Booked for Murder

by Val McDermid

  Lindsay clenched her eyes shut. “This does not sound pretty,” she said. “But how come it’s taken him the best part of a week to ‘remember’ this?”

  “He claims he didn’t know it was Meredith,” Geri said evenly.

  “He didn’t know it was Meredith? He’s been publishing Penny for ten years and he didn’t know Meredith?” Lindsay demanded. “Shit, I know they were in the closet, but I can’t believe he never met Meredith. Baz knew her. How come Danny didn’t?”

  Geri sighed. “Meredith confirms she never actually met Danny. A couple of times, they were both at parties to celebrate Penny’s books, but Meredith always kept a low profile.”

  “Even so, her pictures were all over the newspapers after her arrest. I don’t see how he can have missed that,” Lindsay protested.

  “He says he only realized this morning. He claims Penny’s editor was putting together the program for a memorial service, and they were going through her photographs of Penny to choose which one they’d put on the front. Among the photographs was one of Meredith and Penny together. Danny immediately recognized the woman in the car park, he says.” Geri’s voice was crisp, the warmth gone like a winter’s day when the sun sets.

  “You don’t believe him either,” Lindsay said flatly.

  “I can’t think why he would lie,” she replied obliquely.

  “To protect the killer?” Lindsay said.

  “Or if he is the killer,” Sophie chipped in.

  “Maybe it’s nothing that dramatic,” Geri said. “Maybe he just wants to keep the pot boiling so Penny Varnavides and Monarch Press stay in the news? You’ve met him—do you think he’s capable of being that venal?”

  Lindsay thought for a moment. Then she said, “He’s a wide boy. I’d say it’s more likely than him taking a risk to protect somebody. How long can they hang on to her before they have to charge her?”

  “Murder’s a serious arrestable offense,” Geri said. “So they have an automatic thirty-six hours. But if they need an extension, I suspect they won’t have too much trouble finding a friendly magistrate to grant it. Fugitive risk and all that. Look, I have to go now. If there’s any development, I’ll be sure and let you know.”

  “Thanks,” Lindsay said dully. She heard the double click as Geri and Sophie both hung up. Lindsay ran a hand through unwashed hair that was already standing up in a halo of spikes round her head. She felt impotent, trapped as much by her inability to think of something to do as by her physical incapacity.

  Sophie appeared in the doorway. “It doesn’t sound good,” she said glumly.

  “So we’d better get on with Heart of Glass.”

  “It doesn’t seem to be taking us much further forward,” Sophie sighed, coming back to squat on the bed beside Lindsay.

  “I know, but what else is there?” With a profound sigh, Lindsay picked up the laptop and started to read again.

  It was early evening by the time they’d finished the revised draft of Penny’s final work. And nothing had leapt out at either Lindsay or Sophie to suggest motive or identity for her killer. Sophie stretched, thrusting her shoulders back and arching her spine, a soft groan escaping from her lips.

  “See, I told you staying in bed was unhealthy,” Lindsay teased. “Look at the state of you.”

  “I blame the airline seats,” Sophie said, dotting a kiss on Lindsay’s undamaged cheek and getting up. “I’m going downstairs to start some dinner for us all. Helen and Kirsten should be home in a couple of hours or so. You fancy pasta with a Provençale daube?”

  “I fancy you, but my face hurts too much. Not to mention the crucial damage to upper arm and elbow . . .” Lindsay smiled sadly.

  “Not the pathos again, please, spare me the pathos! Do you fancy coming downstairs now?”

  “In a bit,” Lindsay said. “There are some other files on here that I want to have a look at. Look, these ones that end .LET. They’re probably letters. And these other ones. God knows what they are. Probably nothing to do with anything, but you never know. I might as well finish while I’m stuck here.”

  “Glutton for punishment,” Sophie said, rumpling her lover’s hair and pulling a face. “Perhaps a bath wouldn’t be a bad idea later. Blood, sweat and tears is not a great recipe for hair care.” She went downstairs and investigated cupboards, fridge and vegetable rack. Half an hour later, she was about to deglaze the caramelized onions with balsamic vinegar when she heard Lindsay’s voice shouting urgently.

