Booked for Murder

by Val McDermid

Meredith sighed. “It wasn’t just that I wasn’t ready. I knew Penny was seeing Sophie. I saw Sophie pick her up one night around dinnertime and drop her off a couple of hours later. I figured you’d have heard Penny’s side of it. Which would not have been a pretty story. I didn’t expect you’d be too bothered about the case for the defense.”

  “You should know me better than that.”

  Meredith acknowledged her reproach with a sad smile. “I know. But I haven’t been thinking too straight.”

  “That’s what I’m here for now. But if you’re serious about wanting me to investigate this, you’re going to have to give me a free hand.”

  Meredith nodded, cradling her coffee in her hands as if it were precious and fragile. “You got it,” she said.

  Lindsay nodded, her lips tight in anticipation of awkwardness. She pushed her hair back from her face and said, “It means I have to ask difficult questions. You probably aren’t going to want to answer some of them, but it’s important that you tell me the truth, okay? Even if it’s something that makes it look bad for you, you have to tell me. I’m not going to misunderstand the way your lawyer might, because I know you couldn’t have killed Penny.” Well, not like that, she added mentally. Not with that degree of premeditation.

  Meredith stared into her coffee. “I don’t have anything to hide,” she said, her voice flat as a synthesized answering machine. She looked up, her eyes blank. “I didn’t kill Penny. I don’t know who did. That’s what I need you to find out.”

  “I’ll do my best. So, when did Penny actually arrive in Britain?”

  “She’d been here a day or two under three weeks.”

  Lindsay jotted a note on the fresh pad she’d dropped into her backpack in Half Moon Bay. “I knew she was coming over, of course, I just wasn’t sure exactly when she’d left. It was Sophie who spoke to her last. And you were due to come too, is that right?”

  “I guess you remember how carefully she liked to plan things, and she’d been organizing us both for this trip for months.” Meredith sighed. “Originally, the plan was that I was going to join her for a couple of weeks near the beginning of her stay, then I was coming back towards the end for another ten days. After we split up, she decided it would be good for her to go ahead with the trip anyway, only alone.”

  Lindsay nodded. “But you decided to come regardless?”

  “I couldn’t leave it be. It meant too much for us to walk away from it. Hell, you know how much we loved each other. You and Sophie, you were there right from the start. Ruby’s birthday dinner at Green’s. The lights shining on the bay, only all I had eyes for was Penny . . .” Meredith’s voice tailed off and two fat tears spilled down her pale cheeks.

  Lindsay leaned forward and put an awkward hand on Meredith’s arm. “I remember. She was the same. I couldn’t get a word of sense out of either of you. If there hadn’t been a table between you, you’d have been arrested for indecency in a public place.”

  A sad smile curled the edges of Meredith’s lips. “Yeah. Feels like ancient history now, though.” She rubbed the tears away with an impatient hand. “That said, I still cared about Penny too much to want to let her go. I figured I had a chance if I could only get her to listen to me. So I came on after her. I’d already booked the vacation time, it was just a matter of arranging a base for myself.”

  “And when did you get in?”

  “Exactly a week ago.”

  Lindsay gave the room a quick scrutiny. “You dropped lucky with your digs.”

  “Pardon me?” Meredith looked puzzled.

  “Sorry. Soon as I get back on British soil, I become more idiomatic than the natives. I was saying, you lucked out with the apartment.”

  Meredith looked round her vaguely. “This place? The company has a deal with the management here. This is where we always stay when we’re over on business. It’s easier to be private for meetings and stuff in an apartment like this than in a hotel. I just asked our travel department to book me a place and bill me direct.”

  Lindsay leaned back, relieved that her ploy had loosened Meredith up a little. “Going back a bit,” she said casually. “To when you split up. That was about five, six weeks ago, am I right?”

  Meredith’s eyes went back to her coffee cup. “I guess,” she said.

  “I’m not entirely clear what went wrong.”

