by Helen Smith
Emily hesitated. She had promised Morgana, after all. But Nik put his arm up to bar her way. He said, “I insist.”
“I’ll get my books and help you with the gift bags,” Polly said. Emily left her waiting in the lobby for the elevator that would take her up to her room, its teasingly slow progress toward the ground floor tracked by the lights on an art deco brass panel. It seemed to hint that guests might have been waiting for the elevator to arrive since the 1930s.
“Don’t you wish you had a private elevator that could whiz you up and down really quickly between floors?”
Polly laughed. “Is that all you want? If there’s ever a vacancy, I’ll be your fairy godmother, Emily.”
Emily walked downstairs to the basement conference area where uniformed staff were setting up for the private dinner in the Montagu room later that night, the waiters and waitresses whispering and discreet as they brought in cutlery and glasses on a rattling trolley, the porters shouting instructions noisily to each other as they set up the tables. She looked in and smiled and waved hello. They nodded, smiled or ignored her.
“Yes, miss?” said one of the waitresses, clearly half expecting some daft instruction to break it all down and set it up differently. Her name badge said she was called Maria.
“No, it’s fine. Just having a look,” said Emily. “Thanks, Maria.”
The conference area was a place of low ceilings with no natural light. There was a cloth-covered table on one side of the room, and under it there was a row of gilt-colored paper gift bags with gold ribbons for handles. A big, brown cardboard box had been set on the table. It was stamped all over with branding for Zhush!, a company that made sexy lingerie—presumably its contents were also intended for the gift bags. Emily went up to it and tried lifting it. Whatever was inside weighed next to nothing. Either it was filled with the emperor’s new clothes, or something expensively wispy. Emily had lived long enough to know this: the smaller the lingerie, the more expensive it is. So it was probably something wispy.
Polly arrived promptly in a service elevator with a porter, he carrying the chocolates, she carrying a stack of her new paperbacks, She Knew Too Much, which were also to go into the bags. Stickers on the front of each copy of Polly’s book proclaimed that it had already been chosen for discussion by a television book club.
Emily wondered if any of the other authors ever got jealous of Polly’s success. But Polly was too young, too practical, too unshowy, too unpretentious, too helpful to inspire jealousy. Not many people would have stood there and helped Emily pack bags when they weren’t being paid to do it. Not many people would have come down in the scruffy service elevator with a porter, carrying her own books. Emily had helped out at enough events like this to know that people’s status as a conference delegate was usually too important to them to compromise it by being seen to help with the admin or carry anything that belonged to them.
“Emily!” There was a silvery, jangling sound, and Morgana appeared. She looked anxious. “Darling, any sign of Winnie? Lex is here, and we want to get the tea party underway.”
Emily shook her head. “She must be in London by now.”
“I’ll go and look,” said Morgana, with the vague good intentions of someone oblivious to the fact that London was too vast an area to cover with a search party of one.
“Winnie?” said Polly, after Morgana had left. She frowned. “Most of the time I have no idea what Morgana’s talking about. I hope Winnie is the name for one of her hats.”
Emily laughed. “Winnie’s one of the bloggers. She uses the name Tallulah.”
“Oh, I see! Tallulah’s Treasures? Yes, she’s one of our special guests. Should we be worried that she hasn’t turned up?”
“I hope not.”
But Emily must have looked worried because Polly said, “Do you have any contacts in the police?”
Emily thought of Constable Rory James, whom she had met when she’d helped out at her neighbor Victoria’s stage school recently. He had given her his phone number and suggested they meet one night for some Thai food in Brixton Village, which was an engagingly quirky network of covered alleyways with stalls, shops and restaurants in Brixton town center, and not a village at all. He’d had a pleasant manner and soccer player’s hips, so she’d said yes. But she had never got round to meeting Rory James for dinner, and anyway he was hardly influential. Not in the way that Polly would mean it. If Polly was going to be an MP and she owned a swannery, she was probably related to a chief superintendent at least. Emily shook her head.
