Booked for Murder (23 page)

“So,” she said to Lindsay. “Are we on for tonight? The big sting? Or are you going to be too busy catching murderers?”

“Trust me, I'm a doctor,” Lindsay said.

Helen snorted. “It'd take more than an American PhD to make me trust you, kiddo.”

Lindsay stood up, pretending to be on her dignity. “It'll all be done and dusted by seven. Then you and I will be ready to roll.”

 

Impatiently, Lindsay drummed her fingers on the arm of the chair she was reluctantly occupying at Monarch Press. Seeing her scowl, Lauren leaned forward across the reception desk and said confidentially, “She won't be long now. The editorial meeting never lasts past eleven. Danny's always got too much on to waste time letting them rabbit. He only allows the editors five minutes max to pitch any of their titles.”

Lindsay pursed her lips and glared at her watch again, as if that would make the time pass more quickly. She couldn't even use the minutes constructively to see if Lauren's brain contained anything else worth picking since the reception area was never empty for more than a minute at a time. The longer she had to wait, the more her conviction of Baz's guilt grew. No matter that the meeting Baz was in was a routine weekly session, Lindsay couldn't prevent herself feeling Baz had made herself deliberately unavailable to spite her. Illogical and paranoid, she knew, but the feeling still wouldn't depart. She flipped open the front pocket of her backpack again and checked that her microcassette recorder was in voice-activated mode. She wasn't taking the risk that Baz would confess something she'd later try to deny.

Finally, as the minute hand crawled towards the hour, a young woman appeared, looking harassed. “You're waiting to see Baz, right?” she greeted Lindsay. Without waiting for an answer, she gestured impatiently to the door. Lindsay got to her feet and forced herself to follow the woman through the editorial floor at a measured pace rather than the trot that would have matched her mood.

Baz was sitting behind her desk shuffling papers when Lindsay walked in. She glanced up. “Hi. Siddown, yeah?” she said as she finished reading the top sheet and scribbled what might have been a signature across the bottom of it. Then she looked up, her face still a painful scarlet from too much sun. “I've spoken to Meredith,” she said bluntly.

“Good. That's one less awkward conversation for us to have,”
Lindsay said, her voice the only chilly thing in the partitioned space.

“So what brings you back here?”

“Your boss asked if I could track down a copy of
Heart of Glass
,” Lindsay said, avoiding the guest's chair and perching on the edge of a credenza stacked with manuscripts that ran along one wall, forcing Baz to turn awkwardly in her chair to maintain eye contact.

“You've managed to find it?” Baz asked cautiously. “Where was it?”

“Penny always deposited a set of back-up disks with friends for safekeeping. It wasn't hard to find out where they were and to get a copy. You don't seem as excited as I expected.” Lindsay crossed her legs at the ankles and leaned back on her arms.

“I'm just relieved,” Baz said, a note of defensiveness creeping in. “I've got a lot riding on this book.”

“Oh, I know you have. A damn sight more than a bloody big hole in your catalog.”

Baz shifted in her chair, almost imperceptibly altering her position to close herself off from Lindsay's probing stare. “You're going to have to explain that. I'm not quite sure what you're getting at.”

Lindsay snorted with sardonic laughter. “Was that meant to be a subtle attempt to find out which draft I've got? If so, there was no need for the subtlety. I'll happily tell you, Baz. I've got the lot. I've got three early drafts, going as far as Chapter 18.” Lindsay paused, gauging Baz's watchful stare. She thought she saw relief there, but couldn't be sure.

“How soon can you let us have a copy?” Baz asked, fiddling obsessively with the pen she'd used to sign the document.

“That's going to be up to Meredith and Catriona Polson,” Lindsay replied. “Oh, and probably the police as well.”

“Why should it have anything to do with the police?” Baz asked, her busy fingers freezing, the pen stationary in mid-turn.

“I've also got the final draft.” Lindsay stared steadily at Baz. “The one I wouldn't want anyone to see if I was in your shoes. The one that gives you a motive for wanting Penny Varnavides dead.” Her words cut through the humid air like the hiss of a thrown knife.

