Kissing Toads (22 page)

‘You think you've got sex appeal,' Russell said to me, taking advantage of long association to get, frankly, much too personal, ‘but you lack the one quality which makes any woman irresistible. Ruthie, on the other hand, has it in abundance.'

‘What's that?' I obliged.

‘She's a wonderful listener. We men are simple, self-centred, egotistical creatures: we love talking about ourselves. Any woman prepared to listen is going to have admirers clustering round her like wasps round a jam jar.'

He may have had a point, but I still think tits beat ears in the sex-appeal stakes any day of the week.

Anyway, being a good listener can get you into no end of trouble. There was Roo, providing a sympathetic audience to several inappropriate men, who sooner or later were going to take it the wrong way. Worst of all, I discovered she had taken to hanging out in the kitchen with the gays, and that was the thin end of the wedge. Before she knew it, she'd be a full-time fag hag, falling for men who were sexually out of bounds and having a child with some guy who wanted to give her his sperm in a teaspoon. Once she started down that route, she'd never have a normal relationship again.

I know it's trendy to have a gay male friend (I've got a couple), but I don't believe in overdoing it. Some women maintain it's like having a male girlfriend, but I don't go with that: a guy is always a guy, even if you change the middle letter. No matter how camp they sound, how interested they are in clothes and handbags and other men, there'll always be testosterone in there somewhere. And testosterone is sneaky stuff. Even the nicest men have double standards, an inability to resist temptation, and a tendency to lie when they don't like the shape of the truth. Different sexual orientation doesn't change a thing. If a guy is really a girl inside, he'll have the op.

I'd tried to discourage Roo from spending too much time with Cedric and Ash, but I wasn't sure I was getting anywhere. Like I said, Roo can be really obstinate about all the wrong things. At least Ash wasn't her type, otherwise I'd have worried she was developing an unrequited passion. Plenty of women at Dunblair did. The two village girls who came in to do the cleaning could be seen to swoon as he walked past, neurotic female extras tried to intrigue him with stories of ghost sightings, Makeup and Wardrobe fluttered when he was around. Brie, normally unimpressed by anyone without a celebrity profile, spent a day helping him take the temperature of the old hall and, according to Alex, who was there too, trying to intrigue him with her ghost-spotting skills. It wasn't just his bone structure that hooked them: he had the cool green gaze of an absinthe cocktail and the aloof, disinterested manner of an elf at a football match. He wasn't camp, but his looks, combined with a total indifference to all women except (presumably) dead ones, gave him away. Besides, I know a gay when I see one. I'm never wrong.

Roo's love life would have to wait for more promising material, I decided.

Meanwhile, I still wasn't convinced that Winkworth was the genuine article. I could hire a private detective to check his background, but I had no idea how you found a private detective to hire (Yellow Pages?), and anyhow, it felt like overkill. After all, he wasn't
my
butler. Inspiration came to me in the bath. HG must have got him through an agency, and all these agencies were bound to know each other, the way people in the same field always do.

I rang the one in London through which I'd got Anna Maria. The woman who runs it knows me well, so she was eager to oblige.

‘I'll ask around,' she said. ‘Give me a couple of days.'

We'd done all the historical scenes except the ones with HG by the time she got back to me.

‘James Henry Winkworth,' she said. ‘He's with Acme Domestics.
Very
posh. One of the directors is an ex of mine, so I got all the gen. Winkworth's been with an earl, a lord, and an industry baronet. Hot God, I suppose, counts as royalty. Meedja royalty, anyway. He pays better than the others. Winkworth had a choice when he took the job – he's very sought-after. Could have gone to another aristo, or there was an American agency chasing him for a film producer in California. With that kind of pull, he must be the Admirable Crichton.'

I hadn't a clue who
he
was, but in any case, I didn't believe it.

‘I don't care,' I said. ‘This guy's no Jeeves, honestly. Maybe . . . maybe they paid off the real Winkworth and sent in a substitute.'

‘They?'

