A Fatal Winter Read online

  “Mrs. Hooser can cope,” said Suzanna brightly.

  Both Max and Elka turned to look at her. Really? Since when?

  But in the face of the women’s predicament, and allowing his helpful, peacemaker tendencies again to get the better of him, Max nodded and said, “Okay. Fine. I’ll take Luther in. What harm can it do?”

  DECEMBER 3

  ‘Tis the season to be jolly …

  Jocasta and Simon Jones were flying coach, a rare economy in a lifetime of wild, even frenzied, spending. So as not to be recognized, Jocasta was wearing a wig. Or perhaps, thought a cynical Simon, hoping to be recognized as one so famous a wig was required for her to get from point A to point B in public, unmolested by a ravening media.

  But flying coach was a novel experience for Jocasta. And her entry into this new world was not going well.

  The choices, as their flight attendant Wendy had chirped over the PA system, were between two boxed lunches. Jocasta, at fifty a worshiper at the altar of youth and vitality, chose the “Healthy Option.”

  She unwrapped the box when it had been deposited on her tray table and peered inside. There nestled a small tin of albacore, a small plastic tub of applesauce, and a large bag containing approximately ten crisps, along with plasticware wrapped hygienically and impenetrably in plastic. There was also a large, round, nubby object that might have been a biscuit or a cow pat.

  Jocasta pushed the button on her armrest for the attendant. Two seconds later, she pushed it again. On, off. On, off.

  “Seven dollars and fifty cents for a box of tuna and applesauce?” she cried, when Wendy had rushed to her side, expecting no less than a passenger in the final stages of cardiac arrest. “Are you quite mad?”

  The flight attendant grinned her determined, battle-stations grin. It was the wide grin she saved for the type of passenger she would refuse to assist with their oxygen mask and flotation device should the need arise, hewing close to her own survival-of-the-fittest philosophy. Sod the lot of them, anyway.

  But the airline had only yesterday caught major media flack for its unfriendly service and everyone was on short notice to start being nicer to passengers. Just my rotten luck to draw this witch today, Wendy thought, grinning yet more broadly.

  “What’s so funny?” demanded Jocasta suspiciously.

  “I’m afraid we have no control over the food choices the airline offers.” She was thinking how you used to be able to tell the Brits from the Yanks, and it wasn’t just the accents—you could tell by the shoes and clothing. And the haircuts. This one was British but she’d been in the States a long time. The haircut—or was it a wig?—was expensive, and subtly American in style. The clothes? Designer stuff, but last year’s. It was the clothing that made it hard to tell anymore. We’re all starting to dress alike.

  Wendy leaned in confidingly, a past mistress of the art of talking down the obstreperous passenger. She whispered, “It’s chronic, isn’t it? We have to eat that muck, too—even the pilots!—and we all complain about it, believe you me, dear.”

  Jocasta merely scowled and demanded her money back. She had already eaten the “Healthy Option” crisps and fully intended to eat the rest of the box’s contents. But the flight attendant was too quick for her.

  “Certainly, madam,” she said, seizing the box and turning away, never to reappear until the plane landed at Heathrow. “I’ll credit your charge card.”

  “I simply can’t believe this,” Jocasta fumed to Simon. “I suppose these seats don’t convert into a bed, either? No free champagne? No gourmet meal, just that box of crap? No Canadian Ice Wine to go with the pudding?”

  Her chin quivered with outrage. Jocasta, her husband noticed, was again getting a bit fleshy around the neck, despite the ministrations of a renowned Hollywood doctor who “did” necks as a specialty, much as a garage might specialize in mufflers or brake pad replacement. You could have hidden marbles in the folds of her neck before she had the first of many surgeries. Now she had that death’s-head look, so common in Hollywood, of skin stretched too tautly to fool anyone into believing they were looking at the full bloom of youth.

