Kiss and Tell (122 page)

Landlady Denise took this as a cue to join her new favourite barflies to discuss the hottest local gossip.

‘Seen who your best owner’s canoodling with in all the papers today?’ she asked Rory. ‘Talk about two “souls lost in one moment” …’ she sang a line from the previous year’s number-one hit, her voice a surprisingly sweet and tuneful alto.

‘I’ve not seen a paper all day,’ Rory admitted with a yawn. ‘Anyway, as she’s always reminding me, Faith’s my best owner, not Dillon Rafferty.’

‘That’s what I’m saying.’ Denise slid a copy of the
Daily News
across to them. ‘Take a look at this, boys.’

The red tops had all gone wild that morning with photographic proof that Dillon Rafferty had been cheating on poor Sylva Frost – super-mum, super-WAG, super-woman. Bleary photos of Dillon kissing a mysterious, slim blonde in a sun-soaked Caribbean swimming pool had been syndicated everywhere. Nobody knew who she was, the rags claimed, but there was no mistaking the red-hot passion between her and the rock star in the blue water.

‘Bloody hell – it
is
her!’ Rory’s jaw dropped.

‘Naughty old Dillon.’ Lough whistled, tilting his head this way and that to try to make sense of the picture.

‘Taken from a hot-air balloon,’ Den explained. ‘These are her legs around him here, you see, and they’re both looking up so you can clearly see their faces, even though the features are a bit fuzzy. Looks much sexier without a beard, don’t you think?’

‘Faith or Dillon?’ Lough lost interest as his mobile beeped a text alert.

Rory was too poleaxed to notice the way Lough’s face lit up as he read it. Taking his drink, the New Zealander headed outside to write a reply.

‘You all right, Rory love?’ Denise asked worriedly. The young man’s face had drained totally of colour.

‘Think I need something stronger in this,’ he mumbled, sliding his glass forward.

‘You sure?’ Denise turned to hold it up to the whisky optic, eager to confirm it was the Moncrieffs’ groom and find out the girl’s surname so she could call the
Sun
news desk and claim the reward on offer. ‘So you’re certain that’s Faith with Dillon Rafferty?’

‘Sure.’ He stared down at the photo, swallowing hard.

‘Only I thought she was – well – a little less attractive, shall we say?’

‘Faith is fucking beautiful!’ Rory howled, making the landlady step back.

‘What’s her second name again?’ she asked casually.

‘Beautiful,’ Rory repeated, draining his first scotch since Boxing Day the previous year. It tasted like nectar on fire.

Half an hour later, Lough returned to find the bar unmanned and Rory with his head in his hands and the best malt bottle from the shelves on the table beside him.

‘Beautiful,’ he kept repeating. ‘Shesh beautiful and I’ve losht her for ever.’

‘Is this the slurring thing because of the accident or are you pissed?’

‘Both, I guess.’

Half-supporting, half-dragging him to a quiet window seat, Lough placed himself squarely between Rory and the bar.

After almost three teetotal months, Rory was an instant drunk these days.

‘Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck,’ he sighed quietly, pressing his face to his palms.

‘Definitely a fuck-up,’ Lough conceded. ‘Blew your chance there.’

Rory felt anger flare. ‘What the hell do you know? You’re in love with Tash Beauchamp, and that’s the mother and father of all lost causes.’

‘Say again?’ The voice had a chill factor that could frostbite any accusing finger.

But Rory was too hurt to care. ‘It just ain’t gonna happen, Lough.’

‘You really think not?’ The chill hit bone-deep.

Rory raised his eyes to Lough’s face and two war masks squared up over the quiet pub table. The Brit didn’t really fancy a fight: Lough was seriously ripped. The muscles on his arms were a landscape of hilly sinew and power, the left one covered with those distinctive tribal tattoos. But tonight he was too beaten up by jealousy to care if he took a few extra punches. It needed saying. ‘I think not.’

It was a decisive moment, a pebble spun down in to their new well of friendship to check its depth. It was a long, long time before an echo came back up to them.

