Page 49 of What Would Dolly Do?

I spent the many hours it took to get back to Edinburgh in a state of utter despair about what I had left behind and total panic about what lay ahead of me.

Crammed into a middle seat between two strangers in economy class I’d stuck on a pair of headphones and pretended to be asleep for most of the transatlantic flight but I couldn’t kid myself that sleep would come.

Instead my mind kept going over and over so many questions.

The main one was how I could possibly have got myself into such a terrible situation?

The man I was completely in love with was engaged to be married to someone else and if that wasn’t heartbreaking enough I’d had to walk away, not only from him, but from a chance in a lifetime to appear on the biggest stage in country music.

If I thought about how it might have felt to stand on the famous circle cut from the historic Ryman Auditorium Theatre stage and perform at The Grand Ole Opry a sharp stabbing pain would pierce my heart and make my blood freeze in my veins.

The horror of turning my back on that opportunity was something I suspected I may never be able to recover from.

The other matter keeping me awake and causing my stomach to tie itself into knots was wanting to know who was planning to expose me as a jewellery thief?

I knew I had committed no crime but people can be very quick to believe what they see and even quicker to judge.

If the CCTV footage of me stashing the expensive watches, rings, necklaces and other property belonging to Grayson’s Jewellers was made public my reputation would be tarnished forever.

There would be no chance of me landing a recording contract and I could kiss goodbye to any hopes of making it as an even moderately successful singer.

The truth isn’t always enough for some people, social media commentary will more often take the ‘no smoke without fire’ route.

In some twisted way I thought that perhaps it was better I had received the threatening message before I had accompanied Tom to The Opry than afterwards.

His career didn’t need to be blighted with involvement in my murky mess.

Yes, I wish he had been more honest with me about how serious things were between him and Juliana but I had gone to bed with him willingly and with my eyes open, so to speak.

I’d known he was a famous musician with links to a Hollywood actress and I hadn’t expected any sort of exclusivity at the start.

I’d told myself it was just a bit of fun.

I’d thought I was being so mature, so worldly wise, getting my kicks and then moving on, but of course affairs of the heart are never so straightforward.

I hadn’t meant to fall in love and I’d deluded myself that our liaison had developed into something more substantial for him too.

Well now at least I knew the truth about that and where I stood in the world of Tom Coltrane.

I was devastated and upset but more with myself than I really was with Tom.

I didn’t think he deserved to have his career wrecked by bad publicity by being linked with me.

That was part of the reason I had bolted so fast.

Getting over Tom and my missed opportunity in Nashville would have to go on the back burner for now, however, while I wrestled with the issue of who was planning on doing something so despicable as releasing the jewellery shop footage to the media?

The obvious candidate was Guy Grayson. He was the one who had framed me in the first place after all.

Was he still not content? Was he on a mission to destroy me altogether?

It seemed incredible that he was still not satisfied that he’d done enough to hurt me.

As I’d feigned sleep on the aeroplane a couple of other names had also suggested themselves to me as possible candidates behind the despicable threat.

The first was Juliana of course. The woman had just revealed herself as my mortal enemy after accusing me of attempting to steal her man.

There was nothing as dangerous as a woman scorned and Juliana’s dislike and distrust of me had been obvious.

Had she researched my past and uncovered something she could use against me?

She might not have been sure she had done enough to run me out of town by revealing that she and Tom were engaged.

What if I had been more brazen and not so easily intimidated?

Sending the text right after storming out might have been her masterstroke.

I already knew she wasn’t working alone, Dawn the driver had tipped her off about where she could find me, perhaps they were in cahoots over this too?

My third and final suspect was Robbie. I felt a sense of shame in suspecting my former partner, a man I had always considered to be a good friend, but I’d also seen clear evidence of his jealousy, and jealousy was the emotion most likely to turn someone into a monster.

Robbie and I had split up and then he’d discovered I’d replaced him in my bed with the world-famous country music star Tom Coltrane.

Ouch! That must have hurt his pride. No man wants to think they can be so easily replaced and certainly not by someone so talented and desirable that girls all over the world have posters of them on their walls!

Not only that but I’d made an instant success of Sonny’s Bar while he was struggling with his new job in Peterborough and that must have really rubbed salt into the wound.

When he had scoffed at my make-over and joked about how I now looked with my newly dyed hair and more adventurous clothes all I’d heard was echoes of the mockery I had endured in my youth and I’d seen red.

But I now realised that Robbie had lashed out because of how hurt he was feeling.

I wasn’t excusing his behaviour but I was beginning to understand it better.

I figured either Juliana or Robbie could have got to Calum Crutchley. It was possible the young solicitor could have been charmed by Juliana or tricked by Robbie into spilling the beans on my past behaviour and then used the evidence for their own ends.

So that left me with three possible candidates for the person who wanted to destroy me; Guy, Juliana or Robbie.

How had I become someone with multiple enemies?

But even if I could figure out which one of them it was and narrow the list down to just one name I wasn’t any closer to working out what I was going to do about it.

