A Murder of Magpies

by Flanders, Judith

  But Kit wasn’t buying into this, and he didn’t give up. “They do it in gray, too.”

  I barely glanced in the direction he was semaphoring. “Too bright.”

  “Gray? How can gray be too bright?”

  I began to laugh helplessly. I’m not unaware of my limitations, I even know they’re ludicrous. I just don’t see why I should change them. “Kit, it’s too bright. It’s a bright gray. An incredibly loud, cheerful, bright gray. Practically scarlet. Now let’s just go. I’m not going to buy a suit. I’m not even going to try on a suit. I have a suit.”

  The linguist Noam Chomsky once came up with a sentence to demonstrate how you could say something completely grammatical that still had no meaning at all. His was “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” Kit obviously thought “I have a suit” was on the same level. A suit? One? And what did that one old suit have to do with this lovely new suit?

  I distracted him with a discussion of his upcoming travels—I didn’t know where he was going, but he was always going somewhere, so it was a safe bet—and I managed to maneuver us out of the shop. As well as the two months of the year he spends at fashion shows—or, as he so elegantly puts it, “wasting my time looking at fucking frocks”—Kit also gives a lot of lectures and acts as a consultant to a bunch of companies. He’s good, and he can’t say no, a lethal combination. This was why Sandra and I were having lunch with him now, nearly nine months before publication. Pinning him down for publicity was always tricky.

  We went to the Groucho Club, which I loathe but Kit likes. Kit was late, of course, but I wasn’t going to hang around outside for him, and one of the Groucho’s less attractive aspects—one of its many unattractive aspects—is having nowhere for waiting guests to sit. The theory, I’ve always assumed, is that if you’re not worthy of being a member, you’re not worthy, full stop. Why should they make an effort—and, worse, use up space where they might otherwise be making money—for people that they’d probably rejected?

  I had, however, been there enough to know that a confident exterior goes a long way. I marched up to the signing-in book and scribbled something important looking and illegible, adding Sandra as my guest. After all, what were they going to do if they caught on, force me to join?

  We sat down to wait in the bar and went through the plans Sandra was going to present. It was always fun to work on things with Sandra. Publicity is a relentless business. By thirty most people are howling to get out, which means that publicists tend to be young and therefore, by definition, inexperienced. Inexperienced at best. At worst inept. Sandra was neither. She was a veteran of hundreds of campaigns, and had kept her sanity and her perspective. She had also kept her sense of humor, and it was one of the reasons she and Kit worked so well together: She was scabrously funny. For the moment, though, we were mapping out the detail, which was dull but had to be done.

  “I thought you’d said there was a complete embargo,” Sandra said.

  “There is. I told you. Even in-house. I hope you haven’t given the manuscript to anyone.”

  “Of course not, but if that’s the case I don’t understand why you said that Vogue could have an advance look.”

  “Vogue? I didn’t. What are you talking about? Why would they want to see it anyway, apart from vulgar curiosity, that is?”

  “I had a call just before we left, from a guy named Philippe Anjou, at French Vogue, saying you had told him to get in touch. A smoothy with a gorgeous voice.”

  “Me? I’ve never had any contacts with Vogue, much less French Vogue and their smoothies, and I wouldn’t have told them to ring you—why would I? Serial is being handled by Susie. It always is.”

  “I wondered about that. I thought maybe you’d met him with Kit and you were playing footsie with him—or Kit was.” She looked hopeful.

  I hated to stamp on a perfectly good smutty rumor, but it couldn’t be helped. “It’s probably one of the tabloids, trying to get their hands on an advance copy.”

  Sandra was silent. She would have preferred me to be having a fling with a French smoothy, but had to acknowledge that a tabloid foray was more likely. A bit depressing, when I thought about it.

  “Did you print out the manuscript?” I asked.

  “Yes, I always do—it’s easier. Why?”

  “Can you lock it away? Kit had a break-in.” I told her about it, but let her assume that it was the tabloid hacks. I didn’t want to be overdramatic, and in the cold light of day—well, the gloomy light of the Groucho—it did seem silly.

