A Murder of Magpies

by Flanders, Judith

  Helena tilted her head, thinking. “How did Wright know about the typist?”

  I thought, too. “Kit’s burglary. It must be. He said he had no notes in the house, but I’m sure he wouldn’t think a bill from his typist, or her name in his checkbook, would qualify as material that needed to be locked up at his solicitor’s. There was an attempted computer hack at T and R, too. It may have been connected, or not. Why, if they had the manuscript from the courier, I don’t know, but then, I don’t know why I was burgled either, if they had the manuscript. Just to keep an eye on our e-mail? To see what else we knew? When they found no documents at Kit’s, that might have been the next step.”

  Helena was pacing up and down, something I had never seen her do before. “So we’re saying that Wright was responsible for the courier’s death as well?”

  “Got to be. There is simply no reason for Intinvest, Vernet, Conway—anyone else, in fact—to worry about the manuscript at that stage. Earlier, yes; later, absolutely. But not at that point.”

  Helena stopped. “We need to phone Jake. I’d like to warn Conway, but I can’t. He’d take action, the Vernet contact will run, and the whole house of cards will collapse.” She was putting on her coat.

  “We need to call Jake wearing our coats?”

  “No,” she said tightly, “we need to put the diary back before we call him. It’s the only evidence there is, and it was obtained illegally. Unless the police go in tomorrow with a search warrant and find it again, the case will never come to court.” She looked at the diary I was still holding and handed me a dish sponge and a pair of washing-up gloves. “Sit down and wipe every single page. Don’t forget inside the cover and the edges. Jake took your prints for elimination after your burglary, and all prints are now kept on file automatically.”

  I started to wipe. “How are we going to get back into the building?”

  “Good question.”

  13

  We were silent on the drive back to the City. It was still raining, and Helena drove carefully. An accident while in illegal possession of documents that proved murder seemed like a bad idea. I couldn’t see a way past the security guard, and while one visit could be explained away, just, as coincidence, two would be disastrous, particularly when one was at two o’clock in the morning.

  Although the streets were deserted, Helena parked two blocks down and one across from the building where Wright’s office was.

  “Do we have a plan?” I asked, hopelessly.

  She nodded. “I’m going to get mugged.”

  “Oh. Is that going to be helpful?”

  “It’s weak, but it’s the best I can come up with. I’ll scream and run past the door. Arnie Leavitt is a good man. He’ll come to the door, and when he sees me, I’ll tell him I’ve been mugged, my bag is gone, and I’ve twisted my ankle. When he helps me to the car, you’ll slip in and replace the diary. The whole thing won’t take five minutes. If he stays to watch me drive away, I’ll circle back and meet you there.” She pointed to the corner behind us. “I’ll make sure to hold him long enough for you to get out.”

  “Isn’t there a closed-circuit camera?” I hadn’t thought of this when we went in that morning, but it was all I could think of now.

  Helena was amazed that it hadn’t occurred to me earlier. “That’s why I spent so long talking to Arnie this morning. I wanted to have a look at its range. If you keep your head turned to the right and down, your features can’t be picked up in the front hall. There’s nothing in the lift, and I stuck an adhesive label over the lens of the camera upstairs while you were opening the door. I think it’s unlikely anyone’s found out what’s wrong with the fourth-floor camera yet—not on a Sunday.”

  “Can you keep the guard, Arnie, for long enough? Will it even be Arnie? That’s a long shift.”

  I was asking dumb questions. Again. “I asked him this morning. He does two eighteen-hour shifts, with twelve hours in between, then two days off. Weren’t you listening?” And I had thought she was simply being nice. I took the gloves and the keys from her silently, and separated out the one I thought I’d used that morning, and stuck my hands in my pockets. Helena locked her bag in the boot, held the car keys in her hand and we went off. We walked silently around the block to come at the entrance from the far side. I felt Helena take a deep breath, and then gave a scream that made the hair on my neck stand on end. She sprinted away from me as I stepped behind a pillar near the entrance, and stopped outside Wright’s building, facing away from me. “Stop! Thief! Help!”

