A Murder of Magpies (28 page)

Helena had obviously decided that Jake was going to have to know about yesterday, if unofficially and only in vague outline. “If you get a search warrant for Kenneth Wright's offices, you will find three files in a briefcase in a cupboard in the outer office. From those, you will be able to prove that Wright has been laundering money in phoney property deals in the UK for the past seven years. Here are summaries of the deals, and a précis of the case against him. It's all on this memory stick, which is not traceable.”

Jake was not prepared for this. “Are you telling me you broke into his office?”

Helena remained serene. “No, I am telling you I have a memory stick summarizing the contents of some files. I have no idea where it came from. It was in an unaddressed envelope on the mat this morning. My fingerprints are on it, because I opened the envelope before I knew what it was. I am now handing it to you. This is the envelope.” She pushed both across the table.

Jake made no move to take them. “I can't—”

She went on, in the same unhurried tone. “Furthermore, you will find an engagement diary for 2007 in the bottom drawer of his secretary's desk. There are notations in it that match the times and suggest locations for meetings linked to the property deals.”

Jake slammed his hand down flat on the table, but Helena proceeded as if she were discussing the merits of full-fat over semi-skimmed milk. “In the diary you will find an entry marked A, with a circle around it, the week before Alemán was murdered. The following week, the day before his death, there is an indication that one-third of something was passed from someone to someone else; a second third was passed the day after his death; and a final third the day after the inquest.” She didn't hurry, and she didn't look away. Jake was mesmerized. “It might also be worthwhile to speak to Tiffanie Harris, or check his records, for a connection to the company whose courier was killed two weeks ago. That's more recent, and I assume therefore easier to jog people's memories. You might want to discuss with NCIS the penalties for a solicitor who does not report money laundering. I have been considering them, and Kenneth Wright has a great deal to fear from Kit Lovell's research. On a personal level, he has more to lose than anyone else.”

She paused. Jake had sat back in his seat and was staring intently at her, not angry now, but thinking. She continued. “You can justify getting a warrant based on the anonymous information here. The diary, and what you find in it, will be a surprise to you, of course.”

“Of course,” he said absently, but he wasn't mocking her, just working through the information. He stood up, gently hoicking the memory stick into an envelope without touching it. “That's it for you two now. It's too close, and too dangerous.” He looked over at me, and there was no smile at all. “No more Sherlock Holmes-ing. It's
over
.”

“Me?” I pointed to my chest. “I'm Watson.”

“You're an editor. Go edit something, for God's sake, and stay out of this.” He waved an arm, indicating a vast world of literature that was waiting for me somewhere, well out of his way.

Literature. Shit. I looked at my watch. It was after nine. Shit, shit,
shit.
I was going to be late, and I needed to talk to David before the meeting at ten. I ran.

*   *   *

I got into the office five minutes after the meeting was due to start. Officially that is. Publishing meetings always begin late. I saw David coming down the hall toward the meeting room, and pulled him into my office.

“What—?”

“Sorry, David, but I've only just arrived, and we need to talk before the meeting.”

He looked doom-laden: “we need to talk,” the four words men most dread hearing. In addition, anything that couldn't be discussed in a meeting was bound to be contentious, and David hated contention. He had got to where he was by being everybody's pal—or by being spineless and rolling over and waving his paws in the air, whichever interpretation you preferred.

“Has Smith's been on to you?”

He shook his head. I put my head out the door and called to Miranda: “Did we get confirmation from Nadila yet?”

She looked up: “It's on your e-mail.”

I found it and printed it, and handed it to David. “Here.”

“Can't you just tell me…?” He waved the e-mail at me.

“Read it. Then we'll talk.”

It was four lines long, but it took David several minutes to master the contents. Or not to master them. “I don't understand,” he said, at last.

“It's simple. I sent the manuscript of
Toujours Twenty-one
to Nadila Irani, who organizes author events centrally for Smith's. She loved it, and passed it on to her colleagues, who also loved it. They've made it their September Book of the Month.”