Baz's mouth twisted into the kind of smile that's normally only seen in distorting fairground mirrors. “Come on,” she said in an attempt at
jokey contempt. “You can't be seriously suggesting that a rewrite Penny did in the heat of anger would give me a motive for
murder
?”

Lindsay's grim smile would have worried a shark. “One,” she said, ticking off her points on her fingers, “
Heart of Glass
as rewritten represents total humiliation for you, personally and professionally. Two, Penny and you could never have worked together again, which scuppers your brilliant career. Three, your girlfriend's going to be more than a little baffled as to why your formerly fabulous relationship with your most successful author has turned so sour, and I'm sure Penny would have been more than happy to enlighten her. Will that do for starters?”

Baz's eyes narrowed perceptibly, but when she spoke her voice struggled for lightness. “This is madness. Look, whatever Penny may or may not have done in some intermediate draft, I was her editor and the final shape of the book depends on me as much as on her. I have the authority to demand that she change back to what was, after all, the book outlined in her synopsis, the book I had commissioned.”

“Oh, sure! If it came to a showdown between what Penny wanted and what you wanted, obviously Danny King's going to side with you,” Lindsay said sarcastically. “Come on, Baz. Let's get real here. Penny wasn't exactly Ms. Nobody submitting her first novel. If it was a case of losing Penny or losing you, I can't imagine Danny having to agonize for more than ten seconds.”

Lindsay didn't think it was possible for anyone to have a higher color than the editor had already, but she was proved wrong as Baz darkened almost to purple. “It wouldn't ever have come to that. Penny reacted the way she did because she was hurt and angry and that was the easiest way to get back at me. But she wasn't a fool. She was planning on coming out when this book was published. If she'd gone with the draft you're talking about, then someone would have sussed that we'd fallen out and, eventually, why. The last thing she would have wanted was that kind of tabloid notoriety. If you knew her half as well as you claim to, you'd know what I'm saying is the truth,” she added defiantly.

Rather than give Lindsay pause for thought, Baz's words served only to add fuel to the flames of her conviction. “Maybe so. But it
doesn't alter the fact that enough people would have seen that draft to humiliate you in the business, and jeopardize your relationship with your lover. And you can't tell me Penny Varnavides would ever have worked with you again after the way you wrecked her relationship with Meredith!”

“What the hell is going on in here?” a male voice interjected.

Lindsay turned to see Danny King in the doorway looking baffled. Baz wiped her sweating upper lip with the back of her hand and said bitterly, “Glasgow's answer to Emma Victor here is accusing me of murdering Penny.”

Danny King threw back his handsome head in a guffaw of laughter. “You mean you haven't told her about your alibi?” he gasped.

Chapter 17

T
hunderstruck, Lindsay's head swung from Danny to Baz and back to Danny again like a nodding dog on a car parcel shelf. “Alibi?” she said faintly, clinging to the hope that life would imitate crime fiction, where alibis, like rules, were made to be broken.

“Obviously not,” Danny chuckled. “Go on, Baz, put her out of her misery.”

Baz's tight-lipped smile was closer to a sneer. “I was taking part in a panel of agents and publishers at a literary festival in Colchester at the time Penny died,” she said smugly. “I travelled down by car with Elizabeth Root. She's an agent, her office is a few minutes' walk from here. We had a drink together, then did the panel—which, incidentally, was broadcast live by Oyster FM. All four of us on the panel went for a meal afterwards, and I didn't get back to London until nearly midnight. As I explained to the police the following day,” she added with a vicious little smirk.

Danny moved into the office and laid a friendly arm across Lindsay's shoulder. “So you see, I'm afraid you're barking up the wrong tree with Baz. Whoever killed Penny, it was nothing to do with Monarch Press.”

Lindsay edged away from Danny's arm, making the excuse of standing up and moving towards the door. “Just because Baz seems to be off the hook, it doesn't mean Monarch is in the clear,” she said in an attempt at a defiant face-saver.

