A Murder of Magpies

by Flanders, Judith

  The two from production, who were there only to deal with schedules, weren’t even doing that—even from my end of the table I could see they were playing a rousing game of hangman. And I’d lose a few more if I continued to argue, not because anyone disagreed, just because they were desperate for the meeting to end. I let my attention drift. If you can’t beat ’em …

  “Well,” said David brightly. “If we’re all agreed.”

  I woke out of my dream. “Please. We really do need to talk about Breda.” I knew I sounded sad and desperate, but that’s only because I was. We did need to talk about Breda, but there wasn’t anything to say. If we refused this book, she’d go to another publisher; if we published it and it got the reaction it deserved, she would take her next book elsewhere, too, despite the relationship I’d nurtured for over a decade.

  Everyone looked embarrassed, and got up to go, as though I hadn’t said anything at all.

  So we had to buy this book, and it was up to me to turn it into something that wouldn’t make her a laughingstock. A success would be beyond me, but maybe I could engineer a quiet, genteel sort of failure.

  * * *

  Miranda had turned up my heater before I came back, which meant she was beginning to recover. Timmins & Ross is in four Georgian houses, which have been knocked together into one highly confusing interior in a turning just off Great Russell Street, behind the British Museum. They are lovely houses from the outside, but the inside has not seen much work done to them in the last century. They do have plumbing, it’s true, but they don’t have central heating, and the beautiful sash windows let in gales even in the summer. In winter it’s often warmer outside.

  My office is a partitioned bit of what must have once been a drawing room, because it has a huge window, which is great unless you care about your extremities. If I keep an electric fan heater on full blast from eight, which officially we’re not allowed to do, by noon I can usually manage with just one sweater.

  Before I’d even sat down, Miranda’s head was around the door. “So what was that all about?”

  “What was what all about?” She’s smart, but she can’t possibly have known I’d fantasized about assaulting Ben with the acquisition meeting minutes.

  She thought I was stonewalling, and wasn’t going to have it. “The police?” she nudged.

  My eyes popped wide. “Good lord, I’d forgotten.” I gestured her in. I outlined the conversation and asked her to check delivery dates for both new manuscripts, even though most came electronically, and proofs, which didn’t. She nodded, but her mind wasn’t on it. “A hit-and-run? Really?”

  “That’s what I said. But maybe that’s the way the police work. God knows, he didn’t believe me when I told him how publishing worked.”

  I shrugged and turned to my desk. And then swore comprehensively when I saw my e-mail was down. Already on her way back to her desk, Miranda called through the wall that it was the entire company, so it should be fixed relatively quickly. Meanwhile my voice mail was stuffed, in only an hour. Breda. Breda’s agent. Marketing, asking why I hadn’t approved copy they’d sent down a whole ten minutes earlier. Two copy editors who weren’t going to make their deadlines. A proofreader touting for work. My mother. And Kit, three times.

  Kit Lovell is one of my favorite authors. He is a fashion journalist, he is efficient, he is professional, he meets his deadlines, and he is the best gossip on the planet. I don’t usually do his sort of book—quick-and-dirty low-downs on the rich and famous—but he came to me through a friend, and he’s been a constant delight. But it was unlike him to keep calling. If he had got some really hot gossip, he’d leave a message and then I wouldn’t be able reach him because he would be busy calling the immediate world while it was still fresh. Maybe that’s why we’d become friends so quickly—like publishers, Kit lived off chatter.

  I had his latest manuscript, which his typist e-mailed to me two weeks earlier—Kit was above such mundanities as computers—and I’d already told him how much I loved it, so it couldn’t be that. Whatever it was, he took precedence over my mother, and he absolutely took precedence over Breda that week. I put the phone on automatic redial, hoping his gossip wasn’t so hot that it took him the whole morning to work through his contacts list.