  Hurrying to the bottom of the stairs, Sophie called, “What is it?”

  “I said, I think I’ve found it,” Lindsay yelled.

  Chapter 20

  Lindsay pointed to the screen. “Look there,” she said, indicating with the cursor what she wanted Sophie to pay attention to. “It wasn’t the manuscript of Heart of Glass that the killer was after. It was the notes for the next one. ‘Structure: five sections, alternate POV between Sam McQueen and Martha Denny: The Invisible Man, The High Cost of Living, The Ghost Road, The Information, Crime and Punishment,’ ” she read out. “One of the few pieces of paper left in the flat had those titles written on it. I thought it was a reading list when I first saw it, but she was obviously starting to think about a new novel. She was going to call each of the sections after a book.”

  Sophie nodded. “Yeah, so far so clear. But what’s that got to do with Penny’s death?”

  Lindsay scrolled down further. “Outline,” Sophie read over her shoulder. “Chicago??? NYC??? Sam McQueen: early thirties, Irish/Italian, third-generation respectable face of the Mob, has legitimate front business—???magazine publishing??? Hits on a way of cleaning up the lives of serious criminals. He turns his publishing house into a money laundry. Step one—makes Mob figures respectable; hires them as commissioning editors on huge salary. Every month, the company pays their salaries into offshore accounts, then the money comes back into their US-based accounts from the offshore bank. But what really happens is Sam’s firm pays the money into an account in Sam’s name offshore. And the ‘employees’ bring in their own dirty money from offshore into their domestic bank account, thus making dirty money look clean. Not only that, but they are legitimized in the eyes of the government—they pay taxes, they have Social Security numbers, they pay insurance, and they earn hugely inflated salaries because they are shit-hot editors—ho, ho, ho!”

  “My God,” Sophie breathed. “That’s bloody clever.”

  “You’re not kidding. It gets better, though,” Lindsay said drily, flicking the “page down” key to bring up a fresh screen.

  “In order to pay these non-productive, fake employees, the company has to have a much higher turnover. They pretend to produce fake magazines, which are sent to outlets that are Mob fronts. Outlet claims to have sold, say, 100 copies of computer magazine per week, thus legitimately putting an extra $500 through their till. They pay Sam’s company for the magazine at wholesale, say $250 a week. And so Sam has, on paper, a string of highly profitable magazines with a team of commissioning editors. Only nothing is real.”

  Sophie looked up and grinned admiringly. “That is wicked,” she said. “That is so clever. Where on earth did Penny get an idea like that? I never heard her show any interest in that kind of scam, did you? She was always much more interested in the psychology and sociology of lawbreaking than the mechanics.”

  “Read on,” Lindsay said, gesturing towards the screen. Sophie scrolled down and carried on reading. “Sam’s a keen yachtsman, likes racing yachts. One weekend, he’s sailing and he meets a woman who’s crewing on the yacht he’s helming. Martha Denny. Twenty-nine, undercover Treasury agent working on anti-racketeering crackdown. She’s infiltrated Sam’s social world to try and gather information on Mob-related activities. He thinks she’s a photographer, and he falls for her. Soon, they’re lovers—Martha battles with conscience as government agent, but figures he’s clean, his company is clearly legit. Then odd things start happening. He gets his magazines to commission her to take pics, so she’s
around the office a lot. She notices a lot of calls come in for people who are never there; messages get taken, and presumably passed on, but she never meets the guys attached to those names. Then she finds out they all supposedly work on the mysterious tenth floor—in a nine-story building???

  “Martha’s torn between love and duty. (Watch out—bit of a cliché? Or is that just men?) Sam realizing early on that she’s got suspicions, but he loves her too much to want to lose her, so at first he finds justifications and then has to cope with idea of ??Martha dead?? or ??himself dead?? if his Mob connections find out he’s harboring a viper in their midst.

  “Resolution???”

  Sophie took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “Powerful stuff,” she said. “I mean, it’s a great story by any standards, but when you know what Penny could have done with it . . . it makes her death seem so much more tragic. I know that’s a terrible thing to say, like saying some people’s deaths are more significant than others, but that’s how I feel about Penny.” She buried her face in her hands, feeling the prickle of tears in her eyes.

