The following morning, all hell broke loose.

Chapter 31

T he phone at the Rock, explained Gala, looking absolutely mortified, had been ringing off the hook since five A.M. that morning.

Nobody had gotten any sleep until Gaspard had stormed down in a rage of swearing and unplugged it. When it had finally gotten plugged back in, every time they went to pick it up, it was a journalist called Candace from the Daily Post, wanting to know how things were at “Britain’s Worst Hotel!”

The papers didn’t arrive in Mure until the day after publication, it taking that long to get them up there, but Flora, completely confused, opened them up online and was absolutely astounded by what she saw.

“McFAWLTY TOWERS!” screamed the headline, with a freeze-frame of Gaspard tripping over a dog and a plate in the air.

“Scotland’s wackiest hotel,” the story went on, “left by eccentric, flamboyant billionaire . . .”

“Flamboyant!”

Fintan marched into the Rock, his face absolutely puce. “Flamboyant!! Flamboyant! You know what that means.”

Flora patted him on the shoulder.

“They mean gay! They’re calling him a laughingstock! And me! We’re laughingstocks to them! Those . . . those utter bastards!!”

“I know,” said Flora. “I don’t suppose . . . it might be good publicity for us.”

“Britain’s worst hotel?” said Fintan. “Run by fairies. How’s that going to work? Oh, screw it. I’m going to shut it down.”

“But Colton wanted you to run it.”

“I don’t care what he wanted,” said Fintan, his face white with fury. “I don’t care! I hate this and I hate them and I don’t want pricks coming up to look at our ‘eccentric’ hotel and I am going back to the farm and I am going to make cheese and be miserable and everyone else can just fuck off. ”

Flora gazed after him in despair, then quickly noticed the anxious faces of Isla and Gala peering out at her from reception.

“Does this mean we’re going to lose our jobs?” Isla asked tentatively.

“I don’t know,” said Flora miserably. “I’m sure he’ll calm down. It’ll be fine.”

She was too cross to go and find Iona, who was hiding out in her bedroom and refusing to come out from underneath the blankets. She had let her phone die because she couldn’t bear the constant beep beep beep of more and more and more incoming messages, and she knew she had to turn it back on, that she would just be scaring her friends and then they’d start coming round and then things really would get bad. It was meant to be funny and make them popular! It wasn’t meant to be “THE WORST HOTEL ON EARTH.”

She plugged it in but still left it on the other side of the room, too afraid to touch it, like a spider or a red-hot poker.

FLORA STALKED INTO the Seaside Kitchen looking for Iona. She did not get angry very often; it wasn’t really in her makeup. But she was unutterably furious. Every single table in the café fell silent as she entered, which gave her a pretty good idea what they’d all been talking about.