A Murder of Magpies

by Flanders, Judith

  I was triumphant. “Then you end up with Kenneth Wright.”

  My mother and Jake both looked at me as if I were a toddler they had been indulging, who had suddenly started reciting Hamlet’s soliloquies.

  Jake spoke first. “Kenneth Wright? Who is he?”

  I was proud of myself. “He does the UK property deals for Vernet.”

  Helena was peeved. Solicitor Land was her territory. “Where did you hear about him?”

  I told them about my conversation with Selden’s.

  My mother looked thoughtful. “Cooper’s. That does surprise me. They’re extremely respectable. There’s never been a hint of a problem for them. You say he’s not with them now, and working on his own?”

  I wasn’t going to put too much faith in Selden’s. “So Littlewood said. I don’t know more than that.”

  Jake was getting impatient. “What are we saying here?”

  “We’re saying NCIS should be looking at Wright. Cooper’s are very big, very prestigious. It’s unusual that someone should leave them to set up in a small way on his own. Put that together with the fact that Vernet’s property deals in this country were unnecessarily complex.…”

  She seemed to feel she had said enough, but Jake made a rolling motion with his hand, keep going.

  “It’s straightforward. Kit writes that before the Regent Street shop was bought, three deals failed. It’s the oldest and easiest way to launder money: make an offer on a property, put the dirty money in a solicitor’s escrow account, abort the deal, and then the money comes back, fresh and clean from a reputable solicitor’s bank account. And,” she sat up at the thought, “and if it was coming from Cooper’s, no one would ever think to look further—not even NCIS—you just can’t get more respectable than that. Kit didn’t realize what was going on, so he didn’t follow it up, but Vernet was opening boutiques in ridiculous places, then discovering that the market wasn’t there, and closing them again. It doesn’t take a genius to know that you can’t sell £4,000 dresses in places like Bradford. But if there were three or four aborted deals for every piece of property purchased, then Vernet were washing tens of millions of pounds in Britain alone every year. Multiply by all the countries they were operating in. The stuff Kit found on the false invoices was nothing—probably just a little sideline. The real money was coming from the property.”

  I thought I’d better add in the rest. “Did you speak to Diego Alemán?”

  Jake looked at me blandly, and made a noncommittal noise. It would have been nice if information were a two-way street, but then, I didn’t expect him to tell me how to edit books.

  “Did he tell you he’d worked for Intinvest?”

  Jake stopped looking bland.

  “I met him at a party on Sunday—totally by chance, he’s the student of a friend of mine who teaches at Birkbeck.” I didn’t expect him to believe me, but I also didn’t care. “He was working for Intinvest in Paris, and plans to go back to them this summer.” I paused, then added, as though I was merely thinking aloud. “He said he was in IT. I have no idea what that means in his case, but I assume that that’s how money gets transferred?”

  Jake sat staring at the table, working the implications through.

  I kept quiet and watched him. After a minute he nodded sharply once to himself, and went down the hall to make some calls privately.

  I was still of two minds about nagging Jake to get the police to look at Kit’s file again. Bringing the harassment to their notice again seemed like a bad idea, doing nothing seemed like a bad idea. Which was worse? I had no idea, and decided to hang fire for the moment. Instead I told Helena about the LSD, more to keep her amused than anything else. The Jesus Saves lady made her laugh, which I had known it would, and we sat catching up on more mundane matters until Jake came back. He was pulling on his coat.

  He looked at me. “I’ll drive you home.”

  What could I say: Look, I haven’t made up my mind, and it’s raining and nearly midnight, so thanks, but I’d rather walk?

  We drove the mile and a half in silence. When we got to my house Jake pulled over and cut the engine. I stared out the window.

  “Whatever you want,” he said.

  I kept staring. This was absurd. I wasn’t an adolescent, and I wasn’t making a lifetime commitment. The man didn’t want to marry me, he wanted to fuck me. And, despite the fact that nice men find it more comfortable to think that nice women don’t jump into bed with men they’ve just met and don’t have long-term plans for, nice women sometimes do. They definitely sometimes do.

