Blood Read_Publish And Be Dead Read online

  “We don’t start until ten, most days, you know that.”

  He did know that but hadn’t thought twice about a meeting scheduled for nine. Hannah turned from him, fumbling with her hair. Heavy shoes thudded up the stairs. Police, he recognised the tempo. “Hannah, think, who would want her dead and why?”

  She had no time to answer because two uniformed officers swept into the room, taking charge with body language alone. Capgras gestured them towards Joanne’s office and steered Hannah to the relative safety of the reception desk.

  One of the policemen went into the office while the other peered around the door, keeping half an eye on Capgras and Hannah. They exchanged code words and cryptic numbers but the meaning was clear. Another suicide as far as they were concerned.

  Capgras sat Hannah on a chair and handed her a phone. “Call the partners,” he whispered. “Alert them, get them here.”

  He approached the older of the two policemen, late twenties by the look of him, with the stern face of a man who’s seen too much of life and death already.

  Capgras gestured towards the door that led to Joanne’s office and the scene of her hanging. “Don’t take this on face value.”

  “In what way, sir?”

  “Call CID, just in case.”

  “We’ll do what’s required. Have a seat, sir. Someone will take a statement from you,”

  It meant get lost. Capgras ignored the hint. “This doesn’t look right, doesn’t feel right. Joanne wouldn’t do this, not here, not now.”

  “It always comes as a shock. Please stay out of the way.”

  The man launched into another rapid-fire exchange of acronyms and code words with his colleague.

  An ambulance crew arrived at the top of the stairs followed by a woman police officer who began to take names. She asked Capgras to outline what he saw when he first got there, but she was going through the motions. He’d seen it before, a thousand times. He needed to get her thinking. Focus her attention where it was needed. “Notice the noose. Joanne could never have tied that. And the books on the floor as if there had been a scuffle.”

  She did her best to look patient, but it wasn’t working.

  It was hard to blame her. He sounded like one of the amateur sleuths that plague police investigations with unwanted theories. Capgras had dealt with dozens of them himself in his day: rebuffed by the cops, they would turn to the press as an outlet for their suspicions, hunches and oh-so-rational deductions.

  Perhaps the coppers were right: mind your own business, leave murder enquiries to the professionals. He was too close, affected by the death, not thinking straight.

  He gave the policewoman the facts, the time of his arrival, seeing the cleaning lady how she must let him in. She didn’t look like a killer, but she might have seen something. The WPC took a note of his phone number and said someone would be in touch.

  Capgras doubted it.

  As the agency staff arrived in dribs and drabs, they milled around, faces drawn and pale at the horror of death brought into their workplace. The ambulance crew emerged from Joanne’s office with her body on a stretcher, covered with a blanket. The crowd parted to let them through. A young intern rushed for the bathroom and locked herself inside sobbing audibly. A woman in her forties with horn-rimmed glasses had taken charge of the reception desk and was doing her best to hold the place together but she was close to cracking herself by the looks of her.

  Finally one of the senior partners arrived and urged everyone to keep out of the way while the emergency services put things in order.

  In order, yes. But they couldn’t put things right. Joanne should not be dead. How old was she? Early fifties, plenty to live for, intelligent, successful. Beautiful, even. She’d have been a catch in her day. Capgras wondered if there were troubles at home, or in the business. Had she, like so many, suffered unspoken depression half her life? She didn’t seem the type but who did?

  Hannah, her face haggard, was being comforted by the woman on reception. This was Tom’s chance. His moment had arrived. Yet he paused. Was it too soon? Should he wait, do it next week, next month? But the tide was ebbing on his career. His book would be left high and dry in the flotsam and jetsam of discarded words.

  He approached the two women, leant on the desk and waited.

  The receptionist gave him a look: it was meant to be steely, but her eyes glinted with tears.

  “Tom found the body,” Hannah said.

  “Joanne called me in, we were to go and see a publisher.”

  “There was nothing scheduled.”

  What did she mean by that?

