Page 119 of Cooking Up a Christmas Storm
‘So if they end up here, then we could totally argue that they had to pay us?’
‘And if they say no?’
That was a very real risk. If some of their guests just somehow ended up at the wrong party then it was entirely possible the travel companies would just shrug and claim it wasn’t their problem.
‘That’s why the plan has to work this way,’ she explained, trying to keep the wobble out of her voice. Jodie’s plan to fill the ballroom had three prongs. Firstly, Bella’s council of war had been set to work drumming up as much local interest as possible. Reverend Jill, in particular, had been a star. It seemed like most of her congregations from across the area were now planning to be there. Secondly, Jodie had worked the phones and charmed as many of their previous bookings as possible. As she’d expected, most had politely explained that they now had other plans, but a few had accepted that they’d got the wrong impression about Lowbridge’s event being cancelled and reinstated their bookings. The third prong was the biggest, the riskiest, and by far the most legally questionable, and it all had to happen this afternoon and nothing at all could go wrong. In Jodie’s experience plans she made did tend to go wrong.
‘I want to come with you,’ Bella insisted.
Jodie shook her head. ‘We can’t really stop for puke breaks. And you need to be here. There’s deliveries you need to check.’
‘I know. What if it doesn’t work though?’
Jodie didn’t have an answer to that. The headline to her plan was so simple. The McKenzie estate had stolen their customers and their band. Now they were going to steal them back, and just a few extra paying customers besides. The details were a little more intricate. Because of the scale of the McKenzie estate guests were being ferried from their accommodation in the hotel block and the cabin and lodges around the estate in branded minibuses and four-wheel drives.
That was a problem because the local drivers, at least, would know the way, and they couldn’t send Lowbridge cars to pick the guests up, because key to Jodie’s plan to get paid was that they were able to say the official transport had brought the guests to them and they had simply helpfully offered hospitality to get their rivals out of an embarrassing screw-up. As it turned out, Storm Gemma had helped their plan. Since the storm, Adam’s drive over to the enemy side of the hills had confirmed there were trees down across McKenzie’s land, so a diversion sign or two wouldn’t seem out of place.
Those diversions would send the drivers across the estate to the closest point to the Lowbridge land, and over the border onto a farm track that would bring them down to the castle, where Bella and Adam would greet them in full laird and lady charm-offensive mode and hopefully have everyone into the ballroom and nicely primed with whisky or champagne before too many objections were raised. In short, they were planning to kidnap a Hogmanay party. What could possibly go wrong?
The first thing that could go wrong was that Jodie’s lead co-conspirator could very easily refuse to work with her. To take the diversion signs Jodie had carefully created and printed with McKenzie estate logos over to their destination they needed a van, and Lowbridge’s favourite man with a van had left every room they’d been in together since she returned.
So now she was standing outside the coach house with a pile of home-made signs at her feet and only Adam’s assurance that Pavel had promised he was still in to keep her company. If he did turn up she had three hours, give or take, alone with him and not a clue what she could possibly say. She checked her watch. Five past three. They needed all the signs in place by five thirty. Early enough that people wouldn’t already have been picked up. Not so early that anyone had time to notice and wonder if something was awry.
At ten past three Pavel’s van pulled up in front of her. He jumped out without a word, opened the side door and lifted her signs in. ‘I’m doing this for Adam and Bella.’
‘I know. Me too.’
He nodded and climbed back into the van.
Jodie had hand-drawn a map of the McKenzie estate and marked where the van could easily access, without raising suspicion, and which junctions signs needed placing at. She pulled it from her pocket and smoothed it out on the dashboard of the van. ‘It’s a bit rough.’
Pavel inspected her handiwork. ‘You did this from memory?’
‘Yeah.’
‘It’s good.’ He tapped one of the tracks she’d marked as accessible to the van. ‘We won’t get down there though. Not after the amount of rain we’ve had lately.’ He thought for a second. ‘If we park up there,’ tapping the map again, ‘the van’ll be hidden by the trees and we can do this part on foot.’
‘OK.’
He pulled the van onto the road. ‘Do you think this’ll work?’
‘If it doesn’t will Adam really sell to John McKenzie?’
‘I don’t know if he’ll have much choice. Having the accommodation ready helps but that’s longer term, isn’t it? They need some money now.’
‘The coach house looks great,’ Jodie offered. It really did. Like everything else he did, Pavel had clearly lavished care and attention on his work. ‘You’ve done a brilliant job.’
He nodded an acknowledgement but didn’t reply. Jodie braced herself for the journey to proceed in silence. Silence made her brain itchy. She forced herself to think through the plan to quiet it.Just concentrate on one thought. Don’t let your brain freewheel wherever it wants to go. A seagull swooped low in front of the van. Jodie remembered being told once that there’s no bird called a seagull. There were herring gulls, and black-headed gulls and… she couldn’t name any more types of gull. Were terns gulls? Or shags? She giggled at the fact that there was a bird called a shag.
‘What’s funny?’ Pavel asked.
She was supposed to be thinking about the plan. ‘Nothing.’
And now she wasn’t thinking about the plan or about seagulls. She was thinking about Pavel Stone. About the closeness of him. The kindness of him. The warmth. The touch. The desperate hole in her heart that he’d left behind. And now her brain was going to all the places she desperately wanted not to be thinking about. The adage that it was better to have loved and lost floated into her mind. Whoever had said that was even more of an idiot than Jodie. Loving someone and losing them was torture.
Dusk fell as they approached the McKenzie estate by the main entrance. They’d decided that was the best option to begin with. Pavel had worked up there recently enough that his van wouldn’t arouse too much suspicion around the main car park, and it would give them the chance to scout out how many staff were around. Jodie was hoping that, with the event in the evening and the festive holiday, most of the employees would either be coming in later or fully occupied during the afternoon.
The lights were on in the main visitor centre but the sign outside informed them that the centre closed at four p.m. on New Year’s Eve. ‘Right. Let’s leave the van here. If it’s spotted you can say you came to check on something on-site after the storm.’
