17

It might have been smarter to stay on the sidelines than investigate Anna Monroe’s death. But I had always been fascinated by crime—by murder, to be specific. Not by court dramas: by the time lawyers get involved the truth never comes out. But by the people who commit crimes. By the reasons behind premeditated crime, domestic crime, malice foreign and malice domestic. And all the ways a killer can get away with it—or thinks he can.

At the BBC I started out doing broader categories of show but soon all my assignments were for Bloody Murder: London. It was an enormous hit from the day it launched, and I’ll take credit for that. I even wrote the scripts for some of the better shows. What I learned is that people don’t half get up to some crazy stuff, and they always get caught because they do one stupid thing that gets them caught. In domestic murders, especially, the necessary detachment is missing.

I learned a lot about forensics doing the BM:L gig. For instance, did you know a tongue print is as good as a fingerprint for identification purposes? That everyone’s teeth are different—that even identical twins have different teeth?

Also, FYI, if you’re going to do away with someone, just do it yourself. Hiring a hit man is never the way to go. Those cheap losers who hang around bars trying to find someone to kill their spouse for five hundred pounds—those are the ones who always get caught. The police even send out people to hang in bars, just trolling for malcontents.

I remembered a conversation I had with my BM:L boss. A lecture, rather. He actually wagged his finger at me. “This isn’t fiction, Jillian,” he said. “It’s supposed to be true crime.” In my experience, true crime bears less relation to reality than does fiction, but I didn’t argue with him. The show’s sponsors were unhappy and that’s what mattered.

Now Weycombe villagers would be starring in BM:L or some other British version of Dateline on OWN and here was I. How could I not want in?

My parents once lived off-base near a house where a woman had been murdered five years earlier. I passed that house on my way to and from school—it was yellow, two stories with a red door—and every day I pictured the woman who had died there, lying mutilated in a pool of her own blood, sprawled at the foot of the stairs in the dirt-floor basement until someone at her job finally wondered where she’d got to. A boyfriend did it, they said. Her married lover. They never were able to pin it on him, if he did it. He was rich. He was connected.

You just know that sort of thing happens a whole lot more than people think it does.

How I landed that job at the BBC is difficult to explain, because to this day I don’t know why they thought I was qualified to do it. I applied not exactly as a lark but not expecting much, either. I seriously needed to find a job in the UK or be tossed out as an illegal alien, so I was applying for everything going, in scattershot fashion, only to be pipped at the post by some less qualified but native-born applicant. The only good thing was that the British have a wonderfully fair and polite system whereby if they call you for an interview, they pay for your transportation, realizing, as their American counterparts should do, that the expedition is costly and inconvenient to the applicant who most likely, being unemployed, is broke. In this way I traveled for free a good bit to and from London and Oxford, stopping in after interviews to see every play I could. This went on for months before I took my degree. While it was a good deal for me I was, as I say, growing increasingly worried that no one would hire me and I’d have to leave.

The day of my interview with Eric Avalon, the man I’d soon come to think of as Beelzebub, I was let into his office by his assistant, Noelette Minon, whose finest quality as far as I ever was concerned was that wonderful, toady name. In addition to kowtowing to Eric she acted as his spy, reporting back on infractions large and small.

It turned out that what made me perfect for the job in their eyes (Noelette stayed for the interview, glowering suspiciously throughout) was my Americanness, which they seemed to define as outgoing, friendly, and ballsy. I will own to the latter but not to the rest. I am in fact an introvert. People exhaust me and I am happiest in my own company, where I can withdraw and assess what happened during any unavoidable transactions with the outside world. But Eric had got it into his head that I would be able to draw in the right people with the talent and knowhow for any upcoming production. Finally I realized my spell of employment with Hollywood Green Productions had created this misapprehension. HGP was a deli in Wellesley, Massachusetts. But my experience in amateur theater at Oxford may also have helped.

Of course I did what I could to foster this illusion of vast expertise—I knew I’d learn on the job once I’d landed it. That part of my confidence was, I suppose, pure American. And I had screwed myself up to a fever pitch over this. There was a letter from my Oxford college officials sitting on my desk, asking me to vacate my rooms by the end of summer so they could be readied for the next influx of graduate students. They’d let me overstay by several months after I’d completed all the work for my degree, drag it out as I might, being aware as they were of my circumstances. I had thrown myself on the mercy of the bursar, but even he did not have the authority to let me stay forever. I had to get out of there.

So when Eric asked what I had actually done at HGP, I had done enough research on talent scouts to be able to describe my work at the deli in human resources terms, throwing around words like procurement and interview and due diligence, grinning at him with what I hoped was an energetic, can-do Yankee attitude.

I glossed over the fact that my stint at HGP came just before I was forced to endure death by teenager at a newspaper, a gig that came along when I already thought life had kicked the last bit of stuffing out of me. I was working in a deli, for God’s sake—a college graduate who had gone heavily into student loan debt so I wouldn’t have to work in a goddamn deli.

My journalism career didn’t last long, either. My boss at the small daily was a senior editor by virtue of being old—Mike had to be over sixty-five—and of having survived several past pogroms. The rumor was he had something on the publisher, some dirt or other that allowed him to hang on to his head while those around him were losing theirs.

He and I once had a conversation where he told me he found me alarming.

“You are smart and charming when you want to be,” he’d said. (I let that “when you want to be” slide.) “You have something that makes people want to open up to you, to spill all their secrets. Don’t abuse it. Don’t abuse that power.”

“You’re talking to a journalist and telling me not to get people to open up?”

“I’m telling you to be more careful how you go about it. I’m telling you not to lie to them. It’ll come back to bite you.”

“But schmoozing is okay,” I said. “Got it.”

A fine distinction, but whatever. I’m sure he meant well. Finally the suits sent him to that elephant’s graveyard where old newspaper editors stagger off to drink Mojitos and pretend they could have been Hemingway—if only.

And then—just as I was beginning to taste freedom, then they promoted this girl-child in Mike’s place, and I was asked for several months to endure life under this teenage potentate. It was like building pyramids for a female King Tut. Until finally, mercifully in fact, they let me go, too.

Whenever I relived these job memories, I was overcome by waves of special loathing for Eric, who had assured me not three weeks before canning me that my job at the BBC was safe. Probably safe. But he was so busy by then shagging the married copyeditor (Coleen, Our Lady of the Possessive Pronoun), I should have known this man’s word was not his bond.