An hour before his talk, at two o’clock, Francis made his way down to the main site through the big car park, where groups of festival goers loitered between talks, chattering excitedly, studying programmes or just hanging out. He passed the fluttering purple banners proclaiming 22ND MOLD-ON-WOLD LITERARY FESTIVAL and paced on through the gates into the community school which was the centre of events. It was an unworthy thought, but with the competition removed, perhaps he’d picked up a few more punters for his talk. As he hovered by the entrance to the festival administration office, no less a personage than Laetitia Humble rushed up to him.
‘Francis!’ she cried. She flashed him a wide, toothy smile and though she didn’t quite meet his eye, her mascara-laden lashes fluttered madly. ‘So glad you’re here,’ she gushed. ‘There’s been such a lot of interest we’ve had to move you into the Big Tent. In fact, I think you’re going to sell out. Holly,’ she called to one of the festival helpers, who was bent fetchingly over a nearby photocopier, ‘could you be a darling and check with ticketing how Francis Meadowes is doing.’
‘I guess Bryce …’ he began.
‘Poor Bryce.’ Laetitia’s face switched in an instant to tragic mode. Francis remembered people saying she had once been an actor; clearly she hadn’t forgotten her skills. ‘It’s such dreadful news. We’re all in deep shock.’ Now she took his arm and smiled up at him confidingly. ‘I gather you were one of the people who found the body.’
News travelled fast in this place. ‘Not actually found,’ he said. ‘But I was in the room just along the corridor, so I was one of the first on the scene.’
Laetitia’s phone trilled. She glanced at the screen and did a half-roll of her eyes. ‘Sebastian Faulks. Now what does he want all of a sudden?’ She clicked it off and her gaze returned to Francis. ‘So do you think you’ll want to talk about that at all?’
‘Bryce?’
‘Yes. Finding him and …’
‘I wasn’t intending to.’
‘It’s almost certain to come up in questions. So you might feel you wanted to address it up front. I’m sure people are genuinely dying – I mean, er, gagging – to know what you think. As a crime writer. I know I am.’
‘Laetitia.’ Holly was back again. ‘Francis Meadowes is sold out.’
‘Fabuloso!’ She grinned at Francis. ‘What did I tell you? Holly, darling, this is Francis Meadowes.’
‘Oh. Wow. Hi.’ Holly’s eyes widened in excitement.
‘Hi,’ Francis replied; he could get used to this. ‘So how many is sold out?’ he asked Laetitia, as Holly scuttled back to the photocopier.
‘In the Big Tent. Five hundred.’
‘Goodness. And only yesterday …’
‘You had twenty or something. I know. We offered people who were booked for Bryce either a straight refund or a swapsie with you and the other three o’clock. Fortunately we’ve had quite a lot of swapsies. At least for your event.’
‘Remind me what the other one is?’
‘Virginia Westcott. She writes kind of upmarket romantic fiction. Masquerading as something more significant.’
‘Oh yes. I met her briefly earlier …’
‘Not my cuppa char, to be absolutely frank with you, but she is very pop. Anyway, so can’t wait for your thing. Gotta dash now, but you know where the Green Room is. Get yourself a coffee and chillax …’
‘Thanks. And perhaps I’ll see you –’
‘At your event. Of course you will. I’m introducing you.’ Laetitia’s phone rang again and she glanced down at the screen. ‘Andrew, darling, sorry, I was just chewing the fat-bat with Francis Meadowes … the crime writer, where’ve you been? Too busy penning those wonderful poems of yours for your own good. Anyway, he seems to think …’
She was out of earshot. Francis cut through the busy ticketing hall where a SOLD OUT banner was now pasted over 3 PM. FRANCIS MEADOWES ON CRIME. He found the Green Room round the back: a small marquee filled with comfy armchairs and low tables. The Sunday newspapers were scattered about, and there was a sideboard with an urn of tea and a Kenco coffee machine stewing away by a stack of white china cups and saucers and a tin of assorted biscuits. Further along were plates of sandwiches and bottles of beer and wine. Francis was tempted to have another beer, but opted for tea instead. Five hundred people. He needed to be on tip-top form. There was nothing worse than getting up in front of an audience after a drink or two and realising your reactions had slowed. He had done that once, thankfully in Shetland, where the three dour rows of punters had appeared not to notice, but it wasn’t an experience he wanted to repeat.
