by Oliver Tidy
‘Don’t suppose you can lend us a few quid, can you? Girls need stuff for their packed lunches for next week and mum’s pension day isn’t ‘til Thursday.’
‘Isn’t he giving you anything for the girls?’
‘He’s out of work. Again.’
Her sister might have been about to tell Joy that if it was too much to ask forget it, she wasn’t going to beg. But Joy dug in her handbag for her purse as the words were ordering themselves. As she handed over all the cash she had, forty pounds, she caught sight of an open packet of cigarettes on the worktop and hoped that she managed to suppress any outward signs of her displeasure.
After a final look in on her sleeping mum, she left.
*
When Grimes returned home that night Romney was still up. While Grimes had been bowling, eating, having fun and his eyes and ears tested at the cinema, Romney had spent a quiet evening on his own reflecting and drinking.
Romney had intended to spend his Friday night with a good take-away, a good film on his new television and a couple of cans. The evening had got off to a bad start when he had been unable to banish from the corner of the screen the digital clock that Grimes had activated. That was the period costume drama ruined. Compounding his irritation and underlying everything were the personal and professional revelations of his day, which he’d been unable to drive far from his thinking. Both issues quite separate. Both issues created by women.
As he drank he reflected on Doctor Puchta’s accusation that he displayed misogynistic tendencies. And he reflected that it was hardly fucking surprising, seeing as all the problems he’d ever had in his life were caused by women. He’d distractedly picked at the pizza, given up on Hollywood and, when he ran out of lager, sought out the bottle of Scotch he kept at the back of the cupboard for emergencies.
Grimes could see immediately that Romney was intoxicated. The telly was off and only a dim table lamp provided any light. The shadows that it cast from Romney’s side gave the DI a morose and deathly countenance. Grimes didn’t know what to think, say or do. He knew what must be bothering his DI though. The business with Jimmy Savage must be playing on his mind. That was going to attract some very unwelcome attention for Romney personally.
‘Hello, Peter. Good night?’ Romney managed a tired lift of one corner of his mouth.
‘Not bad, gov. Bloody expensive. You?’
Romney pointed at a vacant chair. ‘Get a glass. Take a seat.’
Grimes helped himself to a small Scotch because to not have done so would have been rude. He eased himself down into the furniture. He’d rather have gone straight to bed. He was tired and sober and his boss was drunk and disorderly. He’d promised Maureen he’d be over early in the morning and they’d make a start on sorting what they could salvage from the storm-damaged wreckage of their life together that was currently cluttering up her sister’s garage. The clock on the mantelpiece ticked away the seconds. Grimes didn’t often hear a clock ticking. He sipped his drink.
‘This is good stuff, gov.’
‘Duty free. Still bloody expensive, mind. Do you get on all right with your mum?’
That was unexpected. ‘Yeah. Great.’
‘My mum’s dead.’
That might explain things. ‘Sorry to hear that, gov. Recent?’
‘No. Fifteen years ago.’
Or maybe not. ‘Oh. Why do you ask?’
‘I didn’t like my mum. She was a negative, nagging, irritating woman. Always complaining. Always finding fault. All I remember of my mum is she made my life a fucking misery.’
‘Yeah, well, mine can be a bit annoying too, now you mention it.’
‘I don’t mean a bit annoying. I’m talking fucking horrible.’ Romney paused and took a slurp of his drink. ‘Remember Julie Carpenter?’
‘Course, gov. You heard from her?’ Maybe that’s what this was all about.
‘Bitch she turned out to be, didn’t she? Do you know she dumped me to go on holiday with her ex-fucking-boyfriend while I was lying in a hospital bed?’
Grimes hadn’t and he wished he still didn’t. He hoped Romney wasn’t going to cry.
‘That Edy Vitriol.’ Romney wagged an unsteady finger in Grimes’ general direction. ‘He was on to something with his theory about women. Do you know what a misogynist is?’
