Authors: Elena Forbes
6
The offices of Stormont Publishing were located in a pair of eighteenth-century terraced houses in Bloomsbury. Tartaglia and Donovan were shown into a high-ceilinged room on the ground floor overlooking the street. The two sash windows were wide open, letting in a breeze as well as the heavy drone of traffic from the busy road outside. The room was furnished with a long, modern white table and matching chairs, with glass shelving units on either side of the marble fireplace that displayed a range of hardcover and paperback books. Several of the authors were familiar to Tartaglia, including Tom Niccol, a fellow Scot and former Detective Chief Superintendent he had once worked for, who had turned his hand to thrillers on retirement. Tartaglia was about to take down a copy of Niccol’s latest novel when the door opened and a sturdily built, dark-haired woman, dressed in a bright, geometric-patterned shift dress, entered the room.
‘I’m Jana Ryan, Joe’s editor,’ she said, closing the door behind her.
Tartaglia introduced himself and Donovan, and Ryan motioned for them to sit down. ‘I’ll close the windows,’ she said, as a bus rumbled past. ‘If it gets too hot for you, you’d better say.’
‘You know why we’re here?’ Tartaglia asked, as she came over to the table and sat down.
She nodded. ‘We’re all in shock. Can’t really believe it. Can you tell me what happened?’ She spoke quietly, with a light American accent; East Coast he thought, although possibly diluted by living in the UK for a long time.
‘There’ll be a press conference later this morning. I’m sorry but I can’t say anything until then.’
‘But he was murdered?’ She held his gaze. Her heavy, black-framed glasses gave her an earnest, academic look, but there was warmth in her eyes and genuine feeling.
Tartaglia nodded. ‘I’m afraid so.’
‘I saw something in the paper this morning about a man’s body being found in the Brompton Cemetery. A name wasn’t mentioned, but I wondered if it was Joe.’
‘Yes, it’s Mr Logan.’
She shook her head slowly as though she couldn’t believe what had happened. ‘Do you have any idea who—’
‘Not so far, which is why we’re here. We need to find out everything we can about him.’
‘What was he doing in London?’ Jana Ryan asked, looking at him questioningly.
Tartaglia frowned. ‘He was living here. You didn’t know?’
‘No. Last I heard, he was teaching at some school down in Somerset or Dorset.’
‘He left just after Easter. For the last couple of months he’s been staying on a houseboat in Little Venice.’
Ryan grimaced. ‘That’s really odd. I had lunch with him only a few weeks ago, and he didn’t say anything about being in London. I guess he didn’t want us to know he was here.’
‘I understand you’d been trying to get hold of him.’
She nodded. ‘Yes. He was avoiding me, if you want the truth.’
‘Why was that?’
Looking from Tartaglia to Donovan, she leaned forward and folded her hands neatly in front of her on the table. ‘Have you read his novel
Indian Summer
?’
‘I’m sorry, no,’ Tartaglia replied. Since leaving university and starting work, reading had become a luxury, confined mainly to holidays. But he was surprised to see Donovan also shake her head. She was rarely without a book in her bag and often swapped titles with a couple of the other women in the office. There had even been talk about forming a book group, although he wasn’t sure what had come of it.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Ryan said. ‘Let me put it in context. It’s a work of literary merit, but also one of those rare birds that crosses the genres and has popular appeal. It won a prestigious prize but Joe refused point blank to come to the awards ceremony. He made some excuse about being ill, but I knew it was because he didn’t want to come. In the end I had to collect the award for him. He positively loathed the limelight.’
‘I understand a journalist called Anna Paget was interviewing him.’
She shook her head. ‘I doubt it. I’ll ask his publicist, but last thing I heard Joe wouldn’t speak to anybody, and I mean
anybody
.’
‘I’d appreciate it if you’d check before we leave.’
‘Sure,’ she said with a shrug.
‘When did you last talk to him?’
‘Not since our lunch. After the awards dinner Radio 4 were chasing us, offering Joe a slot on Front Row with Mark Lawson, and I hoped we might be able to twist his arm somehow. His publicist had had no luck, so I tried calling and left a couple of messages, but he didn’t return any of my calls either.’
‘Why was he so reluctant?’
‘Most writers hate being involved in publicity. They’re very comfortable putting words on paper, but talking about it is another thing. Doing interviews and book signings also takes up a lot of time.’