  In the meantime, I had to start preparing his book. It didn’t need much editing from me—Kit’s work never did—but like all of his books it would have to go to a libel lawyer before we sent it out for copyediting. It was not that Kit was reckless, it was just a by-product of the kind of books he wrote. Most people in business have things that they don’t want the world to know, even if they’ve never so much as crossed the road against the lights. People in the fashion business, which is built entirely on appearances, really don’t want the world to know how they got to where they were. What Kit supplies is the true story, which as he says sweepingly, “everyone” knows. But the “everyone” of the fashion business, and the “everyone” who reads a Sunday newspaper, where Kit’s books usually get serialized, are not the same thing, and his subjects often objected. Strenuously. With lawyers.

  The three rules of checking for libel are short and sweet. Is the reported incident true? Can we prove it? Then the most important one: Can the subject afford to sue, whether it’s true or not? With fashion houses owned by multinationals, the answer to the questions were yes, yes, and yes. So far as I could see, taking a dispassionate look at it, our troubles with this book began on the title page. Kit had called his biography The Gilded Life and Tarnished Death of Rodrigo Alemán. Alemán was Spain’s most prominent (only?) international star on the fashion scene. He had been brought in to put the ailing French couture house of Vernet back on its feet after Jules Vernet’s retirement. And he did, although in a way that probably hastened Vernet’s death—hip-hop and trance at the shows, ads featuring semi-naked models in soft-core pornographic poses. He’d created a diffusion range, with lower-priced clothes than the standard prêt-à-porter, and then began opening boutiques across the world to sell them in.

  Most of this was no different from any other fashion house, but everything Alemán did was brasher, brighter, bolder—and bigger. There were questions about how the gigantic warehouses he called boutiques managed to survive, given that most days you could shoot a cannon off in any one of them without risking harm to a paying customer. His lavish parties always got into the glossy magazines, but the actress-model-whatevers all borrowed his dresses, they didn’t buy them. And short of hookers, who couldn’t afford them, it wasn’t clear to anyone who would want to.

  All fashion stories are stories of money and excess. And money and fame. And money. And, in this case, violent death.

  I tried Kit one last time. Still busy. Instead of gossiping I took the manuscript along the hall to David’s office. David Snaith is our editor-in-chief, so he has an office that isn’t a partitioned bit, but is what must have once been a morning room: a good-sized, east-facing room. Nothing could look less like a social environment than its present incarnation, however. David has kept every single piece of paper that has ever crossed his desk, and most of them are not filed, but thrown into trays, to be dealt with at some mystical “later” time. When the tray is filled, and starts to overflow, he just slings it onto a shelf where it molders gently for the next few years, with additional trays thrown on top as they fill up in turn. When they all fall over David nudges them back into a heap with his foot as he walks past, but that’s the only attention they ever get. The books and spilled papers lie in heaps, and you have to walk through the snowdrifts of memos. If you stick to the little cleared pathways, and the one empty chair, you’re fine. If more than one person comes in for a meeting, they are given a spare chair by David’s assistant. It is much easier to carry one in than to try and excavate the ones that are already there, buried.

  I tried not to get depressed when I sat down. David and I are temperamentally opposed, and it is hard for us to communicate. He has been at Timmins & Ross for nearly thirty years
, ever since he left university, working his way up to editor-in-chief, which he had achieved about a decade before. He is going to stay here for the rest of his life, and they will have to carry him out feet first, probably in the same bin liners the old papers are taken away in.

  I shook myself. These kind of thoughts were not helpful in getting him onside. David is so cautious, anything out of the ordinary has to be approached full-frontally, otherwise he will duck and run, pretending it isn’t there.

  “It’s about Kit’s book,” I said baldly. “We are going to have to give this more than our usual once-over.”

  “Is it so bad?” David already looked hunted.

  “It’s not bad. In fact, it’s terrific. It’s just that all the fun stuff, the stuff everyone will want to read—and the stuff newspapers will pay big money for—is exactly what everyone concerned wants to keep hidden.”