  Jake put his hand on the back of my neck and waited silently, gently rubbing behind my ear.

  The car was very small suddenly, and airless.

  I opened the door. “Let’s go,” I said.

  8

  Jake was up and gone by the time I woke up. Well, actually, he was up and gone by the time I stopped pretending to be asleep. I really didn’t want to talk to him. I had no idea where this could go. If it had been awful, or even just dull, then it was easy—thanks a lot, it was great, but I don’t think so. But it hadn’t. And from what Jake had said last night, he was one of those nice men who didn’t think women should be slept with and then dropped. He wasn’t looking for a just a couple of fun weeks, which would also have been easy. Casual, very enjoyable sex was one thing, but could I see myself having a relationship with a policeman? I didn’t think so. But how could I say that? I had no idea, so I pretended to be asleep. Which was fine for the moment, but unless I developed narcolepsy it wouldn’t work for long.

  I lay with my eyes firmly closed, lying still until I heard the door bang and his car start. The second it did I leaped out of bed and roared through shower, dressing, and coffee, setting the land-speed record in the process on the way to the office. The last refuge of the intelligentsia: when real life gets too difficult, go find something to read.

  I was halfway there before I realized what day it was. I was supposed to be in Paris for Vernet’s show that afternoon. The whole trip was ludicrous. Kit and I had planned it for fun. Now he was missing and there was no point anymore. Miranda had set up this meeting with Loïc, and I had my train tickets, but neither of those things justified five hours in a train. I stood, undecided. Then I realized that if I went, at least I’d be out of meaningful conversation distance with Jake for a bit longer. Decision made, I raced up to my office, grabbed the tickets, left a note for Miranda, and thundered back down the stairs. Hurtling through the reception area I saw the student from the LSD—the thin, not-very-clean one who had taken me to Nick’s office. He was talking to Bernadette, and I had practically mown him down before I stopped.

  “Hi. Are you looking for me?” I looked at my watch as I spoke. I could get to St. Pancras in half an hour—twenty minutes if I was lucky. I should make it.

  He took a hurried step back, as though my momentum had unbalanced him. “No. That is—” He turned to Bernie. “Thanks very much. It’s OK. I was mistaken.” And he bolted.

  Bernie and I stared at the door, then at each other. “Was it something I said? Or something you said?”

  Bernie shrugged. “He was asking if you were in all day. He said he didn’t have an appointment. I was just telling him we don’t keep track of the staff.” She snorted at the idea of even trying. “Then you came back and—”

  “Did he leave a name?” Maybe he knew something about Davies.

  Bernie shook her head.

  “Well, if he comes back, nab him and get a contact number. Frisk him if you have to. I really want to talk to him.”

  She looked slightly sick at the idea, but I knew she’d do what she could. I didn’t have time to deal with it now, anyway, and headed back out the door.

  I made it with five minutes to spare, which meant that the staff at the station were giving everyone those don’t you realize how privileged you are to travel on my nice shiny train, and here you are putting me to all this trouble looks. I ignored them. If you paid attention to all the put-u
pon people in England, you’d never have time to be put-upon yourself, which would take all the fun out of things.

  The compartment was jammed, but once we had left the station I prowled down the corridor and found that, as usual, they’d put everyone in two carriages to minimize the work for the staff. The rest of the train was empty. I moved, ignoring the huffs of annoyance and giving my best Helena Junior stare. Then I settled down to read the morning’s crop of e-mails and submissions.

  It was all very straightforward, but given the tiny amount of time I’d given to anything other than worrying about Kit, there was an awful lot of it, and it filled the journey to Paris nicely. It was only as we were rumbling through the outer suburbs that I reached the e-mail from Breda, and we had arrived at the Gare du Nord before I looked up from it. It was very civil, as always from her, but she had a problem with the jacket copy that had been sent to her—the stuff that would go on the cover, to entice readers to buy the book. She wrote: I know, Sam, that this isn’t your department, but I thought I’d better discuss it with you, as it’s a bit awkward. The person who wrote the blurb has missed the point of my book, and I don’t know how to tell her. She hasn’t realized that the book is a spoof, and has written it as though it were a chick-lit novel. What shall we do? Is it best to ask her to do it again, or, given that she has no sense of humor, is it better just to give it to someone else quietly?

