by Val McDermid
Derek Knight was standing in the hall facing her, his mouth open and his eyelids as wide as they could go without surgery. Lindsay stepped through the doorway, leaning down to pick up her backpack. “Sorry, got to go,” she said.
He lunged at her, mouthing something incomprehensible, but Lindsay sidestepped neatly and rushed for the door of the flat. She took the stairs two at a time, the blood pounding in her ears, obscuring any sounds of pursuit. She didn’t even bother closing the street door behind her, sprinting down the street in the opposite direction to the tube station. At the corner, she turned left at random, cutting diagonally across the road and jinking into a mews court that ran between two parallel streets.
At the end of the mews, she stopped running. She wasn’t dressed for jogging and no one on the Islington/Canonbury border ran except joggers and muggers. As she turned left into the next street, she heard the whooping sirens of police cars nearby. On the corner was a pub. Lindsay breathed deeply to calm her thudding heart, walked straight through the doors and ordered a pint of bitter.
The first drink had gone down so well, Lindsay hadn’t had to work hard to persuade herself that she deserved a second. She’d found an unobtrusive corner, hidden by a raucous group of youths wearing sweat pants, sports shirts and training shoes that had never seen activity more strenuous than the game of darts their owners were throwing. Lindsay kept her head down and thought about the little she’d learned from Derek Knight before she’d given herself away in so embarrassingly inappropriate a fashion.
What stuck in her mind were his comments about the doors. From the moment Sandra Bloom had revealed that Penny’s death was murder, Lindsay had recognized it as a carefully planned, premeditated crime, based as it was on the plot in Penny’s own book. According to Derek Knight, the flat door was ajar, but not flung wide, which tied in with that supposition. It wasn’t left that way in a panic, but deliberately. It also indicated that the killer wanted the body to be found fairly quickly.
However, the mortise lock on the street door had been left undone. That suggested either that the killer didn’t know the residents routinely kept it locked or that in his or her haste to get away from the scene of the crime they hadn’t been able to find Penny’s keys. It was confusing. On the one hand, it had been made to look like an accident; on the other hand, like murder.
Lindsay sighed and finished her second pint. It was nearly nine o’clock, and she felt like she hadn’t slept properly for days. In the ladies’, she splashed water over her tired eyelids, then set off on the long journey across London to Helen’s. Outside the pub, to be on the safe side, she set off on a wide detour that would bring her via side streets to the top end of Highbury Fields, so she could approach the tube station from a diametrically opposite direction to Penny’s flat. Better safe than sorry if the cops happened to be keeping an eye open at the station.
Her route took her down the side of the park, past tall, narrow houses that looked out across the variegated greens of trees and grass. It was a view she knew well. There had been a time when she had regarded one of those tall houses as her home. It had belonged to her lover, Cordelia. When Lindsay had moved in with her after their relationship had pushed her into abandoning her old life in Glasgow, she had thought that love was enough and for ever. “How wrong can you get?” she muttered under her breath as she passed what had been her front door during what she looked back on as the time of the Great Illusion. Neither love nor Cordelia had proved to be what they seemed, and Lindsay still carried the scars. It had been a nice view, though, she thought fondly, wondering who lived there now and if it still belonged to Cordelia, the rent funding her permanent exile.
As the station grew nearer, caution forced nostalgia to the back of her mind. With sinking heart, Lindsay noticed there were a couple of police officers talking to a Big Issue vendor on the station approach. Slipping her backpack off her shoulder, she carried it by her side like a bag and walked briskly into the station, looking right nor left. As she turned to go down the stairs, she risked a quick glance back. Neither police officer was looking in her direction. Grinning to herself, Lindsay trotted down to the platform and waited for her train. The only way they were going to catch up with her now was if they still had her fingerprints on file. After all these years, she doubted that. Even paranoia had to call it a day some time.
By the time she made it back to Helen’s, reaction had set in, perfect partner to her growing jet lag. Her knees felt disconnected from her legs, her hands had a tremble she couldn’t be bothered trying to control and her eyes felt grittier than they did on days when the wind whipped the sand on Half Moon Bay into a hazy cloud. “Oh, God,” she groaned, closing the front door behind her and leaning against it.
