Christopher Brookmyre - Parlabane 04 (7 page)

Sir Lachlan stood a few steps up on the grand staircase, looking as ever like a timid and embarrassed senior relative who'd been asked to make an impromptu speech at a surprise birthday party. His dress was unusually sober, perhaps because for once he would be taking something of a back seat with regard to the hotel's meeting and greeting duties; those, like a great deal else about the running of the place this weekend, being deferred to the UML

lot. He had atypically eschewed the overbearing tartanry, sporting neither kilt nor trews, though Alison's keen eye detected the familial plaid on the inside lining of his waistcoat, which he fingered nervously at the left-hand seam as he spoke. Now that she came to think of it, this was as little tartan as she had ever witnessed or even imagined about his person, including pyjamas as observed during last month's nocturnal false fire alarm. When she'd first arrived she thought he was doing it (or more accurately overdoing it) for the benefit of the tourists, or as part of an affected Scottisherthan-thou image projected by many members of the Caledonian upper orders, possibly in compensation for sounding like they'd seldom left rural Englandshire. In time she had become aware that it was not so much a uniform as an all-over comfort blanket, and the more he wore, the more self-assured he behaved. It was unexpected, then, that on this day of all days, with so much at stake and his anxiety levels correspondingly high, he should be so uncomfortably in mufti, but Alison guessed it was evidence that the hand - or rather tongue - of Lady Jane had ruled the day. If so, it was a testament to the respect in which he held her judgement, or fear in which he held her wrath, that he was in obedience despite her absence, she having left for London via Inverness first thing that morning.

Lady Jane had been to the fore in brokering the deal with UML, she being the one with far more of an astute head for business. With so much riding on the success of the promotional junket, it had therefore been an inopportune 39

time for her mother to break her hip and require the presence of her only daughter at her Kensington bedside. Lady Jane had been forced to depart with all haste, muttering darkly about the folly of octogenarian equestrianism, and leaving the success of this arguably make-or-break venture in the hands of her beloved but less than trusted husband. She had dispensed a lengthy staccato of instructions to Sir Lachlan as he carried her bags to the Range Rover, the last and most impassioned of which was: 'Stay out of the way as much as possible and for God's sake don't be strutting around in all that bloody tartan. It's not a bloody theme park.'

So here he was, left to rally the troops before the guests descended, almost bereft of his talismanic garb and more than a little hamstrung by his wife leaving the staff under no doubt that she shared their perception of him as a bumbling idiot. The staff were gathered in the entrance hall, the almost imposingly impressive sight that greeted guests once they arrived through the wide double doors. The reception desk was to the left as you came in, but the hall was dominated by the staircase dead ahead, sweeping widely up to a halflanding, from which it split in two and ascended to the first floor. The ceiling hung two high stories above, wood panelling flanking the walls, this height accommodating a gallery on the first floor that overlooked the entrance hall on all four sides. Pairs of crossed claymores hung from the wooden panels, both a decoration and a testament to McKinley Hall's survival of less civilised times. The half-landing also bore arms: family heirloom rapiers and cutlasses inside a display cabinet, about which Sir Lachlan would joke: 'In case of emergency, break glass.'

It was an unquestionably grand setting, but given the scarcity of their numbers and Sir Lachlan's nigh-apologetic lack of presence, there was an uncomfortable intimacy about it, like the meeting may as well have been taking place in the kitchen. Granted, Sir Lachlan wanted to impress a sense of moment upon them, but the palpable reality of the gathering was a load of busy people obliged to listen to someone who they all wished would just give it a bye, not least to spare their mutual embarrassment.

'As you are all no doubt well aware, my family has invested a great deal in the restoration of McKinley Hall, and its transformation from a state of neglect into this proud and beautiful building is to me a source of great. . . ehm. . . '

Alison winced in the tension of the silence as he groped pointlessly for an alternative to 'pride', the poor soul doubtless imagining scorn and criticism in the minds of an audience who for the most part weren't actually listening.

