“Sure, absolutely. Is he one of the ones who…?”
I shook my head impatiently. “No, he’s just trouble. My problem is, I don’t know what kind.”
Kath had no idea what I was talking about, but she didn’t care. Who would have thought having lunch with Sam Clair would produce this much gossip?
As Kath and I drew level with the Thin Boy, as I now thought of him, he turned his head away, which was good because Kath was ogling him unashamedly. I’d contemplated trying to corner him, whatever Jake said, but he was in the middle of the bar, with empty seats on either side. Whichever way I approached, he could cut and run. So instead I asked Kath about a launch party that she had been at the night before. She was immediately diverted by the thrill of being the first to tell me all about the scandalous behavior of an agent and the husband of one of her authors. I knew them, and I figured they’d got involved because no one else would even talk to them, much less sleep with them. I managed not to share this view with Kath.
We air-kissed on the pavement after I told her I was taking the bus, which rocked her view of me as Hot. Well, at least I was a Public Transport Princess with four lovers, all insanely jealous.
After all that, my return to the office was anticlimactic. The Thin Boy made no effort to follow me outside, much less get on the bus. The stop was visible from the restaurant, so maybe he just figured I was going back to work? I contemplated waiting for him to come out to see where he went. I could follow him, I thought, patting myself on the back. Then I realized I’d just invented a street version of French farce: I’d follow a man who was following me so that I could … Either we’d chase each other around the block, or we’d both stubbornly sit at the bus stop till we grew old and forgot what we were doing. Instead I got on the bus and tried not to think about him anymore. I was having enough trouble working out what I was doing these days, without wondering what strangers were doing.
As I walked down the hall, Miranda was finishing a phone conversation. She held up a finger to delay me, and when she put down the receiver she followed me into my office looking confused and worried. I sighed. I wasn’t sure I could deal with any more. Maybe I should go into craft books: How to Knit a Chicken, with diagrams. No one worried about those. I pulled myself together.
“What’s the problem?”
“There isn’t one. That’s the problem.”
She didn’t appear to be drunk, or high. Just worried. “Start at the beginning,” I said gently. “First tell me what we’re talking about.”
“Breda.”
“Go on,” I said, still trying to encourage her. It wasn’t like Miranda to be incoherent. “What about Breda?”
“They love it.”
Maybe it was me. Maybe I just attracted nutters. “Miranda, stop. Who loves what? What are you talking about?”
She laughed, which was a small improvement. “Sorry. I’ve just got the third call, and it threw me.” She saw me looking patient again. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. It’s about Breda’s book. I gave the manuscript to a bunch of people yesterday, when you told me to.” I nodded encouragingly, trying not to let hope blossom. “Not just my friends—two friends, and also my sister, who is two years younger than I am. I offered them a double fee if they read it overnight. And I sent it to Nadila from WHSmith. Do you know her? She does their author events. We met when you did Breda’s last book, and we’re quite friendly, so I sent it as a ‘favor.’ You know, letting her get a sneak preview.”
I nodded again, hoping that if I didn’t talk, what she seemed to be saying would indeed be true.
“Well, I’ve had three calls so far—three out of the four—and they all love it. They think it’s the funniest thing they’ve read in years.” She stared at me with a now what? look. “That last call was from Nadila, who said she’d sat up all night reading it, then she’d given it to her colleagues this morning, and two read it over lunchtime, and, well, the result is, they want it for the September Book of the Month, to lead off the main push before Christmas. Her only concern was that we hadn’t highlighted it in our presentation, so did that mean that we were giving the other chains preference?”
I argued, just because none of this could possibly be real, “They’ve settled the September book already. It’s one of Ben’s.”
“I know.” Miranda sounded incredibly smug. “They said they’ve never changed one before, but they hope that since it’s in-house it won’t cause problems.”
“Yeah, right. Out-of-house, it wouldn’t have caused problems. In-house it’s going to be blood on the carpet tiles. Especially since I think I’ve just bought the Mehta from Kath.”
