A Murder of Magpies (2 page)

He shrugged, but now he was apologetic, not dismissive. “I'm investigating a car accident.”

That was no help. “An accident? CID? I don't know anything about the workings of the police, but it seems, well, an overreaction?”

He nodded. I wasn't the first person to say that to him today, and his earlier snappish tone was explained: I wouldn't be the last. I gave him that complicated shrug-hand-roll that says,
Sorry your day is crap, but this is really nothing to do with me, now is it?
He seemed to translate it without difficulty. “It's an unusual hit-and-run.” He went on, as if slightly surprised himself that he was telling me this. “There was an accident on the Hammersmith flyover, early yesterday morning. A courier was hit by a van that didn't stop. It was wet and it looks like a straightforward hit-and-run, except that there were no parcels on his bike, and his list of deliveries for the day had vanished, too. Maybe the material vanished before the accident. Or maybe someone stole it afterward—no one saw it.”

“What does the courier say?”

“He doesn't. He's dead.”

I digested this in silence. Then, “How do I come into the picture?”

“The list and deliveries vanished, but his office had a copy of his schedule. You were on it.”

“Who was the parcel from?”

“A mail shop. Without a tracking number or an order reference, they can't tell us who sent it. They have a few thousand items going through every day.” He clicked his pen. To business. “I realize this is a nuisance, but we'll have to ask you to list everything that you are expecting.”

I gave a snort. “Expecting? Lists? Inspector, this is publishing. Schedules are—” I searched for the word. “They're what we would like to believe might happen.” I could see he wasn't following. “I have, I don't know, a hundred, a hundred and fifty authors with contracts that I look after. Some are due to deliver now, but in my business ‘now' means…” I tried to think how to explain it. “Have you ever watched when parents call their children in a playground? And the children shout ‘Coming!' and keep on doing whatever they were doing before?” I widened my eyes and whispered, “Authors in the making!” He smiled, which was an improvement, but I could see he didn't think I was making a serious point. “Really. Most authors think that if they've delivered a manuscript within their lifetime it meets the legal definition of ‘on schedule.'”

His lips quirked, but what I was saying was also annoying him. He wanted boxes to tick.
Don't we all, Sunshine,
I told him. But only in my head. Outwardly I tried to look sympathetic and helpful, not merely curious and simultaneously wanting him to go away so I could get to my meeting. I made a helpless gesture. “I don't know how to think about this—you're asking me to tell you what hasn't happened.”

He jotted something in his notebook. Thank God, one box ticked, at least. “If you think of anything, will you ring me, please?”

He gave me a card, I pointed him in the right direction down the rabbit warren of corridors and headed off to the meeting room.

*   *   *

As I slipped into my seat, murmuring an apology for my lateness, Ben was saying, “This is going to be really mega.”

If anything could have pushed a meeting with a detective out of my mind, it was Ben being mega. I hastily looked down at the minutes, because like Pavlov's dog, all he had to do was say the word and I was ready. But the dogs only drooled when Pavlov rang his bell. I was worried that one more time and I'd roll up my minutes and assault him with them, all the while shrieking “The word is big, you little toad. Big!” As you may be able to tell, Ben and I already have problems. Ben is twenty-six, and this is his first job. He is small, weedy, and terribly, terribly serious about his work.
His.
Not anyone else's. He despises everyone else's. He has, however, produced our only literary fiction in the last two years that has sold over five thousand copies, so people listen to him. Which is a pity, since he doesn't really have anything to say.

I've made an effort with him, truly I have. When he arrived, fresh-faced and eager-beaver-ish, straight down from Oxford, I took him out to lunch. I nearly drowned in my soup as I dozed off while he told me in detail about his life to that point. Even someone as self-absorbed as Ben noticed I was bored, although naturally he didn't think it was anything to do with him. We didn't repeat the lunch.

