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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Serie: Sam Clair
- Sprache: Englisch
What's an editor to do with so many demands? Do you deal with the morning's pile of manuscript submissions first? Or the swine from sales who steals all the chocolate digestives? Or do you concentrate on your ex-lover, whose business partner has just been found dead in their art gallery, slumped over his desk with a gun in his hand? It's another day at Timmins & Ross publishing house, but when sharp-tongued editor Samantha Clair's CID boyfriend is brought in to investigate Frank Compton's death, her loyalties become stretched. And when one of Aidan Merriam's artists is found dead in identical circumstances, Sam takes on the art world and the CID, armed with nothing more than her reliable weapons: satire, cynicism and a stock of irrelevant information culled from novels.
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Seitenzahl: 447
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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Contents
CHAPTER ONE
THE SUMMER WAS rumbling on the way summer usually does in publishing, and I was ready to murder someone. Murder someone cheerfully. With a song in my heart. Because we had survived the London Book Fair, when thousands of publishing people from across the world poured into London, to be entertained and amused as well as met more formally for work, each one scheduled in at half-hour intervals throughout the day, even as, because it’s our home city, we were also expected to get through our normal work. The Frankfurt Book Fair, in October, was always easier, because then we would become the thousands who poured in from across the world, to be entertained and amused as well as met more formally for work, each one scheduled in at half-hour intervals throughout the day. But then a bounce-back email, ‘I’m out of my office at the Frankfurt Book Fair … If it’s urgent, please email my assistant on …’ and you’re off, no office responsibilities for a week. But Frankfurt wasn’t for another four months, which in publishing time is both an eternity, and tomorrow.
For the marketing and sales departments, October was tomorrow, and they were in full cry, hounding all of us in editorial for catalogue copy, sales pitches, and advance information sheets, so they could produce the material we would need in four months. The art department also knew that October was tomorrow, and were also hounding us, this time for cover copy, design briefs, and the same damn advance information sheets we hadn’t written for marketing, so they could produce the book jackets, which we’d also need in four months. Because book fairs are not about books as words. They are about selling, and if you work in publishing, the sooner you settle down and acknowledge that fact, the happier you will be. You may have bought the greatest novel since War and Peace, but if you can’t sell rights – German translation rights, French translation rights, Japanese, and, if you’re lucky, Norwegian, Turkish and Polish translation rights too – then the odds are your company is not going to see a return on its money. And if your company doesn’t see a return on its money, you can’t buy the author’s next book. And if you don’t have enough authors who write books that make money, you can’t buy books from other authors, whose books probably won’t make any money right away, but might one day, when they’ll pay for … you get the drift.
But that’s not the way to present it to an author who is struggling to produce this book. They know the rights need to be sold – they know, because they need the money. So hounding them for something you can turn into sales material for the people who are in turn hounding you, feels like prodding a sick cow into being milked. The cow is having enough trouble providing milk for her calf, and here I am, Farmer Sam, coaxing, ‘Just a little bit for me. It won’t take you any time.’
Which even as I say it, I know is a lie. Of course it will take them time. Time they would otherwise spend on writing their book. But if they don’t take time off from writing their book to produce sales material, I can’t sell that book. And then they can’t afford to write it. Most authors earn less than the minimum wage for their writing. The only time they make enough to live on from writing is when they’re so famous everyone wants to interview them, or profile them, or have them on TV. And then they have enough money, but not enough time. If you feed the ravenous beast that is the publishing schedule, you penalise your authors. If you don’t feed the beast, you penalise your authors. Don’t try and work it out, because trust me, it doesn’t make sense.
And so, come summer, when Frankfurt still feels far enough away that we don’t have to harass our poor authors, slaving away in their salt mines (yes, I know I said they were cows a minute ago, but bear with me, I’m an editor, not a writer) – come summer, all the editors collectively stick their fingers in their ears as the sales and art departments rampage and sing, ‘La-la-la-la-la, I can’t heeeear you.’ That doesn’t make sense either, but it makes us feel better.
Those of us who are around. Publishing is not very well paid, and it is therefore filled with women, mostly young women, who also therefore have small children. And so an awful lot of people vanish entirely during the school holidays. For some of that time they are officially absent, on holiday. For a lot more, they are ‘working at home’.
In theory I have no complaints about ‘working at home’. I do it too. There are no meetings at home. The coffee is better there, and no one steals the last of the milk. No one wanders in, saying, ‘I know you’re really busy …’ (at this point they give a winsome smile) ‘… but could you just take a quick look at this? It’ll only take five minutes.’ It does take only five minutes. Then we have to discuss their new haircut, what idiocy the finance department has perpetrated by changing the format of the profit-and-loss forms, and did you hear (look over shoulder) about Meg and Dan. They were, you know, even though Dan’s wife was right there. Then that only-five-minutes leaves, and another appears, and Meg and Dan get done over again.
Instead, working at home means you get some work done. But when everyone is working at home – and everyone also knows perfectly well that the home workers are taking their kids to the park, or are sitting in a café, or even just googling to find out how to get plasticine out of the carpet, and we can’t do the same, because otherwise the office would appear so deserted it would be targeted by squatters – then it leads to a fair amount of passive-aggressive tutting and sighing from those left behind. And maybe a bit of eye-rolling. No more than that. We’re British, so we’re not going to say what we really think, now are we? Well, I’m a mongrel, only half a Brit, so I say it in my head. But outwardly I conform happily to the native passive-aggression. Works for me.
