Kissing Toads (45 page)

‘Hope you don't mind my interrupting,' he said, pulling up a stool. He'd left the back-up at the bar. ‘I hear you two are staying at the castle. Part of the visiting TV show.'

Ash looked aloof. I said guardedly, ‘Yes.'

Why was Attila the Suit curious about us – or Dunblair?

‘Been quite exciting over there, hasn't it?' he continued.

‘Has it?' I said.

‘Oh, don't worry, I'm not from the papers. Don't trust the media: they've got their own agenda. They blackout the truth, print whatever lies the government dictate – and the government's rotten through and through. But I'm sure we all agree on that.' I'm not a fan of the government, but my instinct was to disagree with Attila even if it meant supporting TB. ‘Still, there are some things the press don't distort. I read about that rescue – saw you both in the photo. You found those two blokes who went missing on the mountain in the fog. Good work.'

Good work?
He was acting the senior officer commending bright young recruits. It made the hackles rise on my back – and I don't even have hackles.

‘The papers exaggerated,' Ash said. ‘They always do. The guys weren't in any real danger, just cold and cross.' With deceptive nonchalance, he added: ‘What's your interest?'

‘We're just tourists, passing through.' He stretched his mouth into a smile again with the air of someone who has been practising. ‘Beautiful country, Scotland. Who needs to go abroad when we've got everything right here? Britain's the best place in the world, if you ask me.'

Oh, so he was one of
those
.

‘If you don't go anywhere else,' I said, ‘how would you know?'

The smile stretched further, like overstrained elastic. ‘Clever girl, isn't she?' he said to Ash as if I was a performing dog. Ignoring the question, he continued: ‘No, I like it here. Actually, we saw a friend of ours in that photo. Working at the castle. Quite a coincidence, seeing as we were visiting these parts already. Thought we'd drop by and see him.'

‘Who's that?' Ash asked. I could sense his wariness under the aloof demeanor. Or maybe it was my own I sensed.

‘Harry. Harry . . . Winkworth.' Was it my imagination that he hesitated for a fraction of a second over the surname? ‘The butler, the paper said. Or did they get that wrong?'

‘No,' I said, doing my best to match Ash's poker face. ‘He's the butler.'

Inwardly, I seethed with unanswered questions. How come someone like Attila the Suit knew
Harry
? Had Delphi been right when she claimed he was a fraud? Had—

‘I see. He wasn't a butler when we knew him, but that was a while ago. He's an old friend, Harry. D'you know if he's likely to pop in here for a jar sometime soon? But of course you don't. People like you wouldn't get chummy with the servants.'

‘I'm afraid not,' I said, imitating Delphi at her haughtiest. ‘He's always been very helpful, but naturally I know nothing about his personal life.'

Apart from the fact that he spent last night shagging Delphinium Dacres . . .

‘Of course not,' Attila repeated, smiling wider and wider, like Lewis Carroll's crocodile, only with slightly better teeth. ‘But he's a good bloke. An old friend. We'd like to look him up.' He pushed back the stool, got to his feet.

As an afterthought, or so it seemed, he added the part that really chilled me.

‘Don't mention you've seen us, will you? We'd like to give him a surprise.'

Chapter 11:

Laying the Ghosts

With my chaperone out, I retreated to my room to watch TV and paint my toenails. I usually have a pedicurist, but when I'm uptight I find it therapeutic to do it myself. I should have locked the door, but that seemed needlessly paranoid. Harry knocked and came in, uninvited, when I was halfway through my right foot.

‘I didn't ring,' I said. ‘You're not supposed to be here.'

I was determined to keep my cool, although I had a sneaking suspicion my subconscious had left the door unlocked, for reasons too disturbing to think about.

‘I thought we should talk,' he said.

‘We have nothing to talk about. And I didn't say you could sit on my bed!'

‘I didn't ask permission.' He sighed – not a wistful sigh, more like exasperation. ‘Come down off your high horse for a minute, will you?'

I didn't deign to answer. When I had finished applying gold spangles on to a base-coat of rosy bronze I sat back to admire the effect.

