McDermid, Val - Trick of the Dark

From the Mirror

CALLOUS KILLERS MADE LOVE FOR HOURS

Two company directors accused of murdering their business partner on his wedding day spent the night after his death in a noisy sex romp, the Old Bailey heard yesterday.Steven Farnham, a fellow guest at the fatal wedding of Philip and Magdalene Carling, stayed in a hotel room next door to the one occupied by the alleged killers, Paul Barker, 35, and 34-year-old Joanna Sanderson.He said, 'There was a connecting door between the rooms, so the soundproofing wasn't very good. Paul and Joanna were obviously having sex, very loudly and over a period of a couple of hours.'I was disgusted. Philip had been brutally murdered only a few hours before. Paul and Joanna weren't just his business partners. They were supposed to be his best friends. But they didn't seem to be grieving at all.'Asked by the defence if sex were not a common reaffirmation of life after a death has occurred, Mr Farnham replied, 'I'm a stockbroker, not a psychologist. All I can say is that I was devastated by Philip's death. The last thing I felt like was having sex. And they were supposed to be really close to Phil, so I don't see how they could act as if everything was normal and nothing had happened.'The prosecution alleges that Sanderson and Barker killed their business partner during his wedding at St Scholastika's College, Oxford, to prevent him exposing their illegal insider trading activities which netted them a fortune.The trial continues.

Subject: Re: It's a mystery

Date: 23 March 2010 14:46:33 GMT

From: lisak@arbiter.com

To: cflint@mancit.ac.uk

Hi, Charlie

Fascinating stuff. Makes me glad I've given up newspapers! It must be pretty bewildering for you, though, getting all this strangeness in the post. What an interesting life you lead. I suspect you'd find me very dull by comparison.

I can't help thinking you're looking at this through the wrong end of the telescope. If the package came from someone who was interested in you professionally, wouldn't it have gone to the university? I think this is something that connects to you personally. Which make me think it must be something to do with your old college. Anyone connected to Schollie's could get hold of your home address through the alumnae office, couldn't they?

One of the things I've learned from NV is that hardly any of us has mastered the art of asking the right question. Perhaps you should consider what your correspondent has failed to send you? I always like the answer that's not there…I have three one-to-one NV clients this afternoon. My colleagues tell me I should throttle back on the f2f stuff now the program is doing so well, but I don't know. I still like the feeling that comes with making a successful intervention in someone's life. You understand that, I know, even if they're not letting you do it right now.

Till tomorrow.

LKx

My mother disappeared when I was sixteen. It was the best thing that could have happened to me.

When I say that out loud, people look at me out of the corners of their eyes, as if I've transgressed some fundamental taboo. But it's the truth. I'm not hiding some complicated grief reaction.

My mother disappeared when I was sixteen. The guards had walked away from the prison leaving the door unlocked. And I emerged blinking into the sunlight.

Jay Stewart leaned back and read her words, head cocked critically to the side. It did exactly what it needed to do, she thought. Arresting and intriguing. Pick it off the three-for-two table, read that intro and you couldn't not want to carry on. That was the secret of getting the punters to part with their money. Simple to understand, hard to do. But she'd done it once already. She could do it again.

When she'd decided to write her first book, Jay had done what she always did. Research, research, research. That was the key to any successful endeavour. Check out the market. Consider the opposition. Acknowledge the potential pitfalls. Then go for it. Preparation is never procrastination. That was one of her key Powerpoint presentation slides. She'd always been proud to say she'd never plunged headlong into anything.

That was just one of the things that wasn't true any more.

Not that she was about to admit so fundamental a change to anyone except herself. When her literary agent had taken her to lunch the week before so he could reveal that her publisher was dangling a new contract before them, Jay had made a point of appearing as cautious and noncommittal as ever. 'I thought the bottom had dropped out of the misery memoir business with the market crash,' she'd said when Jasper had raised the subject halfway through their finicky starters of scallops with mango salsa and pea shoots. As she waited for Jasper to marshal his reply, Jay stared at the food and wondered when exactly it had ceased to be possible to find simple well-cooked dishes in expensive restaurants.

'And so it has.' Jasper beamed at her as though he were the teacher and Jay the favourite pupil. 'That's why they want something fresh from you. Triumph over adversity, that's what they're interested in. And you, my dear, are well set to be the poster girl for triumph over adversity.'

He had a point. Jay couldn't deny that. 'Hmm,' she said, dissecting a scallop and putting a delicate forkful in her mouth. An excuse not to say more till she had heard more.

'Your story's an inspiration,' Jasper persisted, his lean and wary face uncharacteristically kindly. 'And it's aspirational. The readers can relate to you because you weren't born with a silver spoon in your mouth.'

Jay swallowed, raised an eyebrow and smiled. 'The only silver spoons around when I was a baby were those cute little coke spoons my mother's friends wore on chains round their necks. Not many of my readers came from that universe either.'

Jasper gave a tight professional smile. 'Probably not, no. But your publisher's market research indicates that readers do feel close to you. They feel they could be you, if things had just been a little bit different.'

No chance. Not in a million quantum universes. 'Tangents,' Jay said, her attention on her plate. 'The facts of my life touch the edges of their lives in enough places for them to feel a shivery sort of connection. I see how that worked with the misery memoir. The readers can snuggle under their duvet, all smug and cosy because they escaped my descent into the procession of hells my mother dragged me through in the first sixteen years of my life.' She drew her breath in sharply, hearing it whistle through her teeth. 'But triumph over adversity? Isn't that a bit like rubbing their noses in it?'

Jasper frowned. 'I'm not sure I see what you mean.' Somehow, he'd managed to clean his plate with predatory efficiency while Jay was still barely a third of the way through her food. It was one of the reasons Jay had chosen Jasper as her agent when she'd first decided to write her misery memoir. She liked the people with appetite to be ranged on her side.

' Unrepentant gave them the chance to feel sorry for me. To be glad that they had escaped what I went through. But an account of how I triumphed at Oxford, set up a successful dotcom company, sold out before the bubble burst then went on to found a niche publishing business while knocking out a bestselling misery memoir… Well, it seems to me that all I'm doing is providing them with reasons to hate me. And that's not a recipe for selling books, Jasper.'

'You'd be surprised,' Jasper said, his voice dry as the Chablis they were drinking. 'People who know about these things tell me the punters love to read about people like them who have made it.'

Jay shook her head. 'What they love reading about is vacuous celebrity. Talentless show-offs who will do anything for their moment in OK magazine. Idiots who think appearing on The X-Factor is the pinnacle of achievement. That's people like them. I am not people like them.'