The Will To Live

  For the magnificent Tracy Owen, Stuart McConnachie and Barbara Thorns and all the wonderful Undercover Operatives of Purple Class: Kiera Asquith-Brown, Shakira Betts, Charlie Bishop, Kenny Bonwick, Connor Bradick, Lauren Bristow, Alisha Bullard, Alfie Clarke, Cameron Davidson, Olivia Dean, Lydia Fenton, Liam Guile, Kieran Harris, Ryan James, Akshaj Krishnan, Rosie Lee, Jennifer Mouland, Elsbeth Newland, Kane Parsons, Tyler Ransom, Jack Rutherford, Charley Saunders, Georgina Sutton, Cara Swayne, Ella Sweetman, Aidan Towner and Jessica Young

  CAMILLE’S smile faded to a weary yawn. She wasn’t used to hiking, let alone over rough terrain. Every muscle ached, every sinew screamed. She was trying to put on a brave face to please her husband, but she had never been so exhausted: she felt dead on her feet.

  At heart, she was a city girl – the great outdoors scared her. The sky was too big, the open spaces too vast, the silence too overwhelming. Given a choice of honeymoon destination she’d have opted for a suite at the Paris Hilton, not a tent in the Arctic Circle. The polar bear safari had been Lancelot’s idea and she was so head over heels in love with him that she had been happy to go along with it. Camille was happy to go along with anything Lancelot suggested. She’d always imagined herself having a big church wedding – dazzling white dress, angelic-looking choirboys, pealing bells, huge tiered cake; the works – but he’d persuaded her it would be more romantic to do something spontaneous. “Just the two of us, darling. What an adventure!”

  So they’d married in a registry office, the brief ceremony witnessed by strangers he’d plucked off the street. There had been no reception, no party afterwards – not even a small glass of champagne at the bar next door: he’d wanted to save every penny for their honeymoon. Lancelot had promised her the trip of a lifetime and she had to admit that she’d never, ever forget it. So far it had been horrible.

  They hadn’t even seen any bears yet and the flies were a nightmare. Great swarms of mosquitoes bred in every pool and puddle, rising in black clouds as the newlyweds walked across the tundra – circling, buzzing, whining hungrily. If it hadn’t been for her bug jacket and veiled hat, the creatures would have been up Camille’s nose, in her ears and her eyes, piercing her skin, eating her alive like something out of a horror movie. Urgh! It gave her the creeps!

  “Tired, darling?” Her husband interrupted her train of thought. “Get some sleep. I’ll watch over you.”

  Camille crawled into the tent. It was late but the sun hadn’t set. It didn’t at this time of year, which was another thing she found strange and disturbing. She gave another courageous smile before snuggling gratefully into her sleeping-bag. She was deeply asleep in seconds.

  Her husband watched her, recalling the wildlife documentary he’d once seen about the Arctic. The presenter had explained exactly what the voracious mosquitoes could do to exposed flesh. It was time to find out whether he’d been telling the truth. Unzipping Camille’s sleeping-bag and gently peeling back her layers of protective clothing, her husband murmured softly, “Good night. Sleep tight. Hope the bugs do bite.”

  His hope was fulfilled. In less than an hour Camille’s body was completely drained of blood.

  HIGH SOCIETY

  MY name is Poppy Fields. I don’t understand the point of big, expensive christening parties. All that food and drink and polite conversation: who’s it for? It’s not like the baby’s going to remember any of it. The kid doesn’t even get to enjoy the party while it’s happening. The guests are dressed in their best clothes so they spend the entire time treating it like a plague victim. No one wants to come within a hundred metres in case it dribbles on their designer dress, or vomits on their Savile Row suit, or – ultimate horror! – fills its nappy. As for the churchy bit: dangling a bawling infant over an ancient stone font just so you can drip freezing-cold water on its head seems a bit cruel to me. But then, according to Graham, the Strudwicks of Coldean Manor have always been a cruel family.

  It was a wet weekend in late September. The new school year had started and depressing dollops of homework had already sploshed down on our heads. My thrillingly exciting plans for the next two days consisted of:

  1) walking the next-door neighbour’s dog

  2) making a model castle for my history project, and

  3) getting Graham to help me with my algebra.