I’d had my third conversation of the day about Meg and Dan. (And, really, apart from the tackiness of where, I wasn’t very interested. I wasn’t even entirely sure who Dan was. I knew he was in sales, but was he the one with the funny haircut, or was he the slightly geeky-looking one who piled up biscuits in front of his seat at meetings and then ate them in what seemed to be some carefully determined order?) Anyway, I’d had enough. I was meeting a friend for lunch, and I decided to set off early and walk, since finally, after a long, rainy month, it was one of those bright London days when you think, Yes, it is worth living in this God-awful climate.
I waved at Bernie at Reception and happily banged the heavy Georgian door of the building behind me as I stepped out into the sunshine. I raised my face, eyes closed, feeling the mild summer heat like a physical touch. As I walked along I saw everyone emerging from their offices do the same – step out, take a deep breath with eyes closed and face raised. It wasn’t particularly warm, but the sun made everything feel like it was haloed.
I’d left myself enough time, so I cut through the backstreets. The more direct route would have taken me along Oxford Street, but as I didn’t need a plastic bobby’s helmet, a ‘My Parents Went to London and All I Got Was This Crappy T-shirt’ T-shirt, or even a postcard with a pair of naked breasts painted red, white, and blue and captioned ‘I Love London’, the extra ten minutes seemed more than reasonable. My office is three minutes’ walk from the British Museum, and the same distance from Oxford Street, so the main streets are hot-and-cold-running tourists pretty well all the time, all streaming past the area’s many offices without realising that this isn’t just a visitors’ playground. London’s zoning laws don’t help, as the 1950s concrete buildings and the eighteenth-century brick houses alike all have 1970s fast-food-plastic frontages at ground level. But off the main streets, only a few hundred metres away, a much older London survives. Sometimes that older city is signposted, by blue enamel plaques that indicate where a famous person lived, but more often, noticing the odd old house, or a freak bit of ornament, feels like a private pleasure, a way of marking the city out as belonging to its residents, not the tourists.
I mooched happily along the back way, down streets my feet knew automatically, even though I’d never learnt their names, towards the restaurant where I was meeting Aidan Merriam. He and I had known each other since I first moved to London, and had always been close – at one time, very close. But that was a long time ago. Now we had a friendship where we loved each other dearly, and saw each other rarely. Aidan had been married to Anna for – I stopped and thought about it. Since their children were now teenagers, they must have been married for more than fifteen years. Although they no longer had the baby thing to keep them tied to home Aidan, as the part-owner of an art gallery, was almost permanently on the move around the world, zooming from art fair to auction to biennale to exhibition. I knew this because whenever I invited them to dinner Anna would list the two or three days a month when he might be in London. Anna was high-powered in her own field, a professor at UCL, with a speciality in Renaissance bronzes which, happily, she never expected anyone to know anything about. And while she also travelled for work, not only lecturing but curating exhibitions, her job allowed her to have a home life. While she and I liked each other, we weren’t friends the way Aidan and I were, and so once every two years or thereabouts he and I had a catch-up lunch on our own. Nothing sinister: Anna was entirely aware of our past, and all three of us knew it was past. None of us wanted differently.
This lunch had been in my diary for months, and Aidan had rung up only three times to change the date, which meant he was fairly unharried by his standards. It’s true that he’d texted first thing yesterday to say he couldn’t make it and would ring later, and then, an hour later, he’d texted again, to say he’d see me as planned. That was a little out of the ordinary, but I figured he’d tell me about whatever crisis it was when we met. We never had to say where. We always went to the same cheap ’n’ cheerful Lebanese place, halfway between my office and his gallery on Cork Street, a small café that was all scarred woodwork and uncomfortable pine furniture. The staff were abrupt to the point of rudeness the first dozen times you ate there, until suddenly, magically, one day you had become family. Our pattern was to meet early enough to get the window table, then we’d order too many starters, fight over the last pepper and catch up. The routine was part of the charm.
From across the road, I could see through the window that Aidan was there already. As I waited for the traffic to thin, I watched him. Seeing him behind a window made him look – I paused and thought about it – it made him look as if I didn’t know him. People you know well somehow never change. I’d met Aidan when I was twenty and he was twenty-seven, so in my head that’s the way he’d remained. But the through-the-window Aidan was, I suddenly recognised, much older. He still had all his hair – too much, in fact, since he never remembered to get it cut. But it had once been almost black, and it was now more than half grey. And the lines running from his nose to his mouth weren’t just strong, which they’d always been. Now they were deep grooves almost carved into his face.
The lines were particularly marked as he sat frowning down at his phone. The phone, at any rate, was familiar. It was how I usually saw him in my mind, although it was rare that he was waiting for me. I’m always early and, as I opened the café door, I checked my watch. I was today, too. Aidan never was. He was rarely late, but had that sort of businessman’s timekeeping, one appointment dovetailing into the next, with Aidan neatly arriving at each one with no time to spare before, another meeting ticked off the list, he moved on to the next.
So when I’d kissed him hello and slid onto the banquette opposite, I didn’t waste time with the how-are-you-fine-thanks-how-are-you formula. Just ‘What’s up?’