  Lindsay pushed the laptop to one side and put her arm round her partner’s shoulders, hugging her as close as her painful body would allow. “You’re right to feel like that. Penny was special. Most of us, if we make a difference to the lives of the people we care about, we’re doing well. But Penny made a difference in a lot of people’s lives, thousands of them strangers. She’ll go on doing that for a lot of people, but all the books she still had to write won’t get written now, and we’re all poorer for it.”

  Sophie leaned against Lindsay and smiled sadly. “I’m really going to miss her. You know how it is with couples you spend a lot of time with—you tend to pair off crosswise as well. I always felt you were closer to Meredith than I was, and I was closer to Penny. I talked about things with Penny that I didn’t discuss with many people.”

  Lindsay sighed. “You’re right. I loved Penny, but she could do my head in sometimes. When she got into her New Age meaning of life stuff, it was time for me to go and hug a PC. Or sneak off to Burger King with Meredith.” They sat together in companionable silence for a moment, each busy with their own memories.

  Then Sophie remembered what she’d come upstairs for. “You said this was it, the message that explained why Penny had to die. I don’t understand. Are you saying it was a Mafia hit?”

  “There’s more than one kind of organized crime,” she said. “Look at all the clues in the text. Who published Penny’s novels? Monarch Press, owned by Danny King. Doesn’t that sound a lot like Sam McQueen?”

  “That’s a bit thin,” Sophie protested.

  “Is it? Let’s not forget that Danny King is one generation away from the old-fashioned East End, where organized crime flourished. It didn’t die just because they put the Krays behind bars. It’s still going on. The gangland families are just as powerful as they ever were. More so, probably. They’ve spread out into Essex and branched out into drugs, but they’re still basically the same mobs who have run London since Jack the Ripper was pulling the wings off flies. Just say, for the sake of argument, that Danny didn’t use his pools winnings to set up Monarch—what if he used dirty money from friends of the family to get the business up and running and turning a legitimate profit?”

  Sophie looked skeptical. “Isn’t this all a bit far-fetched, Lindsay? We’re talking a London publishing house, not a New York casino.”

  “You think publishers can’t be crooks too?”

  “Not like this, no. It sounds like a bad gangster movie script.”

  “This isn’t a gangster movie, it’s a hi-tech thriller,” Lindsay replied, her voice bitter and sharp. “One of those ones where somebody gets burned because they pick up too many pieces of the jigsaw by accident and suddenly they’re looking at the whole picture. That’s what happened to Penny.”

  “But how? Penny wasn’t an undercover FBI agent. She was just an ordinary writer.”

  “She was an observer,” Lindsay pointed out. “Penny was shrewd and sharp when it came to watching people. That’s why her psychology was always so spot on, why her characters felt so real. Think about it. All those afternoons she spent at the mall or the bowling alley, hanging out, watching the teenagers, listening to them, absorbing everything about their culture. And she had that uncanny skill for identifying what was a nine-day wonder and what was a genuine trend that would still have resonance for her readers five or ten years down the road. You mean to tell me that if the jigsaw pieces were there for the grabbing, Penny wouldn’t have gone for them with both hands?”

  Sophie disentangled herself from Lindsay’s encircling arm and got up, fanning herself with her hand. “Nothing personal, I was just overheating. I can’t believe this weather, it’s hotter than at home.” She sat down by the open window, trying to convince herself there was a breeze. “So what were these jigsaw pieces you reckon Penny picked up on?”

  “The phone messages. When I read that in her synopsis, I knew exactly what she meant. I didn’t really register it at the time, but both times I’ve been at Monarch, Lauren the receptionist has dealt with phone calls a bit strangely. Some are totally routine—‘Hold the line, I’ll see if she’s free,’ ‘Hold the line, I’ll put you through to her secretary,’ that sort of thing. But there were others where she said straight off, ‘I’m sorry, he’s not here, can I take a message?’ Not, ‘Let me see if he’s available.’ Or, ‘He’ll be in later, can I get him to call you?’ Or, ‘Would you like to speak to his secretary?’ Just a flat offer to take a message. But if Danny King’s operating a ghost-employee scam, that would be exactly what would happen!” Lindsay’s voice was excited, her eyes sparkling for the first time since Sophie had arrived in the UK.

