G Malliet - Death and the Lit Chick

Not that Easterbrook had ever actually read Kimberlee's book. The balance sheets were the only required reading on his night table.

But what the deuce was taking the girl so long with the next manuscript? he wondered now. It's not as if she were writing Pride and Prejudice, for God's sake. The last time they'd spoken on the phone she'd been decidedly cagey about that. "Wasn't quite ready," she'd said. "A bit more of a rewrite on the end, I think," she'd said.

It was balderdash, of course. She was out shopping for a new agent, and a new publisher, if the rumors from the publishing trenches were true. Which was why he'd had the sudden inspiration for this pre-conference gathering, and the little award to keep her happy. A chance to talk with her in person.

The personal touch, yes, that's what was needed.

He looked at the figures, mostly black now instead of red.

Leave Dagger, would she, and break her contract? Well, we'd just see about that.

If the personal touch didn't work, there were always other means.

In a beautiful flat high above the Thames, Magretta Sincock stared at the screen of her own computer with none of the complacency of Lord Easterbrook, just across the water in his counting house. She reread the e-mail several times, blinking in disbelief. Perhaps it was spam, a cruel hoax? But the return e-mail address indicated clearly enough it was from Ludwig's, her American publisher. And the body of the e-mail said clearly enough that regrettably, they would not be picking up the American rights to her next manuscript. But they wished her well in her future endeavors.

Well, that at least was something, after thirty bloody years, thought Magretta. That well wishing certainly made all the difference.

They were dropping her by e-mail. Not in person, saving someone the airfare to London. Not even with the minor expense of letterhead and airmail postage. They were dropping her. Her.

After a very long while, Magretta got up from her desk and walked to the French doors of her aerie. Barely feeling the blast of cold, she stood looking down at the brown river, churning up a whitish foam as it eternally snaked its way through London. Anyone looking up from the ships below would have thought they were seeing a large tropical bird perched on the balcony, bedecked in an array of green plumage. Magretta's large red crest of hair would have added to the illusion.

The conference in Edinburgh, to which she had so been looking forward, she now viewed with dread. They would all know, all her fellow scribes, everyone connected with this wretched industry. Probably knew before she herself was sent that miserable e-mail, bad news traveling faster in the publishing world than in any other. She'd have to call her agent.

But he should have called me. Jay must have known this was coming. This was all his fault. If he'd kept his mind on his job…

Still, she had to go show the flag, since Lord Easterbrook had invited her. She at least could still count on her British publisher.

Couldn't she?

St. Germaine's had been in existence so long it was the one restaurant everyone in Cambridge, rich and poor alike, had heard of. The ruder the maitre d', the wider grew its fame, and the more wealthy patrons schemed and plotted to secure a reservation.

There were exceptions to the reservation rules, but only the owner, Mr. Garoute, knew what they were. Solving the murder by poisoning of the restaurant's sous-chef and thus saving St. Germaine's from certain financial ruin was clearly top of his list. Mr. G. always, therefore, held a table open for DCI Arthur St. Just, knowing the unpredictable schedule of the Inspector, and he always greeted him with rapturous cries of joy-cries that would have astounded his business competitors, who only saw Mr. G.'s flintier side.

It so happened today was St. Just's birthday, a fact he himself had nearly forgotten until his sister's birthday card arrived that morning, and which fact he found somewhat depressing once he'd been reminded. Dinner at Saint Germaine's was his effort to shake off the pall of being forty-three-a boring age with neither a here nor a there to it, he thought.

To make matters rather worse and himself grumpier, his new Chief Constable, Brougham-her motto was, predictably, "A New Brougham Sweeps Clean," and she was given to using terms like "Crime Management," which set St. Just's teeth on edge-had conscripted him into giving a presentation in Edinburgh as part of her "Reach Out!" public relations campaign. He was to speak at a crime writers' conference, for God's sake, on the subject of police procedure. Rooms at the conference hotel already being sold out, his sergeant had booked him a room at Dalmorton Castle for the weekend. St. Just grinned, wondering how the Chief was going to like it if she saw that bill.

Once St. Just had been settled behind a hastily assembled fortress of gleaming glassware, cutlery, table linens, and menus the size of Moses' tablets, he took a moment to survey his surroundings, peering about in the dark, candlelit room like a mole adjusting to daylight. As he was just emerging from his last case, which had lasted many hectic weeks, that was close to describing how he felt.

Mr. G. always took into account St. Just's preference for an unobtrusive table away from the action, where he could sit and indulge his penchant for people watching.

To his right: an animated young couple, perhaps celebrating some sentimental anniversary of a first meeting, the young man resplendent in what may have been his first suit, she beautiful in the way all twenty-somethings in love are beautiful, irradiated by the glow of first infatuation and a little too much makeup.

To his left an older couple, perhaps in their late thirties, provided a contrast, a living tableau of aggrievedness, warning of the dangers that might lie ahead for the young lovers. The older pair sat in a sulking silence, their meal eaten mechanically, with little evidence of pleasure. Their thoughts might have been on absent lovers or the terms of their imminent divorce. Or even, thought the detective, on murder.

At a far table in the opposite corner from his a woman sat, her head bent over a sheaf of papers as she waited for her companion. She made the occasional note in the margin of a page using a Montblanc fountain pen-St. Just could just make out the white six-pointed star on the cap. But by the time St. Just had finished his first course, she was still alone and he was growing alarmed. It was no way to treat a lady, for a lady she clearly was, and St. Just's sense of outrage at this cad-like behavior on the part of her missing companion almost could not be contained. St. Just generally disliked dining alone in public and rarely did so, which was why he was glad to have Mr. G.'s discreet little table at his disposal. Unthinkable then, for this woman to be treated so shabbily by a husband or companion.

Still, the woman herself did not seem perturbed by this social disgrace, calmly setting aside her papers as her meal arrived, and only reverting to them again once her coffee had been brought. Most people, women especially, he felt, would have hidden behind a book the whole time, lacking the savoir faire to dine alone. He found her self-possession fascinating, and he began committing her details to memory for later rendering on his sketch pad. She was not a classic beauty, he decided. Still, it was hard not to stare at her. Maybe this was where all those years of surveillance training paid off, he thought wryly. But she did seem oblivious. Probably, she was used to being stared at.

She looked the type of woman who had found her style years ago and kept it: long dark hair pulled back, with escaping tendrils feathering an oval face, darker brows framing somewhat hooded eyes, an apparent absence of makeup aside from deep red lipstick against translucent, marmoreal skin. He was to learn that she always wore long earrings that accentuated her long white neck; this evening the earrings were silver and spun like wind chimes whenever she moved.