Murder by the Book (3 page)

Langham read the note again. ‘I might be wrong, but this doesn't sound like the type of language a young swimming instructor might use. Or am I being unfair? What do you think?'

‘It is a trifle flowery, and the use of the French …' Charles frowned. ‘I agree. Kenneth is a cockney tyke, and I assume his reading tastes run to the Wizard, not Proust.'

‘Maybe it's the work of his accomplice, the photographer?'

‘In all likelihood they're running a very lucrative business, preying upon the lovelorn and the lonely. If only they could see the heartache they cause.'

Langham slipped the letter into the envelope and passed it back to Charles. ‘I'll pay Kenneth a visit and see what he has to say for himself. Try not to worry. I know that's easier said than done, but I'm pretty sure I'll have the matter sorted out in no time.'

‘My boy, you don't know how grateful I am.'

Langham looked at his watch. It was almost four. ‘And as they say, there's no time like the present.'

Charles forestalled him. ‘The baths are closed half a day today, my boy. The queers of London are spared Kenneth's poisoned charms.'

Langham finished his whisky. ‘In that case I'll pay him a visit tomorrow. I'll be in touch, and notify me as soon as you get another letter.'

Charles reached across the desk and grasped Langham's hand. ‘My dear boy, my gratitude knows no bounds.'

Maria was busy typing a letter when Langham passed through the outer office. He waved as he went and said goodbye.

She tipped her head to one side, prettily, and trilled, ‘
Au revoir
,
Donald!' Her contralto buoyed his steps as he left the agency and emerged into the late afternoon sunlight.

He considered his promise to Charles, and wondered if he'd made a mistake in appearing so overtly confident. Blackmail, he knew from his limited experience, was a messy business which rarely, if ever, redounded to the advantage of the victim.

M
aria stood before the bay window of her father's Hampstead townhouse and gazed, without really seeing anything, across the darkening heath. She nursed a glass of champagne and wondered how many times she had stood in this very place while a party surged behind her.

Her earliest recollection was as a twelve-year-old, way back in 'thirty-seven when her father had first been posted to London. It had been winter then, and she had been delighted by the blanket of snow which had covered the capital. Before the outbreak of war her father had been recalled to France, only to flee a year later to work in the cabinet in exile in London. Maria recalled standing here in the summer of 'forty at the age of fifteen, before being sent away to boarding school in Gloucestershire. While her father's political colleagues had schemed away, she had worried about how she, a foreigner, might be received at her new school. In the event she need not have worried. Half the girls there had been from overseas and she had made friends quickly; in many ways it had been the happiest time of her life.

Now her father held these soirées every month and invited everyone who was anyone in French émigré society: artists rubbed shoulders with writers, politicians with philosophers and professors. Her father always invited her along, he said, in order to add youth and beauty to the ageing mix of largely male guests, and for her father's sake she always attended. She disliked the formality of the gatherings, the stilted manners of everyone present, and most of all she disliked her father's expectations that she should circulate and be sparkling.

She had worked at the Charles Elder Literary Agency for almost five years now, and though she liked the work and loved Charles, she had found herself wondering lately where her life was taking her. Originally she'd decided to go into publishing with the hopes that one day she might become an editor, but after six years with two major London firms she'd come to the realization that it was not only her nationality that was holding her back: the fact was that publishing, like every other walk of professional life, was so dominated by the male of the species as to be practically closed to any woman with aspirations.

At least Charles treated her as an equal, and had even told her that one day she would be made a partner. So, she asked herself for perhaps the fiftieth time that day, why the sudden, indefinable dissatisfaction?

‘Maria, my darling, forgive me – I've neglected you. Old Henri was bending my ear about some convoluted trade agreement and I couldn't get away. But here, I saw your glass was almost empty.' Her father passed her a full, fizzing glass and she smiled up at him.

The French cultural attaché to London was tall, slim and impeccably attired in a sharp evening suit. His face was proportionally thin and aquiline, his silver hairline receding gracefully. He combined the contradictory attributes of artistic acuity and business acumen never found in British politicians, but
de rigueur
in the politicos of her own country.

At the gatherings her father insisted on introducing her to the latest French literary lion – and to men who were neither French nor literary. She found it hard to forgive him for introducing her last year to Gideon Martin, an overbearing narcissist who'd had a few literary novels published in London in the late forties. They had sold abominably – for good reason, Maria thought – and ever since Martin had trudged the gutters of Grub Street, picking up trifling commissions here and there and churning out hack novels.

She had made the mistake of dining with him several times last year – before she realized quite what a self-piteous, self-centred creature he was – and he had followed her like a lovelorn ghost ever since, swaggering with his trademark swordstick.

To her horror she had glimpsed him tonight, and had spent the evening so far attempting to avoid him.

‘You seem withdrawn,
ma chérie.
'

She smiled. ‘I'm tired, Papa.'

‘Then drink. I have always found champagne to be a great enlivener.'

She laughed. ‘To be honest, it sends me to sleep!'

He made to take it from her. ‘In that case, would you prefer a cup of English tea?'

He was forever, in his own gentle way, making gentle digs at all things English. She wondered if he secretly resented the way she had taken to her adopted country. Well, she thought, if so then he had no one to blame but himself.

‘Come, Maria. Look who arrived from Paris just this morning! None other than Monsieur Savagne. He is eager to see you again.'

She allowed herself to be steered across the busy drawing room to a knot of guests by the hearth. She wondered what the dear little man was doing in London this time. On their last meeting – and that must have been over two years ago – he had regaled her with the details of a monograph he was working on: a history of Satanism in Paris and London.

Her father announced her to the small crowd as if introducing royalty. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, my daughter, Maria. M Savagne, Maria has never stopped talking about your book.'

