Christmas At Pemberley: And the Bride Wore Prada. Katie Oliver
your gob shut about this. And don’t tell anyone I’m coming up there.’
Helen entered the Draemar Arms pub late that afternoon and slid into a seat at a booth in the back. Unable to locate Mrs Campbell to ask to borrow a car, she’d offered to do the grocery shop for Colm in exchange for the use of his Range Rover, and he’d agreed.
She took off her hat and gloves and shrugged off her coat – the snow might’ve stopped, but it was still bloody cold ‒ and glanced around the dim interior.
At this hour of the day, the place was nearly empty. Tom hadn’t arrived yet.
She got up to order two pints from the bar and returned with them to the booth, then took a sip of her lager and settled in to wait.
Colm took out the carrots and potatoes and rinsed them under the tap. He skinned the carrots with long, sure strokes of the peeling knife. He set the frothy tops and peels aside to flavour the broth for a future lamb stew. Waste not, want not, wasn’t that the old saying?
A lifetime of scrimping and saving and getting by meant he was no stranger to making do with very little. He left school at fifteen, and in the intervening years he’d washed dishes, been a waiter, run delivery routes, crewed on a couple of freighters, and tended bar. It was good, honest work; and some of it had paid well. He worked hard and kept to himself.
The years following Alanna’s death had been bleak and unending. He got up, he worked, he came home and drank himself into oblivion, and passed out.
He liked it here at Draemar. The Campbells were decent people who paid well and left him to run things without interfering. For the first time in a long time, he felt a cautious hope.
He looked forward to Sunday dinner with Helen tomorrow. It surprised him, this anticipation; after all, what did he, a dour widower with a murky past and no future to speak of, have in common with a street-savvy London tabloid reporter?
Absolutely nothing, that much was sure.
And yet...he couldn’t stop thinking about her, wondering what she was doing, if she thought about him as he sometimes thought about her. He enjoyed sparring with her. She was quick, and clever.
And she’d looked a hell of a lot more fetching in that terrycloth robe than he ever had...
He flung a dish towel over his shoulder and stared, unseeing, out the window at the snow-covered tree branches. Sex with Helen had been amazing. Oh, he’d been with his share of women over the years; but none of them had meant anything. He’d forgotten them by the next day.
Helen was different.
She was the first woman – the only woman – he’d felt something for since losing his beloved Alanna.
And that fact, more than anything else, scared the hell out of him.
‘I’m here.’
Helen looked up from her beer to see Tom sliding into the booth across from her. ‘I got you a pint.’ She nudged his glass over.
‘Thanks.’ He shrugged off his jacket and laid it aside. ‘No one knows you’re here, I take it?’
‘No. Archie and Pen went out for dinner and a film,’ she said. ‘And the rest of us…well, let’s just say we’re all going a bit bonkers, stuck in that castle for the last few weeks. Everyone’s escaped for the evening.’ She leant forward. ‘So tell me what this is all about.’
He didn’t answer. Instead, he reached into his shirt pocket and withdrew a photo and laid it on the table, then slid it across to her. ‘Have a look.’
Helen picked it up. The photograph showed Pen Park and Graeme Longworth coming out of a mansion flat in Marylebone. Judging from Pen’s crocheted mini-dress and Longworth’s sideburns, it was taken around the same time as the snap at Annabel’s, in the mid-seventies.
The pair shared an umbrella, and they both looked straight into the camera, their expressions startled, and more than a little guilty.
‘So I was right,’ Helen said softly. ‘They were having an affair.’ She lowered the photo and gazed at him. ‘Why wasn’t this picture published?’
‘I’m getting to that,’ Tom grumbled as he took the photograph back and tucked it in his pocket once again. ‘When I took that snap, I was young, barely twenty. I was desperate for a big, splashy story to make my name. One day, I got a tipoff over the phone about Longworth and his dolly bird, and I got my story, all right – with bells on.’
‘So it seems,’ Helen murmured.
‘This man – he said he was connected to a senior member of the coalition – wanted a story, with photos, that would implicate Longworth in an affair with a certain up-and-coming British model.’
‘Longworth was married, I take it?’
‘Yes. So the next day, I staked out the front of the mansion flat in Marylebone where Miss Park lived, and I waited. I waited outside ‒ in the rain ‒ for fucking hours. But I got the goods. I messengered the photos to this bloke, as agreed. He called to say he’d got ’em and asked me not to file the story for twenty-four hours.
‘So I waited. The next day, he sent the pictures back and told me to kill the story.’ Tom scowled. ‘I was furious! Longworth’s affair would’ve been the making of me. But he offered me plenty of dosh to keep it out of the paper, so I did, and I took the money. I locked the photos away in my safe, where they’ve been ever since.’
‘But if the story never ran,’ Helen asked, puzzled, ‘then why did Longworth withdraw from the election?’
Tom shrugged. ‘Someone showed him the photographs, I reckon. He was made to understand that if he didn’t withdraw, the photo – and the story of the affair ‒ would run in the next day’s papers.’
‘So that’s how you came by the infamous Aston Martin,’ Helen remarked, and quirked her brow. ‘I always wondered.’
He narrowed his eyes. ‘How’d you know about that? I sold the Aston years ago.’
‘Are you kidding? That car is a newsroom legend! We all thought you must’ve been shagging the owner’s wife.’
He nearly spit out his lager. ‘I’ve never been that desperate for a car,’ he retorted. ‘Or a shag.’
‘So who was he?’ Helen asked as she leant forward, her eyes intent on his. ‘Who tipped you off about Pen and Longworth and paid you to keep the story quiet?’
He shrugged. ‘I never knew the bloke’s name. I saved Pen Park from a world of trouble, though, and no mistake. If that story had run...’ his words trailed off.
Helen traced a finger around the rim of her glass. ‘Someone obviously wanted to force Longworth to stand down.’
‘It happens all the time, love. Politics is a dirty business. That fling with Pen ruined Longworth’s career. Hope she was worth it. It put paid to her career, too.’
‘It did? How so?’ Helen asked curiously.
‘She gave up modelling, didn’t she? At the top of her game, she was, and then she just...disappeared.’
‘Poor Pen. She had to give up Graeme Longworth...and her modelling career.’
‘Oh, don’t feel too sorry for Miss Park. She married into the Campbell family a year or two later, after all. Filthy rich, the Campbells, as you’ve no doubt seen for yourself, with a castle, and that distillery fortune of theirs. She didn’t need to model any more.’
‘No,’ Helen said, a thoughtful expression on her face. ‘No, I suppose she didn’t.’
They were just sliding out of the booth to leave when