Читать книгу Murder, Mystery, and Magic - John Burke - Страница 4

AGENT’S CUT

My secretary has always been very good at fending off importunate authors hoping to bluff their way into my office clutching armfuls of typescript for which they were sure I could negotiate a profitable deal with some distinguished publisher. But just before lunchtime this one incredible day she put her head round the door looking pale and worried, unsure of how she ought to have coped.

“David, there are two…two men here to see you.”

“I’m sure you can give them a thorough vetting, Maisie, before—”

“They’re policemen.”

They were in fact two plainclothes officers: a Detective Inspector Emerson and a detective constable whose mumbled introduction escaped me.

“Mr. David Milburn?”

“The name’s on our plate by the door.”

It was a silly, nervous thing to say, with no reason for being nervous. We surely weren’t going to be accused of handling pornography or terrorist propaganda?

“Your agency represents Mr. Crispin Brooke?”

“It does.”

“When did you last see Mr. Brooke?”

“I had drinks with him and his wife last evening. Why? Is anything wrong?”

“You said with Mr. Brooke and his wife?”

“Yes. We were celebrating acceptance of his latest novel.”

“That’s odd.”

“What’s odd? It’s quite common for old friends to get together when a deal’s been pulled off.”

“Of course. You were friends as well as business acquaintances?”

The sun was warm on the window, but somehow a chill draught had begun fingering its way into the room.

“Of course we were. I mean, we are.”

The detective inspector smiled a very disturbing smile, as if he had caught me but in some damaging admission.

He said: “So you are not aware that Mr. Brooke died last night?”

It was not just a draught now, but a freezing pain in the guts. I could hardly breathe. “Died?”

“And you must have been the last person to see him alive.”

“No, that’s not so. Gemma—Mrs. Brooke—she must have been the last one. After she had dropped me off and gone back—”

“Dropped you off, Mr. Milburn?”

I stammered out a sympathetic tale of Crispin having perhaps had too much to drink, so that I decided to leave early and his wife had driven me home and then must obviously have hurried back to see how he was.

Detective Inspector Emerson took his time, as if savouring something in his mouth, chewing on it and liking the taste better and better, yet at the same time frowning at something far from tasteful.

“But that’s rather odd, Mr. Milburn,” he said at last. “Because Mrs. Brooke assures us she wasn’t at home yesterday. She was spending the night with a friend, and knew nothing about her husband’s death until she went home this morning. And then notified us. It was a great shock to her.”

* * * *

I had been Crispin Brooke’s literary agent for five years, and his wife’s lover for three weeks, when she began to confide her worries about him.

“He’s so depressed. Moaning all the time.”

She sounded cheesed off rather than sympathetic. Gemma was a languid woman with an oddly flat, passionless voice. This chill was one of the exciting things about her. It was a perpetual challenge to try and stimulate that exquisite yet unresponsive body. When she did respond, she went through all the right motions; yet one had the feeling that somewhere within that flawless ivory flesh, behind those slack and languorous lips, she was in danger of yawning.

I had not so far been so tactless as to ask how she got on with her husband. After all, he was my client and we were supposed to be friends. But presumably she wouldn’t have come to bed with me if she hadn’t found him lacking.

Crispin’s career had in fact been going downhill for quite a time now. Publishers had lost interest in his work. There were new names; new fancies; new voices squealing in the Groucho Club, new reviewers with backs to be scratched; and Crispin wasn’t one of this clique.

It was a warm afternoon, and Gemma was lying back with a thin trickle of sweat glistening between her breasts. “We’ve got to do something,” she persisted. “I can’t take much more of his miseries.”

I would rather have talked about something else, or drowsed for a while before we had the second bout. Mixing business with pleasure—particularly when it was her husband’s business—did seem in bad taste. But I supposed we’d have to tackle this question sooner or later.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I do my best. But he’s out of fashion.”

“He writes just as well as ever, doesn’t he?” That level tone might have been taken to mean that she never bothered to read any of his work, and was asking only out of curiosity.

“Publishers have changed. The market has changed.”

“I don’t believe most readers want this modern rubbish. Every book jacket nowadays might as well have a photograph of the author’s navel on it. That’s all they ever seem to contemplate.”