  Simon had come to regret his role, however well remunerated in the past, as a propper-up of a fading actress’s ego—an ego otherwise sustained only by her bottomless belief in her own attractiveness. Jocasta was an actress of a particular stamp: the damsel of horror or science-fiction films, permanently typecast as the moronic but nubile maiden who explores the castle alone with only the aid of a flickering stub of a candle, and later as the moronic but spry matron who is generally the first victim of the headless corpse/marauding microbe. But the longer her career went on, the shorter seemed to be Jocasta’s time on screen. Roles calling for nuance and subtle shading generally going to actresses roughly of her generation like Emma Thompson and Meryl Streep, Jocasta soldiered on, increasingly baffled by her agent’s inability to keep her image before a fickle public. The pinnacle of her career was now considered to be her portrayal of Jula Bates in I See Crazy People, which had developed a (very) small cult following, after which it had all gone downhill. Roles having disappeared entirely, Jocasta had formally announced her retirement, in the hope of generating a clamor for her return. The announcement had been greeted with a stony silence—even the Hollywood trade papers had ignored the press release spat out into the tray beneath their fax machines.

  That Simon was fourteen years his wife’s junior was starting to bother him—in the early days he could not have begun to predict how much it would. He supposed it was because despite the difference in their ages, he was much the more mature of the two, the stabilizing force. But to this day he could not watch Sunset Boulevard without flinching, particularly at the opening scene in which William Holden’s body floats lifelessly in Gloria Swanson’s pool.

  “… watery grave.”

  He tuned back in to Jocasta’s broadcast on words eerily tracking his own thoughts. Surely, he reasoned, one prerequisite for reading another’s thoughts is empathy? Jocasta’s empathy tank always seemed to him to be running on empty.

  “What’s that, dear?” he said easily, well-practiced in soothing and taming the wildebeest.

  “I said,” she repeated irritably, “I said it’s a miracle they don’t send us to a watery grave, if this is their idea of running an airline.”

  At least, thought Simon, she might have been irritated. The Botox injections, a lucrative sideline of the neck specialist’s, made her appear to be in a perpetual state of pouty “Whatev” adolescence. This alternated with a frozen scowl, which at least went with her querulous personality.

  Not sure he followed the connection between food service and plane maintenance, he nodded, checking his watch, a fifth-anniversary present from Jocasta worth the equivalent of the original mortgage on his parents’ old house back in Omaha, Nebraska. He and Jocasta would land in half an hour to find a limo waiting to transport them to Monkslip-super-Mare and then on to Chedrow Castle, where, so Simon had gathered, Jocasta had invited them and someone, presumably the old man, had grudgingly acquiesced in allowing them to come. Everything about the setup struck him as wrong, beginning with the fact Jocasta had had to finagle an invitation. Beginning with the fact he’d not been taken to meet her father or aunt and all the rest of them before now. Whenever he’d asked her about it, she’d replied, “They’re totally dysfunctional. All of them,” as if that answered it. “One of them, I’ve always thought, is actually insane.” And then she’d change the subject.

  Now she had gotten out her cosmetics bag and was busy painting little black wings at the corner of each eye, Cleopatra style, leaning back and turning her head from side to side to take in the full effect in her compact mirror. The inner lids of her eyes she had already lined in a pale electric blue. The effect was to force one to stare into her eyes—an effect that should have inspired trust. But Simon was reminded of nothing so much as snake eyes. Snake eyes edged in blue.

  Don we now our gay apparel …

  L
amorna was getting dressed: Lamorna Whitehall, grandniece—by adoption—of Oscar, Lord Footrustle, and granddaughter—by adoption—of Leticia, Lady Baynard.

  That “by adoption” tag was so automatic Lamorna barely noticed it anymore, or so she told herself. “My granddaughter, by adoption, of course,” Lady Baynard would say dismissively, by way of introduction, when she could be bothered to introduce her at all. When she couldn’t avoid introducing her, more like. Even Lady Baynard realized that to leave Lamorna standing there like a stick of furniture while guests politely, inquiringly turned their heads in her direction only made Lady B look rude, if not blind or barking.

  Funny, thought Lamorna, how she seldom even thought of her grandmother—by adoption—as Grandmother, or even as Leticia. Or even as the Dowager, which suited her down to the ground. It was Lady Baynard—certainly to her face, it was always Lady Baynard.

  And Lady B, but only when the old misery’s back was turned.

