by Val McDermid
“It sounds like you would have come off a lot worse if you’d stuck around,” Kirsten commented.
“Trust a journalist to look on the bright side,” Helen said. “So, did you see who it was doing the Joe DiMaggio impersonation? Was it Guy? Or even Stella?”
Lindsay sighed. “I don’t think it was Stella. I couldn’t see much except a silhouette, and it looked like a male body shape. I don’t think he was as tall as Guy, but I couldn’t swear to it. I think he was wearing a stocking over his head as well. I was giving it some thought back in the hospital. At first I couldn’t work out why his head was such a neat shape, then I realized what he must have done.”
“It must have been Guy,” Helen said. “He knows me well enough to realize I wouldn’t just lie down and die after what he’s done to me. He’ll have left that bitch Stella in charge of the night shoot, and he’ll have come back to stake out the offices. The bastard!”
“It certainly sounds a possibility,” Sophie said. “But what about your murder investigation? Isn’t it possible that someone connected with that has been tailing you, waiting for an opportunity to strike?”
Lindsay sighed. “It’s not very likely, given that I seem to have hit a brick wall. Unless there’s something in Penny’s last draft to point me in a different direction, I’m stuck. I can no more prove Meredith innocent than I can show someone else is guilty. Helen’s probably right. Most likely it was Guy.”
“You’ve got to go to the police,” Helen said firmly.
“No way. That’s the very last thing I should do,” Lindsay said wearily.
“You can’t let him get away with this,” Kirsten chipped in as she braked for a pedestrian crossing. “He could try again, and next time he might really hurt somebody.”
“It’s not worth it. He didn’t actually hit me. All this,” she said, fluttering her fingers in the direction of her face, “was incidental. I doubt he’d even get a custodial sentence. No, the revenge I’ve got lined up for Guy and Stella is going to hurt them a lot more than a something or nothing charge in a magistrates’ court. And to make it work, the last thing we want to be doing is explaining why I was in Watergaw’s car park the wrong side of midnight.”
“This sounds devious,” Sophie commented.
“You haven’t heard the half of it,” Helen said ominously.
“And you don’t want to, either,” Kirsten chipped in. “I had it over dinner and then all the way to Heathrow. Believe me, Sophie, this is one case where ignorance is bliss.”
“I’ll tell you later, Soph. Suffice it to say, Guy turned out to be a real shyster, so I’ve been fitting him up good style,” Lindsay said. “But I need to brief you now, Helen. If you go into my backpack, you’ll find a document wallet with three printed memos in it.” As Sophie passed the bag over and Helen unzipped it, Lindsay continued. “First thing in the morning, you go to your local VAT office and request an interview with an investigator. Failing that, you want the inspector who deals with Watergaw. You tell him you had been told that one of your staff had been using your computer to run their own business on the side, so you were doing a file audit. While you were in there, you found these memos in the private desks of your business partners.”
Helen was skimming the documents as she listened. “Jesus!” she exploded. “This is dynamite. You don’t take prisoners, do you?”
“And that was presumably written before your colleague tried to cave her head in,” Sophie said drily. “Probably just as well. If she was framing him now, she’d not be satisfied with anything less than serial murder.”
“Never mind all that,” Lindsay said. “The important thing is that you stress that you knew nothing about all of this, and you want them hammered because you don’t want your company destroyed. I know it’s casting against type, but for once play the dumb broad,” she added wryly.
“Oh, God,” Helen groaned. “I should have known better.”
“That,” said Sophie, “is what they all say.”
Chapter 19
At first when she woke, Lindsay couldn’t figure out where she was. She knew she wasn’t at home, remembered she was staying with Helen, but the silence disoriented her. She couldn’t recall ever waking into quiet in Helen’s home. If it wasn’t the radio, it was music, the volume pumped up till it threatened to explode. But there was nothing. Just the distant hum of traffic on Fulham Palace Road and the chatter of city sparrows from the open sash window. That and the pounding of her head, a throb so intense it seemed audible.
