A Bed of Scorpions

by Judith Flanders

  Maybe focusing on detail, on the practicalities, would help. ‘What happened? Did you call the police? And how’s Toby?’ Toby was Frank’s partner. They’d been a couple as long as I’d known Frank. Toby was a civil servant, but I knew nothing else about him. I didn’t know them nearly as well as I knew Aidan and Anna. It was more the kind of friendship where we kissed warmly when we bumped into each other somewhere, saying how good it was to meet, and we must get together, and then none of us ever followed up. Not from anything except busy lives and, really, ultimately, lack of interest. Not dislike, but not like, or at least not affection either.

  Aidan brought me back to the present. ‘Of course I called the police. What do you think, we worked around him for the rest of the day?’

  I shrugged an acknowledgement. My question hadn’t made much sense, and the anger in Aidan’s reply was still for Frank, not me.

  ‘We didn’t open yesterday, and so far not today either. They’ve been there, taking pictures, going through the files. They’re talking to his doctor, but if he was ill, he hadn’t told Toby. Who says the two of them were very happy – as happy as any couple who have been together for nearly twenty years can be, at least, is the way he put it, whatever that means. So …’ He shifted his weight, and I realised that only now had he got to whatever it was he wanted to talk to me about ‘So, they think it must be business problems.’

  ‘And were there any?’ He wanted me to ask, or he wouldn’t have told me that much.

  ‘If there are,’ he said, and I noticed the change in the verb tense, although I wasn’t sure if he did, ‘if there are, I’m not aware of them.’

  All I knew about the art world was the bits Aidan had dropped over the years, and what I read in the papers. Both suggested that money was far more important in their business than in mine. Even as I thought that, I knew that it was stupid. Money ruled my working life: how much could I offer an author, how many copies of each book were sold, at what price, how much could we squeeze out of subsidiary rights? But I never saw the money, never invoiced for it, never received the payments. I never had any real sense of the cash flow of the business as a whole.

  The art world was different. A gallery like Aidan and Frank’s – like Aidan’s, now, perhaps – dealt with vast sums. Whenever I heard the two men talking about work, the commodity element was always right there on the surface. Art was about buying and selling, it was about trading an object for cash in a way books never were for their creators, or their version of art dealers, the publishers. Someone would say, ‘Fabulous show, I love what the artist is doing,’ and the answer was ‘Yes, we’ve sold six pieces’, or ‘But no one’s buying’. I’m not saying that publishers don’t think about selling books. We do. It’s just that, at £7.99, one sale more or less doesn’t matter; when you’re selling a single object for six figures, it does.

  None of that was relevant, though, so I returned to detail. ‘What happens now?’

  Aidan looked blank at what I realised was a question vague to the point of inanity, and I clarified. ‘Can Toby make plans for the funeral? Does – did – Frank have family?’

  Aidan sighed and rubbed his face again. He looked bereft. He was temporarily done with being angry with Frank, temporarily done with worrying about the financial havoc that might be lurking. Frank was once again his working partner of two decades, the man he probably spoke to more often than he spoke to his wife.

  ‘His parents are dead. There’s a brother and sister-in-law, and two nieces. He was close to them.’ He paused as the waitress brought our food. We looked at it, slightly nauseated, but automatically spooned random dollops of salads onto our plates. Neither of us picked up our cutlery, though. We waited until the wine arrived. That we picked up. Just as quickly, Aidan put his down. ‘I need to keep a clear head. And I don’t think I’ve eaten since …’ His eyes widened. ‘Since the plane.’

  That was more than a day and a half. I pushed his plate towards him. ‘Then eat something now. Even if you don’t want to.’ I sounded like his mother, but that was a good thing at the moment, I decided.

  He picked up his fork, but he just held it, as though he were pacifying me by making the gesture. He returned to where he’d left off. ‘One of his nieces, Lucy, works for us in the holidays. She’s at university, but she fills in, and Frank was hoping she might join us full-time.’ He paused, his mouth thinning again. ‘How could he do that to her?’

