Crossing the Lines Page 7

  “I’m not thin enough.”

  “What has that got to do—?”

  “Literary writers must be stick-thin, Dad.” Madeleine’s eyes were grave as she delivered the blow. “The women, anyway.”

  “What nonsense!”

  “No, it’s the rules.” There was just the slightest crinkle at the corners of Madeleine’s eyes. “To be eligible for the Sydney Book Prize you must look as though you’ve been so consumed by your art that you’ve forgotten to eat for at least a few weeks, that you been starved into clarity.” She shrugged. “I could diet but Aach-chi keeps making bibikkan.”

  Edward chuckled. It was an absurd observation—something he’d not noticed noticing—but literary writers did tend to look as though they may well have been starving in a garret. Now that the idea had been put into his head, he couldn’t think of one fat female literary writer of note. And suddenly he was hungry. He put down his pen and made himself a sandwich.

  A Necessary Violence

  Perhaps it was the conversation with her father, a contrary reaction to his insistence that she would win every literary award known to man, but Madeleine was suddenly anxious to add pace to Edward McGinnity’s story. To assert a crime-writer’s identity over the manuscript. She read over what she’d already written and there was nothing but the odd typographical error that she was moved to change, but in terms of crime fiction, the plot had not travelled far. There was a body, her protagonist had been entangled and given a reason to investigate, but the story lacked a sense of urgency. Edward was as yet too laid back, too comfortable.

  The American novelist Raymond Chandler had advocated resolving such things by having a man come through the door with a gun. In her past work, Madeleine adapted the advice by introducing a new corpse every time the story slowed, but for this manuscript she thought the original advice would work better. It needed a sense of menace. She would have to put Edward McGinnity in actual physical danger.

  But from whom? And why?

  “I’m just a poor boy from a poor family…” Hugh Lamond wandered into the living room singing “Bohemian Rhapsody”—badly.

  “Queen…really?” Madeleine winced.

  “Damn radio. I can’t get that bloody song out of my head,” he offered by way of excuse. “Oh, you got the fire going?” Hugh removed his jacket. “I thought we were out of wood.”

  “We were. I split some.”

  “Oh, I’ll go cut some more now.”

  “No need, I split enough for tonight.”

  Hugh rolled up his sleeves and picked up the second wood basket. “I’ll get some more just in case.”

  Madeleine smiled to herself. Hugh seemed to take the fact that she could wield a log-splitter as an assault on his masculinity. Funny creatures, men.

  He returned in about twenty minutes with a burgeoning wood basket and the news that he’d stacked about three days’ worth on the verandah so that she wouldn’t get caught short again.

  Madeleine didn’t argue. There was a good measure of thoughtfulness mixed in with the quaint masculine pride behind his actions, and she wasn’t particularly fond of splitting wood.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked looking at her. “Your face is all screwed up.”

  “I’m thinking.”

  “About what?”

  “About how exactly to up the tension in this novel.” Madeleine took the time to explain as Hugh sometimes had good ideas. “I want to introduce some real action, but I don’t want to write myself into a corner.”

  “How would you write yourself into a corner?”

  “Well, I don’t know who the murderer is yet, so I’m not sure what the motivation for this will be.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it,” Hugh said. “There’s always more than one motivation at play.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Write it, decide if it’s a red herring or not later,” Hugh advised. “You can always rewrite it to make it work.”

  Madeleine wrinkled her nose. She had never embraced the idea of going back, rewriting, though she knew that most writers did. She wrote chronologically and once the words were down they seemed immovable.

  “How’s Elmo?” Hugh grinned as he said the name. Among the many things about his wife’s family that Dr. Hugh Lamond found amusing was his father-in-law’s name. He rarely used it without smiling.

  “Dad’s put some kind of windmill in the garden—apparently it will run the fountains.”

  “We should have got married in that garden,” Hugh replied.

  Madeleine giggled. “God, can you imagine the photos? A bridal party of garden gnomes…”

  Hugh loosened and pulled off his tie, draping it over the back of a chair. “I’ll never understand why your father—”

  “It’s an ethnic thing, Hugh. More is always more, and as much as possible, even better.”

  “If I’d said that…”

  “I’m allowed. I have inside knowledge.” Madeleine closed the laptop. “Shall we have Jeeves rustle something up?”

  “I have a practice meeting, I’m afraid. I only came home to change so it’s just you and your writer-detective tonight.”

