Dying Words (A Ghostwriter Mystery)

by C. A. Larmer

  Lorraine reached over and patted one of Roxy’s hands. “Of course you do, sweetie, we understand that. That’s why we had you over that night. Now,” she sat back as the food arrived, “how’s that Max man going?”

  “Max Man is good, thanks,” Roxy said, not sure this conversation was any safer than the last.

  “Is there a ring on that finger yet?” She glanced down at Roxy’s bare hand. “Or is he just getting all the gain, no pain.”

  Roxy sighed. Here we go again. Her mother liked her boyfriend, she knew that, but she was also stuck somewhere in the 1950s and believed there was really only one good use for a man, and that was a good marriage proposal, and the sooner the better. Anything less was just “taking advantage”. The fact that Roxy was enjoying being taken advantage of was beside the point.

  “I’m just saying, he should make an honest woman out of you.”

  Roxy glanced at her watch. Just thirty more minutes to go.

  Chapter 9

  The rest of the weekend was fairly uneventful, if you didn’t count two loads of washing, some online banking and a much needed grocery shop, and by Monday morning, Roxy was back at her desk, trawling through her diary, reviewing her work schedule.

  She had a bunch of magazine articles lined up, but the deadlines were some weeks off as she had expected to still be working on Wolfgang Bergman’s biography at this stage. There was nothing more motivating than an unlikeable client, and she had finished the book in record time.

  The fact that she was now free to get started on her freelance work was cause for happiness. Roxy loved the early process of article writing, the research, the setting up of interviews and the construction of thought-provoking questions. Everything was shiny and new and full of promise. The fact that many interviews turned out less than inspiring, or the writing didn’t always flow freely, was a problem for a future day.

  Speaking of problems, Roxy sighed. First, there was the small matter of Sondra Lane and the missing photograph. She began scrolling through her address book for the publisher’s number when she had a better idea. She picked up her phone and dialled Oliver.

  “I have a bone to pick with you.”

  “Bloody hell. What have I done now?”

  “I thought you said you didn’t give out my details to Sondra Lane.”

  “Who?”

  “Needy woman. Woke you early Saturday morning, trying to track me down.”

  “Oh, right, her. No, I didn’t. I promise! Why?”

  “She tracked me down. Cornered me outside my apartment block.”

  “Shit, sorry. Must have Googled you. Can’t be too hard to find your address.”

  Roxy considered this then she thought of the police and wondered if they’d handed her address over. “Yeah, I s’pose.”

  She filled him in on her strange conversation with Sondra, the police visit earlier that morning, and the juicy details she’d got off Gilda on Saturday night. She finished up by asking, “Do you know where Berny Tiles’s photo has ended up? I think maybe that’s what all this is about.”

  “Must be an award-winning photograph. Remind me what it looked like.”

  “Nothing worthy of an award, I can assure you. It’s just a boring black and white shot of a bunch of people sitting around a table, I think, at some survey conference in Indonesia, circa 1970-something. It came to your office, I had a quick squiz at it, it was about A4 size—”

  “Oh, yeah, that’s right. I sent that on to the publisher, or at least Shazza did, which is the usual procedure. So it has to be with them. Want me to track it down for you?”

  “That would be great, thank you, I really have to get on with some work.”

  “Yeah, like I’m sitting here twiddling my thumbs.”

  She ignored this and said, “When you track it down, do me a favour and ask them to Express Post it straight to Sondra. Easier that way.”

  She retrieved Sondra’s card and repeated the address over the phone to him. It was obviously for her husband’s floral business, but she figured that was better than nothing, then she hung up, hoping to give it no more thought.

  Five minutes later Oliver was back on the line. “You want the good news or the bad news?”

  Roxy snarled. She hated that question. The good news was usually just a Band-Aid patching up the gaping, bloody wound that had been left by the bad news. It never did the trick. “Let’s start with the bad news then,” she said, bracing herself.

  “You will not believe this, but the publisher tells me they got broken into last night and a whole bunch of photos got stolen.”

