If the press had hoped that a slightly dull tell-all would flush out some juicier gossip, they were disappointed, but that marked the turning point in Henry Jarman’s fortunes. He wasn’t a sex maniac, but it now seemed officially all right to dislike him a bit. He went from being typically referred to as ‘outspoken’ to ‘hectoring’ and then ‘bullying.’ BuzzFeed ran a ‘What kind of boss are you?’ quiz, with losers told, ‘You are Henry Jarman, the ultimate tighty-whitey.’
The targets he picked also seemed increasingly safe. Saying you didn’t like shadowy government suppliers like Sodobus was now so trendy it was boring. Gone were the days when he’d exposed previously beloved institutions. He just wanted low-hanging fruit and any kind of attention.
Yet I still admired him. When the Killuminati asked me to go after him, I actually got a bit of a thrill. Not just from hero worship, or from the conflict of knowing that I’d have to kill him, but from realising that this meant that, yes, Jarman was still relevant. He had to be if someone wanted to kill him.
I
BECAME AWARE
that Jarman was stood there in the restaurant, waiting for my reaction. He’d obviously finished speaking, and I’d not even noticed. He was just a man shouting hot air in an empty restaurant.
Jarman stood, looking at me. The only sound was the chew-chew-chew of his Nicotine gum. It popped out between his teeth, stained yellow with turmeric. Jarman sucked it back in, and carried on regarding me.
There was almost a twinkle in his eye.
“I’m not going to kill you,” I told him.
Jarman wrinkled his forehead. “No?” Was that disappointment?
“I just...” I sighed. I’d be kind. “You’re right. I’m being manipulated by an outside order. They’re not... they’re weird. There’s a proper assassin working with me. I keep pulling back. I know when to stop. But she doesn’t. She goes one step further.”
“Does she now?” Jarman chewed, interested.
“But I’m not going to dance to their tune. Not this time.” Not because you’re a sad old hasbeen, but because I’m nice. “I’ve always admired you. I just wanted to see you face to face.” I went to shake him by the hand, and he grabbed me in a hug, which, truth to tell, did go on for quite a while. “Don’t mention it,” said Jarman.
We stood there, looking at each other for another moment, each of us assessing the other.
Then I turned to go, and the waiter was stood by me. Holding the bill. Jarman waved in my direction. “Most kind, most kind,” he boomed. Without thinking I handed over my debit card, and then froze, trying to grab it back, hurriedly replacing it with cash. The waiter stared at me. I shrugged. “There wasn’t the money in the account,” I said, stuffing the card back into my pocket as though it was going to try and break away. “Sorry,”
“Of course,” the waiter bowed his head and vanished.
Jarman observed the pantomime, smiling.
“There’s a war coming,” he announced to the waiter’s retreating back. “I don’t know if it’s a religious war, or a class war, but there will be a war. And it will start on Twitter and then spread. And you’re the first soldier in that battle.”
“I certainly am not!” I snapped at him.
“It’s irrelevant what you think.” He favoured me with a patronising smile. “From here on in it’s about what people think that you think. I can see it all, you know. And... I’ve planned ahead. For the future.”
“Oh, yes,” I was using the tone when Mum starts going on about foreigners.
“There are over two hundred pre-written blogs, and several thousand tweets all set to publish at various times. My team know my wishes and my style. My great work will carry on.”
“I’m sorry,” I was baffled. “I thought you’d heard. I’m not going to kill you.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Jarman shrugged, waving this away like an inconsequential detail. “I have heart disease. I’ve really not got very long left. But I wanted to go out in a special way. And you have made today very special. You’ve treated me to some wonderful company and some impeccable food. Thank you.”
“Okay.” My voice was uncertain. My eyes kept darting to the exit.
Get out get out get out.
“And you have allowed me to do a final service for humanity. Or rather, two final services. You have shown me attention and made me relevant again. And you have allowed me to unmask you as the internet serial killer.”
“What?” I jabbered. “But... I’m not. I mean, I’m not going to kill you.”
“You already have,” rumbled Jarman. “I wondered if you’d be up to it. One should always prepare for an important lunch. While you were in the little boys’ room, I took the precaution of placing a lethal dose of digitalin in my leftover sauce. Fairly soon I shall slip away. In fact, if you don’t mind, I shall just sit down now.” He sank into his chair, and I noticed the sheen across his forehead.
