by Wendy Holden
But Willow was going to have to do some updating of her own. Someone, it seemed, had leaked her accounts which showed that the food queen of clean was not only a brutal taskmaster – quite literally a slavedriver – but someone who regularly expensed McDonald’s takeaways. The report ended, ‘Has the reputation of the duchess of detox taken a toxic turn?’
‘We’re here!’ shouted Lulu, bouncing up and down and clapping her hands as Vlad drew the Bentley’s shining bumper up to a pair of huge, black, iron gates into which wrought-iron gold guitars were set below the scrolled iron letters ‘RIFFS’. As the gates opened, the right-hand side peeled away bearing just the well-known abbreviation FFS, which made Laura smile. On the evidence of Desert Island Discs, this could well be deliberate.
As they proceeded up the tarmac drive, the smile on Laura’s face became awe. The house was incredible. Fantastical, with its spread of red-brick towers and turrets. It looked more like an Oxbridge college, or a very fancy boarding school, than anywhere someone actually lived. Perhaps this was because it had both a clock tower – its diamond-shaped clock-face winking gold in the sun – and a chapel. Both of them reminded Laura unpleasantly of her own school, and from here it was impossible to stop her thoughts bounding to Clemency Makepeace. She looked at her phone, but there was still no message from Ellen. A cold feeling went through her insides as she imagined the glamorous veteran reporter glancing at her messages under a hail of bullets somewhere very hot and violent, then rolling her eyes in scorn at the pathetic professional depths to which Peter Lake’s daughter had sunk.
‘Is good, no?’ Lulu asked, her sunglasses flashing excitedly as she opened the car door and sprang out to examine her domain. Vlad put the brakes sharply on; the car was still moving. Lulu’s clothes glinted in the sunshine almost as brightly as the clock tower. To help blend seamlessly into the rural scene she had bought herself a quilted gold husky and a pair of silver Wellingtons.
Laura clambered out behind her and went to stand with Lulu at the edge of a strangely shaped swimming pool. The voice of Roger Slutt on Desert Island Discs came back to her. ‘I put in a guitar-shaped swimming pool as well. They went BEEPing postal over that...’
The pool’s still, blue surface, on which a number of brown leaves floated, reflected a biplane circling round and round in the sky above. Though neither Lulu nor Laura realised it, this was Tim Lacey, a keen amateur pilot who habitually used his licence to snoop on his neighbours. Like everyone else in Great Hording, he was desperate to know the identity of the new arrival. ‘The only thing I can say for sure,’ he reported to his listening wife in the vast Hollywood House kitchen, ‘is that it’s not George and Amal. It’s two women, one fair and one dark. Over.’
Sabrina was only half-listening, as she was eagerly scanning the leaked pantomime list, which all village residents had received in a group email from Lady Mandy’s hacked account. ‘Anna Goblemova’s playing Cinderella’ she reported to her husband. ‘Which everyone knows is only because Sergei’s invested bazillions in Alastair’s company.’
‘Who’s Prince Charming?’ It had better be him, Tim thought.
‘Haven’t got there yet. Philip Peaseblossom’s the front end of the donkey. And you’re the back.’
‘What?’ Tim was exclaiming. But it came out as ‘Wha— FUCK!’ because he noticed only just in time that he was flying straight at the chapel windows of Riffs. He yanked violently on the joystick and the aeroplane soared upwards with mere inches to spare.
‘Is welcome flypast, you think?’ Lulu asked as she and Laura watched this dramatic display from the ground.
Laura doubted it, but had no alternative theory to offer.
‘Or is local fly club, hmm? I join maybe.’
‘No,’ Laura said decisively.
A hurt-looking pair of sunglasses was turned on her. ‘So why not? Want join in local clubs, yes?’
‘How about golf? Or vegetable-growing?’
This suggestion found favour. ‘Wegetables, yes.’ Lulu nodded her mass of long, blonde hair. ‘Grown own truffles, hmm?’
Laura and Lulu had now reached the mansion’s vast front door. With its huge iron door-knocker and Gothic carvings, it looked like something from a Hammer Horror. As Lulu pushed it open, Laura expected Max von Sydow, a candelabra in each hand, to greet them. And Norma Desmond waiting beyond, ready for her close-up.
