Conferences are Murder

by Val McDermid

Lindsay tried out various responses in her head. “When?” “Why?” “I never liked her anyway.” “Is there . . . someone else?” She settled for, “Oh, Ian. Poor you. What happened?” It seemed to combine solicitude with support. Please God, he wouldn’t feel like telling her.

  At first, it seemed as if Lindsay’s prayer had been answered. Ian said nothing, simply concentrating on the road and the car in front. They started moving again, and, miraculously, whatever had been clogging the traffic vanished. Within minutes, the engine was in third gear, the tower was growing taller and Ian had become talkative. “You know how you think you know someone? You feel comfortable with them? You could see yourself spending the rest of your life with them? Well, that’s how it was with me and Laura,” he said.

  And me and Frances, Lindsay echoed mentally. “You seemed to get on so well together,” she said.

  Ian gave a hollow laugh. “Just shows how blind you can be, doesn’t it? What a mug.” He took a deep breath, then broke into a fit of coughing. As he recovered, his hand went out automatically to the glove box. He opened it and took out a blue plastic tube with an angled end which he put in his mouth. Lindsay tried not to look as if she was paying attention as he used the inhaler and chucked it back in the glove box.

  “Is my cigarette bothering you?” she asked.

  Ian shook his head, holding his breath. He let the air out in a controlled gasp. “Cigarette smoke doesn’t set my asthma off. Now, if you were wearing Rive Gauche or you had a dog at home, I’d have to strap you to the roof-rack. Poor Laura could never treat herself to a new perfume without consulting me first. Oh well, that’s one thing she won’t have to worry about any more.”

  The bitterness in his tone shocked Lindsay. It seemed so alien from Ian, that most gentle of men. It was hard to square with the devoted adoration he’d always displayed when he’d talked about Laura in the past. He was one of those men who carry photographs of their lovers and find the most tenuous excuses to pull them out of their wallets and display them. Long before she’d ever met Laura in the flesh, Lindsay had seen Laura in Greece, Laura in Scotland, Laura on horseback, Laura in a sailing dinghy, Laura in evening dress and Laura asleep.

  “When did all this happen? You haven’t mentioned it at work,” Lindsay said.

  “I could do without the snide jokes. Worse than that, the pity,” Ian said. He wasn’t misjudging their colleagues, Lindsay thought sadly. “I threw her out three weeks ago last Saturday,” he added.

  He threw her out. It took a moment for Lindsay to grasp what Ian had said. Given his devotion, it could only mean Laura had been seeing someone else and Ian had found out. With her looks, and the force of her personality, she couldn’t have been short of other offers. And although you’d go a long way before you found a kinder man than Ian, not even his own mother would have described his sharp features, beaky nose and long, skinny body as handsome. Lindsay had occasionally wondered what had attracted them to each other in the first place. Laura Craig was a woman who liked beautiful things, if her clothes and jewelry were anything to go by. But Ian wasn’t given to superficial judgements so Lindsay had always thought that must mean that there was more to Laura than the stylish, hard-edged exterior she presented to the world. She flicked a sidelong glance at Ian. His mouth was clamped shut, his lips a thin line. Clearly, he didn’t want to dissect what had happened. Lindsay breathed a silent sigh of relief. The sordid details of Laura’s infidelity she could do without.

  The car had slowed again as they reached the center of the town. The pavements were thronged with day-trippers, enjoying the brief moments of sunshine that escaped from the drift of cloud. Like any British Bank Holiday crowd, people were dressed for extremes. It was either cap-sleeved T-shirts or macs as far as the eye could see.

  “The street map’s in the glove box,” Ian told her as they emerged on the Golden Mile in all its tacky glory. Ian turned north, the tram-lines and the sea wall to the left, the endless string of cheap hotels, amusement arcades, Gifte Shoppes, pubs and fast food outlets to their right.

  Lindsay studied the photostat sheet that had been enclosed in their delegates’ fact pack. Efficient as ever, Ian had marked the Princess Alice hotel with a red cross. Lindsay checked the name of the next side street they passed.