Danny opened his mouth but before he could say anything, Baz butted in. “She's got the book,” she said urgently.

He looked astonished. “You managed to track it down?” he said. “But that's . . . that's amazing. Wonderful. How soon can you let us have it?”

“It's not up to me to let you have anything,” Lindsay said stubbornly. “It's up to Meredith. She inherits everything from Penny. She might not want you to have it.”

“She's got to, I'm afraid,” Danny King said, his patronizing tone setting Lindsay's hackles on full-scale bullshit alert. “Penny signed a contract. She'd been paid the first chunk of a very substantial advance. The biggest we've ever paid, as a matter of fact. That manuscript belongs to us.”

Lindsay shook her head. “Not if Meredith decides to repay the advance,” she pointed out as she sailed out of the office, head held high.

The satisfaction of her parting shot lasted for as long as it took her to cross the rapt editorial floor and reach the street. Never had she been more grateful to breathe the fumid air of a steamy London morning. Without hesitating or allowing herself to think about what she'd just experienced, Lindsay strode across the supermarket car park and into their blissfully air-conditioned cafeteria, where she found a quiet corner to drink her mineral water and regroup.

She had been so certain that Baz had killed Penny. Ever since Sophie had passed on the information about the changes to the latest draft, she'd been running the film in her head of Penny inviting Baz to her flat, maybe even for a showdown over Meredith; of Baz arriving with her bottles of wheat beer; then of the murderous attack that had left Penny bleeding to death somewhere as prosaic as an Islington kitchen.

But she'd been wrong. Completely, utterly wrong. Her first serious suspect, Catriona Polson, had been stripped of motive. Now Baz Burton had been revealed as devoid of opportunity. Of the limited group of suspects she'd started with, only Meredith remained. And since she'd known from the start that while Meredith might have killed Penny in a moment of passion, so carefully staged a crime was beyond her, Lindsay was left with no one in the frame.

There was nothing for her to do now except admit to Meredith that she was utterly defeated by the mystery of Penny's death. With a sigh that turned heads at nearby tables, Lindsay acknowledged to herself that she had failed not only Meredith but also Penny. Although her mind knew it for an over-reaction, her heart comprehended it as a betrayal of a friendship that had often sustained Lindsay when she needed it most. To admit that failure to Meredith of all people would be one of the hardest things she had ever faced. Leaving most of her drink untouched, Lindsay walked out into the sunshine and headed for the tube station.

 

She caught Meredith coming back from buying the newspapers. “At least they've lost interest in me right now. Kinda late, though,” Meredith had said as they went up in the lift. She had visibly lost weight even in the short time since Lindsay had last seen her. Her eyes lurked at the bottom of darkly shadowed sockets and her cheekbones seemed on the point of bursting through her taut skin.

“When did you eat last?” Lindsay had asked while she watched Meredith make them coffee.

“I went out for a pizza last night,” Meredith said. “I managed to get some down. But it's hard to eat. I feel like I've got a rock lodged in my throat.” Lindsay's heart went out to her, and she reached out impulsively to hug her friend. But this time, Meredith's grief didn't burst forth like an undammed stream. She sighed deeply, but her hand mirrored Lindsay's, each stroking the other's back in mutual sympathy. “When you love somebody and you commit yourself to sharing her life, you can't help imagining what it would be like if she died,” she said softly. “Only nothing you imagine ever prepares you for the reality.”

“I know,” was all Lindsay could manage. They held on to each other until the urgent spluttering of the coffee pot forced them apart. Then, sitting with Meredith in the stuffy gloom of the flat, Lindsay reviewed what she had done in the previous couple of days. “I've hit a dead end,” Lindsay confessed finally. “I really don't have any idea what to pursue.”

Meredith nodded sadly. “I guess it was a long shot, bringing you
over here. But don't think I don't appreciate it. There is one other thing you could do for me, though,” she added, almost as an afterthought.

“Sure, if I can.”

“Leave me a copy of
Heart of Glass
. I think it would be good for me to see the last thing she was working on. I also need to decide if it's possible for another person to finish what she'd started.”