I heaved myself up on one elbow and contemplated her navel; and then the rest of her. She wasn’t all that many years younger than Crispin, but her skin and shape were those of an unravished teenager. Perhaps until recent weeks she hadn’t been ravished all that often: although she never spoke about it, I was beginning to suspect that Crispin wasn’t terribly active between the sheets.

Or maybe she couldn’t be bothered to encourage him. The icy calculation in her eyes and her movements might put many a man off. I should count myself lucky she had decided to indulge in some variations with me.

Odd, for a man of action like Crispin to be inactive in this one field of operations?

After leaving the SAS he had made his name with tough adventure stories.

For a long time they were tough enough and controversial enough to satisfy the public. But as time went on he had used up all this authentic background material, and his imagination wasn’t inventive enough to save his fiction from contrivance and repetition. And when he attempted to introduce a bit of obligatory sex into his stories, it came out laughable.

I looked down into that disconcertingly cool face and said: “Is this why you’ve been coming to bed with me? Simply to coax me into fiddling things somehow for your husband? To get me under your thumb?”

She smiled her listless smile. “Not just my thumb.” She pushed my arm away and rolled over on top of me. Her eyes were closed—in bliss, or sheer indifference?

We forgot about Crispin for a few minutes. At least, I did. But the moment we had finished, and she had uttered that half-contemptuous laugh with which she always rounded off a coupling—insulting in a way, yet provoking a vow that next time I’d make her gasp rather than laugh—she murmured in my ear: “I mean it. We really do have to do something about him. Otherwise I’ll finish up pushing him off a bridge or something.”

It was nearly time for me to get back to my office and for Gemma to go out and finish her pretence of shopping.

As we dressed, I said: “Look, I’ve got his last two typescripts on my shelf. They’ve both been round six publishers, and they’re getting very dog-eared. Rather gives the game away.”

“You can have fresh copies run off, can’t you? Or get them sent out on line, or whatever they call it nowadays. And charge him against his next royalties.”

“If any.”

She looked back over her shoulder and shrugged that shoulder as if deciding that I too was a washout. I couldn’t help snapping back: “No matter how we tart either of them up, there’s precious little chance of an acceptance.”

She reached for her tights. She really did have the most beautiful back; and she was moving her hips most tauntingly, as if to demonstrate what I’d be missing if I didn’t come up with some bright idea.

It couldn’t just be that she wanted to stop Crispin moaning and boring her. She must think more of him than I had guessed so far. In which case, why was she here with me?

Using me. But that back, those shoulders….

“All right,” I said. “There might be one way to ensure publication.”

“About time, too. I knew you’d come up with something.”

“You pay to have your own book printed and published. Handle your own distribution. Or pay some firm to handle the lot—printing and distribution. Vanity publishing, they call it.”

“How much would it cost?”

“More than it’s ever worth.”

“How much?”

“Now, just a minute. Crispin would hate it. No way would he admit that he had to—”

“He doesn’t need to know.”

This was surely way out of character. “You’d really do that for him?”

“He’s been a good breadwinner so far.” She sounded resigned rather than grateful. “We’ve got to keep him ticking over.”

“Wouldn’t that sort of payment show up somewhere? I don’t know how the two of you manage your budgets, but surely he’d be bound to notice?”

“He leaves the handling of the books to me. Those sort of books. I was his secretary, remember?”

I was tempted to ask her if she really loved him that much, but it didn’t seem quite right at the moment. Or maybe any other moment.

I always hated this stage when all that sleek beauty disappeared within an everyday dress: smart and expensive, but still only an unremarkable sheath for such remarkable contents,

“Next Tuesday, then?” she said levelly. “And you’ll let me have all the details then?”

“Now, look, I’m not sure—”

“Rather than some vanity publisher, as you call it, couldn’t you approach a reputable one? Someone glad to do you a favour?”

“Favours come with a high price tag in this business.”

“I’m sure you can manage it, David.” She stooped to look in the dressing table mirror and pat her already trim hair back into its tight, boyish helmet. As if peering through the glass at someone she had just recognized, she said: “Wasn’t there that rather interesting woman you introduced me to at that last party?”