Miranda was jubilant. “Yesss!” She sobered up. “How are you going to tell Ben?”
“Wearing a flak jacket.” She laughed and I tried to think. “Not today. I want to get the trip to Galway over with first. And get David on side. In the Tuesday meeting, I guess.”
Miranda put her hand up, stopping me in my tracks. “The meeting has been moved to Monday, because of all the foreign publishers coming through for the Book Fair next week.”
I closed my eyes. The London Book Fair. Maybe it wasn’t too late to run away and join the circus. I pushed away the alluring thoughts of having spangly tights and no authors and concentrated on breathing deeply. “Fine.” It wasn’t, but what could I do? “I’ll tell him then. In the meantime, ring Breda and let her know I won’t be staying for the weekend. Since there’s suddenly no editorial work to do, I can go, present the marketing and publicity plans, show her the jacket, and get back tomorrow night. She’ll be thrilled. Once you’ve spoken to her, will you make me a reservation home on the seven-thirty-five?” She made a note. “Now, about the book itself. How stupid do we want to appear?” Miranda looked blank. “Did you tell everyone you’d read it and it was awful?”
“God, no, I never mentioned it at all if I could help it. It was too embarrassing.”
“Me too. I gave it to everyone else to read, and didn’t argue when they made sick noises, but I didn’t actually say I thought it stank, because those things have a way of getting back to authors. So. Neither you nor I have said anything. Given that we have been telling lies like sociopaths for the last week, do you think we can carry off the impression that we knew all along that Toujours Twenty-one was a comic novel?”
For the first time, Miranda looked at me with real respect. “Can we?”
“Get me the cover brief, and let’s see what I told the designer.” I looked at it, and said, “It doesn’t actually say what the book is about at all, mostly because I was too ashamed to write it down. It suggests that the jacket should be a send-up, and asks for a kitsch look. I was trying to disguise the contents, but I don’t see why we can’t claim we knew it was the very send-up and kitsch comedy that I asked for on the cover.”
I thought through the people I’d talked to. “I’ll have to tell Sandra. We talked about it at length. But she’s not going to want anyone to think she hasn’t got her finger on the pulse, and didn’t recognize a comic masterpiece when she read it.”
Miranda was awed. “It’s Stalinist. Airbrushing history. Can you get away with it?”
“Watch me.”
* * *
My mother rang me while Sandra and I were finalizing our plans. “Do you want to be my date tonight? It’s the dinner for the Anglo-American Bar Association.”
“Jesus Christ, Mother, what a totally awful idea.”
“You do, you know.”
“No, Mother, I don’t.” My mind was still on marketing and publicity budgets.
“Cooper’s are this year’s hosts, and they’ll have at least twenty of their partners there. Kenneth Wright will be there. But if you’re too busy…”
“Right, I’m with you now. What time, where?”
“The Dorchester, drinks at six thirty. I’ll see you then. And wear a dress, for goodness’ sake.”
At six forty-five I was pushing my way through a be-suited throng. The Dorchester has always stru
ck me as a really strange place, and having a posse of solicitors collected in one of its function rooms wasn’t making it any less strange. The outside of the building is a rather severe gray Art Deco monolith, sort of attractive if you like that kind of thing. But waltz through the revolving door and you’re in kitsch 1950s stage-design land, full of rococo twirls and cream-and-gilt flourishes. I always expect a line of chorus girls to appear, and the foyer really needs them. It’s too silly to contain nothing but a bunch of people in business suits checking in and out, with suitcases creating an obstacle path at the entrance, just like in any downmarket motel.
Once directed upstairs to the room where the drinks party was being held—excuse me, the “Messel Suite”—the Dorchester had no truck with mere “rooms,” it was Suites for the Suits—the same feeling of dislocation persisted. The place was jammed with people talking and drinking, like any publishing party, but these people looked different to the ones I worked with. They spent more time and money on presentation. They also sounded different. They spoke more assertively, laughed much less. Helena, as always, was the diminutive center of an appreciative crowd. At least these ones were laughing. I joined them, first stopping one of the waiters passing trays of drinks. Another difference. At publishers’ parties it’s hard to find a non-alcoholic drink. Here three-quarters of the glasses were filled with water. I took wine. Me and six hundred lawyers. It was going to be a long night.