  Meredith made a choking sound that Lindsay translated as a bitter laugh. “The chapter and verse is clear enough. But why it escalated the way it did, that’s the obscure part.” She stood up abruptly and walked across to the window to stare out at the canopy of trees. “Do you have a cigarette?” she demanded, turning back into the room.

  “Meredith, you know I quit years ago,” Lindsay protested.

  “I know, I just figured you might have brought some in tax-free for somebody. Friend, family, I don’t know.”

  “You quit too. About six months after me. Don’t do it, Meredith. Don’t let the bastard kill you as well as Penny,” Lindsay said passionately.

  With an impatient gesture, Meredith freed her hair from the elastic band and let it fall around her face in a limp curtain. “Oh, fuck it!”

  “You going to tell me what happened?” Lindsay said quietly, not taking her eyes off Meredith’s face.

  She threw herself into a large wing chair opposite Lindsay. “It all started with Penny deciding it was time she got out of the closet on her own terms before some smartass decided to out her.”

  “Was that likely?”

  “You better believe it. There are a lot of militants out there who think that people like Penny owe it to the lesbian sisterhood to be out and proud. No compromises accepted. Never mind that Penny’s been doing more good by keeping her sexuality to herself and providing positive images in her books. The politically correct know there’s only one way to be and that’s in people’s faces.” Meredith shook her head angrily. “Don’t they understand that when you out somebody like Penny, all it means is that every right-wing parent in the country stops buying her books? As long as she looks as straight as a Midwest momma, they’re never going to look inside the covers to see what their kids are reading. Soon as she’s out, they’ll be burning her books regardless, because she’s a dangerous dyke poisoning the minds of their children.”

  Meredith’s tirade left Lindsay momentarily without words. Compulsory outing was one of the few subjects on which she didn’t have definite and strong views. She was for it when it came to hypocrites who abused their power over the lives of others, like politicians who failed to support gay rights issues and churchmen who preached one thing and practiced another. But when it came to people who merely happened to have become celebrities, she was considerably less certain. She’d heard all the arguments about role models, but what message was being sent by a role model who had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the daylight? Clearly not one Meredith relished. “Mmm,” Lindsay eventually muttered. “And Penny thought it was going to happen to her?”

  “She’d already been threatened. We were at a party about three months back at Samoa Brand’s house. Samoa has this new baby dyke lover, just graduated from college. And since she’s twenty years younger than Samoa, she gets indulged all she wants. So this moron comes up to Penny and starts in on her with, ‘My kid sister’s read all your books. Don’t you think it’s time to pay back? People like you should be outed, don’t you think? Shouldn’t we show the world we’ve got a middle class too?’”

  Lindsay raised her eyebrows. “That’s just one motor-mouth kid, though,” she said. “Surely Penny wasn’t getting herself in a state over that?”

  “She didn’t think the kid was going to do anything, but it made her start to wonder how long it would be before somebody did. So she decided the best way to deal with the fallout was to take control and out herself. She knew there would be a lot of publicity round the new book, with it being her first adult novel. She figured that would be a good time to spread the word.” Meredith rubbed the palms of her hands
over her face.

  “And you didn’t think it was a good idea?”

  Meredith sighed. “This is really difficult for me. No, I didn’t think it was a good idea. I knew it would hurt her sales, but that would’ve been her price for her choice. That wasn’t what it was about for me. I told Penny she was forgetting something important. She was forgetting there were two people in this relationship.”

  “But her coming out wouldn’t automatically implicate you, would it? You didn’t technically live together. You have separate postal addresses, separate front doors. Your lives are legally detached,” Lindsay protested.

  Meredith shook her head. “You don’t understand the kind of job I do. Every damn year, I get vetted. That’s why you never see me the second half of March and the first half of April. That’s when it’s my turn, so I have to look like Little Miss Prim around then. I need top security clearance to do my job. Soon as it became public knowledge that the person who lives in the other half of the house is a lesbian, they’d start to look a lot more carefully at me. If you know what you’re looking for, you’ll find it. Besides, you know what it was like for Pen. She wasn’t some literary writer that nobody’s ever heard of. She was a celeb. There isn’t a literate teenager in America who hasn’t read a Penny Varnavides Darkliners novel. She comes out and there’s going to be media interest. And they’re going to want to know exactly who her lover is. I had no chance of surviving if she came out.”