  Roxy sat forward with a start. She wasn’t expecting that. “My God, you’re kidding? What’s going on with this city! Thieves are out of control.”

  “Yep, they are still going through the damage but they tell me it looks like the box of stuff relating to the Bergman book was amongst the stuff that got stolen. Including a bunch of photos.”

  She considered this. “But why would they take those photos? Or any photos, for that matter?”

  “Oh I think they nicked a few laptops as well but, yeah, you gotta wonder what value some old pix might have. Maybe someone was trying to get hold of some shots that are worth a bit of dosh. Maybe sell them to the tabloids or blackmail him? Bergman is a minor celebrity, after all.” He chuckled. “Get it? Miner? Minor?”

  She groaned again. “This is serious, Oliver. How weird is it that the publisher got broken into on the same weekend that I did.”

  He stopped chuckling. “You think that’s what your burglar was after? Bergman’s photos?”

  “Makes me wonder. Okay, then, so what the hell is the good news?”

  “They didn’t actually take the picture you’re after.”

  Again, Roxy was surprised. “Huh?”

  “I described the photo to them just as you’d described it to me and they reckon that particular one is with Scott’s Scanners in Strathfield, getting some dig’ work done.”

  “In English please, Oliver.”

  He cleared his throat. “Okay, so the publisher sends all the pictures to a separate agency who does the high definition scanning for the book, right? Then the agency returns the scanned pix to the publisher. They reckon—and they’re double checking this—that your photo was one of about seven or eight shots that needed rescanning so it is still at the agency. They never got it back. Hence, it never got stolen.”

  Roxy could have leapt for joy. “That was lucky!”

  “Blood oath. I’ve got Scott’s Scanners’ deets so I’ll give them a buzz and ask them to hunt it down and get it off to Sondra ASAP.”

  “Great,” Roxy said, and then, “No!” She was beginning to hear that clanging bell sound in her head and she wasn’t quite sure why; something was off, she could sense it. “Listen, I might head straight over to the scanners now and collect it myself. The way things are getting pinched around this city, it might be safer. Then I can get Sondra off my back and get on with my life.”

  “Suit yourself,” he said, telling her the address and clicking off.

  Roxy sat for a few minutes thinking about what Oliver had just told her. What a coincidence, she thought, that both her place and the publisher’s were broken into on the same weekend. She didn’t like coincidences, never had, but she didn’t want to read too much into it either. Surely, a whole bunch of people fell foul of thieves over the weekend; she mustn’t let her lively imagination run into overdrive.

  Returning to her bedroom, Roxy changed into an oversized, burnt-orange jumper, black leggings and short boots, grabbed her handbag and the address Oliver had given her, and headed outside.

  Chapter 10

  Scott’s Scanners was a dinky little business down an alleyway just off the main drag of the inner western suburb of Strathfield. There were several men in long-sleeved shirts hanging outside on the street, sucking on cigarettes like their life depended on it, and one of them held the door open as she walked up. She thanked him, stepped in and towards a small desk whe
re a woman wearing an earpiece and very little else held a long finger up to silence her.

  “Yes, Mr Karpathakis, we got that one, yep ... yep, okay, will get him onto it.” She must have ended the call because she then flicked her thickly pencilled eyes to Roxy and said, “Can I help you?”

  Roxy proceeded to tell her about the Wolfgang Bergman photos and her desire to get one back. “That is, if you’re finished with it.”

  The woman pushed her chair back from the desk and stood up, dragging her super tight, super short dress down with one hand. It was a sexy little frock, more suited to a nightclub than an office block, Roxy thought then winced at herself.

  My God, I’m turning into my mother!

  “Follow me,” the woman said and began to click clack down a badly lit hallway towards a back office.

  Roxy dutifully followed and stopped with her at a door marked “Processing”. The woman held her hand up again, indicating Roxy was to stay put, opened the door and disappeared inside, shutting it behind her. A minute later she opened it again and ushered Roxy through before departing.