He stared at me blankly for a moment, as if he wasn’t quite sure who I was, or why I was talking to him. Then he put his elbows on the table and covered his face with his hands.
This was serious. Aidan was one of the most collected people I knew. Not reserved, exactly, but someone always on one level. Problems were, well, problems to him, things to be solved, and then, once solved, they were considered resolved and he shelved them. Since my method of dealing with problems is to run around screaming and carrying on like a headless chicken for a while before I knuckle down to deal with whatever it is, followed by chewing the same problem over afterwards for months, sometimes years, agitating over how I might have done things differently, I’d always found his attitude very soothing. Except in that period when I was the problem. Then it was downright annoying.
I touched his arm gently now, joggling it to get him to let me see his face. ‘Aidan?’
He looked up, but he didn’t see me. He was looking at something else, in some place I wasn’t part of. Then he returned to me. ‘Frank is dead,’ he said.
‘Jesus.’ Frank was Frank Compton, the other partner in their gallery, Merriam–Compton. He was Aidan’s age, maybe a few years older, perhaps fifty. ‘What? When? Did you know he was ill?’ I couldn’t believe he or Anna hadn’t told me earlier.
He smiled without a trace of humour. ‘You don’t have to be ill to kill yourself.’
‘What? When?’ I repeated, and then, more urgently, ‘Why? Why would he do that?’
Aidan shook his head, and then just kept on shaking it, as if he’d forgotten to stop. I slid around to his side of the table and sat close, holding his hand. Human warmth won’t drive away death, but it doesn’t hurt.
‘Tell me,’ I said quietly. I didn’t want to press him, but he wanted to talk. He must, or he would have cancelled our lunch.
‘I got back from Hong Kong yesterday morning early, on the red-eye, and went straight to the gallery,’ he said in a wondering tone, as if he was reading from a cue card and was surprised by what it was saying, as if it were news to him. ‘The alarm wasn’t on when I got there, which meant that either Frank or Myra’ – their associate, I wasn’t sure what she did – ‘was already in. It was only seven, but that’s not unusual, and I just went back to find them, to report on the trip. And then—’ he broke off, covering his face with his hands again.
This was much worse than I’d expected. Even though he’d said Frank had killed himself, it hadn’t crossed my mind that Aidan had found him. I’d assumed that it would be somehow tucked neatly out of sight. Apparently not. I waited. As much or as little as he needed to tell me was fine.
Aidan took a deep breath. ‘I went into his office, and …’ He paused, then continued in a rush. ‘He was there. At his desk. He’d shot himself.’
I flinched. I’d only ever been in the office part of the gallery once, or maybe twice. Downstairs the exhibition rooms were the kind of modernist dream that a movie director would have rejected as being too clichéd: white floors, white walls, and nothing else except big, light-filled windows. Upstairs was different, a rabbit warren of small offices and cubicles, booby-trapped with random outcroppings of old desks that appeared to have been abandoned, and filing cabinets stuffed in anywhere. I imagined Frank, his reddish-blond hair shining out in that dark labyrinth.
Aidan’s voice was hoarse. ‘There was blood. Across the wall, a huge spray of it.’ He was still staring at where I’d been sitting, as if he hadn’t noticed I’d moved.
A black gun appeared in my picture, on the scuffed floorboards, the body in one of Frank’s smooth, dark Italian suits thrown back by the violence Aidan was describing, the blood-red spray like an abstract painting on the wall behind him.
I tried to wipe it away by concentrating on practicalities. ‘Was he ill?’ I asked. ‘Or depressed? Did you know?’
Something shifted in Aidan. ‘I hope the bastard was depressed.’ He wasn’t looking at me, but he must have felt me flinch, because his tone became argumentative, as if I’d protested out loud. ‘He knew I would find him, me or Myra. Why would he do that to us? I’ve worked with him, we’ve been friends, for twenty years. Myra’s sixty and got a weak heart.’ He became pugnacious. ‘What kind of bastard leaves someone to find that?’
I had no answer. Instead, ‘Did he leave a note? Do you know why?’ Why – why kill yourself, and why kill yourself that way, and why there – seemed suddenly very important.
Aidan clenched his hands into fists. He clearly wanted to hit out. At Frank, though, not at me for asking. He barely knew I was there. ‘He left a note, if you can call it that. His computer was open and he’d typed “I’m sorry”. That’s it. “I’m sorry”.’
I answered the pain, not the anger. ‘Oh Aidan, that’s terrible.’ I put my arm around him and we sat there without speaking.
The lovely eastern European waitress who had worked at the café for as long as we’d been customers hovered by the table. She looked questioningly at the closed menus and then at the two of us, Aidan with his hands over his eyes again, me just staring blankly ahead. I leapt at the return of normality, grasping onto ordering lunch as something useful I could do.
I named a bunch of things at random. It didn’t matter what, we weren’t going to be able to eat anyway. I turned to Aidan. ‘Do you want a drink?’
‘God, yes,’ he said, looking at me properly for the first time. I smiled back at him and ordered a bottle of wine, then moved back to my original seat.