“Loved it.” He repeated the words as though they were code for something he couldn't quite grasp.

“Loved it,” I repeated firmly, staring him dead in the eye, daring him to tell me how bad he thought the book was. He wouldn't. He was too much of a weed. “They thought it was a riot. I've had a lot of good feedback from readers of about the same age, too. This is going to be big.”

“Big.” I was still talking in code, apparently.

There wasn't a lot of time, and for the moment I didn't care about his support for the book. We needed to talk about Ben. “David, can we focus on the mechanics of the Book of the Month part for the moment, please? If you remember, we thought it was going to be Ben's book:
The Giraffe, the Elephant, and the Cat
.” I don't make up the titles. Honest to God I don't.

David had caught on. He looked terrified. “They want to
cancel
? They can't do that.”

I nodded toward the e-mail. “It looks like they just have. I don't think they'll understand if we get stroppy about it, either. From their point of view, it should be all the same to us. They're substituting one of our books for another. And
The Giraffe
was never confirmed. I checked on Friday. Ben had a phone call from a friend at Smith's, tipping him off, but there was nothing official.”

I watched David, not unsympathetically. It wasn't a publishing problem, it was a personnel problem. Ben would be furious, quite legitimately, that his book was losing a huge amount of publicity. As a first novel, it needed that kind of push to have any hope of succeeding. But in addition, and more importantly, Ben despised my books, and he despised me. This would be a very public humiliation, particularly as at the acquisitions meeting where
Toujours Twenty-one
was discussed he had gone on endlessly about this being the result of publishing “substandard literature”—that is, the rest of my list.

“
Toujours Twenty-one
?”

I played my cruellest card, and the one I knew I was going to have to show a lot. “Did you read it?”

He was vague. “Well, when it first came in…”

“Not, ‘Did you look at it?' Did you read it?”

He caved in. “No. Only the first twenty pages or so. I hated it.”

I nodded. “Nadila read it. All of it. So did the rest of Smith's. We've got a great comic novel here, David.”

“But you said…” He trailed off. I'd never actually said I hated it.

I stood up. “Don't you think you should talk to Ben before the meeting?”

David stayed in his chair. He really loathed this kind of thing. Tough. That was why he was paid four times my salary. I said, “I'll tell everyone you'll be a few minutes late,” and escaped down the hall.

I whispered to Sandra that it was all set, and then announced more generally to the people milling around the coffee machine that David had said to start without him. It was a good half hour before he joined us, and we'd worked our way fairly swiftly through the minutes in the absence of both him and Ben. David slipped into his seat just as Sandra started to update us on the publicity plans for the coming season.

When she got to September she hesitated, and David drew a deep breath. “I'd better step in here.” She ceded gratefully. “We've had some good news and some bad news.” I started to scribble furiously on my minutes. I didn't want to look as though I was gloating, particularly as I was. I drew a rabbit wearing a bow tie. It looked more like a cat, so I gave it a tail. “Unfortunately,” David said, as if he were reading a ransom note that had been dictated by kidnappers, “unfortunately
The Giraffe
is not, after all, going to be Smith's September Book of the Month.” Everyone looked up. This was more interesting than progress meetings usually were. “Instead.” He stopped dead. He had the same problem saying
Toujours Twenty-one
that I always did. “Instead, Breda McManus's new book has been selected. We had confirmation this morning.” He glared at me. Everyone else stared. The book we'd all been too embarrassed to discuss? I drew a house around the cat. It was too big, so I gave it a steeple and a bench for the cat to sit on.

David said, heavily, “Sam can tell you more.”

