by John Harvey
His back was aching from sitting in the same position too long and his eyes blurry from staring at the screen. By some small miracle, Margaret Hamblin’s assistant was able to put him through right away.
“A favor, Margaret …”
“Name it.”
“That whiz kid of yours who can track down absolutely anything on the internet from a window seat in Starbucks . . .”
In only a little more time than it would take to down and digest a large Caramel Cocoa Cluster Frappuccino with layers of graham cracker crumble, the results were spooling on to Kiley’s computer. Hiding behind a plethora of names, none even close to his own, it seemed that between 1957 and 1989 Christopher LeStrange had published no less than sixteen westerns, three science fiction tales, four travel books, two crime novels and fifteen stories, each sixty-four pages long, in the Sexton Blake Library. Born in 1935, three years after his brother, Christopher had died in 2015 at the age of eighty.
Kiley took a walk around the block to digest the news. The fact that Pierce had been close—one relative away—to a productive writer of pulp fiction meant little or nothing on its own. In the corner shop, he bought one newspaper and glanced through several others. Only two seemed to have picked up on the story of the distinguished poet’s disreputable literary past, though both emphasized the potentially large sums the newly discovered manuscript might fetch on the specialist collectors’ market.
Back indoors, Kiley tried calling Daniel Pike’s number but the line seemed to be permanently engaged. Confronting Alexandra Pierce without anything more to brace her would earn him little more than a look as disdainful as Susan Fisher’s Siamese and a bored So What?
What was needed was another angle of attack.
Another crack in Alexandra’s story.
The next two hours were spent on the phone, laptop open, calling every plumber and handy man within a fifteen mile radius of St. Just. Penzance to Land’s End. He was on the point of giving up when he finally tracked down the man who had been out, twice, to Miller’s Cottage in the preceding three months. Yes, there’d been a leak. Yes, the header tank. The loft. No memory of anything up there being found, taken back down. Nothing wrapped in sacking; no kind of container, large or small. Was he sure? Course he was bloody sure.
So, now, was Kiley.
More or less.
A further call to Daniel Pike proved as fruitless as before.
Time to tackle Alexandra herself.
Early evening: the light just beginning to fade. Shadows deepening across the park. Many of the windows in the mansion block were already illuminated, some with their blinds partly closed. A couple were leaving as Kiley arrived and with a brisk word of thanks he stepped inside and crossed the tiled lobby to the lift.
The door to Alexandra’s apartment was ajar.
Voices raised inside.
And then a scream.
Alexandra was crouching at the far side of the room, one arm raised as if to ward off danger, her face pale against the blue of the wall. Kiley took one cautious step towards her, then another, and her eyes flinched, staring past him, past his shoulder, Kiley turning just in time to avoid the blow aimed at the back of his head and swiveling smartly away.
He was tall, around Kiley’s height, and heavier, but slow, out of condition. Kiley hit him twice in the body and he stumbled back then charged, head down, arms flailing. At the last moment, Kiley stepped aside and stuck out a leg, the impetus sending his attacker headlong into a low table, then somersaulting to the floor.
When he pushed himself up onto his hands and knees, there was blood seeping from a cut above his right eye and he was breathing heavily.
“Fuck this for a game of soldiers,” he said.
Kiley helped him to his feet.
“You know this bastard?” Alexandra said, moving warily away from the wall.
“Not exactly.”
“Steven LeStrange …”
“Jack Kiley.”
They shook hands. Alexandra muttered something coarse beneath her breath and turned away.
Some twenty minutes later, the room set to rights, a plaster rather clumsily in place over LeStrange’s eye, the two men sat facing one another while Alexandra, having changed and repaired her face, uncorked a bottle of wine.
“I’m finding this,” she said, “all a little hard to believe. One minute this oaf is calling me a mercenary bitch and threatening to kill me, the next I’m pouring him a glass of half-way decent Merlot.”
“I didn’t mean it,” LeStrange said. “The killing you part.”
“That wasn’t how it seemed at the time.”
“Well, I’m sorry, okay? But you’ve got to admit …”
“Admit what?”
“You stitched me up. Lied to your hind teeth.”
Alexandra shrugged.
“He does have a point,” Kiley said.
“And which point is that?”
