Kissing Toads (40 page)

‘He could be a bit less airy-fairy,' Russell muttered. ‘People aren't interested in theory; they want to get down to the nitty-gritty. The clanking chains and the skirl of ghostly bagpipes.'

‘Not . . . necessarily,' I said. I hadn't told Ash, or anyone, about the bagpipes. ‘Anyway, he's supposed to be airy-fairy. It goes with the job. You can't expect a psychic researcher to be down-to-earth.'

‘At least he's articulate as well as pretty. We'd never get away with it if it wasn't for that.'

Ash went on – more reluctantly, I thought – to talk about what other people claimed to have seen, heard and felt. HG did his part, relaxed as always, giving his own view of the atmospherics at Dunblair, and just for fun we persuaded Morag to do a bit of doom-and-gloom, propounding the legend that the reconstruction of the maze would wake the spectres of all who had died in it. She was far and away the most effective, if only because she obviously had no doubts.

We were probably going to chop up the pieces and intersperse them with the castle's history, the garden, and everything else – the patchwork quilt.

‘This is a makeover show with a difference,' Russell remarked. ‘I've dealt with dry rot and death-watch beetle, poor topsoil, poor bottom soil and woodworm in the decking, but I must admit I've never had spooks before.'

‘Look on the bright side,' I said. ‘We haven't found a skeleton yet.' Only the dog, which didn't count.

‘There is that.'

Ash was being so aloof he didn't come in to dinner, and Delphi, still in shock at her single state, had rather too much to drink and had to be helped to her room by Harry and me.

‘I don't like it,' I said. ‘She never gets this drunk.'

‘It won't hurt her,' Harry said. ‘Just the once. What about cocaine?'

‘She doesn't do that much either. Delphi likes to be in control.' She got pissed sometimes in her teens, but who didn't? I was the one whose self-control went down the drain whenever it got the chance.

‘It figures,' Harry said. ‘And now her life's got away from her and she doesn't know how to get it back. Might do her good.'

‘I don't suppose you'll tell me what happened when you and HG got rid of Roddy? I know Delphi was pretty uptight about something – something to do with you.'

‘We had a deal,' Harry said, with only a hint of the grin. ‘She owes me. But I wasn't planning to collect right now.'

‘What deal?' I said suspiciously.

‘Confidential.'

He wouldn't say any more.

With all the talk of ghosts I went to bed feeling spooked and lay awake for a long while with my ears on the stretch, though I didn't hear the bagpipes again. The castle breathed softly in its sleep, its joints shifting and creaking arthritically from time to time. There was the sigh of a draught, the rustle of a curtain. I thought of Delphi's dream – the plotters in the gallery – and the ghost of Alasdair McGoogle roaming the castle corridors in search of the bride he had lost. When I drifted over the borders of sleep I saw the maze pirouetting on Nigel's computer screen, while a Lara Croft action-girl from one of Dorian's games dodged down the pathways, pursued by Cedric and his orc-band. Then I was in the garden, and the maze was real, and the hedges were sprouting before my eyes, growing taller and darker by the second. There were snufflings and groanings among the roots as Morag's spectres came to life. I saw the back of a female figure running towards the heart of the maze, her stiff silk skirts swishing around her. I knew somehow it was Elizabeth Courtney, wearing Delphi's wedding dress. I followed her, but she kept disappearing round corners the way people do in dreams, and I couldn't catch up. Then I reached the heart of the maze, and there was a statue in rusted iron with a gigantic phallus, and Elizabeth was rushing towards it. I saw the phallus was really a claymore, dripping with stage blood, and I called out a warning, and she turned round, but she had no face, only a skull.

I woke abruptly and sat up, groping for the light switch to chase away the shadows that crowded round my bed.

‘D'you want to see the papers?' Harry said at breakfast. ‘HG ordered them all, so we could check for anything actionable. His lawyers read them too, but he likes to run an eye over them himself. It's the recipe as usual. They haven't actually said that there's anything between HG and Delphinium, but the hints are dropping like flies. Basilisa seems to have given at least three exclusives claiming she caught him in flagrante delicto with almost every girl on the team.'

‘Does she say he has a limp deek?' I enquired absent-mindedly, my gaze focusing on the
Express
with the headline ‘
HOT GOD
'
S HOTBED OF SCANDAL
'.