  I touched his hand, nudging it towards his plate. He smiled gently at me, and brushed his other hand across my cheek, a gesture of intimacy we hadn’t had for years. Then he ate a couple of mouthfuls, although it was to show me he was OK, not because he was OK.

  ‘The other thing is that I’ve had to cancel all my trips.’

  ‘You do? I know Frank does – did – the admin and gallery side, but is there so much that you have to be there?’

  He looked at me as if I were an idiot. ‘It’s not that. The police don’t want me to leave the country for the moment.’

  I sat back, shocked. ‘They said that? That sounds like television.’

  ‘It was like television: finding him, being told not to leave London without checking in with them first. Oh, they were very polite. But I thought it was best to speak to a lawyer, and a forensic accountant.’

  I tilted my head. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Not the kind who does your books, or your tax returns. The kind you use if you’re being audited. Or, in this case, if the CID are telling you not to leave town.’

  CID. I sat up. ‘I don’t understand. If the police think there are money issues …’ I was circling around the words I didn’t want to use, fraud, tax evasion, money-laundering, or – or what? ‘Are you saying the police are looking at this as … as not suicide?’ Now I was circling around the big word I didn’t want to use. But otherwise, why CID, why not Revenue and Customs? I was hazy on the division of labour at the police, but this didn’t sound right for embezzlement and suicide.

  More importantly, it sounded worryingly close to home. ‘Um, I can’t remember if I told you, when I last saw you …’ I stalled, started again. ‘Do you know about my …’ This was absurd. ‘Do you know I’m seeing a policeman?’

  Aidan stared me dead in the eye. ‘Why do you think I’m here?’

  Aidan had been looking at me as if I were an idiot for the simple reason that I was an idiot. I hadn’t wondered why he was there at all. We were having lunch because we’d planned to have lunch. But that made no sense. If I’d found a colleague dead in my office – I flinched even at the thought – if I had, wouldn’t I have cancelled everything that could be cancelled? And lunch with a friend I saw every couple of years plainly fell into the ‘could be cancelled’ category.

  ‘What are you thinking? I’m not sure I’d know where to begin. I don’t know who does what at Scotland Yard.’ I was burbling, I knew, but I couldn’t stop. ‘Jake doesn’t talk about his work. Sure, he moans about the office, or his colleagues, but nothing else. Not ever. I don’t think he can – how can the details of violent death be conversation? And you know that’s what he does, don’t you? Murder, not fraud, or tax, or …’ I steadied myself ‘Or embezzlement.’

  Aidan was grim. ‘Of course I know that’s what he does. He’s doing it. In my gallery. Now.’

  The breath left my body. I opened my mouth. And closed it again. Then I did it again. Until, ‘Jake is in the gallery,’ I repeated. Of course that was why Aidan was here. And of course that was why Aidan was here. ‘You cancelled our lunch when you found Frank. And then, when the police arrived, and you realised Jake was …’ I waved a hand. ‘That Jake was Jake, you reinstated.’

  He nodded.

  I closed my eyes briefly, trying to gather my thoughts. Then, ‘I have no idea what to do or say. All I can think is that I need to stay as far out of this as possible. Far.’ If I’d been standing up, I think I would physically have been backing away. As it was, I felt myself pushing against the banquette, my hands rigid on the ed
ge of the table. I tried to loosen my grip. Nothing. Because even as I said the words, I knew they weren’t realistic. How could I possibly stay out of this? And whose side was I on? Jake’s? Aidan’s? He and Frank had been my friends my whole adult life.

  I stopped short. Why was I thinking there were sides? Why did I assume Aidan’s side was different from Jake’s? If someone had killed Frank, then we were on the same side. Obviously. I said this to myself twice, to make sure I recognised how obvious it was. The bile sitting at the bottom of my throat replied that perhaps it wasn’t so obvious at all.

