Trick of the Dark (31 page)

One of the things I had realised during my travels is that most travel guides are 'one size fits all'. Your only real choice is deciding whether you're a Lonely Planet type of person, or a Rough Guide, or a Frommer's. It's a cookie-cutter way of arranging travel, and it's one that's hopelessly out of date now we have the ability to deliver what people need directly to their email in-box. It's also no way to cater to a market where the needs of travellers are so varied. I wanted to create something that helped people make the most of their trips, whether they were experienced, seasoned travellers or newbies making their first tentative forays out into the wider world.Their needs are different, but I thought one company could serve them all.

And so 24/7 was conceived.

Just like babies, businesses take a while from conception to birth. And just like babies, a lot of them miscarry on the way. And some are stillborn.The internet age has opened up amazing new horizons for many people. But it's also given false hope to a lot of people. Ideas are ten a penny. Good ideas are more rare than that. But finding someone who can turn a good idea into a profitable reality is more like a one-in-a-million shot.

I'd done it once, so I was confident I could do it again. I returned to London and settled into the house I'd bought two years before and hardly lived in. I enlisted Vinny Fitzgerald, who had worked on the IT end of
doitnow.com
alongside Kathy, and Anne Perkins, my devoted former PA, to help me put 24/7 together.

While Vinny began work on constructing the software package that would allow us to tailor the guides as individually as I wanted, I started researching how we would actually assemble the body of knowledge that would make our guides so special and how we would generate subscribers. I soon became aware that I wasn't the only person with a similar idea. When the word went out that I was looking at travel guides, those people flocked to me because I had a proven track record in online business.

Mostly they came with half-baked, half-formed notions with nothing solid to back them up. It always amazes me that so many people think it's enough just to have an idea, without doing any work to underpin it. I was appalled and astonished at the number of people who turned up with nothing more concrete than a sense of entitlement. Just because they'd had an idea. It's the difference between being a good pub raconteur and a bestselling novelist.That difference is hard work.

Of course, some of the people who beat a path to our door were very far from a waste of time. We ended up buying the work of an Italian entrepreneur who had been working on a similar idea. He had some great marketing ideas, but no software expertise. Without someone like us, he'd never have got his project off the ground and he knew it. He was happy to turn his work into hard cash, and we were happy we'd ended up with something that would save us a lot of time in the long run.

We were also in talks with a Swedish software developer who had been working on a package that would cover similar ground to the software suite Vinny was engineering for us.

Careful now, Jay told herself. Ulf Ingemarsson's death was still an unsolved murder. Caution should be her watchword. Liv Aronsson was a mad bitch who would fall on the slightest ambiguity like a terrier on a rat. She was still hawking her case round lawyers in Stockholm and London, trying to find one who thought there was any point in bringing a case against Jay. She'd failed so far because she always insisted that they pursue a claim against Jay for unlawful killing as well as theft. But one of these days, some slick bastard in a fancy suit might persuade her to solo on the theft accusation. And then it could get messy.

Vinny had warned her that a forensic software architect might be able to isolate elements of code that had come from Ingemarsson's work. Luckily, lawyers didn't have Vinny's insight into the intricacies of programming code. But even so, if Aronsson did manage to demonstrate that some of their code had been written by Ingemarsson, she couldn't prove they'd stolen it. Because of course, they hadn't. They had a paper trail of payments made to various programmers, any one of whom could have introduced that code into the finished program. 24/7 was vulnerable only to the accusation that they'd been conned, the innocent victims of someone else's theft.

And besides, after all the unsuccessful lawsuits over the Harry Potter books and
The Da Vinci Code,
the public were deeply sceptical about the idea of plagiarism in any field of creative activity. They got excited for about five minutes, then they sat back sipping their Pinot Grigio and talking vaguely about Zeitgeist and ideas floating around in the ether. Still, there was no point in making it easier for Aronsson.