“There’ve been so many parties. The only one you came to without Crispin—”

“Nina. Wasn’t that it? Nina something-or-other. She seemed rather nice. And quite fond of you.”

“Nina Whiteley.” I didn’t think Nina had ever been all that fond of me, except when I brought her a potential bestseller; but now I did recall that she and Gemma had talked enthusiastically together for quite a time. “A very agreeable contact,” I conceded, “but she’s already rejected those last two books of his.”

“But with adequate financial back-up to cover any losses, couldn’t she be persuaded?”

“Are you serious about this? I mean, if anything went wrong, as it well might, Crispin would kill you if he found out.”

It was only a turn of phrase, but for a moment her eyes gleamed with an excitement I’d never aroused in her before. Her lips seemed to mutter the words silently. Kill me…kill….

Aloud she said: “Tuesday.”

She clung obediently to me while I kissed her goodbye, and smiled her frigid smile. It was routine. With the usual post-coital tristesse I found myself thinking that all she really wanted was attentiveness rather than passion.

Gemma left by the back door of the block into the gardens. I waited ten minutes as usual, before going out and hailing a cab to take me back to the office.

At my desk that afternoon I was awash with doubts about her ideas on Crispin’s behalf. As a conscientious professional agent, I disapproved of the basic amateurism of vanity publishing; and on top of that there was something about Gemma’s whole attitude that gave me the shivers.

But by the next day I was already so hungry for her naked in my arms that I knew I had to act. I wasn’t going to risk facing her on the Tuesday and telling her I’d decided I couldn’t go ahead with the scheme. Would she be capable of turning, expressionless, and walking out?

All too possibly. So I went to see Nina Whiteley.

* * * *

“Yes, I do remember her,” said Nina. “Charming girl. Never met her husband—that client of yours, right?—but I couldn’t help wondering….”

Not wanting her to speculate too far, I said: “I’ve got a couple of propositions.”

She settled herself in her chair with that cheerful scepticism which so many agents and authors had had to face. The challenge was to break it down, or fail; to argue with her, or woo her.

I had never found it easy to woo Nina. She was thin, dark-haired, and had a darkly bossy manner, as if in dealing with men she had to be as masculine and menacing as possible. There was talk of a divorce in the distant past, but the word “Mrs.” never crept into correspondence or into the gossip columns of the literary supplements.

I said: “I’ve been thinking you ought to have first look at a project one of my clients is working on.”

“Anybody I’ve heard of?”

“He’s collaborating with a certain politician’s dumped doxy who has quite a tale to tell. Several tales, in fact.”

“You mean ghosting.”

“The collaboration is a bit closer than that.”

“Tell me more.”

Her immediately receptive attitude was unusual. As a rule, her studied indifference was part of the game, waiting to see if the next move was worth following up or should be wiped off the board

I told her more. About the revelations, political and personal, the minister’s discarded mistress was telling to her new lover—a journalist who had done many skilful interpretations of governmental scandals and was always eager to broaden his collection of misdeeds. There was also a hint—I wasn’t going to admit to more than a hint at this stage—of some slightly kinky involvement of another woman in the new ménage At intervals Ms. Whiteley nodded, as if to hurry me along and get down to the real business—which I assumed would be the usual wrangle over royalties, advances, availability of the key people for interviews and publicity and so on.

When I had finished and, to my surprise and delight, she had expressed readiness to conclude a deal as quickly as I wanted, I said: “And now I’ve got a favour to ask.”

“I’ve already done you a favour, buying your project.”

“No, I’ve done you a favour by giving you first offer.”

She smiled and crossed her long, lean legs. She really was in a good mood this morning. I wondered if she was having an affair, and was still purring over the pleasures of the previous night. But her attention did seem to be entirely on what I was saying.

“Why don’t we have lunch together?” I suggested.

I quite expected her to say that she was tied up that day—it was pretty short notice—but she said: “Why not?”

Over a cool, scintillating Sancerre I put the proposition to her. In return for the rewarding deal I had just done with her, would she be prepared to publish a subsidised edition of Crispin Brooke’s latest novel? Yes, I knew she had already seen both of the more recent ones, and rejected them; but one hadn’t been all that bad, had it?