  “Oh.” Madeleine’s smile faded only a little. “An evening in front of the fire with Ned McGinnity sounds divine.”

  Hugh Lamond’s brow rose. “Should I be jealous?”

  “Yes.”

  ***

  Once Hugh left, Madeleine microwaved a casserole—at least she hoped that’s what it was. It was difficult to tell what exactly had been frozen in the Tupperware, but casserole was a reasonably educated guess. Bringing it back to the living room, she propped the steaming bowl of something on the bookshelf beside her writing chair. A hunt through the television stations yielded an old Agatha Christie she’d seen years before. A hazy memory of the film was enough to allow her to follow its plot without paying undue attention. It would keep her company, and from focussing too hard on her writing, but no more. And with Christie, she felt among friends.

  She hesitated, aware that what she did now would set the course of the novel. Madeleine took a breath. Right. She was just going to have to risk it and trust that Edward McGinnity would do the rest. She closed her eyes, looking for where she’d find him.

  He’d just arrived home. It was late. He didn’t bother to turn on the lights, confident navigating his own home in the dark.

  Edward dropped his car keys into the pewter receptacle on the sideboard. A metallic clatter confirmed the keys had found their place and he continued into the kitchen. He opened the refrigerator door and it was in the weak illumination of the light it cast that he noticed an unexpected shadow. He turned, but too late. The first blow caught him in the jaw and a forearm locked around his throat from behind, the hold tightening and choking as he struggled.

  Edward’s eyes had adjusted just enough to make out three figures—men. The one who had him in a headlock had recently eaten a large amount of hummus, but beyond that he could distinguish little else.

  Restrained, he could do nothing to defend himself when the other two began to pound. They were workman-like, silent in the face of his demands, and then his pleas.

  As Edward began to believe that this was how he would die, they stopped. Abruptly. They left him in a bloody heap on his own kitchen floor.

  He could feel the tiles against his face. The refrigerator door was still open and by its light he saw a stray Matchbox car under the butcher’s block. The Lamborghini. He’d wondered where that had gone, and for now it was something on which he could focus as he tried to replace the air that had been beaten from his lungs. The slam of the front door registered. Relief. Madeleine. She stared at him unsure, hand clasped over her mouth.

  She seemed so real, so present. She shouldn’t have been standing in his kitchen. Edward tried to ask her what she was doing there, but he couldn’t get out a
ll the words. Then his head swam again.

  He reached for the phone in his breast pocket, hoping it hadn’t been smashed in the attack, and called for help.

  ***

  Madeleine bit her lip, fixed on what she’d just put into train. The look on Edward’s face as his eyes locked with hers. And his words.

  “What are you doing?”

  He’d looked so bewildered, reproachful. As if he knew she’d visited pain and violence upon him with no real idea as to why. She shifted uncomfortably, guilty, sorry that she’d hurt him…and ashamed. Did he consider it the sensationalist trick of a hack—gratuitous violence for cheap titillation?

  Madeleine groaned. No! She was being ridiculous. Edward McGinnity wasn’t real and even if he was, she knew her craft as he did his. She was writing a crime fiction with all the suspense and action the genre entailed. Who was he to judge her decisions?

  But still, this was a big plot commitment. She had no idea who would want to attack Edward McGinnity and for what reason. At some point, she was going to have to make it tie in, or everything she wrote henceforth would be wasted. But for now, she couldn’t deny that it increased the heartbeat of her story.

  ***

  It was Leith Henry whom Edward called. She came immediately and rang an ambulance and the police the moment she saw the state of him.

  By the time the ambulance arrived she had him off the floor, on the couch, with makeshift icepacks made of tea towels and various packets of frozen vegetables. The attending paramedics insisted that he go to the hospital. His protest was too confused and weak to have any effect, and Leith was by that stage deciding for him and directing proceedings. And so, when the police pulled up, Edward McGinnity was already leaving in the back of an ambulance.

  For Edward, the next couple of hours passed in a blur of bright lights and monitors and antiseptic smells. Aside from the pain, he felt blindsided. Three men had broken into his home and belted the living dickens out of him…that kind of thing just didn’t happen. It was absurd. And yet, here he was at the hospital. A dislocated shoulder was set right, stitches above his left brow, and X-rays to identify three broken ribs. The hospital would keep him overnight at a minimum, and the police asked their questions from his bedside.

  Edward could give them little. He could not identify his assailants, they had told him nothing and he could think of no reason why anyone would break into his home and try to break him.

