Kissing Toads (14 page)

The most difficult member of staff, however – and, if rank existed at Dunblair, the most important – was Cedric. Full name Cedric Harbottle, he came inevitably from Brighton, spoke south-coast cockney with occasional lapses into French (‘The language of cooking, sweetie'), and lurked in the kitchen like Grendel in his lair. Wonderful food emerged as and when ordered, but you entered at your own risk. Unfortunately, it was a risk I felt I had to take. HG had vetoed the catering truck, saying it took up space and Cedric could handle all our requirements, but someone had to handle Cedric. I didn't think HG would be happy if his prize chef complained he was being asked to cook above and beyond the call of duty and went on strike.

Directed by Harry, I ventured nervously into the nether regions of the castle – at least, down a few steps from the rest of the ground floor – into a large room vaulted like a crypt whose huge cold fireplace was equipped with witch's cauldron and rusting spit, while more spits and antique pans adorned the walls. The effect was curiously reminiscent of the weaponry in the galleries above. In marked contrast, there was an ultramodern range with fan ovens and gas hobs, a shiny new Aga, even a microwave tucked in a corner. Cedric was chopping vegetables at racing speed with the kind of knife that could have split a hair on water. He was a skinny, brown, monkey-like creature with an ugly Puckish face and a malevolent grin, right now not in evidence. Who was it who said: ‘Never trust a thin cook'?

‘What d'you want?' he demanded, without looking up.

‘I'm sorry to disturb you . . .'

‘Then don't. Piss off and let me get on with my work.'

‘Look, I know HG has asked you to cook for everyone—'

‘He didn't
ask
me, he
told
me,' Cedric interrupted. ‘He's the boss.'

‘I realise it must be pretty inconvenient . . .' I wasn't making much headway here.

‘Cooking ain't inconvenient: it's my job. Visitors are inconvenient. What
do
you want?'

‘I just came to apologise for all the trouble we're giving you. Cooking for a few guests is one thing, but an entire TV circus—'

‘You're one of those soft, squishy females who go through life apologising for things which aren't your fault, right? Sorry for this, sorry for that, sorry for breathing, sorry I don't drop dead. Women like you get trampled on all the time.' He had ceased chopping and fixed me with the evil black glare of someone whose ancestry is part French, part Indian, part Chinese, part
Welsh
– part any race that gives you that level of sloe-black malignance. The knife, sharp as Excalibur, was still in his hand.

‘You try trampling on me,' I said, abandoning diplomacy, ‘and you'll see how squishy I am.'

He flashed me a smile full of uneven teeth. ‘That's better, love. Give as good as you get. It's the only way to live.'

‘I expect you're right,' I said, unnerved by his abrupt volte-face. ‘All the same, I find general courtesy helps too.'

The smile cracked into a laugh. ‘
Courtesy!
Posh word, innit? You mean
manners
. I don't do manners. Gordon Ramsay don't do manners, does he? Effing this and effing that and eff you for a rotten cook. I could've been on TV like him. I'm the best, I am. Could've found yourself working with me, couldn't you? I would've been a star if I'd had a fancy for it.'

‘Why didn't you?' I asked, suppressing doubt.

‘I
didn't
fancy it, did I? Smarming around with Nigella and Jamie-fucking-Oliver, having to put on my make-up to cook in and suck up to a load of celebrity morons. See, there was this friend of mine,
he
had a friend who was a producer, said I'd be great for the telly. Got the cheekbones, got the profile.' He tilted his head sideways so I could admire it. As profiles go, it went. ‘
And
I've got this great personality, all upfront fuck-you star quality. But I fancied this job. The boss, he's the best – biggest rocking fucker that ever was. He's the best and I'm the best, see? We're good together. I let him do his thing, he lets me do mine. It works for both of us.'

‘I can see it does,' I said faintly. ‘Well, I'm really glad we've cleared all that up—'

‘Besides,' Cedric resumed, ‘my 'eart was broke. Down south, it was. The Scots are right about them – southerners. Shallow, that's what they are. He was my man and he done me wrong. Come here to forget, didn't I?'

‘You and me both,' I said before I could stop myself.

