A Murder of Magpies (6 page)

“Mmm. I will.” No I won't. The day after it finishes I'll finally find time. “And yes, thanks, I'd love to come for dinner. Eight?”

“Eight thirty. I won't get home until after eight. I haven't spoken to you in days. What's up?”

“Up? Nothing. The same. You know nothing's ever up with me.”

“I do. I'm just not sure why not. You need to get out more.”

“Mother. I have five manuscripts, all of which have to be read by tomorrow. I can only read after work because I've got meetings all afternoon. I'm supposed to have my detailed editorial comments to two authors about their books by tomorrow, and I'll need to do that after work, too.”

Silence. She doesn't understand why I can't go to a play, then have dinner with friends, then do the work. But she doesn't want to say so, because she thinks it's so obvious that there must be something I'm not telling her.

I gave up. She gave up. We always do. Instead, I changed the subject. “Mother, if I needed to have a really good libel read done, would Selden's be enough?”

“Enough for what? Enough to prevent nuisance suits, of course. Enough to stop people who file thinking you're a big corporation and you'll give them a few thousand just to make them go away. But enough to stop a serious action? That depends on how they think they've been damaged. What's the book?”

I began to explain about Kit and Alemán. She cut in after only two sentences. “Your solicitors are a good City firm. Very prestigious. Lots of clout. Their reputation won't stop this kind of problem for twenty seconds.”

“Great. I really need to hear this.”

“You do need to hear it, Sam. This is precisely what you need to hear.”

“Mother, we just can't find the money in the budget. It's the standard publishing story—there's never any money. We've budgeted £1,000, which is what we usually pay Selden's because we give them all our work, but I assume £1,000 is not what you're talking about.”

“It most certainly is not. Being cheap now will only cost you in the end—you know what a libel action, even a small one, can cost. You're going to have to get the manuscript read by one of the heavy hitters, a firm with a powerful criminal law department as well. There's no point messing around with companies like mine. We're great for corporate work, where we are scary, but no one's going to be worried about us in a question of criminal libel.”

“Criminal? Libel is a civil action. It's not criminal, for God's sake.”

“It's civil here, but you've got to check the rest of Europe. Your murder victim is Spanish, the incident took place in France, and if the companies involved are Italian—”

“One is. One is French. The rest are East European.”

“Well, I'm quite sure that libel is a criminal offense in Italy. And you can libel the dead there, too, so there's no loophole. I don't know about Spain and France, much less Eastern Europe, and neither will Selden's. That's my point.”

“What does ‘criminal' mean in this context?”

“Criminal, dear, means criminal. You understand English. It means you go to jail.”

“Me?” I was saying this a lot at the moment, and always in an involuntary falsetto.

“Well, maybe not you. Maybe just Kit. Or your CEO. Or yes, maybe you as the editor. Depends how the prosecution is worded. Depends how many fish they want to catch. Depends how much trouble they want to cause. Is this something you particularly want to find out?”

“This is something I never want to find out.”

“Then hire some heavy hitters. The cost is less than the cost of a jail sentence. And just because my advice is free doesn't mean it's not good. It's legal advice as well as maternal. I'd hate to have to find time to visit you in an Italian jail. I'd hate even more than that dealing with the amount of paperwork it would take to get you moved to an English jail.”

She'd get me moved, I had no doubt about that. But I'd have to live with an unspoken “I told you so” for the rest of my life. That was more expensive emotionally than finding the money for a second libel read.

 

4

I woke up on Thursday morning with a feeling of low-level dread. It was early—the alarm hadn't gone off, and it wasn't yet light, although the dawn chorus outside my window indicated that it soon would be.

When I'd first moved to this flat the birds woke me every morning. I'd lived beside a main road at university, and cars had roared past for twenty-two and a half hours a day. If I woke in the night and there were only a few cars going past, then I knew without looking at the clock that it was between three and four thirty. That was the only quiet time there was. Silence I never heard at all.

Then I moved here, and the silence was shattering. I'd never realized how much energy we put into blocking out noise. Here I'm in a tiny dead-end street of only fourteen houses, and the street you turn off to get here is a dead end, too. So there is no through traffic. Anyone who is here is here for a purpose, which apart from the general peace it produces also means the street is, for the area, surprisingly safe. I'm becoming one of those snoopy old ladies. If I hear a car, I wonder which neighbor is coming or going, and why at such an odd hour. I've managed to control this bizarre curiosity so far, and I don't actually peer out the window, but I'm close. I figure sooner or later I'll have to get net curtains specially so that I can twitch them.

I checked the clock. Six. I didn't have to be up for an hour. I lay in the dark, contemplating going for a run, which is in theory what I do for exercise. Well, it's not exactly running. More an exhausted stagger, with periodic downshifts to a shuffle, but I tell myself it's the effort, not the style, that counts. I do a two-mile circuit, through Primrose Hill, into Regent's Park, and along the canal. There's no one around at that time except other runners, all looking irritatingly comfortable, and dog walkers. As I pass the dog walkers, puce-faced with effort, I can see their eyes flicker worriedly, wondering if they can remember what to do for a suspected heart attack. It's as vivid as if a speech bubble were over their heads.

If I made an effort, though, I could lie in bed for half an hour, debating the pros and cons of getting up, and by then it would be too late to go. I only do this about half the time, but half the time spent not running is well worth the contempt I feel for myself later. Thinking about the contempt got me up. I peered hopefully out of the window. If it was raining hard, I could go back to bed with a clear conscience. Unfortunately, it was the day that was clear. Damn. Since I've been running, I've noticed an annoying thing about the weather, which is that a day that is gray and drizzly by seven is usually bright and sunny at six. I don't know the meteorological reasons for this, but when I'm running I'm absolutely sure it is done to spite me, and I feel like hell the whole time. There are supposed to be endorphins or whatever that make you feel great when you exercise. I don't think I have any, because I only feel great when I'm lying on the sofa reading a book, possibly while simultaneously eating biscuits. That's why I work in publishing, not athletics.