  “I didn’t know of a meeting,” Hannah said. “I thought Joanne was off today.”

  “She wasn’t due in,” the receptionist said.

  “She emailed me, asked to get in early for a chat, then we'd go to the publishers to discuss a deal. We should contact them, so they can rearrange. Or whatever. Only polite. To tell them…”

  “I don’t know of any meeting.” The receptionist consulted a desk diary. “Nothing in here.”

  Hannah looked up an online calendar. “No, nothing.”

  “I got an email from Joanne,” Tom said. “It’s all in there.”

  He tried to show them on his phone.

  “Forward it to me. Which publisher?”

  “It doesn’t say.”

  “Oh, well, difficult for us to call them then. You don’t look dressed for a meeting…”

  “I was late. Didn’t think anyone would mind. Investigative reporter, after all. Got to look the part.”

  “Tom, we should leave this. Another time.” Hannah’s body language shepherded him towards the door.

  He longed to argue, to make them see sense, to find out about the meeting, to call every publisher in London if necessary, but they wanted him gone. He sensed their need to retreat into the familiar, the team, the family, and to grieve for the one they had lost. “Another time, sure.” He turned and made for the door, trudged down four flights of stairs, shoulders hunched, his hopes in tatters and his nerves frayed. With each step he saw an image of Joanne swinging from the rope.

  Something was wrong about this: timetables, schedules, holidays, emails, all of them out of joint. It was a mess. But no one would want to hear his doubts. And maybe they were right. Who would want to kill Joanne? How could a literary agent develop enemies?

  He stepped into the mayhem of London and paused on the pavement, wondering what to do with the rest of his day. It was too early to start drinking, even for a journalist, so he shambled towards the sanctuary of his motorbike, the one thing in his life that never changed, never lied, never died and never backfired.

  Chapter Three

  Poisoned Words

  Inveterate book blogger Charlotte MacInnes ran a spell check through her latest review. She proofed it by reading right to left, left to right, upside down, roundabout and backwards, determined to eliminate all possibility of typos. She hated small mistakes and castigated authors and publishers alike for letting them slip through. How dare they send her a book that wasn’t perfect? How could they be so slipshod?

  She had not yet dressed for the day though her husband had set out for the office three hours before. He toiled in the offices of a real estate firm in the centre of Pittsburgh. He didn’t earn much, which was one of the great disappointments of her life, but it was enough that she didn’t have to work herself. Which left her free to read.

  Her eleven-year-old daughter was home sick from school and Charlotte had spent most of the morning making breakfast and fussing over her child. At last she had found time to update her website. Then she could get down to the real business of the day: reading a book, a whole book, immersing herself in the experience and the fantasy. And the love.

  Though she hadn’t yet chosen what to read. A large pile of hardbacks stood stacked against the wall near her desk. An even larger stack of paperbacks had been moved out to the garage. She had long ago refused to accept ebooks. Hard copy only. The books brought in a steady stream of revenue off eBay, even if they didn’t all merit a review.

  Once she was certain there were no errors in her article - no missing words or misplaced letters (though she was, it must be said, less of a perfectionist when it came to having ideas of her own) she pressed ‘publish’ and turned her attention to the comments section. Time for pruning. There were always authors hitting back at her reviews. Usually she let her army of commenters deal with the dissenters, but occasionally a disgruntled writer would whinge too much or overstep the mark and she’d stamp them like a bug with her delete button.

  She shuffled in her chair, leaning forward, her face close to the screen, eyes shielded by thick lenses held in place by an even thicker, bright pink plastic frame. She wore a pink dressing gown over a white and pink striped t-shirt and pink pyjama bottoms, with pink slippers to keep her toes cosy.

  Mostly, Charlotte MacInnes read romance. But she also enjoyed, and often reviewed, a good mystery with a murder and a detective and a villain who was hard to spot but obvious all along. Provided there was a love interest to spice things up, ideally with restrained yet kinky sex on the side.

