by Fiona Walker
Conrad’s press release had unleashed a tidal wave of interest, just as he had predicted. Every broadsheet, tabloid, glossy celebrity magazine and television chat show was clamouring for interviews, big name producers wanted to commission documentaries about Gordon stepping from the shadows of anonymity, there was even talk of Hollywood film rights being sold to the story of the man behind Ptolemy Finch. Everybody involved had an opinion over how it – and Gordon – should be handled from now until the big event to maximise the hype.
What about after the event? Legs asked her Team GL colleagues amid the hyperbole. How can we help him prepare for the exposure and intrusion after so long behind the veil?
Don’t jump ahead, Gordon’s dictatorial editor Wendy Savage snapped back, cc-ing her email to even more people on the evergrowing Team GL list.
After two hours of circular emails, attachments and clashing opinions, Legs was close to meltdown. As well as disregarding Gordon’s mental state totally, the team had no understanding of the way Farcombe worked, and how much resistance they would get if they carried on planning as they were. She struggled to get her point across, but it was a losing battle; she badly needed some backup.
Legs, who had now read Gordon’s ‘sting in the tale’ email so many times she knew it by heart, wasn’t so sure he was in a good place right now, but she felt she couldn’t betray his confidence, not even to Conrad.
She composed another email: Your message about the Emperor’s New Clothes has made me think, cry, laugh and worry about you too many times to count. I can’t tell you how much difference it’s made to my personal life. I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart, and reassure you that I’m your emissary, ally, research assistant and trainee Julie Ocean whenever you need me.
Farcombe is a good place and a safe place. I have taken my clothes off there many times and may well do so again. If one is going to strip bare, it’s a great spot. You will be brilliant. You are brilliant. I will be there for you. A.
P.s. Just look out for the gorse bushes.
Unable to send it direct, she went for broke and directed it to Kelly with an urgent tag. As soon as it went, she regretted the p.s.
He made no reply. Nor, by four, was there any direct word from Kelly. Conrad still wasn’t back from his lunch. But Legs couldn’t wait any longer to hurl herself across London to fetch enough evidence to liberate the shiny silver Honda.
At seven o’clock that evening, Tolly was free and legally permitted to stay in the Ealing street on which it was parked. The Farcombe seagull droppings still tattooed on its roof had now been joined by a Jackson Pollock abstract of pigeon poo gunshot. It was a hot, airless evening that smelled of dust and exhaust fumes, thunder rumbling in the far distance. The stormy heat wave looked set to stay all week.
Legs let herself into her flat. All was silent overhead. It was choir practice night; Ros and Nico were at the cathedral.
Francis had sent an ominous text: Say the word. ILY.P.s. Please do not mention your love of your car again before our Friday deadline. I may be forced to rethink.
Was he going to take Tolly back again? She wondered. If so, what had he done with her old red banger of which he denied all knowledge?
Her throat was aching and her head pounding. She couldn’t face running that evening.
Instead, she looked through several new manuscripts picked up from her desk today that had been marked up by the agency’s readers as worth Conrad’s attention. In the first, the corpse of a High Court judge was found floating in the Thames with a key crammed up each nostril; in the second, three schoolgirls kept prisoner in a cellar were drained of blood, and the third was the most gruesome of all, detailing the slow mental deterioration of a ripper who kept all his conquests piled up and rotting in a remote lock up. None had anything unique or compelling about the prose style, although they were better written than most submissions. All three left her with an aching back and a fear of humankind. How could anybody trust anybody else these days? She wondered, marking the third for Conrad’s attention, knowing he would love the potential of a television tie-in; drama producers couldn’t get enough mass murder and mental breakdown these days. Reading them all had served to remind her how exceptional the Delia Meare script was. She wished she’d brought it back with her tonight instead of plonking it in the middle of Conrad’s desk like a guilty love token.
She took a long candlelit bath in her little tub. Her involuntary thoughts drifted to Byrne as she pushed her toes up the taps, unable to stop herself wondering how he was getting on. She hoped he and Poppy could get closer. Both were such difficult buggers, hiding behind defence shields as high as cirrocumulus, yet desperate to be understood. If he had only a little time left, he deserved to break through her grand monologues to the real truth.
