A Bed of Scorpions (19 page)

I was stunned. I was so sure he was going to say yes, I hadn’t prepared for the possibility of his saying no.

The hell with police procedure, or at least the hell with what I imagined police procedure to be, based on my extensive reading of crime fiction. I clicked on a picture of Celia by herself. ‘Her?’ I said bluntly.

He looked, and shook his head. ‘No.’ Not even ‘I don’t think so’. Just ‘No’.

‘Fuck.’ I said it without thinking. It made Sam laugh, but Viv glared.
No more biscuits for you
, her look said.

Story of my life.

‘So if that’s not her, what
did
she look like?’ He stared at me blankly. She looked like a woman.

‘Red-headed? Brown hair? Blonde? Pink?’

He grinned again, hangdog look entirely gone. ‘Not pink. The others?’ He shrugged. No idea.

‘Age?’

Nothing. He knew she was female, he didn’t know how he knew, and that was it. I pulled a couple of business cards from my wallet and scribbled on the backs. ‘This is my mobile. If you think of anything, will you give me a call?’

Both took one, Viv with the enthusiasm of an angler who, at the end of a long day’s fishing, has hooked up a tin can. Sam’s response was more curiosity than enthusiasm. It was like shaking hands with adults. Not something that had happened to him before, but not unpleasant now he’d tried it.

Jake was home by the time I got back, and was staring dubiously at the salad. ‘Lunch?’ he whined.

I waved my basket. ‘Saved by the market. I got you tough-guy grub to water down the wussiness of a salad.’

All the same, he ate his share of salad too. Talk is cheap.

He waited until we were washing up before he said casually, ‘You went to the market OK?’

‘OK? As in, you’re such a lunatic you might forget where the market is, and then how to get home? Or OK as in, I still think a madman will zoom out of a crossing and try to murder you if you venture out, even though I’ve stopped insisting on driving you to work?’ I stood with my hands on my hips. It was a savage reply to a fairly unloaded question – well, a fairly loaded question, but a fairly fair one, too. I couldn’t help it, though. I hated being reminded that someone might want to hurt me, and it made me want to hurt whoever reminded me of it. I rubbed my hands over
my eyes. ‘Sorry. Yes, I went to the market with no problem. And then, on the way home …’

Jake’s back was to me, and he waited, standing with one arm raised halfway to putting the dishes in the cupboard. Finally, when I didn’t continue, he prompted, ‘And on the way back, what?’

‘I stopped to chat to the woman who’d helped me last week. When I fell?’

He didn’t move. ‘And?’

‘And the boy who said the car was a blue Volvo.’

He finished putting the plates away and turned around, rolling down his sleeves. ‘And he couldn’t identify Celia Stein.’

‘What? How did you—?’ I felt like a lab-rat in a cage, my movements monitored, even predicted. ‘Being with you is creepy.’ I saw the look on his face. ‘No! That’s not what I meant. Being with you isn’t creepy, but what you just
did
is creepy. How did you do that?’

He pointed to my laptop, still at the bottom of my bicycle basket. ‘You don’t take your laptop anywhere much, and never to the market. So you wanted it for something, and if you spoke to the boy, that must have been what you wanted it for.’ He held up his hands, palms out –
See, nothing up
my sleeves
.

Most men don’t notice anything ever. Which can be infuriating to live with. But I wasn’t sure that men – or a man – who noticed everything were any easier to live with. Maybe I’d give up on men and get a dog. They only noticed dog food and other dogs’ bottoms. Neither of which mattered to me. I went back to what Jake had said. ‘All right, that was how you knew that I’d been asking.
How did you know that he said it wasn’t her?’

He started to answer the question, then was diverted. ‘He was sure it wasn’t her? That’s interesting.’ Then he went back. ‘There are always three possibilities.’ He pointed, lecturing. ‘The witness positively identifies the person of interest; the witness says it was definitely not the person of interest; or the witness is not certain.’ He left the textbook behind and returned to Celia. ‘If I’d guessed, I would have said he wouldn’t be able to say one way or the other.’

‘He was sure. It wasn’t her.’

‘Were the photographs good? What did you show him?’

I pulled up the page again. And then I also admitted to pointing out Celia when the boy hadn’t recognised any of the photos on his own. Jake looked disapproving, but I could see he was trying not to laugh. What I’d done was probably what the police wanted to do all the time, jabbing at a photo and shouting, ‘Her! Her, for God’s sake.’

