Booked for Murder (11 page)

Kirsten groaned. “Don't encourage her. We'll be here all night and I need my beauty sleep.”

“If anyone needs their beauty sleep around here, gorgeous, it's not you. The problem, Linds, is Guy. Well, it's not really Guy as such, it's Stella. You remember the set-up at Watergaw?”

Lindsay remembered. Helen and Guy had set up their independent film-making company three years earlier. Before that, Helen had worked in theater administration, then run her own casting agency, working for TV and film companies initially in Britain and later across Europe. Guy had been a TV director and producer first of current affairs and later of high-profile documentaries. Together they'd decided to create Watergaw Films to take advantage of new EU funding geared towards community groups who wanted to develop TV and film projects, both dramatic and documentary. “How could I
forget?” she said. “Straight partnership, down the middle, you and Guy. Best buddies, known each other since school, both gay, both refugees from New Labour, both filled with the burning desire to make meaningful TV.”

“That's what I thought too,” Helen said bitterly. She ran a hand through her mop of flaming red hair. “Turns out I was well wrong. On pretty much every count. I could just about live with the way he's turned into the worst kind of exploitative capitalist, because I could always weigh in and get the balance straight again. But now he's got that bitch Stella on board . . . I just don't know how much more of his shit I can take.”

It had to be serious for Helen to be badmouthing another woman like that, Lindsay realized with a jolt. Normally first to the barricades when sisterhood came under threat, it took a lot for Helen even to admit a woman was in the wrong when there was an available male to be blamed. “Who's Stella?” Lindsay asked as Kirsten moved behind Helen and started to massage the back of her neck and shoulders.

“Oh, that's wonderful,” Helen purred, rolling her head back. “The bitch goddess from hell joined us about a year ago. We needed someone else on board with directorial experience, and she came highly recommended. Plus she had a bit of capital which we needed right then, so she bought in at twenty percent of the company. What was supposed to happen was that she would do the bread and butter stuff for Guy and work with me on projects where I was producer. What wasn't supposed to happen was Guy rediscovering his lost heterosexuality and climbing into bed with the scheming little minx,” Helen said. Not even Kirsten's massage was enough to subdue the anger in her voice.

“Oh.”

“Yeah, ‘oh.'” Helen reached behind her and gently disengaged Kirsten's hands. “Thanks for the thought, K, but you're wasting your energy. That pair have got me so wound up . . .”

“Well, don't talk about them, then,” she said reasonably.

“As well as tell a river to stop flowing downhill,” Lindsay muttered.

“Exactly. And as if it's not enough that he's sleeping with her, he's taking professional decisions with her. To all intents and purposes,
she's in control. Whatever she wants, Guy backs her. Whenever there's a difference of opinion, whether it's about company strategy or something as minor as how a sequence should be filmed, Guy sides with her every time, and I'm the one left out in the cold. I feel like I'm being frozen out of my own company, and it's really pissing me off. Things get decided when I'm not even there—like as not between the sheets. But it's more than just being sidelined that bugs me. They're changing the culture of the company, and I'm spending all my time and energy running to try and stand still instead of moving us forward. It's not what I came into this business to do, but I just don't know how the hell to beat this bitch at her own game.” Helen drained her glass and emptied the last of the bottle into it.

Lindsay rubbed her eyes with her knuckles and tried to straighten out of the slump that was spreading her upper body over the table top. “There's got to be some dirt,” she managed to say.

“You what?”

Lindsay dragged herself upright and yawned hugely. “You don't get to be queen bitch at your first attempt. If she's such a smooth operator, there's got to be bodies buried somewhere.”

Light dawned in Helen's eyes. “Hey, why didn't I think of that!”

Those were the last words Lindsay heard as she drifted into a limbo between sleep and waking. “Mmm,” she murmured as she slipped away.

It didn't last long. Before she could fall far enough for dreams to capture her, the shrill chirrup of a telephone cut into her unconsciousness. “Huh? . . . wha'? . . . what is it?” she gabbled as her head shot up and her eyes snapped wide open and staring. She registered Helen reaching over to grab the phone that was buried under some papers inches away from where Lindsay's ear had been.