What actually waited beyond were Roger Slutt’s decorations. Cupids frolicked on the painted ceiling of the entrance hall. Gilt frames were carved with goddesses. There were four colossal chandeliers and a carpet swirling with woven ribbons, billowing and blue, over a woven sea of pink flowers. The curtains at the massive windows comprised five layers of pink, blue and gold brocade roped back with an enormously thick silk rope whose tassels were weighed with chunks of crystal. In one corner stood a shiny white baby grand, in another a gold harp.
‘I like.’ Lulu was looking assessingly round, hands on hips. ‘Is simple English country style, yes?’
By way of Louis XIV multiplied by an oligarch with blingtastic bad taste, Laura thought. Was there an undecorated inch in the entire place?
Lulu’s silver wellies squeaked on the parquet as they walked on into the dining room. Below a gold stucco ceiling was a vast black shiny dining table whose legs were short, thick, fluted gold pillars. Surrounding this monstrosity were twelve black velvet chairs with carved gold legs and gold skulls atop the seat backs. It looked like the meeting room of a particularly flamboyant satanic cult.
‘Mirror is black, why?’ pondered Lulu, trying to see her reflection in the huge dark looking glass set in a gold frame writhing with snakes.
‘It’s a telly,’ Laura guessed.
Adjoining the dining room, accessed by double doors lined with padded silver leather, was a hideous bar whose backlit mahogany shelves were crammed with crystal decanters. In an adjoining room Laura caught a glimpse of some red flock wallpaper and a gleaming gold urinal.
Lulu had by now moved on to the bar top which was made of glass and embedded with bullets. Instead of beer, the pull-handle pumps served pints of a range of champagnes. ‘Is genius!’ Lulu exclaimed in delight as she yanked a foaming stream of Moët on to the floor.
For all its Versailles style, the whole place was computerised. There was a central control room with wall-to-wall banks of screens, buttons and flashing red and green lights.
‘Is called SmartButler,’ Lulu enthused, consulting her tablet. ‘You press button on tablet, bath run, yes?’
Laura’s eyes slid to Vlad, standing politely by the door ready to do her mistress’s bidding. As befitted the smartest butler Laura knew, her expression, as inscrutable as ever, gave no clue to what she was thinking.
Lulu, on the other hand, clearly just wasn’t thinking. Tact had never been her strong point. ‘SmartButler in kitchen too,’ she said, consulting her tablet. ‘You switch on from yacht, robot take food out of freezer and put in stove, hmm?’
The Frenchwoman in Laura could not think of anything more ghastly. Cooking by robot? Missing out all the wonderful, soothing, sensual stages of selecting, peeling, chopping, stirring?
From the door came what might have been a sigh.
‘Is there a wine cellar?’ Laura asked quickly, not just with a Frenchwoman’s interest in vintages but because the wine in the Kensington house was Vlad’s special responsibility. She prided herself on selecting exactly the right bottle for whatever food was being served.
Lulu looked up from the screen, her sunglasses glinting excitedly. ‘SmartButler choose wine! You type in what eat, is all.’ Laura gathered that you knocked in a few numbers and an appropriate bottle of exactly the right temperature would rise up a chute from the capacious cellar. The design, apparently, was based on the hydraulic shell-loading system in a battleship.
She did not dare meet Vlad’s eye after this. Given the circumstances, a knock – or rather a slap – on the silver padded leather double doors came as a rather merciful interruption.
‘Yoo hoo!’ Kiki meant to trill merrily as she came into the room. But the degree of unpleasant shock and recognition meant she just blurted, starkly, ‘You!’
‘You yourself,’ replied Lulu.
Kiki’s reflexes were less fast. She had suffered one tremendous shock already that day in the shape of the revelations about Willow’s criminal Spiraliza chain. Thankfully, Great Hording had not been named. But the story had come hard on the heels of the leaking of Lady Mandy’s cast list and, before that, the Jolyon Jackson horror.
It was beginning to look as if someone was targeting the village and picking off its distinguished denizens one by one. Certainly, this was what it was looking like to Jonny, who was having kittens and demanding Kiki put a stop to the scandals. But while Kiki had now firmly convinced herself that Kearn from the Fishing Boat Inn was behind them, she could prove nothing. It had been a disappointment to find that Sir Philip Peaseblossom, to whom she had turned in her hour of need, was quite unable to arrest and imprison her number one suspect with no evidence. So what was the point of him? Kiki asked herself angrily.