A woman in faded 501s and a white T that told the world “My grannie was working class” pressed “pause” on the video remote control and looked across at her, dark blue eyes crinkling in a smile. “You’ll be Lindsay,” she said. “I’m Kirsten.” She jumped to her feet and thrust her hand out.
Lindsay pushed off from the door and dragged her weary body across what felt like miles of carpet, dragging Kirsten’s details up from the dim recesses of her mind. Freelance radio journalist. A few years younger than Helen, from somewhere in the West Country. They’d met at Pride two years before, had been living together around eighteen months. Sophie and Lindsay had missed meeting her on their last trip home because she’d been off covering some obscure opera festival. “Good to meet you at last,” Lindsay said, taking Kirsten’s hand and letting herself be drawn into a welcoming embrace.
“You look completely shattered,” Kirsten said sympathetically. “Come on through, have a drink, something to eat. Helen’s in the kitchen.”
Lindsay was past independent thought. She let Kirsten lead as they threaded a staggering path through the chaos of the living room into the kitchen.
Helen jumped to her feet and greeted Lindsay with a huge bearhug. “Hey, Linds, it’s great to see you, girl. And now you’ve met Kirsten in the flesh. Isn’t she drop dead gorgeous?” She took one arm away from Lindsay to draw Kirsten into the cuddle.
“Behave,” Kirsten protested. “You’re embarrassing me!”
“Impossible, you’re a journo. And she was one for too long to believe in the possibility of another hack getting a red neck over a compliment,” Helen teased. She stepped back, looking critically at Lindsay. “Where you been till this time? You look like last orders in the dyke bar. We were going to wait to eat till you came back, but we couldn’t hang on, we were starving. But there’s loads left,” she added, waving a vague arm at an array of foil takeaway cartons that covered half the available worktop space. “Just load up a plate and smack it in the video cooker.”
“I’m too tired to eat,” Lindsay said, disengaging herself from Helen’s arm and slumping into the nearest chair. “Thanks for letting me stay here. I really appreciate it.”
“I’m made up you’re here. I’d have been really brassed off if I’d found out you were staying some place else!” Helen opened a cupboard and took out a wine goblet, picked up a bottle of red that was sitting beside the pile of papers she was working on and glugged out a glassful. “Get yourself wrapped round that and tell me what you’ve been up to. Oh, by the way, Soph rang earlier. I don’t think you’re top of her Christmas card list right now.”
Lindsay took the glass and swallowed a mouthful of something that reminded her of a pit bull terrier—warm but with a bite that didn’t let go. “She want me to call her back?”
“She said she’d ring again.” Helen glanced at her watch. “In about half an hour. So what have you been up to? What’s going on? Soph said something about some friend of yours being murdered. What’s the score?”
“Helen,” Kirsten protested. “Let her get her second wind.”
“It’s okay, I’m used to her appalling manners,” Lindsay said.
“Only because I learned them off you!” Helen roared with laughter.
F
ortified by the wine, Lindsay gave Helen a succinct outline of recent events. “I’ll color in the picture when I’ve had a kip, okay?” she wound up.
“You just can’t keep away from it, can you?” Helen said. “We’re two of a kind, you and me. We can’t just sit on our hands when something needs sorting.”
“Mmm,” Lindsay grunted, reaching for the bottle and pouring a second glass. “So how’s the film business?” She needed to keep awake for Sophie’s phone call, and listening to Helen seemed a less taxing option than doing the talking herself.
“If I’m honest, Linds, it’s actually a bag of shit right now.”
“What’s the problem?” Lindsay slurred through a mixture of drink and exhaustion.
Kirsten groaned. “Don’t encourage her. We’ll be here all night and I need my beauty sleep.”
“If anyone needs their beauty sleep around here, gorgeous, it’s not you. The problem, Linds, is Guy. Well, it’s not really Guy as such, it’s Stella. You remember the set-up at Watergaw?”
