Killing a Unicorn (15 page)

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Authors: Marjorie Eccles

BOOK: Killing a Unicorn
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She had a divorced mother who owned and ran the hotel where she worked — another beautiful woman, from whom Bibi had inherited her looks but not her reserved nature. Carys Morgan was an expansively dramatic woman, who had once worked as a small-time actress and had been married for a short time to a moderately wealthy businessman. Using the money from her divorce settlement, she had worked her socks off to make a good life for herself and her child. Twelve years later, the determination to get where she was had begun to show in the hard lines around her mouth and the calculation in her eyes. It had cost her a good deal to turn the Ascomb Arms from a village pub into a small, decidedly upmarket place, furnished in country house style and with a growing reputation for comfort, care and excellent food. She employed a superb French chef and organized gourmet weekends, which were booked up months ahead, where she swanned around among her guests, made up and dressed to the nines, a gin and tonic in one hand, cigarette in an amber holder in the other, keeping an eagle eye on everyone and everything.
She had not approved of Chip, whom she saw as an obstacle to her plans for Bibi's future. Bibi, she'd long ago decided, would continue to run the profitable business built up so arduously over the years when she, Carys, retired. Of course, that wouldn't be for years yet, Carys had no intention of throwing in the towel in the foreseeable future. But it would take some time, anyway, for Bibi to learn enough to assume her mantle. She wasn't cast in the same mould as her mother and was still a little naive, unprepared. And perhaps Carys hadn't met Chip in a good light, seeing him among his rakish cronies, who didn't impress her with their money and their noisy cars and their Hooray Henry lifestyles.
But more than that, she saw he had every intention of
taking Bibi away and installing her in his family home. Carys wasn't unaware of the advantages to Bibi of marrying into what she thought of as the county set, but she'd made it her business to look into Chip's affairs and what she'd found there hadn't reassured her. There was no money behind him, and Chip himself didn't impress her as being the sort who would suddenly turn into a solid proposition. She thought it very likely, taking it from the perspective of her own ambitions and inclinations, that he was out for what he could get, namely the ownership of the Ascomb Arms at some future date.
So she'd put her foot down. Her daughter was of age, her decisions were her own, but Carys had made it clear that if Bibi went ahead and married Chip, she could expect nothing from her, now or in the future. There hadn't been nearly as much opposition as she'd expected, confirming her opinion of Chip as a man of straw. In fact, Bibi had been no match for her strong-minded mother and, torn between the two, had given in and chosen to stay with Carys. Perhaps she had, after all, inherited a little of her mother's self-preservation.
‘It's only for the time being,' she'd pleaded with Chip. ‘She'll come round, I'll make her see …' But this wasn't what Chip, hurt and rejected, had wanted to hear. He'd shrugged, pretended not to care, and left. He'd never in his life had need to force his attentions on a girl who didn't reciprocate and he wouldn't start now. There were, after all, plenty more fish in the sea.
A couple of years later, again with a crowd, up for the racing, he'd gone back to stay at Ascomb, as an act of bravado, perhaps, or to reassure himself that he'd done the right thing in leaving Bibi, and was cured of her. He'd found her still there, still as beautiful as ever, and discovered himself still in the throes of his infatuation. Yet … he saw a remarkable change in her — the same lovely face, the remote delicacy that had so charmed him, but even more elusive. She'd gone vegetarian. She wore clothes of a vaguely ethnic nature and talked of alternative lifestyles.
She liked to think of herself as a free spirit, full of beautiful thoughts. Yet, behind it was a stubbornness he wouldn't have suspected. He might have said ruthlessness if he hadn't been so besotted. Before, she'd seemed young for her age, over-protected by that Welsh dragon of a mother; at times she'd seemed a child almost, but now she was a woman, with a mind of her own, and this only added to her attraction. All his old feelings came rushing back.
‘Well, Bibi.'
‘Well, Chip,' she'd replied coolly.
