by Val McDermid
‘So, what we’re here for is to iron out the fine print of our agreement,’ George said once we were all settled in the enveloping sofas and Carla had been dispatched to produce coffee.
‘Well, not quite, Georgie boy,’ Scarlett said, the hard drawl of her Leeds accent noticeable even in those few words. ‘The first thing we’re here for is to see if I want to work with Stephanie. ’Cos if we don’t hit it off, there’s not gonna be no agreement.’ She was much more assertive than I’d expected.
It was George’s turn for the meaningless smile. ‘Naturally, my dear. Stephanie, perhaps you could outline your working methods for Scarlett’s benefit?’
‘I’ve got a better idea,’ Scarlett said. ‘Me and Steph here, we need to get to know each other without you two breathing down our necks. Georgie, you and Maggie might as well go back to London and sort yourselves out there. I’ll take care of Steph.’ She stood up and made a shooing motion with her hands. ‘Go on. Bugger off, the pair of you.’ She turned to me and jerked her head towards the far end of the room. ‘Come on. Let’s get our kit off and get to know each other.’ And off she walked, as if there was no need for further discussion.
4
It turned out a lot less scary than it sounded. Scarlett had a swimming pool. Well, of course she did. And a Jacuzzi, and a sauna and a gym. What every well-dressed Essex hacienda is wearing. I followed her to the back of the house and through a double door that acted as an airlock for the smell of pool chemicals. In a changing room heavily fragranced with cedar and vanilla, Scarlett flung open a locker to reveal a selection of identical black one-piece swimsuits on hangers. ‘There’s a full set of sizes from ten to twenty,’ she said. ‘Help yourself.’
With the complete lack of self-consciousness that comes from having been drunk and naked on the nation’s TV screens, she stripped off and slipped into a turquoise and blue suit. She looked surprisingly toned and fit, which made the gentle swell of her four-month pregnancy seem incongruous. I’d been right about the all-over spray tan, though.
I didn’t share Scarlett’s ease at public nakedness so I stepped into a curtained cubicle to undress. By the time I emerged, she was ploughing up and down the ten-metre pool in a ragged but effective crawl. I sat on the edge and dangled my legs in the water. I reckoned it wouldn’t hurt to give Scarlett the initiative and see where it took us. There would come a point where I would need to draw my own lines. If she couldn’t stick to that, it was as well to find out now, while I could still walk away.
I could see her checking me out every time she headed back down towards me. I think she expected me to crack and slide into the water. To go head to head with her in an attempt to show who was boss. But I wasn’t playing that particular game. After a dozen lengths, she’d had enough. She glided to a halt alongside me and looked up. The swim had sleeked her hair back against her head but her waterproof mascara was still holding fast. Her lips were pulled back against her teeth as she caught her breath, and I could see the dental work that had transformed her smile after that first series in the Goldfish Bowl. Sometimes the cosmetic dentistry goes too far, giving people a glow-in-the-dark smile never found in nature. But Scarlett’s dentist had done a good job. If you’d never seen the ‘before’, you wouldn’t have thought it was an ‘after’. Just the smile of someone blessed with good dental genes.
‘D’you not swim, then?’ she asked. Straightforward curiosity or aggression; I could have read her tone either way.
It was time to give her a little bit of me. ‘I like swimming. But I don’t like pools much. I prefer the sea. So I don’t swim very often because it’s too bloody cold in this country.’
She folded her forearms on the edge of the pool and looked up at me with a grin. ‘Fair enough. What happened to your leg? It’s not like you limp or owt. I didn’t know there was anything wrong with you till you took your trousers off.’
I looked down at the long scar that runs from my left knee almost to my ankle. ‘I was in a car crash. A drunk drove into my friend’s car. We hit a tree and my leg got trapped by the car door. I’ve got a metal plate and a handful of screws holding my leg together. They did a good job and I did what the physio told me, and that’s why I don’t have a limp.’