‘Why did you keep badgering him then, if he didn’t want to do it?’ Donovan asked.
Ryan leaned back in her chair and gave a heavy sigh. ‘Unfortunately it’s part of the job these days, particularly if you find yourself winning a prize and with a bestseller on your hands. I understood it was difficult for Joe. He wrote his book, took several years to do it from what he told me, and he felt that that should be enough. The book should stand or fall on its own merits as if it was totally independent of him.’
‘What’s wrong with that?’
‘We badly needed his support to promote it. People are interested, they want to know about the writer, particularly when it’s someone who’s come from nowhere and had such unexpected success.’
‘And you want to sell books,’ Tartaglia said.
She smiled. ‘Naturally, although it’s not just about the money, at least not for me. Very few of our writers make it to the best-seller lists. Most of the time it’s about covering our costs and hopefully making a small margin, but when you hit the jackpot, well, of course it’s fantastically satisfying for everybody involved. It gave us all such a buzz and it wasn’t purely the sales numbers.’
The pressure on Logan to perform must have been huge, Tartaglia thought. He remembered what Maggie Thomas had told him about Logan’s aversion to publicity. Whilst he could see both sides of the coin, his sympathies leaned towards Logan. If it had taken him years to write his novel, it must have meant a great deal to him; it must have been something incredibly personal. Clearly he had never envisaged the book being such a success and perhaps that wasn’t part of the bargain as far as he was concerned.
‘You worked closely with him?’ he asked.
‘We had a few meetings, but we mainly communicated by email or phone. He said it was difficult coming to London. I have to say he wasn’t the easiest writer to edit; he absolutely hated making even the smallest changes. He found the whole process incredibly painful and I was sorry for that, but there was nothing I could do.’
‘How well did you know Joe? I mean, how much do you know about his personal life?’
‘Not a great deal, I have to say. I know he wasn’t married, and I don’t remember his ever mentioning a partner. The protagonist in
Indian Summer
is straight, so I sort of assumed Joe was too, but I never thought much beyond that. On the few occasions we met, we talked about the book. He wasn’t at all chatty or forthcoming about himself. He really gave little away. I’m afraid I simply put that down to his being a man.’
Tartaglia smiled. ‘How did you discover him? Did he approach you?’
‘No. We don’t look at unsolicited work. Like most publishers these days, we just haven’t got the people or the time. We use agents as filters. A draft of the novel came in via someone I’ve known for a long time, whose judgement I respect. She said I just had to read it, that it was right up my street. Even so, things were hectic as usual and it took me almost a week to get around to it. I remember she’d been chasing me, saying that others were interested, and I ended up reading it in the car driving down to Wiltshire to watch my son play in a rugby match. My partner was driving, I should add. Anyway, I was hooked from the first page. I just couldn’t put it down and I sat in the school’s car park, with the heater on, trying to finish it. In the end, I missed the whole match and the tea afterwards. What was even worse, my son scored two tries and his school won. He practically killed me, although he knows what I’m like.’
She smiled wistfully, looking down at the table for a moment, then back at Tartaglia. ‘You know, Joe’s novel was the most exciting thing I’d read in a long time. We may not have seen eye to eye over everything, but I’m very sorry indeed he’s dead. He had real talent.’
‘We’ll need his agent’s name and number.’
She nodded. ‘She’s in the US at the moment. I spoke to her on the phone only yesterday when I couldn’t get hold of Joe. After I heard what had happened, I rang this morning and left a voicemail. She’ll be devastated. I’m sure she’ll be in touch as soon as she wakes up and gets the message.’
‘What’s the book about?’ Donovan asked.
‘It’s about a group of men who were buddies at university. Fifteen years later they’re brought together again when one of them dies. Basically, his death opens a can of worms. I don’t want to give away too much of the plot because you should read it, but it’s about the destructive power of guilt and envy, about being in the wrong place at the wrong time and the choices we make.’
‘Is the novel autobiographical in any way?’ Tartaglia asked, thinking that it didn’t sound like his cup of tea.
Ryan put her head to one side and made a moue. ‘Most first novels have some autobiographical element, and in some superficial ways Joe was quite a lot like Jonah, the main character.’ She paused for a moment, as though thinking it all over, before adding: ‘But Jonah commits suicide at the end of the book, or so it seems. He’s a deeply unhappy, dissatisfied man. I certainly never saw Joe as someone standing on the edge of a precipice, either metaphorically or in reality.’