‘So you're still here? And your mother?'
He learned with a shock that Carys was dead, that she'd been killed a couple of years before when her car collided with a tractor coming out of a farm-turning on the road from York, and Bibi was trying her best to run the hotel on her own. It was fairly obvious, however, that Carys had been proved right. Bibi might be older, she might have the willingness, but she was woefully lacking in her mother's business sense. The hotel, now, was not well run. Chip saw signs of neglect everywhere, the French chef had left and the food was not up to the old high standards, reflecting too much Bibi's own vegetarian inclinations. She had no chance of emulating her mother in the nicely judged way she mixed with her guests, either, cordial and welcoming, yet keep-your-distance. She couldn't even control the noisy excesses of the group of young men Chip was with — though she tried, as her mother had, by chatting with them, being friendly, accepting the odd drink. More than the odd one, if the truth were told. There'd been a riotous party on the last night which had resulted in vociferous complaints from the other guests in the hotel.
Chip paused in his narrative, passed his tongue round his dry lips. Kate reached out to the carafe of iced water she'd placed on the table earlier and poured him a glass.
‘Thanks.' He took a deep draught and smiled gratefully, though the ice in it that she'd begged from the kitchen had long since melted.
Up to this point, Crouch had allowed him to carry on
without interruption. Now that Chip had at last begun to talk he didn't want anything to interrupt the flow. But there was something he needed to know and this pause gave him the chance to ask it. ‘What about the child?'
Chip stared at him. ‘Jasie wasn't born then. I still wanted to marry her and take her away from it all — things were in a hopeless mess, and there didn't seem to be a lot of hope of retrieving them. She wasn't Carys, she hadn't got her push.'
‘And what did she say to that?'
‘She said she realized that things were not going as well as they should, but everything was about to change. She had in fact already hired someone to come in and manage the place. He was arriving the following week and between them they'd soon have things back to what they had been. Anybody with half an eye could see it wasn't going to work, the place had gone too far downhill for someone as unfitted for the job as Bibi to pull it back. But she insisted she could, and this manager, she said, had come highly recommended … together, they'd get the hotel on its feet again. How naive can you get?'
‘It was Armstrong? Graham Armstrong was the new manager?'
‘Yes,' he said bitterly. ‘And he turned out to be a total disaster, though I'd no idea of this until later. There was nothing I could do to influence her. She still refused to marry me, so I left and that was that. As far as I was concerned, it was over. Done with. Finis.'
And yet, whatever he'd said and thought about other fish in the sea, he hadn't been able to get her out of his mind. She'd haunted his dreams, wouldn't be dismissed from his life. He didn't let it show, outwardly he went on being the same good old Chip, hail fellow well met, with women still featuring largely in his life, plenty of whom he fancied, but none of them enough to want to marry.
‘Then, years later, out of the blue, I had a telephone call from her. She begged me to come and see her. She said she was desperate, but wouldn't say anything more until I got
there. I drove up, didn't bother to book, and when I arrived I found the Ascomb Arms had been taken over by someone else. It was a comfortable enough place to stay, the food was OK but nothing special, they'd redecorated and made it spruce again, but — ordinary, somehow. I suppose they just lacked Carys's flair. They told me Bibi still worked in the hotel a few days each week, but she was married now, and she had a child, though she was separated from her husband. She still lived in the village, in a cottage down a narrow lane, just off the main street. There was something cagey about the way they spoke about her husband. I suppose I wasn't really surprised to hear that he was the bloke who'd come to manage the hotel. Armstrong.'
Chip drank some more of the tepid water. He hadn't been sure whether it was a good idea to see her or not, but he'd gone to the address the hotel had given him, all the same, and found her with this little boy, about six years old, Jasie — or James, he'd still been then. Chip had always thought the boy's insistence on being called by the new name his school friends in Middleton Thorpe had given him was one way of pretending that the life he'd left behind had never happened.
