House of Malice

FOUR

After roughing it for her first night in Summer Cottage, Mandy was happy to see the removals lorry roll up outside right on schedule the following morning.

Suddenly, the serene atmosphere of the empty house was filled with noise and bustle as the men tramped back and forth carrying crates, boxes and furniture through the hallway and into the various rooms. Mandy was in the middle of the activity, directing them here and there and supplying them with tea and biscuits. Her old upright piano went into the dining room, against the wall nearest the biggest window where it would get the light. Her desk and bookcase went into the writing study. The trickiest part was getting her wardrobe and bed up the tight stairway, but after a lot of heaving and sweating they were finally in place without any damage having been done.

As the last of the load was brought in, Mandy began to realise how little stuff she actually possessed. What had filled her tiny place in London to bursting point scarcely seemed to take up any room here. It looked as if a series of major antiques centre shopping sprees were going to be in order. ‘Have to start selling more books, Buster,’ she said to the dog. ‘Maybe one day, we’ll have as many bestsellers as Ellen did. What do you say to that?’

The Jack Russell looked up at her with mournful eyes, and not for the first time since yesterday she wondered what was wrong with him. Normally a happy, playful sort of dog, he’d been restless and whingeing all yesterday evening, and this morning had been moping about with his tail between his legs looking decidedly morose. She hoped he was all right. Ten wasn’t that old for a Jack Russell. Most likely, it was the disruptive presence of the removal men bothering him, on top of the general stress of moving house. She’d read that dogs could be very affected by it. Or was it cats? She couldn’t remember now.

Thinking that the vase of white roses Sarah Grace had kindly left her would look nice on the window-sill of her new writing study, she went into the entrance hall to retrieve it. ‘Damn,’ she said when she saw the state the roses were in, badly wilted and shrivelled. The water in which the stems stood had turned a murky shade of slimy green. ‘Should have put them in the light,’ she scolded herself. There was nothing for it but to chuck them away.

Afterwards, she returned to the task of unpacking. First things first: her several large boxes of books. It seemed only fitting that Ellen Grace’s titles should be the first to be put up on the bookcase. Mandy arranged them, left to right, in chronological order of publication, the way she’d always done: from A Maiden’s Choice to her much-prized signed hardback copy of One Night in December, a book she’d queued for four hours to have autographed by the author on the one magical, all-too-brief occasion Mandy had come face to face with her idol.

And there it now stood on the shelf, in the very place that Ellen had penned that final novel.

She was busily unpacking clothes in the bedroom a little while later when she heard the ringing of the old-fashioned telephone and hurried downstairs to answer it. ‘Hello?’

‘What happened to your mobile? I’ve been calling and calling.’

That was Chester’s way. Evidently, literary agents were just too busy and efficient to bother with minor details like “Hi, Mandy, how are you? Hope you’re getting settled in all right”.

‘Trouble getting reception in the house,’ she said. ‘I think it’s the thick walls.’

‘I hope your skin’s as thick as your walls are,’ he said. Another of Chester’s little habits. He didn’t waste time on chit-chat.

Mandy tensed. This was the news about her new book deal that she’d been anticipating, and so far it didn’t sound good. ‘Go on, let’s have it,’ she said.

‘I just had a long talk with Katie Piggott.’

‘And what does my illustrious editor have to say for herself? I suppose they won’t increase their advance offer from the last contract?’

A pause. ‘It’s worse than that, Mandy. I’m afraid they don’t want any more books from you at all. Before you say anything, it’s not just you. They’re not renewing contracts with any of their historical romance authors.’

‘Jesus.’ She hadn’t expected great news, but this was a shock.

‘I really tried. But it’s no go. Not unless you’re willing to take a whole new direction.’

‘What kind of whole new direction?’ Mandy asked stiffly.

‘Erotica’s the thing now. Everyone’s getting on board with it.’

‘You mean jumping on the bandwagon just because some publisher in the USA managed to sell a boatload of it.’

‘Call it what you want.’

‘Come on, Chester. I can’t write that stuff. It’s just glorified porn.’

‘Sure it is. Who cares? That’s what selling out there right now. It’s your only option if you want to cut a new deal with them.’

‘They’re not the only publishers, are they? What about Orion, have you approached them? Or Random House?’

Chester heaved a sigh. ‘Mandy, I’d already done the rounds before I even spoke to Katie. I hate to tell you, but the fact is nobody’s going to want Lady Cordelia’s Secret. Maybe if the last book’s sales had been a little stronger…’

‘Maybe if Miss Piggy had tried promoting it better—’

‘Yeah well, that’s in the past now. Let’s deal with the present reality. As your agent I can only advise you to sit down and try to come up with something different.’

‘I can make Lady Cordelia different.’

‘Forget Lady Cordelia, okay? I mean something totally new.’

‘I’ve been working flat out on that for seven months.’

‘Put it down to experience.’

‘Just like that,’ she said bitterly.

‘And maybe a change of name wouldn’t hurt, either.’

‘What am I, publishing poison?’

Mandy could hear another of the agency office phones ringing in the background. ‘Listen,’ Chester said, ‘I’ve got to rush. Mull over what I’ve said. And have a think about what pseudonym you could go out under. Why not have a go at writing erotica? Act like a pro. You are a published author, after all. Okay? Talk soon.’