“Hiya, Soph. All right? . . . Yeah, she's here. All seven dwarfs rolled into one—Sleepy, Grumpy, Dopey, Snorey, Guilty, Boozy and Sexy.” Helen roared with laughter.

Lindsay, pitying Sophie's eardrum, said, “You've been practicing that line all night. Gimme the phone.” She stretched her arm out, beckoning with her fingers.

“Here she is. See ya, Soph.” Helen grinned, handed the phone to Lindsay and grabbed a bundle of papers before sweeping out of the kitchen.

Lindsay cleared her throat. “I know. If I was home, I'd be sleeping with Mutt. In the doghouse.”

“No, if you were home, you'd be where you're supposed to be,” Sophie said, sounding more exasperated than angry. “How do you get into these things?”

“Natural talent?”

“Natural stupidity, more like.”

“I couldn't just leave Meredith to it, could I?” Lindsay said plaintively.

“I don't see why not,” Sophie grumbled.

Even with a continent and an ocean separating them, Lindsay could tell her heart wasn't in it. “The woman you fell in love with wouldn't turn her back on Meredith.”

“That was then. Things that are endearing in the first flush of passion can lose their charm, you know,” Sophie pointed out, a warning creeping into her voice. “This isn't just about Meredith, is it?”

“Yeah, all right. Partly it's for me. I cared about Penny. We both did. I've tried to keep my nose out when people I care about have died before, and I never managed it. I thought this time I might as well be honest right from the start and admit that I know I can find out things the police won't get to hear in a million years.”

“I thought it might be something like that. Is that why you didn't wait until I got home? Did you really think I'd try to talk you out of it?”

Lindsay thought she detected a trace of hurt under the warmth in Sophie's voice. “I wanted to wait till you came home, but the plane tickets were already bought and booked. I didn't feel I had the right to go wasting Meredith's money. I did try to call you at Crazy John's, but they said you guys weren't in and didn't have a table booked. I didn't know where else to try. I'm sorry if you feel I didn't take you into account. That wasn't what I had in mind.”

Sophie sighed. The silence stretched and Lindsay couldn't avoid filling it. “Anyway, you'll be here next week. Things'll be sorted by then. We'll have our holiday just like we planned.”

Another sigh. This time Sophie followed it up with words. “If you're still in one piece,” she said gloomily.

“No reason why I shouldn't be,” Lindsay said. “Come on, I know how to take care of myself.”

More silence.

“I've done this before, you know. I did it before I had you fussing around like a nursemaid. I'm not a child, Sophie. I'm not helpless.”

“I didn't say you were, my love. I just worry about you, okay? I know it's totally unreasonable of me, but I do worry.”

“You don't have to. I'm too much of a coward to get damaged.”

In her office with its view of the Oakland Bridge, Sophie Hartley grabbed her graying curls with her free hand. Lindsay might have chosen to forget, but she could never lose the knowledge of how dangerous her lover's favorite game could be. “I hope you're right,” she said softly. “I really hope you're right.”

Chapter 8

L
indsay stirred the warm gray liquid that passed for coffee in the supermarket café and stared across the car park at the row of converted mews cottages that housed Monarch Press. Nothing was moving so far. But that was hardly surprising of a publishing house at five to nine in the morning. In an ideal world, she'd still be tucked up in bed letting her body recover. But Helen had never mastered the art of rising quietly and unobtrusively. If she was awake at seven, the rest of the house was guaranteed to be awake by five past, their ears possessed by Radio Four at full volume. Helen liked to hear the morning news wherever she was in the house, including the shower.

Lindsay had staggered downstairs at ten past seven, lured by the smell of coffee. She'd found Kirsten reading the
Guardian
in her dressing gown, her short dark hair sticking up in a Fido Dido crest, hands wrapped round a mug of very black coffee. The room was an oasis of relative quiet, the radio there being silent. “Plenty in the pot,” Kirsten mumbled. “Croissants in the oven. A couple of minutes yet.”

Lindsay tried moving a mouth that seemed to be lodged in a concrete face. “I can't believe you got her to switch off the radio in here,” she managed as she helped herself to coffee.