  Lindsay closed her eyes momentarily. “I’d avoid saying that to the police, if I was you,” she sighed. “So, Penny was talking about coming out and you were trying to dissuade her. That about the size of it?”

  “I guess.”

  “So how did you get from there to splitting up?”

  Meredith looked away. “The whole thing was so dumb.” Her voice was bitter.

  “It usually is,” Lindsay said.

  “We were fighting a lot. That’s something we’d never done before. Things never used to escalate like that between us. But it seemed like every time we were together we ended up fighting about whether she should come out.” Meredith ran her hands through her hair in a gesture of frustration. “It was driving me crazy. I need to be clear-headed at work, I need to be able to think straight. And Penny was making me nuts. She just wouldn’t be logical about the situation.”

  Lindsay waited. Eventually she said, “It’s a lot of pressure, when things start going wrong between you and your lover. Something’s got to give.”

  Meredith nodded. “It did. I slept with somebody else. I was out of town, we had dinner together. She was all the things Penny used to be with me—warm, funny, sympathetic. And I slept with her. I didn’t even need a few drinks to get me there, I went sober and willing.”

  Lindsay thought back to a time when infidelity had been something infinitely casual to her. It was so alien to her relationship with Sophie, it felt like a past life experience. But memory helped her construct a glimmer of what that urge to betrayal felt like. “You’re not the first and you’re not going to be the last. There are other kinds of treachery that cause just as much damage. I take it Penny found out and confronted you?”

  “I told her,” Meredith said bleakly.

  Oh, great, thought Lindsay. Why couldn’t she have been a Catholic and off-loaded the guilt to a silent priest? “You didn’t think she’d take it badly?”

  “I knew she’d take it badly. That’s why I told her. I figured it would make her realize how upset I was about her plan to come out. I guess I thought she’d realize that if I felt backed into a corner so far that I had to do something that went so fundamentally against everything our relationship was about, it was real serious and she should think again about what she was doing.”

  “And that’s not what happened.”

  Meredith snorted ironically. “You got it. She could not see past her own concerns. All she could see was that I’d been unfaithful to her. She didn’t stop to think why I might have felt driven to do that. She just didn’t get it. Far as she was concerned, I’d committed one of the cardinal sins against the relationship. She was judge and jury and there was only one sentence she could pass. Had to be the death sentence. No mitigation.”

  “Didn’t you try and explain?”

  Meredith leaned forward, elbows on knees, hands clasped. “What do you think?”

  Lindsay gave a wry smile. “I think you showered her with flowers and cards, filled her answering-machine tape with messages and kept a constant watch on the deck so that if she so much as stuck her nose out the door of an evening, you’d be able to saunter casually up to her and throw yourself at her feet and beg for mercy. That’s what I think.”

  “Not far off the mark.”

  “And she ignored all your messages, dumped the flowers on your doorstep and didn’t set foot outside from the moment you came home from work to the minute you left again in the morning?”

  “She tell you all this?” Meredith asked, resigned to embarrassment.

  “She didn’t have to. Like you said earlier, I’ve known the pair of you right from the start. So you followed her over here to try and change her mind?”

  Meredith nodded. “Waste of time and money. She’d have no more to do with me over here than she would back home. I guess she just about wore me down. The day she died, I left her another message on the answering machine. I swore it was going to be the last, and I told her so. I said it was her last chance to put it back together, otherwise I was going to assume she meant what she said and take appropriate action.”

  “Ah.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I was wondering how the cops got to you so fast.”

  “Wonder no more,” Meredith said wryly. “I left the number, of course.”

  “And you knew all about the plot?”

  “Oh, sure. Penny used to discuss her plots with three people—her agent, her editor and me.”

  “Is that all?” Lindsay asked, dismayed at seeing her circle of suspects shrink towards zero.

  “She ever talk about them with you and Sophie?”