  “But surely no one denies Alemán was murdered? Isn’t that why we bought the book?”

  “No one denies it. Except his family. Vernet. Oh, and the police. Apart from them, everyone, as you say, knows it was murder.”

  “Do they think it was an accident? How is that possible?”

  “It isn’t. They don’t. They just want it to be one. And they think if they say so loud enough, and often enough, gradually we’ll forget what really did happen.”

  “So what did really happen? I’m not much for fashion news. I read the proposal, but that was last year. I can’t remember them all.”

  I tried not to look impatient. “David, this was all over the front pages for weeks. Cut down to the basics, Alemán was coming home from a club in a Paris suburb at five o’clock one morning when a car screeched out of a turning, drove up onto the pavement, hit him hard enough that his body flew over the top and bounced off the windscreen, at which point the driver backed up and ran over it again. Apparently a belt-and-braces type of killer.”

  “There were witnesses?”

  “Five. And two were bodyguards, so they were sober. But somehow their first statements vanished, and once the Vernet lawyers got there, they saw, I believe, a little old lady who was confused about which was the brake pedal and which the accelerator. Although she was clever enough to drive a car with fake license plates, and then vanish.”

  “How can anyone believe that?”

  “No one does. But as far as Vernet and Alemán’s family is concerned, that was the inquest verdict, and the papers are too scared of being sued to print anything else.”

  “Why aren’t we too scared, then?” David was looking at me like a puppy that’s just made a mess in the house, but hopes that if he looks cute enough, it could be overlooked. David wasn’t cute enough.

  “Kit has done some extraordinary research: early police reports, witness statements that were suppressed, witnesses who were mysteriously never contacted by the police.”

  “Bottom line, what’s he saying?”

  “Organized crime. It’s not phrased that way, naturally. He says there is a dodgy bank and companies laundering money through Vernet. Not that anyone at Vernet knew about it. Maybe Alemán didn’t, either. Or didn’t want to. But it’s what kept the company afloat. That’s how the boutiques survived without customers. Everyone knew. Only no one did.”

  “Does Kit have enough for us to publish safely?”

  “More than enough. Names, dates, copies of invoices for goods never supplied—never even manufactured—with corresponding bank statements for cash received. Lots of cash received. Millions every month.”

  “How did Kit get it all?”

  “I haven’t asked and I don’t intend to. He assures me he has broken no laws, and I believe him. Everything else is for him and the lawyers to sort out.”

  David looked pained. “Is there something about you that just magnetically attracts trouble?”

  I bristled. “This isn’t trouble. It just needs a legal read.”

  If I could go back now and erase the dumbest thing I’ve ever said in my whole life, it would be those two sentences.

  2

  By six o’clock I’d had it. Our e-mail was still down, despite everyone screaming at IT every five minutes. Possibly it was still down because everyone was screaming at IT every five minutes. Either way, we had been reduced to trying to read contracts and check jacket copy on our phones, and we were all fed up. There was a launch party for the newest wunderkind’s novel, but I couldn’t face slogging down to the Aquarium, this year’s hip place for parties, to drink warm white wine and see the same people I’d just left in the office. I packed it in and headed for home.

  One of the perks of my job is a car, but it’s not something I take advantage of, mainly because I don’t drive. I know from being driven that you don’t actually get anywhere in London any faster by car. It’s more pleasant, because you’re insulated from people, you can have Radio 3 on instead of listening to the thirty-six different beats leaking out from the earphones of a carriage-worth of plugged-in commuters, it gives you a little bubble to decompress in at the end of the day. But you don’t save time.

