“We don’t cake-sit, Ciaran. The venue’s banqueting team will be able to accommodate you.”
“You’re right. They should do for what they charge. Have you ever been there?” Were we chit-chatting?
“No,” I answered, more than bemused. “But Jesse’s told me all about it,” I said in a voice that must have shown my disinterest.
I felt a large droplet of cold fall from my hair onto my thigh.
“Then he’s told you how exclusive the venue is?” What was he getting at?
“He mentioned it.”
“That it’s notoriously difficult to get into?” This was getting weirder. The place was seriously swanky, I got it.
I was about to disappoint him. “As Jess explained it to me, it’s not difficult to get in there. You just have to pay your way in.”
“At an eye-watering price,” he added.
“I heard that, too.”
“And you wouldn’t take the chance to enjoy an evening there? Without having to pay your way in?”
“The cost of entry isn’t what puts me off, Mr Argyll. Well, it would, but places like that just...” I remembered to choose my words carefully. I might be sat on my bed, for some bizarre reason talking about frivolous haunts, but I was still talking to a customer.
“Not your thing?” he offered. Exactly.
“Nope. Not really,” I said, wondering how to round this chat off before I did offend him.
“And is it Jesse’s thing?”
I gave a small laugh myself then; his question had surprised me. “Anything with gold, music or overindulgence is Jesse’s thing.”
“Then the Gold Rooms must score highly on places he’d like to visit?”
Jesse had already made it perfectly clear how much he’d like to visit. It would be mean to head off a chance for him.
“You’re welcome to ask him if he wants to cake-sit. But your best chance of catching him will be on Monday...when we’re open.”
The line went quiet again for a few moments. Maybe I’d gone in too hard. “Sorry. I’ve kept you. I’ll deal with Jesse, then, from now on?”
“Jesse’s your man.”
“Thank you for your help, Miss Jefferson. I’m sorry to have disturbed you. Enjoy the rest of your evening.” He clicked the phone off before I had chance to say ’bye.
chapter 8
Jesse was grinning like the cat who had the cream. I ignored him; this hadn’t been my idea. And he looked like Liberace in that tux.
Above us, great swathes of twinkling fabric pitched away like the insides of a circus tent, and gathered at the point an enormous chandelier, fashioned in sweeping strands of golden chain mail, hung regally over us all. It was dizzying looking up at all that glitz, but down here there was even more going on.
Jesse had my hand, and was pulling me deeper into the bodies, dancing furiously around us. I didn’t want to dance but Jess wasn’t listening. I wobbled on my shoes as he pulled me further into the heaving mass. At least if I fell here, I’d be swallowed up by a pit of legs and shaking booty.
These were beautiful people, all right. The men all looking every bit as tweezed and polished as the women, the women all dressed like each other in gold evening gowns, sparkling cocktail dresses and—was she dressed as an ancient Greek?—the odd historical fashion, apparently.
Some five or more bodies into the crowd behind Jesse, a large chap was throwing crazy shapes to the music pulsing around us. The people immediately next to him had all moved back to give the big guy some space. Smart move—somebody was really enjoying themselves. Suddenly I didn’t feel so self-conscious about falling off the heels I was stupidly wearing, or drawing attention to my limited knowledge of dance.
I wasn’t really dancing anyway, more swaying with the motion of the sea of people around me. Jess hadn’t noticed my lacklustre efforts, demanding that I get more into the party spirit, so I was good for now. Besides, I was busy people-watching. It was hard not to stare at the big guy through the other dancers. He was way too interesting not to. I’d only caught him from behind, arms flailing wildly to the music and head of perfectly coiffed deep red hair swaying and bobbing to the beat reverberating through my feet.
As is so often the case when you’re rubbernecking, though, Twinkletoes started to turn that hairdo this way. Big Frank? What the hell is Frank doing in the Gold Rooms? And what has he done to his hair! Frank was lost in the music, and turned back before I could catch his attention.
“Jess?” I shouted. I caught his eye for a second. “Is that Frank over there? You remember he worked with Charlie?”
Jess frowned like he couldn’t understand me. I looked for a way through the crowd to get closer to the person I was sure was Frank. The crowd wasn’t budging, though—we were packed in. I turned to look out across the rest of the partygoers in various shades of golds and creams.
Up on the podium, the only normal-coloured suit in the room had gone against the grain and was looking out in grey over a sharp white shirt, surveying the crowds beneath him. I watched curiously as he finally turned eyes to where Jesse and I stood.
Ciaran Argyll looked down at us and nodded. Next to me, Liberace was too busy throwing crazy shapes of his own to catch Mr Argyll’s greeting. I looked back up to the podium, and saw that the ice maiden had made her way to his side. Her impossibly blonde hair was loose now, a little shorter than mine, sitting just above her shoulders, just short enough not to detract from the line of her neck. She was dressed in a strapless white bustier, pinching in at her tiny waist before a full tulle skirt burst away from her in every direction. She looked like Miss Universe, and all of us in the crowd knew it. It didn’t matter how any of us dressed; in this place we were the commoners, looking in awe to the king and queen in their tower.
It wasn’t like me to care, really, but I found myself checking down to see my own clothes against theirs.
