Anne Billson - Stiff Lips

'Did they hang him?'

'Didn't have to. He knotted strips of his shirt together, and hanged himself in his cell before the law could exact the full penalty.'

Grenville chose this moment to barge drunkenly in. 'Penalty? You like English football?'

'We're talking about capital punishment,' said Walter.

'We had that at school,' said Grenville.

'Walter was telling me about the Butcher of Balham,' I said. 'What was his name again?'

'Arthur Mowbray.'

I frowned into my wine, wondering why the name sounded so familiar. Probably from Walter's film, I decided.

'The funny thing is,' said Walter, 'the reason I got interested in the first place was that he used to live in Hampshire Place.'

'You're kidding.'

'Although it wasn't called Hampshire Place in those days. It was…'

'Farrow Lane,' I said.

'That's amazing,' Grenville said, looking from one of us to the other. 'How do you guys know all this stuff?'

'I've lived here a long time, on and off,' said Walter. 'You get to meet people.'

I asked if he'd ever met anyone who remembered Arthur Mowbray.

'I met people who said they remembered him,' said Walter, 'and I read eyewitness reports, though you have to take most of them with a pinch of salt. Mowbray lodged in Hampshire Place for a couple of months, at most, but to judge by the number of people who swore they'd been out drinking with him, you would have thought he'd been out partying every night for years.'

There was still something I needed to ask.

'Which house did he live in?'

Walter chuckled. 'You mean you didn't realize? Why do you think I chose to live at number nine in the first place?'

Sophie left the Crow Bar early, complaining of a headache, though I was pretty sure this was just an excuse for her to go home and cavort with someone whose status put a whole new slant on the term 'ex'. Walter watched her go with what could only be described as regret, but I didn't mind; she would be out of the picture for the rest of the evening.

It wasn't long before the others were out of the picture too. Isabella led them off to some fashionable new tapas bar. Walter and I were included in the invitation, but he made his excuses and stayed where he was, and I stayed with him. It never occurred to me that he might simply want to pump me for information. By now I was getting tipsy while he had switched to mineral water, so my responses weren't as guarded as they might have been.

'Tell me about Sophie Macallan,' he said.

'What is there to tell?'

'That girl has secrets,' Walter said.

I looked him straight in the eye, thought why not , and said, 'Sophie's got this thing about Robert Jamieson.'

Walter looked as though he wanted to smile but thought it might ruin everything. 'I wasn't aware they ever met.'

'They didn't,' I said. 'Not exactly. But Sophie's obsessed with the idea of him. She thinks he's the perfect man. Was the perfect man.'

Walter threw back his head and roared with laughter so uninhibited it almost fooled me into believing it was spontaneous.

'What's so funny?'

'The perfect man? What a joke. I knew the guy.'

'You did?' Of course Walter must have known Robert Jamieson, I thought. Why hadn't I realized that before?

'A first-class fuck-up,' said Walter. 'Miserable, misanthropic, misogynistic: our man was all the misses. Failed as a writer, failed as a lover, failed as a human being. Suicide was the only thing he ever got right, and even then he messed up on the timing.' His face took on an oddly tragic cast. 'Most of the time he just wallowed in misery, waiting to be rescued, hoping for some stupid little woman to come along and sort him out.'

Disconcerted by his vindictive tone, I said that I thought wanting to be rescued was more of a feminine trait.

Walter hoisted an eyebrow. 'You reckon? In my experience it's the other way round. Only women are willing to be sacrificed to someone else's needs at the cost of their own. They sit and watch as their souls are sucked out of their orifices.'

'You don't have a very high opinion of women,' I said, feeling a little upset, though I couldn't say exactly why.

Walter suddenly switched on his strange humourless grin. 'But I love you all. You girls are endlessly fascinating creatures. Men, by comparison, are… predictable.'

'Men lie,' I said, staring into the bottom of my empty wineglass and feeling tearful.

'Of course they do,' said Walter.

'All men lie,' I said, thinking of Miles.

Walter was still wearing his grin. 'Like I said, they're predictable.'

I was predictable, as well. I couldn't resist purloining another of Robert Jamieson's letters. I told myself sternly that this would be the last time, that I wasn't going to do it again, I would leave this fantasizing about dead people to Sophie and from now on would dutifully leave Robert's mail to be collected and forwarded by Marsha.

But before that, I wanted just one more peek into the life and times of the 'first-class fuck-up'.

Walter Cheeseman had certainly been merciless in his appraisal of the late Mr Jamieson's character. So much so that I wondered if Walter had a hidden agenda of his own. Was there a hint of jealousy there, perhaps? Did Walter suspect that Robert Jamieson had succeeded in being the subversive, controversial, original artist that Walter, with his cheap porno slasher movies, knew he could never be?

Perhaps suicide had been a final act of defiance in a subversive, controversial, original life. Better to die than to compromise one's ideals.

This one was on headed notepaper.

DEFOREST PUBLISHING

A Division of Arbooks International

Dear Mr Jamieson,

Thank you for submitting your novel to us. I am afraid we do not consider Ways of Killing Women suitable for publication at this present time and it is therefore being returned to you under separate cover.

While the novel is well-written, we feel that readers may find the subject matter distasteful, if not offensive. If you are thinking of submitting it to other publishing houses and are hoping for a more favourable reception, may I suggest you tone down or even cut some of the more extreme passages, in particular the episode with the vacuum cleaner on pages 39 to 48, the trip to Llandudno on pages 84 to 87, the poisonous snake and the sanitary tampon, pages 108 to 123, the liquidizer incident on page 161, and just about everything on pages 179 to 232.

Should you decide to revise these sections and make them more accessible to a general readership, we would be delighted to take another look. I hope you do not find these comments too discouraging, as there is no question that you have talent; unfortunately we feel it is currently being misdirected.

Yours sincerely,

Madeleine Curran

(Senior Editor)

P.S. I should inform you that several of the girls on our staff found themselves unable to progress beyond page 17. In fact, two of them confessed that your writing made them physically ill. Can this really be the sort of effect you intended?

The letter was dated August the fourteenth, but someone had corrected the year by hand and the numerals were no longer legible. I wondered if it had taken Madeleine Curran all this time to read Robert's novel, or whether she'd written her rejection letter ages ago and it had somehow been caught up in a backlog of paperwork and only just come to light.

To me, Ways of Killing Women sounded nothing short of a masterpiece, a bestseller at the very least; Madeleine Curran just hadn't understood it. I wondered if there were any copies still in circulation. If so, perhaps I could resubmit one of them for publication somewhere else. Perhaps Robert's posthumous literary reputation lay in my hands.