Booked for Murder (22 page)

“Have you looked at them?”

“I spent most of the night with a very awkward delivery,” Sophie protested.

“I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm just a bit keyed up over this,” Lindsay apologized. “What's the best way for you to get them to me? Express courier?”

Sophie chuckled. “You're still a Luddite at heart, aren't you? I thought you were supposed to have embraced the new technology now?”

“Eh?”

“If you pick up your e-mail, you'll find them all there. In the few odd moments of calm during the night, I put the files into a format I could transmit, and sent you a bunch of massive e-mails.”

“Hellfire!” Lindsay exclaimed. “You are a fucking genius, Doc! Oh, God, now I've got to get right across town to Helen's, I don't have my laptop with me and she's got a different network provider for her Internet connection and I don't know how to use the software and I've
got to read up on all the stuff Ellie pointed me at . . .” She stopped gibbering and subsided into thought.

“Carolyn reckoned there could be another delivery in the pipeline, if Penny was sticking to her usual weekly cycle. She was due to have sent another disk off the day she was killed,” Sophie said.

“Yeah, yeah,” Lindsay said, too distracted to take in what Sophie was saying. “That's terrific. Soph, you're the berries. The absolute berries. Listen, I'm going to have to run. I've got to pick up my laptop and start plowing through this stuff, plus Helen's got a hell of a situation going on here that I'm trying to help her out with, so I'm going to have to steam off. I'll call you, okay? I love you.”

“I love you too. Take care,” Sophie said. But she was already speaking to herself.

Chapter 16

L
indsay rubbed her eyes and drew the curtain a few inches further across her bedroom window to keep the sun at a distance. In vain she'd searched for a lead that would connect her computer to Helen's printer, so instead of printing out the long files of text that Sophie had sent her so she could read them on paper, she was forced to struggle with a laptop screen that was perfectly adequate for normal use, but never meant for long hours of close scrutiny.

It wasn't just having to read the novel on screen that was causing her problems. If she'd been able to print out the three versions of the book she would have been able to lay them alongside each other and make a page-by-page comparison. But even with the splitscreen facility her word-processing software allowed, she could only compare two versions at a time. She had decided to work through it chapter by chapter, first comparing the original version with the second, then the second with the third.

It was heavy going, even with the work of a writer as talented as Penny Varnavides had undoubtedly been. Lindsay, who had read most of the Darkliners series, at first out of loyalty and later pleasure, was astonished by the maturity and depth of the writing. If Penny had had work of this calibre in her, it was no wonder she was frustrated by the scope of teenage fantasy. The only marvel was that it had taken her so long to develop the confidence to break out of the comfort zone and stretch herself.

Lindsay wriggled around, trying to find a more comfortable position on the bed. She knew she was welcome to set herself up either at the kitchen table or in Helen and Kirsten's home office, but she wanted neither to be in their way when they got home nor to have the distraction of their inevitable interest. So she had holed up in her room with a bunch of grapes from a stall by the tube station and a six-pack of Rolling Rock. The beers were cooling in a basin filled with the bag of ice she'd bought at the small supermarket at the corner of Helen's road. After five hours of staring into the screen, she was starting to wonder if she should be applying the ice to her gritty eyes.

It wasn't as if she was coming up with anything that pointed the finger of suspicion at anyone she knew about.
Heart of Glass
was the terrifying story of two serial killers, one deliberate, the other accidental. The central character was a mystery novelist who realized that every time he created a particular murderous scenario, it was reflected almost immediately in real life. As an experiment, he deliberately wrote a book where his despised older brother, thinly disguised, died in a murder made to look like a freak accident with an exploding beer bottle. Just as Penny herself had died. Within weeks, his brother was dead, by almost identical means.

With this gruesome proof of his gift, the writer set about killing off everyone he had ever disliked. Judging from Penny's novel, he'd devoted a lot of energy over the years to hatred. In parallel with his remote-controlled homicidal spree ran the story of a surgeon who had developed his surgical skills in the bedrooms of his victims as efficiently as he had in the operating theater. He had been killing successfully for years, escaping detection by never murdering in the same city twice. An international serial killer, he'd earned frequent flyer miles for murder.

