Bad Heir Day

by Wendy Holden

  Damn. Damn. Damn. Cassandra rolled her bloodshot eyes hard at the ceiling. What an opportunity missed. How could she have been so stupid, so pig-headed as to have had the girl in the house with her and have no idea she was capable of this? When a soft Scottish voice suddenly enquired whether she was all right, Cassandra leapt a foot into the air and looked furiuosly at the small, timid-looking woman who had appeared at the foot of her bed. Doubtless one of the castle servants. “Do you always creep up on people when they’re reading?” she snapped at Mrs. McLeod, looking in disgust at the rollers and tartan apron she was sporting. Really, Anna needed to take a firmer hand with the appearance of her domestic staff.

  “I’m very sorry, Mrs. Knight. I didn’t mean to wake ye up. But ye were so quiet…” Mrs. McLeod touched her rollers in panic. She’d just wanted to titivate her hair; one didn’t, after all, get a great author staying every day of the week. Not that she had intended the great author to see her in her rollers; given Cassandra’s condition when she and Anna had stuffed her between the sheets, Mrs. McLeod had not expected the great author to see anything for several days, in fact. “I just wanted to leave ye a couple of notes. Your son has been taken up to the castle and you’re invited to stay there when you feel well enough to go. I’m very sorry to disturb ye…”

  “Quite all right, quite all right,” snapped Cassandra, relieved that this hideous little room wasn’t the castle after all. The woman, however, was irritating—not only one of the servant classes, but a fan of hers as well. These grovelling old crones could be so tiresome. She knew the type—hideous old crumblies who crowded to her periodic bookshop appearances by the ambulance load and gathered dribbling and twitching round her table while she signed “To Edna” as quickly as she could before the reek of mothballs and Parma violets overwhelmed her. Ghastly.

  Cassandra waved the paper in her hand impatiently. “Was quite enjoying this, actually. Rather well written. Quite impressed.”

  “Oh, Mrs. Knight, do you really mean it? I’m such an enormous fan of your work.”

  “Do I mean it?” Cassandra gazed dramatically up in the air. “Well, yes, actually, I do,” she pronounced, patronisingly. “Must say, wish I’d known this was the sort of thing on offer. Could have written half of my books for me, ha ha.” Anna bloody could have done too, with all the spare time she’d had on her hands, seethed Cassandra silently. Could have knocked off entire sagas between school runs. Damn. All that time she’d been suffering from writer’s block herself and there’d been the literary equivalent of Dynarod just up on the next landing.

  “Mrs. Knight…”

  Really, the old girl was getting very excited. Gone quite red in the face.

  “Yes, Anna certainly kept her light under a bushel.” Really, it was infuriating. What a team they could have been. I, Cassandra thought wistfully, could have supplied the name and the reputation. All Anna would have had to do was bash out the books.

  “Anna didna write it.”

  “Yes, well, I must say I found it hard to believe myself—plump, plain sort like that knowing about sex and all that. Still, the ugly ones are supposed to go like the clappers aren’t they—so grateful. That’s been my downfall really, being born beautiful means you don’t have to try and so you don’t tend to bother. Not that you’d know much about that of course, Mrs., er, um, but—”

  “McLeod. I wrote it…”

  “As I was saying, there are positions in here I wouldn’t have dreamt possible—and the language. Very, very racy. If this doesn’t get the gussets of Gloucestershire moistening, nothing will. And it’s those gussets”—Cassandra raised herself on both elbows and looked aghast into Mrs. McLeod’s blazing eyes—“that I need to reach. What did you say?”

  “I wrote it.”

  “You wrote it? You?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fuck me.” Cassandra fell back on her pillows, gasped, and stared at the ceiling. The answer to her prayers had just walked through the door in rollers and a tartan apron. “Mrs. McLeod, please sit down. Does the term ghostwriting mean anything to you?”