Lindsay remembered. Helen and Guy had set up their independent film-making company three years earlier. Before that, Helen had worked in theater administration, then run her own casting agency, working for TV and film companies initially in Britain and later across Europe. Guy had been a TV director and producer first of current affairs and later of high-profile documentaries. Together they’d decided to create Watergaw Films to take advantage of new EU funding geared towards community groups who wanted to develop TV and film projects, both dramatic and documentary. “How could I forget?” she said. “Straight partnership, down the middle, you and Guy. Best buddies, known each other since school, both gay, both refugees from New Labour, both filled with the burning desire to make meaningful TV.”
“That’s what I thought too,” Helen said bitterly. She ran a hand through her mop of flaming red hair. “Turns out I was well wrong. On pretty much every count. I could just about live with the way he’s turned into the worst kind of exploitative capitalist, because I could always weigh in and get the balance straight again. But now he’s got that bitch Stella on board . . . I just don’t know how much more of his shit I can take.”
It had to be serious for Helen to be badmouthing another woman like that, Lindsay realized with a jolt. Normally first to the barricades when sisterhood came under threat, it took a lot for Helen even to admit a woman was in the wrong when there was an available male to be blamed. “Who’s Stella?” Lindsay asked as Kirsten moved behind Helen and started to massage the back of her neck and shoulders.
“Oh, that’s wonderful,” Helen purred, rolling her head back. “The bitch goddess from hell joined us about a year ago. We needed someone else on board with directorial experience, and she came highly recommended. Plus she had a bit of capital which we needed right then, so she bought in at twenty percent of the company. What was supposed to happen was that she would do the bread and butter stuff for Guy and work with me on projects where I was producer. What wasn’t supposed to happen was Guy rediscovering his lost heterosexuality and climbing into bed with the scheming little minx,” Helen said. Not even Kirsten’s massage was enough to subdue the anger in her voice.
“Oh.”
“Yeah, ‘oh.’” Helen reached behind her and gently disengaged Kirsten’s hands. “Thanks for the thought, K, but you’re wasting your energy. That pair have got me so wound up . . .”
“Well, don’t talk about them, then,” she said reasonably.
“As well as tell a river to stop flowing downhill,” Lindsay muttered.
“Exactly. And as if it’s not enough that he’s sleeping with her, he’s taking professional decisions with her. To all intents and purposes, she’s in control. Whatever she wants, Guy backs her. Whenever there’s a difference of opinion, whether it’s about company strategy or something as minor as how a sequence should be filmed, Guy sides with her every time, and I’m the one left out in the cold. I feel like I’m being frozen out of my own company, and it’s really pissing me off. Things get decided when I’m not even there—like as not between the sheets. But it’s more than just being sidelined that bugs me. They’re changing the culture of the company, and I’m spending all my time and energy running to try and stand still instead of moving us forward. It’s not what I came into this business to do, but I just don’t know how the hell to beat this bitch at her own game.” Helen drained her glass and emptied the last of the bottle into it.
Lindsay rubbed her eyes with her knuckles and tried to straighten out of the slump that was spreading her upper body over the table top. “There’s got to be some dirt,” she managed to say.
“You what?”
Lindsay dragged herself upright and yawned hugely. “You don’t get to be queen bitch at your first attempt. If she’s such a smooth operator, there’s got to be bodies buried somewhere.”
Light dawned in Helen’s eyes. “Hey, why didn’t I think of that!”
Those were the last words Lindsay heard as she drifted into a limbo between sleep and waking. “Mmm,” she murmured as she slipped away.
It didn’t last long. Before she could fall far enough for dreams to capture her, the shrill chirrup of a telephone cut into her unconsciousness. “Huh? . . . wha’? . . . what is it?” she gabbled as her head shot up and her eyes snapped wide open and staring. She registered Helen reaching over to grab the phone that was buried under some papers inches away from where Lindsay’s ear had been.