‘No, but their legal advisers may have expurgated it,' Harry said. ‘So . . . when did you hear her say that?'

‘I witnessed their final showdown,' I said, disregarding the shrewdness of his scrutiny. ‘Or part of it.'

‘Should think it would be difficult to shag around with a limp deek.'

‘That's what he said.'

Delphi was still in bed; my knock on her door had
elicited only a tragic demand for coffee. Russell joined me, leafing through the papers. ‘
BREAKOVER SHOW
,' declared the
Sun
. ‘Hot God Marriage On Compost Heap. DD Wedding Off: Fiancé Alex and Best Friend Brie.' The tabloids often called Delphi ‘DD' for the sake of brevity. ‘
FLOWER POWER
!' cried the
Mirror
with something approaching wit, beside a picture of HG on the beach at Mande Susu looking like an ageing hippy. (Presumably one of Basilisa's.) ‘Makeover Show Blamed For Rock Star's Marital Bustup.' ‘
CATASTROPHE CASTLE
,' alliterated the
Scoop
. ‘
BROKEN MARRIAGE; CANCELLED WEDDING
,' juxtaposed the
Mail
. ‘The Lost Maze of Relationships,' said the
Guardian
(inside pages). ‘Come into the Garden, Gawd,' quipped a misguided wag in the
Telegraph
. ‘Hot God's Fifth Wife Demands Divorce,' the
Indy
said pedantically. (We all tried counting on our fingers to see if they'd got the number right.)

It went on and on.

‘It's the cringe-making attempts at humour that really get you in the gut,' Russell said. ‘Still, it gives people a change from tsunamis and suicide bombers.'

‘True enough,' Harry said. ‘It's the cream cake in a diet of rare steak and greens. It's high in cholesterol and puts on weight, but everybody likes cake best.'

‘Crusty thinks it won't hurt the show,' I said.

‘Good God, no,' Russell responded. ‘The only trouble is, we're peaking too early. By the time the show hits the screens HG could have notched up two more divorces and Delphi married a minor viscount with a fortune in sugar and half a dozen brain cells. We need to keep something in reserve. D'you have a story you can leak at the right moment, Ruthie?'

He gave me a canny look – he was much too acute at times – but I managed a light answer. At least the only people looking at me that way were him and Harry. HG's slight penchant for me had evidently made an impression with the observant, even though Basilisa seemed to have omitted it from her various interviews. She probably didn't want to reveal that the final straw had been catching her husband kissing a total nonentity.

‘I know you hate the idea,' Delphi said when she surfaced, ‘but you could sell your story for
millions
. I wouldn't mind, truly I wouldn't. Right now, I'm getting the credit for something that was nothing to do with me. It's an improvement on “Delphinium Dumped!” or whatever they would've said,
but
 . . .'

‘You can have the credit, if that's the right word,' I said. ‘I don't want it. Get your make-up on; we need to do some work.'

Delphi shuddered. ‘I can't face the camera,' she announced. ‘I look like hell, I feel like hell, life is hell.'

‘Don't be wet,' Harry said, supplying a third cup of coffee. ‘It doesn't suit you.'

In the garden, we were doing more digging than filming. (That's the royal ‘we', since I didn't actually dig.) Nigel & Co. had agreed on the centre of the maze and Young Andrew and another local lad were excavating there, since HG's new statue was to include a water feature which would require underground pipes. About three feet down they struck stone. Not rock, but the smooth face of a man-made slab. Clearing the soil away, an area was revealed about four feet by six, with a hinged section at one end obviously designed to be raised. The hinges had rusted as rain had seeped through the earth, and the stone was very heavy, so it was some time before it was possible to lift it.

‘Of course!' Nigel said in a state of great excitement. ‘You've heard of a priest's hole? It was a kind of secret room installed in many old houses during the Civil War, so runaway clerics could hide from Cromwell's men . . .'

‘We know that,' Morty said irritably.