Once again she was relying on distraction to head off her incandescent boss. The identity of the new owner, or owners, of Riffs, should, she had calculated, do just that.
Her horror at realising it was Lulu, the street-fighting It girl, and her friend the dark-haired slut who had slept with Caspar Honeyman and eavesdropped on her conversation with Jolyon Jackson, was absolute. That the room stank like a pub bar the morning after – a scent with which Kiki was more than familiar – supported what she already knew. These women were no good for Great Hording.
‘What do you want?’ Laura was looking at Kiki with her arms folded. She suspected that the woman was here out of sheer curiosity, and her suspicions were confirmed when Kiki went red.
‘I wanted to make sure you were happily settling in,’ she said in a strained voice.
‘We’re settling in fine, thank you.’ Laura continued to give Kiki a hard stare.
‘Well, I must be off to my pantomime rehearsal.’ Kiki backed out of the room in her best special-edition designer Birkenstocks, worn in honour of the occasion.
The one bright spot in all the current ghastliness was the fact that Lady Mandy had, finally, given her a small part. It was not on the leaked list; Kiki’s name, crushingly, had not featured at all. Dung Spaw had been given the coveted part of Buttons, and Kate Threadneedle was playing Dandini.
But the lure of a free champagne party had, after all, been enough for the great producer to graciously cast Kiki as ‘Mine Hostess’ of the Village Idiot, the pantomime’s pub. It hadn’t seemed an especially brilliant role, given that it was non-speaking. ‘But, my dear, landladies have a great theatrical history. Take Mistress Quickly, in Henry IV, Part One,’ Lady Mandy had boomed. Only once Kiki returned to the Golden Goose and consulted BardOnline did she discover that Mistress Quickly had run a brothel.
‘Pantsomime?’ Beneath her thick tumble of blonde hair, Lulu’s diamond-dangling ears pricked up. ‘There is pantsomime here?’
Too late Kiki realised her mistake. But there was no hope of this unacceptable stranger crashing the hallowed circle of village thespians. ‘Great Hording puts on its own performance every summer,’ she said haughtily, stalking towards the door with her chin in the air.
‘But is Christmas, pantsomime, yes?’ Lulu sounded puzzled.
‘Not in Great Hording,’ Kiki informed her snootily. ‘The entire village decamps in December to Klosters or the Caribbean. So the pantomime’s in summer instead.’
‘Is great!’ Lulu’s glossy pink lips spread in the brightest of smiles. ‘I have part, yes?’
Kiki turned on her Birkenstocks. ‘I’m afraid it’s all been cast.’
There was a stubborn glint in the sunglasses that now turned on the pub manager. ‘Is who in charge of pantsomime?’
Kiki had had no intention of revealing it. But now it struck her that Lady Mandy in full pompous sail was the least that Lulu deserved. Accordingly, she gave full details of the hallowed producer, and of the location of Promptings.
‘Is your behind!’ Lulu declared suddenly.
Kiki clamped both hands on her rear. ‘What?’
‘Is your behind!’ roared the billionheiress, again.
‘What’s wrong with my behind?’
‘Is what they say in pantsomime,’ Lulu chortled triumphantly. ‘Is your behind! I practise, hmm?’
Laura and Lulu watched as Kiki stalked out through the silver-padded doors with as much dignity as she could muster. ‘I go down there, yes?’ Lulu said. ‘To the cheeselady. You come too?’
Laura shook her head violently. Her horror of amateur dramatics dated back to school productions where she would be third spear carrier watching her hated enemy take the lead part. Clemency, unsurprisingly, was a talented dissembler whose scheming Lady Macbeth had been especially admired.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Lulu and Vlad drove off to beard Lady Mandy in a sudden burst of rain, but this had eased off by the time Laura walked up the Riffs driveway to wander round the village. The birds were powerfully singing. Seeing them hopping about the dripping trees she wondered how anything so tiny could make so much noise. Or why, come to that. Was it a matter of territory, or just for fun? Laura, a city girl, had never considered such questions before. She wondered if the country might be growing on her, even Roger Slutt’s maximalist version of it.
In pretty Georgian Fore Street, the song of blackbirds gave way to the cries of seagulls. They circled around, yellow-beaked and white-winged, in air blue and bright with the reflected light of the ocean just behind the row of shopfronts. The wet cobbles were steaming under the strength and warmth of the sun. It felt as if the place had been washed and was now drying like clothes on a line.