  Spoof? I stared, dazed, at the passengers shrugging into their coats and collecting their bags. The blurb writer had no sense of humor? Where did that leave the rest of us?

  As I moved through the usual rugger scrum masquerading as a taxi queue, sidestepping the thin blonde women of indefinite age with small dogs in Vuitton carry cases, I was operating entirely on automatic pilot. Every time I go through the Gare du Nord I swear I’ll learn to use the Métro, but every time I get there, I can’t face it and tell myself, Just this once more. And all the while, I turned the e-mail over and over in my mind, trying to figure out where we’d gone wrong. Breda had written a comic novel? Why had none of us laughed? Was it not funny, or had we just not expected it to be funny? Was she a bad writer or were we stupid? I had a feeling that I knew the answer to that last one. I rang Miranda once I was in a taxi and read her the e-mail. She was doubtful. “We can’t all be wrong, can we?”

  “Can’t we.” I was grim, and it wasn’t a question. “Look, print out a couple of copies of the manuscript without the author’s name on them and give them to your friends. Tell them it’s a new comic novel that’s just come in and you think it’s great.”

  “I have to tell my friends that I think it’s great?” Miranda saw social death looming.

  “You can tell them the truth afterward if they start to treat you like a leper. None of us can read this book fresh, and we need to know if we’ve all had total sense of humor failure. Did we just misread it because we know Breda?”

  She was un-persuaded, but it meant she could stop working on it while her friends read it. “If I pay them a reader’s fee, I can ask them to do it in a couple of days.”

  “If there’s anyone in the world who will read that stuff in forty-eight hours for £35, go for it. But find people who will give you a real response, not what they think you want to hear. Make sure you don’t include the title page. I want them to read it without any preconceptions based on the author’s name.”

  She said she’d get straight onto it, which left me free to think about the coming afternoon.

  Kit had told me the drill, so I didn’t worry about getting to the Palais des Sports in good time. The show was called for two thirty, and he told me it wouldn’t begin before three, probably not until three thirty. So I went to find some lunch. There’s a restaurant that I like, but I never take anyone I know there, because it is too ordinary. For me that’s its charm. It is a neighborhood place, with a changing lunch menu of plats du jour, and a line of single tables by the door where men who eat there every day have their regular seats and napkins they fold up and leave for the following day. It serves basic food—roast chicken, stew—the kind of thing those solitary men would eat at home if only there was someone to cook it for them. The waitresses all wear white dental-nurse uniforms, and are large and forceful. If you don’t eat enough of your chicken, they push the plate back to you and urge you on. It felt like a good idea to go there today and let a motherly bully tell me what to do. Pretty much like the rest of my life, now I thought about it.

  I ate my chicken and sat thinking about the meeting with Loïc after the show. I wasn’t quite sure why I had set it up, apart from the fact that they wanted to see me. What could I say? We know Alemán was murdered, that Intinvest has been laundering money through Vernet, now would you kindly tell us what you’ve done with Kit, and we’ll stop publication? Apart from anything else, it probably wouldn’t work. It would be good to know what they wanted, though. Vernet had been hugely obstructive, refusing throughout to talk to Kit. Now someone there was falling over themselves to talk to me. What had changed? It could only be Kit’s disappearance. What I couldn’t tell was whether they knew something about it, or whether they wanted to. Whichever it was, it might give me more to go on than we had now, which was zip. We knew Vernet was laundering money, which we’d known before, and we knew how, which we hadn’t, but frankly I didn’t care. Let them wash the entire contents of the Bank of England if it made them happy. I just wanted to know what had happened to Kit, and go back to publishing women’s reads. Or, as it would now appear, comic novels.