‘That must have hurt like a bitch,’ Scarlett said. She pushed herself out of the water and scrambled to her feet.
‘It did. But it doesn’t now. Only when I do too much walking. Then it aches a bit.’ I lifted my legs out of the water and stood up. I was a good three inches taller than her; I could see the roots of her hair would soon need touching up. ‘Would you like me to tell you how I go about helping people tell their story?’
Scarlett dragged her hair back from her face and gave a little snort of laughter. ‘You never call a spade a spade, you lot.’
‘What lot?’
‘Journalists. Writers. Interviewers. All you lot that take me and twist me into summat for your readers to feed off of.’
‘Is that what you think this is all about? Because if that’s what you genuinely believe, there’s not much point in us carrying on this conversation.’ I walked across to a table that held a stack of clean towels and picked one up.
‘What are you here for then?’ Scarlett challenged me. ‘Come on, get in the Jacuzzi and tell me there.’ Again, there was no backward glance. I wasn’t ready to give up on her yet, so I followed.
She fiddled with the controls and the deep pool began to rumble and bubble. I don’t like Jacuzzis much. They’re too hot for my taste. I always come out feeling over-heated and sweaty and in need of a shower. But this was work, so I simply settled myself down at right angles to her. People argue less that way than when they sit opposite each other. I gave her the full-on reassuring smile. ‘What you’ve done is not ordinary,’ I began. It’s a shtick I’ve honed over the years. ‘That means you’re not ordinary any more either. Other people, the ordinary ones, they’re desperate to know your story. They want to find out how you became extraordinary. They want to share your secret. My job is to help you to tell them. It’s simple.’
She frowns. ‘How is that different from all them journalists that wrote all that crap about me when I fucked up in the Goldfish Bowl? And the other times, when I’ve said one thing and it’s come out totally different?’
‘Because I’m not working for a newspaper or a magazine. I’m working for you and for your publisher.’
‘But you want to sell books. The more books you sell, the more money you make. So it stands to reason you’ll do whatever it takes to sell the most books.’ There was a stubborn set to Scarlett’s mouth, coupled with an uncertainty in her eyes. I’d seen it before with people who had grown up with good reasons not to trust.
‘If we do this, we make a deal, Scarlett.’ It was the first time I’d used her name and yes, it was calculated. The same way you stroke a strange dog you think might be getting used to you. ‘As far as I’m concerned, the best story isn’t necessarily the one with the most shocking revelations. It’s the one that speaks loudest to the readers. What I promise you is that I will tell your story the way you want your story to be told. If you tell me something that I think you would come to regret, I will leave it out and I’ll tell you why. I won’t tell your publisher though. Because you’re right. If I do, they will want to keep it in the book for the sake of making a few extra grand selling it to the Daily Mail.’
‘Why would you do that? I don’t believe this bleeding heart shit about protecting me from myself. Why would you leave out the really juicy bits? Are you soft, or what?’
It was another of those surprising flashes of intelligence. Or maybe it was just a hard-won shrewdness born of being exploited once too often in the past. I shook my head, laughing. ‘I’m the opposite of soft, Scarlett. I do it for one very good reason and it’s called the second bite of the cherry. I’ve helped a lot of extraordinary people bring their story to an audience. And I’ve learned that those people mostly don’t go back to being ordinary. They carry on doing
stuff that makes amazing stories. Now, if I write your story with my eye on how much I can score off you, it’s not going to be me you talk to next time, is it?’
There’s no motive clearer to a minor celebrity than self-interest. Scarlett perked up. ‘So if you don’t fuck me over, you can come back for more when I get to be even more famous?’
‘That’s right. When I look at you, Scarlett, I don’t just see the story you’re going to lay out for your baby to read when they’re old enough. I can see you’ve come a long way. And I believe you’ve still got a long way to go. And I want to be the person who tells all those stories still to come. That’s my vested interest in doing the right thing by you.’