'Pride,' he eventually decided with an acknowledging smile. 'But restoring a building is a straightforward matter in comparison with the, ehm, matter of restoring a reputation, and it has been the challenge of, well, all of us here, to make people think. . . the right thoughts about McKinley Hall. Rather than 40

the wrong ones, as they may have before.'

The right thoughts. Inspirational stuff. Adding to Alison's empathetic discomfort was her knowledge of how passionate and engagingly articulate Sir Lachlan could be when he was talking about this very subject. His problem was that he didn't do bullshit or business-speak very well, something of which Lady Jane was excruciatingly aware in laying the groundwork for playing host to UML. Alison didn't know much about this team-building outfit, but had garnered enough to guess that business-speak would be their stock-in-trade, with bullshit never running low in the supply cupboard.

'The right thoughts are that McKinley Hall is now a magnificent country hotel in a splendid setting, with a heady kind of atmosphere you can only find somewhere steeped in. . . history. A place with elegant accommodation, unrivalled tranquillity and, of course, the finest of staff.'

It was an indication that he was barely treading water that he had resorted to quoting the hotel's own brochure copy, but this actually counted as a decent recovery from the jolt of almost careering into the treacherous badlands of '. . . history'.

Peter Mathieson, the chef, cleared his throat ostentatiously. Sir Lachlan looked at him, a little startled, in fear that this was a form of heckling or confrontational disrespect, all the worse for its source being the person other than his wife whom he held in most cowering awe. Then his face visibly lightened in relief as he realised it was merely a humorous prompt, and for that as close as he could have hoped to get to audience rapport.

'And, sorry, yes, how could I forget, absolutely the finest of food. Thank you, Peter. We have indeed so much to offer, and with this weekend a very important opportunity to demonstrate that. I know you're probably thinking that what we all need now is for me to shut up so that you can get on with preparing for this weekend, but I wanted to acknowledge a few things, not least your efforts in what have sometimes been trying. . . times. We had to lay some staff off in the summer and I know the rest of you have felt you're spread rather thin as a result. We didn't have the best of luck and there's been times when I've felt the weight of. . . well, I suppose you could say, the past was against us here. But we've held it together, haven't we? And now we're looking at what we all hope will be a whole new beginning.'

The weight of the past. That was what he meant by 'the wrong thoughts', and what he had unintentionally stumbled towards when he mentioned history. These were all tentative references to something Sir Lachlan would never directly speak of or even formally acknowledge, and his staff would be skirting dismissal were he to hear them mention it.

Alison had been working there a little under four months, since leaving school at the end of June. Her sixth-year exam results, supplementing what 41

she had already garnered in fifth, had earned her offers from a number of universities, but having spent all of her nineteen years in Inverness, she knew her restless feet would not be satisfied by mere relocation to Glasgow or Edinburgh, exciting as student life there would no doubt be. The limits of her world had been so narrow that the desire to expand her horizons grew in inverse proportion; so much so that she reckoned it was a good thing she wasn't from Dingwall, as it might have taken a trip to outer space to sate her wanderlust. As it was, she would settle for the Far East to begin with, and see how much farther east she could get before the money ran out. That was why she was at McKinley Hall. With her name not being Jacasta and her parents inexplicably having failed to establish a six-figure trust fund for her further education and gaap yaah, she was going to have to finance her travels off her own back. It had therefore seemed a prudent - if a wee bit ascetic - course of action to get a job that would not only earn her some money but drastically curtail her opportunities to spend it. The McKinley Hall estates appeared on the Ordnance Survey map approximately four kilometres north of the Middle of Nowhere, so the only jobs offering fewer opportunities to go shopping and socialising were on platforms in the North Sea, where the time-on to time-off ratios were more forgiving. She slept there six nights a week, sometimes seven when she couldn't be bothered with the eight-hour round trip (minibus, bus, train) home to Sneck. The plan was to stick it out until Christmas, then take off into the great unknown in the new year with every penny she'd accrued.