“Hiya, Soph. All right? . . . Yeah, she’s here. All seven dwarfs rolled into one—Sleepy, Grumpy, Dopey, Snorey, Guilty, Boozy and Sexy.” Helen roared with laughter.
Lindsay, pitying Sophie’s eardrum, said, “You’ve been practicing that line all night. Gimme the phone.” She stretched her arm out, beckoning with her fingers.
“Here she is. See ya, Soph.” Helen grinned, handed the phone to Lindsay and grabbed a bundle of papers before sweeping out of the kitchen.
Lindsay cleared her throat. “I know. If I was home, I’d be sleeping with Mutt. In the doghouse.”
“No, if you were home, you’d be where you’re supposed to be,” Sophie said, sounding more exasperated than angry. “How do you get into these things?”
“Natural talent?”
“Natural stupidity, more like.”
“I couldn’t just leave Meredith to it, could I?” Lindsay said plaintively.
“I don’t see why not,” Sophie grumbled.
Even with a continent and an ocean separating them, Lindsay could tell her heart wasn’t in it. “The woman you fell in love with wouldn’t turn her back on Meredith.”
“That was then. Things that are endearing in the first flush of passion can lose their charm, you know,” Sophie pointed out, a warning creeping into her voice. “This isn’t just about Meredith, is it?”
“Yeah, all right. Partly it’s for me. I cared about Penny. We both did. I’ve tried to keep my nose out when people I care about have died before, and I never managed it. I thought this time I might as well be honest right from the start and admit that I know I can find out things the police won’t get to hear in a million years.”
“I thought it might be something like that. Is that why you didn’t wait until I got home? Did you really think I’d try to talk you out of it?”
Lindsay thought she detected a trace of hurt under the warmth in Sophie’s voice. “I wanted to wait till you came home, but the plane tickets were already bought and booked. I didn’t feel I had the right to go wasting Meredith’s money. I did try to call you at Crazy John’s, but they said you guys weren’t in and didn’t have a table booked. I didn’t know where else to try. I’m sorry if you feel I didn’t take you into account. That wasn’t what I had in mind.”
Sophie sighed. The silence stretched and Lindsay couldn’t avoid filling it. “Anyway, you’ll be here next week. Things’ll be sorted by then. We’ll have our holiday just like we planned.”
Another sigh. This time Sophie followed it up with words. “If you’re still in one
piece,” she said gloomily.
“No reason why I shouldn’t be,” Lindsay said. “Come on, I know how to take care of myself.”
More silence.
“I’ve done this before, you know. I did it before I had you fussing around like a nursemaid. I’m not a child, Sophie. I’m not helpless.”
“I didn’t say you were, my love. I just worry about you, okay? I know it’s totally unreasonable of me, but I do worry.”
“You don’t have to. I’m too much of a coward to get damaged.”
In her office with its view of the Oakland Bridge, Sophie Hartley grabbed her graying curls with her free hand. Lindsay might have chosen to forget, but she could never lose the knowledge of how dangerous her lover’s favorite game could be. “I hope you’re right,” she said softly. “I really hope you’re right.”
Chapter 8
Lindsay stirred the warm gray liquid that passed for coffee in the supermarket café and stared across the car park at the row of converted mews cottages that housed Monarch Press. Nothing was moving so far. But that was hardly surprising of a publishing house at five to nine in the morning. In an ideal world, she’d still be tucked up in bed letting her body recover. But Helen had never mastered the art of rising quietly and unobtrusively. If she was awake at seven, the rest of the house was guaranteed to be awake by five past, their ears possessed by Radio Four at full volume. Helen liked to hear the morning news wherever she was in the house, including the shower.
Lindsay had staggered downstairs at ten past seven, lured by the smell of coffee. She’d found Kirsten reading the Guardian in her dressing gown, her short dark hair sticking up in a Fido Dido crest, hands wrapped round a mug of very black coffee. The room was an oasis of relative quiet, the radio there being silent. “Plenty in the pot,” Kirsten mumbled. “Croissants in the oven. A couple of minutes yet.”