  Sandra looked bemused. “I’ll try and think what to do, but I’m not sure there’s anything that locks in my office.”

  Come to that, neither was I. My office door didn’t lock. Publishers are an honest bunch—or at least we’re all aware that none of us has anything worth stealing. Whatever the case, petty pilfering has never been a problem and since manuscripts are not intrinsically valuable, and we have so many, and so many copies of each one, nothing is ever locked up, or even put away. The usual filing system with manuscripts is much like David’s with everything: pile them up until they topple over. They’re not exactly gold bullion. Sandra’s office is particularly loaded. As well as copies of each manuscript that was being published, she had proofs, presenters, or sales folders, and finished books. And, being Sandra, all of this went back for the entire time she’d been with the company. My office is much emptier, as about every six months or so the clutter and dust irritate me into getting a bin liner and throwing out everything that has already been published.

  Much emptier. Much easier to find things.

  I was edgy, and I was also now cross. It was one thirty, and Kit was half an hour late, which was excessive, even for him. I wanted to sort out the publicity and get back to the office for a three-thirty meeting. I tried calling him at home, but there was no answer. There was no point in trying his mobile, as although he carried it he usually forgot to turn it on, and he doesn’t know how to access his voice mail. He’d asked me to answer it a couple of weeks ago when he was driving, and I discovered he had messages going back six months, none of which he even knew were there.

  The waiter came over to ask what name the bill should be in. He looked at Sandra, which was understandable. She was standard publicity issue, which meant blonde, pretty, and black-lycraed. I intervened. Sandra was used to paying for all her authors. “Lovell,” I said, smiling brilliantly at him, “Kit Lovell.” If Kit was going to be late, he could at least pay for it.

  Sandra and I went and had lunch in the Groucho’s restaurant at two, also on Kit’s bill. Apart from leaving increasingly irritable messages, there really wasn’t any choice. By three when he hadn’t still hadn’t shown up, we went back to the office.

  I didn’t know whether to be annoyed or worried. Kit sounds flighty, but I’ve always found him totally professional. He’d never have got as far as he has if he was as much a butterfly as he pretended. I figure it was a persona he had assumed when he was young, as a cover for insecurity, and now it was second nature. But he’d never stood me up before. If he is going to change his plans, which he does frequently, he always rings, or gets a message to me somehow. In fact, he usually claims that it’s me who does the standing up, a charge I no longer bother to deny, because it gives him such pleasure.

  So where was he? I’d called Miranda, in case he’d thought we were meeting at the office, but she’d said she’d worked at her desk on Breda’s book throughout lunch, and he’d neither rung nor appeared. There wasn’t much I could do. I could hardly start phoning hospitals and the police because someone’s missed a meeting. Even I, with all my mothering instincts toward my authors, know that.

  Mothering. Hell, I hadn’t called my mother back yesterday. My parents had divorced years ago, and my father has a second family in Canada, where we’d spent part of my childhood. He and I are civil, but not close. Helena, on the other hand, lives, in mothering terms, absolutely on my doorstep, or, as she calls it “just around the corner,” in St. John’s
Wood, and we are as close as two people who had lives that are totally incomprehensible to each other can possibly be.

  I don’t really understand how my mother lives her life, much less why. From time to time I consider the possibility that she is really two people, or perhaps a Martian. The Martian scenario usually wins out. My mother has been with the same City law firm forever. She made partner outrageously young, in her twenties. She had shown her fitness early: When she was twenty-two she took three days off work to have me, and has never really let me forget it, mostly by looking amazed whenever I am ill, as if to say, You’re staying home for that? She is at the office by seven every morning, and she never leaves before seven in the evening. So what I can’t work out is how she has also managed to see every play in town, go to concerts and opera regularly, have dinner with friends regularly—even worse, give her own dinner parties regularly—read all the latest novels, see all the latest films. She also walks three miles every morning before work, and has a large and close circle of friends. As I say, two people. Maybe three.