‘Very pretty,' Harry said. ‘Fortunately, I'm not a foot fetishist. In fact, your feet are the only part of your anatomy I can look at without getting a hard-on.'

‘What's wrong with my feet?' I demanded with a show of indignation.

But Harry wasn't fooled. ‘Nothing,' he said. ‘They round off your ankles very nicely. But I'm more interested in what's at the other end of your legs.'

Damn. I'd walked into that one and I knew it, but I realised I didn't much care. If you allow a breach in your defences, even for just one night, you know the enemy is going to get through again sooner or later, whatever you do. It was a dull afternoon; it would pass the time. I might as well surrender to superior force . . .

(This was your fault, Roo. You should never have abandoned me.)

Harry bent over and kissed my cheek, the tip of my nose, my lips, brushed my nipple very lightly with his finger. It stiffened in response so that the lace of my bra chafed against it. Then he took my hand and carried it to his crotch, where there was already a pronounced bulge. And suddenly I wanted him in my mouth, all the bigness and the hardness of him – I wanted the power and control that you can only get with fellatio – I wanted him gasping and groaning and helpless with pleasure. The want went down between my legs with a stabbing sensation so sharp it almost hurt. Harry undid his zip and I pulled down the front of his boxers and began to suck. Happily, I'm good at multitasking. I could concentrate on sucking his dick and the growing tension in my X-spot and still remember to keep my feet off the bed so I didn't smudge my newly-applied varnish.

After a while I forgot all about that, but by then my gold spangles were dry.

Thank God for quick-drying nail polish.

‘You said you wanted to talk,' I reminded him some time later. ‘Or was that just an excuse?'

‘No. There are things I need to— Bugger.' On the bedside table his mobile was ringing. He answered it, said ‘yes' a couple of times and ‘With you in a few minutes', and hung up. ‘Sorry, I have to go. Technically, I'm working. I'll come back tonight . . . if you like.'

‘If I don't like,' I said, ‘you'll come anyway, right?'

‘D'you want to be sure of that before you say no?'

I was silent, trying to find an answer that would be both witty and scathing, but would also carry the underlying message that I might not object if he were to force his attentions on me again. I was still groping for the right words when Harry gave me a quick kiss, tugged on his sweatshirt and left, with a final murmur of ‘See you later'.

I got dressed again rather more slowly and went downstairs, feeling relaxed, or restored, or resigned – or a comfortable mixture of all three. So I was into rough trade. What the hell.

In the entrance hall I ran into HG.

‘Tell me,' I said, remembering something I'd been meaning to ask, ‘who moved that picture?'

‘Which one?'

‘The portrait of Elizabeth Courtney. It used to hang more to the right, but it's been moved. Now, in the late afternoon the sun falls straight on it.'

‘I don't think anyone moved it,' HG said. ‘Surely it was always there.'

‘No – I noticed particularly. I've looked at it lots of times.'

‘You must be mistaken,' HG assured me. ‘No one would move it without my permission. Anyway, it's too difficult to reach.'

He continued on upstairs and I stood staring at the picture, certain I was right. I was still there when Roo and Ash came back.

I said, ‘Hi,' exuding relaxability and giving Fenny a hug, but Roo didn't respond.

‘Where's Harry?'

I went slightly pink – I could feel it – but neither of them seemed to notice. ‘I don't know.'

‘We need a word with him,' Roo explained.

In the drawing room, she picked up the in-house phone and called him.

‘What's happened?' I asked. ‘You look worried.'

‘A bit,' Roo said. ‘I'll tell you when . . . Harry!'

‘What's the problem?' Harry came in, flicking me a quick glance. I felt instantly warm all over, which was ridiculous – he was having the most devastating physical effect on me, and he wasn't even really good-looking.

‘There are these three men staying in the village,' Roo began. ‘Dirk's sinister strangers. We saw them in the pub. They're not journalists – we didn't like the look of them at all.'

‘
I
don't like the look of journalists,' I remarked.