  ***

  “Christ. What a day.” At approximately the same time Mrs. McLeod drew a chair up to Cassandra’s bedside, Anna pushed open the door of the castle dining room. “Oh, Geri. Wonderful. You’re still here then. Thought you’d have given up on me and be halfway back to London by now.” Was she imagining things, or did Jamie and Geri spring apart almost guiltily as she entered? Their heads seemed to have been practically touching as they pored over the maps spread across every possible surface of the room. Jamie seemed to be midway through a drain tutorial. But even that didn’t explain, Anna thought, why they both looked so flushed.

  “I’ll get you some coffee,” said Jamie, hastily beating a retreat.

  Geri gave her an apologetic smile. “Sorry I was so vile to you this morning. I had the mother of all hangovers and I’m afraid you rather got it in the neck. Whatever I said, I didn’t mean it. I take it all back.”

  “Oh, there’s no need.” Anna swallowed. “Quite useful, actually, some of it. What are you doing with all these maps?”

  “Thought I’d try and give Jamie a hand. You know how I love to organise things.”

  “And has she organised things,” Jamie exclaimed, returning with a coffee cup trembling violently in his hand, his wide-apart eyes shining. “She’s been on the phone all morning ringing up rock stars to try and get them interested in coming to play up here. She talked to Robbie Williams for ages.”

  “Really? I didn’t know you knew Robbie Williams.” But much more amazing than that, Anna considered, was that Jamie knew who he was.

  “Oh yes,” said Geri casually. “He’s one of Savannah and Siena’s—”

  “Godfathers,” finished Anna. “Don’t tell me.”

  “Yes, but he wasn’t at the party because he was on tour. And sadly, he’s on another one at the moment so won’t be able to come and play Dampie for ages. But he’s definitely interested.”

  “Meanwhile,” Jamie was barely able to control his excitement, “we’ve had a breakthrough. Tell her, Geri.”

  “Oh yes, well, as Jamie said, I’ve been phoning round, and one of the people I called was Solstice. You remember—Jett St. Edmunds…”

  Anna rolled her eyes. “Unfortunately I do, yes.” Would the memory of him prancing around in a thong, she wondered, ever fade?

  “Solstice are really huge now,” Geri informed her, eyes wide with enthusiasm.

  “They are?” Certain aspects, Anna thought, were pretty huge then.

  “Yes. Amazing, I know, but they’ve become a massive ironic student hit.”

  Anna said nothing. A sense of impending doom seeped through her veins.

  “They’re really famous now,” Geri pressed. “They’ve revived heavy metal single-handedly. They’re on every chat show going. You can’t open a paper without reading about them—and Champagne D’Vyne, of course.”

  “Champagne D’Vyne?” She’d been the blonde, tanned girl with the hot pink heels from the Tressell children’s party, hadn’t she?

  “Jett St. Edmunds’s new girlfriend. Dumped her last fiancé—one of the Manchester United squad she’d been engaged to for about forty-eight hours—to get in on the act with Jett. Self-publicist like her couldn’t let an opportunity like him go to waste. He’s massive, you know.”

  “So he used to keep telling me.”

  “Yes, well, it’s great you know him, because he’s coming to stay.”

  “What?”

  Geri and Jamie nodded eagerly. “Most amazing coincidence,” Jamie gabbled. “Geri called him on his mobile and it turned out that he’s just come to the end of an extensive tour of British universities—”

  “His Wold Tour, as he calls it,” Geri interrupted. “It was a sell-out.”

  “And he’s just, er, been playing at the, um, University o
f Achiltibuie, just over on the mainland. Better still,” Jamie stuttered, “he’s doing a live, um, album of all his concerts—”

  “Which his record company want released as soon as possible.” Geri regained the narrative while Jamie looked at her in open admiration. “But he now needs to shoot a cover and mix the tapes of all his live gigs. He’s had a lot of trouble finding the right place to do it. So I told him all about the special acoustic effects of the dungeons here, and also that the castle not only looks stunning but also sits at the junction of every known ley line and is filled with cosmic forces.”

  “And is it?” Yet another fascinating fact about Dampie that’s passed me by, thought Anna.

  “May well be, for all I know,” grinned Geri. “Anyway, Jett was thrilled and said he’d be right over with the boys.”

  “The boys?”

  “The engineers,” said Geri. “The rest of the band have gone back to London.”

  “But there’s the girl,” added Jamie.