Something else was wrong, she realized, still not moving. She was alone. Her memory of the night before was trickling back from behind the barrier of drugged sleep and she knew she shouldn’t have been waking alone. Sophie! Sophie was in England. She had been there with her when the hospital painkillers had finally carried her over into what felt like a coma. But where was she now?
Lindsay rolled over, making the mistake of turning on to the side where a row of stitches held her face together. “Shit,” she exploded, squirming swiftly up the bed and into a sitting position. Sophie, sitting by the window in a basket chair, looked up from the book she was reading.
“If it hadn’t been for the snoring, I’d have started to think you’d died,” she said. “How are you feeling?”
Lindsay’s face twitched as another worm of pain snaked down her jaw. “My face feels like it’s wired for electric shock treatment and my body thinks it’s been hit by a bus. My brain seems to have been connected to a bass drum machine and while I was sleeping, somebody stuffed my mouth with cotton wool, then left a dead reptile there for long enough to make my mouth taste of decaying lizard. Apart from that, I feel terrific,” she grumbled.
Sophie smiled sympathetically, closing her book and crossing to the door. “I’ll get you some coffee and a couple of painkillers.”
“Great. But just some paracetamol or aspirin, not those industrial-strength ones the hospital gave me. I’ve decided I want to put the zombie lifestyle on hold until I’m actually dead.”
“Wise move.”
“What time is it anyway?” Lindsay asked, looking around vainly for her watch.
“You broke the glass on your watch when you did your swallow dive into the asphalt. It’s ten to twelve,” Sophie said on her way out.
“Ten to twelve? As in lunchtime? It can’t be! You mean I slept through Helen greeting the world with Radio Four?”
“I made her leave the radio off,” Sophie shouted from the stairs.
“I have died and gone to heaven,” Lindsay said faintly. Kirsten could only get the radio turned off in the kitchen, but Sophie could still pitch Helen into starting the day without it altogether. If she’d had a suspicious mind, Lindsay would have wondered if there was still unfinished business between them. But six years with someone as dependable as Sophie had restored Lindsay’s fractured trust in human nature. Helen’s radio silence, she felt sure, was more to do with concern for her health than a desire to creep into Sophie’s good books.
While she waited for Sophie to return, Lindsay shifted across the bed so she could see herself in the wardrobe mirror. Her right cheek was a patchwork of purple and blue-black bruising and brownish scabbed grazes, with her stitched scar running like a line of black thread up her jaw from the angle under her ear to a point level with the corner of her mouth. The bruising continued on her shoulder and down her right arm as far as the elbow, which sported an ugly scrape that still looked red and raw. As Sophie came back, Lindsay said, “Really, you have to wonder if I’d have been better off with the baseball bat.”
“Not if you’ve ever worked a shift in casualty, you don’t,” Sophie said drily, depositing a mug of coffee on the bedside table and handing Lindsay two paracetamols and a glass of water. “Believe me, if that bat had connected, you wouldn’t be lying here. You’d still be in the Royal Free. Either that or in a drawer in the mortuary.”
“I don’t think he was trying to kill me,” Lindsay objected. “He gave up too easily. I think
it was a warning.”
“So you think Helen’s right? That it was Guy?” Sophie asked.
“Who else? I’ve dead-ended on the murder inquiry, so I’m no threat to Penny’s killer.”
“But does the killer know that?” Sophie mused.
“If the killer is anybody I’ve met over the last few days, then they’ve seen me floundering around making an complete arse of myself,” Lindsay said bitterly, then winced at the effort of swallowing the painkillers. “They’re not going to feel threatened, they’re going to be laughing their socks off. I’ve accused one person whose motive crumbled faster than an Oxo cube and another who had an alibi with thousands of witnesses. Well, hundreds. It was local radio, after all.”
Sophie gave a conciliatory shrug. “Just a thought. So that leaves Guy. Funny, he never seemed like the violent type.”