Maybe focusing on detail, on the practicalities, would help. ‘What happened? Did you call the police? And how’s Toby?’ Toby was Frank’s partner. They’d been a couple as long as I’d known Frank. Toby was a civil servant, but I knew nothing else about him. I didn’t know them nearly as well as I knew Aidan and Anna. It was more the kind of friendship where we kissed warmly when we bumped into each other somewhere, saying how good it was to meet, and we must get together, and then none of us ever followed up. Not from anything except busy lives and, really, ultimately, lack of interest. Not dislike, but not like, or at least not affection either.
Aidan brought me back to the present. ‘Of course I called the police. What do you think, we worked around him for the rest of the day?’
I shrugged an acknowledgement. My question hadn’t made much sense, and the anger in Aidan’s reply was still for Frank, not me.
‘We didn’t open yesterday, and so far not today either. They’ve been there, taking pictures, going through the files. They’re talking to his doctor, but if he was ill, he hadn’t told Toby. Who says the two of them were very happy – as happy as any couple who have been together for nearly twenty years can be, at least, is the way he put it, whatever that means. So …’ He shifted his weight, and I realised that only now had he got to whatever it was he wanted to talk to me about ‘So, they think it must be business problems.’
‘And were there any?’ He wanted me to ask, or he wouldn’t have told me that much.
‘If there are,’ he said, and I noticed the change in the verb tense, although I wasn’t sure if he did, ‘if there are, I’m not aware of them.’
All I knew about the art world was the bits Aidan had dropped over the years, and what I read in the papers. Both suggested that money was far more important in their business than in mine. Even as I thought that, I knew that it was stupid. Money ruled my working life: how much could I offer an author, how many copies of each book were sold, at what price, how much could we squeeze out of subsidiary rights? But I never saw the money, never invoiced for it, never received the payments. I never had any real sense of the cash flow of the business as a whole.
The art world was different. A gallery like Aidan and Frank’s – like Aidan’s, now, perhaps – dealt with vast sums. Whenever I heard the two men talking about work, the commodity element was always right there on the surface. Art was about buying and selling, it was about trading an object for cash in a way books never were for their creators, or their version of art dealers, the publishers. Someone would say, ‘Fabulous show, I love what the artist is doing,’ and the answer was ‘Yes, we’ve sold six pieces’, or ‘But no one’s buying’. I’m not saying that publishers don’t think about selling books. We do. It’s just that, at £7.99, one sale more or less doesn’t matter; when you’re selling a single object for six figures, it does.
None of that was relevant, though, so I returned to detail. ‘What happens now?’
Aidan looked blank at what I realised was a question vague to the point of inanity, and I clarified. ‘Can Toby make plans for the funeral? Does – did – Frank have family?’
Aidan sighed and rubbed his face again. He looked bereft. He was temporarily done with being angry with Frank, temporarily done with worrying about the financial havoc that might be lurking. Frank was once again his working partner of two decades, the man he probably spoke to more often than he spoke to his wife.
‘His parents are dead. There’s a brother and sister-in-law, and two nieces. He was close to them.’ He paused as the waitress brought our food. We looked at it, slightly nauseated, but automatically spooned random dollops of salads onto our plates. Neither of us picked up our cutlery, though. We waited until the wine arrived. That we picked up. Just as quickly, Aidan put his down. ‘I need to keep a clear head. And I don’t think I’ve eaten since …’ His eyes widened. ‘Since the plane.’
That was more than a day and a half. I pushed his plate towards him. ‘Then eat something now. Even if you don’t want to.’ I sounded like his mother, but that was a good thing at the moment, I decided.
He picked up his fork, but he just held it, as though he were pacifying me by making the gesture. He returned to where he’d left off. ‘One of his nieces, Lucy, works for us in the holidays. She’s at university, but she fills in, and Frank was hoping she might join us full-time.’ He paused, his mouth thinning again. ‘How could he do that to her?’
I touched his hand, nudging it towards his plate. He smiled gently at me, and brushed his other hand across my cheek, a gesture of intimacy we hadn’t had for years. Then he ate a couple of mouthfuls, although it was to show me he was OK, not because he was OK.
‘The other thing is that I’ve had to cancel all my trips.’
‘You do? I know Frank does – did – the admin and gallery side, but is there so much that you have to be there?’
He looked at me as if I were an idiot. ‘It’s not that. The police don’t want me to leave the country for the moment.’
I sat back, shocked. ‘They said that? That sounds like television.’
‘It was like television: finding him, being told not to leave London without checking in with them first. Oh, they were very polite. But I thought it was best to speak to a lawyer, and a forensic accountant.’
I tilted my head. ‘What’s that?’
‘Not the kind who does your books, or your tax returns. The kind you use if you’re being audited. Or, in this case, if the CID are telling you not to leave town.’
CID. I sat up. ‘I don’t understand. If the police think there are money issues …’ I was circling around the words I didn’t want to use, fraud, tax evasion, money-laundering, or – or what? ‘Are you saying the police are looking at this as … as not suicide?’ Now I was circling around the big word I didn’t want to use. But otherwise, why CID, why not Revenue and Customs? I was hazy on the division of labour at the police, but this didn’t sound right for embezzlement and suicide.
More importantly, it sounded worryingly close to home. ‘Um, I can’t remember if I told you, when I last saw you …’ I stalled, started again. ‘Do you know about my …’ This was absurd. ‘Do you know I’m seeing a policeman?’