  So when I say she left a message asking me to dinner, I don’t want to give the impression she’s some little old lady waiting only for a visit from her daughter to cast a ray of sunshine into her otherwise desolate existence.

  One of her more irritating characteristics is that I always get her right away on the phone. Dammit, she’s a lawyer. Why do my meetings spread over my days like ectoplasm, but not hers? “Never too busy, darling, to talk to you,” she trills. I’d like to ask why not, but I know the answer. Martian.

  “Sorry not to get back to you yesterday. Nightmare day at the office.”

  She doesn’t have nightmare days, so she didn’t bite. Instead, “I wanted to know, darling, if you’d like to come for dinner tomorrow. There’s that nice judge I wanted you to meet, and possibly those two actors from Chichester.” Mother’s friends are always incredibly glamorous. “That nice judge” is never a part-time magistrate in Slough. He’ll probably turn out to be a Law Lord, or the American Attorney General. The actors from Chichester won’t be two struggling kids just out of drama school, but some Hollywood stars beefing up their credentials by doing a short-run stint in Britain—or, if they are just out of drama school, by the time dessert arrives they’ll have had Steven Spielberg on the phone, begging them to let him direct them in his newest production.

  It’s not that my mother is a starfucker. Everyone genuinely likes her, she genuinely likes them. I like her, too. She’s interested, interesting, good company. I’d go to her dinner parties with pleasure if she’d met me somewhere and asked me. As her daughter, though, I just feel everyone sitting there comparing us all the time. No, not comparing us. I feel them sitting there awed into silent astonishment that we could be even distantly related.

  She moved on. “Have you seen the new show at the Tate? It’s marvelous—do go. But go early, once the reviews come out it will get crowded.”

  “Mmm. I will.” No I won’t. The day after it finishes I’ll finally find time. “And yes, thanks, I’d love to come for dinner. Eight?”

  “Eight thirty. I won’t get home until after eight. I haven’t spoken to you in days. What’s up?”

  “Up? Nothing. The same. You know nothing’s ever up with me.”

  “I do. I’m just not sure why not. You need to get out more.”

  “Mother. I have five manuscripts, all of which have to be read by tomorrow. I can only read after work because I’ve got meetings all afternoon. I’m supposed to have my detailed editorial comments to two authors about their books by tomorrow, and I’ll need to do that after work, too.”

  Silence. She doesn’t understand why I can’t go to a play, then have dinner with friends, then do the work. But she doesn’t want to say so, because she thinks it’s so obvious that there must be something I’m not telling her.

  I gave up. She gave up. We always do. Instead, I changed the subject. “Mother, if I needed to have a really good libel read done, would Selden’s be enough?”

  “Enough for what? Enough to prevent nuisance suits, of course. Enough to stop people who file thinking you’re a big corporation and you’ll give them a few thousand just to make them go away. But enough to stop a serious action? That depends on how they think they’ve been damaged. What’s the book?”

  I began to explain about Kit and Alemán. She cut in after only two sentences. “Your solicitors are a good City firm. Very prestigious. Lots of clout. Their reputation won’t stop this kind of problem for twenty seconds.”

  “Great. I really need to hear this.”

  “You do need to hear it, Sam. This is precisely what you need to hear.”

  “Mother, we just can’t find the money in the budget. It’s the standard publishing story—there’s never any money. We’ve budgeted £1,000, which is what we usually pay Selden’s because we give them all our work, but I assume £1,000 is not what you’re talking about.”

  “It most certainly is not. Being cheap now will only cost you in the end—you know what a libel action, even a small one, can cost. You’re going to have to get the manuscript read by one of the heavy hitters, a firm with a powerful criminal law department as well. There’s no point messing around with companies like mine. We’re great for corporate work, where we are scary, but no one’s going to be worried about us in a question of criminal libel.”

  “Criminal? Libel is a civil action. It’s not criminal, for God’s sake.”

