. And I ripped up your letter of intent.’

  ‘The legal papers are being prepared anyway,’ said Jacques. ‘It’s yours.’

  Eve looked at him, really looked at him, and tried to imagine him in a uniform, leading men. It wasn’t that difficult really. Despite the stupid woolly hats and SpongeBob SquarePants sock, he was a natural leader of men and that had been clear from the off.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you let me believe that you were a . . . a . . .’

  ‘Gold digger? A cross-dressing gold-digger at that,’ he supplied, and then smiled t
o himself as he sat down and picked up his mug, drawing warmth from it. ‘Mischief at first, I think. You were so incredibly snotty. I suppose I had faith in my ability to both win you over and teach you a lesson.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were a soldier?’

  ‘I’m not a soldier any more, Eve. It had no bearing on things. I’d rather be judged on what people find me to be now than have them pity me because I’m a disabled ex-soldier.’

  ‘You weren’t just a soldier though, you were a wonderfully brave one. You lost a leg defending your men. I didn’t have a clue – you don’t even limp.’ She remembered how he had run through the enchanted forest as sure-footed as a goat.

  ‘Prosthetics have come on in leaps and bounds in the last few years. We amputees no longer need to resort to a wooden leg and a parrot.’ He smiled at her – his big open twinkly-eyed smile. ‘It was painful to wear at the beginning until they got the fit right. I’ve thrown a few legs across the room in anger, I can tell you. It takes time to learn to walk in a different way from how you’ve been accustomed to for the whole of your life.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ said Eve. ‘I thought you were either deranged or a practised con man who went around taking life savings away from old ladies.’ She put her cup down because she felt in danger of dropping it. ‘I couldn’t have been more wrong about everything, could I?’

  ‘And you’ve got so much right too,’ said Jacques. ‘Delivering baby reindeer, rescuing horses, bringing Evelyn’s dream to life. You could run Winterworld blindfolded.’

  ‘Why are you really leaving me?’ said Eve, surprising herself even with that question.

  Jacques smiled at her. ‘Because you bought a Christmas tree.’

  Eve wiped a perfidious tear from her eye before he saw it. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘You’ll be all right,’ he said. ‘Christmas is making progress with you. It’s all your Aunt Evelyn wanted, to see you join the real world again. When you bought that Christmas tree, I knew you’d be fine. You’re starting to need people again, to enjoy them in your life. You’re looking forward more and more instead of backwards. Your heart is opening up, Eve Douglas, and you’re letting Christmas into it.’