The Cherry Blossom Corpse (12 page)

“Great,” I said. “I'll try and meet him there.”

“Is there anything
wrong
?” the telephonist asked.

“You could say so. Amanda Fairchild is dead.”

“Oh no! And I'm sitting here reading her latest. No more of those
lovely
books!”

It was my first contact with an Amanda fan. She had sounded very sensible, too.

I begged a police car off Stein, and set off for Bergen airport, a bit nervously, driving on the wrong side of the road and sitting on the wrong side of the car. The combination of pot-holes and hairpin bends over dizzying drops did nothing for my confidence, but forty minutes later I got there. Bergen airport was pretty much like any other—cleaner, perhaps, but greyer. It was full of people in drab clothes drinking black coffee and eating horrible-looking cream cakes. At the news-stand they had a copy of that morning's
Times,
and I sat over a cup of disgraceful tea, reading about the terminal gasps of the Thatcher government.

When the 11:05 Oslo—Bergen plane disgorged its load, it was easy to spot the passengers who were English. They were less good-looking than the others. Which of the five or six was likely to prove an English publisher I was less than sure, but for safety's sake I had had a message sent through to the plane that I would be waiting at the barrier. In the event it was a cherubic little
man, with thinning hair and bloodshot eyes, who looked as if, at better times in his life, he might be utterly charming, but who for the moment was not finding it easy to gather his mental equipment together. Under his right eye there was a tic in his cheek, perhaps caused by all the happy tears that must have flowed down it. He soon got over his surprise at being met by a Scotland Yard man, and took me as a matter of course.

“Thought I'd better come,” he said, in a high-pitched, aristocratic squeak, as he trotted beside me towards the car.

“Good of you. I wasn't at all expecting it.”

“Difficult matter. Ticklish,” he said.

“For you, yes.”

“More than you can know,” he insisted.

“Oh, I think I may have some idea,” I said complacently, but he was wrapped up in the contemplation of the ticklishness of it all, and didn't notice.

“To think I very nearly came on this binge
anyway,”
he said fretfully. “We sent someone from our Australian subsidiary instead, but now I rather wish I had done. I don't suppose it would have made any difference, but it would have saved me all this hassle.”

“Quite,” I said. “Particularly as no one would ever suspect you of killing off one of your best golden-egg layers. What put you off? The thought of the company you'd have to keep?”

“No, no. Not at all.
Charming
people . . . many of them. No, it was more the thought of the sessions. I do trust I've missed ‘Whither the Gothic?' ”

“You have.”

“Whither went it?”

“I rather think it proved to be more of a stationary than a mobile vehicle,” I said. I let us into the car, but before driving off I had a thought. “I wonder if
KvalevÃ¥g is the best place to take you. I want a long, quiet chat, and the place is packed tight with guests and police.”

He shrugged, and looked around him bleakly.

“Somewhere quiet where I can have a nice pick-me-up or two. Do you know, there was no alcoholic refreshment on the plane from Oslo?”

“Perhaps we could go to the Scandilux. It's where the conference is being held, but it has one or two tiny little bars where no one seems to go.”

“So long as you don't
pitchfork
me into a session. What is it this morning? Second chance romances?”

“As a matter of fact, I rather think it is.”

He put on an air of world-weariness.

“Most of the women that read them, you know, have either never had a first chance, or else they've taken all too many!”

He was settling down as if for a snooze, so I braked suddenly to wake him up.

“On the way, I suggest I tell you exactly what happened to Amanda,” I said.

“Yes—I suppose you must. If it's not something that can be hushed up altogether—” he looked at me hopefully, and I shook my head—“then I hope it was some sort of
beautiful
murder, something with glamour or passion in it. So that our publicity people can make something of it.”

“Not a very beautiful death at all, I'm afraid,” I said, remembering the sodden bundle of pink on the wooden slats. “And there was more than a touch of the ludicrous about it.”