“What?” I think I said that a few times. Panic had grabbed hold of my chest and was giving it a squeeze.
“I’ve already explained,” rumbled Jarman, his eyelids half-closed. “As you wouldn’t kill me, I’ve done it for you.”
“But—”
“Oh, it doesn’t matter.” Jarman’s eyelids closed and then bounced open a little. “This way I get to go out with a bang, rather than be found dead in bed.”
“I’ll go now. I’ll leave the restaurant.” I could hear I was gibbering. “No one will know.”
“There’s Mahmood and the waiter, they’re both witnesses. And also, there’s that photo.”
I remembered as we’d walked in. The flash. I’d assumed it was someone taking a picture of Jarman.
“My assistant—the ever-so capable Michelle Fischer—took it. It’s a picture of us both together, my boy. The assassin leading me to my last meal.” Jarman chuckled, his eyelids fluttering. “I’m so tired,” he said, his breath coming in snores. His jaw went slack, and his gum rolled out onto the thick carpet. “It’s all been worth it...”
I stood there, slapping him, screaming at someone in the restaurant to call an ambulance. But there was no rousing Henry Jarman. I brought the phone out of my pocket to call 999. And then I stopped. What if they could trace me, trace my voice? The same thing would happen with a landline. Crap. I considered picking up the landline using a paper napkin and speaking into it, muffling my voice, making the call, wondering if the operator would believe me. But no, they’d expect me to stay with the body. And I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.
Henry Jarman’s head drooped onto his chest. He seemed to be smiling.
The bastard was dying knowing that he’d won.
I
WENT TO
the kitchens. There was no sign of the chef, or the waiter, just a vast pile of chopped onions. I went out through the fire escape and then I started to run.
VAMPANTHA’S SERIOUSLY DARK SECRET
Jackie Aspley has a surprise for the erotic novelist
My friends swear by Vampantha. “She is SUCH a guilty pleasure,” they tell me.
That’s the problem about living in the countryside. No one has any fun or even knows how to have it. So they buy ridiculous pot-boilers that describe ludicrous sex acts so that they don’t have to bother with them and can carry on spending all their spare time on jam-making and jigsaws.
Vampantha is quite the rave in the village at the moment. Everyone’s reading her. “My dear,” they confide in me in the village shop, “it’s so wonderful. I can read her on my Kindle and no-one knows!”
Trust me, everyone does. Because you can’t shut up about it. “She’s so racy and so rich. You should write one.”
I’d rather work in an abattoir. I’ve interviewed Vampantha before. Back when she wasn’t famous and I was. Stupid of me to brag about these things, but she was grateful to meet me. Now it is she who is doing me the favour.
She’s late. You can tell when someone’s made it. They think it’s cool to be late. She’s not quite at the stage of granting interviews in hotel suites. She meets me at a posh London club. It’s artfully chic and used by people in suits to bray at each other over their iPad presentations. It’s utterly hell and the only person who looks extraordinary is Vampatha.
She’s calmed down the undead chic, but she still looks like an abandoned upholstery project. There’s a lot of velvet and lace. But it’s no longer trying quite so hard to be noticed.
She gets some glances. The men-in-suits stare at her cleavage. The dieting women in pencil-skirts gawp at her fleshiness. Her bulk is commendable.
She’s allowed success to settle on her. Both on her manner and her hips. She’s the voluptuous side of fat. She’s commanding. She progresses around the room. She’s seen me already, but she wants to make the most of looking for me. Little Bo Beep looking for a vampire sheep.
“Vampantha,” she says, holding my hand firmly. “Seriously charmed.”
“Me too,” I tell her. I talk to her about her books. There were some thumbed copies of the paperback editions at a White Elephant stall. I figured if I just read the pages with turned down corners, I’d get a fair flavour. But I got rather more than that.
“What does your husband think of all this?” I asked.
Her answer is rehearsed and prepared and ever so careful. Her tones are warm and honeyed and I won’t bother reproducing her answer. You’ve read it a dozen times before. I’ll spare you the time.
I work through all the other touchstones, as bored as she is. The abuse, the accusations about her early career, and then her emergence as a thoroughly controversial feminist icon.