The connection between the two men was the surgeon's wife, who was also the writer's editor. The final ingredient in the heady stew was the wife's lover, a charismatic congressman about to mount a presidential campaign.

Knowing that Penny used elements of her friends, acquaintances and professional contacts in the construction of her characters, Lindsay tried to match the characters in the book to people she knew in Penny's life, to see if any clues lay there. But Penny was too skilled
in her craft to have left an obvious trail leading back to her immediate circle. Even where parallels seemed possible, there were no correlations that struck Lindsay. The editor was nothing like Baz, being a weak character swept along by events, unable to control her life. Nothing like the woman Meredith had described, a woman capable of seizing the opportunity for infidelity, then taking steps to make certain it didn't disrupt the relationship at the heart of her professional life.

There didn't even seem to be any signposts in the changes Penny had made between the drafts. There was a certain amount of linguistic tinkering, some reorganization of material, rearranging the order in which certain sections appeared. But there was no structural rewriting that went to the heart of the book. However Penny had fiddled superficially, her central storyline had driven forward with the impetus of an arrow flying from a bow.

By the time she had reached the end of the final chapter, it was after midnight and Lindsay was no nearer an answer. Whatever Penny's killer had feared from the pages of
Heart of Glass
, it was far too subtle to strike her.

 

“You're never going to believe this,” Sophie said, the excitement in her voice travelling easily across ocean and continent.

“Mmm,” Lindsay grunted, forcing her eyebrows upwards in a vain attempt to get her eyes to stay open. It was quarter past seven in the morning, but it felt like the middle of the night. Seeing her plight, Kirsten thrust a mug of pitch-colored coffee in front of her. Lindsay took a scalding sip and felt synapses snap to attention all through her brain. “Believe what?” she asked, sounding like a reasonable approximation of a human being.

“Penny's latest draft.
Heart of Glass
. The package arrived by courier today and Carolyn called me right away, at work. She knew you'd want to see it. Penny actually sent it the day she died. Three new chapters plus the very last revisions she ever made to the text.” There seemed to be an exclamation mark hanging in the air at the end of each of Sophie's sentences.

“And?”

“I skimmed it. I knew you'd want chapter and verse on any substantial changes as soon as possible.”

“I didn't realize you'd read the earlier drafts,” Lindsay muttered.

“I dipped in and out of it whenever I could get a spare moment,” Sophie said. “Darling, she'd made a lot of changes in this draft. The surgeon's wife—the editor? She's had a complete personality change. You know how she was passive and weak in the first drafts? Well, she's not any more. She's been turned into a strong, scheming bitch. A real sexual adventurer. Now it's her who seduces the politician, not the other way round. And it's clear she's not a victim any more. In fact, it looks like Penny was shaping up to turning her into a killer—I think the twist she was aiming for is that the novelist isn't really capable of causing death by remote control, but his editor goes out and makes his books come true, partly as a publicity stunt and partly because she enjoys it.”

By now thoroughly awake, Lindsay drew her breath in sharply. “Now that's what I call a significant change. Tell me, Soph. Has Penny changed the physical description of the wife at all?”

“Funny you should say that,” Sophie said. “In the first draft, she's described as slightly built with mousy blonde hair, pale skin.”

“Human wallpaper,” Lindsay interjected. The coffee was starting to do its stuff.

“Right. But the description this time is quite different. Hang on, I printed it out . . . ‘Her hair was hennaed a dark, glossy auburn, cut like Mia Farrow's in her waif period. It contrasted with dark eyebrows and eyes the color of Hershey Kisses, and served to emphasize chubby cheeks that reminded Carradine of a squirrel storing a lucky find of nuts for later. Somehow, he wouldn't have been surprised to discover her body pierced in places that would make most women wince.'”