He agreed that the photos were good enough for identification, just adding mildly that it was lucky the boy hadn’t recognised anybody, as my pointing her out would have made his evidence inadmissible. I shrugged. He hadn’t recognised anybody, so it was moot, and anyway, I’d promised not to identify him, so at least that was a battle I now wouldn’t have to have.

But I still didn’t know how Jake had known that the boy hadn’t recognised her. He was dismissive. ‘Nothing very clever. You wanted it to be her. If he’d said yes, you would have told me first thing.’

That simple. I closed down the page. Behind it, I saw a new batch of emails had appeared, including one from
Lucy. I clicked on it. Aidan had asked her to send me photos of the Stevensons with book jackets in them. And she attached eleven
JPEGS
. I turned the screen toward Jake. ‘Do you want to send this on to your office?’

He looked at it and nodded, forwarding it on.

‘Is that it, then? Are you finished for the weekend?’

He looked smugly pleased. ‘Barring emergencies, yes. And just in time. The football begins in half an hour.’

Be still, my fast-beating heart.

I
LIKE
TO IMAGINE
that I subscribe to the never-do-today-what-you-can-put-off-until-tomorrow school of thought. In reality, I’m methodical and plodding. So while Jake watched the match, I opened up the
JPEGS
Lucy had sent, zoomed in on the colophons and printed them off. The pictures were all dated, three in a cluster from the late 1960s, which included the puppy/Kafka one I’d already got. Then there was another series of four that had been made in the early 1970s. After that, Stevenson must have stopped using book jackets until the 1990s. The final four were from just before he vanished.

I stood in front of my bookshelves, scanning for Tetrarch spines, then checking each one for a date. I pulled examples from the 1950s through to this year, and then carefully went through each one, checking the reprint dates inside, setting them down spine upwards on the floor, in groups for each decade, with smaller groups within the decades,
whenever the publisher had had the colophons redesigned. This was why cop shows always got an audience, right? The glamour.

Jake kept his eyes on the television, but he was watching me all the same.

I was working at a glacial pace. This wasn’t the kind of situation where ‘close enough’ was going to fly. It took me nearly an hour to find enough examples from each date. I wanted at least one example for every five-year span, but the early years, before I had been buying books, were thin on my shelves. In two cases, however, I had copies of the books Stevenson had used – he was not exactly a literary maverick, and his taste ran to counterculture-mainstream, if such a category exists, and I think it does. One was the Kerouac. Mine was a later reprinting, from 2000, so I moved that to the 2000s decade group. The other was a William Burroughs novel.

Only when I’d chosen all the books did I let myself pick up the copies from the printer in the next room. I had cropped each image so that only the colophon showed, not the title above it on the spine, with no other identifying features visible. I didn’t want to be guided by what I thought the dates ought to be, based on when I knew the books were published, or the collages created.

Then I sat on the floor moving the photocopies from group to group. Small children can be kept quiet for hours with a pack of cards turned face down on the carpet: turn up two that match, you encourage them. The level of difficulty was the same with this task. The answers were as immediately and screamingly obvious as two aces would be to a six-year-old. Anyone who had ever worked
in publishing or design could have seen what I saw right away. But I pretended I didn’t, and went through each one slowly and carefully.

When I’d paired up each photocopied colophon to a book with a matching colophon, I got my laptop out and opened up the
JPEGS
again. Then I went back to the photocopies, checking the collages’ titles and dates, copying them down onto their respective photocopies.

I sat back.

Jake had given up all pretence of television half an hour before. ‘Well?’

‘Two.’ I said, talking to the floorboards in front of me. I’d just proved that my ex-lover’s gallery had been selling forgeries. ‘The one that I knew about, with Kafka and the puppy – which is, by the way, with dazzling originality entitled
Kafka’s Puppy
. And one more, a late one, from 1992.’

He whistled. ‘Two out of eleven.’

‘That’s what it looks like.’ I didn’t look up. ‘What now?’

‘May I take the books?’

What did he think, I was going to withhold the evidence? At this stage? I got up wearily, and started to re-shelve all the books except the eleven from the dates of the pictures. It was good to have something mechanical to do. I stared at the title of each book carefully, as if the alphabet were a new concept that had only just been explained to me, and I didn’t want to jump to any conclusions about whether Dostoyevsky came before or after Asimov.

Finally nothing but the eleven books and their photocopies sat accusingly on the floor. I tucked each
photocopy into the book whose colophon it matched, and piled them up on the table by the door.