And through his sighs, I gave him a reasonably full account of Amanda's last evening, and her end. This took us all the way into Bergen, and then I had to concentrate on getting us both to the Scandilux. Fortunately
HÃ¥konshallen, further along the promontory, was well signposted, so I made it with no major errors, and put the police car in the hotel parking basement with a sense of relief. When I turned off the ignition I found that Auberon Lawrence was unbeautifully asleep.

I jogged him into a sense of where and who he was, and we took a lift up to the hotel proper. I nosed out the dark, deserted little bar that I had noticed earlier in the week. There was not a soul there except a doleful barman reading a sociology textbook. I gracefully let Auberon buy me a drink, and watched delightedly as he held out his hand for the barman to take what he required, only to find that he extracted from his palm almost all the money he had changed at Fornebu airport. He took his terribly dry martini and I took my Scotch to a corner table, and we settled over our glasses as if they were pans of gold-dust.

“There's something I ought to tell you about Amanda,” began Auberon Lawrence. Did he like people to call him “Bron,” I wondered?

“That she didn't write the books published under her name?” I asked.

He gave an outraged squeak.

“Collapse of stout party!” he shrilled. He comforted himself at his glass, and that made him much brighter. “Of course! It's not a disaster. You've been reading that awful little stoat's awful little book.”

“Arthur Biggs? Yes, I have.”

“I suppose it's a wonder more people haven't picked it up. Luckily the two things are separated—one in the text, one in the biographical index. Anyway, people who read romantic novels don't read books
about
the romantic novel—they just go on reading more romantic novels. Luckily for us, I expect
Happy Tears
only sold to libraries, and then mainly on its title . . . May the appalling Biggs
rot in hell for the ghastly little turd he is,” he added, in his seraphic voice.

“Hadn't you better tell me about the whole business?” I suggested gently.

“Ah! Yes . . . well . . . Let's see, it began in, I think, 1965 or 6. Before my time, but not
much
before it. It was old Fothergill's idea, and I became his deputy in 1967, so if I wasn't in on the ground floor, I was certainly in at the first. What he was after was someone we could promote, make into a minor national figure. And all we had was—well—”

“Mousies?”

“Drearies, I'd call them. And more than half of them men. I don't want to get into this sex-grudge business—you know, ‘Anything you can do I can't do half as well because I'm the wrong sex.' But promotion
is
easier in this game if you're a woman. The Americans are doing rather well at the moment with a romantic writer who looks like Gary Hart, but how many writers look like Gary Hart?”

“How many politicians?”

“Anyway, what old Fothergill decided was that the writers we had were perfectly good, so the easiest thing was to stick with the writers, but hire somebody as the front figure—somebody who could conform to every expectation the great romance-reading public has of the romantic writer. He hit on the idea of a not-too-successful actress who would settle for a regular, fairly modest income, in return for a lifetime of public performance. He came up with Amanda—with Maureen, rather, as she was then called—and the results were fabulous.”

“I knew Amanda, but what sort of person was Maureen?”

“Ah—that's a difficult one. I knew Maureen, you see, quite early on. Used to wine and dine her if old Fothergill
was busy; in fact, I took over the whole impersonation from quite an early stage. What was she like then? As I remember, quite commonsensical, businesslike, liked everything cut and dried and insisted on a price-tag on everything she did. A little bit actressy, if you know what I mean, but that didn't go amiss as far as the Amanda performance was concerned.”

“You talk as if she was someone you
once
knew.”

He thought.

“Yes . . . It's difficult to explain. It's not quite that she
became
Amanda, though there was an element of that. It's just that she became Amanda at our meetings. They were more or less public—at restaurants, at launching parties, television studios—and in places like that the performance had become second nature to her. Early on, when nobody would recognize her, she could be herself, but not any longer. No doubt she could still be herself with the publicity department. They got together periodically to discuss the details of her performance: what she would appear on, what she would open, the clothes she would wear. No doubt those discussions were completely businesslike, and she was still Maureen Shottery for them. As for me, I sometimes caught a glimpse of the ‘real' person, but it was only a glimpse.”

