‘You’ve not been home?! Why ever not?’
‘Because I’m scared of what I shall find when I get there. And because I wanted to make sure you got the manuscript. I wanted,’ I said in a smaller voice, ‘some help.’
Our starter arrived. Absentmindedly Marion returned my glass and poured us both wine. An Australian red: ABV 14.5 per cent.
‘All right: go through all the people you might have annoyed in the flesh.’
‘I’ve been doing nothing else since it happened. When I’m doing author gigs, I meet a lot of people. I always try to speak to everyone afterwards, even if – especially if – they don’t seem to have approved of everything I say.’
‘Don’t you sometimes teach writers’ groups?’
‘Not very often. And you’ve no idea how nice I am about what they write.’
When I got home, I said the same to the officer from our local force who came to interview me at the request of West Mercia Police. It turned out she’d read some of my books, though she was more interested in fellow writers I had met. As a dewy-eyed fan of them, not me, in fact. But then, medieval Italy isn’t everyone’s taste, as my royalties proved year after year. Which is why I’d changed tack completely with the new novel. This featured a sassy contemporary protagonist – a sharp-talking, quick-thinking, fearless version of the young woman I’d have liked to have been.
‘Were you writing about anyone in particular?’ asked DC Bracewell.
‘I wasn’t writing about anyone. I was writing fiction.’
‘So no one you know might have thought it was about them?’
‘How could they? The book’s only just arrived at the publisher’s!’
‘Let’s get back to your ideas: have you ever stolen one from anyone else?’
In a parody of trying to remember I ostentatiously scratched my head. ‘Off the ideas tree in someone else’s back garden?’ She didn’t laugh. ‘OK, I’ll come clean: I have a couple of times. Last time I read The Prince by Machiavelli. And when I was researching in the library of the Duomo in Florence. Just because my pursuer alleges the ideas aren’t my own doesn’t make that the truth, you know.’
‘Think hard: have you ever, ever, seriously annoyed anyone?’
At first I shook my head. Then I recalled that I had. ‘I was once the judge for a short-story competition, and declined to give the first prize to a story I’d read somewhere else. But that was twenty years ago, surely when the woman who looked like me would have been only a child. I can’t recall the competition, let alone the person who’d tackled me and whom I’d accused – yes – of plagiarism.’
‘What did you tell this person?’
‘“I loved your story. And I loved it even more when I read Georgette Heyer’s version.” And actually, now I come to think of it, I was a tutor on a residential writing course once. I told the students they could send me their work when they’d finished it so I could comment on it. One woman’s manuscript got lost in the post. It was very embarrassing. I asked her to send it again, registered post, this time. The problem was she hadn’t got a copy. Can you believe it? Despite everything I said about making sure you always had back-ups. That should have been that, but she did get very aerated – as if it was somehow my fault, even though, when I’d seen the original, I had nothing but praise for her work.’
‘Ah! What was her name? What did she look like?’
I spread my hands. ‘I’m coming to the age where I find it hard to recall my own name, Ms Bracewell. As for what she looked like – young, healthy.’
‘The course she was on?’
‘I’ve taught so many…’
But she wasn’t going to let it go. ‘Could that have been the start of all this?’
I shrugged. ‘I’ve lived uneventfully since.’
She got up to look at all the books on my shelves. ‘You’ve been very prolific. Have you always been a writer?’
‘I used to work in a library when I lived in London.’ Imperial College, as it happened. One of the world’s leading academic institutions. I’d have loved to tell her all about my time there – including working with great scientists from all over the world.
‘Oh. A librarian.’ She was practically yawning with boredom; it was all too clear that she saw me as a dull stereotype, too busy reading about life to live it. She could barely raise her pen to jot down the answer to her next question. ‘Anything else?’
‘For a time I worked for the government.’
‘A civil servant. Hmm.’ That confirmed it: what a grey person I was. She was looking at her watch, clearly ready to go. ‘We’ll keep you updated if there are any developments,’ she said. ‘If only the hotel or the shop had had adequate CCTV coverage…’ She went off sucking her teeth at the failure of other people to do the police’s job for them.
They didn’t contact me again. I decided to let the matter rest.
The problem died down as quickly as it had started. My life fell back into its productive pattern of writing and talking about my books to the public. I remained watchful, however, especially as my publication date approached. My agent told me that one of my fellow writers had had the weird experience of seeing her Amazon page loaded with books apparently written by her but in fact nothing but gobbledegook. I should brace myself for a similar attack.
But nothing happened until after my new novel had been published and widely reviewed – a rarity for me. The critics were universally admiring, praising my original plot and clean fresh prose. It was tipped for an award.
Then the deluge began. Imagine the public humiliation of being accused of plagiarism – by a hitherto unknown writer whose work so far had only been self-published on Kindle. Kate Stone. Fortunately the traditional media were wary of printing her allegations, but as the Twittersphere got going, gradually even the Guardian started reporting on the furore.
‘Legal action: that’s the only option,’ Marion declared emphatically. ‘Stone says you took the novel word for word from a manuscript she sent you. She’s rewritten it, and here it is on Kindle – and it is remarkably like yours, I have to say. Almost identical.’