  I was vaguely aware that Graham’s mum, Sally, was doing the catering at some posh christening. Graham, being Graham, had done some research when Sally landed the job and he’d informed me that baby Marmaduke was the latest addition to a very long line of stinking rich, aristocratic Strudwicks. He’d also thrown in some stuff about their family history but I hadn’t paid that much attention. I wasn’t ever going to meet any of them face to face so the fact that Marmaduke’s long-dead great-grandfather had been an evil, stuck-up fascist pig didn’t affect me personally. Or so I’d thought at the time. How wrong can you be?

  Sally had everything planned and prepared, but just as she was loading her van at 6.37 a.m. on Saturday morning, she had a phone call saying that the two waiters she’d booked had gone down with flu. She made a whole load of increasingly desperate calls but by 7.08 she’d exhausted all her options. At 7.09 Graham rang me to ask if I’d like to earn some extra pocket money.

  It was a simple enough job: all we had to do was carry trays of canapés around and help wash up afterwards. We’d be home by teatime, he said. Well, I’m fascinated by people and it seemed like a brilliant opportunity to study some genuine toffs in their natural habitat. I knew if we were “staff” we’d be practically invisible – observing their behaviour in microscopic detail would be a piece of cake, literally. I figured Mum could walk next-door’s dog for once. Algebra and castle-building could wait. By 7.38 I was washed and dressed in my school uniform – white shirt, black trousers, sensible shoes – suitable waiters’ gear according to Graham’s mum. Two minutes later the three of us were in Sally’s van, hurtling through the rain-lashed autumnal countryside towards Coldean Manor.

  For the first hour all Graham and I did was doze in silence. But as we got closer to our destination I yawned and said, “Go on then, remind me. How old did you say the manor was?”

  “Over five hundred years,” Graham answered promptly. “It was gifted to the family by Henry VIII.”

  “What do you mean, ‘gifted’? Was it a present or something?”

  “Exactly. A reward for services rendered.”

  “Big thing to wrap up,” I said. Graham gave me one of his blink-and-you-miss-it grins. “What ‘services’ did they render to him then?”

  “All sorts. Despatched his enemies. Spied on his friends. And provided so-called ‘evidence’ of witchcraft against Anne Boleyn when Henry got bored with her.”

  “Didn’t she get her head chopped off?” I asked.

  “That’s the one.”

  “Nice family.”

  “Very. They were even worse in the seventeenth century. Changed sides in the English Civil War as soon as they realized Charles I was going to lose.”

  “Loyal too. How lovely.”

  “It gets better. In the 1930s Lord Albert Strudwick – Marmaduke’s great-grandfather – was a Nazi sympathizer. Essentially their whole family history is riddled with dodgy dealings. And they’ve been persecuting the peasantry and slaughtering the local wildlife for centuries,” Graham concluded disapprovingly.

  I looked at his mother who was hunched over the steering-wheel. The weather was appalling – gusts of wind buffeted the van and the rain was so heavy, the windscreen-wipers could barely cope. As a result we were running late, on top of which Sally had to negotiate the torturous twists of a winding lane while simultaneously studying the satnav’s screen. No wonder she looked stressed.

  “Are you sure you wa
nt to work for these people, Mum?” asked Graham.

  “In 100 metres, turn left,” commanded the satnav.

  “It was all a long time ago,” Sally snapped. “I’m sure the present family are perfectly civilized.” She swung the van into a tree-lined drive.

  “I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” said Graham darkly. “From what I read, the estate was supposed to pass on to James, Lord Albert Strudwick’s eldest son, on his death.”

  “And…?” I prompted.

  “James’s wife was killed…”

  My antennae started twitching. “Killed?”

  “In a train crash about twenty years ago. Signal failure. There was a big collision – nasty but not suspicious. James couldn’t cope, apparently. He vanished one morning and hasn’t been seen since. James’s younger brother, Lawrence, is running the place now.”

  Graham and I exchanged Significant Looks, which Sally couldn’t possibly have seen but nevertheless she growled, “Behave yourselves.” The satnav informed her that in 500 metres we would reach our destination. Needlessly Sally pointed out, “We’re nearly there. I want you to stick close to me the whole time. Keep a profile so low you wouldn’t see it through a magnifying glass. No poking about in people’s personal lives, no stumbling over dead bodies and no exposing of murder plots. In fact, I want there to be absolutely no accidental deaths of any kind, OK?”