She gave me a grudging nod. ‘That makes sense. I couldn’t figure out why you would be on my side. But I get it now. You don’t just want my story because it’ll make us all a load of dosh now. You think I can be a cash cow down the line.’
Brutal, but not so different from the way Maggie would have put it. ‘I think of it more as a long-term partnership,’ I said wryly.
‘I want to see what you write before it’s turned into a book.’ Scarlett wiped the sweat from her upper lip with the back of her hand.
‘Of course you do. How else will you know I’m not putting the shaft in? You’ll be the first person who reads it. You get it before my agent, before your agent, before the publisher. After you’ve read it, we sit down together and go through anything you’re not happy with. But there shouldn’t be any problem. Because this is your story, after all. I’m just the person who knocks the sentences into shape and gets the spelling sorted.’ It never ceases to amaze me how my subjects always swallow this. They’re completely comfortable with the idea that there’s no skill in what I do. They genuinely believe all I’m there for is getting the commas in the right place. Because I’m such a good ventriloquist, what they hear is their own voice. They have no idea how much craft has gone into shaping what are often little more than inchoate ramblings.
Scarlett had taken the bait, though. And that was the main thing. ‘Sound as a pound,’ she said. ‘I like you, Steph. You talk sense. You don’t try and blind me with science. So how do we go about this?’
‘You talk, I tape. I’m told you want this to be in the form of a letter to your unborn baby? Is that what you’ve got in mind?’
Scarlett’s chin jutted up. ‘There’s nothing wrong with that, is there?’
It’s interesting to me that it’s always the women I write about who see criticism in the most straightforward of questions. The men – even the ones who are abuse survivors – are seldom assailed by any flicker of self-doubt. Deep down, they believe they have a right to be heard. Even when they’ve been mired in sexual and financial scandal, like another politician I did a few years ago, they’re still convinced that their story should be told exactly as they perceive it.
‘Quite the opposite. I think it’s a good idea. It always helps to have a theme that pulls the book together. How did you see it taking shape?’
‘I know it sounds back-to-front, but I want to start where I am now, pregnant and getting over being in disgrace. But how my baby’s saved me from myself. About Joshu and how loving him’s changed everything. And then go back to the beginning and talk about my crappy childhood and my shitty family and how I got out alive.’ Scarlett dipped her head and gave me the up-and-under look that Princess Diana added to the armoury of generations of women. ‘Without sounding like a twat, obviously.’
I gave her a twist of a smile. ‘I think we can just about manage that. It would be good if I could talk to Joshu too.’
She looked uncertain. ‘I suppose. He’s not one for sitting around talking, Joshu.’
‘It wouldn’t have to be a long chat. Does he actually live here with you?’
Now Scarlett was positively shifty. ‘He’s supposed to. Only, when he’s DJing club nights and shit, it gets late and he crashes with his mates in town instead. So sometimes he’s here and sometimes he’s not. I used to go out on the town with him, but obviously now I’m pregnant I can’t be doing that kind of shit. Not with the paps round every bloody corner.’
I do try not to be judgemental. Mostly because it makes the job easier. But sometimes there’s a little voice at the back of my head that gibbers things like, ‘Never mind the paparazzi, what about the fucking baby?’ And I struggle to keep my face on straight and my voice even. ‘That’s fine. I’m sure he’ll turn up sometime when we’re doing the interviews and I can slot in a chat with him. And if that doesn’t work out, we’ll set something up.’
‘So we do this talk and tape here, do we?’
‘Not actually in the Jacuzzi. We need to be somewhere quiet. But yes, here at your place would be the easiest.’
The wary look was back. ‘Would you stay here, like?’
‘No, I’d go home at the end of the day. Back to London.’
She nodded. ‘Yeah, you wouldn’t want to be round here when Joshu starts playing his music. Some nights, bands come back here and all sorts.’ Her mouth curled in an indulgent sneer. ‘You wouldn’t like the kind of stuff they get up to, a nice respectable lady like you.’
I laughed. ‘I’ve not been called a lady for a very long time. Or respectable, come to that.’