‘Back home, there’s a mountain on the North Island called Taranaki,’ Lough said eventually. ‘Maori legend has it that it used to live with its friends Tongariro, Ruapehu and Ngauruhoe, but then it made the mistake of falling in love with Tongariro’s pretty wife, Pihanga. When Tongariro found out a huge battle ensued and Taranaki ultimately lost. He uprooted and plunged west towards the setting sun, gouging out a deep, wide trench through the land as he went. The next day, a stream of clear water sprang from the side of his friend Tongariro, and it flowed down the deep scar that Taranaki had left on his journey to form the Whanganui River. There are those that say Taranaki is silently brooding and will one day return inland to fight Tongariro again. The Maori are scared of living between the mountains for that reason.’

Rory listened, his head on one side, the alcohol rush receding. ‘It’s a beautiful story. I’d like to go there one day.’

His companion didn’t look up, the pain of the story having ripped out his throat.

‘Are you saying property prices will suffer between here and Maccombe because people will fear living between you and Hugo?’ Rory checked.

Lough smiled sadly, looking into his drink and shaking his head.

‘Or are you saying that Hugo will cry such a stream of tears the Moncrieffs will need to sandbag Lime Tree Farm?’

‘Nah,’ he laughed, surprised at the strange liberation joking about it granted. He looked up at Rory. ‘I’m saying you’re right, Rory. Fuck it, you’re right.’

Rory nodded, appreciating how hard that must be for him to admit. He was nowhere near that close to admitting it about himself and Faith yet, despite clear photographic evidence to show him it was another lost cause.

‘We all climb the wrong mountains sometimes,’ he sighed now, ‘but that doesn’t make it any easier when we fall off the side.’

Lough managed another rueful smile.

‘I’ve never even got past base camp,’ Rory admitted. Then he thought about Faith and his heart blew open. ‘Faith’s not a mountain.’ His head went into his hands again. ‘She’s my Sherpa. She’d climb alongside me all the way. Oh fuck.’

Lough looked down as his phone beeped with a text message. It was just Penny, back late from Hartpury after a very long negotiation to sell a horse, asking whether the yard horses had been fed and whether he had a note for her?

‘Shit!’ He groped inside his coat pocket and fished out the note India had written hours earlier, two hand-written pages in a shredded envelope now crusted like papier maché after so many downpours had seeped through Lough’s seams and into the jacket lining.

Before he could phone Penny to explain and apologise, Rory started prising the leaves apart. ‘They’ll never know – we’ll dry it on the radiator and have it looking like new in no time … Hang on.’ He started to read a few lines. ‘Fuck
ing
hell. Listen to this …’

India had, it seemed, stumbled on the truth behind a career- and marriage-wrecking myth. She and her brother Rufus were very close to their cousins by marriage, both of whom had been at the New Year’s Eve party. Young Huey Moncrieff, in particular, had reported having a fantastic time there, something he’d been boasting about at his boarding school ever since. His GCSE work had improved no end: he’d leaped up the grade forecasts and was predicted all As and Bs. But it wasn’t until Rufus took his cousin out for an end-of-term drink before the boy flew home to South Africa that the full story
came out, and had now started the slow process of filtering its way back through the family.

‘
“He told Rufe that he got very intimate with a girl at the Lime Tree party”
,’ Rory read aloud now. ‘
“It was in the dark in the hayloft and it
definitely
went past first base, but not a lot further because he bottled it when his mother appeared on the scene. He doesn’t know who the girl was, just that she was older and very experienced. Rufe said nothing to him about what’s happened, and we really don’t want to get him into any trouble and he doesn’t think he’s done anything wrong”
…’ It was obvious from the letter that she wanted to protect her cousin. It was equally clear that the man who’d got carried away with a drunken Beccy on New Year’s Eve hadn’t been Hugo Beauchamp, it had been Huey Moncrieff. And to the young Hugo’s mind, the encounter had been a first sexual experience close to perfection.

Rory and Lough stared at one another in shock.

‘And Beccy cried rape.’ Rory whistled in disbelief as he read through the crumpled pages.

‘She never said that,’ Lough snapped. ‘Lem said that.’

‘She’s a hysteric.’ He handed the pages back. ‘Everyone knows she’s a coin short of operating normally.’

‘Take that back!’

‘She’s sweet, but she’s a fruitcake. You don’t know her, Lough.’

Lough carefully placed the sodden letter on the table. ‘Actually I do. We text a lot.’

Rory stared at him in amazement. ‘And how long has this been going on?’ he asked, sounding like an elderly aunt.

‘On and off, about a year.’

‘A
year
?’

‘Since before I came here. That was her texting earlier. She’s very low right now.’

‘I’m not surprised. She’s screwed up a few lives recently, not least her own.’