  It was ironic, really. Sally turned her head to give Graham and me a warning glare. Very Big Mistake.

  She didn’t notice the old tramp stagger into the road until it was too late.

  CAR CRASH

  GRAHAM yelped, I screamed, Sally swerved and the van skidded sideways, missing the tramp by millimetres. The sudden squeal of tyres was followed by the thudding crunch of metal and tinkle of glass as we hit a tree. Then there was a long, shocked silence.

  It was broken by the tramp.

  He’d obviously strayed into Coldean Manor’s drive by accident, because he didn’t seem to know where he was or what he was doing. The fact that Sally had nearly run him over also seemed to have bypassed him completely. He staggered across the road from one verge to the other, turned around a couple of times, then eventually stumbled back towards us and came to rest on the bonnet of the van. We couldn’t see his face – he was wearing a very large, very tatty broad-brimmed hat – but he raised a filthy, grime-caked hand in a gesture of greeting. Then he pointed through the shattered windscreen at Sally and asked genially, “Who are you?”

  “Sally Marshall,” she whispered. Her voice was shaky and she was pale with shock.

  “Sally Marshall,” he repeated. “Good, good. What do you do, Sally Marshall?”

  “I’m a caterer.”

  “And what do you cater for?”

  “Weddings. Funerals. Christenings.”

  “Christenings? Yes. That’s right. Good. Very good. Lovely. Well, carry on. Keep up the good work.”

  He turned, and started weaving his way unsteadily back down the drive towards the main road.

  Sally watched him go past, her mouth opening and closing a couple of times. Then it dawned on her that if her van was wrecked, her trays of oh-so-carefully prepared christening nibbles were likely to be wrecked too. She went even whiter.

  “I’ve got 300 blinis in the back!” she gasped hoarsely. “My God! The pavlovas! What if they’re smashed?”

  Graham patted her hand and looked anxious. After a moment or two Sally made a supreme effort to pull herself together. “Let’s just get there, shall we? I’ll sort it out then.”

  The van had stalled on impact with the tree and, although the engine grumbled into life when Sally turned the key, its wheels had sunk deep into the soft, wet grass and no matter how hard she revved she couldn’t shift it.

  Graham and I jumped out – stupidly leaving our coats tucked under the front seat. On our first shove the wheels spun furiously and we were spattered with clods of mud from head to toe. We finally managed to get the van onto solid ground, but then the engine sputtered and died so we had to push it all the way up to the house while Sally sat in the front and steered.

  When we reached Coldean Manor – red-faced, muddied, soaked, out of breath and pushing a smashed-up van – keeping a low profile wasn’t really an option.

  “Oh Lord,” drawled an aristocratic voice as we ground to a halt by the front door. Standing in the massive stone porch was a young woman in an extremely expensive-looking silk dressing gown having a not-so-sneaky cigarette. She had almost white-blonde hair and pale blue eyes which pierced us with an icy stare. Her face would have been pretty – beautiful, even – if it hadn’t had a hooked, hawk-like nose stuck in the middle of it. “Look what the cat dragged in.” She blew smoke in our direction and then called into the house, “Jennifer? Jen! Cousin, dear! Cuz! Your caterer’s arrived. Looks like botulism on wheels! E. coli on a plate! I shan’t be eating any.” The gales of laughter that followed her little joke were deeply unpleasant. Graham looked as uncomfortable as me but there wasn’t anything we could say – not if his mum was going to keep the job. I suddenly knew how generations of persecuted peasants must have felt. Revolting.

  Sally, who was now in a state of extreme anxiety over the condition of her canapés, fortunately hadn’t heard the remark. She was rummaging in the glove compartment for her paperwork, muttering, “Contact! Who’s my contact? What’s her name?”

  Just then another young woman, who looked very like the first one but seemed kinder and gentler, came into the porch carrying a sleeping baby in her arms. She threw an angry look at Silky Smoker and said, in a voice that had the same crisp accent, “Ignore Lydia, she’s got a cruel sense of humour. For heaven’s sake, Lyd, put that cigarette out! Don’t you know the damage smoke can inflict on a baby’s lungs?”