To our horror, he was murdered in a burglary at his holiday villa in Spain before we could reach an agreement on how we could work together. So his work died with him. The tragic waste of another life reawakened the pain I had felt when Kathy died, and for a few weeks I found it hard to concentrate on work. I wanted to run away again, but this time I had responsibilities to other people. So I stayed.

Jay read what she'd written. Nothing there that Aronsson could use, she thought. And a good place to end a chapter. She reckoned she'd given them enough grief and pain on Kathy's account. Nobody could accuse her of being heartless, not on the basis of this. And of course, with the up-to-the-minute ending, where Jay could wax lyrical about her new life and new love with Magda, she'd be demonstrating even more of her warm and emotional side. She'd never really written much about her personal life, nor talked about it in interviews. So this was the best possible climax to a book that was all about overcoming adversity. See, readers? Work hard, do the right thing and you too will end up rich and beloved.

If only it had been that easy.

21

W
hen she got home from work, Magda almost expected there would be no leather wallet sitting on the dining table. That it would all have been a dream, like a bad soap opera. But it was still exactly where she'd left it. She hung up her coat then sat down at the table. Opened the wallet and there were the four bearer bonds. More money than she'd ever dreamed of holding in her hands. It should have been exciting but instead it was puzzling and frightening.

More than anything, she wanted to talk to Jay about it. But that prospect was even further away now. Magda planned to drive down to Gatwick to pick Jay up, but before she'd left work, she'd checked the airport website and discovered the Bologna flight had been hit by a three-hour delay. No point in heading straight there, so she'd come home to grab a sandwich and a coffee first. Now at least she could take the bonds with her to Jay's tonight, to prove to her lover she wasn't dreaming.

She went through to the kitchen and started assembling a sandwich with the remains of a roast chicken, some black olives and half a Little Gem lettuce. But her mind wasn't on food. All day, she'd found herself drifting off in the middle of conversations with patients and parents, her mind worrying at the notion of Philip as a crook. It wasn't how she wanted to remember him. Knowing this about him undermined everything she believed about the man she had been happy to marry. She'd thought he had integrity. She'd believed he'd worked to earn what he'd achieved. But she'd been wrong. He was a cheat and a liar. Worse, he was willing to betray his friends to protect himself. If she'd been so wrong about Philip, how could she trust her judgement again? She shivered, the knife sliding off the chicken and catching the side of her finger.

Blood oozed from the fine cut and Magda swore, reaching for the kitchen roll and pressing a sheet tight against the wound. She closed her eyes and leaned back against the table, feeling sick and pathetic. After Saturday, she couldn't even pour her heart out to her mother. It was all too hard and too horrible.

As if on cue, the phone rang. Expecting Jay, Magda jerked into full awareness and grabbed it. 'Hello?' Even to her own ears, her voice sounded desperate.

'Magda? It's Charlie Flint.'

'Charlie?' For a moment, Magda was nonplussed. Then everything fell into place. 'Of course, how lovely to hear from you.'

Charlie chuckled. 'You don't sound like it's lovely. Is this a bad time?'

'No, it is lovely,' she insisted. 'I just cut my finger, right before the phone rang. I was a bit discombobulated. How are you?'

'I'm good. More to the point, how are you? I just wanted to touch base. I know you were apprehensive about telling your dad about you and Jay. I thought I'd give you a ring, check you were OK.'

Magda felt herself choke up at Charlie's consideration. What was that thing they said about the kindness of strangers? Well, Charlie wasn't exactly a stranger, but she wasn't exactly a friend either. She was simply someone who was easy to talk to. 'Thanks,' Magda said. 'It was pretty grisly. Dad and I had a terrible row. He was so hostile, so cold. It ended up with me walking out and Wheelie coming with me.' She forced out a wry laugh. 'It was pretty harsh. A real "never darken these doors" moment. I think his only regret was that it wasn't snowing.'

'I'm sorry it was so shit.'