  “About another mile to go, I’d say,” she estimated. The Golden Mile’s attractions petered out, giving way to more hotels, boarding houses, and bed and breakfast establishments. “There it is,” Lindsay said at last, pointing to a huge red brick edifice whose five storeys looked forbiddingly over the gray Irish Sea. “It looks more like a Victorian asylum than a hotel.”

  “Couldn’t be more appropriate for a JU conference, as you’ll discover soon enough,” Ian replied. “And as you’ve probably noticed from the map, it’s conveniently situated only two miles from the conference center itself. Bloody hell,” he exclaimed as he pulled off the road onto the forecourt. “They weren’t joking when they said there was limited car parking, were they?” The whole area in front of the hotel was asphalted over to provide spaces for cars, but it had clearly never been a majestic sweep of lawn to start with. Ian inched forward, looking for a space.

  “Over there. Right by the wall, look, someone’s pulling out,” Lindsay said. Ian shot forward and squeezed his Ford Escort into the narrow gap.

  “Well spotted,” he said, opening his door and getting out. He raised his arms in a long stretch and yawned. Then he opened his eyes and froze. “Jesus Christ. What the hell is she playing at?” he whispered.

  Lindsay turned to look at the woman who had caught his eye. Laura Craig strode up the short drive of the hotel, wavy brown hair lacquered solid against the whipping westerly wind. But Laura wasn’t alone.

  2

  “Delegates are reminded that their duty is to follow debates and cast votes on behalf of their members. However appealing the bars, cafés, fringe meetings, gossip sessions and members of your gender of choice, the conference hall is where you should be. We know it can be boring; we even know of delegates who prefer hanging around at Standing Orders Sub-Committee rather than staying in the hall. In the interests of preserving your SOS members’ sanity, please do not attend our sessions unless you are entitled to a voice [see S05(b)(ii) and Footnote xiv]. Flattered though we are to be the centre of delegates’ attention, this does not help the smooth flow of conference order papers!”

  from “Advice for New Delegates”, a Standing Orders Sub-Committee booklet.

  Lindsay sighed. In spite of sitting up past midnight plowing through the final conference agenda, with all its proposed amendments, she still hadn’t a clue what this discussion was about. She was sitting on the margin of a group of a dozen delegates arguing with Brian Robinson, the Standing Orders Sub-Committee member responsible for preparing the industrial relations order-paper.

  As Brian wiped his perspiring pink face with a flamboyant silk handkerchief, Ian leaned over and said quietly to Lindsay, “With it so far?”

  “Not really,” she admitted. “What exactly are they arguing about?”

  “Manchester Branch and Darlington Branch have both submitted motions on the same broad topic, and Brian wants to amalgamate them into one composite motion. Now they’re each arguing about what they think their motion really said. Brian has to make sure they end up with something that includes all of the key points in the two original motions, without incorporating anything that wasn’t there to start with.”

  Lindsay shook her head. “I can’t believe grown-ups think this is a reasonable way to spend their time,” she muttered. “It’s like an Oxford tutorial without the relevance to real life.” She tried to concentrate on the obscure negotiation that continued like some quaint ritual dance whose meaning was lost in the sands of time. But it was no use. There wasn’t enough meat in the argument to occupy her mind, and her grief kept butting in like an anarchist at the trooping the color. After another half hour, she leaned towards Ian and muttered, “I’m going to get some air.”

&n
bsp; She emerged into the foyer of the Winter Gardens with a sense of relief. The large committee room had begun to feel unreasonably oppressive. Oblivious to her surroundings, she wandered down towards the stands of the assorted pressure groups who had rented space for the conference. She didn’t notice the chipped tiling on the walls, the scruffy paintwork or the garish posters for the forthcoming summer attractions. She paused long enough to buy an enamelled metal badge proclaiming “Lesbians and Gay Men Support the Miners” before walking back into the stuffy hall to rejoin her colleagues.