“As I understand it, when Steven was going through his father’s things …”
“A nightmare. Copies of everything he’d ever written, not in any sort of order at all.”
“… he came across the manuscript of Dead Dames Don’t Sing.”
“That’s right. Along with several others which, for whatever reason, had never been published. Some with publishers’ rejection letters, some not. But this particular manuscript had a letter that made clear it was written at your father’s request. Paid for and commissioned by him and based upon his own outline, which was attached. My father delivered a first draft which your father read through, adding suggestions for some small changes before sending it back. Before those revisions could be made, for whatever reason, your father must have changed his mind about any possible publication. There was no second draft.”
Alexandra angled her face away.
“I showed you your father’s letter,” LeStrange continued, “when I first got in touch, wondering if the manuscript would have any particular value. And you said you thought probably not, though there was a faint chance it might be of interest to a Ph.D. student somewhere researching your father’s early work. Find the right person, you said, it might fetch as much as six or seven hundred pounds. Leave it with me and I’ll use my contacts, ask around. Better still, why don’t I just take it off your hands? And for the manuscript and the letter, you offered me five hundred pounds.”
“Which you accepted.”
“In good faith. While you thought you’d find a way to make a great deal more.”
Alexandra shrugged. “If you were gullible, that’s not exactly my fault, is it?”
“You lied.”
“That’s not a crime.”
“Maybe not,” Kiley said, “but I suspect the kind of misrepresentation you were guilty of foisting on Daniel Pike might well be.”
“Daniel believed what he wanted to believe.”
“If you’d shown him the letter as well as the manuscript, he wouldn’t have been able to, would he? You’ve still got it, I suppose?”
“What if I’ve burned it?”
“Then,” LeStrange said, “I’ve a photo copy and another scanned into the computer. Perhaps I’m not quite as gullible as you took me for.”
Alexandra went into the bedroom and came back with a plain A3 envelope, the letter inside.
‘Take it. And get out of my house, the pair of you. If I never see either of you again, it won’t be too soon.”
Like most stories that
begin with once upon a time, this particular story has a happy ending. For some, at least. Daniel Pike withdrew the advertised manuscript of Dead Dames Don’t Sing from private sale in sufficient time to keep his customers onside and avoid his integrity being besmirched. Kate contrived, some convenient time later, to place a lengthy article in the Guardian’s Saturday Review, in which she referred to the confusion over the novel’s authorship as a footnote to the careers of two talented brothers, both of whose work had blossomed in the heady world of 1950s bohemian Soho, the screenwriter and producer Anthony LeStrange and his brother, Christopher, a hitherto unremarked and under-appreciated writer of popular fiction.
As a consequence of this and several related pieces, a short retrospective of films written by Anthony LeStrange were shown at the British Film Institute’s South Bank cinema and Daniel Pike was able to sell the manuscript of Christopher’s unpublished novel, Dead Dames Don’t Sing, for a four figure sum.
Frederica Pierce’s novel, An Inner Life, was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and there were rumors that the movie rights had been bought by Nicole Kidman. Her sister, Alexandra, set her camera aside, temporarily, in favor of a return to modeling and was seen at London Fashion Week in the company of Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss.
As for Kiley, after some scrabbling around, he found an affordable studio apartment in the nether regions of Kentish Town, the building sandwiched between a hardware store and a tattoo parlor. Having given Kate a spare set of keys, ever hopeful he might come home one day and find her expectantly awaiting his arrival, he found instead, one grim late afternoon in November, that she had been and gone, leaving behind one of Arthur Neal’s paintings, the one she had bought that day in Deal, a semi-abstract landscape—rich reds, dark blues and lustrous greens, all leaning, one against the other—that gladdened his heart and banished, for a time at least, all thought of the surrounding misery and gloom.
So Nice to Come Home To.
He had that Chet Baker CD somewhere still, didn’t he?
Notes
For professional advice about the rare book trade, the author is grateful to Giles Bird of BAS Ltd., London N7 8NS.
Cathi Unsworth’s “Bad Penny Blues” was published by Serpent’s Tail in 2009. Her web site is www.cathiunsworth.co.uk
Arthur Neal’s work can be viewed at: www.arthurneal.co.uk
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2016 by John Harvey
Cover design by Amanda Shaffer
978-1-5040-4562-9
Published in 2017 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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