‘Yeah? Here – you want a bit of cake? I done it for tea yesterday, but nobody ate any. Too busy arguing about their bloody garden. Take a piece –' he waved a tin at me – ‘I do a mean ginger cake, I do.'

I nibbled a slice. It was moist, spicy, gingery. In a word, mean.

‘What happened with your bloke, then?'

‘He got married,' I said. ‘To someone else.'

‘Fucking 'ell. So did mine. Ten years together and he drops me for a fat blonde with a uterus.
I want kids
, he whines.
I wanna settle down, go straight
. Huh! He couldn't go straight if you tied him to a ruler. Ain't men all shits?'

Through a mouthful of cake, I agreed.

‘How about a drink? You like port? I've got the best stuff down here – I tell 'em it's for cooking. Have a slug.' He whipped a bottle from a discreet cupboard and poured a glass for both of us. It was a little early in the day for me, but who cared?

In the interests of good relations with the staff . . .

‘To your ex and mine!' Cedric raised his glass. ‘May their new wives give 'em the clap, may their balls shrivel like pickled walnuts, may their todgers drop off and—'

‘Excuse me,' said a cool – a
very
cool – voice somewhere behind me. ‘I'm looking for the producer.'

It was, of course, Kristof Ashley.

It's the sort of thing that happens in stories, but only because it happens in real life too. Art imitates Life, Life imitates Art – the vicious circle goes on and on. If there's someone you don't want to see, they're bound to make an entrance at the worst possible moment. The psychic researcher was rapidly becoming a sort of recurring bogeyman for me, as ill-timed and unwelcome as one of his own phantoms. There I was, sitting in the kitchen, swigging port at barely five o'clock with a questionable eccentric whose dental work was worthy of an orc, whatever the calibre of his profile. And knowing Ash, he'd caught every word of that toast. Yet again, my compassion wasn't showing.

‘That's me,' I said. ‘Again. Hi.'

Ash evidently hadn't been told whom to expect.

‘Oh,' he said. ‘It's you. Hello. Again.'

‘A beautiful stranger.' Ash's elfin looks were having their inevitable effect on Cedric. ‘Only not so strange to you, right? This ain't your ex, is it?'

‘Of course not!'

‘Glad to hear it. Sit down, love –' this to Ash – ‘have a port. We're drinking to the men who broke our 'earts – may they rot! You got an ex like that to drink to? Nah, you're the sort what does the exing, anyone can see that. I only hope you ain't a lying, cheating bastard like my Neville, or the creep who dumped angel here.' I
wished
he wouldn't go on about my being dumped. It was bad enough knowing I lacked compassion without looking completely pathetic as well. ‘Look into my eyes. Fucking allspice! I take it all back. If you're a liar, baby, you can lie to me any time.'

Ash looked only mildly startled. Presumably he was as blasé about advances from gay chefs as he was about besotted poltergeists. He leaned back in the chair, stretching out his legs and accepting the proffered glass of port, though he didn't drink it.

Cedric fetched a sigh which was probably intended to be soulful but sounded more like lustful. ‘So what's your job on the telly team?' he asked. ‘Bet you're on camera – they wouldn't want to waste that face behind the scenes.'

‘I'm a psychic researcher,' Ash explained. ‘I'm not a TV person; I just give expert advice. Most of my work's quite different.'

‘Like what?' I inquired, politely curious.

‘I lecture, write for a magazine on paranormal science, that sort of thing. I've done a couple of books. I also get called in to investigate supernatural phenomena.'

‘A ghost-buster!' Cedric and I said almost simultaneously.

Ash's lip didn't even twitch. ‘I've heard that one a dozen times. This week.'

‘Do you come across many real ghosts,' I asked, attempting to take him seriously (and failing), ‘or are they all fake?'

‘It depends what you mean by fake,' he said, taking himself seriously enough for both of us. ‘The ghosts are so often inside people, manifestations of their subconscious. Deep-seated unhappiness, suppressed trauma, forgotten fragments of memory – all these can show themselves as ghosts, creeping out of the dark places in the mind to cause freak behaviour patterns, the physical and metaphysical stigmata of the soul.'