He is a good reader, and he spots trends, but everything for him is mega. Ben has never bought a book because he thought it would be a nice steady seller. His books either fail miserably (often), or they earn enough to be partly worth the ridiculous advances he pays (sometimes). Ben has major-league Big Dick Syndrome—if a book doesn't cost several times the GDP of many third-world countries, then he doesn't think it can be worth anything.

“Sam?”

I looked fixedly at the minutes, as though still trying to find my place. “Yes, I see your point.” Translation:
No, I don't.
“The proposal was quite interesting.” Translation:
It was barely three pages long, one entire page of which was about the author. Who was still at school.
“But shouldn't we ask to see a sample chapter?” Translation:
We don't know if the child can write.

An exasperated sound from Ben. “Look, Sam, there is major interest in this, and we've only got this far because his agent likes me.”

Of course the agent likes him. Ben pays top dollar for very little on paper. I'd like him, too, in those circumstances. I don't know why I bother. We're going to buy this book, and I'm going to have to be nice to the little shit, and pretend I like his novel whether I do or not. Then it will fail and the next little shit will be along. Like buses. I stared at the wall behind Ben. I couldn't look at him. I wasn't sure I could look at the wall much longer, either. It was gray and dingy and peeling. Over the years people had pinned up notices and pulled them down again. Dozens of bits of Sellotape were all that remained, gradually yellowing and growing old. I felt the same. Our offices in general were not particularly attractive, but the meeting room was the worst. It was a small partitioned area of what had once been a bigger room. The furniture was all 1960s style, and it must have been described as “fun” or “cheerful” in the furniture catalogue, but in reality orange-molded plastic is never a good look. Orange-molded plastic that had half a century of dirt covering it didn't bear thinking about. I continued to stare at the wall, otherwise I'd have to look at Ben.

A phone was nudged to where I could see the screen without moving my head, and a finger tapped at it to get my attention. Sandra, the publicity director, and one of my closest friends in-house. I let my eyes float down.
Wnkr,
said the text. It wasn't going to change anything, but it made me feel better. I considered. Probably about half the people around the table—maybe eight or ten—thought the same as I did, either about Ben himself, or this book in particular. Of those, possibly four or five had been paying attention, the others either openly doing e-mails or just reading on their iPads until the meeting got around to a book that directly concerned them. Three others were quietly chatting about a lunch they'd all been to, nothing to do with work, officially. But maybe it was—work in publishing is often indistinguishable from chat, and chat was what we did all day.

The two from production, who were there only to deal with schedules, weren't even doing that—even from my end of the table I could see they were playing a rousing game of hangman. And I'd lose a few more if I continued to argue, not because anyone disagreed, just because they were desperate for the meeting to end. I let my attention drift. If you can't beat 'em …

“Well,” said David brightly. “If we're all agreed.”

I woke out of my dream. “Please. We really do need to talk about Breda.” I knew I sounded sad and desperate, but that's only because I was. We did need to talk about Breda, but there wasn't anything to say. If we refused this book, she'd go to another publisher; if we published it and it got the reaction it deserved, she would take her next book elsewhere, too, despite the relationship I'd nurtured for over a decade.

Everyone looked embarrassed, and got up to go, as though I hadn't said anything at all.

So we had to buy this book, and it was up to me to turn it into something that wouldn't make her a laughingstock. A success would be beyond me, but maybe I could engineer a quiet, genteel sort of failure.

*   *   *

Miranda had turned up my heater before I came back, which meant she was beginning to recover. Timmins & Ross is in four Georgian houses, which have been knocked together into one highly confusing interior in a turning just off Great Russell Street, behind the British Museum. They are lovely houses from the outside, but the inside has not seen much work done to them in the last century. They
do
have plumbing, it's true, but they don't have central heating, and the beautiful sash windows let in gales even in the summer. In winter it's often warmer outside.

My office is a partitioned bit of what must have once been a drawing room, because it has a huge window, which is great unless you care about your extremities. If I keep an electric fan heater on full blast from eight, which officially we're not allowed to do, by noon I can usually manage with just one sweater.

Before I'd even sat down, Miranda's head was around the door. “So what was that all about?”