  Lamorna, adjusting her crocheted white collar to lie flat against her shapeless dark dress, straightened the large wooden cross hanging from a cord around her neck. The cross, which she always wore, added little to her ensemble, but it did tend to act as a barricade to anyone not of her religion. She assessed herself impartially, even fearlessly, in the age-spotted mirror over her dressing table, squaring up to peer at herself through the thick lenses required to correct her 20/250 vision. She was no beauty, that she knew, but she had been told she had a “noble nose.” How she cherished that compliment, made by the only mother she’d ever known. (Adoptive mother? Eyewash! Lea had been all the world. All the world.) In response to Lamorna’s anxious teenage inquiry, after a particularly brutal term among the hellions at school, Lea Whitehall had looked long and hard at her beloved, plain-as-rice-pudding child and said, “I’ve always thought you had a noble nose. A fine example of a Roman nose, in fact.” In other hearts less anxious for approval, less in need of shoring up than Lamorna’s, this blatant flattery would have been seen for what it was. That the nose in question had a cold at the moment—a cold she’d caught from Leticia, the old monster—only added rosy insult to injury, but Lamorna still saw the protuberance as her saving grace.

  Her father had seen her only as a disappointment—that much she knew without being told. Not that that stopped him from dropping broad hints about her looks, her style of dress, her hair, her lack of makeup. On and on. To have lost both of them in the airplane crash was the cruelest twist—with her father at the controls, of course, killing her mother with his carelessness, although they said it had been an accident. Had it been only her father who died … now that would have been Divine Justice.

  Her heart raced with thoughts of doom and retribution, which thoughts were interrupted by the tinkling of the bell installed by her bed. It connected directly to Lady B’s room where it connected to a bellpull ending in a large maroon tassel. How Lamorna had come to loathe the sound. Thus must Pavlov’s dogs have come to regard the bell that sometimes meant food, sometimes meant hunger. Or was that the rats and the pellets? Lamorna couldn’t remember—she’d never been much good at school, its reward system having eluded her entirely.

  She considered the option of dawdling rather than hopping to attention in response, but after thirty seconds the whole idea of making her grandmother wait made her nervous. Lady Baynard would not be pleased. Everything went more smoothly if she, Lamorna, responded promptly. It was undoubtedly something minor, it always was. The old ogress probably just wanted a fresh handkerchief.

  Troll the ancient Yuletide carol …

  Gwynyth, Lady Footrustle, was at her vanity table in the nearby Watch Tower bedroom, wielding a mascara brush with practiced ease, and singing softly, a bit off-key, and getting the words slightly wrong:

  God rest ye marry gentlemen

  Let nothing you dismay.

  The tune had been playing as she shopped recently in Fantasian, the carol a piquant counterpoint to the rampant materialism on display (for who could really afford this stuff besides Gywn and her Sloaney cronies? Scarves by Hermès and Tag Heuer watches and Gucci bags to hold it all). Although in point of fact Gwynyth, having maxed out several of her credit cards, and with the bank getting quite shirty recently about her overdraft, could only just afford the cocktail dress and matching evening bag she finally settled on. She couldn’t be photographed by Tatler over and over again in the same old party rags, could she?

  Using a tweezers she picked up a snippet of false eyelash, applied glue to its base, and attached it to the corner of one eye. She sat back to observe the effect, lifting her chin and turning her head to the side. Halfway, she decided, to perfection.

  As she continued her task, she thought: So, according to the song, having married, like, way above a gentleman, an actual freaking earl, and having rested, I should let nothing me dismay, right? Well. Well, well. Having married Oscar, Lord Footrustle, borne his children (nothing restful about that), and then having been dumped … well. Thank God for the children. Without them, the sodding divorce judge would have been even less generous in giving me the measly monthly allowance I was suddenly expected to live on.

