December (14 page)

      
She was a largish blonde in a blue and white butcher's apron,
which, in a vegetarian foodstore, was probably something of a gesture.

      
'It's a savoury flan, sir,' she said crisply. 'With onions and
chives and a rather interesting soya-based cheese-substitute.'

      
Martin Broadbank, Cotswold councillor, owner of supermarkets,
said, 'Interesting, how?'

      
He put her age at about the same as his, mid-forties.
Earth-mother type, he supposed, but very attractive with the wide mouth and the
heavy blonde hair like a big brass bell. And, of course, those wonderfully
generous breasts. She looked slightly harrassed but very capable.

      
He remembered Sir Wilfrid ...
I mean
she
seems normal
enough, the woman. Runs some sort of health food business in Stroud.'

      
'We think it's probably the
closest anyone's yet come to developing something which actually tastes like
cheese rather than sour yoghurt,' said Mrs Shelley Storey.

      
'I see,' Martin said. 'But surely at least twice as expensive
what we traditionalists like to think of as
real
cheese.'

      
She said, 'If you're talking about bulk Cheddar, produced,
that's one thing ...'

      
Martin Broadbank felt the lever controlling life's rail points
begin to tremble significantly under his hand. A reliable number of interesting
trains were now converging on this part of Gloucestershire.

      
'… but if you look at specialist cheeses,' Mrs Storey said,
'you'll find this is actually not incomparable in price to some locally
produced goat and sheep cheese, and when you consider …'

      
Who was he doing this for? For Stephen Case, who'd been his
emergency best man when they were at university together (studying law, which
neither of them had turned into a career)? Or for Sir Wilfrid, who was set on a
collision course with the reclusive Tom Storey, to whom Martin Broadbank wished
no harm at all, and why should he?

      
No reason at all, except that Sir Wilfrid was clearly a
vindictive man and, what was worse, a vindictive man with some residual
influence at the Department of the Environment which had sometimes been less than
enthusiastic about plans for large supermarkets like Martin Broadbank's on the
fringes of country towns.

      
Well, I'm doing it for me, of course, Martin Broadbank
acknowledged, accepting a sample of cheese substitute. And for the general good
of mankind, which has to be more or less the same thing.

      
'Interesting aftertaste,' he said. 'Good seller, is it?'
      
The business was called Love-Storey
(rather cute, the woman's maiden name had been Love), with specialist retail outlets
in Cheltenham, Stroud and Cirencester and a wholesale warehouse supplying a
range of home-made vegetarian gourmet delights of the nut-and-beanburger
variety to sundry village stores.

      
A couple of swift telephone calls had revealed Love-Storey to
be in some financial difficulty stemming, apparently, from over-expansion in
the late eighties.
Most
opportune.

      
'I mean, how many of these, er, flans do you manage to offload
in a week?'

      
Never before had Martin Broadbank attempted to ingest anything
in the soya-substitute line and he was not terribly impressed, to be honest.
But vegetarianism was no passing fad; supermarkets back-shelved it at their
peril.
      
She was looking at him curiously.
He met her eyes.
      
'How many would you say?'

      
Mrs Storey bridled. 'I ...' Then she closed her luscious lips,
smiled wryly and called to an assistant. 'Jan, the savoury - what would you
say? Fifteen, this week?'
      
'Fifteen?' said Martin Broadbank
with no hint of a sneer. 'Suppose you had an order for, say, five hundred? What
would your price be then?'

      
'All right,' Mrs Shelley Storey said, hands on hips, glorious
chest out. 'Who
are
you?'

      
Martin Broadbank had the not-so-absurd desire to lean across
the counter of the yacht-varnished pine and bury his face in those wonderfully
friendly
knockers.

      
Instead, he told her his name. On the offchance she really
didn't know, he told her what his line of business was. He told her they appeared
to be living in neighbouring villages. He invited her to discuss the
possibilities of wider marketing of cheese-substitute flans and similar items.
Over dinner.
      
'And your husband, of course,' he
added regretfully.
      
'Oh,' she said.
      
'Problems?'

      
'No, I ... it could be a little difficult, that is …'
      
She was silent for a moment, then
she smiled. Behind the smile he could see a whole computer-game of
criss-crossing emotions: a ray of hope zapped by dark apprehension, a trace of fear
even.

      
'Of course.' she said. 'We'd love to.'

After his supper of cheese
and water-biscuits, the vicar wandered across to his church.

      
It was a smaller building even than the vicarage, probably
never much more than a chapel, an outpost of the Abbey. And quite intimate, especially
at night, soft, white moonlight washing through high windows, making pools on
the stone floor around the altar.

      
The vicar knelt in the silence before the altar and prayed for
strength.

      
'How are you going to get me out of this one, eh?' he said
forlornly. 'I didn't want to come, but you - and he - put the arm on me and so
here I am, and look at me. Shit-scared. I need help.'

      
He waited, hands clasped, elbows on the altar. A wooden cross
in its centre had an aureole of moonlight.
      
The vicar listened to his heart.

      
Half an hour passed. The only image he received was one of
Isabel Pugh, poor cow, in her electric wheelchair.

      
Eventually he sighed and got to his feet.

      
'Not time yet, then? That what you're saying? A few things to
work out?'