“I don't mind bringing work home with me. But I'm damned if I'm going to wake up to it as well. I told her, it's the
Today
program or me.”

“It must be love,” Lindsay commented.

Right on cue, Helen bounced into the room swathed in a kimono, her marmalade hair in damp coils to her shoulders. “Sleep okay, Linds?” she demanded, sweeping past them both and yanking a tray of hot croissants and
pains au chocolat
out of the oven.

“Yeah,” she said. “Could have done with a few more hours, but . . .”

“Don't be daft,” Helen said, dumping the croissants on to a plate and balancing it on top of the papers she'd been working on the night before. “Never mind Tulsa, you're back living on Tulse Hill time,” she continued, breaking into song and playing air guitar in a bad imitation of Eric Clapton.

“Helen,” Kirsten groaned plaintively.

“Best cure for jet lag,” Helen persisted. “What've you got on today, K?”

Kirsten frowned momentarily. Then her face cleared. “Doing a piece for Radio Bloke about holiday reading. One last interview to do, then I can cobble it all together.”

“Radio Bloke?” Lindsay asked faintly.

“Five Live,” Helen informed her. “‘Twenty-four-hour news and sport from the BBC,'” she mimicked, helping herself to a croissant.

“I do bits and pieces for them, but mostly I work for Four,” Kirsten said, her warm radio voice re-emerging from the early morning gravel. “Arts and media stuff.”

“That's handy,” Lindsay said, perking up as the coffee worked its way through to her brain.

“Watch out, K,” Helen cautioned through a mouthful of pastry. “When this scally starts to take an interest, there's always an ulterior motive. She'll be after borrowing some fancy recording equipment or something, just wait and see.”

Reaching for a
pain au chocolat
, Lindsay shook her head. “You know me too well, Helen.”

“You can't scam a scammer,” Helen said.

“Is there something I can help you with, Lindsay?” Kirsten asked between mouthfuls.

“I don't honestly know,” she said. “Maybe. Do you know anything about Monarch Press?”

Kirsten nodded. “As it happens, yeah.
Kaleidoscope
did a feature on their tenth anniversary. I wasn't producing, but I went along to the party. Lemme see . . .” Her dark eyes focused on the middle distance as Helen leaned across to refill her coffee cup. “Thanks, love. Now, lemme get this right. The guy behind the company is an East End wide boy called Danny King. He's a proper cockney, one generation away from a barrow boy. Though that's being a bit unfair. His dad actually got off the barrows and worked as a printer in Fleet Street.”

Lindsay groaned. “Bigger highway robbers than Dick Turpin.”

“Yeah, well, old man King retired to Spain on his redundo some time in the mid-eighties, leaving his wife behind.”

“How did you find all this out?” Helen demanded. “I know you're nosy, but that's ridiculous!”

Kirsten grinned. “I was standing next to his dad during the speeches, which were mostly the kind that can only be improved by talking through them. He told me his entire life story, most of which, thankfully, I have managed to erase from the memory banks.”

“So how did an East End cowboy get to be a gentleman publisher?” Lindsay asked, trying to keep the conversation on track.

“Who said anything about gentleman?” Kirsten said, eyebrows steepling. “Danny's mum was a great believer in self-improvement, and she was always encouraging her little lad to read. When he ducked out of school, his dad called in a few favors and got him a job in the print works of one of the big publishing houses. From there, Danny parlayed himself a job as a sales rep. Supposedly he was a very good one. Then he won the pools.”

“You're kidding!” Helen exclaimed. “How much?”

“A mill and a quarter. Which was a lot of cash eleven or so years ago.”

“It's a lot of cash now,” Lindsay pointed out. “And he set up a publishing house?” The incredulity in her voice was matched only by the expression on Helen's face.

“That's right. He announced to a waiting world that nobody was publishing the books he'd wanted to read as a teenager, or the books he'd wanted to sell, or the books he wanted to read now, and he was going to fill the gap in the market. Everybody laughed at him, of
course. Publishing was in a decline, the market was shrinking, there were too many books and not enough buyers already. And of course, he was a toerag from the wrong side of the tracks without the requisite English degree. But he proved them all wrong.”