Which was an exaggeration, but she smiled anyway and said to the diminutive man, ‘And what brings you to London this time, Monsieur? Research?'

He waved away the suggestion of another monograph. ‘
Non!
Certainly not research. I am afraid my scholarly days are behind me. The thought of writing another book …' His blue eyes twinkled at her. ‘Do you know how old I am, my dear?'

She sipped her champagne and said, ‘I'd guess at not a day over sixty.'

‘You flatter an old man! I am eighty next week, eighty!' He went on with something like sadness in his tone, ‘It is too old to be doing what I am doing, my dear.'

‘Which is?'

He smiled, and launched himself into an account which seemed to have little bearing on his current business. ‘During the last war, when the Nazis invaded Paris, they ransacked various apartments, though I think they used the word “commandeered” – but that is by the by. They also “appropriated” various works of art. One of these was my late uncle's pride and joy, an eighteenth-century Italian statuette of the virgin and child. For many years it was thought lost in Germany, but it has recently come to light.'

‘In London?'

‘Actually, my dear, in Rome. But a little bird told me that it was coming up for open sale at Sotheby's this week.'

‘And you hope to purchase it?'

M Savagne pulled an expressive face. ‘If only I had the financial wherewithal to do so, my dear. No, my only hope is to approach the purchaser and appeal to his better nature. I hope to propose something along the lines that the buyer might, in his altruism, donate the statuette to a Paris museum. At least then it would be back where it belongs.'

Maria laid a hand on the little man's arm. ‘A noble sentiment, but do you think the buyer might agree?'

‘That remains to be seen. But that is why I am in London, and later this week I shall attend the auction at Sotheby's when the statuette will come under the hammer.'

Maria raised her glass. ‘To your success,' she said.

A waiter arrived and recharged their glasses, Maria declining by placing a hand over hers. M Savagne said, ‘But I will bore you no longer with my trivial concerns, my dear. I must say you are looking enchanting tonight – and how goes life in the Smoke, as I think they call this metropolis, and for good reason?'

For the next ten minutes they chattered amiably about literary life in London and her job at the agency; she managed to make her rather humdrum daily routine sound interesting, with exaggerated anecdotes of bidding wars between publishers and gossip about Big Name authors.

Canapés were served and her father, perhaps fearing M Savagne was overstaying his daughter's welcome, pounced and said, ‘If you will excuse me while I steal my daughter for just one moment. My dear, I must introduce you to an eminent young man of letters …'

She smiled at M Savagne and wished him good luck at the auction. As her father escorted her across the room, he said, ‘I feel sorry for the poor fellow. He told you about his crazy idea? The trouble is, which collector in his right mind would consent, after paying for the statuette, to have it sitting in some Paris museum when it could be gracing his private collection?'

‘Perhaps an arrangement might be made for a part-time loan?' she suggested.

Her father smiled. ‘The optimism of youth …' he murmured. ‘Ah, here we are.'

The eminent young novelist turned out to be a bore in his forties who wrote sub-Proustian, stream-of-consciousness tracts and who was looking for a London publisher.

Maria tried to come up with a tactful way of telling the man that his book was unlikely to find a market in this country. ‘The English,' she temporized, ‘are more interested in whodunits than literary experimentalism.'

He rallied; she listened politely, her attention wandering. She looked up, and wished she hadn't. Her gaze was snared by that of Gideon Martin, who took the establishment of eye contact as permission to hurry across the room and drag her away.

‘Do excuse us,' he said to the bemused writer as he gripped Maria by the elbow and steered her towards the window. He tapped her on her upper arm with the brass top of his swordstick and said, ‘Now, why on earth were you talking to that ghastly little man?'

Her blood boiling, she snapped, ‘Because my father introduced me, and actually I found him rather interesting. I was advising him how to go about getting a decent publisher.'

‘If only you would do the same for me!' he said peevishly.

Gideon Martin – he insisted that his surname was pronounced in the French manner, as his mother had been from Paris – was a small, portly man in his late forties, with a huge, barrel-like chest and short legs, whose undeniably handsome face belied his age. On being introduced to Martin last year, she had assumed him to be no older than forty – and initially he had been the epitome of charm.

She had agreed to a dinner date with him, enjoyed the evening and Martin's witty company, and found herself swept off her feet by his urbane manners and wide knowledge. In retrospect she told herself that at the time she had been lonely, and therefore desperate. She had gone out for drinks with him on a few other occasions, until she saw the writer in his true colours. He was a desperately jealous man who resented more talented authors their success and blamed everyone but himself for his current situation as a jobbing hack.

She had screwed up her courage and told Martin that she no longer wished to see him, citing differences of personality and taste as the reason. He had been distraught, threatening to throw himself beneath a tube train if she did not agree to see him again – always the last refuge of the morally bankrupt, she thought – and had dogged her steps ever since.

He had even submitted some of his more literary efforts to her agency, under a pen name, but she had seen through his ruse and his overwrought prose, and returned his manuscripts only partially read.

Now he said, ‘His experimentalism is passé. Merely stylistic, lacking any intellectual content.' He had the annoying habit of not looking at the person to whom he was speaking; his gaze was forever fixed, broodingly, on something distant. Maria thought it was an indication of his egotistical self-absorption.

Maria almost said, ‘Very much like your own “serious” work, then?' but stopped herself just in time. Instead she found herself snapping, ‘And I suppose yours is brimming with intellectual content?'

His gaze came to rest on her face, swiftly, before flitting away. ‘Maria, why must you treat me like this?'

He really did have the ability to annoy her. ‘Like what?'

‘As if …' His gaze flicked to her, then away. ‘As if I were less than nothing.'

She was tempted to say, ‘Because, Gideon, to me you
are
less than nothing.' Instead she said, ‘My treatment of you is nothing of the kind.'