“I have a relative in the police force. Flying Squad but he’ll be able to pull a few strings with Missing Persons. I’ll give him a call if this woman doesn’t turn up by nightfall—put Morgana’s mind at rest.”
“Is it true you’re thinking of going into politics?” Emily didn’t want to seem impertinent, but it wasn’t something she’d consider doing in a million years, and she’d never before met anyone who’d been tempted by the power/sacrifice trade-off. “Aren’t you worried the newspapers will try to dig up some scandal—or find something in your past and make it seem scandalous?”
“I’ve thought about that, and talked it over with Pete—my husband. The kids are too young to consult, so I’ll just have to trust that I’m doing the right thing for them. And I’ll try and keep them away from the press while they’re growing up. I’ve done stupid things. I used to get drunk when I was younger. I liked to go clubbing. But so what if some reporter digs up a ten-year-old photo of me staggering out of a gay club at five o’clock in the morning? I’m not going to deny anything or hide anything. It’s crazy to pretend that other young people—voters—don’t do what I did and grow out of it. Making mistakes is a healthy part of growing up. What about you, Emily? Are your wild days behind you?”
“Well…” Emily suddenly felt awfully dull. She always had to get up for work in the mornings, and she valued her precious weekends too much to waste them on headaches and hangovers. “I’m not one for clubbing. I have a little garden I’m really proud of. I grow most of my flowers and a lot of my vegetables from seed. I work in it most evenings if I can. It’s really peaceful. Just me and the squirrels and the birds.”
Polly laughed. “You’re adorable. If you ever go into politics, I’ll vote for you, Emily.”
“Can I help you girls?” It was Cerys, lipstick on, coat on, carrying her handbag. She didn’t look as though she’d come to help.
“We’re nearly done, thanks,” said Emily.
Cerys took a box of chocolates out of one of the gift bags, and squinted at the label on it. “Violent what?”
Emily laughed, realizing now that Cerys’s forceful personality and no-nonsense manner concealed the heart of a clown. Cerys rewarded Emily with a wink. She put on a pair of reading glasses and looked again at the label. “Violet crèmes. I see…Very nice…I was just passing. I’m on my way out to the shops.”
The basement conference area wasn’t somewhere anyone “just passed.” Guests had to come down in the elevator or walk down a short flight of stairs to reach it. It had been specially designed, with its own toilets and a lobby area where tea and coffee could be served, so that conference delegates wouldn’t intrude on the calm of the main business of the hotel.
“Fair play, I wasn’t really passing,” Cerys admitted. “I thought I’d come and have a nose.”
Cerys was now opening the Zhush! box and fingering its contents, which looked to be frilly and pink. “Remember that year, Polly, when Morgana tried to find a gift that was suitable for Archie?”
“Oh yes!” said Polly. Then, to Emily: “The triple-pack of Beckhamish underpants in medium size that he found lurking in his gift bag made him feel so uncomfortable—not literally, of course, so far as I know, he never put them on—” (Cerys laughed gaily at this) “that in subsequent years she just let him have whatever we’re having.”
“You don’t try and assign a particular gift bag to a particular person?” asked Emily.
�
��No point,” said Cerys. “Too many opportunities to give offense. Imagine if I got a pair of extra-large knickers in my gift bag. I would not be impressed, knowing someone—some little twig of a person like M—had determined that extra-large was my size. Never mind that it is my size. We all get the same, and if it’s not suitable, we can always pass it on.”
Cerys turned over the frilly, rose-colored satin item in her hand, pulling thoughtfully at the black lace edging, and then twanging the black elastic fastening, to test how much give there was in it. Then she held it up against various parts of herself, trying to work out what it was. “I’ll be passing this one on,” she said, a little disappointed. “It’s not in my size.”
“Cerys, it’s a frilly sleep-mask, not a very small bra,” said Polly, giggling. She put one on to demonstrate. She took another out of the box and threw it to Emily so she could do the same. Emily looped the black elastic over the back of her head and pulled the eye mask down over her eyes, leaving a little cheat’s peephole at the bottom, like a sly child preparing to play blindman’s buff. Emily and Polly stood facing each other across the table for a few moments, peeping out at each other from beneath the padded pink satin of their gigantic black ringed pink eyes, like giggling bush babies.
