A Murder of Magpies

by Flanders, Judith

  * * *

  At my mother’s office the meeting took on the aura of a case conference. The only way you could tell that Jake was the policeman and we were the civilians was that he had automatically taken charge. Then again, have you ever seen a meeting with two women and a man where that doesn’t happen? Really, I suppose, the only way you could tell that Jake was a policeman was that my mother let him take charge.

  “What have we got?” he said, leaving it up to us to decide who “we” were, and what we might have.

  My mother was quite sure of both answers. “Given that Sam can’t describe the man who hit her?” She raised her eyebrows at me, and I mutely shook my head. The landing was dark, and I had sensed the man, rather than seen him. “And there were no fingerprints?” She raised her eyebrows at Jake, treating him exactly as she did me.

  “Nothing. Nothing, that is, that we can match at the moment—we’ve eliminated Sam’s, and what appears to be her cleaner’s, but there are stray prints that we can’t source. None of them match anything we’ve got on file, so we’re either talking about Sam’s friends—most likely—or people who’ve never entered the system—much less likely, because they weren’t very clever about it. And villains who aren’t very clever we usually meet before too long. The final possibility is that they were from outside the country.” He tapped off the possibilities on his palm: “There’s the bank, Intinvest, and their friends; Alemán’s family; Vernet; or someone we don’t know about yet.”

  “Or the French police,” I added thoughtlessly.

  He acted like I hadn’t spoken, with only a flattening of his look indicating that I’d gone a step too far. I moved back on to safer ground. “Is there some way of checking the prints in Europe?”

  “In theory. In practice, we expect the Spanish and the French to respond in about twenty-four hours; Lithuania is anybody’s guess; and the Italians may take twenty-four months. It depends on how busy they are—and if they can match the prints.”

  “If they can, when do you expect to hear?”

  My mother looked impatiently at me. “No, dear. If they can, it’s twenty-four months. It’s if they can’t, we’ll hear back quickly.”

  It was lucky my mother had decided to be one of the good guys, because she’d have made a sensational baddie. But while all this was important, I couldn’t really give it my full attention. I was more worried about Kit. “Surely that’s more urgent? Have you heard anything?”

  Jake looked gently at me. “Nothing. We’ve spoken to his sister, who hasn’t heard from him for a few weeks, although she says that’s normal. We found his ex. They’d seen each other a few months ago—he claims they’re friendly.” He looked over at me, to see if I knew differently, but I just shrugged. “He says he hasn’t seen him since, and he was in New York when Kit missed his meeting with you.” He still didn’t say “disappeared,” I noticed. “His passport confirms that.” At least he was taking it seriously enough to check, I thought sourly. Jake continued, “His solicitor says that the papers Kit left with him have been in his safe, and there’s no indication they’ve been disturbed. I spoke last night to the rector at the London School of Design to see if he’d heard anything.”

  “But Kit hasn’t lectured there since—” I stopped short.

  “Since he was accused of harassment by one of his students last year. It’s all right, we know all about it, although you might have mentioned it to me when we spoke yesterday. It would have saved time.” He saw me looking stubborn, and plowed on. “The rector didn’t think that there was anything in the accusation, and an internal investigation showed that the student,” he checked his notes, “Davies, was a bit of a fantasist, with a history of instability. He left the LSD soon after—” He broke off. “Can it really be called that?”

  “Yes, it can. Don’t bother with the jokes, they’ve all been made already.” I refused to be distracted. “Look, Kit said Davies was really weird. And he said that before he was accused. He sort of stalked Kit. He was at all his public lectures, he followed him around the country. He must have spent a huge amount of time and money on it.”

  Jake wasn’t interested in a dropout with a yen for fashionistas. But I was. It wasn’t unusual for a student to make trouble, even if this kind of trouble was extreme, but it was very unusual for a student to put a lot of cash into something with such an unproductive end result. I thought it was worth following up. I decided I’d call the rector, who’d published a few books on design and whom I knew slightly. Nicholas Meredith was always plugged in to what was happening. If there was any gossip about Kit, he might not want to pass it on to the police, but maybe he would talk to me.