‘Do you think the book could have a bearing on Mr Logan’s murder?’
Ryan looked surprised. ‘I don’t see how. I mean, it’s hardly news.’
‘I understand he’d started another book.’
‘Yes. He mentioned it when we had lunch, but he didn’t tell me a great deal about it.’
‘Could the second book have anything to do with what happened to him? It may seem silly but we need to explore every angle.’
Ryan pursed her lips thoughtfully. ‘I don’t know what to say. He didn’t give me the impression the idea was hot in any way. If anything, he seemed a little woolly about the story line, as though he hadn’t really worked it out just yet. We hadn’t even talked about a contract and he was a long way from having anything he wanted to show me, from what I could tell.’
‘Thank you.’ Tartaglia unfolded a copy of the email found amongst Logan’s papers and slid it across to her. ‘Do you recognise this paragraph?’
She read the text, then passed it back, frowning. ‘I’ve never seen it before.’
‘So it’s not from
Indian Summer
?’
‘Absolutely not.’
‘What about his next book?’ Donovan asked.
Ryan shook her head. ‘I doubt it. It’s not his style.’ She waved her hand dismissively.
‘How can you be so sure?’ Tartaglia asked.
‘One minute. I’ll show you what I mean.’ She got up and went over to one of the bookshelves, standing hand on hip as she scanned the wall of titles. ‘Here we are,’ she said, stretching on tip-toe to take a copy down from one of the shelves. She came back to the table, handed it to Tartaglia and sat down again. ‘This will give you an idea of Joe’s writing. You can keep it, if you like. It’s certainly a good read, if nothing else.’
It was a fat paperback, the title
Indian Summer
highlighted against a sepia-toned photograph of an old house and garden.
He frowned. ‘It says here it’s written by someone called Andrew Miller.’
Ryan nodded. ‘Andrew was Joe’s second name and Miller’s his mother’s maiden name.’
‘He used a pseudonym. Why?’
‘I wouldn’t read too much into it. Lots of writers do it. He said he wanted to keep his acting and writing identities separate.’
Tartaglia skimmed the blurb. It was more or less as Ryan had described, with nothing that immediately suggested a possible connection with the case. He then switched his attention to the back. On the inside of the cover he found a small, black and white snapshot of Logan. Taken somewhere outdoors, Logan was seated on a wooden bench, squinting into the sunlight, his arm resting lightly along the back, with a cigarette between his fingers. He had a pleasant face, if a little weak, but there was something appealing and humorous about his expression, as though he found the whole thing amusing and wasn’t taking it too seriously. It wasn’t the pose of a vain man, Tartaglia thought, nor was his choice of photograph for his book jacket. He found himself thinking back to the body he had seen lying on the gurney in the morgue. Even cleaned up, the face bore little resemblance to the man in the photograph; as often happened, death had robbed him of any humanity.
‘We had quite a battle to get a photograph out of him,’ Ryan said. ‘In the end, I think he got a friend to take it.’
‘That’s strange. He was an actor. He should be used to putting himself in the public eye. If nothing else, you’d think he’d use a professional studio shot.’
‘As I said, I imagine he wanted to draw a line between the two careers.’
‘Is it a good likeness?’ They needed something to release to the press in the hope that someone might remember seeing Logan the night he died.
‘Yes. It captures what he was like, pretty much.’
‘We’ll need a copy of the jPeg.’
She nodded.
He read the few lines of biography underneath the photo but they gave nothing new away, other than that Logan had been born and raised in Crewe, in Cheshire. At least that might help with tracing the next of kin.
He tapped the cover. ‘Doesn’t tell you much about him, does it?’
‘That’s the way he wanted it. Lots of authors are like that, I have to say.’
Still not satisfied, Tartaglia turned the book over and started to read aloud some of the newspaper quotes that filled the back cover.
‘“
Claustrophobic and haunting first novel . . .
”, “
Compelling and disturbing . . .
”, “
A gripping and absorbing read that keeps you guessing until the end . . .
”, “
Deep and intense, with an evocative sense of place . . .
”, “
An extraordinary debut . . .
”, “Peter’s Friends
meets
The Secret History . . .”’