  On cue, Arnie ran out. He didn’t leave the shelter of the doorway, calling instead, “Who’s there? What is it?”

  “Arnie. Thank God! I’ve been mugged. Please. Help me.”

  “Wait a minute, Mrs. Clair. I’ll just go and call it in.”

  I hadn’t thought of that. Helena had. “Please, Arnie. I’ve been hurt. Help me, and then I’ll call and give a description. He jumped into a van and he’s gone.”

  If I had said something as feeble as that, no one would have paid any attention, but Helena has a will of iron. When she tells you to do something, she sends thought waves into your brain, until you think that what she wants you to do is exactly what you had decided to do from the beginning. Arnie was not immune either. He walked over to her, and after a minute’s discussion put his arm around her to steady her while she limped off toward her car. I ran.

  Those five minutes were the longest of my life. I swear that every gray hair I have from now to eternity will be caused by my career as a criminal. How people do this for a living I have no idea.

  By the time Helena drove up to the appointed spot I thought I was going to be sick. She didn’t say anything, but took me back to her house and made me tea with a generous slug of whiskey. She didn’t ask me, she told me: “You’re staying here tonight.”

  I was too cowed to fight. Wright, Kit, even my abortive foray to Gloria Ramsay’s, were all combining to give me nightmares while I was awake. I couldn’t imagine ever sleeping alone again.

  * * *

  By the time I came downstairs in the morning, Helena was halfway through a pot of coffee. The sun had finally broken through, and fresh, scented air was pouring in at the open window, the first really spring-like day we’d had. It was the kind of weather that after months of gray skies and sheeting rain makes Londoners think their climate is really pretty good after all, but I shivered when I saw it. Helena looked at me critically. “You look like you haven’t slept for a week.”

  “You slept?”

  “Why not?”

  “Just a few minor details: murder, breaking and entering, planting evidence.”

  “Not the latter, I think. I’m not sure how a judge would rule, but since the diary was replaced where it had been earlier—”

  I broke in on her legal musings. I wasn’t up to a discussion on the finer points of evidentiary law. “Have you called Jake?”

  She nodded. “He’ll be here any minute.”

  There wasn’t anything else to say, and we sat quietly, waiting.

  Jake arrived, looking even more tired than when I’d last seen him. I kissed him on the cheek, gave him some coffee, and sat again.

  He wasn’t any more interested in social niceties than I was. “What is it that couldn’t wait?”

  Helena pulled out her notes. “First, you need to hear this from me, with no witnesses, and no notes.” She looked sternly at the notebook in his hand.

  Jake didn’t budge. “Tell me.”

  “If there are notes, this will be useless to you.” Helena was implacable.

  So was Jake. He repeated, with an edge to his voice, “Tell me.”

  Helena had obviously decided that Jake was going to have to know about yesterday, if unofficially and only in vague outline. “If you get a search warrant for Kenneth Wright’s offices, you will find three files in a briefcase in a cupboard in the outer office. From those, you will be able to prove that Wright has been laundering money in phoney property deals in th
e UK for the past seven years. Here are summaries of the deals, and a précis of the case against him. It’s all on this memory stick, which is not traceable.”

  Jake was not prepared for this. “Are you telling me you broke into his office?”

  Helena remained serene. “No, I am telling you I have a memory stick summarizing the contents of some files. I have no idea where it came from. It was in an unaddressed envelope on the mat this morning. My fingerprints are on it, because I opened the envelope before I knew what it was. I am now handing it to you. This is the envelope.” She pushed both across the table.

  Jake made no move to take them. “I can’t—”

  She went on, in the same unhurried tone. “Furthermore, you will find an engagement diary for 2007 in the bottom drawer of his secretary’s desk. There are notations in it that match the times and suggest locations for meetings linked to the property deals.”