Helena introduced me to Derek Gascoigne, Cooper’s senior partner. “This is my daughter, Samantha.”
He looked at me with some interest, which surprised me. I’m not usually a magnet for the City crowd. Then he said, “Pat Conway told me about you.”
I blinked. How did that man end up everywhere? My confusion must have showed, and he filled me in. “Cooper’s are Lambert-Lorraine’s solicitors.”
“Ah,” I said, neutrally. Lambert-Lorraine’s solicitors were the same people who had employed the man who now looked after Vernet’s property deals? He had probably looked after Vernet at Cooper’s, and they went with him when he set up on his own. It made sense, I supposed. But none of this was a reason for Conway to be discussing me with his solicitor. I didn’t know how to phrase that without sounding as though I were accusing them of something, so I said nothing.
Gascoigne was extremely tall—probably over six foot three, a blond elegantly turning silver, in a suit that must have cost two months’ salary. Even I, with no eye at all, could tell that. He nodded now, as if my response had been what he was expecting. “He said you listened more than you talked. He was impressed.”
There was no point in pretending to be what I wasn’t. “I didn’t have anything to say.”
Gascoigne took my arm and drew me apart from the rest of the group, stooping over me like a distinguished stork. “That doesn’t usually stop people.” I took a sip of my drink. “He was right. You’re not saying anything now.”
I shrugged again. “I’m not fencing. I’m just not sure what we should be talking about. When I spoke to Mr. Conway he had a message for me to deliver. I delivered it. Where we go from here is up to him, surely.”
“We want the same thing. Pat wants to find out what has been going on in his company; you want to find out who has been doing it so you can publish your book without fear of libel. It’s in both our interests to work together.”
I waited.
“We’re happy to cooperate with the police—of course,” he added hastily.
“Of course,” I echoed, trying not to sound bitchy.
He looked at me as if I’d said something clever. “But they may be forced to act before it suits us to do so. There’s no mileage for us in simply exposing the operation without ensuring that all of those who have been running it are eliminated. If that happens, we will get the drones, but not necessarily the queen bee. In fact, almost assuredly not the queen bee. That is not what we want at all.”
“I don’t see how I can help.”
Either Gascoigne was tired of bending down to my level so he could talk without shouting, or he was getting to the point. He steered me into the ballroom where the dinner would be held later. More gilt, more flourishes, more rococo swirls. I was mildly surprised not to find a stray cherub tootling a horn from the ceiling. The room appeared bare without. Instead, sixty round white tables, with sixty round white flower arrangements tortured into low-key fashionability dotted the floor. Gascoigne pulled out a chair at the nearest table and held it for me. We looked like two black-cloaked co-conspirators planning a raid in the vast white-on-white elegance.
“Diego Alemán came to see me yesterday.” That made me sit up. “He said he’d had an interesting conversation with you, that you thought he was involved.”
“Interesting. How did he know about you? How did he know there was something to be involved in?”
Gascoigne nodded. “I wondered, too. What did you talk about?”
I looked bland. “Seditious libel.”
“Seditious libel? Is there such a thing anymore? I do corporate law, but I would have thought…” His voice trailed away.
I waved it away. “It’s not important. It was a way of talking about what we didn’t want to talk about openly.” I stared at the tablecloth, thinking. “What I’m saying is that we were talking about this book I’m publishing—about a dead fashion designer and his company, not about, shall we say, creative accounting methods. Diego worked for Intinvest, which we both know—” I slid my eyes to him, and when he nodded, I continued—“which we both know may or may not have had some involvement with” and now I mimicked his phrase, “with what has been going on in one of Lambert-Lorraine’s companies. Vernet is high profile, but if Diego Alemán is clean, how did he know to come to you? And about what? As far as I can see, as a member of the Alemán family, he’s concerned about his brother’s death, about his brother’s memory, and therefore me, as the publisher of a book that may damage that. But Vernet’s business practices? He should know nothing about them.”