He contemplated a Sunday paper, but the headlines seemed irrelevant now. On a side table there was a pile of blue photo albums. A printed sign read MOLD FESTIVAL PHOTO ARCHIVE – NOT TO BE REMOVED. This last instruction was a bit unnecessary, as each of the books was attached to a central ring with a length of brass chain. There was one for each year, stretching back to Mold’s beginnings in the early 1990s. Francis picked 1998 and was rewarded with snaps of a much younger Laetitia, with high cheekbones and hair cut short like a pixie, arm round a genial-looking old boy with a neat white moustache. LAETITIA AND HENRY HUMBLE, FESTIVAL FOUNDERS, read the handwritten caption (though ‘LAETITIA AND’ and the ‘S’ of FOUNDERS looked as if they’d been added later). Francis flicked on, through pages of famous literary names in earlier incarnations. How young they all looked, these Ackroyds and Amises and Barneses and Bainbridges and Bakewells and Dicksons and Drabbles and Motions and Weldons and … here was an interesting one. Young Guns! Bryce Peabody, Scarlett Paton-Jones, Dan Dickson, Tilly Bardwell. The four of them were posing in front of a tumbledown stone cottage half submerged in brambles. So that pretty bob-haired blonde between Bryce and Dan was Scarlett. And Bryce and Dan had been friends …
Enough of that! Francis had work to do. He took the cards for his talk from his bag and sank into one of the battered sofas, just along from – oh no, it was his competition! As he caught the badger-woman’s eye, she smiled.
‘Francis Meadowes.’
‘Yes.’
‘We meet again.’ She held out a bony-fingered hand. ‘Virginia Westcott. I think we’re on at the same time. In the slot that poor Bryce has conveniently vacated. Though by all accounts you’ve done rather better out of him than I have.’
‘So Laetitia was saying. Yesterday they were talking about moving me to the School Room because I’d sold so few.’ He laughed.
‘And now you’re in the Big Tent.’
‘So it seems.’
‘While I’m in the School Room.’
‘Oh no, I’m sorry.’ Francis’s face fell. How obtuse of him not to spot that one coming.
‘Obviously the vulgar hordes are bound to be attracted to a crime writer who everybody now knows was first at the scene.’
‘Do they?’
‘The gossip at this festival is toxic. People have been tweeting about it all morning …’
‘I’m afraid I’m not on Twit –’
‘Though actually, if people understood anything about this particular story, it would be me they’d be coming to see.’
‘I’m sorry, I don’t follow you.’
‘Bryce and I … go back.’ Virginia paused. ‘As undergraduates at Cambridge we were great friends.’
‘Really. I didn’t realise …’
‘That the old shit was that ancient. Were you going to say? It’s amazing how some of these chaps get away with it, isn’t it? No, Bryce had clocked his half-century all right. One can only hope he didn’t have any problems in the bedroom department with pretty little Preeta …’
‘Priya.’
‘That’s the one.’
There was a pause. Virginia met his eye, then flashed him a rather awkward, artificial smile.
‘So you met Bryce at college?’ Francis asked.
‘University, please. Cambridge has many colleges. But yes, in our first term. At one of those fresher meetings, you know, when you go along and wonder whether you’re going to join the Christian Sky-Diving Society or what-have-you.’
‘And did you?’
‘What?’
‘Join the Christian Sky-Diving Society?’
‘Don’t be absurd! There wasn’t one.’
‘But you met Bryce?’
‘I did. He was very taken with me, I can tell you. I had the power at that point. For a start I was a woman, and in the late Seventies in Cambridge there were something like nine men to every one woman, so getting a girlfriend at all was quite a challenge, unless you wanted to go out with a nurse or someone from one of the secretarial colleges.’
‘I see …’ Francis kept his thoughts to himself; the snobbery of this remark was so throwaway it was almost unwitting.
‘And then I’d been to a co-ed school in North London which I’d loathed, but had somehow made me reasonably trendy. My stockings were purple, rather than blue, put it that way.’
‘What about Bryce?’
‘What about him?’
‘How “trendy” was he?’
This made Virginia laugh. ‘Not very at all. Rather an earnest, spotty little fellow with dreadful National Health specs. He’d been at a grammar school in Solihull and still had a bit of that horrible Birmingham twang. Cambridge was terribly public school in those days, so poor Bryce didn’t know anyone. He was very happy to be friends with me.’
‘More than just friends, though?’
‘What an inquisitive chap you are. Yes, we did get it together. But not immediately. I was a virgin, would you believe? Very concerned about what I should do with my much-prized cherry. Just lose it in a mad one-night stand so I could be like all the others, or keep it for someone special. I liked Bryce, and I could see he was terribly clever, but I wasn’t sure that he was The One.’