Aidan stared me dead in the eye. ‘Why do you think I’m here?’
Aidan had been looking at me as if I were an idiot for the simple reason that I was an idiot. I hadn’t wondered why he was there at all. We were having lunch because we’d planned to have lunch. But that made no sense. If I’d found a colleague dead in my office – I flinched even at the thought – if I had, wouldn’t I have cancelled everything that could be cancelled? And lunch with a friend I saw every couple of years plainly fell into the ‘could be cancelled’ category.
‘What are you thinking? I’m not sure I’d know where to begin. I don’t know who does what at Scotland Yard.’ I was burbling, I knew, but I couldn’t stop. ‘Jake doesn’t talk about his work. Sure, he moans about the office, or his colleagues, but nothing else. Not ever. I don’t think he can – how can the details of violent death be conversation? And you know that’s what he does, don’t you? Murder, not fraud, or tax, or …’ I steadied myself ‘Or embezzlement.’
Aidan was grim. ‘Of course I know that’s what he does. He’s doing it. In my gallery. Now.’
The breath left my body. I opened my mouth. And closed it again. Then I did it again. Until, ‘Jake is in the gallery,’ I repeated. Of course that was why Aidan was here. And of course that was why Aidan was here. ‘You cancelled our lunch when you found Frank. And then, when the police arrived, and you realised Jake was …’ I waved a hand. ‘That Jake was Jake, you reinstated.’
He nodded.
I closed my eyes briefly, trying to gather my thoughts. Then, ‘I have no idea what to do or say. All I can think is that I need to stay as far out of this as possible. Far.’ If I’d been standing up, I think I would physically have been backing away. As it was, I felt myself pushing against the banquette, my hands rigid on the edge of the table. I tried to loosen my grip. Nothing. Because even as I said the words, I knew they weren’t realistic. How could I possibly stay out of this? And whose side was I on? Jake’s? Aidan’s? He and Frank had been my friends my whole adult life.
I stopped short. Why was I thinking there were sides? Why did I assume Aidan’s side was different from Jake’s? If someone had killed Frank, then we were on the same side. Obviously. I said this to myself twice, to make sure I recognised how obvious it was. The bile sitting at the bottom of my throat replied that perhaps it wasn’t so obvious at all.
And Jake. Jesus. That he wasn’t going to be happy was an understatement of epic proportions. Even calling it an understatement of epic proportions was an understatement of epic proportions. We had met when he was investigating the death of a courier. First I was simply someone he interviewed for background, and then, involuntarily, I had become more deeply involved. And he had hated that. That I’d been in danger had made him furious, not with me, but with himself for letting it happen. That I knew Aidan and Frank, that Aidan was having lunch with me even as Jake was opening an investigation, wasn’t going to get a five-star write-up in the Crimebusters’ Review.
That was on the professional side. On the personal … On the personal, my stomach churned. We had been feeling our way gently. I had what Jake called a reflexive liberal-leftie attitude to the police, distrusting much of what I saw in the news. He, in turn, was, I think, slightly bemused by what I did for a living, or at least the passion I felt for it. He liked books, he read, but he didn’t really think they were essential. They were a fun pastime, like football, not a reason for existence. I also had a sneaking suspicion that it was probably wildly against police regulations for him to have begun a relationship with me when I was a witness in a case he was investigating. But he had never said so, and I had never asked. There was rather a lot neither of us had talked about, in fact. I’d always known that while I talked a lot, it was only ever about things that didn’t matter. Now I realised he was the same.
‘Was Jake there yesterday?’ I asked abruptly.
Aidan nodded, keeping his eyes on my face.
I’d seen him yesterday evening. We spent most of our free time together, but there wasn’t that much of it. As a detective, Jake worked unsociable hours. Publishing also spills out long past the eight-hour office day. I do a fair amount of evening work-socialising – launch parties, readings, and events – as well as the more usual social-socialising. In between that, and work, whatever time was left, we were usually together.
I thought back to the previous night. Jake had arrived at my flat early and we’d cooked dinner together. Jake was a surprisingly good cook, and made things I was scared of, like pastry, so we worked in tandem, without getting in each other’s way, with a couple of glasses of wine and idle chat. I closed my eyes, trying to remember what he’d said. He’d mentioned the politics that was holding back a promotion for one of his colleagues, and that he needed to prep for an upcoming court appearance, neither of which was about the day’s work as such. After dinner he’d watched television, I’d read, and then we’d gone to bed, which was where we did some of our best communicating.
I gritted my teeth. He definitely hadn’t mentioned a death in an art gallery. That wasn’t the kind of thing I might have forgotten. I pulled back from my anger. There was no particular reason for him to. Maybe. ‘He didn’t say anything about it. But did you say you knew who he was? That you know me? You haven’t met him with me, have you?’ I asked, even though I was sure he hadn’t. Jake’s shifts meant he didn’t often go out with me in the evenings, and I hadn’t seen Anna and Aidan in months, maybe more.
‘No. I mean, no, I hadn’t met him before; and no, I didn’t say that I knew you.’
‘What do you want?’ There seemed no point in tiptoeing about.
‘I don’t know.’
CHAPTER TWO
ITOOK THE BUS back to the office. I didn’t notice the way the sun struck the red-brick façades any longer, or the people enjoying its warmth. Instead, I huddled in my seat as if it were midwinter.