  Meanwhile my mother was lining up our tasks. “I’ll start to ask some questions about Intinvest and its subsidiaries. I don’t think I’ll get much from the East European side, but I’ll see what’s being said.” She turned to me. “Will you get me a copy of the manuscript, please? There might be some place where I might have leverage.”

  I looked from her to Jake, like a puppy who isn’t quite sure who it should be obeying. Jake shrugged. “Nell knows far more about corporate malfeasance than I do. The Fraud Squad is looking at the manuscript, and the papers Kit left with his solicitor, but they’re more interested in the money laundering than they are in who might have arranged for his disappearance. They’ll give me whatever they think is relevant, but more is always better at the beginning of an investigation.”

  I was momentarily sidetracked. Nell? When had Jake and Helena become so friendly? And anyway, no one ever abbreviated Helena’s name. Then I heard what he’d just said. “When did you get a manuscript? And from whom?”

  He looked noncommittal. “We took it off your office computer while we were looking at the hacker’s attempted entry. Your IT man was very helpful.”

  Was he? I didn’t think I liked IT going into my computer, even with the police who, presumably, had a warrant. But it probably wasn’t the best time to bring that up. Jake seemed to think he was on thin ice, too, and moved on quickly. “I’ll take on Diego Alemán, Alemán’s brother. He’s here, studying at Birkbeck, and I think it’s time to talk to him.”

  This changed things. In some ways, everything had been comfortably distant: French police, Italian or Lithuanian thugs laundering money. But Birkbeck College wasn’t distant. Most of the staff were on a different planet, it’s true, but it was my kind of different—the have-no-television, “What is The X Factor?” kind of different.

  “What is he doing at Birkbeck? Is he studying there? I might know his tutors.”

  Jake was playing this one close to his chest. “Let’s compare notes later.” “Later” was going to be sometime soon, I could see. Possibly the next millennium. I let it ride.

  Jake stood. “Well, if that’s all for the moment?” My mother nodded impatiently—she wanted to hit the phones and start picking up scuttlebutt. Suddenly I felt exhausted. What I really wanted to do was go home and go to bed. But I had the weekend in front of me to begin to repair the damage to my flat, and to my body. If I didn’t reach Nicholas at the LSD, I wasn’t going to be able to speak to him until Monday, and that was too long to put Kit’s disappearance on hold. I decided to go to the office. With luck, I could skulk in while everyone was at lunch, make some calls, and leave without seeing too many people—or being seen by them.

  * * *

  I stopped at the chemist for some cheap eye makeup before I went into the office. The woman behind the counter tried to steer me toward neutral tones, but once I took off my sunglasses she agreed 1960s hippie green was the way to go. She even helped me match the bruises, and as she said cheerfully, “Well, honey, you look like you’re really bad at makeup, but you don’t look like you got beat up anymore.”

  Miranda didn’t agree when I slunk past her desk. I’d timed my entry carefully—not that hitting lunch hour on a Friday is difficult in a publishing office. It goes on for so long, after all. Miranda was the only one there, bent over Breda’s book, looking
a little beat up herself. She was terrific. She didn’t ask questions, didn’t comment at all. She only flinched slightly, and said, “Coffee?” Even if she hadn’t been able to read, I’d have kept her forever just for that.

  I nodded my thanks and quickly shut myself into my office. Lunchtime was good in that no one was around to question me, but equally, there was no one around for me to question. I left messages for Nicholas Meredith, and Chris Stanley, a friend of Peter’s who taught political theory at Birkbeck. I contemplated trying to get in touch with Kit’s editor on the Sunday News, to see if he had any ideas. I’d met him once, briefly, when Kit and I had bumped into him at the cinema. That he was terrifying was an understatement. He was a huge alpha male who was only happy when making other people cry. And if that was the read I got on him at a Rita Hayworth retrospective, imagine what he’d be like at work. I sat up straighter. I’m not a coward, I told myself severely. But even if I wasn’t, and the statement was open to discussion, I also couldn’t see how to approach him. Hello, you won’t remember me, but I’m looking for your missing journo even though I have no official reason to? That needed work.

