A Murder of Magpies

 

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For David,

without whom …

 

1

“Oh, just kill me now!” I didn't shriek that out loud, just clenched my teeth more tightly. It was eight thirty, and already the day couldn't get much worse. I'm always at my desk by eight, not because I'm so wonderful, although I am, but because it's the only time of day when no one asks me anything, when I can actually get on with some work, instead of solving other people's problems.

Being a middle-aged, middling-ly successful editor has a downside that no one tells you about when you're starting off. Publishing offices are run by middle-aged women like me. We will never be stars, but instead know dull things like how books are put together. We know how to find reliable proofreaders, what was done on that three-for-two promotion in 2010 and why it failed miserably, and even how to sweet-talk a recalcitrant designer into designing our book jackets instead of tweeting clips of his cat being adorable.

And so people ask you questions. They ask you all day. They text in meetings. They grab you in the corridor. They stop you in the street on your way to lunch. I'm only surprised that no one has followed me into the loo. Yet.

Luckily, most publishing people are not early risers, and from eight until at least nine thirty, often ten, the place looks like the
Mary Celeste,
and I get through all those jobs that need complete concentration and yet are completely boring—checking jackets (remember the time some squiffy copywriter thought that
The Count of Monte Cristo
was
The Count of Monte Carlo
?) or reading the stuff the marketing department wants to send out (I know they can't spell. It's just always a shock to find they can't cut-and-paste, either). In fact, on a good morning, I should be deeply aggravated by the time my assistant of the week staggers in.

Miranda was the current one, and to be fair to her, she's lasted three months. Before her was Amanda. Then Melanie. Then—well, lots more Amandas and Melanies. Publishing from the outside is so glamorous they arrive in droves. Then they discover that it's just office work, and that I don't spend my days swanning around the Wolseley taking TV presenters for three-hour lunches to discuss their autobiographies. Worse, they discover that I'm
glad
I'm not swanning around the Wolseley taking TV presenters for etc. etc. So they move on, either to the publicity department (more parties), or to the star editors (more everything).

Miranda is impressive. She has mastered such essential skills as getting the right address on the right mailing of proofs. (I know, but the last Amanda looked at me like I murdered kittens when I suggested she give it a try.) She likes reading, not something that always happens. And, bless her tidy little heart, she's a neatness freak, and files everything almost before I've put it down. It's true, she never shows up before ten, and her retro neo-Goth makeup makes some of my authors pause, but it's a small price to pay for someone who not only knows that M comes before N, but actually does something about it.

She wouldn't be in for another hour and a half, though, and my jaw was already clenched tight. My dentist tells me that I ought to have one of those contraptions that you wear to bed, to stop you grinding your teeth. I don't have the heart to tell him it's the daytime that does it for me. Today's gem was lurking for me first thing, a voice-mail message from Breda, left last night after I went home, saying in a faux cheerful voice that she hoped I liked the new book, and when was she going to hear from me?

Good question. Because I hated the new book. David, the editor-in-chief and my boss, hated the new book. The publicity department was frankly appalled by the new book. None of us, in fact, knew what to do about the new book, which was so embarrassing a hot wave of shame washed over me every time I thought about it, which I did as little as possible.

Breda McManus was one of our star authors, and my starriest author. Regular as clockwork, every other January for the last twelve years, she had delivered a nice fat slab of a manuscript, filled with middle-class girls growing into middle-class women, overcoming middle-class problems on the way. We published them in September, ready for the Christmas market, and they paid my salary, many times over.

They did well because Breda was exactly the kind of women she wrote about. She was a secretary in a solicitor's office in Galway and decided to write in her spare time. She now lived in a Georgian house with her husband, her children were grown, and she had decided that instead of redecorating the house she was going to redecorate her style. I felt exactly like one of those people on a makeover program where they walk in and have to pretend to
adore
the fact that the walls have been covered with aluminum foil.

Because Breda delivered a chick-lit novel.

Not only was chick lit well past its sell-by date, so was Breda's connection to twenty-year-olds. Hell, her children were in their forties. The damn thing was supposedly set in a poly (she hadn't noticed they were turned into universities decades ago), but it was more like a school story. The characters didn't quite have crushes on their teachers, and get up to “japes” in “rec,” but it was awfully close.