Miranda was lying in wait for me as soon as I appeared. She’s my assistant, and her retro-Goth look puts some people off, but she’s great. She’s been with me for nearly six months, and I’ve been able to leave more and more to her. Now she picked up her mug and stood as I came down the hall, using a sheaf of cover briefs to gesture me into my office. The mug was ominous, indicating she expected a long session, and when she didn’t lean on the door frame, but pulled a chair close to mine, I knew I was doomed.
I put my head down and slunk to my desk suitably chastened, but also very happy to focus on something I could do something about. She was right, and the work needed to be done; I might as well do it with good grace. Cover briefs are outlines to tell the jacket designer what the book is about (no, they don’t read them, don’t be silly), and how we want to position it in the market. Most of the books they pretended to describe hadn’t been delivered – many hadn’t been written – so they were written on little more than an outline and a prayer that the author would come up with the goods. Taking that into account, Miranda had done a good job, and we only needed an hour to tidy them up.
I was pleased to get it done. At least, I was until Miranda hitched her chair closer. Apparently there was more. She gave a brisk nod, and ‘Now’ she said, as though she were getting a small child ready for her first day at school. I jumped inwardly. That was usually my tone – half-editor, half-sheepdog was how I privately saw my relationship with my authors. The notion that Miranda thought the same about me was endearing, and I grinned at her, despite being quite certain I wouldn’t want to do whatever it was she had lined up for me.
‘Now,’ she repeated firmly, ‘I’ve almost finalised your Frankfurt schedule.’ She pursed her lips when I shuddered. Give her a ticket to Frankfurt and watch her dust, her expression said. ‘In the meantime,’ she went on, not giving an inch, ‘you need to prepare for the Culture Committee panel.’
This was much worse than I’d feared. In a moment of total derangement, I’d agreed to sit on a joint Arts Council committee, and what a waste of time that had turned out to be. David Snaith, Timmins & Ross’s editor-in-chief, and my boss, had put me forward for it. With all the government spending cuts, it was undoubtedly sensible for various cultural bodies to pool their knowledge, and the committee was made up of people from concert venues, from museums, theatre companies and music festivals, as well as more book-related things like book festivals. Theoretically the range, from government-funded institutions like the Opera House to commercial outfits like ours, should have made an exchange of views interesting.
That was the theory. Back here in real life, however, a lot of time was spent whining. Yes, times are hard, yes, music, and books, and dance, and theatre, don’t have the stranglehold on entertainment that they used to. But moaning got old fast. Even when time was spent more constructively, discussions revolved around matters that, in general, applied to only a few people in any one meeting. Things that were essential to one art form – audio-guides in museums, or live-streaming for theatre – had no relevance to the rest of us, and so we settled back to bitch and moan again.
And the panel. That was my lowest moment. I hadn’t been bitching and moaning, I’d been daydreaming in the meeting when it was proposed, and so I hadn’t heard when the committee chair volunteered me. I bet the son-of-a-bitch knew I wasn’t listening, too. Now I was doomed to make a presentation on ‘Subsidy in a Commercial World’. And since the area of publishing I work in barely deals with subsidies, it meant hours of setting up meetings with people in those areas that are subsidised. And all so that, when my turn came, I could say something that anyone who dealt with subsidies already knew, and anyone who didn’t, didn’t care.
I think I growled, because Miranda giggled, then hastily looked solemn, like a child with crumbs around her lips swearing she had no idea who had taken the biscuit out of the tin, hadn’t even know there were biscuits in that tin. She hadn’t giggled, no siree.
‘I’ve set up meetings for you over the next few days, when it’s quiet.’ I must have growled again, because she repeated ‘when it’s quiet’, now in full primary-schoolteacher mode, quelling the unruly through sheer force of personality. ‘You’re seeing Emma Cotton from the University Presses Alliance, and Neil Simonson from the Riverside Literature Festival. They can both fit you in on Monday. There’s also that charity that subsidises the cost of illustrations for art books.’
I nodded gloomily, resigned. I’d had some dealings with the Daylesworth Trust because, although I mostly do fiction, every now and again I publish a fashion book. The costs of printing illustrations, and paying the picture fees, were so high that we couldn’t do them on standard publishing terms. Either we had to get the fashion houses to contribute, or we needed some outside help. I hated relying on the fashion houses. They only knew what worked in magazines or advertising, and so what they wanted – what, if they were paying for it, they demanded – was often entirely unsuitable for books. So when a few years ago a friend who worked for an art publisher pointed me to the Daylesworth, it seemed a gift. The trust had been set up by some rich businessman who collected art, and it was entirely focused towards art books. But I’d decided that if you stretched the definition of ‘art’, it could cover fashion too. Maybe they had agreed, or maybe doing the odd frock book made them feel hip. I don’t know. I’d never met anyone there. They had a grant application on their website, I’d filled it out the first time, and when it worked, I continued to do so. Maybe this meeting would be help for later books. I feel almost positive about this, I told myself. Then I added, Liar.
Miranda was still organising me. ‘They’ve been playing funny buggers, but I’ve got them pinned down now.’ She paused, diverted. ‘It was very strange. I couldn’t get a call-back for weeks.’
I didn’t see why that was strange. I’d avoid meeting me to discuss arts subsidy too, if I could.