  Instead I e-mailed Robert Marks at Selden’s, and David. Then all the people in the building who had copies of the manuscript, asking them to delete them off their computers, as well as returning any printed copies to me for shredding. I worded it to imply that we had a libel problem, and therefore we couldn’t afford to have stray copies lying about, but I didn’t think that would hold after I’d spoken to David. I sent a list of all these people to IT, too, so they could scrub their hard drives, or whatever it was they needed to do to delete the manuscript permanently. All in all, I was a whirlwind of activity, even if none of it seemed to get me any further forward.

  Miranda came in with the coffee, and stood hovering. I couldn’t really blame her for wanting to know what was going on. So did I. I took a deep breath and said, “Close the door.” I’d decided that, if David agreed, we’d tell the rest of the world that I’d been hurt when I came home during a burglary, and that Kit’s manuscript had serious libel problems, and present them as two separate issues. But I thought it was important to tell Miranda the truth—she was in the line of fire if anyone identified her as my assistant, and anyway, I just couldn’t deal with it on my own.

  She tried to look professional, but she was goggling at me like a five-year-old on a school trip to the fire station. But she pulled herself together, and halfway through she began to make notes. By the time I’d finished she was acting as though I was telling her how to brief a designer for a book jacket, the most exciting thing I’d let her do so far.

  “Right,” she said briskly. “What story do you want me to give as your cover story, and what story should I pass as deep gossip—you know, ‘I’m telling you this, but don’t tell another soul’? That’s the only way you’ll keep a lid on this, even for a while.”

  It was a good plan. I couldn’t stop the talk, but I could tailor it. If my colleagues thought something was being withheld from them, they’d move heaven and earth to get at the truth. If, on the other hand, they thought they had the facts, they’d be happy for days ringing each other up to say “Did you hear…?”

  I had an inspiration. “Are you still in touch with Kathleen Strong?” Kath was her ex-boss, a literary agent and a gossip to rival Kit. If you wanted a particularly vicious rumor spread, she was your girl.

  Miranda grinned. “I am a bit, but not enough to call her out of the blue. She’d suspect. Can I go to the launch of that new book tonight? Kath represents the author, and she’s sure to be there. I can easily drop it then.”

  “Yes, that’s a very good idea. It’s a drinks party, and no one will care how many people show up. What’s our story?”

  Miranda thought. Gossip was a serious business. “Well, your main idea, that you disturbed burglars, works. I think that we just need to cover it up with something else, otherwise people will link the Alemán libel problems to it. Two things happening to you on the same day is not good.”

  “No, heaven forbid that more than one thing should happen to me at a time.”

  She flashed a smile of apology, but wasn’t deflected. “You got burgled, but what you’re not saying is … How about you think it was your ex, in some sort of revenge deal?”

  I hadn’t laughed in days, but the thought of Peter breaking into my flat to destroy my possessions in a state of thwarted passion was irresistibly comic—and so far from anything he might actually do that it couldn’t hurt. “All right, but poor Peter. Can we make it ‘an’ ex—suggest that I have so many that I can’t be quite sure which one it was?”

  I’m afraid that Miranda laughed out loud at the idea of my having legions of men lined up waiting their turn. But she had the decency to smother it quickly. “That’s great. I can say that you think it wasn’t Peter—a more recent acquisition who you tried out and had to let go. And I can also hint that I know more about him, and that Kath would be astonished to hear who it was. That will definitely get her attention. I can make her think it’s a Timmins and Ross author, and she’ll spend all her energies on that.” Then she looked doubtful. “At least, it’ll work if there isn’t really a Timmins and Ross author…” She trailed off, uncertain whether asking if I had a secret lover was ruder than making the assumption that I didn’t.