And he hung up and left her standing there, staring helplessly around her at this house she’d just bought.

Two hours later, the fledgling and as yet nameless writer of erotica was sitting at her desk having a very bad time thrashing out her opening chapter. It hadn’t taken long to come up with a storyline, some generic and perfectly commercial fluff about a reporter named Desi who became entangled, both professionally and literally, with a handsome racing driver. That was the easy part. The hard part was laying down the bad prose that came with the territory. It just wouldn’t flow. Mandy had never, ever rehashed and rewritten a paragraph as often as:

‘Shit, I can’t write this crap! It’s sub-mental!’ Mandy highlighted the entire text and stabbed the Delete key with such venom that the laptop screen wobbled on its hinges. Glaring at the now-blank screen and realising that she’d just totally wasted the last two hours, she let out a yell of frustration and banged on the desk with the flat of both hands.

As if shaken from its mounting, the framed picture of Ellen Grace dropped off the wall and landed on the floor with a thud.

‘Oh no!’ Mandy cried out. The frame was nothing special, but the picture itself was irreplaceable. She rushed over to pick it up, and anxiously checked it over. Thankfully, it appeared undamaged. She hung it back on its hook.

‘Thanks a bloody million, Chester. This is all your fault,’ she muttered ungraciously.

She couldn’t bear to go back to the computer. She paced the room instead, feverishly racking her brain. There must be something else she could do, she thought. Maybe a rom-com — they were always popular. Or how about a detective story? If Chester wanted a new image for her, why not reinvent herself as a crime author? She could write a whole series, even write it under a male pseudonym. Wouldn’t be the first writer to do so. Chester would love it… But no, no, crime was too complicated. Too much nitty-gritty research to do. You had to write what you were passionate about, and rom-com was more Mandy’s style. She decided that Chester could whistle for his crime series.

Coffee suddenly seemed like a wonderful idea. Mandy trotted into the kitchen. Buster was coiled up in his bed, peering up at her with that worried look he had when he’d done something wrong. Near the back door was a small pool of what was unmistakably urine.

‘Oh, Buster,’ she groaned. She knew it was both pointless and cruel to shout at him. As she cleared up the mess, she said in a gentle tone, ‘You could have let me know you needed to go outside, no? You’re not a pup any more. What’s got into you?’ And it was unusual. Buster could go for ever without peeing, and had been completely housetrained since he’d been tiny. She knelt down beside him and patted his small, hard head. ‘I’m sorry, pet, did I stress you out with all that banging and shouting earlier? I wasn’t yelling at you. I was yelling at… oh, never mind.’ Why burden the poor thing with her human problems? Dogs didn’t know how lucky they were.

Buster skulked out of bed, crept to the back door and stood there looking entreatingly back at her. Mandy opened the door and let him out into the garden. He seemed happy, even relieved, to get out of the house. Instantly, his whole body language was different, tail wagging high. Two wood pigeons were strutting about the lawn; Buster spotted them and gave chase with an excited bark.

After she’d finished mopping up the last of the mess, Mandy washed her hands and made herself a coffee. She savoured a few gulps of the warm drink and then headed back to the study, cup in hand, to check her emails. Who knows, she thought, a publisher might have had a last-minute change of heart about Lady Cordelia.

She walked into the study and stopped dead. She almost dropped her cup.

The picture of Ellen Grace had fallen off the wall again. Except this time, it was lying several feet away from the skirting board, well out towards the middle of the room.

‘I don’t believe this!’ She ran over and picked it up. This time the precious picture was damaged, damn it. One lower corner of the glass was cracked where it had landed badly. Part of the pane was missing and there were shards on the floor. Worse, there was a laceration on the picture itself where a sharp edge had gashed it. ‘Oh, shit,’ she muttered.

She frowned. How had it come to be lying where it was, so far away from the wall? It almost looked as if it had been thrown there. Had Buster moved it? Impossible, Buster was still outside in the garden, and before that he’d been closed in the kitchen. Maybe the picture had somehow bounced towards the middle of the room on hitting the floor, but that seemed weird.

That was when Mandy noticed that it wasn’t just the picture that had fallen. Three books were lying on the floor where they’d somehow managed to slide off the shelf. She laid the cracked picture and her cup on the desk, went over to pick them up and saw that all three were Ellen Grace books: her well-thumbed paperback editions of Take My Heart and Julia’s Tale and the signed hardback of One Night in December. None of the other books appeared disturbed.

Completely baffled as to how they could have fallen, she carefully replaced them on the shelf, lining them up neatly as she always did. She was virtually nerdy when it came to caring for her books, not like some writers she knew who stacked them in teetering piles all over the place. Which made it all the less likely that they’d just topple off her shelf like that.

Perplexed, Mandy grabbed a waste paper basket and went back over to where the picture had fallen, to pick up the little shards of glass on the floor. She was just about to kneel down when she heard a sound.

She froze, tensed.

That wasn’t Buster, either.

The sound was right behind her in the room.

She jumped to her feet, whirled round to face the study door and let out a cry of fright.

The figure of a woman in black stood in the doorway.

Staring at her.