“Mr. Toad,” said Hilarian.
“Great idea, eh?” said Kelly.
“Kelly,” said Hilarian. “There’s a clue in the name here. Mr. Toad?”
“And … ” Kelly looked confused. “You wanted a picture of a frog. Same thing, isn’t it?”
Hilarian sighed but relented when he saw the disappointment creep into Kelly’s expression. “Close enough,” he told her.
And so the Froggy Bottom label went to press with a picture of Mr. Toad. What did it matter really? It was a funny, humorous little image that would hopefully catch the eye of the wine buyers and their customers in turn. Kelly, at least, was very pleased with it.
Guy wrote the blurb for the back of the label, making much of the “young team” eager to “shake up” the world of winemaking.
“We don’t advise you to go shaking up this bottle, however,” Guy’s blurb concluded. “Acting like a racing driver could leave you with nothing to drink.”
When the first bottle bearing the new label rolled off the production line, Kelly snatched it up and cradled it in her arms like a newborn child.
“We made this,” she said to Guy proudly.
She finally felt like part of the team.
The post always arrived late at Froggy Bottom. Guy and Kelly were out in the vineyard long before the postman skidded into the courtyard in his red and yellow van and so it wasn’t until lunchtime that they found out what had been delivered.
Guy handed Kelly the big envelope. She held it. Her face dropped.
“What is it?”
“I think it’s my results from UC Davis,” she said. She peered at the American stamp and the postmark that covered it. “It’s definitely my results.”
“Go on, then. Open it.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“What if I’ve failed?”
“You won’t have failed.”
“I might have.”
“Well, if you have failed, not opening the envelope isn’t going to change things, is it?”
Kelly knew that but right then, with the envelope still sealed, all her dreams were still intact. Once she opened the envelope and saw that capital letter “F,” it would all be over. The good feeling taking the course had given her would evaporate. She would be officially thick again.
“For heaven’s sake.” Guy snatched the envelope from her. Kelly made a desperate lunge to grab it back but Guy held it high above his head and well out of her reach.
“Sit over there,” he commanded, pointing toward the kitchen table. “And don’t move until I say so. I’m going to open this damn envelope for you.”
Kelly sat at the table. She leaned forward on her elbows, closed her eyes and covered her ears. Guy ripped the envelope open, pulled out the letter and scanned it quickly.
After what seemed like an age, Kelly opened her eyes and looked up at him. He was frowning.
“I knew it. I knew I’d bloody failed!” Kelly cried. She pushed her chair back from the table and got ready to run upstairs and sob.
Guy merely laughed at her distress. He grabbed her arm as she tried to get past him.
“You passed, you silly sausage. What’s more, you passed with distinction.”
He handed her the letter. She wiped her eyes and began to read.
“Which makes you even more highly qualified than I am,” he went on to say.
Kelly’s smile returned as she saw that he really wasn’t joking.
“I passed with distinction! I’ve never passed anything with distinction before!”
“Congratulations,” said Guy. “You really deserve this.”
He gave her a hug. She continued to snuffle her disbelief into his shoulder.
“How are we going to celebrate?” Guy asked.
“Well,” said Kelly. “Now that I am officially the most highly qualified winemaker at Froggy Bottom, I’m going to start bossing you about!”
The one person Kelly really wanted to tell about her success on the wine course was Gina. Before she would allow herself to celebrate, she had to tell her best friend. She called a couple of times but went straight through to voicemail. Guy started getting impatient to open a bottle of Froggy Bottom’s finest and toast Kelly’s new qualifications. So they went ahead.
Gina finally phoned the next morning.
“Where have you been?” Kelly asked. “I’ve got big news. I passed that exam.”
“I knew you would,” said Gina.
“This will be you soon. Celebrating passing your first-year exams at uni.”
“I don’t know if I’m going to go,” said Gina.
“What?”
“I’m not sure what the point is anymore. I’m making really good money. I couldn’t earn the same in any ordinary job.”
“Come and see me again,” said Kelly, thinking that maybe it was time to have a serious talk about where Gina’s life was headed. “How about this weekend?”
“I can’t,” said Gina. “I’ve got a job. I’m going to St. Tropez. Staying on a yacht.”
Kelly could understand why Gina was finding it so hard to break away from the world she’d become involved in. Who wouldn’t want to spend their weekends on a luxury yacht? “But it’s not as if this guy is your boyfriend,” she said.
“You know what?” said Gina. “I sometimes wonder if there isn’t a little part of you that is actually jealous of what I’m doing with my life. You’re stuck out in Sussex not getting laid and I’m traveling all over the world, getting paid to have better sex than I’ve ever had.”
Kelly was shocked by the force of Gina’s accusation. Not least because she wondered in part if it wasn’t true. Perhaps she was jealous. Gina was certainly right that Kelly hadn’t had much sex since she moved to Froggy Bottom. Now that she wasn’t into hanging out and smoking weed all day, the guys she used to sleep with seemed to find her less interesting. They certainly interested her far less. A few weeks earlier she had been to a party in London and got off with a bloke in the kitchen but it was nothing more than a kiss really. Perhaps Gina’s love life was making her envious. But it wasn’t a “love life,” was it? Gina was having sex for cold hard cash.