  She’d addressed her remarks to her cousin, so when she actually turned to look at Graham and me and took in the mud and the smashed-up van, she did a big double take. “Goodness! What on earth happened? Did you have some sort of accident?”

  “A man stepped out in front of us,” I said.

  “Heavens! Was he hurt?”

  “No,” Graham told her. “Mum hit a tree instead.”

  By now Sally had found the paperwork and she climbed out of the buckled driver’s side. “Jennifer Thomas?” she said.

  “That’s right. Come in, come under cover, you’re all getting terribly wet.”

  Once we were safely in the porch, Sally prodded the baby gently. “You must be Marmaduke,” she said in a squooshy voice. “Aren’t you a lovely boy? Are you looking forward to your big day?”

  Marmaduke didn’t answer – in fact, he didn’t even open his eyes. Wise baby. Instead his mother said, “It sounds like you’ve had a terrible time getting here. I am sorry.”

  “It was OK until that idiot tried to kill himself,” Sally replied grimly, checking her watch. “Look, I’ll sort the van out later. Right now I’d better get on. I’m running late, I’m afraid. There’s a lot to do.”

  “Yes, of course. Lydia, could you give Gethin a shout? My husband will show you where everything should go, Mrs Marshall. And you two…” She looked at Graham and me thoughtfully. “Do you want to come and get washed? I can probably find you some clean clothes too, if you like?”

  “They’re not guests,” objected Lydia.

  “No, but they are people. Children. And they’re horribly wet. They’ll catch their death of cold.”

  “It’s their own fault if they fell over,” shrugged Lydia.

  “Really, Lydia. Must you be so unkind? Noblesse oblige and all that.”

  Her cousin lit up another cigarette and said nothing.

  “Come on, follow me,” ordered Jennifer, hurrying us and the baby away from the toxic fumes.

  “OK. Great. Thanks.” Graham and I were starting to shiver. The prospect of a shower and some dry clothes was very appealing.

  So that was that. We all went into the house and Gethin, Jennifer’s husband, arrived – cheery, dark-haired and so
unding very Welsh. He led Sally off in one direction and we followed Jennifer and Marmaduke in another. We trooped along behind them towards a huge staircase. The walls were oak panelled and hung with portraits. Generations of Strudwicks, all with the same Viking-blonde hair and cold blue eyes, peered contemptuously down their sharply hooked, hawk-like noses at us. The largest painting was of a man dressed in a grey double-breasted suit. His hair was slicked back and he looked like something out of an old wartime newsreel so I guessed this must be Albert. His hands were clasped tightly together in his lap, fingers interlocking, white at the knuckles as if he could barely resist the urge to salute and scream, “Heil Hitler!”

  Jennifer had climbed only three steps when she stopped in her tracks. “Actually,” she said, turning to face us, “maybe we ought to go the other way. Uncle Lawrence can be a bit … funny with strangers… Well, of course, he’s terribly unwell, poor man, in a lot of pain. I suppose one can hardly blame him…”

  She led us back through the house, past the kitchen where Sally was surveying her wrecked raspberry pavlovas in near despair. Another Strudwick, who was basically Jennifer in a man’s suit and turned out to be her brother, Julian, was looking at the same devastation. Unaccountably he was rubbing his hands together in delight. “Are you doing mess?” he asked. “How fantastic. That was my favourite pud at school.”

  Sally’s eyes narrowed. “Eton?”

  “Of course.”

  Her eyes gleamed with sudden inspiration and she started scraping the pavlovas into a heap.

  Graham and I left her to it, following Jennifer up the back staircase which led into what must once have been the servants’ quarters.

  By now I was having fantasies about a steaming power shower, perfumed body wash and a fluffy towel. What we got was rather different. Apologizing for the sub-zero temperature – “Uncle doesn’t heat this part of the house” – Jennifer showed us to a spacious but arctic bathroom, where we were permitted to scrape the mud off our faces and wash them (in freezing water) with an old lump of soap (that was as hard as marble and about as fragrant) and towel ourselves dry (on what appeared to be a couple of dishcloths). She went in search of spare clothes and while we waited for her to return I said to Graham, “Not exactly luxurious, is it? I thought you said the Strudwicks were rolling in it.”