“What was what all about?” She's smart, but she can't possibly have known I'd fantasized about assaulting Ben with the acquisition meeting minutes.

She thought I was stonewalling, and wasn't going to have it. “The police?” she nudged.

My eyes popped wide. “Good lord, I'd forgotten.” I gestured her in. I outlined the conversation and asked her to check delivery dates for both new manuscripts, even though most came electronically, and proofs, which didn't. She nodded, but her mind wasn't on it. “A hit-and-run? Really?”

“That's what I said. But maybe that's the way the police work. God knows, he didn't believe me when I told him how publishing worked.”

I shrugged and turned to my desk. And then swore comprehensively when I saw my e-mail was down. Already on her way back to her desk, Miranda called through the wall that it was the entire company, so it should be fixed relatively quickly. Meanwhile my voice mail was stuffed, in only an hour. Breda. Breda's agent. Marketing, asking why I hadn't approved copy they'd sent down a whole ten minutes earlier. Two copy editors who weren't going to make their deadlines. A proofreader touting for work. My mother. And Kit, three times.

Kit Lovell is one of my favorite authors. He is a fashion journalist, he is efficient, he is professional, he meets his deadlines, and he is the best gossip on the planet. I don't usually do his sort of book—quick-and-dirty low-downs on the rich and famous—but he came to me through a friend, and he's been a constant delight. But it was unlike him to keep calling. If he had got some really hot gossip, he'd leave a message and then I wouldn't be able reach him because he would be busy calling the immediate world while it was still fresh. Maybe that's why we'd become friends so quickly—like publishers, Kit lived off chatter.

I had his latest manuscript, which his typist e-mailed to me two weeks earlier—Kit was above such mundanities as computers—and I'd already told him how much I loved it, so it couldn't be that. Whatever it was, he took precedence over my mother, and he absolutely took precedence over Breda that week. I put the phone on automatic redial, hoping his gossip wasn't so hot that it took him the whole morning to work through his contacts list.

In the meantime, I had to start preparing his book. It didn't need much editing from me—Kit's work never did—but like all of his books it would have to go to a libel lawyer before we sent it out for copyediting. It was not that Kit was reckless, it was just a by-product of the kind of books he wrote. Most people in business have things that they don't want the world to know, even if they've never so much as crossed the road against the lights. People in the fashion business, which is built entirely on appearances,
really
don't want the world to know how they got to where they were. What Kit supplies is the true story, which as he says sweepingly, “everyone” knows. But the “everyone” of the fashion business, and the “everyone” who reads a Sunday newspaper, where Kit's books usually get serialized, are not the same thing, and his subjects often objected. Strenuously. With lawyers.

The three rules of checking for libel are short and sweet. Is the reported incident true? Can we prove it? Then the most important one: Can the subject afford to sue, whether it's true or not? With fashion houses owned by multinationals, the answer to the questions were yes, yes, and
yes
. So far as I could see, taking a dispassionate look at it, our troubles with this book began on the title page. Kit had called his biography
The Gilded Life and Tarnished Death of Rodrigo Alemán
. Alemán was Spain's most prominent (only?) international star on the fashion scene. He had been brought in to put the ailing French couture house of Vernet back on its feet after Jules Vernet's retirement. And he did, although in a way that probably hastened Vernet's death—hip-hop and trance at the shows, ads featuring semi-naked models in soft-core pornographic poses. He'd created a diffusion range, with lower-priced clothes than the standard prêt-à-porter, and then began opening boutiques across the world to sell them in.

Most of this was no different from any other fashion house, but everything Alemán did was brasher, brighter, bolder—and bigger. There were questions about how the gigantic warehouses he called boutiques managed to survive, given that most days you could shoot a cannon off in any one of them without risking harm to a paying customer. His lavish parties always got into the glossy magazines, but the actress-model-whatevers all borrowed his dresses, they didn't buy them. And short of hookers, who couldn't afford them, it wasn't clear to anyone who would want to.