‘Coat of Many Colours’ started playing on the radio, crackling like mad because the batteries needed changing. She sank beneath the bubbles for a moment as she remembered singing it off key the night she’d told Byrne so many of her secrets.
Before she knew it, she was having an imaginary conversation with him, asking about his childhood and his illness, offering friendship and support. By the time the bubbles had all popped and the bathwater had gone lukewarm, they were firm allies.
She certainly needed allies right now, even imaginary ones.
Her iPhone started ringing with ‘I’m a Believer’, Conrad’s designated tone.
Dripping water everywhere, she located it on the bed.
‘Have you read your emails?’ He demanded, launch party still raging in the background.
‘Not for an hour or two.’ She found herself wondering what finger food and drink they served at the Hansel and Gretel Diet book launch. Chicken bones and water?
‘Read it. Deal with it. We’ll have a breakfast meeting at my desk at eight tomorrow. Don’t be late.’
Not bothering to wait for her laptop to boot, she looked at her emails on the iPhone. Team GL had spent a busy evening forwarding attachments and cc-ing them to even more people. Gordon himself had replied to nothing, but Kelly had sent a collective message.
Dear all,
Gordon asks that Allegra North no longer works on his behalf and ceases all involvement with his forthcoming appearance at Farcombe Festival without further notice.
Kind regards,
Kelly
Legs felt the bathwater dripping down her body turn to ice as she sat down heavily on the bed.
Hands shaking, she started composing a reply and then remembered he had blocked all incoming mail. She went on to direct messaging instead. Gordon was online.
May I ask why you want me removed from the project? She addressed him as stiffly as if she was writing a formal letter. Was it my email this afternoon? If I have been impertinent then I can only apologise wholeheartedly and beg your forgiveness. I would really appreciate your time in letting me know why this has happened. With kind regards and concern, Allegra.
Gordon Lapis went immediately offline.
He sent an email in the early hours. She was still awake, lying in bed with the covers kicked off because it was so hot and close. Reading the last chapters of Ptolemy Finch and the Topaz Eagle, she’d just reached such an exciting cliffhanger that her phone’s message alert beep made her scream out loud.
My dear Allegra,
You may be the only one of the lot of them who seems to understand me, but right now I do not require understanding; I require action. You do not act very well.
Your friend,
GL.
P.s. Be careful in what you say to Delia Meare; she has once again flooded my inbox; I have reinforced my firewall and changed my email. I advise caution for all her writing brilliance.
She heaved a deep, infuriated sigh, deciding she didn’t like the Mad Hatter very much at all when he was in this mood. She wasn’t going to waste her bedtime wishes on him tonight. When she closed her eyes to try to sleep, however, a face was waiting beneath her lids, a curious composite made up of
Francis, Conrad, her imaginary Ptolemy Finch, and even Byrne, those furnace eyes full of disapproval. It wasn’t a face to be ignored.
She clicked on the light and groped for her phone to reply.
Sleep tight.
Sleep tight, was returned in a less than a breath.
Chapter 25
The breakfast crisis meeting with Conrad was stickier than the melting Danish pastries that went untouched on the plate in front of them. He was wholly unimpressed by Legs’ explanation that Gordon thought she acted too badly to stay on Team GL.
‘This isn’t an amateur production of Pygmalion,’ he stormed. ‘It hardly matters that you’re insincere if you get the job done.’
‘I am not insincere!’ She was highly affronted.
Conrad waved her protests away. ‘Gordon calls the shots and that means he can call you any name he likes. He’s just being bellicose. He needs you. Let’s find a solution.’
‘I can hardly beg him to change his mind,’ she rationalised.
He wiped his sweating forehead with a handkerchief that had ‘World’s Best Dad’ written on it. ‘This means I am going to have to take on the entire mantle of protecting his interests,’ he said furiously, far more worried about his time commitments than Gordon’s wellbeing.