“People do ridiculous things when they feel threatened.”
“Yeah, but . . .” Sophie frowned. “I thought they’d seen you and Helen off with your tails between your legs.” She sat on the bed beside Lindsay, resting an arm on her lover’s unhurt shoulder.
Lindsay cautiously drank some coffee. She closed her eyes as the rich flavor burst on her tongue and savored the sensation of its warmth coursing down her throat. “Heaven,” she murmured appreciatively. Then she opened her eyes and said, “Guy’s known Helen a long time. He knows she’s not the sort to give in easily. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he’d decided to keep an eye on us. It would also explain where he disappeared to when I got away. He didn’t follow me to the street; the taxi driver said he couldn’t see anybody. But Guy could easily have slipped back inside the Watergaw building. He’d have keys and he knows the alarm code.”
“I suppose you’re right. It is the logical answer,” Sophie sighed.
Lindsay drained her coffee cup and presented it to Sophie. “I wouldn’t mind another cup,” she said, looking up from under her eyebrows.
“Cut out the pathos and you might just get lucky.”
Lindsay forgot herself enough to smile, gasping as the pain kicked in again. “Just get me some more coffee, or I’ll find somebody that knows how patients should really be treated,” she growled.
Sophie chuckled. “Did they give you a charm bypass before I arrived last night? Okay, more coffee it is.”
As she got off the bed, Lindsay said, “Be a pal and pass me my laptop. It’s over there on the chest of drawers. And if you could dig out Penny’s last disks, then I can get stuck into the stuff she was working on when she died.”
Sophie shook her head. “No way. Not today, Lindsay. You need to rest and recover. Doctor’s orders. Believe me, you’ll know exactly what I mean as soon as you get up to go to the loo. You’ll have legs like rubber and muscles that are stiffer than a sergeant-major’s salute.”
Lindsay scowled. “Look, I know my body’s cream-crackered, but my brain is working just fine. I’m not an invalid. It’s not exactly going to strain me to hit the ‘page down’ key every few minutes, is it?”
Sophie smiled. Lindsay’s irrepressible determination was one of the things she loved about her partner, but there were times when it slid inexorably into stubbornness. This looked like being one of them. Sophie walked across to the chest of drawers and picked up the laptop. Turning back, she noticed a look of triumph on Lindsay’s face. “I meant what I said,” Sophie told her, walking out of the room with the laptop under her arm. Ignoring the howl of frustrated fury behind her, she carried on downstairs and put it in one of the kitchen cupboards before pouring another cup out of the pot.
“I don’t believe you just did that,” Lindsay said, outraged, the moment Sophie walked back into the room. “I do not believe you just did that.”
“One day is not going to make a blind bit of difference. If the cops were going to charge Meredith, they’d have done it by now,” Sophie said mildly, holding out the fresh coffee. “Believe me, you’ll feel so much better for it tomorrow, the day won’t have been wasted.”
“Huh,” Lindsay snorted, grudgingly taking the mug. “So what am I supposed to do? Play I-Spy with you?”
“Relax. Read a book. Have a bath. Watch some TV.”
“Boring.” Sulky as a teenager, Lindsay glowered at Sophie.
“Okay. So tell me about the investigation, all the things you didn’t go into over the phone. Two heads are supposed to be better than one.”
“I thought I was supposed to be having a day off?” Lindsay grumbled. Sophie just stared her down. Eventually, Lindsay relented. “All right, sit down and I’ll tell you all about it.”
She’d got as far as Lauren’s tale of being bribed by Penny to get into Monarch’s offices when the phone rang. Sophie rolled off the bed and raced out of the room, calling, “It’s probably Helen. She said she’d check in to see how you were.”
At first, Lindsay could hear only a distant mumble from Sophie, then her voice grew clearer as she mounted the stairs, still talking into the cordless phone. “. . . quite a battering, so she’s not in a fit state to do much . . . Yes, I appreciate that, and I know she’ll want to know what’s happened . . .” Sophie walked into the bedroom and held the phone out. “It’s Meredith’s solicitor. The police have taken her in for further questioning.”