“Ah, love you! Course it is,” said Cerys, good-humoredly. “I won’t chance trying it, mind. I’ve that much spray on my hair at the back, it’s turned into a helmet. I could probably come off a motorbike with not a single hair out of place. Still, I don’t want to risk mucking it up before dinner tonight.”
Serious now, Polly pushed the sleep mask to the top of her head, like a welder in a car repair shop taking a break. She said, “I wonder if Morgana’s made a mistake inviting only three bloggers along to the gala dinner.”
“Only three!” said Cerys. “What? You want more?”
“There are more than three book bloggers in the world. Think about it—those who haven’t been invited are bound to feel left out. It’s the bad fairy at the christening syndrome, isn’t it?”
“That’s all we need. A posse of disgruntled book bloggers stalking the place.” Cerys looked around wildly, as if such lawless individuals might already be on their way to attack her. But then all she said was, “Is there a ladies’ toilet on this level, do you know?”
Emily pointed, and Cerys headed that way with a wave.
When all the gift bags were packed—it didn’t take long—Polly said to Emily, “I’m going for a massage, and then I’ll join you upstairs when Lex has gone. I don’t want to sit there and listen to him pontificate. You think these gift bags will be OK? No one’s going to pinch them, are they?”
Emily thought it unlikely, but she didn’t want to offend Polly (the bags contained a copy of her new book, after all) so she tried to look concerned yet noncommittal. Perhaps she just looked vacant because Polly said, “Tell you what, I’ll drop by the concierge desk and ask if they can be distributed as soon as possible. I have to pick up a towel for the spa, anyway.”
Emily went to look for Morgana. She found her with Lex and two women in the drawing room by the fire, drinking tea. A selection of cakes and sandwiches were displayed on two three-tiered china stands, each layer decorated in a different rosebud pattern; each layer offering bite-size teatime treats (cucumber sandwiches with their crusts cut off, triangles of sugary almond pastries, calorie-packed cubes of chocolaty cake). It looked delicious, and Emily was very hungry. Unfortunately, it would have been bad form to reach out and help herself from the selection—no one else was eating anything.
Lex was leaning back in his comfortable wing-backed chair, talking rather grandly. He was a large white man in his sixties (probably just past retirement age, though of course literary agents never retire: they go on and on, until one day they drop dead of a heart attack when a publisher offers an insultingly low advance on royalties for a favorite client). Lex held a teacup in one hand and sipped from it occasionally when he needed thinking time, or when he wanted to create a slight pause for dramatic effect. He looked like a prosperous legal adviser—which, in effect, was what he was.
Morgana was perched on the edge of a high-backed dining chair, which placed her a little higher than everyone else, like a dignitary at a ceremonial event. Two other women were also there, side by side on a chaise longue positioned close to the fire, leaning forward to listen to Lex. They were Teena Durani and Maggie Tambling, the two remaining prizewinning bloggers. Teena was a slim Indian woman in her late thirties with a sour face and chin-length, dark, shiny hair. Maggie was a white woman in her early forties, plump and pinkish with scraggy brown, shoulder-length hair, her damp fingers with their bitten nails clutching at her handbag as though she feared it might get stolen. When Morgana saw Emily approaching, she got up and left the tea party, and steered Emily toward a pair of high-backed chairs across the room.
“Ugh,” said Morgana. “Something dreadful has happened. Just dreadful.”
Emily had no idea what she was talking about. Morgana was so dramatic. Emily had seen that the dainty treats they’d been served were untouched. Was there something wrong with the food?
“A woman—a tourist—has been murdered in the estate next door to the hotel. Nik Kovacevic told me it was a drug deal gone wrong. But that’s ludicrous, isn’t it? To think, the poor woman came all this way…”
“Did you know her?”