My palms were sweating. ‘Do you think … no, that’s crazy.’
‘Think what?’
‘Could she possibly be the woman who caused all that trouble last winter? We know someone vandalised my car and burned my case. What if she removed the manuscript from my case before she set it on fire?’
Marion looked puzzled.
‘Think about it. I came straight down after the trouble in the Midlands and handed you the memory stick. You printed it off. You sent a copy straight through to the publisher. If she’s hacked it after that, then she’s very clever indeed. When did her novel appear on Kindle, by the way?’
‘No idea. But I can certainly find out.’
The answer took a few days, but it was what I suspected: it was published less than a week after the incident.
‘I think you should tell the police,’ Marion said. ‘This is becoming more serious by the moment. Not only has this woman made libellous and slanderous allegations, she might have impersonated you and committed arson. That’s a terrible crime!’
I had had enough fuss and palaver, though. I shook my head gently but firmly. ‘Some people want something so desperately they actually believe they’ve already done it. Maybe she really, truly believes that this is her work and that I’ve stolen it. What if she went to court? What would we get? Perjury? It wouldn’t be fair to her. No, I genuinely feel sorry for Kate Stone. I just want to shut her up, that’s all.’
She stared at me with narrowed eyes. ‘You really mean that, don’t you?’
‘I remember what it was like to be so desperate to be published I’d have done almost anything. Poor Kate.’
‘I wonder if a lawyer’s letter would fix everything. I’ll talk to my solicitors, and we should get your publisher’s team involved too. Then, with luck, everything should go back to normal. Have I shown you your sales figures, by the way…?’
So the public heard no more of Kate Stone, and a lot more of me. Despite the amazing success of my venture into contemporary crime, I returned to the Middle Ages, where I felt altogether safer. Part of me was sad I would have no more use for the work I’d researched in Imperial College’s library, or the years I’d spent working for M16. How many spies had I taken down in that time; how many false allegations had I successfully made? How many cars had I attacked with tiny explosive charges so that the damage looked like the work of mindless vandals? How many fires had I set from afar? It was a shame all that computer and other technological know-how, all my cleverness hiding in plain sight would wither after one brief late flowering. The trouble was that, in those days, I’d taught myself to be entirely amoral. Now I found the recent pangs of conscience quite uncomfortable.
And, of course, there were some things you simply can’t get away with twice.
Wife on Tour
Julia Crouch
They finally got onto the 0800 EasyFly Gatwick to Frankfurt at the back of Boarding Queue Two.
‘I can’t believe they still don’t allocate,’ Larry said as they surveyed the crowded cabin. A couple of vacant single seats lurked in the back rows.
‘We should have paid for Nifty Boarding,’ Ruth said.
‘Waste of money. In any case, you would have got us here too late to make any use of it.’
Was it really her fault that Google Maps had led them into icy gridlock on the M23?
‘For fuck’s sake get a fucking move on,’ Larry muttered under his breath at an old man who, in his battle to cram his heavy bag into the overhead locker, was completely blocking the aisle.
‘Excuse me, my dear.’ Larry turned to a flight attendant standing in the exit row next to him. ‘I’m Larry Speakman.’ He tilted his Panama hat, took her hand and reached it to his lips. ‘Performing for the opening of the Christmas Market. I’ve booked a ticket for this fine lady,’ he stroked his violin case. ‘And it’s most important that we sit next to each other.’
The flight attendant fluttered stiff bars of mascara and almost curtseyed. ‘I’ll see what I can do for you, Mr Speakman.’ She sashayed along the aisle. After a brief exchange with a lone young man, who gloomily rose and moved, she ushered Larry to two adjacent empty seats.
‘Thank you so much, my dear,’ Larry said, as, without a backward glance to his wife, he squeezed into the window seat and strapped his violin in next to him, slipping both Ruth’s and his travel documents into his breast pocket. He always carried their papers, ever since an incident thirty years earlier when, distracted by a feverish toddler, Ruth had left her passport on a nappy-changing table at Orly.
Ruth was directed to a seat by the toilet, next to an overspilling obese woman who smelled of stale sausage.
She elbowed herself some space, fastened her safety belt and closed her eyes to perform the putting-yourself-to-sleep trick she had learned to cure her fear of flying.
One … two…
She rarely accompanied Larry on tour. She was only doing so this time because he had sprained his back playing squash and needed someone to help him with the bags.
Three … four…
She would have preferred to go somewhere warm. He had gone to Dubai two weeks earlier, to play at some oil magnate’s son’s bar mitzvah. His back had been fine then.
Five … six…
But Frankfurt, in early December, with a grumpy Larry: the prospect hardly lifted the spirits. She consoled herself with the thought of the Christmas market. She would have four or so hours alone while he rested before his performance. She planned to buy presents for the grandchildren.
Seven … eight…
She tried to imagine herself in a snowy, Glühwein-scented glow, surrounded by cheery, red-faced Germans offering her delicious tidbits.
Nine…
But she kept being sidetracked by the thought of damp, cold gloves and freezing toes. A familiar sick chill brewed in her solar plexus.
Ten…
‘Drinks? Snacks?’
