In his room at the White Hart Francis Meadowes couldn’t sleep. He had been at the Sentinel party earlier and was now regretting drinking so much white wine. Once it wouldn’t have mattered; he would have crashed out and slept through to breakfast time. In the past few years, though, things had changed. Wine now did this to him: woke him at 3 a.m. and kept his mind dancing around all sorts of pointless subjects. It was as if his own body were saying to him, ‘OK, Francis mate, let’s make sure you’re really not on form tomorrow.’
What did it matter? He was only a minor crime writer. A junior genre man. Not a big draw like Dan Dickson or one of those telly celebs. That afternoon, having attended the ‘dickson’ talk and witnessed the bust-up with Peabody, Francis had popped into the festival office to see how his own ticket sales were going. Yes, said the young woman at the computer, he was still in the Small Tent, though it was possible that could change. To the School Room. ‘Only twenty-eight sold so far, I’m afraid.’ She made a face. ‘Sorry.’ So now he knew: it was going to be one of those grim sessions where he had a couple of rows of punters and had to keep looking upbeat while everyone thought, Who is this loser? Why did I sign up for this? As if it were his fault that his audience was so paltry. Which in a way it was.
The main problem was that he was scheduled opposite Bryce Peabody – at 3 p.m. How very unfair was that? After the events of this afternoon, who was going to want to miss Bryce in full spitting form? Laetitia herself had bustled in at that moment and Francis had made the mistake of bothering her about his concerns, going over to her desk while she was on her mobile, then waiting patiently as she made another call on the land line.
‘Hi, I’m Francis Meadowes,’ he said, when she was done.
‘Of course you are.’ Laetitia flashed him a worn smile; then gazed hopefully at both her phones, as if someone more interesting might rescue her.
‘Your assistant told me you could be moving me. From the Small Tent to the School Room. Is that likely? I just want to know as I like to check the venue before the talk.’
‘I seriously hope not, er, Francis. But I’ll make that call tomorrow morning. Sorry, I’ve got to dash.’ And she was off, punching numbers into her mobile as she went. Rude cow, Francis thought. You asked me down here. You charge punters £10 each to listen to me. The least you can do is be civil.
Now, at 3 a.m., this encounter whirred pointlessly round Francis’s head. He shouldn’t have gone over. If anything were going to go wrong it would be the thing he least expected. His laptop wouldn’t work, like that time at Dartington, when his visuals had been continually interrupted with Windows updates. Or he would get in there and clam up. Be unable to go through with the ordeal of standing up, just him, for fifty minutes, spouting on about himself. He would stop mid-sentence and break into a Tourette’s style string of obscenities. He would pick on the one person he knew in the audience and reveal their intimate secrets to the crowd at large. He would break down in tears …
Come on Francis, he told himself, pull yourself together. His talk, his saner self knew, was perfectly well-structured and entertaining, an historical canter through the subject of the amateur in crime fiction: from the very earliest examples in The Thousand and One Nights and the Chinese detective fiction of the Ming dynasty, through European beginnings, Voltaire’s Zadig, early nineteenth-century Danish and Norwegian writers, Poe, Sherlock Holmes, the ‘Golden Age’ of Wimsey and Poirot and Marple, right up to contemporary television’s Jonathan Creek and Jackson Brodie. It was of course a way of showcasing his own series hero, George Braithwaite, a retired professor of forensic science, and his feisty wife and sidekick Martha, who had done well for him over a run of seven books. Though to be perfectly honest, he was a little sick of them now, was wondering if the time had come to kill at least one of them off. Having said that, his publishers loved the idea of more of the same. At a recent lunch, his ever-upbeat editor Nigel had pretty much begged him to keep the pair alive. No, a new detective would not be a good idea. Nor would Francis’s ambitious plan to abandon the genre altogether and attempt something more like literary fiction.
‘I’m never going to win the Booker Prize with George Braithwaite,’ he’d said. To which Nigel had sighed deeply and replied: ‘So, how d’you feel about a pudding?’
Let’s face it, if he got really stuck, there were always questions.
Now Francis leaned over and switched on the bedside light. He got out of bed and wished he were back home in his flat in Tufnell Park, where he could make himself some hot milk, with honey and nutmeg, his sure-fire cure for small hours insomnia. As it was, there was a bizarre choice of coffee and tea: Nescafe Instant, Kenco Smooth, Clipper Decaffeinated, Yorkshire Gold, Tetley’s Green, Twinings Digestif and Tranquillity. Only that last one offered even the vaguest promise of sleep. Perhaps he should risk going downstairs, finding the kitchen, raiding the fridge. But what if there were a fire alarm?
Whoo-ooo-ooo-oosh! How loud the little kettle sounded at this time of the morning. Francis tiptoed to the window. Even the last revellers had gone to bed now. It would be dawn soon. Out here in the country, the noise would begin early.
As the kettle clicked off, he heard a footstep in the corridor outside. Then, ‘Shit!’ – a man’s voice – ‘Shit, shit, shittety-shit!’ Somebody back late from one of the parties, he presumed. The celebrated Bryce Peabody perhaps. Francis had been introduced to him at the Sentinel do, then run into him half an hour later in the hotel lobby, pacing up and down like the White Rabbit, staring at his watch. He had looked at Francis as if he’d never seen him before.
Now, overcome by his usual curiosity, Francis opened his door a crack and peeped out. Nothing. Just the green carpet stretching away to the steps at the end of the corridor and the arrow pointing, one way, to ROOMS 26–8, FAMILY SUITE and the other, ROOM 29. That was where Peabody and his pretty young girlfriend were staying. You had to wonder what the attraction was for her: fame, presumably, or fortune. Perhaps she just wanted to get on in journalism. Maybe – who knew? – she was escaping from an arranged marriage. When Francis had been researching his last but one Braithwaite novel, A Matter of Honour, he’d come across many extraordinary examples of what young Asian women would do to get away from the unions the more traditional of their families still demanded of them.
Francis got back into bed with his tea and the chocolate that had been left on his pillow earlier, which was decorated with a tiny purple sugar rose. Then he pulled out the stack of cards on which he’d typed his talk. Was he really only going to scrape thirty punters? When he’d made a special effort to do more than the usual festival dreariness of a reading from the book you were promoting followed by a Q&A? Oh well, he decided, however many there were he would do them proud. That was the key to being professional in these situations. Even if it were just a handful, you had to treat them as if they were the centre of your world.