  And Jake. Jesus. That he wasn’t going to be happy was an understatement of epic proportions. Even calling it an understatement of epic proportions was an understatement of epic proportions. We had met when he was investigating the death of a courier. First I was simply someone he interviewed for background, and then, involuntarily, I had become more deeply involved. And he had hated that. That I’d been in danger had made him furious, not with me, but with himself for letting it happen. That I knew Aidan and Frank, that Aidan was having lunch with me even as Jake was opening an investigation, wasn’t going to get a five-star write-up in the Crimebusters’ Review.

  That was on the professional side. On the personal … On the personal, my stomach churned. We had been feeling our way gently. I had what Jake called a reflexive liberal-leftie attitude to the police, distrusting much of what I saw in the news. He, in turn, was, I think, slightly bemused by what I did for a living, or at least the passion I felt for it. He liked books, he read, but he didn’t really think they were essential. They were a fun pastime, like football, not a reason for existence. I also had a sneaking suspicion that it was probably wildly against police regulations for him to have begun a relationship with me when I was a witness in a case he was investigating. But he had never said so, and I had never asked. There was rather a lot neither of us had talked about, in fact. I’d always known that while I talked a lot, it was only ever about things that didn’t matter. Now I realised he was the same.

  ‘Was Jake there yesterday?’ I asked abruptly.

  Aidan nodded, keeping his eyes on my face.

  I’d seen him yesterday evening. We spent most of our free time together, but there wasn’t that much of it. As a detective, Jake worked unsociable hours. Publishing also spills out long past the eight-hour office day. I do a fair amount of evening work-socialising – launch parties, readings, and events – as well as the more usual social-socialising. In between that, and work, whatever time was left, we were usually together.

  I thought back to the previous night. Jake had arrived at my flat early and we’d cooked dinner together. Jake was a surprisingly good cook, and made things I was scared of, like pastry, so we worked in tandem, without getting in each other’s way, with a couple of glasses of wine and idle chat. I closed my eyes, trying to remember what he’d said. He’d mentioned the politics that was holding back a promotion for one of his colleagues, and that he needed to prep for an upcoming court appearance, neither of which was about the day’s work as such. After dinner he’d watched television, I’d read, and then we’d gone to bed, which was where we did some of our best communicating.

  I gritted my teeth. He definitely hadn’t mentioned a death in an art gallery. That wasn’t the kind of thing I might have forgotten. I pulled back from my anger. There was no particular reason for him to. Maybe. ‘He didn’t say anything about it. But did you say you knew who he was? That you know me? You haven’t met him with me, have you?’ I asked, even though I was sure he hadn’t. Jake’s shifts meant he didn’t often go out with me in the evenings, and I hadn’t seen Anna and Aidan in months, maybe more.

  ‘No. I mean, no, I hadn’t met him before; and no, I didn’t say that I knew you.’

  ‘What do you want?’ There seemed no point in tiptoeing about.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  I TOOK THE BUS back to the office. I didn’t notice the way the sun struck the red-brick façades any longer, or the people enjoying its warmth. Instead, I huddled in my seat as if it were midwinter.

  Miranda was lying in wait for me as soon as I appeared. She’s my assistant, and her retro-Goth look puts some people off, but she’s great. She’s been with me for nearly six months, and I’ve been able to leave more and more to her. Now she picked up her mug and stood as I came down the hall, using a sheaf of cover briefs to gesture me into my office. The mug was ominous, indicating she expected a long session, and when she didn’t lean on the door frame, but pulled a chair close to mine, I knew I was doomed.

  I put my head down and slunk to my desk suitably chastened, but also very happy to focus on something I could do something about. She was right, and the work needed to be done; I might as well do it with good grace. Cover briefs are outlines to tell the jacket designer what the book is about (no, they don’t read them, don’t be silly), and how we want to position it in the market. Most of the books they pretended to describe hadn’t been delivered – many hadn’t been written – so they were written on little more than an outline and a prayer that the author would come up with the goods. Taking that into account, Miranda had done a good job, and we only needed an hour to tidy them up.

  I was pleased to get it done. At least, I was until Miranda hitched her chair closer. Apparently there was more. She gave a brisk nod, and ‘Now’ she said, as though she were getting a small child ready for her first day at school. I jumped inwardly. That was usually my tone – half-editor, half-sheepdog was how I privately saw my relationship with my authors. The notion that Miranda thought the same about me was endearing, and I grinned at her, despite being quite certain I wouldn’t want to do whatever it was she had lined up for me.