I’d gone strapless, too, an unusual choice for me. I liked dresses, but I was more for a light floaty tunic in the summer, at a push a tea dress maybe for an evening drink in the village pub. Nothing that required anything with more faff than flip-flops. I really had broken with tradition tonight.
I allowed my hand to investigate the fabric wrapped around me. It was cream, better than gold at least, but rough, and soft...all at once. I rubbed it between my fingers.
“Glad you could make it,” called a satin-smooth voice over the music. Ciaran Argyll stood behind me, every bit as casual as he’d been at my shop counter. I knew this was all a little odd, but I was going with it. Going with the feeling in my chest was the oddest thing of all.
I looked up to face him with more assuredness than I’d managed in the shop. I was wrong. He was rocking a little gold, but it was the gold the sun had given to the edges of his hair. In a roomful of finely groomed excess, his simple charcoal suit and rugged hint of a beard made him even more attractive than I’d remembered. Assuredness gave way to a smile, and I liked how it felt. Long live the king.
“Holly, what are you wearing, darlin’?” A very sweaty, but dapper-looking Frank had appeared at my side as I’d been thinking of something to say to Mr Argyll.
“You look beautiful, Hol, ignore him. Frank—shut up, man.” Jesse had stopped dancing now, too. Ciaran Argyll hadn’t moved. He was just standing there watching me, his approving eyes almost as brown as Jesse’s. I looked down at my dress and felt the smile fall from my lips. With a sickening lurch, I realised that I was still wearing my bath towel.
Right on cue, of course, the ice maiden took her place at Ciaran’s right arm, just as I started to hyperventilate. “Would you like me to take you to get those waxed?” She smiled sweetly.
* * *
A vicious intake of breath and I jolted back to life on my bed. Dave was looking at me from the edge of the sheets, panting warm doggy bre
ath my way. On the bedside table next to him, an empty pot of feta had a lot of explaining to do. No more cheese before bedtime.
Kicking off the covers, I dragged my pyjama leg up. Right. They were being sorted today. I really had to stop snacking before bed. It had been the strangest dream I’d had for a while, but at least it wasn’t a bad one. There’d been a real mix of those lately and at least I wasn’t in the reservoir again.
I sank back into my pillow. Frank’s hair had been disturbing.
The clock on the dresser declared it was already past eight. I must have been zonked. I had to have slept for more than ten hours. No wonder Dave was waiting for breakfast. His appetite hadn’t been off the rails for long once the vet had pulled the shard of bark from his gums.
I flopped out of bed and trudged over to the window, patting Dave’s sturdy head on the way. My brain was trying to hang on to the sense of panic it had felt at the prospect of clubbing in towel and heels.
I was not going to spend today dissecting that dream. I pushed the voile drapes aside and looked out through the window at the day waiting for me. It was a little greyer than yesterday, but dry at least. Dave wouldn’t be treading mud in all day.
Mrs. Hedley was collecting eggs from the henhouse in her garden.
“Do you fancy a boiled egg, Dave?” He didn’t answer.
I let go of the drapes and they settled themselves back into position. They were useless. Martha said they looked right for the window, but they didn’t keep any of the light out and, since I last checked, that was the whole point.
“Come on, big guy, I’ll fetch you breakfast.” And while you’re eating it, I’m shaving my legs.
chapter 9
True enough, over the following weeks October proved to bring about a dip in temperature, and along with it, a noticeable dip in passing trade.
Usually Jesse and I would have used the time harvested from our scaled-back cupcake schedule to start working on the next season’s range of wedding cakes, and the dummies we’d need ready to exhibit in the new year’s big-bucks wedding fairs. Jesse had an eye for fashion trends and so long as he got to spend a few hours researching what noises were being made by all the big fashion houses, he’d always come up with a way to work their magic into ours. We had to get the exhibition cakes prepped in October as the work involved in the run-up to Christmas always squeezed us either side of the season.
The last few weeks, however, had been a little off-key. The cupcake order Jess had run by me had turned out to be genuine, and seemed to bugle in a spate of sporadic last-minute orders that had kept us nicely busy over the last fortnight. It wasn’t that people always booked us weeks in advance, but most of our business was called in by women, often mothers, charged with arranging a party somewhere, and they were largely a militant breed. Last-minute orders always came in, but very rarely for gold-level cakes, and recently, it had been all about the gold.
Jess was sat on the sofa in the bunker, flicking through one of the magazines he’d brought through from the consultation area, while I sat at the desk and checked through the accounts. October was also a good time for getting paperwork up-to-date for the January deadline. I always left our tax return until the last minute.
“No way. Aleta Delgado was snapped in town! Aleta, I love you. I’ve got to start reading these things—give me the edge over the honeys.”
I cocked my head round from the spreadsheet to look at Jess. I’d been waiting for an excuse. “Aleta Del who?”
“Who’s Aleta? Hol, sometimes I think you don’t pay me any attention.”
“Go on, then, educate me.”
Jess cast me a look that wasn’t at all convinced by my expression of interest. “Paperwork a bit boring, is it?”
“Actually,” I said, spinning back to the laptop, “it’s making for pretty nice reading. First October ever.”