“We don’t know that he does.”
“He knows that there’s something to know. Otherwise why come to you? If there’s a problem, he should be going to his boss at Intinvest. Unless he can’t.”
I sat and watched Gascoigne process the information. He came to a decision. “Pat will be here in the morning. Can you come to a meeting at seven?”
Seven. Jesus. “I can. But what for?”
“I think we’ll have Alemán back. We’re liaising with NCIS and Revenue and Customs, and they’ll give us some rope, but not much. What we need is to pool everything we’ve got and make some decisions.”
“Yes, I understand why you’re going ahead. But what do you want me for? I’m a publisher. I know about books. I don’t know about corporate fraud—” he winced at the word—“and I don’t know about the business world. I don’t see what I can bring to this.”
“You’ve read the manuscript. You know the players.”
I shrugged. Whatever Conway had said, I didn’t believe they couldn’t get their hands on a manuscript if they wanted one. According to Helena, Kit had only spelled out one aspect of the fraud—they would have to do their own digging for the rest, although that shouldn’t be difficult. Once you know what you are looking for, and where, it is never hard to find. They wanted me for something else, and I couldn’t figure out what. But as long as they wanted me, I could make my own demands.
“I need to catch a ten-fifteen flight to Galway. I’m due there for a lunch meeting. Will the meeting be finished for me to get to Gatwick in time?”
Gascoigne looked dubious. “It would be better if we didn’t have to rush. Let me speak to the office.” He pulled out his phone and moved away from the table.
While I had no idea why they wanted me there, I wanted to be there. Maybe some information about Kit might surface. Even so, I couldn’t cancel Breda—playing Nancy Drew was a pastime, but I had to earn a living, and too much hung on what now looked to be a bestseller. Yet I wanted to use Lambert-Lorra
ine as much as they wanted to use me. My concern was still Kit, and it looked like finding the route for the money meant finding out what had happened to him.
I sat quietly, staring into space, pleased to have a breathing space. Between the office, a potential new relationship, and Kit’s disappearance, I was just reeling from crisis to crisis without any fixed purpose. I allowed my thoughts to drift, and jumped when Gascoigne touched me on the shoulder. He looked pleased with himself. “It’s not a problem. Pat is flying in tomorrow morning. His plane will wait for you and take you to Galway. I’ve arranged a car to drive you to Luton after our meeting. That way we can talk as long as we want, and you’ll still get to your appointment by lunchtime.”
I tried to look as if I was offered the use of private jets every day, sometimes twice a day before breakfast. I obviously failed, because Gascoigne touched me on the shoulder again, and said, “I told you you’d impressed him.”
If not talking had got me this far, it would be a shame to blow it, so I just smiled, hooked my arm through his, and drew him back toward the party.
As we walked back into the heaving mass of solicitors enjoying themselves, my mother wormed her way through to me and said crossly, “What did you say to him?”
I was startled. “Gascoigne? Nothing, we just—”
“Not Gascoigne.” Helena was impatient. “Wright.”
Wright? I craned my neck to scan the crowd. Not really very intelligent, since I didn’t know what he looked like. Helena realized I was clueless. Again. Or maybe still. “Over there,” she said, jutting her chin. “Medium height, brown hair, five o’clock shadow.”
I looked where she was looking. “Red tie with horses? Got him.”
He’d got me, too. He saw me watching him, and nodded and smiled as if we were old acquaintances. “Shit,” I muttered. “Heading this way.”
My mother was dismissive. “A horrible man with sweaty palms. Came up and introduced himself. He said he thought we should talk. I suggested that a dinner was neither the time nor the place.” The look she gave me at this point froze my blood. I hated to think what it would do to a stranger. “He melted away again, but if you haven’t spoken to him, it’s odd that he came to me, not you.” She was curiously cheered by this.
A Murder of Magpies Page 14
