A Bed of Scorpions

by Judith Flanders

  ‘Morning, darling,’ she trilled, managing to come in, kiss me, check the coffee pot’s level, get a cup, and put down her files on the table, immediately marking out her place as the chair of a meeting about to be in session, in an eye-blink. I don’t know how she does it. She’s not quite five foot two, and exquisitely neatly made. Yet she dominates a room, even as her teeny-tiny feet tap along so daintily you’d think she was an escapee from a Disney movie: one of Cinderella’s mice-helpers. Except Helena wouldn’t have let Cinderella hang around waiting for a fairy godmother. She’d have had her stepmother up in court for child abuse; the stepsisters, not being bright enough for further education, would have been sent for vocational training – plumber’s mates, perhaps; and as for little Cinders, she’d have got a lecture clarifying that while glass-slipper-wearing and hanging out with frog footmen might be fun, an education and a profession would get her further.

  None of which altered the fact that I was now forcibly attending a meeting at my kitchen table. ‘Good morning. To what do we owe this early pleasure?’

  Sarcasm bounced off Helena. I don’t know why I bothered.

  ‘Good morning again, darling. I thought we should discuss the Matt Holder situation with Jake. Until there’s an inquest verdict, nothing is final, and I’d like to dot some i’s and cross some t’s. I have twenty minutes before I need to leave for my first meeting.’

  There, that was us organised. Jake and I came to order, and I was amused to see him take out his notebook, as if this were a scheduled staff meeting.

  Helena didn’t wait for us to settle. ‘The main question is, what is Reichel’s interest in you?’ she said to me, tapping a list.

  ‘Interest in me? He has no interest in me.’

  ‘I don’t mean after you assaulted him.’ Trust Helena to put it in those terms.

  ‘Then what do you mean? He had no interest in me. When we sat down he launched into some long boring story about why he was the …’ I faltered.

  Jake turned his head. ‘The what?’

  I put my head down on the table and spoke to the mat. ‘Why he was the world’s best art collector.’ I sat up again. ‘I didn’t think about the subject at all. It was some interminable story about how he’d bested some dealer at some sale for some picture. I never thought for a moment … But it must have been chance. Why would he talk to me about it? He doesn’t know anything about me.’

  ‘That,’ said Helena, ‘is open to question. When I rang Stella this morning to thank her for a lovely party – and darling, you have written her a note, haven’t you? – she said that she hadn’t planned for you to sit next to him, but he’d asked her to change things around so he could talk to you.’

  I felt Jake next to me, quietly not laughing. I assumed it was because in his staff meetings the boss didn’t remind her subordinates to write thank-you notes. Then I processed what she’d said. ‘Reichel asked to sit next to me? Why?’

  ‘It’s a question, isn’t it? What exactly did he say?’

  I closed my eyes. Then opened them, defeated. ‘I have no idea. He said the Wynfords had a Hockney he wanted to buy from them, but then I stopped listening. He was pompous and he was boring.’ Jake was still quietly not laughing, so I turned on him. ‘It’s OK for you. When you’re interviewing people, first of all they know it. Second of all, they don’t try to patronise you.’ I returned to Helena. ‘I can’t imagine what you wanted me to say: “Let’s have it, buster, why did you hire the man my friends fired? Speak into the microphone, please,” as I held a dessert spoon to his mouth?’

  Jake called us to order. ‘This is unlikely to go anywhere, but let’s look at it all the same. Spencer Reichel asked to sit next to you. He had a reason, which from what you say, wasn’t an interest in you personally, because he doesn’t have much interest in women in your age group.’ Unpleasant, and also accurate. I nodded. ‘Or women who talk back.’ I started to scowl at him, but he went on. ‘So he wanted to see if you were aware of something. He probably mentioned a name or an event, but you weren’t listening. Did he know that?’

  ‘I have no idea. I kept saying, “No, really?” in a Kewpie-doll voice. That’s usually all that’s necessary, and it worked for a while. When he got nasty …’ I considered. ‘I thought he’d realised I wasn’t listening, but could it be that he’d said whatever it was and I hadn’t responded, so he was pushing to get a reaction?’