“Nothing official yet.” Morgana put her hand to her face and pinched her nose with finger and thumb. Presumably it was a strategy to stop herself from crying, but her eyes filled with tears anyway. “Oh, Emily. I’m so ashamed of myself.”
Emily had a sudden, horrible insight. “You don’t think it’s Winnie?”
“American people are so trusting. So innocent. I should have met her at the station. I should never have set this thing up. I only invited her because I thought it might benefit our gathering this weekend—I put our needs before hers.” In her distress, Morgana began to speak in phrases that sounded like the titles of romance novels: “I Put Her in Harm’s Way. She Has Paid Too High a Price. An Innocent Creature, Exploited!”
She set Emily off on a riff on crime titles: “Blame Solves Nothing. Too Late to Help Her Now. No One Knew She Would Die.”
There was no telling how long the two of them might have carried on like this. Fortunately, they were interrupted by the sound of raised voices from the party by the fire.
“I don’t consider myself a romance writer,” Teena was saying. “Mostly, I write upmarket fiction.”
Emily wondered at the crassness of someone who would turn up at a romance writers’ convention and speak scornfully about the work they produced. (And what was “upmarket fiction” anyway?) She looked over to see what Lex would make of it. He had a discomforted expression, as though he was suffering the aftereffects of a gassy lunch, and trying not to break wind. “My dear Teena,” he said, calmly but a little too loudly. “In the publishing industry, we don’t usually—”
But Teena interrupted him. “I thought you were going to take us on as clients.” She sounded aggrieved, and vaguely threatening. “I wonder what my readers would say about all of this.”
“Well,” said Lex. “I hardly—”
“We can get advice in the magazines. We can go to an online forum if we want”—here Teena put her fingers into the air at either side of her face and made rabbits ears with forefingers and middle fingers, to denote quotation marks—“a ‘chat about publishing.’ This is my time you’re wasting here. I’m never going to get it back.”
Emily reflected that Teena would not get back the time she had spent chatting with Lex, even if she had spent it doing something she considered more worthwhile (like chatting to the Queen of England, or inventing a cure for cancer), because that’s the way time works. Surely that was obvious? But Maggie, the other blogger, was now hunched over with both arms around her handbag, as if she thought Lex might dip into it to steal her money as readily as he had stolen Teena’s time.
Emily took a
large notebook out of her handbag and began to write up the notes from the recent committee meeting:
NOTES FROM THE RWGB COMMITTEE MEETING:
Though none of the committee members remembered voting for the three shortlisted winners, two of the three winners are here. The third, unfortunately, has gone missing. The winners are all bloggers, chosen with the hope that they will write favorably about the conference. It remains to be seen whether this plan will be a success.
But as she wrote, she started to get distracted by some of the discrepancies in the information that had emerged, and she began to think about those instead.
It was odd that no one remembered voting for those pieces of writing, as if the poll had been rigged. But who rigged the poll? Morgana?
Polly wandered up to Emily’s table with Cerys and Zena, and Emily shut the notebook. Polly raised her eyebrows in an amused inquiry
“Poetry,” said Emily. No one ever asked to look at another person’s poetry.
Polly’s hair was still damp from the spa. Cerys and Zena were wearing their outdoor coats. Emily noted that Cerys wasn’t carrying shopping bags, and anyway hadn’t had long enough to visit the shops and get back to the hotel since she’d last seen her. What had Cerys been doing since visiting Emily and Polly in the basement?
The romance authors stood around Emily’s table with their backs to Lex and the bloggers so they wouldn’t get drawn into the discussion. But they listened very carefully.
“Teena seems rather put out,” said Polly in a low voice.
Morgana hurried back over to join them. “It does seem a little odd to denigrate romance writers, when we’re hosting this event.” She also spoke in a low voice. She had a face that might have turned Teena to stone, had Teena gazed on it.
Cerys stood with her arms folded and nodded. She pursed her lips and made an I’m saying nothing face.
Polly said, “You don’t think she’d try to expose Lex, do you? On her blog?”
“Goodness no!” Morgana said, “None of those accusations were ever proved!”