‘Don’t be so quick to judge her,’ Lough said quietly. ‘She’s taken a lot of wrong turns in life, and I know all about that. But she’s amazing underneath.’ A smile touched his lips.

Rory’s face brightened with a sudden realisation. ‘You think you’ve got the loose change to make her add up, don’t you?’

Lough glared at him with such force Rory thought his eyeballs would freeze. ‘It’s not like that.’

‘Wake up and smell the blue mountain coffee, Lough,’ Rory laughed. ‘You’re half way up the tallest peak already, but you’ve been too busy looking across at Pihanga’s pretty rockface to notice you’ve climbed so high.’

Another pebble fell into the well. This time it span for so long Denise had time to take their empty glasses, wipe the table, double-check Faith’s surname really was Beautiful and pick a couple of dead leaves off the carnations in the vase between them before it splashed into the water.

‘Can I borrow your car?’ Lough asked Rory urgently.

‘Totalled it ages ago,’ Rory apologised. ‘I’ve got Hugo’s quad bike here. Any use?’

‘Not to get to Windsor.’ His Yamaha was up on a stand in one of Gus’s barns with its back wheel off because he hadn’t got around to fitting a new drive chain. ‘I’ll have to take my horsebox.’

Rory shoved the battered note under his nose. ‘Go back to Lime Tree Farm and show them this: they’ll lend you a car. If not, just nick Gus’s bike – he leaves the keys tucked in his helmet lining for a quick getaway these days in case Penny discovers Lucy’s been in touch and starts waving the kitchen knives around.’

He was out of the door before Rory could ask him why on earth he wanted to go to Windsor. It seemed an odd time to start sightseeing.

Chapter 82

In Benedict House, a fine-looking Georgian villa sitting in ten acres of meticulously landscaped grounds where Royal Berkshire met commuter-land Surrey, Pascal had, for several hours, been enjoying Henrietta’s hospitality as both patiently awaited Beccy’s awakening in the pretty bedroom above their heads with its Laura Ashley wallpaper festooned with crystals and dream catchers. According to her mother, she had been lying wide awake in there for days reading endless trashy novels, watching daytime TV and crying a lot. But that day, rather curiously, she had been largely comatose. It was now almost dark, and she was still asleep.

‘Her painkillers are very powerful,’ Henrietta apologised as she made yet more coffee.

Pascal’s mobile phone rang out with a refrain from Debussy’s Arabesque No. 1, making Henrietta jump.

He held up his hand apologetically as he took the call. ‘’allo?’

‘This is Lough Strachan again. Please don’t hang up.’

‘Okay.’ Pascal was magnanimous.

‘I have to talk to with Beccy Sergeant.’

‘
Oui, bien sûr, moi aussi.
’

‘No, I’m not Aussie, I’m from New Zealand.’

There was a brief pause before Pascal confirmed: ‘I am visiting Beccy now, but she sleeps.’

‘I must speak with her.’

‘
Porquoi?
’

The New Zealand boy was clearly not a great communicator, especially on the phone to a stranger who couldn’t understand much of his accent, but he said enough to convince Pascal to give him the address for Benedict House and agree to wait for him to arrive.

After the call, he glanced at his watch impatiently. He had booked a room at the Great Fosters, where he was very much looking forward to sampling the restaurant. He’d had half a mind to tell Lough Strachan not to come, but he had a feeling this break could be his only way of getting to the bottom of this whole sorry riddle, and he owed it to his beautiful Xandra to find out the truth.

He’d never seen the home where his wife’s first marriage had been thrown against the rocks, and felt as though he had walked on to the set of a Jane Austen costume drama; it was so pretty yet fusty and formal. He found it all the more strange and disconcerting to be so politely welcomed by the very blonde, very English Henrietta. She had even baked croissants in his honour. James was away in Scotland, playing in a golf tournament with other retired bankers, she’d apologised, to Pascal’s great relief.

And while Beccy was childlike in her morbid distress and wouldn’t talk to him at all, Henrietta proved as sensible and openminded as she was protective and concerned.

‘It was my older daughter Em who Beccy really talked to about the … sexual encounter with Hugo,’ she explained, turning as pink as the stargazer lilies bursting from pots in her conservatory, but equally open. ‘She hasn’t said a lot since. She is very embarrassed
about it, and the riding accident has knocked so much of the stuffing out of her.’