“Not all that bad,” she granted, “but not all that good.”

“But it wouldn’t actually disfigure your list.”

“No. Only it wouldn’t be likely to sell many copies. Precious little return for our money. Our accountants wouldn’t like that.”

“It’s not your money I’m talking about. Accountants don’t get too cross if income is guaranteed before any expenditure has to go out, do they? Crispin’s wife is offering to underwrite the book. Just so he can see his name in print again. To give his friends autographed copies. You know what authors are like. That’s all we have in mind.”

“We?” She swilled the wine gently round her glass, and the word round her palate. “David, just what terms are you on with Mrs. Brooke?”

“I’m…well, she’s Crispin’s wife, we’ve all been good friends, she’s…well, naturally I see quite a lot of her.” I didn’t dare lift a suggestive eyebrow.

There was a long silence. I thought she was marshalling arguments against the proposition, but in the end she said: “I’d rather like to meet her again. Talk this over with her, personally.”

“Is that necessary? I can act for her, the way I act for her husband.”

“Then you can arrange an appointment for her in my office.”

* * * *

On the Tuesday, Gemma made no move to undress until I had told her the result of my meeting. Then she stripped with methodical deftness and settled obediently on her back.

When we had finished, she said: “Thank you, David.”

I didn’t suppose she was offering gratitude for my physical prowess. She simply wanted to take up the conversation where we had left off.

“Has it occurred to you,” I asked, “that if Crispin cheers up, he may get demanding again? Maybe you’ll find yourself with a reinvigorated lover.”

“Would you be very jealous?”

It had never occurred to me until now. “I…I don’t know.”

“I don’t think we’re taking too great a risk,” she said.

A reverberating note of contempt had crept into that usually level voice. It was quite frightening hearing her virtually write her husband off as inadequate—and this at a time when the two of us were conniving to salvage him.

Trying to keep it light-hearted rather than dig too deep, I suggested that the best system would be for me to pay the total amount direct to the publisher, while Gemma could make regular payments to me in order not to knock too sudden and obvious a hole in the Brooke bank accounts.

“You can make regular visits here,” I said. “And hand over the instalment for my services. Give you an extra frisson.”

She smiled thinly. “If it were about that sort of thing, shouldn’t you be paying me?”

“That would muck up the whole plan. Anyway, better for you to regard me as a gigolo than for me to regard you as…well….”

“Do stop talking rubbish.”

We did stop talking for a while. She had got her way, so I could have mine.

I then told her that Nina Whiteley would like to meet her again. And suggested that we should both go along. Gemma, very cool and offhanded, said she would prefer to handle it on her own.

“Look,” I said, “this isn’t just girl-to-girl chat, you know. Not with Nina Whiteley. She’s tough. A real butch lady at heart. Not safe to tangle with her unless you’ve got good back-up.”

“I’ll tell you later how it goes,” she said with dismissive firmness.

We made love again. Or, rather, I made love and Gemma let me. But, again surprisingly, when we parted she kissed me more fervently than usual—yet with a bit of an effort, I sensed—and said: “You’re really not bad, David.”

Not bad…at what, specifically?

* * * *

Crispin was complacent rather than grateful when I called him to announce that I had found a buyer for his Dummy Run. He has always assumed the attitude of a strong, silent man of action. “About time, too. Glad they’ve come to their senses at last.” His tone of voice was the equivalent of a condescending pat on the shoulder. One of his NCOs had at last come up to scratch.

I imagined him being just as taciturn and doing things according to a strict discipline when making love to his wife. That might go some way to explaining Gemma’s own unyielding face and voice even when her body was at its most yielding. Lie to attention…at ease…wipe that smirk off your face….

Not that I very often let myself think of the two of them together. It wasn’t a picture I enjoyed.

Would you be very jealous?

The next time we were together I deliberately made her whimper. She had spent a lot of time in the bathroom before coming to bed, and her face looked set and almost hostile. She stared up at me with something I could almost have interpreted as revulsion. So I made it a bit rough, until she uttered that little moan of protest.