  ‘He got that.’ He turned to Helena, but whatever he was going to say was cut off by his phone. He looked at the caller’s name and was halfway out the room, ‘Field,’ he said, grabbing for his notebook.

  Helena began to gather her things. The meeting was adjourned. I decided breakfast was too, and took the cups over to the sink.

  ‘Have you spoken to Aidan about Holder?’

  I fumbled one of the cups. ‘Me?’ I couldn’t help it, but I squeaked. ‘No, why would I do that?’

  ‘To find out why they settled. It made no sense at the time. If what Alan said last night was accurate, that Holder had a new job lined up, it makes even less sense in retrospect. And if Reichel was paying Alan’s bill, and wanted to talk to you …’ She snapped her briefcase lock shut with a sorrowing, firm-but-fair click. ‘There’s got to be a reason that makes sense of that.’

  I sighed. ‘I was planning to drop by Toby’s on my way home from work. If Aidan is there, or Anna, I’ll see what I can do.’

  I could see that ‘I’ll see what I can do’ wasn’t nearly enthusiastic enough for her, but she nodded. She’d conveyed the points she’d planned to make, and allocated the tasks she’d planned to allocate. She left, as briskly and efficiently as she’d appeared.

  I was just finishing the dishes when Jake came back, and the look on his face was not a happy one.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I’ve only got five minutes. Did you know a man named Werner Schmidt?’

  I started to shake my head, and halfway there turned it into a nod. ‘I don’t know him at all, but I heard his name last week. This is Merriam–Compton’s restorer, right?’ Jake nodded once, a ‘go on’ nod. ‘Then he’s Frank’s ex-boyfriend, the reason Matt Holder was sacked. Why are you asking about him?’ Then I played his question back in my head. ‘Not “do”. “Did” I know him? Past tense.’ I put my arms around myself, false comfort.

  Jake nodded. ‘He’s dead. He was found yesterday morning.’

  ‘How?’ My voice was hoarse.

  Jake’s wasn’t. He was angry. ‘Still being investigated. Unofficially, industrial accident.’

  I relaxed a fraction. Accident was good, wasn’t it? I looked at Jake’s face. No, it wasn’t.

  ‘The file only just came through to us. He runs his own company, lots of clients, so it took twenty-four hours to spot the connection to Compton. Two unexplained deaths in the same week. The Compton file has just been reopened, and we’ve been handed Schmidt too. I’ll know more when I see that.’ He looked over at me and spoke more gently, but I could see it was to reassure me, not because he believed what he was saying. ‘It may very well be an accident. We don’t know yet, so don’t worry.’

  Oh yes, that was going to work.

  His lips thinned. ‘I’ve asked for the reports on your hit-and-run. The file will be with me when I get in to work.’

  ‘No.’

  He blinked, back in the kitchen, no longer at work. ‘No?’

  ‘No. It can’t have anything to do with those – with them. That’s not fair.’ I wasn’t thinking, it was just coming out.

  He tugged me over to his side of the table. ‘I know, baby. But life’s mostly not fair.’ He stood me away from him and looked at me. ‘I hate to have to do this, but are you ready to go? I need to get to the office and I want to drop you off first. You can give me the Holder story in more detail as we go. I’m sure you skimmed over it lightly last night.’

  I had no arguments now.

  Tuesday mornings at work are my least favourite. There is a weekly acquisitions and progress meeti
ng, where grievances get aired, interdepartmental hostilities are played out, and a ghastly time is had by all. Tuesday meetings in the summer are a little less painful, because people are away, not just in our office, but also among agents, and authors, so there is less to discuss in general. In some ways, I was sorry, because on this particular Tuesday a few pointless power plays would have kept me focused. I’d tried to reach Helena after Jake dropped me, but she was in a meeting, so I’d emailed her the news about Werner Schmidt. Then I sat with another open email in front of me, with Aidan’s name in the address bar, but after ten minutes I closed it without writing anything more. What could I say? Helena would have the information, and she was his lawyer. Let her tell him.