‘Sorry, a what?’
‘Misogynist.’ Romney was slurring so badly that Grimes was having trouble understanding him. It was like talking to Bernie Stark without the hair.
‘No, gov. Something to do with bells?’
‘It’s someone who hates women. A woman-hater. How long have we known each other, Peter?’
Relieved that Romney had changed the subject, Grimes thought for a moment and said, ‘Over ten years.’
‘Do I strike you as a hater of women?’
‘No, gov.’ What could he say? ‘Why would you say that?’
Romney waived it away. ‘Forget it. Sorry about this morning.’
One thing Grimes was fairly sure of, in ten years he’d never heard Romney apologise. It was a moment to treasure, even if he didn’t have the first idea of what he was apologising for and the DI was quite drunk.
‘Why don’t I put the kettle on, gov? Nice cup of coffee, eh?’
Romney didn’t answer. Grimes stood and left the room without another word. When he returned a couple of minutes later, Romney had slumped asleep where he sat. He was snoring loudly.
Grimes sighed heavily, removed the empty tumbler from Romney’s grip, took the throw from the back of the sofa and arranged it over the sleeping policeman’s knees. He wondered about taking a photo with his camera phone to show Maureen and quickly dismissed the idea. He turned off the lamp at Romney’s side and crossed towards the hallway doorway. He turned on the hallway light and cast one final look around the room in the dimness it provided. He noticed the half-consumed pizza sitting in its box on the coffee table. He trod quietly over, removed a couple of cold slices and went to bed.
***
7
When Grimes stepped warily into the lounge the following morning Romney’s chair was empty. The blanket was on the floor. Grimes picked it up and arranged it on the sofa. He noticed there was still pizza left, finished it then disposed of the box. He put away the bottle of Scotch, took the glasses from the previous night into the kitchen and washed them up. Then he went to find his wife and children, whom he suddenly realised he missed with an ache that startled him. Bachelor pads, he thought as he let himself out into the bright autumnal morning, you could keep them. Give him mess and noise and family life any day of the week.
*
Justin had the children for the weekend, which was fine with Joy. He’d made a tentative suggestion that perhaps she would like to meet them. They could have lunch somewhere. She said she’d think about it. That was a very big step and despite her feelings towards Justin she wasn’t sure she was ready for it.
Besides, Joy had firm plans for the Saturday that nothing short of a crazed gunman running amok in the High Street was going to interrupt. And after the previous evening that had left her miserable enough to cry most of the way home she needed some time to and for herself.
There was an event at the Dover Marina Hotel on the seafront just along from her home in The Gateway that she had been excited about attending ever since she’d seen it advertised.
The Dover Marina Hotel was about the poshest hotel in town. And that was one good reason why it had been chosen. Someone was trying to make a statement. Someone was showing off. Someone was letting the world know that she’d made it on her own. That someone was Stephanie Lather, self-published author of the tremendously successful and popular JR Lleroy novels.
Stephanie Lather had been born and bred in Dover. The daughter of Dover shopkeepers, she’d gone to the local comprehensive, left school at sixteen to pursue a career in hairdressing, got married, had kids, been divorced and taken up writing.
Writing had been the teenage passion Stephanie had been
forced to abandon when real life reared its ugly head. When her girls had started sleeping at regular and manageable hours of the evening, Stephanie had gone back to her greatest childhood love: making up stories and writing them down. At twenty-five, she sold a short story to a women’s magazine. Encouraged, she’d worked harder at her gift for story-telling. She had more short stories published, but, despite repeated and tireless efforts, never impressed a literary agent enough to be made an offer of representation for any of her full-length novels.
Then the ebook arrived. Stephanie had been quoted in media articles detailing her rise to fame and fortune as claiming that the advent of the ebook, with all its possibilities and opportunities, opened up the world of readers for her like Moses opened up the Red Sea. She also liked to add that she probably made more out of it than he did, which some commentators clearly found a little crass. But with the kind of money Stephanie was raking in for her churn-em-out-cheap JR Lleroy series she didn’t take too much care in what she said.