Lindsay grabbed the phone. “Hello? Ms. Cusack?”
“Ms. Gordon. I’m sorry to hear about your injuries. No permanent damage, I trust?” Geri Cusack asked, her creamy voice as rich as a pint of Guinness on a winter night.
“I suspect I’ll have to forget the modelling career,” Lindsay said drily. “But never mind me. What’s this about Meredith?”
“The police hung on to her this morning when she reported in under the terms of her bail. I’ve just had them on the phone. I’m on my way there now.” That explained the background noises on the line. She was talking on a car phone, Lindsay realized.
“Why have they pulled her in?” she asked.
“According to the custody sergeant, they’ve got a new witness. Danny King, the boss of Monarch Press?”
“A witness to what?” Lindsay demanded.
“It’s something and nothing. He’s given a statement saying he saw Meredith hanging around outside their premises the last time Penny was visiting. I’m sure it’s nothing, but they’re clutching at straws. Is there anything you’ve come up with I should know about?”
“As of now, I’ve got zilch,” Lindsay said, her bitter tone revealing exactly who she blamed for that. “But hang on a minute,” she added, puzzled. “How come it’s taken till now for King to come forward with this statement?”
“I don’t know. I agree it’s odd.” The line started crackling, the static like emery board on fingernails. “I’ll tell you what,” she shouted. “I’ll call you back after I’ve spoken with Meredith.”
“Thanks,” Lindsay said. But the line was already dead, their conversation abruptly terminated. She looked up at Sophie and gave a lopsided smile. “What was that you said about one day not making any difference?”
“I have this funny feeling we’re going to have to forget about the day off,” Sophie sighed. “I’ll get the laptop.”
“Can’t we print this stuff out?” Sophie complained after an hour of looking over Lindsay’s shoulder at the laptop’s tiny screen.
“I haven’t got a lead that connects into Helen’s printer,” Lindsay explained.
“So let’s just stick the floppy into Helen’s PC and print from that.”
Lindsay guffawed derisively. “Helen’s PC came out of the ark. She hasn’t upgraded since before you two split up.”
Sophie groaned. “Wrong size of floppy disk?”
“Got it in one. We’re stuck with the migraine master here.”
With a sigh that made the mattress quiver, Sophie read on. “It’s very different from the first draft.”
“Mmm. It’s better, too. More hard-edged, more economical with the language. I just can’t get over how good it is,” Lindsay said without taking her
eyes from the screen. “One thing’s for sure. Whoever tries to finish this has got a hell of a job on their hands.”
They carried on reading in silence, Sophie swept away by her first close read of Heart of Glass, Lindsay marvelling at the improvements that fury and heartbreak had brought to her friend’s novel. They were disturbed twice, once by Helen inquiring after Lindsay’s health and revealing that, as she spoke, VAT inspectors were going through every piece of paper in Guy and Stella’s office, every file in the computer, and Watergaw’s accounts. “They’re going to have to explain where that EU grant went as well,” she said gleefully. “One of the inspectors stuck his head round the door half an hour ago to ask me about it. It turns out Stella was so sure of herself that she didn’t erase the text of the forged letter from her personal section of the computer.”
“I like it,” Lindsay said, glad something she’d attempted had worked out. She didn’t get long to bask in her success. Only minutes later, Geri Cusack had called back. Lindsay asked her to hold on while Sophie picked up the extension.
“Okay,” she said when she heard the click and the line quality changed subtly, “here’s the meat. They’re holding Meredith while they ‘develop their lines of inquiry’ following Danny King’s revelations. Apparently there’s a supermarket opposite Monarch’s offices and King’s office overlooks it. He says he saw Meredith hanging around the car park, looking as if she was trying not to be conspicuous. She’d sit in one spot for a bit, then move and lean against a car, then move somewhere else again. This was when Penny made her last visit to Monarch.”