‘The tabloids. Whoever. Do you have a description of him?'

‘About six foot, medium build, fair hair, grey eyes. Works out.'

There was a gym at Dunblair – I'd used it twice so far – but I had no way of knowing if Winkworth frequented it.

‘I'll swear he's only five eleven,' I said.

‘So he lied about his height. Men do sometimes: it's an ego thing. They'll add an inch on paper.'

‘Yes,' I said, ‘but usually on a different part of the body.'

She laughed. ‘He's got a wife and two kids, if that's any help. Have you seen them?'

‘
What?
' The possibility that Winkworth might be married had never occurred to me. He didn't
act
married. The idea unsettled me, for some reason. He didn't give off a married vibe. ‘He can't have. He lives in, and I'm sure he's not hiding them anywhere. They'd be around – kids always are. I mean . . .'

‘Perhaps he's left them in London. His home address is in Kensington. HG might have specified no family, though it would be unusual. Or perhaps Winkworth's got divorced.'

My sudden jumpiness steadied. ‘I don't believe any of it,' I said. ‘He's a fake – he's got to be. The only thing is how to prove it.'

The next step, obviously, was to search his room. That's what heroines always do in thrillers. But I didn't know where his room
was
, it was almost certain to be locked, and even if I could get in, supposing he found me there? What on earth would I say? The thought of it made my blood run cold – or rather hot, anticipating embarrassment. I'd need to steal a key (there must be master keys somewhere) and take someone to act as a lookout. In short, I'd need Roo.

‘You have to be joking,' she said.

‘He's a fraud,' I reiterated. ‘I know he is. My agency contact says he has a wife and two kids, but if so, where are they? Besides, Winkworth's never been married – whoever he is.'

‘How do you know?'

‘He doesn't have that stressed look that men get when they're worrying about teenage daughters and school grades and paying the maintenance and all that. Anyhow, I just know.'

‘Did your contact get you another address for him – apart from here, I mean?' Roo said.

‘Kensington. I wrote it down somewhere.'

‘You could ask someone to go round there, I suppose. If you must go on with this. It's becoming an obsession with you – a sort of paranoia. You've got to stop . . . well, fantasising about Harry. He's a nice guy, he's a butler. That's all.'

‘I'm not
fantasising
about him! He could be a crook, in with some gang planning a robbery – the man on the inside. He could be—'

‘He could be the Akond of Swat. Listen, Delphi, I'm not going to start playing detective with you and get caught snooping in Harry's underwear drawers. You can't do things like that. I think the atmosphere of this place is getting to you – all those mysterious disappearances and murders and things. Your imagination's doing overtime.'

‘Winkworth's attitude isn't a figment of my imagination! All we have to do is steal –
borrow
– the key, and then you keep watch while I—'

‘
No
.'

‘You can't let me down,' I said, shocked. ‘When we were kids, you always helped – whatever I planned.'

‘We're not kids any more,' Roo said unhappily.

Since she was being so stubborn, I decided I should take her advice and get someone to go round to Winkworth's Kensington address. I wasn't sure whom I could trust, but in the end I asked Anna Maria, telling her I was trying to trace the wife of a friend and assuming an air of dismissive hauteur when she questioned me. ‘Be discreet,' I ordered. ‘I can't tell you what's going on; I just need to know if Mrs Winkworth's there.'

But she wasn't. Anna Maria reported back that the house was let but the lessee was unresponsive to her enquiries and would say little about the owners except that they were away. All of which did nothing to allay my suspicions.

And every time I saw Winkworth, which was much too often, even the hint of his grin set my nerves tingling with remembered indignation.