I wasn’t given much time to brood, however. Miranda had suddenly speeded up, clearly thinking that if she spoke very quickly, the content wouldn’t register. ‘The woman there is Celia Stein, and she’s apparently very busy at the moment, so I booked you in to see her this afternoon at four.’ And then she had gathered her papers and her mug and slid out the door before I could share my views on scheduling.
I’d been thinking recently that I should put her forward for the next junior editor vacancy that came up. She was new, but she had hoovered up everything I’d thrown at her, and she deserved a better job than the entry-level one she did for me. And the job’s laughable salary meant that I couldn’t keep her and just give her better work. But if she kept this up, I was going to get her promoted simply to get her out of my hair.
I called through the wall to the pod where she and her colleagues sat: ‘Where am I meeting her?’
‘Her office,’ she called back. ‘The address is in your diary.’ I looked. It wasn’t as bad as it could have been – just on the edge of Regent’s Park, which meant I could walk home afterwards. I tried to continue feeling martyred, but it wasn’t working.
‘Thanks,’ I called instead, my tone an apology for my thoughts.
She giggled again. I really would have to find her a better job.
At three-thirty I gave up. I’d spent most of my afternoon worrying about Aidan, then pushing those thoughts aside and going back to the contract I was negotiating with a new author, before the picture of Frank in his office took over again. The image was so vivid I was barely aware any longer that I hadn’t seen him myself.
Instead I checked out Celia Stein online. The Daylesworth Trust’s website was remarkably uninformative. It said she had worked in ‘the arts’, as though that were a job description, before she had moved to the charitable sector. And that was all. I googled her, too, but with no other information I couldn’t disentangle her from the other Celia Steins the world was filled with, although for amusement I let myself imagine that she was the Celia Stein who was a competitive dirt-bike racer. Sadly, I decided the odds were against it, and so I set off knowing nothing, not a position I liked to be in.
I walked. The bus would have taken as long, and I hoped that the mindlessness of walking would stave off the pictures of Frank, that dark body in the dark room. It didn’t, but it did make me realise that however much Jake wanted to keep me away from his job, we needed to talk. So when I reached the park, I stopped and texted quickly: Are you working or am I seeing you tonight? Then I looked around for the Daylesworth’s offices. The address Miranda had given turned out to be a street of white-stuccoed, rather grand houses, on one side of the road only, as they faced a private square at the south end of Regent’s Park. I’d always assumed the trust was a fairly small operation, but if it could afford more than a couple of rooms here, that was not the case. Or maybe the founder ran his business, whatever that was, from there, and they benefitted by the connection.
The office, when I found it, had no sign at all out front, neither for the Daylesworth Trust nor any other business. I went up the stairs past a group of three women smoking in the sun. Inside was even less informative. Where I expected a reception area, or a hall, there was nothing but a surprisingly small stone-flagged foyer, dominated by a vast double staircase, its large stone steps and elaborate gilt and wrought-iron railing making it look like it belonged in a seaside resort hotel in the 1890s. There was no sign, but also nowhere to go but up, so up I went. At the top of the first flight, tucked into the side of the landing, was an ugly 1960s veneered plywood desk. A plainly dressed, middle-aged woman looked up. ‘Yes?’ she said, and it was only manners that stopped me from doing a carton-style double-take. She had the most beautiful voice, deep and gravelly, like Lauren Bacall, oozing sex and sin, but coming out of a completely ordinary face.
I contemplated asking her to marry me, just so I could wake up to that voice for the rest of my life, but I decided she might think it was too sudden. ‘Would you tell Celia Stein that Samantha Clair is here?’ I said instead.
She picked up the phone and dialled. Then, ‘I’m afraid there’s nowhere to sit, but she won’t be long.’
I smiled. An opportunity to listen some more. ‘Not to worry. This is a very strange building. What was it before?’
A snort escaped her. ‘It’s nineteenth century, and it’s listed, a building of historical importance. But for anyone who works here, it’s a white elephant, is what it is. We’re not allowed to touch any of the architectural features, so we’re just shoved in wherever we fit, all over the place.’
‘Why are you here, then, if it’s so impractical?’
She looked sour. ‘Good question. We were in a purpose-built office block not far away. When the building was scheduled for demolition, when Crossrail was given the go-ahead, we needed to move quickly. The upstairs here is lovely – the bosses have beautiful offices. That may have something to do with their choice.’ She stopped abruptly and picked up the phone. I couldn’t tell if she had just realised she was spilling internal politics to a total stranger, or if she’d heard a step before I did. At any rate, when a woman appeared on the stairs above us, the receptionist was booking a cab and I was admiring the ceiling mouldings.
She came towards me holding out her hand. ‘Celia Stein,’ she confirmed. ‘How nice of you to offer to come to me. I appreciate it.’ She was the kind of woman I’ve always longed to be, looking at them wistfully in restaurants and theatres. She was neither terribly tall, nor terribly thin, but she looked both. Her hair, a reddish brown, fell in waves past her shoulders, and was held back from her face on one side with a comb. Her clothes were not dissimilar to mine – trousers and a blouse – but there the resemblance ended. Hers were two shades of elegant taupe, chosen to set off her russet colouring, while mine were black and white, chosen to reduce to the bare minimum the time spent thinking about them. And, I acknowledged to myself, that was why I would never look like women like Celia Stein: she took time and trouble and I didn’t. Her hairstyle, so simple-looking, probably took half an hour of careful blow-drying every morning, and needed highlights once a month; my hair was cut when I remembered, and otherwise had to look out for itself. She also spent money, a neon sign flashing over her head: Expensive to Maintain. Her trousers were linen, her shirt silk, her watch thin and discreet, her shoes sleek Italian (maybe) leather. I bet the highlights cost a bomb too, and her dry-cleaning bill.
