Val McDermid - The Vanishing Point

She was on the money, Vivian thought. Why had she jumped to the wrong conclusion so quickly? Why had something they knew perfectly well not occurred to her or Abbott? The obvious answer was that their concerns were always with possible breaches of security from outside. Once you were inside, you were, by definition, secure. You’d been verified, screened and deemed acceptable. Why would there be any further cause for concern? But Stephanie Harker had looked at the system with the eyes of an outsider and she’d seen something they’d missed. Maybe the interview room was the place where this would be resolved after all. ‘I need to make a call,’ she said, pushing her chair back and dialling Abbott’s number on her way back out to the hallway. ‘We got sidetracked by the idea of somebody following the kid. We forgot about incoming passengers,’ she said as soon as he answered. ‘They come from all over the US and they walk straight out into the main concourse. You can’t tell who’s an arrival and who’s a departure. Our guy could have flown in from anywhere.’

‘Shit,’ Abbott said.

‘We’re going to have to backtrack the CCTV to see if we can figure out where the fuck he came from,’ Vivian said. ‘If he came off a flight, he could have been wearing anything. But he had to change somewhere. He must have used a bathroom, right?’

Abbott sighed. ‘We need more bodies.’

‘Check with security in the camera room. This takes priority. A kid’s life could be on the line here. I’m going back in to the interview now.’

‘OK. Good call, Vivian.’

When she sat down this time, Vivian eyed Stephanie with more respect. ‘It’s in hand,’ she said. ‘Thanks for that insight. Now, can we get back to Scarlett Higgins’ family? I’m wondering whether they might be behind all this. Were they not pissed that you ended up with the kid? And presumably the money too? I’m guessing Scarlett left her money to you? For Jimmy?’

‘Ha,’ Stephanie said. ‘I wish. They were pissed off at first. When they thought there was some money. But you couldn’t see them for dust once they realised Scarlett had left all her money to the charitable trust she set up after she discovered she had cancer. I got the kid. Not the money.’

‘Jimmy didn’t inherit? Surely she left you something to take care of him? Just to pay the bills.’

Stephanie shook her head. ‘Not a bean.’ Her smile was wry. ‘That’s totally bizarre.’

‘Tell me about it. Her rationale is that she started out with nothing and that’s what spurred her on to make something of herself. She didn’t think throwing money at kids was good for them.’

Vivian couldn’t decide whether she was impressed or appalled. ‘So her family really weren’t interested in the boy?’

Stephanie sighed. ‘Her mother’s a drunk and her sister’s a junkie who’s already had one kid taken into care. Even if they’d known Jimmy – which they didn’t – no judge in his right mind was going to let them anywhere near him.’

Vivian shook her head. ‘That doesn’t mean they didn’t want him. Blood’s thicker than water, after all.’

‘In the Higgins family, money’s thicker than water. And if there was no money in it for them, they couldn’t have cared less about Jimmy.’

‘How come you ended up with the boy? Are you trying to tell me the best friend she had in the world was her ghost writer?’ Vivian tried to keep the incredulity from her face as well as her voice, but it wasn’t easy. It was hard to imagine an emotional life so impoverished that the nearest thing you had to a bgf was the woman who’d been hired to portray you to the world in the most flattering light.

Stephanie shrugged. ‘That’s one way of putting it. The other way would be that we fell into friendship five years ago when I wrote Scarlett’s first book. Neither of us expected it. But it happened and it persisted. There was a lot more to her than met the eye. I’m not proud of the fact that the woman I portrayed to the world was not the woman I knew, but for all sorts of reasons, most of them economic, that was what worked for both of us. And when she knew she was dying, I was the person she knew she could trust with her boy.’ Stephanie blinked away more tears. ‘Looks like she couldn’t have been more wrong.’

‘It wasn’t your fault,’ Vivian said.

Suddenly Stephanie snapped into anger. ‘Of course it was my bloody fault. He was in my care. And now he’s not. Scarlett trusted me. Jimmy trusted me. I’ve let everybody down. If anything happens to that boy, if he doesn’t come back to me alive and well . . . ’ The muscles in her face went slack as the prospect sank in.

‘We’ll find him,’ Vivian said, hating herself for the false hope. But she had to do what she could to keep Stephanie on her side. She had to keep teasing away at the details of their history in the hope she could find a reason for what had happened. ‘I accept what you’re saying about your friendship. Even though, frankly, it looks unlikely from where I’m sitting. But how was it that you got so close that she felt you were the one to entrust with Jimmy?

10

Aghost is a professional hypocrite. We’re constantly editing the person we’ve discovered into the person they want the world to see. We are the cosmetic surgeons of the image. We become experts in what should be left out. I generally ask clients if they would be comfortable with their mother or their child reading particular episodes that I consider to be prurient or predatory. And when I’m writing about sexual abuse, for example, I’m always conscious that there are creeps out there who look for this sort of memoir only because it turns them on. So I’m careful not to include any explicit descriptions or much detail about the process of grooming children for sexual exploitation. I’m not in the business of writing a primer for paedophiles.

Even with all the practice I’d had at creating a central fiction to form the spine of my ‘autobiographies’, Fishing for Gold turned out to be one of my more challenging enterprises. I think the issue was that Scarlett had given me a problem I’d never faced before. Usually, what I’m editing out is the material that paints the subject in a less than flattering light. For example, when I was ghosting a champion snooker player who had successfully battled cancer, the heart of the book was the strength he’d found in his loving marriage. It didn’t need any intervention from me for the player and his agent to be clear that they did not want the public to read about the prostitutes and the drugs that had been the reality of his backstage life.

I’ve become an adept at treading the narrow line between providing just enough revelation to justify newspaper serialisation but not so much that the client becomes a pariah in their own life. And while it was true that what I was hiding about Scarlett would make her life uncomfortable, it wasn’t because the secrets were dirty and damaging. Apart from Joshu, who was her one blind spot, the truth about Scarlett was that she was smarter, shrewder and much more sensitive than any TV viewer or tabloid reader would have thought possible. I’d found it hard to believe myself at first, but I’d gradually had to accept the creeping suspicion that the Scarlett the world had been privy to was mostly as artificial a creation as Michael Jackson’s face.

I couldn’t believe she’d got away with it for so long. It was on the seventh or eighth day of our interviews that I broached the subject. ‘You’re a lot smarter than you let on,’ I said.

We were lounging on the leather sofas in the late afternoon. We’d been talking about the ill-fated second series, and Scarlett had clearly been bored by my insistence that we had to talk about the horrible thing she’d said to Danny Williams. ‘Look, it happened,’ she said, struggling upright and glaring at me. ‘You don’t need me to go through it all again. It’s there on YouTube for ever.’