“I seriously adore the controversy,” she pats my hand. “It’s just divine, isn’t it? Whatever I do, they’ll tell me I’m wrong, so I may as well do what the hell I please.”
“I’ve a confession to make,” I tell her. “I’ve not read all of your books.”
“Oh, no?” she looks a little disappointed. “Journalists are so lazy these days.”
“But what I have read...” I smiled. “Impressed me.”
She nodded, taking the compliment.
“Some of the writing is really, really good.”
She nodded again.
“I wonder if you could sign an autograph for me?”
“Seriously delighted.”
I start rifling in my handbag, among the mints and the tissues and the sheer crumpled hell. As I do so, I talk. “I learned to be a journalist when we still did research. It’s so time-consuming and expensive. I’ve only just got the internet at home, and I can see how it makes it all so easy. So simple to just pull in what everyone else is doing. Talking of which... Yes, this is the book I’d love you to sign.”
I push the book across the table. She pales. Underneath her pale make-up, she pales.
“I first read
Under The Milk Dark Moon
when I was twelve,” I told her. “It was on my grandfather’s bookshelf. It’s completely forgotten now. Have you ever read it?”
“No... not that I can recall,”
“Interesting,” I said. “Well, when I say completely forgotten now, I mean by clearly everyone except you and me. Granddad never knew what to talk to me about, so we always chatted about that book. He’d liked it a lot. The odd thing is... well, it’s completely forgotten, and yet, curiously, whenever a copy comes up for sale, it’s almost always bought up by the same person. Your husband. I wonder why that is. Maybe he really likes it...”
“I don’t know,” she begins. Her hands are twitching, like she wants to grab the book from me. “Seriously I don’t.”
“We’re about the same age,” I tell her. “Underneath all the make-up. Perhaps we both read it when we were children. Maybe you still have your childhood copy. I say ‘maybe.’ I know full well you do.”
“I seriously don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I yawned. “Research took a while. The thing is, I’ve got good at the internet. This book’s theoretically out-of-copyright. There’s a lovely site that offers up these things for free. Sadly,
Under The Milk Dark Moon
’s not made it there. So I scanned the text in and uploaded it. That’s what’s so lovely about ebooks. You can search the text instantly. For similarities... in fact”—I smiled again—“anyone can. Now I’ve uploaded
Under The Milk Dark Moon
to Project Gutenberg. Enter in any sentence from that book, and it’ll pop up on Google. As will, of course...”—I fished out a paperback with a toffee stuck to it—“quite a lot of
A Rubber Of Velvet
.”
“I really don’t... I’m sure it’s accidental...”
“I’m sure it’s accidental too. That someone took a forgotten old crime potboiler and stuck a lot of frisky sex into it. So cleverly done. Must have taken hours.”
“Seriously...” begins Vampantha. But it doesn’t matter. No-one will ever take her seriously again.
Jackie Aspley, The Daily Post
I
WAS ON
the run. I was hiding out in the last place anyone would look for me. A resort hotel. People construct elaborate attempts to go on the run. Really, I’d just laid my plans down carefully. The fake passport didn’t even get glanced at, and the Killuminati would have been delighted to know that I’d got a really decent rate.
The hotel itself was a lot of empty luxury in the middle of nowhere. I was going mad, but it was completely anonymous. It was an all-inclusive deal, which meant that the bars and the restaurants were crammed from dawn till midnight with a glut of humanity, heaping their bowls high and making it a double. People came and went. Some of them wore identical orange tour jumpsuits, like fat convicts. Some were large families, having a blow-out. There was a phalanx of grumbling pensioners, sitting in a corner, tutting at everything. Some of us were French, some German, some Russian, and some English. All we were interested in doing was stuffing ourselves. Constantly.
I’ve never felt more anonymous in my life. No one talked to me, no one looked at me. No-one cared.
The hotel was in a small town nowhere near anywhere. There were trips to interesting places, which I didn’t go on. There were quiz nights which I didn’t go to. I simply ate and sat in my room and read. Occasionally I walked into the small town, and sat at a restaurant where I ordered my food and enjoyed the wait for it.
It passed the time.
Occasionally I’d check the news. Just to see if I was on it. But I wasn’t, really. The murder of Henry Jarman had all seemed so baffling to everyone. Everyone thought the CIA had done it. Apart from the CIA. Who were blaming Russia.