  ‘Now,’ she repeated firmly, ‘I’ve almost finalised your Frankfurt schedule.’ She pursed her lips when I shuddered. Give her a ticket to Frankfurt and watch her dust, her expression said. ‘In the meantime,’ she went on, not giving an inch, ‘you need to prepare for the Culture Committee panel.’

  This was much worse than I’d feared. In a moment of total derangement, I’d agreed to sit on a joint Arts Council committee, and what a waste of time that had turned out to be. David Snaith, Timmins & Ross’s editor-in-chief, and my boss, had put me forward for it. With all the government spending cuts, it was undoubtedly sensible for various cultural bodies to pool their knowledge, and the committee was made up of people from concert venues, from museums, theatre companies and music festivals, as well as more book-related things like book festivals. Theoretically the range, from government-funded institutions like the Opera House to commercial outfits like ours, should have made an exchange of views interesting.

  That was the theory. Back here in real life, however, a lot of time was spent whining. Yes, times are hard, yes, music, and books, and dance, and theatre, don’t have the stranglehold on entertainment that they used to. But moaning got old fast. Even when time was spent more constructively, discussions revolved around matters that, in general, applied to only a few people in any one meeting. Things that were essential to one art form – audio-guides in museums, or live-streaming for theatre – had no relevance to the rest of us, and so we settled back to bitch and moan again.

  And the panel. That was my lowest moment. I hadn’t been bitching and moaning, I’d been daydreaming in the meeting when it was proposed, and so I hadn’t heard when the committee chair volunteered me. I bet the son-of-a-bitch knew I wasn’t listening, too. Now I was doomed to make a presentation on ‘Subsidy in a Commercial World’. And since the area of publishing I work in barely deals with subsidies, it meant hours of setting up meetings with people in those areas that are subsidised. And all so that, when my turn came, I could say something that anyone who dealt with subsidies already knew, and anyone who didn’t, didn’t care.

  I think I growled, because Miranda giggled, then hastily looked solemn, like a child with crumbs around her lips swearing she had no idea who had taken the biscuit out of the tin, hadn’t even k
now there were biscuits in that tin. She hadn’t giggled, no siree.

  ‘I’ve set up meetings for you over the next few days, when it’s quiet.’ I must have growled again, because she repeated ‘when it’s quiet’, now in full primary-schoolteacher mode, quelling the unruly through sheer force of personality. ‘You’re seeing Emma Cotton from the University Presses Alliance, and Neil Simonson from the Riverside Literature Festival. They can both fit you in on Monday. There’s also that charity that subsidises the cost of illustrations for art books.’

  I nodded gloomily, resigned. I’d had some dealings with the Daylesworth Trust because, although I mostly do fiction, every now and again I publish a fashion book. The costs of printing illustrations, and paying the picture fees, were so high that we couldn’t do them on standard publishing terms. Either we had to get the fashion houses to contribute, or we needed some outside help. I hated relying on the fashion houses. They only knew what worked in magazines or advertising, and so what they wanted – what, if they were paying for it, they demanded – was often entirely unsuitable for books. So when a few years ago a friend who worked for an art publisher pointed me to the Daylesworth, it seemed a gift. The trust had been set up by some rich businessman who collected art, and it was entirely focused towards art books. But I’d decided that if you stretched the definition of ‘art’, it could cover fashion too. Maybe they had agreed, or maybe doing the odd frock book made them feel hip. I don’t know. I’d never met anyone there. They had a grant application on their website, I’d filled it out the first time, and when it worked, I continued to do so. Maybe this meeting would be help for later books. I feel almost positive about this, I told myself. Then I added, Liar.

  Miranda was still organising me. ‘They’ve been playing funny buggers, but I’ve got them pinned down now.’ She paused, diverted. ‘It was very strange. I couldn’t get a call-back for weeks.’