  Jake slammed his hand down flat on the table, but Helena proceeded as if she were discussing the merits of full-fat over semi-skimmed milk. “In the diary you will find an entry marked A, with a circle around it, the week before Alemán was murdered. The following week, the day before his death, there is an indication that one-third of something was passed from someone to someone else; a second third was passed the day after his death; and a final third the day after the inquest.” She didn’t hurry, and she didn’t look away. Jake was mesmerized. “It might also be worthwhile to speak to Tiffanie Harris, or check his records, for a connection to the company whose courier was killed two weeks ago. That’s more recent, and I assume therefore easier to jog people’s memories. You might want to discuss with NCIS the penalties for a solicitor who does not report money laundering. I have been considering them, and Kenneth Wright has a great deal to fear from Kit Lovell’s research. On a personal level, he has more to lose than anyone else.”

  She paused. Jake had sat back in his seat and was staring intently at her, not angry now, but thinking. She continued. “You can justify getting a warrant based on the anonymous information here. The diary, and what you find in it, will be a surprise to you, of course.”

  “Of course,” he said absently, but he wasn’t mocking her, just working through the information. He stood up, gently hoicking the memory stick into an envelope without touching it. “That’s it for you two now. It’s too close, and too dangerous.” He looked over at me, and there was no smile at all. “No more Sherlock Holmes-ing. It’s over.”

  “Me?” I pointed to my chest. “I’m Watson.”

  “You’re an editor. Go edit something, for God’s sake, and stay out of this.” He waved an arm, indicating a vast world of literature that was waiting for me somewhere, well out of his way.

  Literature. Shit. I looked at my watch. It was after nine. Shit, shit, shit. I was going to be late, and I needed to talk to David before the meeting at ten. I ran.

  * * *

  I got into the office five minutes after the meeting was due to start. Officially that is. Publishing meetings always begin late. I saw David coming down the hall toward the meeting room, and pulled him into my office.

  “What—?”

  “Sorry, David, but I’ve only just arrived, and we need to talk before the meeting.”

  He looked doom-laden: “we need to talk,” the four words men most dread hearing. In addition, anything that couldn’t be discussed in a meeting was bound to be contentious, and David hated contention. He had got to where he was by being everybody’s pal—or by being spineless and rolling over and waving his paws in the air, whichever interpretation you preferred.

  “Has Smith’s been on to you?”

  He shook his head. I put my head out the door and called to Miranda: “Did we get confirmation from Nadila yet?”

  She looked up: “It’s on your e-mail.”

  I found it and printed it, and handed it to David. “Here.”

  “Can’t you just tell me…?” He waved the e-mail at me.

  “Read it. Then we’ll talk.”

  It was four lines long, but it took David several minutes to master the contents. Or not to master them. “I don’t understand,” he said, at last.

  “It’s simple. I sent the manuscript of Toujours Twenty-one to Nadila Irani, who organizes author events centrally for Smith’s. She loved it, and passed it on to her colleagues, who also loved it. They’ve made it their September Book of the Month.”

  “Loved it.” He repeated the words as though they were code for something he couldn’t quite grasp.

  “Loved it,” I repeated firmly, staring him dead in the eye, daring him to tell me how bad he thought the book was. He wouldn’t. He was too much of a weed. “They thought it was a riot. I’ve had a lot of good feedback from readers of about the same age, too. This is going to be big.”

  “Big.” I was still talking in code, apparently.

  There wasn’t a lot of time, and for the moment I didn’t care about his support for the book. We needed to talk about Ben. “David, can we focus on the mechanics of the Book of the Month part for the moment, please? If you remember, we thought it was going to be Ben’s book: The Giraffe, the Elephant, and the Cat.” I don’t make up the titles. Honest to God I don’t.

  David had caught on. He looked terrified. “They want to cancel? They can’t do that.”