  No one glanced at her as she slipped into her seat. Only five others of the twelve-strong delegation from her branch were at the table. One of them was fast asleep, head pillowed on his arms. Another two were reading the morning papers. That left two who actually seemed to be following the debate. Lindsay shook her head. For weeks, every chapel meeting had been dominated by the impending annual conference. They had discussed their attitudes to motions, the importance of driving through certain policies, the crucial impact of decisions taken here in Blackpool. She’d spent the first morning taking notes on the debates and the results of the votes, until she had realized that she couldn’t see another soul in the hall doing anything with a pen except the Telegraph crossword. She could only assume that the real politicking was going on elsewhere, perhaps in those tight huddles that seemed to spring up all over the place every quarter of an hour or so. As she looked around, Lindsay spotted one of her own delegation coming away from a group clustered around the platform.

  Lindsay watched Siobhan Carter, a feature writer on the Sunday Trumpet, weave through the delegation tables and wondered how long it would be before she understood what the hell was going on around her. Siobhan seemed to fit in perfectly, yet it was only her second time at conference. She flopped into the seat next to Lindsay and fanned herself with an order-paper.

  “Whew! It might only be the second day of conference, but there’s already enough scandal going the rounds to keep a clutch of gossip columnists going for a month.”

  “Is that what you’ve been doing? Gossiping?” Lindsay asked.

  Ignoring the note of censure in her voice, Siobhan giggled. “What else? You surely don’t expect me to listen to this boring load of crap?”

  “I thought that’s what we were here for,” Lindsay said.

  “What? To die of boredom listening to some obscure, incomprehensible motion that’s only relevant to television journalists in the Republic of Ireland? No way! Listen, Linds, you stick with me. I’ll keep you on track. I’ll tell you when you need to be listening, okay? Trust me. I once screwed a doctor!”

  Lindsay looked dubious. “I don’t know, I feel guilty if I don’t get involved.”

  “Fine. Get involved. But stick to the stuff that’s got something to do with you. I mean, tell me the truth. Did you enjoy SOS?”

  Lindsay pulled a face. “Enjoy. Now, there’s a word. You’d need to have a mind more twisted than a corkscrew to get off on Standing Orders. I had to get out before my brain blew a fuse.”

  “Exactly. You’re getting the idea. And you missed a wonderful bit of goss while you were gone,” Siobhan said eagerly, completely ignoring the passionate debate on the platform about whether the union’s perennially troubled finances could stretch to a major publicity campaign in Eire. Siobhan wasn’t the only one, Lindsay realized, glancing round the hall. She reckoned that less than ten percent of the delegates even knew which motion was under discussion. Why should she join yet another minority group?

  “Tell me,” she asked, putting Siobhan out of her obvious misery. “What have I missed?”

  “You know Jess, don’t you? Jess Nimmo, from Magazine Branch?”

  “How could I not?” Lindsay said with feeling, recalling the braying upper-class voice that had dominated every meeting of the JU Women’s Caucus that she’d ever attended. “She thinks consensus is a head count the government takes every ten years.”

  “And you know Rory Finlayson, the Glasgow Broadcasting Branch heart-throb?” Lindsay nodded. Everyone knew ITN’s Scottish correspondent, who gazed lovingly out of their TV screens several times a week on News At Ten. It was obvious to anyone who had ever encountered Rory in the flesh that his biggest fan was himself.

  “Well, Jess has been trying to get into Rory’s knickers for a million years now, just like half the other women in the country. And in spite of throwing herself under his feet at every available opportunity, she’d never managed to get him to pay her the slightest bit of attention.”

  “I suppose she’s no competition if there’s a mirror around.”

  Siobhan giggled. “Nice one. Anyway, last night, she finally cracked it. They left the bar together about one, and they were last seen canoodling in the lift. End of scene one. Scene two. About half an hour later, Paul wakes up to the sound of someone banging on his door.” Siobhan gestured with her head in the direction of their delegation leader, branch chairman Paul Horne, the thirtysomething social policy editor of The Watchman, who was one of the handful absorbed in the debate.

  “So he gets up and opens the door,” Siobhan paused for effect.

  “Yeah?” Lindsay urged her.

  “And there, wearing nothing but a parka, is Jess. ‘I went for a pee and now I can’t remember what room Rory’s in,’ she wails and marches past Paul into his room. He’s completely bewildered by this apparition and by the time he gets his head together and follows her into the room, she’s helped herself to his bed, the parka’s on the floor and she’s telling him he’s got the choice of climbing in beside her or finding Rory.”