‘So he persisted?’
‘He did. That’s – that was one of the things about Bryce. He was highly persistent.’
‘But it didn’t last?’
‘Evidently not. No, two years later he’d suddenly made good. He was editor of the student newspaper, Stop Press, and was starting to get known for his brutal theatre reviews. He didn’t need me any more.’
‘So he left you?’
‘For the inevitable brilliant fresher. In the summer term before my finals. I took it all much worse than I should have done. Totally messed up my exams and barely scraped a 2.2.’
‘When by rights you should have got a First?’
‘I would have done if he hadn’t messed me around so dreadfully. Promising me things he then went back on. The sad thing is I was far too young to realise how much more important a First is than a silly student love affair.’
‘Is it? Once I left York, nobody ever mentioned my degree.’
‘It’s there, though. On your CV. All the key employers take note of it.’
‘Don’t tell me, Bryce got his First.’
‘Course he did. His double First. He worked bloody hard for it, don’t think he didn’t. I watched him swotting and sweating. Under that newly debonair exterior was the same old grammar school boy, who worked late and got up early and never let himself go too much.’
‘It wasn’t you that murdered him, was it, Virginia?’
In Francis’s books, George Braithwaite often used the direct-question technique to shock his suspects into surprising revelations. Now Virginia laughed, Francis thought, just a bit too loudly.
‘What! Get my revenge thirty years later? Perhaps I should have done.’ Her eyes met his quite candidly, but in her lap, he noticed, her hands were trembling. ‘So do you seriously think there was foul play, Francis? You were the one who saw him this morning. Wouldn’t let anyone else in the room, would you?’
‘A herd of guests trampling around in dressing gowns and slippers wouldn’t have helped the police very much.’
‘You haven’t answered my question. What was in there to arouse your suspicions?’
‘Nothing much.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘There was one item I was rather intrigued by. A silver Parker 45, with the initials V.R.C.W., a date from the Seventies, and a Latin tag, memento mori …’
Virginia’s face was a picture: of excitement mixed with … was that sadness, or something more sinister?
‘And where was that?’ she asked.
‘Right by the bed.’
She was looking into the middle distance, almost as if in a trance. ‘So he kept it … all these years …’
‘I was going to ask you your middle names, but I guess …’
‘… there’s no need. Ruth Constance. No, I gave him that pen. For his twentieth birthday. A week before he took his part ones.’
‘And garnered the first part of his First?’
‘Indeed.’
‘Remind me exactly what memento mori means?’ Francis asked.
Virginia pursed her lips. ‘Literally,’ she said, ‘“Remember, you must die.” But metaphorically, more like, “Don’t take your life for granted.” The sort of motto that seems terribly sophisticated when you’re nineteen.’ She looked away across the tent for a moment. ‘I can honestly say I had no idea he still had it, let alone used it. Perhaps he hung onto it for luck. He was always oddly superstitious. So what else did you find?’
‘That was about it. As far as I could tell it could easily have been a heart attack that killed him.’
‘What did the police say?’ Virginia asked, eyes narrowing.
‘The police were a pair of rookies. Luckily there was a medic there too. Local GP. He seemed to think a cardiac arrest was the likely picture. That or some kind of brain event. Hopefully the post-mortem will confirm.’
She sighed deeply. ‘Poor Bryce. A completely inadequate shit of a man, but generally an intelligent read. In a strange way I shall miss my weekly dose of viciousness.’
‘Did he ever review you?’
‘Funnily enough, he left my first novel alone, but he couldn’t seem to bear it when I looked set to repeat my success. I was too much of a threat to him, I suppose. You know he always wanted to be a novelist too?’
‘I didn’t.’
‘When we were at Cambridge we were going to be George Eliot and Henry James. Reimagine the great Victorian novel for the modern age. A simple enough task it seemed to us then. But in the real world Bryce’s efforts never got anywhere. His talent was too flashy, I suppose. Brilliant at the one-line put down, but he never had the stamina for the lonely long haul. Anyway, yes, he ignored Entente Cordiale. But when it came to A Fine Imagined Thing, he couldn’t help himself. Actually, it was embarrassing, because the sheer level of vitriol made it clear to anyone with half a brain that it wasn’t about the book at all. None the less, at the time, it was a shock. I was foolishly upset. It seemed like adding insult to injury.’
Injury being binned ten years before, presumably. ‘Did you say anything to him?’ Francis asked.