“And nobody ever guessed?”

He did a mental shuffle.

“Well . . . hardly anyone . . .”

“Arthur Biggs?”

“That horrible little creep. You saw what he put in that book of his . . .”

“Was it in fact a sort of blackmail?”

“Put bluntly, yes. Only it never was put bluntly. It was in fact the most genteel sort of pressurizing, never remotely acknowledged as such. He was with an utterly insignificant publisher called Robertson Harty, and he
wanted to get on to our lists . . . Of course he became one of our authors.”

“He didn't tell me that. He mentioned you quite objectively, as if you were nothing to him in the world.”

“He was trying to fool you. Lorinda Mason, as he calls himself, is one of our middling-to-low earners, churning out three or four a year. He/she doesn't disgrace our list, but he's certainly no money-spinner.”

“He never wrote any of the Amanda Fairchild books?”

“Oh no. We'd want someone with a much lighter touch than Arthur Biggs.”

“Who did write them? Lots of people, or just one or two?”

“Recently just one or two. One of them does a conventional one—
Mood Indigo
is the next—and the other either does a Second Chance or a Historical. I've just got a manuscript from her.”

“The Pretender's Sweetheart?”
I asked.

“How did you—? Oh—Amanda preparing the way, I suppose. That was the marvellous thing about Amanda: you could send her anywhere and be quite sure she'd do a marvellous job.” A thought struck him. “I say—I wonder how many manuscripts we could say she left behind completed?”

“That's if the whole business of the imposture doesn't have to come out at a trial,” I pointed out.

He nodded gloomily.

“Getting a new performance on the road is going to take so long! And if it does all come out, who is going to trust us again?”

“You were saying that two people write as Amanda Fairchild now,” I said, steering him back to the main point. “Is either of them here at the conference?”

“Oh no—shrinking violets, both of them.”

“What about in the past? When you were putting out several Amanda Fairchild titles a year?”

“Oh—masses of people. We used whatever seemed suitable, provided their authors consented. And it was very much worth their while to. Quite a few people would have had one or two under the Fairchild name. There are about eighty or ninety titles, you know.”

“I know. Could you get me a full list of every writer whose work you used?”

His voice rose to a stratospheric squeak, like Florence Foster Jenkins attempting the Queen of the Night.

“My dear man! Absolutely impossible! It's years ago!”

“But couldn't you get someone back in London to go through the records?”

“Dear chap, there's
nothing
so scrappy and disorganized as publishers' records! We had to move five or six years ago, after we'd nearly been taken over by a dreadful Australian. I've no doubt most of the relevant stuff would have been jettisoned then.”

“But your accounts department? They'd have to keep records because they pay the royalties.”

“After they've been out of print for a couple of years, people reclaim their rights. We very seldom reprint old ones, unless it was a
very
popular title. People want to read the
latest
Amanda Fairchild, not something published way back in the 'sixties.”

“I shouldn't have thought it made a great deal of difference,” I said, but I put aside the idea since it seemed to reduce him to a quivering jelly. “Well, please do any checking you can. Meanwhile I suppose I can assume any of the British writers here might have contributed an Amanda Fairchild title?”

He shrugged.

“I suppose so.
Not
Arthur Biggs. Otherwise . . .”

“Or American? Would that be conceivable?”

“Could be. One or two with an American setting could quite easily be incorporated into the Fairchild
œuvre.
Quite a lot of our readers seem quite to like the idea of
the place. They think it has glamour—if only they knew! In the early stages of the game we put in anything that seemed likely to go.”

He was getting a bit pop-eyed, and was looking regretfully at his glass. I didn't have anything more to ask him, and didn't think his company alone was worth the Norwegian price for a drink.