Having got her way over the deal to save Crispin’s pride, was she going off me?

I said: “How did you get on with Nina?”

“She’s delightful. A truly strong character. Beautiful.”

It wasn’t a word I would have used myself. Striking, yes. Strong, when it suited her, indeed. But beautiful?

“Well, it’s all settled now, anyway.” I said. “You don’t need to get too involved. From now on you can leave it all to me.”

“Oh, but we’re having dinner together next week. We’ve got so much in common.”

“I’d never have thought so.”

“You could say she regards me as part of the package.”

“Look, are you trying to cut me out?”

“You’ll continue to get your usual percentage.” It came out as a cool, matter-of-fact insult. “Your usual cut.”

I tried to keep things going my way. “Speaking of which….” My fingers strayed over her in the familiar preliminaries. “Time for some more of my perks.”

She flinched. “Don’t you think this is getting a bit of a routine? A bit repetitive?”

It wasn’t good enough. Not after all the trouble I had gone through on her husband’s behalf. She gritted her teeth—I actually heard her do just that—as I mounted her; and when I lay back she said: “So that’s what rape is like.”

“Rape? For Christ’s sake, Gemma, what’s wrong?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“Oh, I think I’m beginning to understand. You let me shaft you when you wanted me to do something for bloody Crispin. Now it’s fixed, and I’m superfluous. Back to the joys of the marital bed? Back to normal?”

“It was never normal. Nothing like the real thing.”

“The real thing? Like what the two of us have just…?”

“You wouldn’t understand,” she said again, infuriatingly.

We parted very coolly. Early next evening, despising myself, I couldn’t restrain myself from picking up the phone to ring her. Then at the last minute I put it down again.

Ten minutes later it rang. It was Crispin, inviting me round for a drink.

“We’ve just been talking about you. Gemma thinks we ought to have a little celebration. Tell you what, come round right now. Just for drinks.”

The invitation sounded stiff and oddly uninviting. Maybe Gemma’s suggestion hadn’t appealed to him at such short notice. I tried to argue, but at once he got into forceful mood and sounded downright angry at any idea of my not doing as I was told. He might not really have wanted to offer one of the lower ranks a drink, but now that the offer had been made he expected it to be regarded as an order.

I rang for a taxi. If we were going to knock back toasts to the revivified career of Crispin Brooke, I wasn’t going to risk taking my own car and driving back awash with celebratory booze.

* * * *

When I arrived, my discretion proved justified. Crispin immediately poured a large Scotch and stared at me as if to see whether I was man enough to knock it back. I had seen him in many moods--swaggering he-man, charismatic author at a signing session, and resentful, neglected author—but never in quite this tautly aggressive mood. If this was going to be a celebration, its atmosphere was no jollier than some of our dismal sessions discussing his falling sales.

Gemma swept in and kissed me more effusively than she had ever done before in her husband’s presence or, for that matter, when we were alone together. “Darling David,” she gushed. “The miracle worker!”

She sat down, crossed her exquisite legs, and went on looking roguishly at me—yes, roguishly—while Crispin without a word poured her a vodka and tonic.

There was a silence.

Gemma broke it. “Crispin, do tell David about your idea for your next book.”

My heart sank. It would surely sound drearily the same as the theme of the last two. But for a moment he seemed to relax, and threw out a few vague ideas. Doubts and gloom had been banished. His present novel had been accepted and would come out later in the year, so what was there to worry about?

Yet he remained prickly and resentful about something.

I wondered how much more money Gemma was prepared to invest in their life together.

“A pity,” she said out of the blue, “that you’ve never tackled a straightforward murder mystery. There’s a market for them, isn’t there, David?”

“If you’ve got the knack, yes.”

“Not my scene,” said Crispin dourly. “Too much contrivance.”

Gemma wasn’t looking at either of us but contemplating something far away. “Isn’t that the point? Working out a problem just for the fun of it. Dreaming up twists and turns, and then surprising everybody with a clear-cut logical ending. Aren’t you even tempted?”

“Maybe you ought to try one yourself,” I suggested.

Now at last she glanced at me, with that same sudden gleam as when I had joked about Crispin killing her. “Maybe.” It was an echo of that whisper: Kill me…kill….