  Lindsay’s mouth fell open. “You’re kidding!”

  “It gets better, believe me. It turns out she’s not even had a legover with the man of her dreams so she’s in an absolutely filthy mood. Poor Paul ends up getting dressed, going down to reception, finding out what room Rory’s in, trekking back up there and knocking on Rory’s door. Rory, of course, is spark out in a drunken stupor by this time, so he doesn’t answer his door. And by the time Paul gets back to his room, Jess is comatose in his bed. He can’t even go and take over Jess’s room because, of course, her keys are in her handbag in Rory’s room. So poor old Paul ends up spending the night in his armchair while Jess snores in his bed.”

  “She doesn’t snore, does she?” Lindsay asked, glancing over at the Magazine Branch table where Jess sat, immaculate in a sweater so baggy and shapeless it had to have a designer label, black leggings and ankle boots. “I bet she’s even more pissed off about people knowing that than she is about missing a legover with the fabulous Finlayson.”

  Siobhan giggled again. Lindsay had a feeling she was going to become very fed up of that giggle by the end of the week. “You’re not kidding. By the way, how’s Ian? Has he recovered from discovering the new love of Laura’s life?”

  While she enjoyed the sharp savour of gossip about people she either disliked or knew only by reputation, Lindsay was less keen to dissect the private life of a friend as close as Ian. “He seems fine,” she said stiffly.

  Either Siobhan didn’t notice, or else she was in investigative journalist mode. “He must have been pretty demoralized to find he’d been replaced by a golden retriever. I thought at first it must be a guide dog. I mean, there must have been something wrong with her eyesight, fancying Ian enough to have lived with him all these years.”

  “That’s the trouble with you feature writers,” Lindsay said. “You’re all so superficial. Image, image, image, that’s all that excites you. It takes a news reporter to penetrate below the surface and discover the truth.” It was an old argument, but none the less attractive. It had the advantage of shifting the conversation away from Ian, and it kept the two women occupied until the end of the order-paper.

  “Coming for a drink?” Siobhan asked as they shuffled their papers together.

  “Tom Jack’s speaking at a fringe meeting,” Lindsay replied, thinking that answered the question.

  Siobhan looked horrified, then her f
ace relaxed into a grin. “I keep forgetting it’s your first time,” she said patronizingly. “I bet you still think fringe meetings are a vital part of conference business.”

  “They aren’t?”

  “They’re a distraction from the serious business of drinking and socializing,” Siobhan told her. “Come on, let’s go and have a hair of the dog. Whoops, remind me not to say that to Ian!” She giggled.

  “Thanks, but no thanks. He’s talking about how workforces cope when they get bought up by media buccaneers. Since we’re still reeling from being taken over by Carnegie Wilson, I feel obliged to go and see what Union Jack’s got to say for himself. God knows, he’s said little enough at the meetings in the office.”

  Siobhan winked. “Say no more. I can read between the lines. You want to find out what he’s not been telling you guys, then you can slip a banana skin under the sexist pig at your next meeting.”

  Before Lindsay could deny it, Siobhan had slipped away. With a sigh, Lindsay headed for the committee room. She still felt she had a duty to the colleagues she was supposed to represent. Like the rest of them, Lindsay was worried about her future following their recent invasion by the New Zealand media tycoon. As well as being the senior JU official at Nation Newspapers, Union Jack headed the loose federation of the seven different unions represented there. If anyone could speak from experience about the implications of take-overs, it was him.

  The meeting had attracted a large crowd, unlike the previous lunchtime’s meeting where six women had gathered to hear a talk on “Media Language and Gender Bias.” Not surprisingly, more journalists were concerned about potential damage to their pay packets than about the pursuit of equality. By the time Lindsay arrived, all the seats in the small committee room were taken. She slipped down the side of the room and leaned against the wall near the front. Union Jack leaned against the edge of a table facing the room. Shanti Gupta, one of the two candidates running for JU vice-president, was already introducing the meeting, her strong voice rising above the desultory chatter of the audience.