“I can't, really. We only just heard, as David said,” I smiled sweetly at him. “Breda's books have been chosen before, but we're thrilled that a comic novel from her is getting the same recognition.” There, it was official: It was a comic novel. Now for reinforcements. “I know Sandra hasn't had much time to plan, but given the response we were hoping for, and the usual budget allocated for Breda's books, we're starting to shape up a very active campaign.” There were nervous little murmurs. Sandra had known how good it was, too, and had budgeted for it. Mental realignments were going on all over the room. The only comfortable-looking people were the ones who had never pretended to read the book.

Sandra went through the plan she and I had scribbled out the week before. She was a good publicist, and it sounded as though a great deal of time and effort had been put into it, that she'd spent months assuming that this book was going to be her big title for the autumn. Just as she was finishing, Ben walked in, not looking at anyone. And in return, everyone else was suddenly riveted by Sandra's plans. No one wanted to look at Ben, for fear of seeming too pleased, or too sorry, for him. Neither would be welcome.

After that, the heart went out of the meeting, and we ran down the rest of the list in record time. I'm not sure what we discussed, and I don't think anyone else was, either. Everyone wanted to be out of the meeting: me to escape from Ben, the others to talk about him. When David gave his ritual cough before saying, “Well, if no one has anything else?” we all stood up as one. The usual chitchat and jokes were in abeyance as we headed for the door in a silent group. When Ben said, “Sam. Could we talk?” the others scuttled, like crabs when a stone is thrown into their rock pool.

It would have to be faced at some point, so it was good to get it over with. Even so, I stood near the door. “Ben.”

He was having trouble formulating what he wanted to say. I looked closer and realized he was close to tears—tears of anger, I suspected. I took a step forward, putting out my hand. “Ben. It's only a book, Ben.”

I couldn't have chosen anything worse to say. “Don't you fucking patronize me,” he whispered.

Now I was angry, too. It was not my fault I was publishing a book that other people liked. It was not even my fault they liked it more than his. I have no competitive instincts about publishing. I know that a lot of people do, and Ben is particularly consumed: who is buying what, who is publishing what, is every bit as important to him as what he is publishing himself. He can only judge his own work by how others are doing. Well, fine, but I wasn't going to play. “I am not patronizing you,” I replied tightly, mentally adding,
You little prick.
“You asked to talk to me. If it's only to abuse me, then I'm going. I'm busy. I have a big marketing campaign to plan,” I added cruelly. He flinched. “What do you want me to say? I'm sorry about the mix-up with Smith's.” That was the phrase I'd chosen, and I thought it was inspired. It implied Smith's were incompetent, and it had nothing to do with either book. “But what can we do? It's happened.”

“Just like Charles Pool happened?”

So that was what was eating him. Well, tough. “I don't know what you're talking about,” I said, flatly.

“You don't. Funny, everyone else knows about it.”

“Then why don't you go and talk to them. Because I have nothing to say. I've never met the man.” Straightforward denial is always disbelieved, but the purpose of this rumor was long gone, and I no longer cared. Even if it had been true about me and Pool, what was it to Ben?

He wasn't going to back down. “It's—it's just unprofessional.”

It took a supreme effort not to laugh. What a baby he was. But he was also a pain in the butt, and I didn't have the time or the energy for this. I started gently. “Ben, if I persuaded one of your authors to send their next manuscript to me instead of you, that would be unprofessional. However,” I hardened my voice, “if I decide to fuck your entire autumn list—male
and
female—that is, I'm afraid, completely outside your editorial remit.”

Ben had always treated me like I was a brain-dead senior citizen, gently knitting and dozing in the corner while he got on with the cutting edge of publishing. It was time he realized everyone over twenty-five wasn't senile yet. I smiled viciously at him, showing all my teeth. “Are we finished?”

I didn't bother to wait for an answer.

*   *   *

I stood in my office, breathing heavily, as though I'd been running. Miranda came in, saying, “You've had a—” She looked at me and changed it to, “Are you all right?”

I was still angry. “Ben thinks other editors fucking his authors is unprofessional.” There, let that piece of childishness get around.