Stephanie Lather wasn’t even thirty and thanks to her books, hard work and her canny self-promotion through the manipulation of social media, she was an international sensation on both sides of the pond. She was also rumoured to be considerably wealthy.
From reading about Stephanie, Joy had learned that while the gatekeepers to the world of traditional publishing had shunned her, she had never given up hope and had kept thumping away at the keyboard and submitting manuscripts. With the advent of ebooks and ereaders, she had seen and seized her opportunity. Stephanie had ditched her dream of a book deal and, as one particularly influential traditional publishing house with substantial vested interests in the dying physical book market had famously remarked on the subject of ebooks, sold her soul to the devil. Fundamental to her success were her self-promotion skills, which were on a par with her writing skills – aggressive and irresistible. Stephanie Lather had worked with a single-minded tirelessness – one that she claimed made Mother Theresa look like a part-timer – towards fulfilling her dreams of becoming an author of note and she had succeeded in emphatic fashion. An author of note she had certainly become, but perhaps not in the way she had originally intended. This was not something that appeared to bother her as she commuted between her homes on the Dorset coast, in London’s Knightsbridge and in a New York apartment building.
No one was pretending that Stephanie wrote erudite and scholarly fiction. No one was talking about literary prizes, not even longlists for them. But she did have a gift for telling a good tale, her plotting was regularly ingenious and her characters always seemed so familiar and real and created for readers to empathise with.
Sales of her ebooks numbered in the millions. She churned them out quickly and priced them cheaply. She would often Tweet reminders to her followers that her books could be had for less than the price of a cup of decent tea. Her fan base was huge – cross-gender, cross-generational, cross-culture and across continents.
By all forms of media she had been singled out as one of the great success stories of the ebook boom and the traditional-publishing industry had been forced to sit up and take notice. Then, when they’d realised that there might be money to be made from a complementary series of ‘real’ books and audio books, they’d fist-fought each other in the streets to offer her the kind of publishing deal that all writers, traditional or self-published, fantasise about.
Stephanie Lather had made it big. Very big. And by her own admission she wasn’t finished, not by a long way.
There was talk that although she no longer lived in Dover and felt no great affinity for the place, which she had once described in her blog as, ‘...the dour town on the Dour river...’, she had chosen the place for the launch of hard copies of her books for one reason and one reason only. It was not because she felt she owed anything to the community in which she was raised. It was not because she felt a debt to any one from there. It was because this is where her ex-husband still lived and worked. At the docks. Which could be seen clearly – even on an inclement winter’s day when the English Channel was throwing itself through thick sea mist at Neptune’s whim and Dover’s beach – from the Dover Marina Hotel. The husband that had betrayed her, cheated on her with her sister before, during and after her pregnancy with their second child. The husband that had abandoned his paternal obligations to both of his daughters and left a penniless Stephanie to struggle like a blind three-legged mule climbing Everest with a shed on its back – her words. There was talk that Stephanie Lather was back in Dover to rub his nose in her success as much as to launch her traditional publishing career.
Stephanie Lather was to give a talk about her journey from a self-publishing nobody to a traditionally-published success story. And then she was going to do a book signing. Joy had tickets.
Joy was a big fan of the JR Lleroy series – undemanding, pure escapist reads. She had all twelve novels on her ebook reader. Each time a new book came out she would quickly download and devour it. Sometimes even reading it twice.
After some hanging around in the lobby with free coffee and biscuits to the gentle background murmur of polite and expectant conversation, Joy went in to take her seat in the Chartwell conference room along with everyone else. As people waited and chatted she looked around and took in the opulence of the venue: the fine and expensive wallpaper, the deep and luxurious carpet, the picture windows with superb harbour views. It was all far removed from the daily life of the humble detective constable – the drab grubby surroundings, the scumbags they had to deal with, the constant cycle of unpleasantness – and Joy felt that, given the chance, she could get used to it.
