A Winter Flame (2 page)

‘Aunt Evelyn?’ She wondered if Mr Mead had picked up the wrong client file. Dolly Parton’s for instance. ‘Evelyn Mary Douglas?’ Cuckoo Aunt Evelyn, with the
seven-foot plastic Christmas tree in the corner of her lounge, and owner of Gabriel the elk?

Mr Mead’s shaggy grey eyebrows rose so far they almost left his head. ‘Your aunt may have lived frugally, but she was a woman of considerable means,’ he continued.

‘Frugally? That’s putting it mildly,’ Eve interrupted. Evelyn had a mania for Mr Kipling’s French Fancies, but she would only ever buy them when they were on BOGOF.

‘She was a genius on the stock exchange. She had a remarkable nose for exactly the right moment to buy and sell,’ Mr Mead continued. ‘I thought it was beginner’s luck
when she first started to dabble, and advised caution, but she was a master of financial enterprise. She could smell a shift in the market as surely as a cat can smell an injured bird.’

‘You’re joking.’ Eve shook her head. Maybe it was she who was on drugs. Those mushrooms she had in her omelette last night did look a bit misshapen.

‘I’m not joking at all, Miss Douglas,’ said Mr Mead, and it was quite obvious that he wasn’t either.

‘You’ll forgive me if I’m a bit gobsmacked, Mr Mead,’ said Eve, flicking a few strands which had worked loose from her tightly tied-back, dark-brown hair, whilst thinking
that Mr Mead must be getting a bit tired of her looking confounded and saying, ‘You’re joking.’ ‘It’s rather a lot to take in. Old ladies don’t build theme
parks. Especially old ladies who live in Barnsley in one-bedroom bungalows.’

‘This one did,’ smiled Mr Mead, his eyebrows doing a Mexican wave now. ‘I think you’ll agree that your Aunt Evelyn was a woman very much made in her own unique
mould.’ There was a fond softness in his voice now as he talked about the old lady. He lifted another document to the side of him and started to unfold it with his large gnarled fingers.

‘This is what your aunt wanted to achieve. I also have the plans proper, but they are heavily detailed and this is perhaps easier to digest, seeing as you’re presently in
shock.’

It was a crude plan, the words written in Aunt Evelyn’s familiar scratchy handwriting, and there were illustrations simply but deftly drawn. There were log cabins amongst fir trees, a
restaurant, a grotto, a reindeer enclosure . . . it all looked very festive. It was the sort of map a child would draw in a jotter.

‘She was building a
Christmas
theme park?’ Eve questioned. Of any theme it could have been, Eve should have known it would be a Christmas one.

‘That is correct,’ said Mr Mead. ‘Apparently she had hundreds of Christmas trees planted there in the seventies. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she had forgotten that
she had done so.’

‘A Christmas theme park.
In Barnsley
?’

‘Indeed. And now it’s your Christmas theme park. In Barnsley.’

‘Can the theme be changed?’

‘Most categorically not. It is stipulated in the will.’

Oh God, anything but Christmas. There was no way on this planet that Eve could live, breathe and eat Christmas as a business. She hated Christmas – loathed it, detested it, abhorred it as
much as her aunt had lived, breathed and eaten it. She couldn’t think of one Christmas that hadn’t been tainted by a sour memory. For the last four Christmases, she had holed herself up
at home and read books as if it didn’t exist.

‘How long had all this been in her head?’ Eve wasn’t aware she had spoken her thoughts aloud as she stared at the plans. She was going to wake up in a moment and find that she
had dropped off at her desk halfway through arranging a retirement party for a Chairman with a penchant for cancan dancers.

‘She acquired the land in the sixties. She started building—’ he checked his records ‘—in March last year. If you peruse the files, you’ll find everything you
need to know in them. Mr Glace has his copy also.’

Eve totted up in her head how many months ago that was. Eighteen. That might explain it. Just over nineteen months ago, Aunt Evelyn had a mini-stroke. But rather than it grind her down, she had
bounced out of hospital like a spring chicken. Her brush with death had totally altered her outlook on life and sent her mentally off-kilter, if that scraggy old elk Gabriel was anything to go
by.

‘She never said a word about any of this and I saw her at least once a month.’ Eve shook her head in disbelief. Something was niggling at her brain too. ‘How can you keep this
sort of thing secret? You can’t. It’s too big. What was she thinking of? How come no one knew? This is crazy.’ If she scratched her head any more she’d reach bone.