‘This has to be the same type of thing, only underground. These stones are very old. Who knows why it was built originally – no doubt for some nefarious purpose – but at a guess Bonnie Prince Charlie hid here while British soldiers scouring the maze were picked off one by one by the Laird's henchmen.' Only Nigel could use the word ‘
nefarious
' in ordinary conversation. He always talked as if he were narrating one of the more dramatic history programmes; it could have been force of habit, or maybe he spoke that way from infancy. Probably the latter. ‘It's been buried deeper over time, but when in use it would have been concealed by the plinth of the statue, with only a thin layer of soil to cover the trapdoor. On a dark night, of course, even the soil wouldn't be necessary. This was the secret of the maze: people would go in, “disappear” . . .' he drew the punctuation marks in mid air – ‘and leave later when everyone had ceased to look for them.'

‘They'd need help,' Russell opined. We still hadn't raised the trapdoor. HG had taken over and was directing operations.

‘Yes, but . . . why would Elizabeth do that?' Delphi said. ‘Why hide at all? She wasn't a fugitive. She was madly in love – she'd just got married.'

‘We don't know if she
did
hide,' I said, feeling a strange sense of disquiet.

‘We're there,' HG said as Young Andrew levered the trapdoor open.

There was a dark cavity below, out of reach of the daylight. In the frenzy of anticipation, no one had thought to get a torch, and we had to wait while somebody ran to fetch one. Then HG dropped to his knees by the hole and shone it down into the blackness.

I couldn't see much – Nigel, Morty and Delphi took up most of the space round HG. But I didn't need to.

‘Dear God,' he said. ‘There's a skeleton in there. And it looks as if it's wearing a dress.'

Chapter 10:

The Butler Did It

I didn't realise, but if you find a skeleton in your garden, no matter how old it may be, the first thing you have to do is contact the police. HG's name meant we actually got a superintendent, a red-haired Glaswegian whose cheerful references to ‘muddurr' reminded me irresistibly of
Taggart
. Incredibly, the centre of the maze became a crime scene, with yellow tape to discourage intruders and people dressed from head to foot in white plastic tramping around looking for clues. The pathologist, however, soon confirmed that the
corpus delicti
was some one hundred and thirty years old, at which point the Law lost interest and a forensic archaeologist took over. Nigel, practically shivering with enthusiasm, put on a spiritual deerstalker and set about detecting the crime – if crime it was. Delphi, rather to my surprise, appropriated the role of Dr Watson.

‘We need him,' she said to me. ‘He
is
an expert, after all. It's Elizabeth: we all know that. But how did she get there, and why?'

‘You look upset,' I said stupidly. Finding a skeleton is always upsetting – or so I assume; I haven't found many – but Delphi seemed to be suppressing real distress.

‘I feel . . . like I knew her. Like she was a friend.'

‘She died over a century ago. Before your mother was born. Before your
grandmother
was born.'

‘That doesn't change things. I said we had to solve the mystery, didn't I? Well, now we've got a body. That's a start. They can get DNA from a skeleton, can't they? No matter how old it is.'

‘I think so,' I said. ‘But what would they have to compare it with?'

Overhearing, Nigel chipped in. ‘There may be modern descendants of the Courtneys,' he said. ‘Remember, Elizabeth went into society under the aegis of her aunt and uncle, the aunt being her father's sister. Their name was, I believe, Dagworthy. He was untitled but well connected – a bishop in the family – so they shouldn't be difficult to trace. And the name is uncommon. If we can locate a latter-day Dagworthy who will agree to give a DNA sample, we can confirm that the remains are those of Elizabeth Courtney.'

‘That would be great,' Delphi said, flashing a quick ray of charm in his direction. ‘We know it's her, but it ought to be official. I wonder . . .'

‘You wonder what?' I prompted. She had that glint that Delphi always gets when inspiration comes along.

‘If we could speed things up a bit. There are all those journalists hanging around. Why don't we give them something to do?'

So the hacks got a story, if not the story they came for. They already knew about the skeleton, of course; someone in the police must have tipped them off. But Nigel organised an impromptu press conference in the pub where he ran through the history of Elizabeth Courtney, her romantic marriage and tragic disappearance, explained that the corpse was believed to be hers, and requested help in tracing modern-day relations for a comparison of DNA. Russell, Morty and I were there for back-up; for obvious reasons, Delphi and HG weren't present. There was a hail of questions about the forthcoming divorce, the aborted wedding and all concerned in them, but Nigel rose above the mêlée and even managed to engage his audience's attention over a mystery that happened two centuries ago. My respect for him increased dramatically.