“Don’t go making the mistake of thinking that one of them is going to fall in love with you, Gina. That only happens in Pretty Woman.”
Kelly suddenly found herself talking to dead air. She replaced her own receiver thoughtfully. She didn’t feel so much like celebrating anymore.
CHAPTER 43
Axel Delaflote drove through the night from Champagne to the center of Paris. Randon had summoned him at ten o’clock that evening to discuss the ongoing plans for the expansion of Maison Randon. The meeting could not wait until the following morning. Randon was flying out to Napa via London the next day.
Tired and slightly angry, Axel looked at the table as he explained to Randon once more that none of the owners of the vineyards the great man had earmarked for domination were amenable to becoming part of the Domaine Randon empire.
“They don’t want our money. They’re all doing very well.”
“Then we must set about weakening their position,” said Randon.
“I don’t know how we do that,” said Axel. “This year’s harvest was excellent. They’re all about to release excellent vintages.”
“Use your imagination,” said Randon. “That is what I pay you for. I want Madeleine Arsenault’s vineyard or your head.”
“I can’t get anywhere near her,” said Axel in exasperation.
“Then perhaps you should hand over some of your responsibilities. There’s someone I’d like you to work with.”
Randon walked across his office to the door that led on to a small private library. Someone was waiting in there.
“I’d like you to meet Monsieur Tremblant,” said Randon.
“Jesus,” Axel said under his breath as he took in the man’s horrible and horribly familiar face.
Axel left Randon’s office with a headache but he d
idn’t go straight home. Right then, he wanted to be away from everything to do with Domaine Randon and that meant staying out of his apartment, with the portraits of his employer’s cold-eyed ancestors hanging on the walls, as though they were Randon’s spies, watching his every move.
Neither did Axel want to go somewhere too familiar. His usual haunt was likely to be full of people he knew, who would ask too many questions about life as Mathieu Randon’s sidekick, and he wasn’t sure that he would be able to refrain from punching anyone who referred to him as Randon’s “poodle” that night. Axel went instead to the bar of a hotel about a mile away from where he lived. It was one of those corporate places, recently refurbished to bring it into line with the rest of the chain to which it belonged, with identical fixtures and fittings so that the traveling businessman could feel at home whether he was in Paris, France, or Paris, Texas. If you didn’t step outside you wouldn’t know the difference.
Axel took a stool at the long, highly polished bar in the lobby. It was meant to evoke thoughts of Paris in its decadent heyday but there was something just a little too clean about the place. Antiseptic. Right down to the smell. Not that there weren’t a few dubious characters there.
Axel ordered two vodka martinis in quick succession and felt the violent energy within him subside just a little. He caught the eye of a woman at the other end of the bar. She was exactly his type. Slender. Dark. She’d painted her eyes with great sweeps of eyeliner that gave her the air of an Ancient Egyptian princess. She reminded Axel of a girl he’d seen in London a couple of times. She had the same narrow shoulders. Slender arms. Tiny waist. The way she flicked her cigarette ash into the ashtray. That same calculated languidity. The girl slowly smiled at Axel with the self-assurance that made him confident she wasn’t a tourist, nor was she there on any ordinarily respectable sort of business.
Axel slid a fifty-Euro note across to the barman. He stood up, keeping eye contact with the woman the whole time. She knew what he wanted. As he left the hotel, she followed him. This is becoming a habit, thought Axel.
CHAPTER 44
For a girl with a past like Kelly Elson’s, the appearance of a police car always spelled trouble. It put a shiver down her spine. She couldn’t help feeling guilty when she saw that blue and yellow livery. And so her first thought, when she saw the squad car pull into the courtyard at Froggy Bottom, was that they were coming for her.
Perhaps someone had complained about the noise from the last Froggy Bottom Fandango, even though the nearest house was a mile away. Or perhaps they were going to arrest her and Guy for making illegal hooch—was there some kind of special license she needed to be a wine-maker, she wondered. She hoped Guy was on the case. The last thing Kelly expected was that the two police officers getting out of the car would ask whether she had time to see them. As she stood at her front door, Kelly almost had her wrists out for the handcuffs.
She said she did have time.
“Then perhaps we better come inside,” said the female officer. “Put the kettle on, eh?” she added with a sorry sort of smile.
“What’s the matter? Is it my mum?” Kelly asked, feeling panic rise. Did Marina need bailing out?
“No. It’s not your mum. But it is bad news, I’m afraid.”
Kelly sat down. She couldn’t think whom the bad news might pertain to. Apart from her mother, she had no family that she knew of. Guy was fine. He was in the winery. Hilarian had called just that morning with news of his post-Vinifera party hangover.
“I believe that you knew Ms. Gina Busiri.”
Knew? In that single, past-tense word, Kelly heard the full story.
“Is she dead?”
The male officer nodded. “I’m sorry. I know she was your friend.”
“She was my best friend,” said Kelly.
“We know,” said the female officer. “That’s why we’re here. We need to know who you think she might have been with when she died.”