Mr Mead allowed himself a little smile. ‘I thought she had told you. I rather got the impression she was planning to when I last spoke to her. Such a shame that she was taken before she
delivered her news. She was very excited about it all. Poor, dear Evelyn. You could almost say she was born in the latter years of her life.’

‘So it seems,’ said Eve, who didn’t quite reconcile the rather batty old lady with the power magnate alter ego she obviously had. ‘What if I don’t want to do
anything with the park?’ Eve asked.

‘You both have three months to either undertake the project or all rights will revert to the other. If both of you resign your rights, then ownership will pass to the Maud Haworth Home for
Cats—’

‘Wait a minute,’ Eve interrupted, holding her hand up in a gesture of
shush.
That’s what was nipping at the edge of her thoughts – that name. ‘Who the heck
is Mr Glass?’

‘Mr Jacques Glace is the joint beneficiary.’

‘Jack Glass? Who is he? I’ve never heard of him.’

‘All I can tell you is that he is the joint beneficiary of the estate and the person to whom your aunt bequeathed the care of Fancy’s and Kringle’s ashes.’

Blimey, thought Eve. She must have thought a lot of this Mr Glass to leave her precious ‘children’s’ ashes to him. But that still didn’t explain who he was.

Mr Mead shrugged. He would offer no more information on the man other than that he was an associate of Evelyn’s, lived in Outer Hoodley and was very tall. And he, apparently, was as
gobsmacked as Eve about being left a theme park. Mr Mead had seen him that morning and given him the news. He was going to give both parties a week to study the files to decide if they wanted to
take the project forward or resign their rights before meeting again in his office. Eve looked up at the ceiling to see if there were any candid cameras recording her reaction to all this.

‘So, let me just get this straight in my brain,’ Eve said, tapping both sides of her head simultaneously. ‘My aunt Evelyn wants me – and this Jack Glass – to finish
off a theme park which she started to build and then run it as a business concern.’

‘Correct.’

Eve laughed. ‘Well, I presume she’s left us a fortune to be able to do that.’

‘Yes, that’s also correct.’

Eve nearly fainted.

‘Subject to all the expenses being approved by you and Mr Glace and myself,’ went on Mr Mead. ‘Obviously you won’t be able to take the monies and spend them on cruises
and fine wines.’

‘How much did she leave?’ said Eve in a voice shocked into temporary laryngitis.

‘A very considerable sum,’ said Mr Mead. ‘I don’t have the exact figure in front of me because interest accrues at a daily rate, but I will have for our next meeting.
It’s quite a few million pounds.’

‘A few mill . . .’ Eve couldn’t even finish the word. This is what lottery winners must feel like – seeing all those numbers on the screen that matched their own and yet
there was a membrane as thick as a plank of wood over the part of their brain that let them absorb the information. ‘Mr Mead, you cannot be serious,’ she gulped, like a bustier,
Yorkshire version of John McEnroe. For a moment she thought her life had been hijacked by a computer game – ‘Zoo Tycoon’ or the equivalent ‘Christmas Park Tycoon’.
People inherited jewellery and nick-nacks from old aunts, not ‘quite a few million pounds’ and future expenses for reindeers.

‘A fifth percentage of the revenue earned by your venture will be split between your aunt’s affiliated charities: The Maud Haworth Home for Cats and the Yorkshire Fund for Disabled
Servicemen. Any remaining profit, of course, will be equally divided between yourself and Mr Glace.’

It was sinking in, slowly but surely, that Mr Mead was not as barmy as Aunt Evelyn. Not that it mattered. Eve had little interest in being part of such a ridiculous scheme. She was happy as she
was, with a good, profitable events-organizing business, and didn’t need or want to change professions and work alongside a total stranger. She was a lone wolf in business and always would
be. Jack Glass, whoever he was, could have the bloody thing. It all sounded far too good to be true – and that was a sure sign that there must be catches as big as man-traps waiting for her.
Little old ladies who bought stuffed elks from the internet did not know the first thing about building theme parks – how could they? She had obviously just flung her money at a ludicrous
self-indulgent project – what a total waste of a fortune.

‘I’ll think about it, of course,’ said Eve. She wasn’t that daft to dismiss it all out of hand without looking through the paperwork, but really it was madness. A theme
park in Barnsley wouldn’t work. People would laugh their socks off at the incredulity of it. A seasonal theme park was especially dodgy – who would want to see Santa in August?

She left Mr Mead’s office determined to let the mysterious ‘Jack Glass’ take the helm and go bankrupt after three months – because that is surely what would happen. But
by the time she had got to her car, Eve Douglas’s brain was fast at work and a sea change of mind had already happened.