  Lindsay shook her head. “She once asked Sophie for some background information about HIV, but even then she didn’t explain why she wanted to know. We had to wait till the book came out before we knew what it was all in aid of.”

  “Exactly. She always said if she talked about it too much, she got bored with the story, then she couldn’t be bothered to write it.” Meredith’s words clearly jogged a painful memory, for her eyes glittered with tears again. “I can’t believe it, you know? It’s like some sick joke. Like the phone’s going to ring and she’s going to say, ‘Hey, have you suffered enough yet?’” She clenched her eyes shut, but tears still seeped through.

  Unsure what to do for the best, Lindsay stood up and crossed to Meredith’s side, putting a careful arm round her shoulder. “I know,” she said softly. “Just when you think you’ve learned everything there is to know about pain, something creeps up on you and lets you know you’re only a beginner. And everybody tells you you’ll be all right, that time’s a healer. I’ll tell you something, Meredith. I don’t think it ever gets better. It just gets different.”

  Meredith half turned and buried her face in Lindsay’s chest, her body jerking with sobs. As she wailed, Lindsay simply held her close, one hand rubbing her back, trying not to think about Penny. Or her own Frances, all those years ago. It couldn’t last for ever, she told herself.

  Eventually, cried out, Meredith pulled away and blurted, “I miss her so much,” her voice choked with emotion. She pulled herself upright and staggered across the room into the hallway. Lindsay, hesitantly taking a step or two after her, was reassured by the sound of running water. She went back to her seat and waited. Long minutes passed, then Meredith returned, her eyes even more bloodshot, her face glowing from the scrubbing she’d clearly given it.

  “Okay,” she said briskly. “This is not getting you any closer to finding Pen’s killer. What do we do now?”

  “Who had
a motive?” Lindsay demanded. “Apart from you, that is?”

  Chapter 4

  Lindsay hadn’t expected London temperatures to be nearly as high as California’s. She was still dressed for the air-conditioned coolness of the plane, she thought, shrugging her shoulders to unstick shirt from skin. In this heat, jeans and cotton twill were not the ideal outfit for climbing four flights of narrow, dusty stairs with the smell of urine from the entrance still pungent. She wondered how many prospective clients were put off by the approach to Catriona Polson’s office. Then she remembered that those climbers would be pre-published authors full of hope. “None,” she muttered under her breath as she rounded the curve of the stairs and reached the final landing.

  In contrast to the understated brushed-steel plaque on the downstairs wall and the ambience of a stairway which clearly doubled as a hostel for the homeless, the offices of Polson and Firestone indicated that somewhere on their client list there were some major earners. Even when Lindsay had left Britain, before Soho went up-market and sexually ambivalent, office suites in the area had commanded high rents. Now that the district was almost chic, it must take a sizeable bank balance to secure the whole top floor of a building with a view of Soho Square.

  The offices lay behind tall double doors of pale gray wood and brushed steel. Lindsay opened the right-hand door and walked into a reception area that was still lurking in the previous decade. The bleached gray wood was the keynote, looking like the ghost of trees. What wasn’t wood was leather or brushed steel. Including the receptionist, Lindsay thought grimly. She was glad she’d employed a ruse to ensure Catriona Polson would be in. Looking at hair blue-black as carbon steel and a jaw with a higher breaking strain than a girder, she knew she was about to be given the brush-off for having the temerity to arrive without an appointment or three chapters and a synopsis. The sweat on her forehead from the sudden transition to air conditioning didn’t make her feel any more confident of success.

  Lindsay had felt slightly guilty about ringing up and pretending to be an American publisher’s assistant breathlessly booking a noon phone call to Ms. Polson, but not guilty enough to miss making sure she wouldn’t have a wasted journey. The receptionist’s grim glare gave her immediate absolution. She smiled. Nothing altered. The receptionist continued to stare at the screen of her computer. Lindsay cleared her throat. The receptionist’s plum-colored mouth puckered. Lindsay found herself irresistibly thinking about cat’s bottoms. Then the lips parted. “Can I help you?” haughtily, in a little girl voice that would have shattered crystal.