“Where did you find her?”
The female officer insisted on making Kelly a cup of tea before she gave her the blow by blow. At the same time, her colleague went out to the winery and asked Guy if he would mind coming and sitting in the kitchen while Kelly heard the worst. Guy downed tools at once.
“Her body was found about four weeks ago. In the Marne. That’s a river in France.”
“I know,” said Kelly. “It runs through Champagne.”
“She’d been dead for a couple of days, we think. The French police guessed that she was English from her Marks & Spencer’s tights. She was identified from police records. Fingerprints.”
Kelly nodded. She remembered the day that she and Gina had been arrested for shoplifting.
“Her brother confirmed the identification. He put us on to you. We need to know why you think she might have been in France. Who she might have been seeing.”
“We fell out. I haven’t spoken to her for a while.”
“Was she visiting a friend, do you think? Or a client? Was she on the game, Kelly?” the female detective asked. “It’s important that we know.”
Kelly bit her lip. It was strange. She still felt as though, in trying to help the police piece Gina’s last moments together, she would be betraying her.
“I don’t think she was meeting a boyfriend,” Kelly admitted at last. “I think she was meeting a client.”
It was a harrowing afternoon. Guy, Kelly and the police officers sat at the kitchen table and went through the details of Gina’s life as Kelly knew them. Kelly covered her eyes with her hands as she recalled the early days of her friendship with Gina. She described their first meeting with an older girl at the hotel who told them exactly how she managed to buy Gucci shoes on a chambermaid’s wages and encouraged them to follow suit.
“So, you worked as a prostitute too,” said the female detective.
Kelly kept her eyes firmly on the table as she confirmed the worst. She didn’t dare meet Guy’s eye after that.
The male detective then brought out an envelope full of photographs. He handed them to Kelly one by one and asked her to say when she saw one she recognized. They were mostly police mug shots. Men who looked as though they would kill their own grandmothers for a fiver. Kelly didn’t recognize any of them. In some small way, she was relieved she didn’t, though she knew it wouldn’t help Gina.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know any of them.”
“Don’t worry,” said the female detective, squeezing Kelly’s hand. “We will find out who killed your friend.”
After the police left, Kelly and Guy went back to the kitchen table. Guy put the kettle on at once. He’d become almost English in his reaction to disaster. Kelly gratefully accepted another cup of tea, though she couldn’t face the biscuits he also put in front of her—the remains of a packet of Hob Nobs, Gina’s favorite.
“I can’t believe she’s dead,” said Kelly. “It doesn’t feel right. I mean, I feel like I’d know if she wasn’t alive anymore. Perhaps they got the wrong girl.”
Guy squeezed Kelly’s shoulder but she knew he couldn’t offer her any reassurance on that count. Gina’s brother had identified the body. The fingerprints and dental records also matched up.
“I encouraged her to go on the game,” said Kelly. “It’s my fault.”
“She made her own choices,” said Guy.
“It wasn’t just for the money. She wanted to make something of herself. She was saving up so she could go to college.”
“I know.”
“She could have got a loan instead. I should have encouraged her to do that.”
“Yeah,” said Guy. “But that was up to her. Do you want more tea?”
“Open a bottle of wine.”
Guy frowned.
“Please. Just one between the two of us. I’m not going to drown my sorrows. I just want to make them shut up a bit.”
“What do you want? Red or white.”
“Petrus,” said Kelly. “Gina liked that.”
Guy went into the
cellar and brought out a bottle from 1982. Having decided that Kelly could be trusted, Hilarian had returned some of Dougal’s bottles to the cellar to make room in his own, though this particular Petrus was the one bottle that Hilarian had told them should be drunk in his absence only if nuclear war had been declared.
Kelly sobbed when she saw the label.
“I told Gina we would open this when we both got our degrees,” she said.
“Shall we open something else?”
“No,” said Kelly.
Guy got two glasses out of the cupboard and made sure they were properly clean before he poured out the first sip.
“To Gina,” said Guy.
“To Gina,” Kelly choked.
That evening, Kelly told Guy more about herself than she had ever done before. She told him about growing up with her mother. She told him her hazy memories of Dougal and of living in the cottage tied to the big house in Norfolk. She remembered playing on the grass and walking on the fabulous beaches, but then she was uprooted and moved with her mother to South London, where, if you could find any at all, the grass was full of broken glass and dog shit.
She told him about the men who had drifted through her mother’s life. None of them were what you would call “gentlemen.” A couple of them used to smack Kelly’s mother about. One of them even put her in hospital. He smashed her cheekbone. It was hard for Kelly to concentrate on doing well at school when there was so much to worry about at home.
“I didn’t know what to do. I tried to protect Mum but she kept going back to them.”
“There wasn’t anything you could do,” said Guy. “She was supposed to be protecting you.”
“Perhaps she just couldn’t.”
Kelly hadn’t told anyone but Gina the full story of her life. And now Gina was gone. She hadn’t spoken to her mother since she had arrived to stay at Froggy Bottom. She had never felt so alone. Especially now she was sure that she was going to lose Guy too. How could he not see her differently after that day’s revelations?
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