Lots of readers (including most of my colleagues) despise Breda's books at the best of times. They love the literary fiction that we publish, and think that my sort of book is beneath contempt. I love literary fiction, too, but I also love what are called, usually dismissively, “women's reads.” The fact that our literary fiction list has never paid its way, in the entire twenty-eight years of its life, is something we tactfully never mention. Instead the hip twenty-year-old
du jour
gets a huge publicity campaign, and once in forty or fifty writers we strike it lucky. In the meantime, Timmins & Ross makes its money every year on women like Breda.

Until now. So instead of reading proofs, checking marketing and publicity copy, and going through the schedules before our weekly progress meeting, I was on my fifth cup of coffee, which was something of a miracle when you consider how tightly my teeth were clenched.

I smelled french fries, but it couldn't, surely, be ten o'clock already. Then I heard Miranda's computer hum in the space outside my office where all the assistants are shoved in like battery hens. It
was
ten o'clock, and Miranda had evidently been out late the night before—the french fries and a Coke are her hangover cure. I collected the minutes for the meeting and headed out, whispering a tiny hello to Miranda, whose eyes were closed against the glare of her computer screen.

I hadn't gone ten feet when her phone rang, and, wincing, she called after me, “Sam, there's a Jacob Field in reception for you.”

“Field? For me? Are you sure?” She stared at me. On hangover days she had the energy to say everything only once. I didn't know anyone named Jacob Field, and I don't make appointments on Tuesday mornings because we always have a meeting then, from ten o'clock until everyone is too bored to go on—usually lunchtime. “I'll go past reception—will you call David and tell him I'll be a few minutes late?” It was probably a friend of a friend, or someone who'd got my name somehow and was trying to flog a manuscript, no doubt about how his mother had abused him, or proving that his great-great-grandfather was Jack the Ripper. We don't have to deal with real live members of the public often, but every now and again one sneaks under the radar. It wouldn't take me long to get rid of him.

I walked briskly in to reception, smiling with my teeth bared. “Mr. Field? How can I help you?”

He was a surprise. No scruffy manuscript, no lost-dog look. Instead he was conservatively dressed, in student-y sort of way, a short, dark, stocky man in his early forties. He looked, in fact, like a publisher. I hesitated. Maybe he was an ex-colleague, and I was supposed to remember him? I looked again. Well-cut brown hair, nice brown eyes. In fact, generally just nice-looking, although it would have been difficult to put a finger on why.

“Inspector Field.”

I was confused. What did he inspect? Drains? Schools? Oh God, not a novel about a schools inspector.

He must have seen that I'd missed a few steps, so he spoke kindly and gently, as one does to the hard-of-thinking. “Inspector Field. CID.”

Now I was totally lost.

He went on gamely, although he had realized he was going to get no help from me, as I was too dim-witted to know how to breathe without help. “Can we go somewhere to talk?”

He was right. Whatever he wanted, our reception area was no place to talk. “Area” was really a polite fiction. It was a desk stuck in a niche carved out of the corridor, and as most of my colleagues were only now arriving, dozens of people were pushing past us, reaching over us to collect parcels left overnight, calling back and forth to one another.

I motioned him up the stairs, signaling confusion at Bernadette, the receptionist, whose raised eyebrows signaled in return that this was more interesting than usual.

Once back in my office I gestured to a chair and waited. He took his time, looking at the piles of manuscripts, the acres of files, the almost obsessively empty desk surface, and the absence of anything decorative at all: a blank white space.

He sighed, as though I'd requested the meeting, and this was the last place he wanted to be. When he finally spoke, his voice was as abrupt as his manner. “Ms. Clair, can you tell me if you were expecting any parcels that have failed to appear?”

I mulled this gently for a moment. “Can I tell you about something that hasn't happened?” All right, I was being slow on the uptake. “I'm sorry,” I said insincerely, “but could you tell me what we're talking about? And why?” I tried to find a way out. “I'm in the middle of a very busy morning. I should be in a meeting right now.” His eyes narrowed at my very overt desire to avoid the meeting I was in, with him, and I softened my slightly schoolteacher-ish tone. “I'm really not sure who you are or why you want to talk to me.”