And Crispin was glaring. Alert to any threat of competition as a writer? Or as something else?

Standing awkwardly in the middle of his own Persian rug, he emitted a bluff, would-be no-nonsense laugh. As if to show who was in charge here, he leaned down to kiss Gemma just as extravagantly as she had kissed me. Only I was sure his mouth didn’t open. He kept his lips hard, compressed, assaulting. I saw her shiver.

“This last week”—he raised his mouth and spoke to me over her head—“I’ve hardly seen Gemma.”

“Been out buying bottles of bubbly?” I suggested feebly.

Gemma got up and, although the room was not particularly warm, opened a window which, I vaguely recalled, faced out across a passage between this house and the one next door, Then, not leaving the honours to her husband, she reached for the whisky bottle and insisted on refilling my glass. She took her time, leaning over me so that her left breast rested against my cheek.

Crispin glared at me. “You’re not really interested in my next book, are you?”

“Well, old lad, until you’ve come up with a few pages—”

“It’s not me you’ve been interested in for a long time, is it? Not me or my work. It’s my wife you’re after.”

“Crispin, what the hell’s got into you?”

“It’s you. That’s what. You getting into my wife. Every bloody day of the week. D’you think I’m blind and deaf and bloody stupid?”

I’d only been with her a couple of hours that one day in that one week, If she’d been away from home more than that, it wasn’t with me. But protesting that it had certainly not been every day of the week would hardly have been a sensible defence. While I shook my head, playing for time, Gemma sat down again and looked coolly from one to the other of us as if to guess who might risk the first blow and who would qualify to carry off the prize.

I took it slow and dignified. “I do think you’d find it more fruitful to keep your lively imagination for your writing, Crispin.”

“And don’t patronize me, Milburn.” My Christian name had been ditched and his voice was rising to a parade-ground bellow. “You’ve done damn-all to promote my books until even you could hardly fail to sell this last one. And all the time you’ve been having it off with my wife. Sniggering behind my back.”

“Where’d you get all these crazy notions?”

“From the way she looks, and the things she’s told me.”

“Told you?”

Still Gemma wasn’t saying a word. Might almost not have been in the room with us. Yet she was the most important person in that room, round which everything was revolving. Had they already had a big scene before I arrived? Was she planning to leave him? To come to me?

I put my glass down. “I’m not going to listen to any more of this.”

“You’ll listen to just as much as I choose to say to you.”

Now I was the one who was shouting. “And who d’you think you are, insulting me without the—”

“How could anyone insult anyone as two-timing as you?”

I got up. “I’ve had enough of this.”

“You’re not leaving here until we’ve—”

“I shall leave here when it suits me. And it suits me right now. So just get out of my way, or else—”

“Or else what?”

He stood there, swaying from side to side. And we went on swapping ridiculous insults and accusations, standing in the middle of the room and making a racket like football hooligans. Enough, you’d have thought, to get the neighbours phoning or coming round and ringing the doorbell to complain.

I risked a glance at Gemma, hoping for a hint of some kind, wondering how much she had really told him, or if that had just been a wild stab of his.

Her smile was distant, almost contemptuous—contemptuous, I thought, of both of us. Sitting there so silently, just letting it happen.

I said: “I’m going to ring for a taxi.”

“Not from my phone, you’re not. You can start walking. But only when I’ve finished with you.”

His threatening sway from side to side became erratic. He lurched forward, put out a hand, but could find nothing to grasp except my arm. I tried to steer him towards an armchair. He recovered for a few seconds, long enough to bellow a string of obscenities at me before collapsing into the chair.

In an undertone, hoping not to start him off ranting again, I muttered to Gemma: “Look, how much did he have to drink before I got here?”

She seemed to wake up at last, and motioned me to follow her out into the hall.

“I do think you’d better go home and leave this to me.”

“But just what have you been telling him? What started all this?”

“Let him sleep it off. I can cope.”

“If you’d ring for a taxi for me, then. Don’t want him to wake up and start another battle over his precious phone.”