  Inside, a very young, very obese man was sitting on a swivel chair, working away on what was clearly a large flatbed scanner, adjusting a light over a series of transparencies, which had been placed side by side on the glass top. He closed the lid and held up a pudgy hand, too, obviously wanting to finish his job before Roxy spoke, and she wondered at all the sign language going on around here. As far as she knew, noise didn’t affect picture quality. After a few minutes, a loud zapping sound and a flashing light, he reopened the lid then turned to Roxy.

  “I’m Phil. Kylie tells me you’re here to collect the Bergman shots?” As he spoke, he pushed his chair away from the scanner and towards an old, rusty filing cabinet.

  “Not all of them, no, I just want to get one in particular.” He looked around. “The owner of the picture has been hassling me for it, so I didn’t want to wait until you got it back to the publisher. Hope that’s okay.”

  He shrugged, opened the cabinet and began sorting through the files. “Which one?”

  “It’s a black and white photo of a group of mostly blokes in suits, circa 1970.”

  He turned back to her with a “Duh” look on his face. “That sums up half the shots. Got anything more specific for me?”

  “Well, I was told you only have about seven or eight from the book, that you’d sent the rest back, so if you locate those shots ...” “Duh” right back at you, she thought.

  He turned around and kept searching. Soon he was pulling out a thin manila folder and swivelling it across to his desk. He flipped open the folder and went through the pictures, producing one with a loud, “Voila!” as he held it out to her.

  She frowned. “No, that’s not it. Do you mind?”

  She indicated the folder and he handed it over. Roxy flipped through them herself and realised he was right, there were five black and white shots of men in suits, one of a large muddy tractor and a final one of a very hazy mountain view with a man in a suit in front of it. It was obviously Sir Wolfgang in the ’70s. His lascivious smile and pork-chop sideburns were a dead giveaway. The group shot she was after, however, was not in the file and she told him as much.

  “Maybe we never got it.”

  “I hope you did. The shots that were still at the publishers were all stolen over the weekend.”

  Phil looked up at her then, his large ruddy face brightening. “OMG! What happened?” This news had clearly livened up his day.

  “Well, I don’t know the details, but a bunch of pictures and a few computers got pinched. The publisher says, though, that the one I’m after needed rescanning so it should still be in your files.”

  “That’s my file,” he said, glancing down at the folder in her hand. “If it’s not there, I ain’t got it.”

  “Could it be in transit?”

  “Just the one shot? No way, José. These have already been rescanned and as far as I know the job is finito. They were all due to go back tomorrow if I hadn’t heard differently from Johnno at Book It. I don’t send them in dribs and drabs, they go as a unit.”

  Dammit, she thought. So where was the picture she needed?

  “Can you show me which pic it is from the mock-ups?”

  She shook her head. “It never made the final cut. But you did scan it, apparently.”

  He nudged his eyebrows towards a large desktop computer. “Then I’ll have the original scan in here somewhere. We don’t trash them. Want to look? I could even get you a print out and then you’d have a replacement at least.”

  “That’d be great, yes.”

  It wasn’t quite the same thing as having the original and she was sure Sondra would not be satisfied, but it was a start. Besides, she was now very curious to see what all the fuss was about. Phil got to work on the computer, tapping his way through several folders until he found the one he was after.

  “Here are all the pix from the Bergman book.” Tap, tap, tap. “Here are the seven we rescanned.” Tap, tap, tap. “Hang on a minute.” He took the file from Roxy’s hands and flipped through it. “Yep, seven images here, seven scans, so yours never made it to us, unless it got lost somewhere between Kylie’s desk and mine, which happens, like, never. We’ll go back to the first scans we did ... Let me see ...”

  He continued tapping away slowly until he located another, larger file, then pushed his chair away from the desk. “Here are all the Bergman pix that came through on the first run. You’ll have to go through them, yourself, see if you can spot the one you’re after.”