  This, at least, is what I say when people ask. In reality, I can drive, I just don’t. I am, probably, the worst driver on the planet. When I was growing up in Canada I assumed, like all North American children, that the day after I turned sixteen I would take driving lessons, and four weeks later, voilà, the driving fairy would tap me with her wand. And, up to a point, that is what happened. Well, not the fairy bit, but everything else. I took lessons, I got a license. Then my first day out, I sideswiped a parked car. Don’t worry, everyone said, we all do that. So I went out again. A car hit me. That was it. I figured a third time someone would get killed, and it would probably be me. I didn’t drive for years, until a holiday in the States made it a necessity. My friends took me around the first day, showing me the layout of the town. I hit a FedEx van.

  My so-called friends claim that it was a truck, and that I knocked it into a ditch. This is a vicious lie. It was a van, and I only dinged it, and I shall maintain this to my dying day. But whatever it was, and whatever I did to it, that was the end of my driving career. Enough. Some things I’m good at, some things I’m not. I can live with that, and in London it isn’t really crucial. I’m happy enough on public transport most days, and if I’m late or tired or fed up I get a cab. I live close enough to the center of town for it to be affordable.

  It was raining when I left the office, the kind of thin, persistent drizzle that London specializes in in February, despite the fact that it had been March for several weeks. It seemed set to continue this way well into April. I turned up my collar, shifted my bookbag onto my shoulder and made a run for the Tube station.

  There weren’t any seats, of course. I considered myself lucky to find a square inch of space near the plexiglass divider by the door. I braced myself against it, my arms crossed tight across my body to hang on to my bag and not take up more than my fair share of space in this oversized sardine tin. There was no space to hold a book in front of me, but by craning my neck I could read over the shoulder of the woman sitting on the other side of the divider. She had that morning’s Daily Mail, so it was a story on the idiocies of the royal family, and how to lose ten pounds in ten minutes. Then she turned the page, and a picture of a horribly mangled motorbike was spread across two pages, with a standard hyperbolic headline: THE WORST ACCIDENT BLACKSPOT IN BRITAIN? It was only when I read down the page that I realized this was the accident Inspector Field had been investigating. I turned quickly away, straight into the armpit a man bopping unselfconsciously to his earphones. Still, better than looking at the twisted metal. I resolutely stayed that way until I was finally extruded from the train at my station.

  I’d moved to the flat I live in now when I first came to London, nearly twenty years ago. It was a flat share with three friends from university, the ground floor of a fairly dilapidated house in a fairly dilapidated bit of London not too far (not nearly far enough) from Camden market. Gradually the others had all moved on
and out—new partners with flats of their own, marriage and children, jobs in other parts of the country—and five years ago I had bought the flat as a sitting tenant. With the others gone, over the years I’d knocked down walls, restored the floorboards, ripped out the old kitchen and bathroom, turning it from a scruffy student makeshift into a wonderfully empty, open space. Now the flat is so much a part of me I can’t imagine being anywhere else. It is a quiet, white, open space, with big windows and wonderful south light pouring in for most of the day. Although I can’t say that the area has improved—how can it with fifteen thousand adolescents wandering through in search of leather trousers every weekend?—it is a pleasant mix of young couples just starting out, professionals who like the slightly raffish tone, and people who were born in the area, and think gentrification is something that happens when you move to an old-age home.

  Anthony and Kay Lewis, with their five-year-old son Bim, live above me, with Mr. Rudiger on the top floor. Mr. Rudiger never goes out. His daughter drops off his shopping a few times a week, and runs errands for him. In the twenty years I’ve lived here, I’ve only seen him twice: once when I needed to turn off the water in the whole building so the plumber could do some work, and I went up to warn him, the second time to discuss reroofing the house. There doesn’t appear to be anything wrong with him, and he was perfectly pleasant, but he made it plain he liked being alone up there.

  Anthony and Kay are different. They’re both actors, and therefore are around a lot more than most. This suits me fine, as they are happy to take parcels in for me, sort out meter readers, and water my garden when I’m away. In exchange Bim plays in my garden, and I pretend I can’t hear him screaming. We enjoy each other’s company without needing to be too close, which is my preference. About once every six months they come down for Sunday brunch, or to a dinner party. That’s the extent of it.