“I’ll drive you back.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“I think it’s a very sensible idea.” She had been so silent, and now was so decisive. “Come on, David, I do know what I’m doing.”

She closed the front door very quietly, walked briskly but soundlessly down the short path to the gate, and then even more briskly along the pavement to the corner of the street. I had to hurry to catch up with her, “Don’t you keep your car in the garage?”

“There was somebody blocking the way when I got home today. Had to park it round the corner.”

When we were in her Mégane I said: “You were talking about when you got home—home from where?”

“Shopping, of course. I do have to do some real shopping sometimes, you know. Not just as a cover-up.”

She pretended to concentrate on the road, although there was little traffic and it was no more than a ten-minute drive to the block where I lived. We stopped a hundred yards from the entrance. That was unremarkable: we had always been careful to cover our tracks. Maybe we wouldn’t need to from now on.

I said: “Are you planning to leave Crispin?”

“We’ll talk about that some other time.”

I put my hand on her arm. It tensed; and then she made too obvious an effort to relax. “Are you coming in?” I asked. “We can talk about things then. About everything.”

“The state he’s in, I’d better get back.”

“The state he’s in,” I said, “you don’t know what he’ll do.”

“Oh, I think I know him well enough. Leave it to me, David.”

She kissed me quickly and meaninglessly.

“Tomorrow?” I said. “I can take the afternoon off. Sort things out,”

“Tomorrow,” she said, “maybe things will sort themselves out.” And as I got out of the car, she said with unexpected intensity: “Thanks, David. Thanks so much for everything.”

* * * *

So here I am in a police cell, refused bail. My solicitor has just left, and obviously doesn’t believe a word I’ve told him, any more than the police do.

Their first assault had left me winded, incredulous. I didn’t feel that I could really be in my own office, on an ordinary day, listening to something far more crazy than anything some of my clients offered as storylines.

“But hold on a minute,” I was protesting. “She was there with us last evening. Having a drink. The three of us.” And when that stony face yielded no response, I demanded: “Look, how did Crispin die? Fall over blind drunk, or something? Alcoholic poisoning?”

“Not alcoholic,” said the inspector. He cleared his throat and said very formally: “Do you think we might come and have a look round your flat, Mr. Milburn? In your presence, naturally.”

“What on earth for?” I groped through memories of so many detective stories for the right procedure. “Anyway, have you got a warrant?”

“If we have to get one, we shall get one. In the meantime, have you any reason to be worried about what we might find?”

I had no reason at all to be worried; but that didn’t stop me being worried. There was something very threatening in the atmosphere.

And they soon gave me reason to worry. Once they had driven me home the two of them prowled from room to room with a hideous determination to find something where there could not possibly be anything to find.

“Look after things yourself, Mr. Milburn?” asked Emerson.

“I have a cleaner in twice a week.”

“Yes. All very tidy Systematic. Do your own cooking?”

“When I’m not taking clients or publishers out,” I said as loftily as possible, “or being taken out.”

“A very agreeable arrangement, sir.”

They peered about in the kitchenette, sifting my spice pots and condiments and jars of this, that and the other to and fro. It took a further fifteen minutes of trawling before the detective constable called from the bathroom to show the little phial tucked under the ball-cock of the lavatory system.

“Not alcoholic,” the inspector said again. “A different kind of poison. Far quicker.”

It was grotesque. “D’you seriously think I’d be clumsy enough to hide something, whatever it is, in such an obvious place? If I’d had anything to hide, that is.”

“In a hurry, last night? Going to tidy up when you’d got your breath back?”

“Last night.” I drew a deep breath and tried to keep my voice steady. “If you ask Mrs. Brooke about last night, she’s got to admit she was muddled. The shock of it, all right. Must have thrown her. She’s simply got to confirm that we were there together, and she drove me home, and—”

“No, Mr. Milburn. Mrs. Brooke was away. She had gone to stay with a publishing friend. She was apparently scared of the hostility between her husband and yourself, and when she heard you were coming round she didn’t want to be there.”

“A publishing friend?”

“A Miss Nina Whiteley. She went there for protection.”

A terrible, incredible suspicion was dawning. I thought of Gemma paying her usual quick visit to the bathroom that last time she was here. Thought of her strange silences and that recent conspiratorial expression of hers.