Luckily it turned out that I didn’t have to. By the time I arrived back in Edinburgh, weary, worried and overwrought, Stella and Dorrie had put their clever heads together and come up with a cunning plan to save me.

‘Let me get this straight,’ I said, my mind boggling with what they had just tried to explain as we all sat in the deserted basement bar of Sonny’s, ‘this plan of yours to defeat my arch enemy involves a contortionist, a hypnotist and a ventriloquist?’ I shook my head trying to clear my jet-lagged brain.

It was almost comical that I thought Dorrie had just said those words: of course that was impossible, but I was also finding it impossible to figure out what else she might have said that had sounded just like that?

Dorrie nodded. ‘Yup, that’s exactly what I said.’ Ahh. She went on to say that as soon as Stella had called her and told her what was going on she’d known just what to do.

Stella looked from one to the other of us with a solemn look on her face.

I’d called her from Nashville airport to tell her the edited highlights, or rather the gloomy lowlights of my aborted trip to Tennessee.

I’d started with the shock news about Tom’s engagement to Juliana Ripon at which point she’d sworn heavily and cursed them both.

When I then explained about the picture message I’d received and the threats to expose me as a jewel thief she’d insisted I forward her the messages.

I think she’d called Dorrie before I’d even boarded the plane and now here we were seated around a table like three mafiosos in an episode of The Sopranos .

Sonny’s Bar was now the Bada Bing Club and we were hatching a plan to wreak revenge on a sworn rival. What. Was. Happening?

‘I knew she was our girl,’ Stella said nodding sagely as she clapped Dorrie on the back. ‘As soon as I filled her in she swung into action. Aren’t you glad you’ve got us on your team?’

I wasn’t sure how to respond to that. The world appeared to have shifted on its axis and, now Stella and Dorrie were instant best buds, they had embroiled me in a complicated plot to neutralise my nemesis and I was struggling to process where a hypnotist, a contortionist and a ventriloquist came into the equation.

I had to presume that this was exactly what a nervous breakdown felt like.

‘You’re looking a bit confused,’ Dorrie said.

‘Oh. You think?’ I shouldn’t have snapped at her but seriously, one of us was clearly crazy and the thought that it was probably me was making me quite tetchy.

‘D’you want me to go over it all again?’ She spoke to me now like I was a small child trying to remember what the big hand on a clock was for.

I swallowed back the retort I was desperate to give and instead answered meekly, ‘Yes please.’

Stella and Dorrie took turns to fill me in, fleshing out the detail of their convoluted plot.

Somehow, between the two of them they managed to make it all sound slightly more sensible second time around.

Both of them were convinced the traitor out to get me was Guy.

Robbie could be dumb but would never be so devious and to think Juliana had tracked down the Scottish footage from the States was a stretch that even Dorrie’s contortionist mate Tatiana would struggle to achieve.

(I hadn’t imagined it; there was indeed a contortionist now involved in the latest bizarre chapter of my life.)

‘Tatiana has already made contact with our mark,’ Stella informed me, sounding increasingly like an undercover cop in a B movie. ‘Guy Grayson is such a sleazebag he actually fell for her spiel, just like Dorrie knew he would.’

‘Tatiana’s skills aren’t limited to bending herself into ridiculously impossible positions or folding herself into a small carry-on piece of hand luggage.

’ Dorrie paused while I think we all imagined a grown woman concertinaed into a flight case …

she took a breath and then carried on, ‘She’s from Eastern Europe, speaks with a deliciously husky accent and has charms no red-blooded man would be able to resist. Once she made a play for Guy he was putty in her hands. ’

So the talented Tatiana had apparently made it her mission to convince Guy she fancied him and then set up a time and place for them to meet for a date.

Guy was so arrogant he appeared to take the pass she made at him completely at face value, presumably thinking this gorgeous, young, mysterious woman found him completely irresistible.

But the date was a honeytrap, a way to lure Guy away from the jewellery shop where Tatiana had posed as a regular customer and into a world unfamiliar to him, a place peopled by performers, speciality acts and creative artistes.

Dorrie had collected them all together for a showdown performance the like of which had never been seen before during Edinburgh Fringe Festival, or indeed anywhere else.

Once Stella and Dorrie had finally finished describing how Guy Grayson would eventually be exposed and his threat against me neutralised, I didn’t know whether to laugh or break into spontaneous applause.

I did a little of both while also asking, ‘It’s a brilliant, if bonkers plan … d’you really think it could work?’

Dorrie looked a little hurt at my lack of confidence but Stella fixed me with a steely look. ‘What other choice d’you have?’

She was right. The plan was on. It sounded like the start of a joke delivered by one of the many up-and-coming comedians trying to get a break in Edinburgh: ‘ so a contortionist, a hypnotist and a ventriloquist walk into a bar … ’ But this wasn’t a set piece in a stand-up comedy routine, this was my life.

Tatiana the contortionist, Jeffrey the hypnotist and Freddie the vent arrived at Sonny’s shortly after. Soon it would be Showdown!