Edward Aubyn - Lost for Words

Slobodan acknowledged Alan’s changed appearance by briefly raising an eyebrow to show that he was not so easily fooled. He handed over two canvas bags, which Alan couldn’t resist glancing into immediately. In one was the familiar sight of two typescripts in transparent plastic folders. From the other Alan fished out a gigantic purple book covered in debossed golden domes and parapets. The Mulberry Elephant was written in rich orange calligraphic lettering across its front. On a note obscuring the name of the author, someone from IPG had written, ‘Published In India — looking for publisher here’.

Alan decided to leave the intimidating volume in his room and take the intriguing typescripts with him to a cafe. He felt the visceral excitement that had kept him going as a publisher. Maybe these would turn out to be yet more disappointing and incompetent texts, but perhaps one of them was a masterpiece, or still better, something he could help turn into a masterpiece.

It was ironic, in Penny’s opinion, that her slavish devotion to the cause of literature was preventing her from writing any more of her own novel. She was determined to spend the last twenty-four hours before the feeding frenzy of the Short List announcement doing some of her own work for a change.

Quite apart from their distracting quality, she was not at all pleased with the discourteous tone that had come to dominate the Elysian committee meetings. David Hampshire was taking her out to dinner that night and she was going to suggest a remedy. Last Sunday she had watched a thoroughly inspiring documentary about corporate bonding. It had followed two groups of colleagues, up a Norwegian fjord in one case, and across Dartmoor in the other, all being led by former SAS commandos. These young soldiers started out looking like strong silent types, but turned out to have thought long and hard about the value of getting back to basics and cultivating esprit de corps . Although there would not be time to spend a week on Dartmoor with three matches, a compass and a rabbit trap, or to go to Norway and enjoy the breath-taking natural scenery, howl at the moon, and gaze at the aurora borealis , she did intend to ask David to have a word with the Elysian Board and see if they would finance a trip to Paris with an overnight stay in a nice hotel.

Most people went to Paris to look at Impressionist paintings of holidaymakers lying around on a riverbank. What Penny had in mind was altogether more challenging: a good hard look at the infrastructure of the city. A limited public tour of the Paris sewers had been on offer for years, but Penny intended to use her Foreign Office contacts to get the committee taken through the entire system, led by a real expert, with a map of Paris showing them exactly what they were underneath at the time. The Louvre, the Opera House, the Comédie Française, whatever it might be, they would be seeing it from a point of view that very few people indeed had ever had the chance to enjoy.

That was tonight’s task, but right now, it was time to get on with some writing.

Jane took a moment to assess her situation. It didn’t look good. In fact, it couldn’t have been much worse. She was in an isolated castle on the west coast of Sicily, without her mobile phone, hiding in an old oak cupboard with far from silent hinges, while the world’s most dangerous terrorist took a shower in his en suite bathroom next door. It defied belief, but all the evidence pointed to the fact that the Russian oligarch and owner of the Villa Concerta, Vladimir Rhazin, was bankrolling Ibrahim al-Shukra’s international terrorist network. The old Soviet cold-war game of destabilizing the West was clearly still part of Russia’s foreign-policy agenda, even if the perpetrators were now disguised as some of the world’s most avid consumers of Western decadence.

It was a distinctly odd feeling, Jane reflected grimly, to be in possession of such stunning intelligence, without knowing whether she would live long enough to pass it on to Thames House. One person she would certainly not be telling was Richard Lane. He would somehow claim all the glory for himself, while managing to reprimand her for burning the rulebook. She had to admit that hiding in the freezing luggage hold of Rhazin’s Falconer T 300, the most expensive executive jet on the market, with a price tag of forty-five million dollars, had been insanely risky, but if ever the motto ‘Nothing ventured, nothing gained’ had any meaning at all, it was now. If only she hadn’t forgotten her BlackBerry in the glove compartment of her Audi 3.0 TDI, she could have sent a text to Peggy Fields right now, and got her to transfer it to her computer with a time code, so that Lane couldn’t get his thieving hands on her intelligence.

Penny sank back into her button leather swivel chair. That was as far as she had got. What was going to happen next?

Jane winced as she opened the creaky old cupboard door.

Penny paused; she wanted to really give the reader a sense of how dramatic this moment was, really get the atmosphere across. She typed the word ‘atmosphere’ in the Gold Ghost Plus search box, and then changed it to ‘air’, which seemed to her more subtle and suggestive. Immediately, dozens of alternatives rippled on to the page.

‘The bracing seaside air … the air, heavy with the scent of roses … the air was crackling with tension…’

That was it. She highlighted the last phrase, clicked, and Bob’s your uncle.

The air was crackling with tension. Every nerve in her body was straining to hear the shower. While the water was still running she was safe. If it stopped, she would have to run back to the cupboard

The situation reminded Penny of something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Then she got it, and finished the sentence triumphantly.

in the most lethal game of Grandmother’s Footsteps ever played.

She climbed carefully out of the cupboard and started to tiptoe her way across the vast room. When she was halfway across, the sound of running water suddenly stopped. Jane froze; she was as far from the cupboard as the door. What should she do? Using her woman’s intuition, and her memories of a parachute-training course she’d been sent on when she had first joined the Service, she threw herself onto the floor and rolled smoothly under the giant Jacobean four poster bed recently purchased by Rhazin for a six-figure sum at Christie’s, Geneva. She was panting like

Penny paused and closed her eyes waiting for inspiration.

a schoolgirl after a hockey match, but she had to force herself to breathe more quietly so she could concentrate on what was happening.

The shower door opening. Al-Shukra’s singing growing louder. The last splashes of water from the showerhead. A sudden cry of alarm. A thud. A groan. Silence. Jane lay on the floor under the musty mattress for what seemed like an eternity. Then she lifted the velvet valence and peered across the room. Nothing stirred. Her heart was beating like a jackhammer in her chest. She wriggled out from under the bed, got to her feet and moved gingerly towards the bathroom door. The sight that greeted her was both horrifying and highly satisfactory. Al-Shukra was lying on the white Carrera marble floor, a red stain spreading slowly from the back of his head.

Gaining in confidence, Jane walked into the bathroom. In the corner of the room she saw the glistening bar of Bulgari’s Liaisons Dangereuses bath soap that had quite literally caused al-Shukra’s downfall.

‘You think you’re so clever,’ said Jane, standing mockingly over al-Shukra’s fallen body, ‘sending suicide bombers out to make cowardly attacks on innocent members of the public, but you don’t look so clever now, do you?’