'It's not like I was expecting anything else.' Magda sniffed. 'He's just an unreconstructed old bigot.' She tucked the phone into her neck and opened the drawer beneath the cutlery, her version of what her mother called 'the all drawer'. She raked through, looking for an Elastoplast while she listened to Charlie.

'Well, you've got it out of the way now. That's one less person you're going to have to come out to. And most people are not like him.'

Magda sighed. 'At least he's honest about his feelings, Charlie. I don't know what's worse - facing that kind of abuse directly, or dealing with the sneaky, behind-your-back stuff that you can't fight because you never see it head on. Just catch it out of the corner of your eye, if you get my drift.'

'I'm not quite sure I do.'

She found the tin with the plasters and yanked the top off. 'We used to have a pretty busy social life, me and Philip.' She sighed again. 'Maybe it was my way of not having to spend too much time alone with him. I don't know. Everything is cast in a different light now I've finally got to grips with my sexuality. Anyway, we had lots of friends. Couples mostly, but some singles. And some of the women I thought had become proper friends. We did stuff together - shopping, cinema outings, meals. You know?'

'I know,' Charlie said. 'Nothing special, just the fabric of friendships that develop over the years.'

'Exactly. And they were really kind to me after Philip died. At least one of them spoke to me every day on the phone, they came round with flowers and wine. They were totally there for me. Anyway, once Jay and I became an item, obviously I told them. I didn't want to lie to them. They were my friends. And they were all apparently cool with it. Only one of them said anything remotely negative, and she was just concerned that I'd jumped into something too soon after Philip's death.' Magda stripped the backing paper off the plaster and wrapped it round the cut, which had stopped bleeding. Uncertain how to express the tenuousness of what had happened, she ground to a halt.

But Charlie understood very well. 'And then they drifted away, am I right? They stopped calling or texting or commenting on your status on Facebook.'

'Bang on. And when I left a message, they just never got back to me. At first, I thought they were maybe being tactful. You know? Giving us the chance to spend time together without people butting in every five minutes. Then I realised it was because they didn't know how to connect with me.' She paused again, trying to figure out how to say what she meant. And appreciated the way Charlie didn't feel the need to fill every silence. 'I'm not saying they're homophobic. I don't think they hate people because they're gay. It's more that they think we don't have anything to say to each other any more. Like I suddenly stopped being interested in going to the movies or shopping for a new pair of jeans.' Another sigh. 'And it's been hard, because you can't actually confront a blank. So that's what I mean about it almost being easier to deal with the way Dad was.'

'Makes perfect sense to me,' Charlie said. 'You've had a complicated year. And right at the heart of it is losing Philip. And that's a massive loss.'

'Yeah. And that's sort of got lost in everything else.' Magda walked through to the living room and stretched out on the sofa. 'People think because I'm with Jay now that I've somehow forgotten Philip. And that's rubbish.'

'Of course it is. I don't want to intrude-I don't know what your rationale was for marrying Philip - but I imagine you really cared for him.'

Magda smiled, a sad reminiscent look in her eyes. 'I loved him. The same way I love Patrick and Andrew. He reminded me of my brothers in so many ways. He was very kind, and the sex thing, that was OK. You know? Nothing sensational, but not repulsive or anything. I've thought a lot about this and I'm not proud of myself. The bottom line is I married him because he asked me, Charlie. Because he asked me and I knew it was the easy option. Easy for me, and also what everyone wanted me to do. That's pathetic, isn't it?'

'It's not pathetic. I've known a lot of people who have married for much worse reasons. I didn't imagine for a moment that you'd done it lightly. Or that you had any intention other than to make it work. Bad luck for you that you hadn't worked out why you liked the girls so much.'

Magda could hear the sympathetic laughter in Charlie's voice. In spite of herself, she was laughing too. 'No, really,' she said. 'I kept telling myself it was just a sign of how immature I was, that I was still having teenage crushes.'

'At least you finally picked up the clue phone. But that doesn't mean you stopped grieving for the person you lost.'