They both knew Conrad needed her as much as Gordon. He’d shifted so much of the Lapis workload across to her in recent months that he’d lost interest as well as control. Gordon’s eccentricity and lack of ambition irritated him. Looking after the Ptolemy Finch brand was a full-time job in itself, especially right now with the launch of a new book imminent, then Farcombe Festival’s key event and the surrounding media furore following straight on. Conrad was a risk-taker who liked breaking new names and making new deals, not mollycoddling demanding authors. In the same way that he’d presented Legs like a treat to his most lecherous client that first lunch he’d taken her on, he had handed her to his bestselling client as a pacifier. Now that Gordon had spat out the dummy and was throwing his toys out of the pram, Conrad was at a loss.
Looking at him now, Legs felt a wave of regret that all her fantasies of sharing power coupledom with one of publishing’s most fêted mavericks had come to so little. She was, after all, still just a lover he assigned to weekday nights and lunchtimes in hotel rooms, a corporate freebie he used to best advantage. But she wanted to help Gordon, her loyalty guaranteed for evenings, weekends and sleepless nights. Gordon inspired devotion, even among the newly fired.
‘I’ll work in the background,’ she suggested, fanning herself with her notepad because she was so hot. Not thinking, she pulled forward her dress neckline and blew down into it to try to cool her sweat-slicked chest. Then she saw Conrad’s eyes harden in that hypnotic, sexual way which told her he was no longer thinking about Gordon.
‘No melting into the background in that outfit,’ he growled, admiring another of her Browns dresses, this one asymmetric sunflower yellow jersey, clinging softly to all the right places.
‘Just melting.’ She fanned herself faster. It was a sweltering day. The air conditioning in the office was on the blink. She wished she hadn’t worn the dress, which was having an effect on Conrad that she found she no longer desired.
‘My splash pool is wonderfully cool,’ he promised, then called the meeting to a halt by asking her to book their usual table at Chez Bruce that evening, after which he promised a very long, very thorough seduction.
Legs smiled weakly, the feeling of dread mounting.
‘Meanwhile, I want you to go through the Cuthbert the Cat contract queries with Olga and Eric,’ he smiled wickedly. ‘That should leave you plenty of time to be on hand to help me get up to speed with the Gordon projects.’
Legs groaned. Olga Jones, creator of the world-famous Cuthbert books, was a lovely German illustrator and cat-enthusiast married to retired accountant Eric, who’d now made it his full-time hobby to manage his wife’s business affairs from home. As the most pedantic man in England, he was monstrously time-consuming to deal with. In recent years, he’d at least embraced email which had cut down on the three-hour phone conversations, but he was no less nit-picking. Olga, who trusted him implicitly, would not do a thing without his say-so and the new contract, which should have been signed months ago, was still being amended almost daily. This week, Eric had read a book on intellectual copyright. The result was a barrage of messages.
While Legs worked her way through the first of Eric’s most recent twenty emails, Conrad began tackling Gordon and the agency’s interests leading up to next week’s launch of Ptolemy Finch and the Raven’s Curse followed by the Farcombe appearance.
A new Gordon launch was always huge, involving so much global communication and massive secrecy that it was exhausting to orchestrate. Protecting copyright was paramount. No printed copies could be allowed out of the warehouses until the last moment, and all those were guarded by hired-in security teams. The midnight bookshop launches, synchronised to GMT and held simultaneously across the globe, were a military offensive. The ebook would be released a week later.
But artwork for the exclusive collector’s edition had been rushed back to the illustrator when it was spotted that Ptolemy looked like he had a hard-on from certain angles. Meanwhile Gordon was laying down more codicils about Farcombe, mostly about increasing security and limiting the media, the detail of which curiously seemed to revolve around protecting the Protheroe family.
‘That’s so generous of him.’ Legs was moved by his forethought as the tiny, family-run festival faced a tidal wave of his fans, most sane but a few certifiable.
‘It’s bloody inconvenient of him!’ Conrad raged. ‘I’ve got far too much on my plate already!’