“King hell,” Lindsay said.

“I take it that means something to you?” Sophie asked.

“With a description like that, you could pick Baz Burton out of any line-up,” Lindsay said. “You think there's any doubt that Penny knew about Baz and Meredith's night of passion?”

Sophie chuckled at Lindsay's ironic tone. “Is the Pope a Catholic? Remind me never to cross a writer. If what you're saying is right, the
character would have been instantly recognizable to everybody at Monarch as Baz.”

“Not to mention the rest of the publishing world. And not just in London. What do you think they'd be gossiping about at the Frankfurt Book Fair, if not the way that Penny Varnavides had extracted her revenge against her former editor? Make no mistake, sending a message like that to Baz is the longest sacking note in history,” Lindsay pointed out as Helen barged into the kitchen.

“What is this, Pinkerton's Detectives, we never sleep?” she demanded loudly enough for Sophie to hear her in California.

“Tell Helen to shut up, we're talking serious murder motives,” Sophie said.

Lindsay relayed the message and Helen poked her tongue out at the phone. Kirsten shook her head in amusement and gestured at the oven with her thumb. “Get on with your call then, Sherlock,” Helen mock-grumbled, taking warm pastries out of the oven.

“It is a motive,” Lindsay said. “No two ways about it.”

“It's horrible to think of Penny dying for something so petty,” Sophie said soberly.

There was a long silence as they both recalled what lay behind the excitement of the hunt. Then Lindsay said, “I need to see this stuff soon as.”

“I know,” Sophie acknowledged. “But I'm up to my eyes. I've had to come back into the clinic.”

“The joys of high-risk deliveries?”

“Yeah. I had to come back into the city after I'd picked up the disk from Carolyn. I don't know how soon I'll have the chance to reformat these text files and e-mail them to you.”

Lindsay groaned. “Oh, God.” Both Helen and Kirsten looked up momentarily from their morning paper and Danish, decided it was nothing serious and carried on, ignoring Lindsay's histrionics.

“I'm doing my best, Lindsay,” Sophie said, sounding hurt.

“I know, I know, I wasn't having a go,” Lindsay said apologetically. “It's just so frustrating.”

“I promise you'll have them by the end of the day,” Sophie said.

“That's terrific, honestly. That's fine,” Lindsay reassured her. Then
she sighed. “I really miss you, you know. Helen and Kirsten have been great, but it's not like having you around.”

“It won't be long till I'm back in Britain too. Don't forget, we already had our flights booked for next week.”

“I know. I just wish I didn't have to do without you that long. You're always telling me I'm not fit to be let out on my own.”

“You need some back-up, huh?”

Lindsay grinned. “That's right. I need someone to cover my back when I'm dealing with these heavy people. Violent types like publishers.”

“Joking apart, you be careful. At the risk of sounding like the last line before the commercial break in
Murder, She Wrote
, there's a killer out there, and I don't want you to be the next victim.”

“Don't worry,” Lindsay said. “With what you've told me this morning, I think I've got a pretty good idea who killed Penny. And I'm not about to confront her up a dark alley. I don't think that even Baz Burton has the bottle to jump me in an open-plan office in front of the entire office staff of Monarch Press.”

“I don't suppose there's any point in me suggesting you hold off on this confrontation till you've had the chance to read the revised text for yourself? So you can quote chapter and verse at Baz?”

“Absolutely correct. What would be the point in that, unless you're winding me up and telling me stories?”

Sophie sighed. “Promise me you'll be careful?”

“I promise I'll still be in one piece when you get here,” Lindsay said.

“So let me speak to Helen now,” Sophie said. “I love you.”

“Love you too,” Lindsay said, waving the phone at Helen, who grabbed it and had a short conversation with Sophie which was remarkable for its monosyllabic quality. Lindsay had never seen anyone but Sophie reduce Helen's dialogue so drastically, and it appeared the old gift hadn't left her. After a series of grunts, yeahs and “no problems,” Helen hung up.