As Joy sat and waited, her thoughts strayed to the state of her own life. Despite her gripes and a very big career wobble caused by her near-death experience at the hands of ex-DS Wilkie, she still largely enjoyed her job and her confidence was growing. She didn’t hate where she lived. She was involved with a man whom she understood she felt something significant for. So why did she feel so... unfulfilled?
Joy recognised that, of course, news of her mother’s ailing health and the emotional trauma of seeing her the previous evening had contributed to her feelings of discontent, but Joy also understood that it went deeper than that. She had been feeling... unfulfilled – there was no better word for it – for a good while. She wanted more from life. She was only in her early thirties and while her biological clock wasn’t audible just yet, she found herself wondering about that element of her future with greater regularity. Would Justin be the man for that? He already had two young kids. No, that wouldn’t work. Not for her. Not other people’s kids. Was a relationship that involved levels of commitment she had no experience of what she needed now? If she wasn’t careful, life would be in danger of settling down into a grind, a rut, and that frightened her as much as anything. Should she push herself harder at work? Look for new opportunities? Advancement? Superintendent Vine had indicated that she could be influential in a good way, but there was a price tag attached to that kind of help. And Joy finally found herself considering the thing that might be at the root of her despondency.
To break the spell of Joy’s reverie, Stephanie Lather entered from a door behind the elevated little stage to a warm round of applause. She looked good in a designer suit – everyone knew she liked her clothes. She looked fit – everyone knew she could afford and had a personal trainer. She looked happy – everyone knew she was living the dream. She looked like a woman who’d won the lottery. Better than that, she was a woman who’d fixed her own win. She had a right to enjoy it.
While the couple of other figures that had entered with her took seats at the table on the dais, Stephanie remained standing and walked to the front of the stage to smile and blow kisses at her adoring audience. Joy found herself irresistibly caught up in the fervour and clapped and smiled back. It was all very uplifting.
Stephanie used her hands and body language to show that she felt unworthy and gradually the commotion died down.
When all had been
reduced to an expectantly-charged hush, she began: ‘Thank you. Thank you. How kind and lovely you all are. How truly unworthy I feel. I’d like to start by thanking you all for coming today and giving me such a wonderful reception.’
She was interrupted by a resurgence or applause. Again she quietened them with some appropriate hand signals.
‘As most of you may know, I was born and bred in Dover and although I don’t visit as often as I would like, it will always have a special place in my heart.’
A couple of rows behind Joy and off to her left someone blew a large raspberry. That changed things. Stephanie’s verbal stride faltered. Her fixed wide grin curdled and her eyebrows dipped. She looked momentarily unsure or herself. All those who’d heard it turned to seek out the source but it was not immediately apparent.
Stephanie resumed, perhaps wondering whether she had been mistaken: ‘One question that readers often ask me is: where did the character of JR Lleroy come from? Is JR’s life based to any extent on my own?’
‘That’s two questions,’ shouted someone from across the other side, not kindly it seemed to Joy.
Stephanie again looked fleetingly perplexed by the interruption. After a short pause she carried on. ‘Like many authors’ central protagonists, there is a good deal of JR Lleroy in me and a good deal of me in JR Lleroy. We are of a similar age. We have comparable backgrounds...’
‘What do you attribute your popularity to?’ came a loud female voice two rows in front of Joy.
In Stephanie’s obvious confusion and hesitancy at yet another interruption, one of the other women who’d entered from behind the stage with her and had been sitting at the desk – a cold, frigid-looking, stern-faced woman – stood and walked to take up a position beside the author.
She smiled a tight icy smile as she speared the owner of that enquiry with her stare. ‘Stephanie will be taking questions at the end, but because of our tight time constraints, could I please ask that questions are kept until after Stephanie has given us a reading from her latest novel.’