  I nodded toward the e-mail. “It looks like they just have. I don’t think they’ll understand if we get stroppy about it, either. From their point of view, it should be all the same to us. They’re substituting one of our books for another. And The Giraffe was never confirmed. I checked on Friday. Ben had a phone call from a friend at Smith’s, tipping him off, but there was nothing official.”

  I watched David, not unsympathetically. It wasn’t a publishing problem, it was a personnel problem. Ben would be furious, quite legitimately, that his book was losing a huge amount of publicity. As a first novel, it needed that kind of push to have any hope of succeeding. But in addition, and more importantly, Ben despised my books, and he despised me. This would be a very public humiliation, particularly as at the acquisitions meeting where Toujours Twenty-one was discussed he had gone on endlessly about this being the result of publishing “substandard literature”—that is, the rest of my list.

  “Toujours Twenty-one?”

  I played my cruellest card, and the one I knew I was going to have to show a lot. “Did you read it?”

  He was vague. “Well, when it first came in…”

  “Not, ‘Did you look at it?’ Did you read it?”

  He caved in. “No. Only the first twenty pages or so. I hated it.”

  I nodded. “Nadila read it. All of it. So did the rest of Smith’s. We’ve got a great comic novel here, David.”

  “But you said…” He trailed off. I’d never actually said I hated it.

  I stood up. “Don’t you think you should talk to Ben before the meeting?”

  David stayed in his chair. He really loathed this kind of thing. Tough. That was why he was paid four times my salary. I said, “I’ll tell everyone you’ll be a few minutes late,” and escaped down the hall.

  I whispered to Sandra that it was all set, and then announced more generally to the people milling around the coffee machine that David had said to start without him. It was a good half hour before he joined us, and we’d worked our way fairly swiftly through the minutes in the absence of both him and Ben. David slipped into his seat just as Sandra started to update us on the publicity plans for the coming season.

  When she got to September she hesitated, and David drew a deep breath. “I’d better step in here.” She ceded gratefully. “We’ve had some good news and some bad news.” I started to scribble furiously on my minutes. I didn’t want to look as though I was gloating, particularly as I was. I drew a rabbit wearing a bow tie. It looked more like a cat, so I gave it a tail. “Unfortunately,” David said, as if he were reading a ransom note that had been dictated by kidnappers, “unfortunately The Giraffe is not, after all, going to be Smith’s Sept
ember Book of the Month.” Everyone looked up. This was more interesting than progress meetings usually were. “Instead.” He stopped dead. He had the same problem saying Toujours Twenty-one that I always did. “Instead, Breda McManus’s new book has been selected. We had confirmation this morning.” He glared at me. Everyone else stared. The book we’d all been too embarrassed to discuss? I drew a house around the cat. It was too big, so I gave it a steeple and a bench for the cat to sit on.

  David said, heavily, “Sam can tell you more.”

  “I can’t, really. We only just heard, as David said,” I smiled sweetly at him. “Breda’s books have been chosen before, but we’re thrilled that a comic novel from her is getting the same recognition.” There, it was official: It was a comic novel. Now for reinforcements. “I know Sandra hasn’t had much time to plan, but given the response we were hoping for, and the usual budget allocated for Breda’s books, we’re starting to shape up a very active campaign.” There were nervous little murmurs. Sandra had known how good it was, too, and had budgeted for it. Mental realignments were going on all over the room. The only comfortable-looking people were the ones who had never pretended to read the book.

  Sandra went through the plan she and I had scribbled out the week before. She was a good publicist, and it sounded as though a great deal of time and effort had been put into it, that she’d spent months assuming that this book was going to be her big title for the autumn. Just as she was finishing, Ben walked in, not looking at anyone. And in return, everyone else was suddenly riveted by Sandra’s plans. No one wanted to look at Ben, for fear of seeming too pleased, or too sorry, for him. Neither would be welcome.