We were shooting the scenes with HG over the next couple of days. Wardrobe had pulled out all the stops and he looked spectacular in an outfit patched together from bits of animal pelt and the McGoogle tartan, festooned with assorted weapons, stained with stage blood, his long hair gelled into wildness and his piratical features enhanced with greasepaint versions of sweat and grime. The effect was sort of Braveheart meets Conan the Barbarian. HG's short and fairly skinny, but somehow, once in costume and in front of the camera, he seemed to
grow
, in some intangible way, switching on his aura, becoming larger than life. It wasn't that he was a great actor – he was just the only person you wanted to look at in the whole room. I don't know what they call that quality; it isn't charisma, because if you've got that, you've got it all the time. More like presence, if presence is something you can activate at the touch of a button in your subconscious. It went away as soon as the camera stopped rolling, and suddenly he looked shrunken and tired, just an elderly guy in bizarre fancy dress. Maybe that's what aged him, I thought: not the drugs and the drink but the presence, that magical energy that possesses and expands and surrounds him, a magnetic field that, in a concert, could knock out a crowd of thousands.

Like the Force in
Star Wars
. If he wanted to, I bet HG could use his presence to control people's thoughts, when he's on stage anyway. After all, he's made audiences think he's a star for more than forty years.

That evening he sat down to dinner with us, looking haggard and wrinkly but still sort of lit up, more alive than usual in the aftermath of performance. The Force wasn't with him any more, I concluded, but there was a little bit of glitter left over, in his eyes, his voice, his manner. In his heyday he must have been amazing, not just a megastar but a real god: the übergod of rock superfame. Like Elvis and Bacchus and the Pope all rolled into one.

I was sitting next to him. Brie tried to muscle in, but I was determined and I'm bigger than she is. Mindful of Russell's comment, I thought I'd try being a good listener, as a result of which dinner took longer than usual, or at any rate
felt
longer, though of course it was a big thrill to have HG beside me talking about the old days and so on. It was rather less of a thrill when Morty, who was opposite, began to go on about
his
youth, when he'd played bass guitar in a band called the Weeds (or something like that). This is what it's like to be Roo, I told myself, smiling and saying, ‘How fascinating,' in all the right places. By the time Morty had finished the saga of his (brief) musical career, I'd decided it was just too much hassle. Being a good listener may make you irresistible, but it simply isn't worth it. In future, I was going to stick to a push-up bra.

We'd just finished dessert when it happened. Footsteps outside – clinky footsteps, the unmistakable sound of very high heels on an echoing floor. The door was flung open the way someone flings a door open when they are going to make an Entrance, rather than merely coming in. An icy blast invaded the room, the sort you get with the arrival of Banquo's ghost or Jacob Marley, except in this case it was because the three doors through to the front had all been flung wide and left that way. The woman who entered so dramatically didn't look at all ghostly. She wore embossed silver thigh boots and a pink mink jacket, with bits of brown flesh showing in between. She was at least five foot ten (plus four inches for the boots), with the kind of good looks that seem to have been soused in preservative just a little too long: plumped-up pout, complexion of moisturised leather, eyes a fraction too small, cheekbones a fraction too large. And big hair.
Enormous
hair. Once it might have been dark, but now it was coffee beige with vanilla streaks, moussed out into a mane worthy of a fashion-conscious lion, with waves and curls and shaggy bits over her forehead. As she must have been travelling all day, she had either brought a portable hairdresser or was wearing enough hairspray to hold the style in a tornado.

She could only be Basilisa Ramón.

The mere sight of her explained the magenta sheepskin, the devil-mask, the fertility goddess bedposts. Everyone stared at her in glazed horror, pretty much as if she
was
Jacob Marley. Except HG, who appeared inscrutable. He must, I thought, have a skin of rhinoceros hide and balls of reinforced concrete. I mean, when your wife looks like a cross between Ivana Trump and a high-class drag act, how many men could remain inscrutable about it?

‘Who are these people?' she demanded. ‘They are from television, no? Why you not tell me you make television here? You are
mi marido
, you make television, but I have to read about it in
la prensa amarilla
. It is
asqueroso
! If there is television, of course they will want me. I am big star of television, I have many fans—'

‘I did tell you,' HG said quietly. ‘I told you we were redoing the garden. You've never been very interested in gardening.'