  The blue eyes had been completely fringed now, offering a smoky, sultry illusion of unplumbed depths; the lip gloss applied; the powder dusted to set the foundation with a few strokes of a Kabuki brush. Thinking of the twins, which she did as seldom as possible, Gwynyth crossed the room to the armoire, pausing before a full-length mirror to examine her artistry from a distance. She smoothed the silk nightgown taut against her concave stomach and observed with a critical eye. She still had, she thought, even after years of personal training, a tiny pooch where she had carried the Elephant Children (as she thought of them) for years and years and years, until finally they had emerged, both of them cabbage-heads weighing like a ton each. Fortunately, the nanny engaged for their care had whisked them out of sight like something that, left out, might begin to spoil. Too right, that idea, and too late—no question the pair of them were spoiled rotten. School games and uniforms, field hockey and polo and rowing—why, her own comprehensive in Luton had barely had room for a little corner by the gymnasium for the drug dealers to hang about. Oscar had at least been generous in paying for the twins’ removal by Dragon Lady, as he had been in paying for the posh, la-di-da schooling. She recognized that without that generosity, she’d have been stuck caring for the twins herself. Gack. Just the thought of the three of them stuck in some walk-up council flat, herself slinging beans on toast for their supper, a cigarette dangling from one side of her mouth and her wearing an old wrapper like her mother used to do—the thought actually made her ill. Like that was ever going to happen once she was Lady Footrustle, but still … Oscar had insisted on paying for the twins’ education directly, as part of the settlement, as if to suggest Gwynyth might spend the tuition money on makeup and wardrobe if left to her own devices. Insulting, that’s what it was, but that hanging judge who handled the settlement had agreed. Bloody men stick together, her mother had been right about that if nothing else.

  People thought she had frog-marched old Oscar down the aisle (actually, up the steps to the civil ceremony at Old Marylebone Town Hall) but people would think what they liked, and never mind the truth. She guessed her mother had been right about that, too.

  There was a knock at the door that could only be the twins wanting something. The Watch Tower, attached to the castle and let as a holiday cottage in season, ranged over three floors with a steep set of stairs in between each. The twins had the two small bedrooms on the ground, she the double bedroom and separate lavatory on the first floor. The second floor held the sitting room where the twins seemed to spend half their time engrossed in some idiotic computer game or another. The place was painted inside in frenetic yellows and bright blues, jarringly at odds with the outer stone appearance, an attempt to deny the dark hues of winter and hurry along the closer sun of July.

  She tied a robe around her waist and shouted at them to come in. With a mumbled �
��hello” Alec slouched through the door, grabbed some electronic gadget he’d left behind, and slouched back out. Amanda waited wordlessly by the doorjamb. Fine manners they were taught at their posh schools.

  Being on the cusp of teenage-hood, they seemed to think, gave them special privileges. Little did they know that the next few years would be the worst of their lives, if history was any guide. But right now, they were by anyone’s standards beautiful, clear-skinned, with the flaxen hair they’d inherited from her, and with their father’s aristocratic features.

  Gwynyth supposed she should be grateful for the invitation that had brought them all here, but somehow all she could do was look that particular gift horse in the mouth, wondering what the aristocratic old coot was up to now. Oscar didn’t seem particularly overjoyed to see any of them, although he was trying to show an interest in the children, which made a nice change from the usual.

  She needed to make sure Oscar didn’t forget altogether he had children besides that awful actress person—Jocasta Jones, as she now was. Jocasta, who had flown to England posthaste in response to her own summons, her husband the lap dog at her side.

  It was essential Jocasta not get any ideas that being Oscar’s firstborn gave her any special privileges. Oscar’s son—his one and only son, Alec—he was what mattered, in the competition for the Footrustle heritage.

  See the blazing Yule before us …

  Randolph, formally Viscount Nathersby, or simply Nathersby when plying his trade (“It’s a Nathersby, of course. Cost the earth, but the man is worth it.”), and Cilla Petrie, his stylist-slash-assistant, huddled in warm comfort by the fireplace, sipping a pre-dinner sherry as they waited for the rest of the castle dwellers to assemble. What was now called the drawing room, slotted into an area above one end of the Great Hall, was reached by a fifteenth-century spiral stone staircase and dated from the times, roughly the late Middle Ages, when families began to think privacy was a better idea than living, eating, and sleeping among the help. Certainly, it was a more fragrant idea. As in Lord Footrustle’s nearby bedroom, one wall contained a squint through which the family could keep an eye on the merrymakers below.