Jake looked at me sympathetically as he stood and picked up his phone. ‘Mark each sheet, and its partner book 1a, 1b; 2a, 2b; and so on. Then sign and date both the books and the sheets under the numbers. Someone will come and collect them.’ He stopped. ‘I’m sorry, you won’t get the books back.’

My voice sounded swollen, as if I had a cold. ‘I never want to see the bloody things ever again.’

And I went into the bedroom and closed the door behind me firmly. It wasn’t Jake’s fault, but I didn’t want to talk to him, and I didn’t want to listen to him explain to whoever he spoke to on the phone, or see the person who came to get the books. I wanted to go to bed and pull the duvet over my head. But that was stupid and melodramatic, so I sorted the laundry I’d done that morning. At least Sam Spade regretted losing Brigid O’Shaughnessy, I thought. I was sitting on the bed trying not to cry over a lost sock. And my poor lost friend Aidan.

After half an hour I’d heard the front door open and close, and I went back to the sitting room. The football had ended, and some sort of historical adaptation was on, the kind television companies think are improving. Cultural Weetabix. But Jake wasn’t watching, he was staring out the window, waiting for me. I went and sat down beside him, leaning into him.

‘I hate this a lot,’ I confided.

‘Me too.’

I knew he hated it only because it touched my life. That made me feel better. So I scrubbed at my face and
sat up. ‘Can we forget it for the rest of the weekend?’

‘We can try.’

And so we did. I sent Helena an email telling her about the colophons, but that was as far as I thought I needed to go. She would tell Aidan. Jake’s office didn’t call him in, I didn’t have anything terribly urgent to read, and instead we spent the time together without any of the scratchiness that had been hovering around so many of our conversations in the past weeks. So much so that we silently decided not to break the harmony by discussing any of those things we’d postponed to ‘later’. Later was, by mutual agreement, not now.

The only episode remotely connected to the case, therefore, was an email from Aidan on Sunday, sent to both Helena and me. ‘The installation is almost finished, and tomorrow evening a few journalists are coming in. It’s not the main press view, but just for the broadsheet reviewers whose deadlines are early. Do you want to come? I’ll be there around five, and I’ll leave your names. Ask for Esther Wolff in the press office, and she’ll bring you in.’

By this time we were sitting in the garden after dinner. It was just starting to get dark, not enough that we needed to turn the lights on inside, but not light enough to see each other properly, either. The phone’s glow cast a little sodium firefly on Jake’s face as I handed it over to him to read.

I resolutely didn’t look at him as I said, casually, ‘What do you think?’

He grunted. Then, ‘I don’t know what the specialists will have got up to on the weekend, but if you want to go, go. Why not?’

‘I doubt Helena will. She thinks leaving the office early
is for lightweights. I might, though. Although I need to try and set up an appointment about Miranda. It’ll depend on when Olive can see me. And five means I’d have to leave at four. I am, theoretically, in full-time employment. I can’t just wander off whenever the fancy takes me. I was out all day Friday.’ I have no idea who I was trying to convince. No one in the garden was fooled. We both knew that the first ‘I might’ meant ‘I will’, while the torrent of reasons why not that had followed was nothing more than window dressing.

We sat on for a while longer. Then, ‘Are they looking for Celia?’ My voice was much smaller than I intended it to be.

Jake didn’t answer, but he took my hand until it got too cold, and then we went in and went to bed.

On Monday, Jake dropped me at work again. I didn’t tease him anymore. He thought there was some danger, but not enough to warrant full-out precautions. If he could watch over me he would, and when he couldn’t, he would trust to my good sense. Whatever he thought that might mean.

I hadn’t tried to set up a meeting with Olive the previous week, since I needed David to be on holiday before I could legitimately go over his head. When I got in it was early, only just eight, but I thought I’d get my foot in the door for an appointment today if that were possible.

Publishing office etiquette is informal, but there are ways we shape that informality that we unconsciously adhere to. Most conversations are conducted by email along the corridors, unless it’s serious gossip, in which case the kitchen is the place for conversations that begin ‘You have to promise that you won’t tell anyone’. Some of
us, though, are still old-fashioned enough to like talking face-to-face. Whoever wants to do that just puts their head around an office door, or wanders into an open-plan area. An open door means any gossip, or even idle chit-chat, is welcome. A closed door says ‘Knock and come in, but only if its work. Oh, all right, but the gossip better be
really
good’.