  I counted to ten and tried to concentrate on work. Jake had said he’d be looking at my cycle accident, but I didn’t – I refused – to believe that there was anything more than a pissed-off driver. The rest wasn’t my business. Publishing was, and given the rumours sweeping the company, I should occupy my mind with that, or I might not have a business soon.

  The morning meeting would be a focal point of those rumours, anyway. Not overtly. David Snaith, who ran it, would give nothing away, even if he knew anything, which was by no means a given. That wouldn’t stop us looking for clues in everything he said. If the acquisition of a new book was rejected, we’d read it as, You can’t buy new books because none of us will be here next month. If an acquisition was agreed, it was, You can buy it because there’ll be an injection of capital next month. None of this was rational, but it didn’t stop us from reading meaning into things that were entirely meaningless.

  The meeting was scheduled for ten. Ten in publishing o’clock, which is 10.20-ish in human hours. That would give me plenty of time to wander around the building, checking in with those people I’d sent copies of the three manuscripts I wanted to buy. Had they liked the books, would they share my enthusiasm by saying they could market the hell out of them, or sell lots of copies, or had high hopes that the big chains and supermarkets would like them? I’d done the costings, and if the sales people would back me up by saying they thought my figures were credible, I’d probably win on at least two of the three. The third was more of a long shot. I loved it, but it wasn’t the sort of thing I normally did, and it might be difficult to persuade people I could publish it well. That difficulty was welcome today. I could concentrate on that. Otherwise an ‘industrial accident’, with no details, let me imagine every lurid possibility, and many I’m sure weren’t at all possible. Profit-and-loss sheets were a welcome anchor in reality.

  As it turned out, the mood in the meeting was either surprisingly cheerful, or just completely reckless, a sort of We’re-going-down-with-the-Titanic-so-let’s-have-fun-beforehand. No one stood up and sang ‘Nearer My God to Thee’, but that was probably an oversight. At any rate, my first two books, as I’d hoped, slid through with no trouble. The advances it was agreed I could offer the authors matched what I thought the agents would be looking for, so unless the agents lost their minds, or the competing publishers did, I should at least be in the running. And as I expected, the third book was a problem. In fact, it became the touchpaper for a huge barney. Should we do this kind of book, how would we market it, did we have the expertise to promote it, and on and on. There was also a looping digression that took in a novel that three of us had turned down last year, which had just been shortlisted for the Booker. There was no real point in that kind of after-the-event flagellation, but we flagellated away all the same. Well, the editors who hadn’t been offered the book, or hadn’t read it, flagellated on our behalf. The three of us who had rejected it all agreed that the book had been bollocks when it was offered, and it continued to be bollocks now. If it won the Booker, it would be Booker-winning and financially rewarding bollocks, but you couldn’t acquire books on an I-hate-it-but-maybe-it’ll-win-the-Booker basis. Everyone knew that, but it didn’t stop us from churning the subject over for a good, or bad, half-hour before we finally returned to my potential third acquisition.

  And after all that David, who hated and feared dissension with a passion that made pet bunnies look confrontational, decided I should get some marketing plans drawn up, and we’d discuss it again the following week. Which meant, translated out of David-ese, that by then maybe the agent would have sold it to someone else, and David wouldn’t have to make a decision that was bound to irritate half his staff.

  It was all in a day’s work – not the barney, the not being allowed to offer for everything I wanted to buy. No one ever achieved that, and I was pleased about the two which had been okayed. I immediately sent offer emails to the two agents, outlining how much I could pay, and for what. Marianne, our rights manager, thought they both had good potential for translation, which meant I could add a bit more money in the expectation that we’d make it back by selling foreign-language rights. All of this was run-of-the-mill, but it still had to be outlined carefully, and the figures juggled so we stayed ahead on the bottom line. The meeting had taken up the entire morning, breaking up in bad-tempered pseudo-agreement only when we got too hungry to continue, and the figures took even longer, so I’d just managed to get the two emails off before it was time to go.