It sounded like bullshit to me, but perhaps that was just the long words.

‘Bit of a psycho, aren't you?' Cedric said smartly.

‘I beg your pardon?'

‘Psycho. Person what pokes around in people's heads. Like Freud and that. Psychoanalyst.'

‘Ah . . .' For once, Ash looked nonplussed.

‘What do you expect to find here?' I persisted. ‘Human ghosts, or . . . ghostly ones?'

‘I don't know,' he said. ‘I've yet to learn the nature of the phenomena.'

‘Well,' I said, ‘there are plenty of icy draughts, creaking floorboards, unexplained drops in temperature. But then, it's an old building.'

For the first time that I could recall, he smiled. It was an unexpectedly attractive smile. Or rather, in view of his elfin good looks, an expectedly attractive one. ‘Old buildings always carry their own atmosphere and special effects,' he said. ‘The phantoms of the past can live on in many ways. A lot depends on how you define a ghost.'

‘Meaning?' For all my scepticism, I was becoming sincerely interested.

‘I mentioned atmosphere. A house absorbs a certain resonance from incidents that have occurred there. You must have noticed how even a new place can feel instantly welcoming or inexplicably depressing – the legacy of the people who've lived there. I remember many years ago visiting an old manor with my aunt, a very down-to-earth, matter-of-fact sort of person. She became uncomfortable as soon as we went in. After about fifteen minutes she was so pale and faint she declared she would have to leave. She knew nothing of the manor's history, but in the Victorian age it had been an orphanage where the children had been treated with notorious cruelty, probably sexually abused. They'd dug up several small skeletons in one of the cellars. That was a classic case of an “atmosphere” ghost, and my aunt, though she didn't know it, was what some people call a sensitive. Atmospheric ghosts are fairly common, though rarely so potent. Very few phantoms pop up as an apparition draped in a sheet, moaning round the corridors at midnight. Apparitions are pretty unusual.'

‘Have you ever seen one?' I asked.

‘No,' Ash said. ‘But I've met people who have. Normally very young children, or the old, or the sick. I sometimes think you have to be close to death, at one end of life or the other, in order to acquire that kind of specialised vision.'

‘Young children are close to birth, not death.'

‘But what comes before birth? I see our whole existence as a period of life that intervenes between two phases of unlife. Birth and death are not enduring states, merely forms of transition.'

‘Bloody philosopher, aren't you?' said Cedric, who was obviously feeling left out.

‘It goes with the territory.' Ash sipped his drink, more, I suspected, for politeness's sake than anything else.

I was feeling slightly woozy. My lunch break had disappeared in routine chaos and the port was very strong.

‘I saw a ghost once,' Cedric offered. ‘When I was a kid. Me mum took me to see round this stately 'ome, don't remember the name. I got bored, wandered off, the way kids do, and suddenly I was in this little room all by myself, and there was a funny old biddy in a long dress all bunched up behind –' (‘A bustle,' I supplied –) ‘bending over a desk. Think I spoke to her, but she didn't say nothing, didn't even look at me. Then people came calling for me, and I turned round, and when I turned back she'd gone. I asked me mum, “Where's the funny old lady?”, and I remember the guide going all pale and shushing me, but they never told me who she was, or what she was doing. I only realised she was a ghost years later.'

‘How old were you?' Ash said.

‘Dunno. Six. Seven.'

‘Sounds fairly typical,' Ash concluded. ‘As I said, children see things other people don't, though they're usually even younger at the time.'

‘Might of been,' Cedric said. ‘Four or five, maybe. Ain't never seen anything here, mind, though the castle's supposed to have more spooks than a Stephen King graveyard. And there's this here haunted maze they're always on about. You going ghost-hunting in the garden, then?'

‘I'll look around,' Ash said. ‘That's what I'm here for.' He turned to me. ‘Perhaps we should . . . ?'

‘Yes, of course.' I stood up, too quickly, and nearly overbalanced. Damn the port. ‘Have they given you a room?'

‘Mm.'

‘Hope it's haunted!' Cedric said with a cackle. ‘Don't want to disappoint you, do we?'