Try as she might, she could not sleep that night. As if she were in a courtroom, a defence barrister popped up in her head, in full wig and silk ensemble, and presented his
case.

‘If a ninety-three-year-old woman can do most of the hard graft of planning and starting off such extensive building work, I put it to you, Eve Douglas, that you could not possibly reject
the challenge of finishing off what your aunt had begun and make yourself a zillionaire in the process. This is the chance of a lifetime. It is the greatest challenge of your career. Can you tell
the court that you could honestly turn your back on that magic word “challenge”, Miss D?’

That damned barrister knew that the word ‘challenge’ was like a red rag to a bull to Eve. That barrister sounded a lot like Aunt Evelyn as well. He was even accompanied by a scent of
yellow French Fancies.

Eve abandoned her goose-down quilt, slid her feet into her slippers and headed for the kettle to make some strong coffee. She knew there was no way she would get a wink of sleep until she had
taken those files apart and read every word. So she did. Then she checked out the competition on the internet. Then she made a note to ring her friend in the morning and borrow her secret weapon
– Phoebe May Tinker.

‘I didn’t get you up, did I?’ asked Eve, with the hint of a yawn. After all, she’d only had four hours’ sleep.

‘Are you joking?’ returned a jolly voice. ‘I’m up sorting out her ladyship’s Crunchy Nut Cornflakes. You’re ringing early. Are you okay?’

‘Sort of,’ said Eve.

‘You don’t sound so sure.’

‘Alison. Aunt Evelyn left me her locket.’ Eve thought she’d build up to this one slowly. Alison was six months pregnant and she didn’t want to shock her too much.

‘Aw, bless.’

‘And a theme park.’

Alison laughed. ‘Alton Towers or Pleasure Island?’

‘Neither – Winterworld. And I’m not kidding.’

Now there was a shocked silence on the other end of the phone.

‘Winterworld is a one-hundred-and-fifty-acre plot just outside Higher Hoppleton. Aunt Evelyn bought the land in the sixties as an investment and then last year went mad and starting
building log cabins on it, apparently.’

‘Dear God, you aren’t joking,’ said Alison, half laughing, half breathless with amazement.

‘Nope. That is as much as I know for now. I’ll fill you in with more when I’ve got my brain around it all. Anyway, why I’m ringing you is because I want to borrow Phoebe
to come with me to Birmingham on Saturday. There’s a place called “White Christmas” that I want to check out. I thought she could help me spy.’

‘I’m sure she’d be delighted,’ said Alison.

‘Wonderful. I’ll pick her up at nine.’

‘She’ll be ready,’ said Alison. ‘Blimey, Eve. You really do know how to start my day off with a bang. I’ll have to ring Rupert and tell him. It’s not every
day your oldest friend has news like that.’

Eve put down the phone and wished her life was more like Alison’s. A smooth ride instead of a roller coaster of white-knuckle dips and rises. Especially as there had been more dips in the
past five years than she cared to think about.

‘Auntie Eve, why is that elf smoking?’ Phoebe pulled down on her honorary aunt’s sleeve as she asked the question at 43,000 decibels. The said elf gave the
small red-haired child a resentful sideways sneer that would have put Elvis to shame, before placing the cigarette to her lips once last time, then dropping it on the floor and twisting the ball of
her foot on it. Eve was itching to respond to the seven-year-old with the same volume.

‘I don’t know, sweetheart. I think Santa should kick that elf’s backside because she’s not exactly doing a great PR job for him.’ But the elf looked very big, very
butch and that short cropped hairdo said ‘New Hall prison’ more than ‘North Pole’.

‘Santa will be back in a minute,’ said the elf grumpily when the little boy at the front of the queue asked where he was. Eve half expected the elf to go on to explain that he had
gone for a piss. She wouldn’t be surprised at anything after what she had seen so far. It was all so fantastically, brilliantly awful and super-tacky.

‘Let’s go for a look around and come back later,’ said Eve, taking Phoebe’s hand. ‘And let Father Christmas get on with his jacking up,’ she added under her
breath.

The ‘White Christmas’ theme park had made all the national papers recently for being a total and utter rip-off, earning it the nickname ‘Shite Christmas’. So, in
Eve’s opinion, there was no better place to do some market research than here, especially with the aid of Phoebe May Tinker, who was a cross between Simon Cowell and Hedda Hopper in judging
children’s entertainment attempts. A half-dead pilot light inside Eve coughed into certain life when she read about Shite Christmas on the internet. She knew it was going to be awful but
never anticipated it could be quite this bad.