  I wanted to leave on time, so that I could go and see Toby without it looking as though I was expecting to be asked for dinner. I was sure they wouldn’t want me, the night before the funeral, but if I got there later in the evening, they might feel they had to offer, or, even worse, put me in a position where I had to accept. I figured that if I got there by six, I could decently leave at seven, and honour would be satisfied.

  The tube would be faster, but I decided to take the bus up to Highgate. First of all, it was a nice evening, and I’d been indoors all day. But that was a polite fiction I made up to fool myself. What I really wanted was something to keep my mind busy so I didn’t have to think about this second death. I was sure I would hear the details at Toby’s: the man had been the gallery’s restorer, and lots of the people there must have known him. But information was one thing. I longed for information. What I didn’t want was to have to turn the bare facts which Jake had given me over and over in my head, which I would do if I was strap-hanging on the tube. If I took the bus, I could busy myself with the day’s backlog of emails: the meeting, and then rushing to get the two offer letters written, meant that I’d otherwise only dealt with emergencies, or things that looked like they might soon become emergencies. I hear that other cities have this legendary thing called Wi-Fi on their underground systems, but as London had yet to join the twentieth century, much less the twenty-first, we see no reasons to pollute our transport network with such crass modernity. There were a few stations that proudly announced they had a connection, but that was only on the platforms. If our ancestors could fight the Crimean War without Wi-Fi, seemed to be the consensus, then it must be admirable to continue proudly on without it. I think that is the technical explanation.

  It was rush hour, and the bus was crowded. I was lucky to get a seat, and it was on the top deck. Since they banned smoking on the buses years ago, the only people who go upstairs if there are seats below are tourists and children. The natural swaying of the bus is magnified; add in bus drivers’ union regulations that require them to stomp on the brakes with the strength of a rhino in heat, and doing email becomes complicated. But sitting was better than standing, and email was better than worrying.

  I clicked and scrolled busily as we stopped and started up the hill to Highgate, getting through an enormous amount of dull but necessary routine as we went. Two or three stops before we reached Toby’s, I looked up to check where we were. I was staring out blankly at the street below, not really paying attention, when something nagged at me. I looked again. That was it, a russet flash. I turned to look back, and sure enough, there was Celia Stein.

  Without thinking, without even processing the thought, I leapt across the person sitting next to me and flung myself down the stairs. The bus was already in motion again, but it was
one of those new ones, with the old-style back opening. This, too, is a space for tourists, or maybe for government ministers to look at nostalgically as they drive past in their cars, remembering the days of their youth. Whatever, it’s not officially for use, and each of the buses boasts a conductor whose sole job is to prevent people entering and exiting this way. But in my mad scramble the momentum I’d gained on the stairs was no match for him. I leapt off the moving bus and was steadying myself on the pavement before he’d even managed to put out a hand to stop me.

  I looked in the direction I’d seen Celia. There was no one there now. I looked up and down the street. No one. Had I been mistaken? Was I having Celia Stein hallucinations? For all I knew this was where she lived. It was as likely a place as anywhere.

  I was an idiot. That wasn’t news, so I turned and headed up the hill to Toby’s.

  I walked slowly, dreading the evening. I’m not good in social situations – if I were, I’d have become a publicist. But more than that, there was the little job Helena had landed me with. People who have never met Helena tell me ‘Just say no’ when I complain about her making me do things like this. Not about making enquiries linked to sudden death. That hasn’t come up much up until now. But more generally. My answer is simply to introduce them to my mother. Then they know better.

  The front door was ajar when I arrived. I took this as a sign that lots of people were there, or at least were expected, so the family didn’t have to run back and forth. That was hopeful. And so it proved. The sitting room already held maybe thirty people, standing and talking as though it were a drinks party. I slid through, nodding and smiling at the few people I recognised – some gallery staff, whose names I didn’t know but I’d seen them over the years and their faces were familiar, and some people I’d met at Aidan and Anna’s. But I saw no one I knew and I could see their eyes widen as they saw my injured face, not something I felt like discussing with strangers. So when I saw Lucy, I stopped. At least we’d chatted a bit, and we could talk about Jim, and the show. In these circumstances she was as close as I was going to get to a friend.