“Yeah, we’re having a good run,” Jess replied idly as the sound of pages turning resumed.
I studied the figures I’d inputted outlining the value of cakes against the dates they’d been made for. We were into our third week of the month, and had taken on an unusual amount of high-value orders. Roughly four a week, actually, all over the five-hundred mark, all ordered last-minute.
“Jess? These bespokes we’ve been making lately...”
“Mmm.”
“What have the customers been like?”
“What do you mean?” he asked, still flipping through his magazine.
“I’ve taken a few of the orders over the phone, but out of—” I ran my fingers down the list of entries on my spreadsheet “—eleven cakes, I’ve only seen two Friday collections. The rest have all either been delivered by you, or picked up late afternoon on Mondays and Wednesdays.”
“Yeah, and...?”
“So, what are they like?”
“What do you mean, ‘what are they like?’ They’re like people, Hol, hungry people.” Jess went back to his mag. “Very hungry, some of ’em. None of those cakes have been small.”
I skimmed over the order values in front of me. Five hundred, five-fifty, six hundred, six hundred, five-fifty. “Jess, have we priced any of these cakes?” The numbers looked too rounded all neatly stacked up in their column. Too many zeros. Jess gave me a little more attention. “I’ve taken three of these orders over the phone, and now I think about it, they were all really easy-going about the price. They all gave me a budget to work to,” I said.
“And basically told you to get on with it?” Jess added.
“Yes. Weird, right?”
“I guess,” Jess said, thinking it over. “But not really. They were all last-minute, Hol. People in a rush don’t want to wait for quotes, not if they can just give you the go-ahead.”
“But all of them, Jess? All eleven cakes just giving the go-ahead? On cakes with values of five hundred pounds and up? We’ve done enough business to know that people don’t just do that, Jess. It’s weird enough that they were all last-minutes.”
“So what are you saying?” he asked, eyebrows reaching for the purple brim of his cap.
I didn’t really know what I was saying as it went. I shrugged my shoulders. “I’m saying it’s weird.”
“It’s business,” Jess answered, throwing the spent magazine down onto the coffee table in front of the sofa. “I’ve got to go crack on with number eleven now if I’m going to deliver it Friday,” he said, walking to the sinks.
“Where’s it going to, Jess?” I called around the wall, still curious about our recent activity.
Jess walked over to the workstation where his order sheets for the week were all lined up on the wall in front of him.
“It’s in town. St Harry’s Square. Er...number nineteen.” By town, Jesse meant his town—the city. Not the town we were actually in.
“What is that, a bar?” I asked, nowhere near as familiar with the city as he was.
“Nah, a flat. St Harry’s is a nice little neighbourhood. It’s where the yuppies live and get together for canapés and cocaine.”
“A house? Why is it going to a house?” I said, moving over to look at the sketch on the order sheet in front of him. “All that’s going to a house? Why haven’t they had it delivered to the venue?”
“Everything I’ve delivered in the last two weeks has gone to someone’s gaff. Not the same one, obviously, but all residential addresses. All nice, too.” Jess watched me start to chew at my lip. “What?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Something just feels off. Where are the rest of the order sheets?”
“In the folder. Why do you care, though, Hol? Money is money.”
And there it was.
I sat back into my chair and couldn’t help but lock down on the name Ciaran Argyll. Jess didn’t realise, but he’d thrown a thread of suggestion out there, and it had
snagged on something in my head. He shook his head at me and left me to it.
Over in the bunker, I pulled the orange completed-jobs file from its shelf, and dug out the order sheets for everything bespoke over the last three weeks. Flicking through them, they all looked reasonably inconspicuous. All of the order names were different women, as were the contact numbers, and addresses where delivery had been required. The designs had ranged from a deep-sea theme to butterflies and pearls to chocolate cherubs. In fact, the only thing any of them had in common was the limited specifications scribbled on the sheets.
When people were spending this much money, they were usually very particular about what they would like us to achieve for them. But with each of these cakes, the notes were equally scant. Contact details, a nice round budget, a theme and choice of flavour. I whizzed through them again.
The first Monday’s cupcakes had been elderflower, two days later and three tiers in honey and walnut, the day after that and toffee apple, the next cake—coffee and walnut, then banoffee, then chocolate and maple. The orders were reading like our flavours list, as if a group of customers had got their heads together and decided who was buying what, so they could all have a try.
Like the pick ’n’ mix girls.
The phone on the shop counter started to ring, and Jess went through to answer it. He was still helping whoever he was talking to when the bell over the door jangled at someone’s arrival.
After tucking the orders back in their file, I went through the front to serve.
Martha cut a flustered figure as she lay in a collapsed state across the leather sofa reserved for blushing brides-to-be. She was blushing, all right. Scarlet cheeks are quite the shocker next to a lemon-yellow dress and sticky blonde hair, plastered haphazardly to one of said cheeks.
The whites of Martha’s eyes told me she’d been overdoing it, and she knew it, too.
I was just taking in the rare view of my utterly dishevelled sister when Jess put the phone down behind me. “All right, Marth?” He half chuckled.
Since You've Been Gone Page 7