Olive nominally subscribes to this code, but as she’s the publishing director few people take her up on her open door. Instead, I emailed Evie. ‘If Olive has time this week, can you slot me in for five mins? Won’t take more, I promise. Sam.’ In tacit acknowledgement that this was a formal request for a formal appointment, I didn’t add the ‘x’ that most publishing people – all publishing women, and far more publishing men than would care to admit it – add beside their names automatically. I suspect many of us emailing the bank to sort out a missing direct-debit payment have absent-mindedly blown cyber kisses to bemused data processors.

Less than two minutes after I’d hit Send, a reply pinged back from Olive directly. ‘Now is fine if you’re in. O.’ I hadn’t known she read Evie’s email account, and there were no kisses for me. Still, there was an appointment.

The downside of this up-and-at-’em early-morning manoeuvring was that Miranda had yet to appear. I was going to have a little trouble saying she’d ‘just’ told me when she wasn’t there to tell me anything. I headed down the hall. I’d burn that bridge when I came to it.

Olive is great. I think everyone at T&R knows how lucky we are to have her. She’s a couple of years younger than me, probably just turned forty or so, and came up
through editorial, which means she knows about books, and reading. It sounds unnecessary to say that, but more and more publishing houses are run by accountants, or sales people, or people who love marketing brands. Even sales and marketing people are a lesser evil. At least they worked with books before being elevated to the money end. One or two companies are now run by people who have never had any connection to books. To them books are just another commodity. Like Cheddar.

None of this should matter. What we sell is imagination, the possibility of being somewhere else, talking to people who never existed, or died a millennium ago. How you do it, by words on paper, or on an e-reader, or carried through your window by phosphorescent pixies driving chocolate sleighs, shouldn’t matter. But it does. Which is why we have been so fearful for the past fortnight. The big fear is that we’ll lose our jobs. The lesser fear is that we’ll keep our jobs. Just in a corporate gulag.

Of course, when I went into Olive’s office I hadn’t officially heard anything about her meetings, or any takeover rumours, so I just plonked myself down with my coffee and thanked her for squeezing me in. ‘I wouldn’t have bothered Evie so early if I’d known you were picking up her emails.’

‘Not a problem. If I hadn’t had the time, I would have left it for her.’

Fair enough. ‘It’s a smallish thing, and normally I’d speak to David.’ If I’d ever wanted proof that God didn’t exist, I had it right then, because if he did exist, and he was as passionately devoted to micromanaging our lives as most religions suggest, he’d definitely have struck me
dead for that lie. ‘But unfortunately, it needs to be sorted right away, and he’s on holiday this week.’ I filled her in on Miranda’s job offer, which she’d notified me of by email on the weekend, I now discovered as the lie tripped fluently out of my mouth. ‘There’s no immediate slot for her to move into here, but I’d hate to let her go without at least trying to find something. She’s terrific. She did most of the work on Breda’s last book.’ Breda is my starriest author, and a major contributor to T&R’s bottom line. ‘And not just editorial. The authors like her personally, and she’s made really good contacts.’ I summed up. ‘She’s great, and she’d be an asset to T&R.’ So what about it, lady?

Olive was direct. ‘If you want her, we should try and keep her. But if there isn’t a vacancy, or likely to be one soon’ – she raised an eyebrow, asking if I’d heard anything on the office grapevine that she hadn’t, and I shook my head in reply – ‘we can’t create one. There is no possibility of adding another salary at the moment.’ That was final, her expression said. Don’t go there.

So I didn’t. ‘I thought that would be the case, but maybe half-and-half? If I have her three days a week, and she does junior editorial two days?’

‘Are you willing to give up your assistant?’ Her tone was a warning: don’t come crying to me later, saying you have too much work and you need a full-time assistant.

‘
Half
my assistant. And when we find a vacancy for her to move into, I get the other half back.’ Olive smiled at how fast I’d corrected her, and how vehemently. Miranda was terrific, but I wasn’t willing to lose all my backup to keep her. I went on more moderately. ‘It goes without saying that
I’d like not to have to give her up. But it’s, well, it’s just unkind for her to miss a chance because I’m not willing to take on a bit more. And anyway, she does more than my last three assistants combined. If we go out of our way for her, she’ll pay it back. She does.’

Olive considered that. ‘I’ve spoken to her to say hello to, but no more.’ My lips twitched, and Olive nodded as if I’d spoken. ‘Yes, the Goth thing isn’t great.’