  “Oh yes, the girl.” Geri smiled at him conspiratorially.

  “What girl? Not…?”

  “Champagne D’Vyne. Sure. They’ll be here”—Geri looked at her watch—“within the hour.”

  “Perfect timing. Considering Jett St. Edmunds’s soon-to-be-ex-wife is at this moment throwing up in a bathroom very close to us,” Anna remarked grimly.

  It was Geri’s turn to look amazed. “Oh Christ, yes,” she said, slapping her forehead loudly with the palm of her hand. “Meant to tell you. I met her on the sleeper. Completely went out of my head.”

  Anna looked at her searchingly. So that explained Cassandra’s sudden advent. “Shame my address didn’t then.”

  Geri had the grace to blush.

  “Well, she’ll be arriving here soon as well. We should,” said Anna, “be in for an interesting evening.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Jett St. Edmunds was delighted. His two engineers, Bill “Newcastle” Brown and Tommy “Vindaloo” Jones, had finally finished setting up the mixing equipment in the dungeons and disappeared to the pub. At last, he was able to put his secret cover concept into action. Devising a way to get the rest of Solstice back to London so he could be photographed gloriously solo had used up practically every megabyte in his brain for the past few days.

  Geri’s sudden offer of a castle had seemed the answer to his prayers. Her assurance that Dampie was a fusion between Abbey Road Studios and Balmoral had failed rather spectacularly to deliver the former, but had not disappointed with the latter. The castle fitted the photographic bill—which Jett would do his best to get out of paying—superbly. Even as he lurched up the drive, Jett was planning how magnificent he would look against the battlements, aquiline profile silhouetted before a savagely beautiful sunset, hair lifted in the wind like storm-tossed waves, cloak thrashing as if possessed by the devil. Jett was very proud of his cloak, a sequinned, hooded affair in midnight blue bought in a rock auction in the belief that it had belonged to Steven Tyler; a belief Jett persisted in despite his subsequent discovery of the legend “Walberswick Amateur Dramatic Society” embroidered on the inside of the collar. He had not previously realised that Steven Tyler was a member.

  All that remained to be sourced for the cover shoot were the pair of devil horns he intended to have protruding from his storm-tossed tresses. Plus, of course, some blood to drip from his hands and run in gory rivulets across his cheekbones. It had not been easy to brief the photographer on a dodgy mobile from the back of the tour bus, but he’d finally got the message, despite sounding doubtful about where to get the blood and the horns. Typical bloody photographers, thought Jett. Everything was too much goddamn trouble for them. Anyone with a camera thought they were goddamn Mario Testino these days.

  He’d never been in favour of Seven des Roches, Solstice tour photographer and self-billed rock ’n’ roll snapper extraordinaire; after all, what had been so wrong with Annie Leibovitz? But the record company’s budget had ruled practically anything else out apart from an art student with an Instamatic. Which was more or less what Seven seemed to be. Still, Jett was confident of success. His visual concept was so strong it was practically foolproof. The whole idea of the title was rock and roll perfection; an idyllic fusion of the theatrical with the threatening, the light with the dark, the poetic with the diabolic; and the whole subtle, witty, and slightly mysterious. Spawn of Satan. It had a ring to it. Ten at least. He admired the array of gold skulls, snakes, and wolves’ heads ranged along his fingers like knuckledusters; unable to pick just one for the shoot, he had worn the lot.

  Call him a sentimental old fool, but something about the fistful of metalware reminded him of his wife. As he left the studio to make the rendezvous with the photographer, cloak swishing and swirling about him, Jett wondered how Cassandra was getting along. He hadn’t heard from her for ages, not since the night Solstice had been playing the Enormodome in Portree and his mobile had gone off mid-set. Dragging it out of the bulge in his pants before a crowd of at least fifty had been bad enough; far worse had been Cassandra screaming at him about school fees and accusing him of being homeopathically disturbed. He had put the phone away conscious that he almost missed her.

