Val McDermid - The Vanishing Point

I could see her checking me out every time she headed back down towards me. I think she expected me to crack and slide into the water. To go head to head with her in an attempt to show who was boss. But I wasn’t playing that particular game. After a dozen lengths, she’d had enough. She glided to a halt alongside me and looked up. The swim had sleeked her hair back against her head but her waterproof mascara was still holding fast. Her lips were pulled back against her teeth as she caught her breath, and I could see the dental work that had transformed her smile after that first series in the Goldfish Bowl . Sometimes the cosmetic dentistry goes too far, giving people a glow-in-the-dark smile never found in nature. But Scarlett’s dentist had done a good job. If you’d never seen the ‘before’, you wouldn’t have thought it was an ‘after’. Just the smile of someone blessed with good dental genes.

‘D’you not swim, then?’ she asked. Straightforward curiosity or aggression; I could have read her tone either way.

It was time to give her a little bit of me. ‘I like swimming. But I don’t like pools much. I prefer the sea. So I don’t swim very often because it’s too bloody cold in this country.’

She folded her forearms on the edge of the pool and looked up at me with a grin. ‘Fair enough. What happened to your leg? It’s not like you limp or owt. I didn’t know there was anything wrong with you till you took your trousers off.’

I looked down at the long scar that runs from my left knee almost to my ankle. ‘I was in a car crash. A drunk drove into my friend’s car. We hit a tree and my leg got trapped by the car door. I’ve got a metal plate and a handful of screws holding my leg together. They did a good job and I did what the physio told me, and that’s why I don’t have a limp.’

‘That must have hurt like a bitch,’ Scarlett said. She pushed herself out of the water and scrambled to her feet.

‘It did. But it doesn’t now. Only when I do too much walking. Then it aches a bit.’ I lifted my legs out of the water and stood up. I was a good three inches taller than her; I could see the roots of her hair would soon need touching up. ‘Would you like me to tell you how I go about helping people tell their story?’

Scarlett dragged her hair back from her face and gave a little snort of laughter. ‘You never call a spade a spade, you lot.’

‘What lot?’

‘Journalists. Writers. Interviewers. All you lot that take me and twist me into summat for your readers to feed off of.’

‘Is that what you think this is all about? Because if that’s what you genuinely believe, there’s not much point in us carrying on this conversation.’ I walked across to a table that held a stack of clean towels and picked one up.

‘What are you here for then?’ Scarlett challenged me. ‘Come on, get in the Jacuzzi and tell me there.’ Again, there was no backward glance. I wasn’t ready to give up on her yet, so I followed.

She fiddled with the controls and the deep pool began to rumble and bubble. I don’t like Jacuzzis much. They’re too hot for my taste. I always come out feeling over-heated and sweaty and in need of a shower. But this was work, so I simply settled myself down at right angles to her. People argue less that way than when they sit opposite each other. I gave her the full-on reassuring smile. ‘What you’ve done is not ordinary,’ I began. It’s a shtick I’ve honed over the years. ‘That means you’re not ordinary any more either. Other people, the ordinary ones, they’re desperate to know your story. They want to find out how you became extraordinary. They want to share your secret. My job is to help you to tell them. It’s simple.’

She frowns. ‘How is that different from all them journalists that wrote all that crap about me when I fucked up in the Goldfish Bowl ? And the other times, when I’ve said one thing and it’s come out totally different?’

‘Because I’m not working for a newspaper or a magazine. I’m working for you and for your publisher.’

‘But you want to sell books. The more books you sell, the more money you make. So it stands to reason you’ll do whatever it takes to sell the most books.’ There was a stubborn set to Scarlett’s mouth, coupled with an uncertainty in her eyes. I’d seen it before with people who had grown up with good reasons not to trust.

‘If we do this, we make a deal, Scarlett.’ It was the first time I’d used her name and yes, it was calculated. The same way you stroke a strange dog you think might be getting used to you. ‘As far as I’m concerned, the best story isn’t necessarily the one with the most shocking revelations. It’s the one that speaks loudest to the readers. What I promise you is that I will tell your story the way you want your story to be told. If you tell me something that I think you would come to regret, I will leave it out and I’ll tell you why. I won’t tell your publisher though. Because you’re right. If I do, they will want to keep it in the book for the sake of making a few extra grand selling it to the Daily Mail .’

‘Why would you do that? I don’t believe this bleeding heart shit about protecting me from myself. Why would you leave out the really juicy bits? Are you soft, or what?’

It was another of those surprising flashes of intelligence. Or maybe it was just a hard-won shrewdness born of being exploited once too often in the past. I shook my head, laughing. ‘I’m the opposite of soft, Scarlett. I do it for one very good reason and it’s called the second bite of the cherry. I’ve helped a lot of extraordinary people bring their story to an audience. And I’ve learned that those people mostly don’t go back to being ordinary. They carry on doing stuff that makes amazing stories. Now, if I write your story with my eye on how much I can score off you, it’s not going to be me you talk to next time, is it?’

There’s no motive clearer to a minor celebrity than self-interest. Scarlett perked up. ‘So if you don’t fuck me over, you can come back for more when I get to be even more famous?’

‘That’s right. When I look at you, Scarlett, I don’t just see the story you’re going to lay out for your baby to read when they’re old enough. I can see you’ve come a long way. And I believe you’ve still got a long way to go. And I want to be the person who tells all those stories still to come. That’s my vested interest in doing the right thing by you.’

She gave me a grudging nod. ‘That makes sense. I couldn’t figure out why you would be on my side. But I get it now. You don’t just want my story because it’ll make us all a load of dosh now. You think I can be a cash cow down the line.’

Brutal, but not so different from the way Maggie would have put it. ‘I think of it more as a long-term partnership,’ I said wryly.

‘I want to see what you write before it’s turned into a book.’ Scarlett wiped the sweat from her upper lip with the back of her hand.

‘Of course you do. How else will you know I’m not putting the shaft in? You’ll be the first person who reads it. You get it before my agent, before your agent, before the publisher. After you’ve read it, we sit down together and go through anything you’re not happy with. But there shouldn’t be any problem. Because this is your story, after all. I’m just the person who knocks the sentences into shape and gets the spelling sorted.’ It never ceases to amaze me how my subjects always swallow this. They’re completely comfortable with the idea that there’s no skill in what I do. They genuinely believe all I’m there for is getting the commas in the right place. Because I’m such a good ventriloquist, what they hear is their own voice. They have no idea how much craft has gone into shaping what are often little more than inchoate ramblings.