Scarlett’s eyes clouded over. ‘Compared to my life, chuck, you’re Mother Teresa. And while we’re on the subject, I don’t want you shooting up to Leeds for a cosy little chat with my mam and my sister. You keep them well the fuck out of it. I’ll tell you all you need to know about them and then you’ll understand why I don’t want you listening to their poisonous crap. We clear on that?’
I eased myself up till I was sitting on the lip of the Jacuzzi. ‘You’re the boss. But it would make good reading if we could meet up with somebody who does know you from those early days. Just to make the comparison more powerful.’
Scarlett scowled. ‘I’ll have a think. Trouble is, they’re all drunken slags and junkie wankers. You wouldn’t want to be in the same room.’
‘I’m sure you can come up with—’
‘What have we here?’ An amused voice cut across mine. ‘Scarlett, my girl, my woman, what’s on your mind? You bringing your girlfriends round to have fun with us now? You got a nice little threesome in mind?’
I swung round to see a young Asian man in familiar uniform – baseball cap set at an angle, athletic letter jacket two sizes too big shrugged on over a dark polo shirt, low-slung baggy trousers falling in folds on over-sized trainers.
But it wasn’t the outfit that caught my attention. It was the gleaming chrome handgun cradled in his hands.
5
Stephanie stopped in her tracks, clearly reliving the shock of that moment. As a trained FBI operative, Vivian McKuras had faced danger and loaded guns and taken them in her adrenalin-fuelled stride, but even she was taken aback by Stephanie’s revelation. Till then, the woman’s story had seemed a pedestrian tale of low-level fame gilded with the rosy glow of Vivian’s idea of British life mainly garnered from Mystery Theatre. But it had been starkly transformed by the introduction of a big shiny handgun.
‘He was toting a gun?’ She wanted to be clear about this before she put out an APB on this British DJ.
‘With the emphasis very much on toting,’ Stephanie said. ‘The thing about Joshu is that he was always a complete tosser.’ Seeing Vivian’s frown, she clarified. ‘A wanker. A jerk-off. All mouth and trousers.’
‘Even so. He was carrying a gun the first time you met him. That must have been pretty scary. As I understand it, that’s not exactly commonplace in the UK.’
Stephanie stared at a patch of wall over Vivian’s shoulder. ‘There was a moment when I couldn’t make sense of what I was looking at. This shiny thing in his hands. He was almost cradling it. Then it dawned on me that it was an actual gun. And yes, I was scared. And yes, I showed it. And he just stood there giggling.’ She shook her head and dragged her eyes down to meet Vivian’s. ‘He was high, of course. Which mad
e it considerably scarier.’
‘What did Scarlett do?’
‘She rolled her eyes and said, “For fuck’s sake, I told you not to walk around with that. Some five-oh is gonna see that and take you down.” Then she told me to chillax because it was only a replica. Which, as it turned out, was very Joshu.’ She sighed. ‘He was always on the fringe of the action. Never a serious player. He knew the big-time dealers and gangstas, charmed his way into their circle and skated close to the edge, but he wasn’t one of them. And assuming he was in a position to do anything about his son, this business with Jimmy would be nothing to do with him. Scarlett and Joshu were married and divorced before the kid was a year old.’
‘That doesn’t change the fact that Joshu is his father. These emotions run deep. They’ve got a way of coming back at you. If it’s not him, it could be a family member acting on his behalf or on their own initiative.’ Vivian reached for her computer and started tapping the keys.
‘You’re not getting it. Jimmy doesn’t exist for the Patels. Joshu’s family hated Scarlett. They blamed her for everything that went wrong for their precious son. They didn’t come to the wedding, they never came to the house and Scarlett never crossed their front door. As far as I’m aware, they’ve never set eyes on their grandson outside the pages of a tabloid.’
Vivian shook her head. ‘All the same. It’s the strongest lead you’ve given me so far. What’s his surname, this Joshu?’
‘It’s Patel. But—’