  She heard a van pull up outside, footsteps heading for the porch. The bell rang. She glanced over her shoulder towards her daughter but Amy was wearing headphones and hadn’t stirred. Charlotte pushed back her chair and lumbered towards the door.

  A courier stood on the step. He handed her a parcel. “Got to sign the customs form. It’s from the UK.”

  She scribbled her name and took the parcel. Another book, it was plain from the size, the shape and the weight of the thing. Around four hundred and fifty pages. Probably not a romance.

  Amy hadn’t moved or even looked up from her computer game. Charlotte put the parcel u
nopened on her desk and went back to her blog maintenance. Twenty minutes later, happy that her online world was in order, she took a pair of scissors to the string.

  She held the book in her hand, beaming a smile. A new Arthur Middleton novel: that was funny. Hilarious. Did his publishers not know? Had they forgotten to strike her from the mailing list?

  She had torn into his previous two novels with withering bile. They were terrible – badly plotted, poorly written, lame and unemotional. What’s worse, they contained typos. That was unforgivable, even among the great unwashed of the self-publishing brigade. But these were supposed to be proper books.

  Her last review had upset Middleton personally, so effectively that he’d started a flame war. Big mistake. She had her allies, people who stood by a book blogger and their right to say what they wanted. Middleton had been run out of her corner of the internet with his tail between his legs.

  Now, here, fat and juicy, was another mid-list muddle she could tear into with glee. This would be fun. This would be a riot.

  Charlotte tucked the book under her arm and settled onto the sofa next to her daughter. She flicked through the opening pages, licking her index finger for traction, until she reached the first chapter and began to read, a smirk on her face.

  The prose was lumpen and stilted. The ideas, the setup, the story, it all seemed so familiar. Just like all of Middleton’s other books. But worse. Tired and flat and lacking the charm, energy and humour of his earlier stuff. He’d lost it, completely, gone off the rails. As though the skill of it had deserted him entirely. Even the cover was blotchy and lame.

  She moistened her index finger and turned another page, only vaguely aware of a bitter taste on her tongue. Still the prose stuttered and failed to ignite. She kept going, delighting in how bad it was and how scabrous her review would be. She glanced at her hand, wiped it on her dressing gown. Was that talc?

  She licked her finger and turned another page.

  Chapter Four

  Midlist Crisis

  In the middle of an otherwise empty desk - clear of paperwork and computer equipment - sat a hard-backed book. The cover featured a gun, a pair of legs in high-heels and an expensive car. And the name of Arthur Middleton in large letters.

  The desk was hardwood, carved, dark and ancient and resided in an office that overlooked the Thames, within a shiny metal and glass building down by the river. The building itself clearly longed to cut a dash, to be bold and daring, yet its youthful dreams had turned to disappointment. It had settled for being an unremarkable slender tower of steely reflections.

  Above the building the sky resembled an army-issue hospital blanket from the second world war: dark grey, rough-spun, damp and drab. Beneath the clouds the city churned, its traffic moving ceaselessly, pumping people around the veins and arteries of the metropolis, into cells and out again, spreading life and contagion, energy and slow decay.

  On this day, when the blanket hung so low over the buildings that it threatened to sag on top of them, Joseph Haslam loitered outside his brother’s office, tentative about knocking on the door.

  Joseph, having graduated in law, with a post-graduate qualification in accountancy, was the brother with the nose for business, the head for figures and the ears constantly on alert for an advantageous deal. Or the sound of tills ringing.

  Tony Haslam, on the other hand, had studied literature. His hobbies included the theatre and poetry. He lived for books. His life revolved around them. Books were how he made his living and his reason for living. He worshipped books of all kinds, sizes, shapes and genres.

  Provided they had been properly curated. By the right people.

  Tony brought literary sensibilities to the offices of Haslam and Haslam. That was something that Joseph could respect. Literary sensibilities were essential in the publishing business. They gave the place respectability and an aura of importance even if they didn’t actually help to pay the bills or contribute to the infamous, all-important bottom-line.