He consequently spent all morning thrusting his head out of his office door and bellowing ‘Legs!’ as he demanded that she both brief him and run errands, Frau Whiplash meets whipping boy with no coffee or loo breaks. The more hectic the task, the more apoplectic he grew, taking it out on her first and others second. By the time he set off for a client lunch, he’d argued with almost everyone on Team GL, including Gordon.
‘The man is maddening!’ he raged. ‘He’s refusing all interviews, and insists his first appearance can’t be televised, which buggers up the Farcombe sponsorship with EuroArts TV. He’s just called me a “media pimp”.’
‘He’s Gordon Lapis,’ Legs said soothingly. ‘He calls the shots and the names, remember.’
Conrad and his BlackBerry stormed off to hail a taxi on Piccadilly.
Legs returned to her Eric Jones emails. In the time it had taken her to reply to his first ten, he’d sent fifteen more. She wished she could get IT to block his emails like they’d done with Delia Meare.
Feeling guilty about Delia, who she now saw as Gordon’s protégée, she wrote her an old-fashioned letter, a very rare event in Fellows Howlett’s offices these days. In it she explained that she was personally very excited by her writing, which was boundary-breaking in this ultra-cynical era when so many readers were impervious to shock. She went on to say that Delia’s enthusiastic submission approach was to her credit; tenacious and original material could help make an agent live and feel the book. But she then gently advised that the same follow-up might not work for Conrad. Satisfied that she’d got her point across and spread some cheer, she threw it in the pile for the afternoon post and sagged back at her desk, wiped out by the humidity.
Throughout the afternoon, she got hotter and hotter. Her head was pounding again. By five-thirty, she was pouring with sweat, the yellow dress now glued to her skin.
Conrad kept forwarding Team GL messages from his BlackBerry for her to deal with, telling her to pretend to be him. He wasn’t returning to the office after lunch, he explained; he’d see her later at the restaurant for a ‘debrief’.
Working through the messages, Legs wasn’t sure she could face being debriefed by Conrad twice in one week. She was trying not to resent the fact that he was probably at his club or the gym right now, avoiding
the Gordon issue while indulging in what he would call ‘networking’ and she would call ‘skiving’.
Legs needed to go home and shower before heading across the river with her overnight bag. The thought of a huge meal and a sexual marathon with Conrad exhausted her. She knew she had to address her doubts, and even though she felt too drained to know where to start, she was determined to tackle the situation with maturity and in privacy before another day dawned.
But when Legs got back to Ealing, Ros was out of the upper entrance like a shot. ‘There’s someone been waiting here to see you since five,’ she hissed. ‘You really must explain to your friends that I can’t abide dogs in the house.’ For a strange, illogical moment Legs imagined Byrne and Fink the basset calling by. But Ros quickly shattered the illusion. ‘She’s in the garden looking suicidal. You must get rid of her soon; I have my embroidery ladies coming at six-thirty.’
Thinking longingly of her shower, Legs headed through the side gate.
Sitting on Nico’s old swing was what she first took to be a teenage girl. Dressed in baggy shorts, her hair scraped back beneath a green cotton bandana and thin freckled legs dangling down to scuffed trainers, she cut a pathetically frail figure.
Then Legs spotted a terrier in a matching bandana cocking a wonky leg on her sister’s begonias and realised its owner was Kizzy de la Mere.
As soon as Kizzy saw Legs, she burst into tears.
‘I’m so sorry to come unannounced, but I have to talk to you!’ she sobbed.
Legs could see her sister glaring at them through the kitchen windows.
Feeling like a large sweaty banana in her yellow dress, she led the waif-like Kizzy to the bench behind the apple tree, out of sight of the house. It was a relief to know she was alive, at least, and hadn’t swum out to sea the night she disappeared, or been bumped off in a dastardly Protheroe conspiracy. She tried not to look at her watch too obviously.
‘I’ve been going demented with worry,’ Kizzy wailed. ‘Francis won’t s-speak to me or tell me what’s g-going on.’