If Chip had been surprised to see the change in Bibi the first time he'd returned, this time he was astounded — and enraged — at what marriage to this man Armstrong had done to her. She'd never been an assertive person, but now she was cowed and seemed frightened of her own shadow. She'd clutched the child to her, he'd clung to her, and Chip wasn't sure who was protecting whom.
‘When she saw me she burst into tears. “I knew you'd come,” she said, and begged me to take them both away. I could see how desperate she was. I thought at first that Armstrong had been abusing either her or the child, but it wasn't that — not physical abuse, anyway. He was just simply paranoic, insanely jealous if she so much as looked at another man, which was unfortunate, the sort of work she did, meeting different people all the time. I wondered
why in God's name she'd ever married the man. Then I realized she'd never had the chance to find out what he was really like — they'd been married within a few weeks of his arriving in Ascomb. That staggered me. A bit quick off the mark, wasn't it? I said, but she just shrugged and said well, he could charm the birds off the tree when he wanted.'
A bitter pill that had been to swallow, after his own rejections, one he hadn't quite managed to down even yet.
‘Even if she'd suspected he was out for the main chance, her mother had left a will that stopped anyone but Bibi getting their hands on the hotel. If she sold it, she'd only get half the proceeds, the rest would go to some charity or other. And anyway, he was a great ideas man, she said, and she believed him when he told her she was sitting on a little gold mine, that he could help her put the place back on the map, if she'd give him his head.'
Chip looked down at his shoes. ‘Later, I came to think she'd actually been under no illusions, she understood he was offering his services in return for marriage. I suppose she thought she could do worse, it was a fair enough exchange. But she couldn't have had any idea what her life would be from then on. She became pregnant straight away which gave him the excuse to take complete charge of everything to do with the hotel, and maybe it would have worked out OK, except that gradually, her personal life became hell. She swore she'd tried to make the marriage work — Jasie needed a father — but it was no use and in the end, she found courage enough to sell the hotel over his head, sue for a divorce and walk away from the situation. It didn't stop him from pestering her, though. He followed her everywhere she went, besieged her with telephone calls and threats. He tried to get possession of Jasie, but he was refused, and ordered to stop persecuting her, which of course he didn't. She applied for a court order, a whatyoumaycallit -'
‘Restraining order.'
‘Whatever. Fat lot of notice he took of it. Well, anyway, she got desperate, and that was when she rang me for help, when I went up there. I went to the cottage several times, walked her home after she'd finished work at the hotel … and he must have seen us, or found out. That last night, the bastard set fire to her house — with her and Jasie in it. It was sheer bloody good luck I happened to be there and saw the smoke … it was off the beaten track, along a lane that led to nowhere, not a place anyone actually had reason to pass. Minutes after they got out, it went up like a torch.'
It was some time before he was able to resume. ‘Two lives nearly sacrificed — and what did he get for it? Pleaded diminished responsibility and was sent down for a mere seven years — one of those bleeding heart judges who believed him when he said he hadn't known they were in the house at the time, that he'd been provoked by being denied access to his child. Despite the fact that he'd said at the trial that he'd intended if he couldn't have Jasie, nobody would.'
There was a long silence.
‘He's admitted the offence, addressed his problems and showed contrition. A psychiatric assessment has judged him no longer a danger. If he really
wants
the child,' Kate said, ‘he won't harm him.'
‘Psychiatric my backside … I've no time for that sort of claptrap! She'd tried to take her own life, you know, and afterwards … well, that was why she asked me for help, she was just so all out desperate, I'd no illusions about that. It was a long shot, God knows, after all those years. But she'd nobody else to turn to and I'd always sworn … Anyway, I took her away, brought her down here. The whole thing had knocked her absolutely sideways, ruined her life — and not just hers …' He shifted on his seat, reddened. ‘You know how it is, this sort of thing has a knock-on effect, it's not only the victim that suffers.'

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