‘This lot look more like thugs,' Ash said. ‘The worst kind.'

‘One of them smarmed up to us,' Roo said, ‘only he wasn't smarmy. It was like watching someone smarm who's read about it and knows what to do but doesn't . . . doesn't smarm from the heart.'

‘
Can
you smarm from the heart?' Harry speculated.

‘The thing is,' Roo said, ‘he asked for you.'

Suddenly, Harry went absolutely quiet.

‘Dirk told us the other two called him Attila,' Ash said. ‘He didn't have the tache, but I'm afraid it suited him.'

‘He had a suit,' Roo added, ‘but that
didn't
suit him.'

‘What's the matter?' I said. My warm feeling had been replaced by a sort of coldness, not exactly fear but the chill that comes when fear is on its way.

Harry said: ‘Fuck,' and then, ‘Did he say how they knew I was here?'

‘They saw your picture in the paper after our search party the other night,' Ash explained.

‘The Attila guy said not to tell you he'd asked about you,' Roo went on. ‘He said he wanted to give you a surprise.'

‘I'll bet he did.' Harry's face had a kind of tight, closed-in look which I'd never seen before.

‘Are you in trouble?' Roo asked.

‘You could say so.' He gazed directly at me. ‘I didn't want you to find out like this,' he said. ‘I wanted to tell you in my own time. I was going to earlier on, but I got . . . distracted.'

‘Tell me what?' I said in a voice that came out small and scared, like a child. Had I been cheated again? had I been gullible and stupid twice in one week? Had I been fooled by the
butler
? Only somehow that part didn't matter. All that mattered was the look on Harry's face.

‘You were right,' he said. ‘I'm not a real butler.'

I couldn't speak. I just stared at him.

‘But,' Roo said, ‘but . . . how could you get this job? How could you
do
this job? For months and months . . . with nobody guessing?'

‘Jim Winkworth is an old friend,' Harry said, still looking at me. ‘I've stayed with him and Carrie when he was working for Gordon Chisholm. I wanted to learn about the job – it's unusual, and I'm naturally curious. All the same, I couldn't have got away with it if the regime here hadn't been so laid-back.'

‘Carrie?' I said, latching on to irrelevancies.

‘Jim's wife.'

The house in Kensington, the wife and kids . . .

‘But why?' Roo said. ‘I don't understand.'

‘I needed a cover,' Harry said. ‘A place to hide out. Jim had two jobs on offer – this one, and one in the States through an international agency. He was going for California – better climate than Scotland – so I took this one. On paper, I fit his description: similar height, similar colouring, no distinguishing features. It was almost a joke at first – I never thought I'd get away with it – but I suppose I got to like it, and no one found me out, so I stayed on. I knew getting sucked into your PR opportunity was a mistake.' He gave me a faint shadow of his normal grin.

‘Why did you need a cover?' Roo persisted. ‘What's your real job?'

Ash was frowning slightly as if struck by a new idea. ‘He's a journalist,' he said. ‘Aren't you?'

Harry nodded.

‘No,' I whispered. Suddenly, shagging the butler was fine – the butler, the plumber, a leather-clad courier with throbbing motorbike.
Anything
but a journalist.

‘Sorry,' Harry said. ‘I was going to tell you.'

Roo had turned to Ash. ‘How did you . . . ?'

‘Attila 33,' Ash said. ‘That's who that guy was. It's only just hit me.'

‘Attila 33 . . .' Roo seemed to be chasing an obscure recollection.

‘They're a far-right neo-Nazi group,' Ash explained. ‘Named after the Hun, obviously, and . . . 1933 was when Hitler came to power, I think. Someone went undercover to investigate them, managed to join up – a year or two ago. There was an exposé, in the
Independent
as far as I recall. A couple of them were tried for murder – beating an Asian student to death. The journalist was a witness for the prosecution. He had them talking about it on tape.' He looked at Harry.

‘Yep,' Harry said.

‘The leader got off on a technicality. He's the one they call Attila. I'd forgotten – it's only just come back to me.'