Laura lingered, looking in the shops. Here was the Post Office Stores with its jars of traditional sweets in the windows. Caribbean Limes. Uncle Joe’s Mint Balls. Coconut Mushrooms. She grinned, imagining Mimi’s reaction. Her grandmother thought the English made the strangest sweets in the world. Liquorice bootlaces? Sérieusement?
Centre of the window display at Neverland, a high-end toyshop, was a doll’s house featuring its own media room, home gym and garage with tiny sports car and Land Rover. Each bedroom had a flat-screen TV and en suite bathroom. Great Hording in miniature.
Here was a boutique, The Dreamy Englishwoman, which sold floaty clothes in muted shades – not Laura’s sort of thing at all – and here was the bookshop, painted the sort of clear, bright pale blue that lifted the spirits just to look at it. The window was filled with the latest releases, all obviously hand-picked to suit the locale. Front and centre were Dame Hermione’s Saddle-Saw novels. ‘We’ve all read Nasty and Brutish,’ affirmed an elegantly handwritten placard. ‘And we simply can’t wait for Short!’
Laura remembered the understated, slightly shabby but definitely handsome quizmaster; this was his lair. She stood aside as the door opened and a tall, fair, lean man came out. The barman from the Golden Goose, Laura remembered. He had struck her as a civilised sort, quite the type to go in bookshops. He was Russian, or perhaps Polish; both big book-reading nations, of course.
If Great Hording was the quintessential English seaside village, this had to be the quintessential bookshop. Shelves painted the same jolly blue as the shop’s exterior filled every inch of wall, rising from sisal floor to stucco ceiling, stuffed with volumes on subjects whose categories were advertised with neatly lettered signs. Here and there along the shelves small recommendations had been attached below particular volumes. Some were quite funny: ‘The ultimate coming of aga story,’ it said beneath a new novel about moving to the country. Rather to her disappointment, the bookshop-keeper with his worn cords and world-weary charm had not yet materialised. No one sat at the small desk at the shop’s shady rear, equipped with a till and a small computer.
Laura continued to peruse the shelves.
The ‘Local Au
thor’ section would have filled a smaller bookshop just by itself. The variety, reach and sheer size of Great Hording’s collective influence was amazing.
Here was Superspook: A Life of Philip Peaseblossom; Blue Moon: The Riotously Unofficial Biography of Jolyon Jackson; Banking On It by Sir Richard Threadneedle and Towards A Fundamental Interpretation of The New Legal Corporate Alternative by Lord Jeremy Young, QC. The shelf devoted to Dame Hermione was enormous and contained, in addition to the expected canon, a good many steamy Mills & Boons she had penned early in her career when trying to get off the ground as an author. Margaret Tache was also well represented, with Catullus’s Underpants: A Life of Rome’s Raunchiest Poet being the latest release.
Laura browsed on. Here was The Future Is Breezeblock by Bingo Borgen; the same blue-bearded architectural maestro Lulu had been so excited about on the way up. Laura hadn’t realised he lived in Great Hording and wondered what his house was like. Breezeblock, presumably. And wonky-floored with no windows.
Speaking of Wonky, here was the celebrated florist’s book Through A Hedge Forwards. Laura flicked through the lavishly illustrated ‘About Wonky’ section. Here she was in tight, faded jeans outside a smart white-painted shop in an expensive Chelsea street. Behind rows of parked Bentleys and shining Aston Martins were ranged wooden buckets of dock leaves and rosebay willowherb. Beneath this were testimonials from simple country-flower lovers ranging from the Duchess of Porthminster to the chairman of Goldman Sachs by way of South’n Fried, ‘multi-Grammy-winning recording artist and owner of MotherF****r Records.’ Where was Lulu’s erstwhile fiancé now? Laura wondered. Still roaming the globe on his ‘Bust Yo Ass’ tour, presumably. Having had his ass – or at least his heart – conclusively busted by Savannah Bouche.
‘Former Ralph Lauren model Wonky trained as a wild florist at the Académie des Fleurs Sauvages, Paris,’ the introductory article went on. ‘Wonky has four children, Wolf, Echo, Norman and Lucky Blue, and homes in Italy, America and France as well as London and the English countryside. Famous for inventing the jam-jar posy, Wonky believes that simple is always best.’