  Sophie frowned. “Okay, I grant you it makes a certain kind of sense if you reason it backwards. But how did Penny get from noticing a peculiarity in the receptionist’s phone habits to working out the whole ghost-employee scam? I mean, you heard the same thing and it meant nothing suspicious to you until you understood what was really going on.”

  Lindsay shrugged, then glanced at the bedside clock. “I don’t know the answer to that. But I know a woman who might. And with a bit of luck, I might just catch her.”

  Sophie looked around the café with a critical eye. “A bit gloomy, isn’t it? You’d think she’d be glad of the chance to get a bit of sunshine on her day off.” Judging by the absence of other lunchtime patrons, everyone else was doing just that.

  Lindsay shook her head. “She doesn’t want to risk being seen with me. Even on a Saturday. Lauren has the same relationship to Monarch as a flea has to a cat, which means she doesn’t want to risk losing her meal ticket, though she’s not averse to a nibble elsewhere as long as the price is right.”

  “One look at you and she might think twice about opening her mouth,” Sophie commented, gesturing at her own cheek to illustrate her point.

  Another night had spread Lindsay’s bruises up and across her face to engulf her eye as well as her cheek and jaw. Time had rendered them more lurid shades of blue, with green and yellow making an appearance round the edges. The scabs covering her grazes had darkened, looking like mud that had been flicked over her skin and allowed to dry there. Under Sophie’s gentle bathing, the dried blood had been cleaned from the long hairline cut along her jaw, leaving it looking far less serious than it had done the day before. The pain had subsided to a gentle throb, the ache dulled by the paracetamol Lindsay was still swallowing at four-hourly intervals. “I’ll just have to tell her the truth,” she said wryly.

  “Let’s hope she shows up,” Sophie said.

  “Yeah. Before the cops decide they’ve got enough circumstantial evidence to charge Meredith,” Lindsay said glumly. “They’re not going to wait for ever, and they obviously think they know who did it. Which means nobody except us is looking for the real killer. Who thinks he’s got away with it.” As she spoke, she saw Lauren walk in, and waved at the receptionist. “Over here,” she called
.

  Lauren walked towards them. When she saw Lindsay’s face, her double take was almost comical. Her face fell like a failed soufflé and her step faltered. Cautiously, she approached. “What the fuck happened to you?” she said wonderingly. “You look like you just went ten rounds with Freddy Kruger. I don’t think I wanna be here.” She took a step backwards.

  “I had an accident,” Lindsay said hastily. “It’s the truth. I took a header over a wall I didn’t know was there and landed on top of a broken bottle. Nobody’s had a go at me.”

  “She’s telling the truth,” Sophie butted in. “I’m a doctor and believe me, her injuries are consistent with that explanation. Look at those grazes—you don’t get skin damage like that in a straightforward beating.”

  Lauren scowled. “Who the hell are you anyway?” she demanded of Sophie, then rounded on Lindsay. “I’m taking a risk, coming here to talk to you. What d’you want to bring a stranger along with you for?”

  Lindsay sighed. “Sophie is my girlfriend. She also happens to be a doctor, and on both counts she wasn’t about to let me out of the door by myself this morning. It’s okay, Lauren, you can trust her. Sophie was Penny’s best friend back in California.”

  Lauren looked uncertainly from one to the other. Something in Sophie’s steady eyes calmed her and she sat down abruptly. “You going to get me something to drink, then?”

  “I’ll go,” Sophie said, taking details of what everyone wanted.

  While she collected drinks and food, Lauren said, “You better be making this worth my while. Baz was having a right go about you yesterday, taking the piss something shocking. About how you was accusing her of murder, then Danny walks in and points out that she was doing a live radio show when it happened. And Baz says to me that if you turn up again looking for her, I’m to show you the door. So this better be good.”