  That wasn’t a route I wanted to go down, so I paid up and headed over to the Palais des Sports. I’d never been there before, but I knew that I was in the right place because it was besieged by a huge number of incredibly scruffy-looking people—much scruffier than me—all trying to push past the security guards. I held on tight to my ticket as I waved it in the air, joining in the melee. Kit had warned me about this. He said a friend of his had fainted at one of these shows, and the person who caught her as she fell stole her ticket and dumped her on the pavement. Eventually I squeezed through, and found myself in a sports stadium that had been covered with pink plush and roses to look like the Opéra. So, if they had used the Opéra, would they have ripped out all the plush and flowers to make it look like a sports stadium? I mentally shrugged. It was good to see a business that appeared to make even less sense than my own.

  The bouncers inside were no less aggressive than those outside. The general feeling was, Prove you deserve to be here. Since I’d had a foul week, and couldn’t care less about this, my basic attitude was, Well, fuck you too sonny. The weird thing was, it worked. I didn’t even have to say it. Apparently just walking in a way that suggests Fuck you is the way to make people believe you’re important. I wondered briefly if it would do the trick outside the fashion world, too. Something to consider.

  Once inside the arena itself I was enchanted to find that the little gilt and red velvet chairs that I’d seen in movies from the 1940s were still in use. Everyone was squeezed tight, breathing in to ensure they fit. A quick look around was enough to show me that fashion people were on the whole no thinner or more stylish than the rest of the world. In fact, the bulk of the audience consisted of brisk middle-aged middle-sized women in sensible shoes, and the chairs—and the lack of space between them—were definitely not made to accommodate them.

  I smiled at the woman whose lap I was about to almost sit on. It seemed rude to do so without introducing myself, so I did. She was fifty, with a wonderful quiff of gray hair, and a quizzical look for the seething, chattering masses. She told me was Mary-Kay Montgomery, the fashion editor of the Chicago Times. “Do you do fashion publishing?”

  “Not really. I’m working with Kit Lovell on a book on Alemán.”

  She was torn. The first part of the sentence had caused a pleased response—she obviously knew Kit and liked him. When I got to the bit about Alemán, she withdrew, like a snail shrinks back into its shell if you poke at it with a stick. “Yes,” she said flatly, �
��I heard about that.” There was no welcome in her voice now.

  I changed the subject. “I’ve never been to one of these before.” I waved toward the runway.

  “You’d better get yourself a drink,” she advised, deftly swiping a glass of champagne from a tray as it floated past. “It will be at least half an hour before we begin. The last show was nearly two hours late, and they’ll wait for everyone to arrive.”

  She was right, it was, and we chatted idly until the lights finally went down. Mary-Kay pointed out celebrities—all of whom I had spotted by their larger-than-life behavior, and all of whom I’d misidentified. She showed me Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, sitting in what the fashion world would regard as isolated glory, although to me she just looked bored and lonely. There was Manolo Blahnik, shoemaker to the stars and permatanned to the color of a pair of brogues, manically kissing everyone on sight. The Ladies Who Lunch—the women rich enough to buy couture clothes—sat in a little enclave, about a dozen strong. They passed up the champagne—those calories, my dear—and looked as bored as I would have at Marks and Spencer. I was fascinated by the whole thing. It was like entering an alternate reality. The beginning of the show was signaled by a shift in the music, from thunderous to deafening, and by the photographers, penned in at the end of the runway like particularly dangerous animals, loosing off a battery of flashes that would have been bright enough to land a 747 by.

  I’m not quite sure what I’d expected, maybe something that looked like MTV. The one thing I hadn’t expected, though, was—well, a fashion show. Which is exactly what it was. Incredibly tall, incredibly thin women clip-clopped like ponies down the runway, opened their coats, twirled their skirts, or just flicked their hair, then walked back. They were glazed over, both mentally and physically: their makeup was an inch thick, and birds’ nest wigs meant that they all looked identical. I’d also expected the kind of clothes that you see in the newspapers the next day—bare-breasted women in nothing but a pair of lavender velvet jodhpurs and a necklace of cowrie shells, say. Those were there, but there were only two of them, and they were entirely for the cameras. The rest of the clothes were totally gorgeous, totally wearable. Even a peasant like me felt the urge. There was one yellow taffeta ball dress that was larger than my entire flat, and I wanted it so badly it was like a physical need.