  Joseph was not a sensitive man by nature but he was a twin and there was no breaking the bond with his brother. Even the steel and glass of this building couldn’t interfere with that signal. Something was wrong with Tony, he sensed it in his bones. He braced himself for emotional turmoil, took a deep breath and knocked on his brother’s door.

  ✬✬✬

  The exterior walls in Tony Haslam’s office, as in most rooms in the building, were glass from floor to ceiling, giving uninterrupted views of the Thames, the skyline of London, and the shroud of steely grey stratocumulus. “We should have built taller,” Joseph often remarked, “a few more storeys and we’d have been above these clouds.” He didn’t say that today, however. Instead he peered down at the murky brown river and the mud exposed by the low tide. It reminded him, as did many things, of the relentless passage of time. “Let’s go for lunch.”

  Tony sat at his desk with his head in his hands, staring remorselessly at the hardback book. He moaned loudly, the long grating moan of a man who might be physically sick at any moment.

  Joseph inched warily towards the waste paper basket. He nudged it with his foot, pushing it closer to his twin. “I take it breakfast didn’t agree with you.”

  Tony’s head jerked upwards, his eyes wild and glaring as if he’d just been dragged from a dream. “What? Oh, no, it’s not that. It’s this.” He pushed the book away from himself in disgust.

  Joseph raised an eyebrow. It wasn’t like his brother to be so repulsed by a novel, even if the cover was somewhat garish and ill-conceived. He didn’t recognise it, but he paid little attention to the mundane production of books. His role was to be a guiding hand, steering the ship of business into fertile waters. “Editors buying garbage again? Don't worry, it’ll probably sell like hot cakes.”

  Tony groaned louder and pushed the novel further across the desk.

  It was yet another Arthur Middleton mystery. Joseph had never managed to read a whole one. A couple of pages, here and there, but that was a few years back now. It was staple detective fare. Sales were unspectacular. “Not up to his usual standard? I’m not sure about that cover.”

  Tony flung it towards his brother. “Look at the damn piece of.... We didn’t publish it. We dropped him. His sales were down. Or plateaued. There was a reason. Anyway, he’s finished. And no one else will touch him. So he’s gone over to the dark side.”

  “He didn’t?” If there was one thing Joseph knew for sure about Arthur Middleton, it was that he despised the self-publishing brigade. Despised, mocked and harried them in the newspapers and the late night talk shows. He was renowned as one of the attack dogs of the traditional publishing establishment, always good for a withering remark. Joseph picked up the novel tentatively, holding it in his fingertips.

  “It’s print-on-demand,” Tony said.

  Joseph dropped the book instantly, as if he’d just been told that it was laced with ricin, anthrax and ebola. It hit the carpet with a thud. Joseph drop-kicked it towards the waste paper basket. “End of his career. Shame about his backlist, but if it wasn’t selling, then so be it.”

  “You don’t read the newspapers much do you?”

  Joseph pursed his lips and scowled at his brother. “You know how it is. Don’t have the time. Tell me: what’s going on?”

  “Publicity,” Tony said with a flourish. He pulled a newspaper from his briefcase and flung it in the direction of his brother. “Middleton is generating sales with lots of damned publicity.”

  “And how has he done this?” Joseph asked. “Riding on our coat-tails? Exploiting the years of nurturing we provided? Selfish…” His rant tailed off into a sharp intake of breath as he read the headline in the newspaper. Not the front page. Not even in the main section. It was an entertainment supplement from the previous Sunday, in the ‘Books’ section, but prominent within it. Written in letters a mile high: “Traditional publishing is doomed says best-selling author.” And underneath, in only slightly smaller text: “Famous crime writer sticks the knife in over contracts.”

  Joseph scanned the article. There was nothing in there about Middleton being dropped because his sales were weak. Nothing about the books being atrocious into the bargain. No, it was all about how Arthur Middleton had rejected his publishers and embraced the new world. “I was wrong,” he proclaimed. “Publishers are no longer needed. Get rid of these middlemen.”