I shoved in my contacts, grabbed my keys, and went. I don't do anything that they say you should, like eating or drinking something healthful and nutritious first. The idea of food on an empty stomach is nauseating. Until I've got a good layer of caffeine down, I'm not ready for health. The five minutes it takes me to get from home to Primrose Hill on the posh side of the tracks is what I call my warm-up when I feel in need of rationalization—which is when I write a check for £55 at the end of a visit to the physiotherapist to repair the damage this marvelous exercise produces.

All this is private. In public I simply say, grandly, “I run,” when exercise and gyms are under discussion. I leave people to imagine that I do a brisk ten miles on Hampstead Heath every weekend after interval training all week (oh, yes, I have the vocabulary), although you only have to look at me to realize this cannot possibly be the case. However, in publishing most people's preferred sports are drinking and smoking, so by comparison my life looks healthy.

I normally try hard to think of things when I'm running, because if I allow my mind to focus on the activity itself, all I can think of is how much it hurts. If I can focus instead on a book, or a problem, or a conversation I need to have with someone, I can usually get a couple of miles under my belt without brooding on the pain. This morning, though, I was nearly through before complete paralysis of the lungs made me think how much further I had to go. The rest of the run I spent worrying about Kit.

It was absurd. The man hadn't shown up for a meeting, and he hadn't called. That was it. If it had been any other author I would have been pissed off, not worried. I wouldn't have tried to reach them endlessly. One brisk, firm message pointing out that they had missed the meeting was all they would have received—then let guilt settle in and do its job. But—and this repeated itself in time to my footsteps—Kit wasn't like that.

He was, however, an early riser, so it was possible there would be a message when I got home, or on my voice mail at the office. Our body clocks were, unusually for both our industries, set early, although mine was from necessity whereas he just liked getting up early. I hated it, but hated not having an hour or so to myself first thing even more.

I staggered home, therefore, with more than my usual speed, even finishing up with a slight flourish, as though to say to invisible watchers,
See? Easy.
Nothing on my voice mail. I showered and was out the door in half an hour, eager to get to the office. There was no real reason not to just ring through and check from home, but it seemed better to be physically there. I don't know why. I suspect it was because I wanted to postpone the moment when I found there was no message.

It wasn't even eight when I reached the office. Nothing from Kit. Nothing from his typist, either. He'd said he'd get her to send me the details of the manuscript dispatch, and it was unlike him to forget in the normal course of events. Even less likely given his burglary.

I had no idea what office hours CID officers kept. It was still early but I could always leave a voice mail: It was obviously routine. Then neither he nor I would have to think about it again. I dialed the number on the card he had given me, staring out the window—now it was raining, of course—while I tried to work out a message that didn't make it sound as if I'd given barely any thought to his visit from the moment he left my office. Normally a real live CID officer appearing in a publishing house would have been a talking point, but Kit's manuscript, and then Kit himself dropping out of sight, had sidetracked me. A man's soft “Hello?” startled me, therefore.

“Oh. I was expecting your voice mail.” Waves of patience wafted down the line and I pulled myself together. I'm not nearly as foolish as I had been making myself sound for past two days. “Inspector Field, it's Samantha Clair, from Timmins and Ross. I haven't got any definitive suggestions for your missing parcel, but there is something else. I don't know, it's probably nothing, but I thought it might be worth telling you about.” I trailed off.

“Anything is worth hearing. What have you got?”

“Well, it's nothing concrete. No one has rung to say, ‘Didn't you get my parcel?' But I may know what it was.” I told him about Kit's burglary, and how it might link to the courier. Then I went on: Kit not turning up for our meeting, the “workmen” at my flat, even the call from
Vogue
. I'd thought that when I'd said it out loud, it would dissolve, but as I put it all together, it no longer sounded nebulous.

Field didn't seem to think so, either. His voice was crisp. No fooling around now. “Will you be in your office this morning? I'll try and get to you by eleven.”

He was there at ten thirty, which said either that cops had nothing to do, which I didn't think was the case, or that there was more happening in the background than I'd been told. I'd spent some time after I called making notes on everything that had happened over the past few days, so I was more coherent than I'd been on the phone.

I repeated what I'd told him on the phone, fleshing out the detail. I repeated the conversations I'd had with my mother and Selden's about libel, and highlighted Kit's findings. I also gave him Kit's contact information, which wasn't really any more than his agent's name and phone number, Kit's landline and mobile, which weren't answering, and an address. Kit and his partner of several years had split about a year before, but I passed on his ex's name. I'd only met him a few times, and had no contact information, but he worked for the EU, or had then. He should be relatively easy to find. I had no idea about Kit's family—he had a sister in Devon, but I didn't know her married name, or where exactly she lived. Inspector Field made notes, but I could see he was not really focused on this part of the story. I stopped speaking, and just waited.

He put on that face men have when they think women are making impossible demands, half-aggrieved, half-truculent. And his voice was so patient I wanted to scream as he said, “I'll pass the information on to missing persons, and they'll speak to his family. But you do realize that not much will happen, even if his family files a formal missing persons report?” He cut off my indignant reply before it had left my mouth. “He's a grown man and he didn't show up for a meeting. There are—” he looked at his notebook—“there are circumstances that mean we'll look into it, which otherwise those bare facts would not warrant, but—” hunted/aggrieved again—“but I suspect you will think it's not enough. I'll do what I can. That's all I can say.”

He waited. Finally, tight-lipped, I nodded.

He did, too. “If we can go back to the manuscript.”