I gave myself a mental shake. I had no idea why my hackles had gone up. She was watching me, and I think she knew it. ‘Please come up,’ was all she said, and, ‘Thank you, Denise,’ to the receptionist as she turned to lead the way.
Celia Stein’s office was small and not particularly glamorous, whatever Denise thought. Or maybe she wasn’t high enough up the pecking order. Her room was not dissimilar to mine, which was also in an old house converted to office use, and equally harshly carved out of a space that had once been beautiful. Hers was at the back of the building, and looked out onto a light-well and the rear of the house behind. Otherwise, it was run-of-the-mill: standard-issue office desk, filing cabinets, shelves. The only spot of colour came from a print on the wall, an orange and gold mishmash of 1950s cartoon characters. Its colours suited her look, even if the style didn’t go with her personality. Or what I had decided in the first twenty seconds was her personality. Sam Clair, the Sigmund Freud of snap judgements.
She sat at her desk and gestured to the single remaining chair. There was coffee in a cafetière on her desk, and two cups, which softened my mood considerably. We made small talk for the few minutes it took to pour us both a drink, and then she said, ‘Tell me how I can help.’
I tried to look like those dewy-eyed ingénues everyone wants to help when they have a flat tyre. Or, at least, that’s the way it works in black-and-white movies. It’s not my best look. ‘I’m not really sure,’ I admitted. ‘I was shanghaied into sitting on an Arts Council panel on subsidies, and since you’re the only people I ever deal with on the subsidies front, I thought I’d come and pick your brains.’
She gave a small, controlled smile. I suspected everything she did was controlled. ‘I can tell you about our own funding,’ she said, ‘and I can give you our guidelines for selecting projects to support. I’ve also put together the figures we release annually on our charitable allocations. Does that help? What more can I tell you?’
It was a good question, because I hadn’t a clue. And what she had done could have been emailed over to me. She hadn’t needed to allow me to break into her day for that, and she didn’t strike me as the sort who went out of her way to have any of her days disrupted against her will.
‘One area I’d like to explore is the future of reproductions in books. Given the spread of images online, and the costs of printing, the question, why illustrate books at all, is an obvious one. If the author can say, “Vermeer’s Music Lesson”, and the reader can look at it online, spending money printing it, or spending money paying a permission fee to the owner of the picture, is surely becoming pointless. Just what is the future of this kind of publishing?’
‘It’s a good question, but my job here deals almost entirely with works of art that are still in copyright, and protecting those rights,’ she said.
That didn’t sound like a charitable activity.
She must have read my face, because she went on, as if I’d argued, ‘We give funds to publishers who want to use these works, who might otherwise not use them, or use them without clearing the legal hurdles. This promotes the spread of modern art, as well as protecting the rights for the artists and their descendants.’
It still didn’t sound like charity to me, but it was none of my business. I nodded as though she’d made valid points, and went through the questions I’d thought up on the way over, about funding and resource allocation. I was going to have to talk for twenty minutes, so the more concrete examples I could gather, the better. Celia, whatever her job was, had plenty of experience.
After half an hour, she made it plain without actually saying anything that we were finished, and I had to agree. I took her cool hand, held out as if she were dropping a charitable donation of her own into my indigent palm, and left. On the way down, I paused to say goodbye to Denise, just so I could hear her velvet purr again. It was just ‘Goodbye’, but it made me smile as I left, and I was halfway across the park and only twenty minutes from home before I thought to check and see if Jake had replied to my text.
He had. You know you’re seeing me tonight. You hadlunch with Merriam.
Eek.
Jake arrived a couple of hours later. I heard the front door close, and the thunk as he dropped his bag. A few weeks before I’d been having a drink with my upstairs neighbour, Kay, when we heard him come in.
‘He’s got keys already?’ she said, aiming for a neutral expression.
‘Does it bother you?’ We did share a front door, so it wasn’t an unreasonable worry. I hadn’t known him long.
‘It’s just, well …’ she looked embarrassed. I waited. ‘It’s fast. You’ve only been seeing him a couple of months.’
I was amused. ‘I didn’t realise we were discussing my relationship. I thought you were worrying about safety, and I was going to tell you that if things went horribly wrong and I ended up raped and murdered in my bed, at least the police had the keys.’
She snickered, and then hastily covered, ‘I didn’t mean to imply—’
I waved it away. ‘I know. It’s fine. He has my keys because he works strange hours, and I don’t want to have to get up at midnight to let him in.’
I didn’t call out when I heard the door. My bag was at the front and Jake would know I was in and come down the hall to find me. As I went up on tiptoe to kiss him hello, one corner of his mouth lifted in a small smile. A finger gently flicked my collar. ‘Battledress?’ he said mildly, but his smile widened.