She'd started in July as a waitress, but like almost everyone else in the place, found the definition of her duties more and more blurred as the summer wore on. Unfortunately, this was not because business was booming and the place stretching to accommodate its guests. Tourism in the Highlands was continuing to suffer in the aftermath of September 11 (and more locally, the attack on Dubh Ardrain), with the free-spending Americans just not travelling here in anything like the numbers they used to. But this summer, it had been a more powerful and even more merciless saboteur that had done the damage. The weather had been utterly bloody miserable, with the relentless rain and unseasonably low temperatures driving the suffering natives abroad in record numbers. So with the Yanks staying put and the Brits buggering off, the tourist economy was like a weakened heart pumping a depleted volume of blood: everyone was suffering, but the more remote you were, the worse it got. McKinley Hall, marketing itself on its isolation, was not best placed to ride out the storm.

Staff were laid off and their duties absorbed into the survivors' workloads, with eighteen-hour days not uncommon to accommodate every whim of what guests the place did attract. Neither the bar nor the kitchen would ever close 42

as long as there was a credit-card-holder still conscious in the building. Alison didn't mind so much though, apart from when her treacherous alarm clock made its implausible claims that morning had come around again after what felt like only twenty minutes' sleep. After months of relentless study, some good, honest, physical hard work still seemed like an easier option than picking up another Chemistry textbook. Plus, a benefit of her expanded workload was that over recent weeks she'd got to help out in the kitchen, rather than just ferrying plates to and from the diners.

The downside of this was that it was against the wishes of the chef, who not only refused to teach her anything, but harassed and abused her even more than previously when she was only waiting tables. His problem wasn't that he was being forced to accept the unskilled help of waiting staff in order to keep the ship afloat (though that was hardly balm to his inflamed ego), but that it was Alison who had been given the nod to do so by Lady Jane. As opposed to Monica, who'd got her jotters instead.

Monica had been there longer than Alison, so it was natural that there would be some resentment about the newer girl surviving the axe, but the more sober consensus was that the decision was as unsurprising as it was inevitable in this necessarily austere regime. Monica was, it was widely accepted, in no imminent danger of death from hard work, moaned constantly about what little she did get around to, and her digits were rumoured to become spontaneously adhesive in the vicinity of a cash register. Mathieson, however, saw properties in her that he judged Alison lacked: principally, big tits and being happy to let him shag her without any complicating commitments such as acknowledging that they were engaged in any kind of relationship. Mathieson didn't go a bundle on Lady Jane, either, though he was less directly vocal in expressing this. To be fair to him (something Alison was far from wont to do), he did have to endure from his boss a degree of attempted interference that someone in his position might consider impertinence bordering on provocation. Lady Jane fancied herself as a cook, or more specifically

'the next Lady Claire Macdonald, except with a half-decent dentist' according to Mathieson. Consequently there were frequent battles, negotiations, compromises and tantrums over the menu, as the boss made her injudicious efforts at pulling rank over someone
she
had hired for his greater expertise. Lady Jane was truly steadfast and business-like in most of her dealings, but perhaps it made her more reassuringly human that she had this flawed compulsion, manifest in the catering equivalent of teaching her grandmother to suck eggs.

In Mathieson's eyes, then, Alison was not only a usurper, but an agent of the enemy: Lady Jane's spy. It was therefore left to the sous-chef, Ger, to make 43

use of her and give her the pointers she required. This was how Mathieson got to have his huff and eat it too: there was a desperately needed extra pair of hands around the kitchen when it was most valuable, but he knew her contribution would fall within his assistant's remit. Thus he could keep up his aggrieved objection performance without cutting off his nose to spite his face. It was difficult to get an accurate handle on the dynamic between the chef and his right-hand man. Mathieson was in his early thirties, something of an aspiring culinary superstar who spurned no opportunity to give the impression that he thought this particular gig was beneath him, an inauspicious step on a career ladder that would inevitably lead to very high places. Alison hoped he got there too, all the way to celebrity chef, with his own publishing deal, TV