“Look,” I said. “Exactly how did Crispin die?”

“Cyanide poisoning. And you wouldn’t know that, Mr. Milburn? Even though there were only two glasses in the room, one of them with traces of cyanide. And both with fingerprints on which may just possibly turn out to be yours, Mr. Milburn.”

“And once we’ve had the stuff in this bottle analysed….” His constable let the words hang in the air.

“I think we’ll continue this down at the station,” said his inspector. And he began to recite the rigmarole I already knew off by heart, thanks to those client authors who went boringly through it every few chapters: ‘“but it may harm your defence if you do not mention, when questioned, something which you later rely on in court….”

In the interview room my solicitor sat stony-faced beside me. For all the moral or legal support he gave, he might as well have been sitting alongside the policemen on the other side.

The accusation was that I had been pestering Mrs. Brooke, and on one occasion had raped her when she was visiting me to discuss her husband’s work. She had made no complaint at the time because negotiations with her husband’s publisher had been at a tricky stage and she did not dare to antagonise me. But then Crispin Brooke began to suspect, and had called me round that evening for a showdown.

“And you lost your temper, and there was a fight.”

“A fight? Me and Crispin? He was ex-SAS, you know. I wouldn’t have stood a chance.”

“Neighbours confirm there was a shouting match. It could be heard halfway down the street.”

Of course. Gemma opening the window and then not saying another word that might give away her presence.

“As you say, Mr. Milburn, picking a direct fight with a highly trained soldier with the deceased’s courageous record was risky. So in the end it had to be something subtler. If you can call cyanide subtle.”

“Cyanide’s agonizing.” I knew that much, again, from my clients’ fictional outpourings. “He’d have screamed his head off.”

“Exactly. That, too, was heard halfway down the street.”

“But what time was this?”

Detective Inspector Emerson glanced at his sidekick, who studied his notes and said: “About twenty-three fifteen, according to the neighbour two doors down.”

“But I was home by then. Gemma had dropped me off, and I was in the flat well before eleven.” I turned triumphantly to my solicitor, who stared dispassionately at the table.

“You have a witness to this, Mr. Milburn?”

“I’ve shown you, I live alone. But check on her car. Someone must have seen it parked round the corner from their house. Or dropping me off. She did drop me off.”

Then I went wild. I had been hoping that the nightmare could be driven away, that commonsense would prevail, that Gemma would come to the rescue and somehow it could all be sorted out.. But I knew starkly what had been going on; and I let fly.

Couldn’t they see it? It was a put-up job. The two women—two lovers. damn them—had planned it from way back, maybe from that very first innocuous meeting.

Drawing two bloody stupid men into the trap. Despising, us, wanting to get rid of both of us.

The taste in my mouth was as bitter as any poison. “As a literary agent,” I said, “I suppose I ought to have learnt to be cynical about such things.”

Part of the package: wasn’t that what Gemma had looked so smug about? She had gone to bed with me, suffered the indignity of something for which she had no appetite, gone through the motions…all the time saving her real self for her woman, her real lover.

“Crispin wouldn’t have been likely to go along with a straightforward divorce.” I was trying to reason with those implacable faces. “Least of all when it was something he’d regard as intolerably kinky. So it had to be a matter of getting rid of the obnoxious husband, and saddling another man with the blame. That way, Gemma inherits the royalties which have survived from those past successes, and she and the Whiteley woman can live happily ever after.”

“Very ingenious, sir.”

“You can’t be that stupid!” I raged. “You can’t let them get away with it.”

“As a literary agent, sir”—the detective inspector took up my own words with a condescending smile—“you must undoubtedly get a lot of tips from your clients on how to put a good story together. Right?”

“It’s better than your other crazy notion,” I protested. “That one simply doesn’t hold water.”

“I think we can promise you, Mr. Milburn, that by the time we’ve finished, we’ll guarantee to make it waterproof.”

* * * *

Women. How did I ever let myself get pushed around by bloody women?

I wonder if Gemma or Nina will amuse themselves by taking it in turns to visit me in prison? Or simply cross me off their list altogether?