  She stepped in front of him and leaned over the desk where a folder of dozens and dozens of thumb-size images had been opened on the desktop. A chair would have been nice, but he didn’t look like he was about to surrender his in a hurry, so she stood and trawled through the shots for five full minutes until she found the one she was after.

  “Here it is,” she said, double clicking to bring the image to full size.

  He moved his chair closer and they both stared at it for a few moments, not speaking. It was just as Roxy remembered—deadly dull and seemingly benign.

  The picture was in a horizontal format and featured six people standing behind an oversized wooden desk. Along the bottom, in capital letters were the words: Indonesia Survey Congress, 1975, and below that, the names of the people featured in the shot. From left to right, W.K. Bergman, Betty Reilly, G.J. Reilly, R.T. Brownlow, C.M. Holderson and B.J. Tiles.

  Bergman was standing very close to Betty Reilly, a pretty young thing and the only woman in the shot, and this did not surprise Roxy one bit. She also noted that B.J. Tiles (aka Berny) was looking away from the camera towards Bergman and Betty, while G.J. Reilly, a tall, scrappy looking fellow with a bushy moustache and matching sideburns, was caught mid-blink with a worried frown on his face. The others were smiling widely, happily staring straight into the lens, as if they didn’t have a care in the world, nor a secret to hide.

  Apart from Bergman and Tiles, at least one other name sounded familiar to Roxy and she was just trying to work out why when Phil said, “I’ll print you a copy, hey?”

  She stepped back from the desk and he began tapping away at the computer again.

  Roxy retrieved one of her business cards from her bag. “Can you also e-mail that image to me, so I have it on my files? Plus, if you could have a look around for the original print, maybe ask Kylie if she has any idea where it might be.”

  He took her card and nodded. “You never know your luck in the big city, maybe it got dropped down the side of the filing cabinet or something.”

  “One can only hope,” she replied before taking the fresh print he had placed in an envelope, and thanking him.

  Roxy then retraced her steps, back out to the reception desk, past Kylie who, surprise, surprise, simply waved a hand goodbye, and out the front where, she could swear, the same group of guys were still worshipping their tobacco god.

  On the way to her car, Roxy snuck another look at
the picture and was left even more perplexed.

  How could such a mundane image be such a pain in the butt?

  Chapter 11

  When Roxy got to her car, she heard her smartphone beep and grappled through her handbag to retrieve it. There was an incoming text from an unknown number and she opened it to find a message from Sondra. It simply said, “Pls call.”

  Roxy unlocked her car, got inside and took a deep breath. Might as well get this over with, she thought as she tapped “redial”. It was answered almost immediately.

  “It’s Roxy Parker, Sondra,” she said.

  “Oh, great, thanks for calling back. And for sending the transcript through. Although you were right, there doesn’t seem to be anything of interest in it. Unless you’re a fan of Sir Wolfgang Bergman’s, of course.”

  And Roxy had already deduced that Sondra Lane was not. “You’re welcome. Listen, I have some bad news on the picture front.” Roxy proceeded to tell her about the missing photo, and the burglary at the publishers. “But don’t worry too much because I’m almost 100 percent sure it wasn’t at the publisher’s when it got broken into. In any case, I have a very good copy of it and I’ll get that in the post to you today.”

  “I really need the original.”

  “Yes, I appreciate that.” She chewed her lower lip. “I’m just outside the picture agency now, and they are searching for it as we speak. I’m sure they’ll find it—”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Well, it has to turn up eventually. It can’t just disappear off the face of the earth.” Can it? She switched the phone to her other ear, and began to turn the key in the ignition. “I’m really sorry, these things happen occasionally when images are being sent backwards and forwards but—”

  “Can I see the copy?”

  “Of course, I’ll post—”

  “Can you bring it to me? Now? If you don’t mind?”

  She tried not to groan aloud. “Sure, what’s your address?”

  There was a pause. “Oh, um, how about we meet somewhere else. Wherever’s convenient for you. I can even shout you lunch if you like. I just need to see that picture.”