Ruth opened one eye to be greeted by the flight attendant’s glowing face.
‘G & T, please,’ Ruth said. ‘Slimline.’
‘How are you paying?’
‘Euros,’ she said with a shiver of pleasure.
She reached into her bag for the fat wodge of notes she had picked up the day before. Larry didn’t like taking money with them on a gig, insisting that they wait for his currency per diems. But because of the Christmas shopping plan, she had performed this act of secret insurrection. She liked cash. It left no paper trail he could pick up, no evidence of wanton extravagance.
The fat neighbour snored and shifted. Ruth sipped her G & T as she watched the flight attendant bending over Larry to serve him, rubbing her patent court shoe against the back of her stockinged leg. His pink, well-cared-for fingers fluttered over her backside as he regaled her with some amusing tale.
Larry could be quite charming with other women.
‘This way,’ he snapped, charging ahead through the brightly lit marble halls of Frankfurt airport, holding only his instrument. Ruth followed a little behind, blinking and bowed down by his carry-on holdall and her own large handbag.
Christmassy violin music piped through the corridors. Ruth recognised it as the work of a Korean soloist – a fifteen-year-old girl Larry considered to be his number-one rival.
‘Why you had to put a bag in the hold, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Slows everything down.’
‘My cosmetics…’ she began. She had once lost a brand-new pot of Clarins moisturiser to an overzealous jobsworth at Heathrow.
‘For fuck’s sake. Poor dear Annaliese will be waiting for us in arrivals,’ he said as they stood in line to show their passports. Annaliese was his thirty-five-year-old, Valkyrie-proportioned, German promoter. ‘And my back’s killing me.’
‘Danke, mein Liebling,’ he said to the dark beauty at passport control, in an altogether different voice.
‘Why don’t you rest in there?’ Ruth pointed to a lounge at the side of the baggage reclaim hall. Inside, space-age Perspex egg chairs dangled from the ceiling on silver cables. ‘And I’ll get my suitcase.’
‘Give me my holdall, then.’
As she left him hanging in a chair, cradling his violin, looking like a spoiled child, she realised that he had forgotten to reclaim her passport. It was still in her hand.
She zipped it carefully in the inside pocket of her bag, next to the envelope of cash.
As she stood by the carousel, watching the suitcases waltz past in time to the carolling violin, she noted how, with Larry encased in that glass lounge like some malevolent dinosaur embryo, she felt, well, free; unobserved, uncriticised.
Her jaunty red suitcase danced along the carousel towards her. She dived forward and plucked it away, taking some of its motion into her bones, and the thought brewing inside her turned the chill in her chest to fire. Checking one more time that her passport and cash were safe inside her handbag, she took her scarlet Samsonite Partner and tangoed it swiftly towards the ‘Nothing To Declare’ channel.
‘Hello there, again,’ she said to her fat plane neighbour, who was waddling just in front of her. She used the bulk of the woman to hide from Annaliese, who was standing statuesquely in arrivals with a hollydecorated sign reading ‘Larry Speakman, Maestro’.
Cash in hand, Ruth headed straight for the British Airways counter. She didn’t want to risk being at the back of the number two boarding queue again.
‘I’d like a one-way ticket, leaving as soon as possible,’ she said to the comfortably plain-looking woman behind the counter. ‘Somewhere warm, please. Oh, and business class.’
The piped Korean violinist performed a magnificent crescendo, and, for some reason – it could have been coincidence; it could have been something in the ether – the airport lights flickered.
The Naked Lady of Prague
Kate Ellis
I tried to call Magda as soon as I got
off the plane. But when there was no answer I told myself that she was bound to be working, trudging round the city with a group of tourists until her feet ached.
When we’d met in London she’d told me all about her life: her history course at Charles University, her part-time job as a tourist guide, and her cramped and shabby apartment in the New Town. Even though we’d spent less than a week together, I felt I knew her as well as I knew myself. Her parents were dead and her sister lived in Australia, so we were both alone in the world. Twin souls. United by our desire to be together.
Soon I’d see her again, but in the meantime I would have to entertain myself in a strange city. And if I did the usual tourist things, I might even bump into her – doing a little detective work to give serendipity a helping hand. I knew her tours began at the Old Town Hall, in front of the astronomical clock, where she waited for her customers with her purple-and-white umbrella. Magda had called the place a tourist trap, but I was sure her cynicism was born of long familiarity and I yearned to see it. I yearned to see anywhere associated with her.
According to the guide book I’d bought at the airport, I should cross Charles Bridge and head for the Old Town Square. As I walked I kept trying Magda’s number but there was no reply. I told myself that she probably switched her phone off while she was working. Or maybe I’d written the number down wrong. For the first time I felt a tiny prickle of unease. I had grabbed the chance of a cheap flight and travelled to Prague on impulse. What if Magda was away for some reason? What if I couldn’t find her? In her haste to catch her flight home she’d forgotten to give me the address of her apartment.
The temperature was rising and the rucksack on my back felt as though it was filled with rocks. I made for the Old Town Square, following my map. Even if she wasn’t there, one of the other tourist guides was sure to know where I could find her.
Mystery Tour Page 12