  “Mr. St. Edmunds? Over here.” Having just managed to find his way out of that spooky goddamn castle and into the yard, Jett almost leapt out of his cloak at the unexpected voice. He whirled round to see Seven des Roches sticking his head out of what looked like an ancient, stone-built shed set slightly apart from the main castle building. Jett felt relieved; after three laps of the ground floor, including a terrifying encounter with a huge bruiser of a woman with a face like a road accident, even a seasoned performer like himself was beginning to feel a little self-conscious mincing round in a sequinned cloak.

  Not least because it was so goddamn dark—he could barely see a thing through his sunglasses. As he approached the photographer, relief turned to surprise and then to terror. Seven’s hands were dripping blood and there was a maniacal grin on his face.

  “Gore galore,” enthused Seven. “And guess what? I’ve found some horns as well.”

  Jett followed him into the building. The interior was gloomy, a sink at the murkiest end of it piled high with glistening organs. Some kind of big, hairy animal was hanging on the wall; beneath it, on the floor, was a bucket of what looked horribly like blood. Jett felt the gorge rise in his throat. “Fucking hell,” he exploded. “What is this? Sweeney Todd’s goddamn fucking sitting room?”

  “It’s a deer larder,” said Seven, who had once had a girlfriend whose father owned a shooting estate. Although the relationship hadn’t lasted more than a week, its enduring legacy was his name losing its T in a bid to sound more glamorous than the Steven he had been born, even if everyone assumed it was either a misspelling of Sven or he was a big Brad Pitt fan. His original surname, Stone, had gone through the same glitzification process with slightly more success.

  “And look at this incredible stag.” Seven directed Jett’s gaze to the hairy animal on the wall. The vast, gutted deer carcass dangled rather abjectly against the roughly whitewashed stone. Jett stared with awe at the gaping cavern inside the massive beast.

  “Horns on tap,” grinned Seven. “We just pull them off and stick them on your head with a few strips of gaffer.” Jett grimaced. The thought of pulling off the antlers made him retch. He could imagine the fur tearing, the sickening rip of muscle off bone. Ugh. “Or just hack the whole thing off,” Seven continued cheerfully. “I’ve got a machete in my bag from when I was shooting the Nolan Sisters’ comeback tour of Uganda.”

  “No fucking goddamn way.”

  It took the photographer a further five tense minutes to hit on the inspired idea of Jett actually getting inside the deer carcass and standing facing front so its shoulders rested on his, its legs dangled down his back, and its head balanced atop his own, antlers soaring outwards. “Fantastic. Very His Satan
ic Majesty,” Seven pronounced admiringly as Jett stood trying not to notice the still-wet insides of the animal and hoping it was water that was seeping into his clothes. At least the cloak was safe—Seven had thrown it over the back of the deer. “Looks awesome, I tell you. Fantastic. Great. Now just hang on while I pop on a bit of blood.” Seven dipped a rag in the bucket and slapped it, dripping, across Jett’s face.

  “Hey, watch my goddamn sunglasses.”

  “Fabulous. You look gorgeous.” Seven prided himself on his professional patter. “Now we’re almost ready to roll. Just come outside, that’s right, take my hand and don’t try looking from left to right—it’ll all fall off. Thought we’d just shoot you with the castle in the background. Awesome.”

  “Make sure you get my goddamn good side,” Jett mumbled, feeling oddly helpless and vulnerable as he slowly emerged, clutching Seven, blinking, and covered in blood, into the daylight. He could only stare straight ahead. One unscheduled jerk of the head and the whole precariously balanced construction would collapse.

  “Sure, sure.” Seven rustled in the bag beside him, producing a plate and arranging something Jett could not quite see on it. “Now here. Just take these prawns. That’s right.”

  “Prawns?” Jett was pleasantly surprised. “Great. Could do with a snack. Got any mayo?”

  “Ha ha. Now just hold them in both hands and look satanic.” He picked up his camera, thrust forward his hips, then swayed them from side to side in a grinding motion. “Great. Let’s go. Wow. Fantastic. Awesome. Now we’re really cooking with gas.”

  Jett stared at him from under the antlers and behind the ever-present sunglasses. “This is for the Polaroid, right? You’re checking the position of the goddamn dripping dagger or whatever it is I’m really going to be holding.”