  “It’s civil here, but you’ve got to check the rest of Europe. Your murder victim is Spanish, the incident took place in France, and if the companies involved are Italian—”

  “One is. One is French. The rest are East European.”

  “Well, I’m quite sure that libel is a criminal offense in Italy. And you can libel the dead there, too, so there’s no loophole. I don’t know about Spain and France, much less Eastern Europe, and neither will Selden’s. That’s my point.”

  “What does ‘criminal’ mean in this context?”

  “Criminal, dear, means criminal. You understand English. It means you go to jail.”

  “Me?” I was saying this a lot at the moment, and always in an involuntary falsetto.

  “Well, maybe not you. Maybe just Kit. Or your CEO. Or yes, maybe you as the editor. Depends how the prosecution is worded. Depends how many fish they want to catch. Depends how much trouble they want to cause. Is this something you particularly want to find out?”

  “This is something I never want to find out.”

  “Then hire some heavy hitters. The cost is less than the cost of a jail sentence. And just because my advice is free doesn’t mean it’s not good. It’s legal advice as well as maternal. I’d hate to have to find time to visit you in an Italian jail. I’d hate even more than that dealing with the amount of paperwork it would take to get you moved to an English jail.”

  She’d get me moved, I had no doubt about that. But I’d have to live with an unspoken “I told you so” for the rest of my life. That was more expensive emotionally than finding the money for a second libel read.

  4

  I woke up on Thursday morning with a feeling of low-level dread. It was early—the alarm hadn’t gone off, and it wasn’t yet light, although the dawn chorus outside my window indicated that it soon would be.

  When I’d first moved to this flat the birds woke me every morning. I’d lived beside a main road at university, and cars had roared past for twenty-two and a half hours a day. If I woke in the night and there were only a few cars going past, then I knew without looking at the clock that it was between three and four thirty. That was the only quiet time there was. Silence I never heard at all.

  Then I moved here, and the silence was shattering. I’d never realized how much energy we put into blocking out noise. Here I’m in a tiny dead-end street of only fourteen houses, and the street you turn off to get here is a dead end, too. So there is no through traffic. Anyone who is here is here for a purpose, which apart from the general peace it produces als
o means the street is, for the area, surprisingly safe. I’m becoming one of those snoopy old ladies. If I hear a car, I wonder which neighbor is coming or going, and why at such an odd hour. I’ve managed to control this bizarre curiosity so far, and I don’t actually peer out the window, but I’m close. I figure sooner or later I’ll have to get net curtains specially so that I can twitch them.

  I checked the clock. Six. I didn’t have to be up for an hour. I lay in the dark, contemplating going for a run, which is in theory what I do for exercise. Well, it’s not exactly running. More an exhausted stagger, with periodic downshifts to a shuffle, but I tell myself it’s the effort, not the style, that counts. I do a two-mile circuit, through Primrose Hill, into Regent’s Park, and along the canal. There’s no one around at that time except other runners, all looking irritatingly comfortable, and dog walkers. As I pass the dog walkers, puce-faced with effort, I can see their eyes flicker worriedly, wondering if they can remember what to do for a suspected heart attack. It’s as vivid as if a speech bubble were over their heads.

  If I made an effort, though, I could lie in bed for half an hour, debating the pros and cons of getting up, and by then it would be too late to go. I only do this about half the time, but half the time spent not running is well worth the contempt I feel for myself later. Thinking about the contempt got me up. I peered hopefully out of the window. If it was raining hard, I could go back to bed with a clear conscience. Unfortunately, it was the day that was clear. Damn. Since I’ve been running, I’ve noticed an annoying thing about the weather, which is that a day that is gray and drizzly by seven is usually bright and sunny at six. I don’t know the meteorological reasons for this, but when I’m running I’m absolutely sure it is done to spite me, and I feel like hell the whole time. There are supposed to be endorphins or whatever that make you feel great when you exercise. I don’t think I have any, because I only feel great when I’m lying on the sofa reading a book, possibly while simultaneously eating biscuits. That’s why I work in publishing, not athletics.