‘I did. Against everyone’s advice. You’re not supposed to bleed in public in the literary world. I didn’t care. I wrote a letter to his stupid newspaper, pointing out the various errors of fact he’d made, and followed it up with a personal missive. Didn’t stop him though. Every time I’ve put my head above the parapet since he’s shot me down. It’s pathetic.’
‘And face to face. How was that? Did you stop speaking?’
‘We barely spoke anyway. Just a nod or the occasional surface exchange at launch parties. Sad, isn’t it, when you think how well I once knew him. So much better than the long string of floozies he’s had since.’
‘Better than his long-term partner, Scarlett?’
She ignored this quiet reality check.
‘Who’s to say?’ she replied. ‘I do think that if you get to know someone intimately when they’re nineteen or twenty you understand them in a way that others can’t. Before they’ve had a chance to put on all those adult airs and graces that fool the world so convincingly.’
‘And what about you?’ Francis asked.
‘What about me?’
‘Did you ever find anyone to match Bryce?’
Virginia looked straight back at him and for a moment the sadness in her eyes spoke volumes; then she recovered herself and the ironic twinkle returned. ‘My my, you do love the direct question, Mr Meadowes. I’m surprised you didn’t try for a career in broadcasting. You’d have given Paxman or Harrumphrys a run for their money. No, as soon as I left Cambridge I was heartily relieved I’d got rid of Bryce. I was free to do all sorts of things I’d otherwise never have done. Travel. See the world. In my twenties I lived for five years in Paris. That experience was the basis of Entente Cordiale. If I’d stayed with Peabody I’d have been buried in nappies, more than likely. I seriously doubt if I’d have been published. I’ve seen too many of my clever female friends swamped by the demands of procreation. Whatever they say about the march of feminism, it’s still the women that bear the brunt of making a family. And always will be, in my view. Until they invent wombs for men …’
‘So you’ve a new novel out this summer?’
‘This week. To tie in with the festival. Sickle Moon Rises. It’s in the bookshop if you’re interested.’
‘When was your last one? I’m afraid I can’t remember.’
‘How sweet you are, Mr Meadowes. There’s really no reason why you should know about my work. I’m hardly a name to be conjured with. But no, it was almost nine years ago.’
‘And Bryce had his usual go?’
‘Savaged it in a couple of paragraphs. In a round-up of what he offensively called “hag-lit” … I’d given the Aga Saga a new meaning for the over-fifties … I was to Joanna Trollope what she was to Anthony …’
‘Trollope?’
‘Of course. Silly, sexist nonsense like that. I’m afraid I’ve forgotten most of it.’
‘Nine years is a long gap. Did you hit a block?’
‘Well, after that review, and, hardly surprisingly, rather poor sales, I was dropped by my publisher. Too “mid-list”, apparently, though they never said that when I was selling well. Nor did they ever consider that their appalling jacket design or their near-comatose marketing department might have had something to do with it. Then my agent died. Run over by an Ocado van while chatting on his mobile phone on Highgate Hill. I couldn’t find another decent one for ages. Either too ancient and grand or too young with no experience or contacts. The old story. I ran through an alcoholic ex-BBC producer and the fantasist daughter of a famous actor before I found darling Harriet.
‘Then my mother had a hideous battle with cancer. Which she lost. Father of course was hopeless without her. Could barely boil an egg. Tried to teach himself to cook from the Good Housekeeping book I gave him, but failed miserably. He was always calling me up, saying things like, “What does it mean, fold sugar into the mixture, they don’t explain.” We had exploding coffee percolators, the works. Then one day he fell down the steep stone stairs I’d been warning him about for ages. Two funerals in two years. A relationship I was in at the time didn’t survive the fallout. So all in all not a terribly fun time.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. Life has its little surprises. But it’s all grist to the mill for us authors, isn’t it? And fortunately Daddy left me enough to keep writing, regardless of whatever sales I might achieve.’
Francis nodded thoughtfully. ‘And are you pleased with this one?’ he asked.
‘As a matter of fact, I am. I can honestly say it’s the best thing I’ve done. Whether it will storm bestseller lists and win prizes remains to be seen.’
‘And Bryce can’t diss it now, whatever happens.’
‘Indeed.’ Virginia looked down at her watch. ‘Oh my giddy aunt, it’s ten to three. We’d better get to our respective publics, Francis.’
‘Yes.’ Francis felt the familiar rush of nerves at the thought of that packed Big Tent. ‘I suppose we better had.’