      
Well, what had he expected? A golden light around him, a
vision like Richard Walden's, accompanied by an overwhelming sense of joy
encased in strength?

      
He stood in silence and raised his eyes to the small window
above the altar. The moon chose that moment to vanish into cloud, and it became
very dark in the church. When the vicar opened the door, there was a quick push
of wind, as if the night was elbowing him aside in its hurry to enter the
church. The vicar felt empty, lightweight, ineffectual and stupid.

      
It was going to be hard.

That night, in bed, Martin
Broadbank mused to his housekeeper, Meryl, 'Could be rather fun, don't you
think? I do love surprises, confrontations, human friction. I'm almost inclined
to invite old Sir Wilfrid, too. In fact, I think I bloody well will.'

      
His housekeeper said, 'You think that's wise? He's not what
you'd call a sociable old man.'

      
'What's wise got to do with it?' Martin was feeling good. Five
minutes ago, at the critical moment, his mind had seized an image of Mrs Shelley
Storey with earth-shaking results. He didn't think Meryl would mind, this once.

      
Meryl said, 'I know one thing. The Lady Bluefoot wouldn't care
for him. I reckon she'd find him rather common, for a Sir.'

      
'Mmmn,' Martin said. 'Well ...' This was Meryl's way of
voicing her own dislike.
      
And she's been very sweet lately,
haven't you smelled it, in the drawing-room?'

      
Tm really quite intrigued, you know,' he said, dismissing
their house-ghost with his usual non-committal tolerance. 'What would Storey be
like
? How will the humourless Case actually
handle him? Hey, you do know
why
he's
a recluse, don't you?'
      
'You're not God, you know, Martin,'
his housekeeper reminded him. 'To arrange people like chess pieces.'
      
'Because he actually killed his wife;
it's quite a story. God? Who wants to be God anyway? God never has any fun.'

Her third night at the
Glasgow airport hotel and Moira Cairns, in a baggy, knee-length Bart Simpson
T-shirt, was lying restlessly between a couple of pillows as hard as flour
bags. And nurturing a low anger, maybe to keep the fear away.
      
Three anonymous nights here were
the kind of luxury - if you could call these pillows luxury - which, hardly
having worked at all the past year, she'd have to start learning to do without.

      
On the slippery side of midnight, she lay all alone in the
double bed and held in both hands the single page of paper: plain blue Basildon
Bond, not a whiff of perfume, nor even a hint of deathbed violets.

      
Was this it? Was this the old witch's principal bequest - a sheet
of folded chainstore notepaper with hex-words scrawled upon it?

      
She glared at the two bland plant pictures on the wall,
especially chosen for people who hated art. Yet she'd come here precisely
because
it was so damn bland, every room
alike. Well removed from both a croft house on Skye and the one palatial mobile
home among the jumble of patched-up caravans on a scruffy, statutory gypsy site
an hour's drive from here.

      
Round about now, Donald and the nieces would be arranging the
Duchess neatly in her coffin - her big day tomorrow - and praying to God the
old besom would not sit up suddenly in the night and rebuke them for doing it
all wrong.

      
And tomorrow Moira would drive back to the site, for maybe the
last time, and would have to react to her mammy's final challenge.
      
How?

      
Twenty-five years ago, she gave me the glamour on a plate,
handed princess-potential to a dowdy kid. Twenty-five years ago, she touched me
with her glitzy music-hall magic and while all that glitters may not be gold,
it sure as hell still glitters.

      
So where's the damn glitter in this?

      
All she leaves for me is a bleak reminder of the worst of
times, two words she surely got out of my own head when I was not taking care.
And scrawled in pencil on a sheet of
 
… not
even her usual gilt-headed parchment but the stuff you can buy pads of at any
newsagent's.

      
This was not the Duchess's style. Had the letter been given to
her by anyone but Donald, she would have been suspicious of its origins. But,
hell... even in a scrawl, the character of the hand was plainly the Duchess's.

      
Written in pain? Written in anger? Frustration?

      
The bedside lights seemed to dim in acknowledgement all around
her, the sheets on the bed suddenly felt deathbed-stiff. She scrambled out in a
hurry, fumbling for the dressing-table lights.

      
Sitting at the dressing-table, breathing rapidly, she spread
out the paper, held her head in her hands, her elbows on the linen mat, and she
stared hard at the words:
Breadwinner,
deathoak.

      
This was the point: no glitz.

      
The note said to Moira: Listen
. I am a woman. I am frightened. I make no pretence of being able to
deal with this. There is no crest on this paper, no perfume, because against
this thing the glamour is no defence. I am on my own with a stub of pencil, one
sheet of blue Basildon Bond and my terrible, terrible fear.
      
This humble, scrawled message,
without grace, without elegance, was therefore the heaviest warning the Duchess
could give her.

      
There was a small noise from behind her. Like an affirmation.
Like
yes.

      
Moira spun in time to see one of the bland Trust House Forte
plant pictures tumble the final few inches to the carpet. When she picked it up
she found the glass had split from corner to corner.

III

All Dead

Shelley had her back to the
window this time, talking to somebody. Probably the man himself.
      
Be dark soon. They didn't like the
Weasel coming round in the dark, but the days getting shorter reduced his options.