  “No, one of our authors is fine. Make it Breda if you think that will keep Kath gossiping.”

  Miranda’s eyes popped. Then she looked regretful. “After three days of Toujours Twenty-one I’d love to believe it, but I don’t think Breda’s ever had sex at all.”

  “You could be right—she probably found her children under a cabbage leaf. Can we bear to discuss her book? We will have to at some point—I’m due in Galway next week.”

  Miranda looked as though the smell of rotten eggs had just wafted through my office. “I’ve done about fifty pages. Do you want to look at it before I go on?”

  “Want? No. Need to? I suppose so. Give it to me before I go, and I’ll read it this weekend.”

  “Good. Do you want me to cancel your appointments for Monday? Are you going to be in? Also, you need to decide about Paris on Wednesday.”

  “My God, Paris. I’d completely forgotten.” Kit had organized for me to go and see the couture show featuring Vernet’s new designer, I think on the basis that after this book came out, he would be banned from their shows for life. I normally don’t get glamorous little jaunts like this, and I’d been looking forward to it.

  Miranda looked sick. If she had had an invitation to a Paris fashion show, it would take more than grievous bodily harm to make her forget about it. It had been planned as a fun day out with Kit, but now it could just be an opportunity to talk to the people at Vernet, see what they thought about Kit’s disappearance.

  “I’ll still go to Paris. Will you get in touch with Vernet’s PR? He’s a ghastly man named Loïc Something-or-other—it’s in the file. Make it sound like we want to make sure Vernet isn’t unhappy with the book, or something. He won’t have time to see me before the show, but try and book him for after. As for the rest, I’ll be in on Monday, but cancel everything that isn’t absolutely urgent. It’s unlikely that I’ll have time for anything except talking to Robert and whoever he dredges up for criminal law at Selden’s—if, of course, Selden’s deign to do criminal law.”

  I saw David go past and stuck my head out the door to stop him. Miranda was relieved we didn’t have to discuss Breda anymore, so she escaped.

  David looked at me warily. My eye makeup was not what he was used to. I shepherded him into his office like a particularly bossy collie dog, and shut the door.

  I quickly ran through the events of the last day. David began by looking irritated, and ended by staring at me, completely speechless, mouth ajar. Crime was not something publishers ever thought would enter their lives, except as a profitable list of whodunits.

  “It’s as under control as it’s going to be for the moment, David.” I tried
not to sound exasperated. “We’re gathering up the manuscripts, and Miranda will shred them. The police already have their own.” This did not appear to comfort him. “As far as the outside world is concerned, I had a break-in. In a totally unrelated incident, Kit’s new book is having a series of libel problems, and will be delayed. End of story.”

  “Do you really think people are going to believe that?” David looked hopeful. He was always one to find the easiest route, even if it took him miles out of his way.

  I snapped. I always find it difficult to talk to David. I constantly have to bite my lip so I won’t say things like, “Stand up straight, take your hands out of your pockets, stop being so wet.” So I was abrupt to the point of rudeness now. “No, David, I don’t. But I also don’t think they’re going to believe that Kit has been abducted, possibly murdered, that I was beaten up by thugs trying to locate his manuscript, and that none of us know what the hell is going on.” I thought and revised. “Well, they’ll believe that last bit. For God’s sake, we’ve got to leave it to the police, do some damage limitation, and move on.” I had no intentions of leaving it to the police or moving on, but David wasn’t going to be much use.

  6

  Chris Stanley was on the phone as I returned to my office, sounding a bit distant. He was a good friend of Peter’s, and we hadn’t kept in touch after the breakup. No animosity, but he was definitely “his” rather than “hers.” I didn’t bother to think of a cover story. What possible reason could I have for wanting to talk to a foreign student? Chris might not even know him. But I was in luck.

  “Diego Alemán? Yes, he’s one of my students, why?”

  “I want to talk to him about a manuscript I’m working on. You know about his brother?”