  Bourke was clearly sceptical. “Were they after information, Mr. McGinnity? Did they ask you anything?”

  “No.”

  “Could you perhaps have something they want?”

  “If I do, they didn’t ask me for it. I’m telling you, Detective, they didn’t say a word.”

  “Do you have any enemies, Mr. McGinnity?”

  “Enemies? No.”

  Bourke flicked through his notebook. “We have a complaint from a Mr. Elliot Kaufman. He alleges that you assaulted him.”

  “Does he?”

  “Did you?”

  “We had a disagreement.” Edward winced as he sat up. “It wasn’t a big deal.”

  “He seems to think it was.”

  “He’d hardly make a complaint and have me beaten up…even he’s not that stupid.”

  “Would you care to tell us the nature of your disagreement with Mr. Kaufman?”

  “No.”

  Bourke waited.

  “Kaufman is married to a friend of mine. Sometimes I don’t believe he shows her the respect he should.”

  “And your friend is Ms. Meriwether?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is there anywhere you can stay for a couple of nights, Mr. McGinnity?”

  “You think they’ll come back?”

  Bourke shrugged. “Our people are still going over the scene.”

  “You’re going through my house. Don’t you need a warrant or something—?”

  “It’s a crime scene, Mr. McGinnity. We’re searching for evidence of your attackers.”

  Edward fell back, closing his eyes against the fluorescent lights of the hospital. A throbbing tenderness with a periodic pulse of white blinding pain. “Fine, just hurry up. I’m going home tomorrow.”

  A doctor came in then with Leith Henry in his wake. He called the interview to an end as he checked the chart at the foot of Edward’s hospital bed with an air of concern. He maintained this semblance of an impending medical emergency until the policemen had left. And then he told Edward to get some rest and departed.

  Madeleine smiled. Leith was in charge, even here.

  The agent took the chair beside the bed. “Do you want to tell me what happened, Ned?”

  He opened his eyes and looked at her. “I wasn’t hiding anything, Leith. I have no idea who they were or what they wanted.”

  She sighed. “Maybe you’ll think of something later. Right now we need to worry about where you’re going to live.”

  “I have a house,” Edward said. “How long can it take to dust for prints or whatever it is they’re doing?”

  Leith frowned. “I’m not sure it’s safe for you to go back…after what happened.”

  For a moment Edward said nothing. “I’ll get a security system,” he offered in the end.

  Leith shook her head.

  “And a dog…I’m not going to be chased out of my house.”

  “That’s very masculine, Ned, and very stupid.”

  He groaned.

  Leith stopped. “Are you in pain, Ned? Should I call a doctor?”

  “Yes, but no. I’ll be fine. I don’t suppose you could get me a coffee?”

  “We haven’t finished talking about this!” Leith grabbed her handbag and prepared to find a cafeteria or at least a vending machine. “This is serious, Ned, and as much as dying might help your sales, I’d rather you were alive to write sequels.”

  He laughed, grimacing and clutching his ribcage as he did so. “Only genre writers do sequels, Leith.”

  “Don’t be a snob, Ned.” She paused at the doorway. “We’ll talk about your living arrangements when I return.”

  ***

  Edward eased himself into the armchair by the window. He could hear Mrs. Jesmond in the kitchen. Though Leith had arranged for professional cleaners to come in once the police had finished, the housekeeper had scrubbed every square inch of the kitchen, using bleach on the tiles where blood had stained the grout. She was baking now, determined that danger could not co-exist with the warm sweet aroma of jam drops in the oven. Perhaps she was right. The incident seemed more a dream now, but for the bruised ache of his body.

  A new security system had been installed while he was in the hospital. It had gone off twice that morning, triggered by a neighbourhood cat and then Leith herself when she’d arrived to check he’d memorised the passwords properly.

  Edward uncapped his pen. He hadn’t been able to write or even think about what he would write in the past couple of days. There was no space in hospital, where every conscious moment was crowded with nurses and visitors and incessantly beeping machines, and unconsciousness was monitored and disturbed.

  His memory of the assault was broken—jagged disjointed sensations, but he did remember that Madeleine was there. Perhaps that was strange—he wasn’t sure. Why would he think of her then? Was it because she was a crime-writer? God, in a moment of weakness had he fallen into some hackneyed platitude of life imitating art?

  Or was it something more complex than that? He hoped it was. For some reason this manuscript, this process, felt different. He was intrigued more than puzzled by the change…and quietly excited.

  Mrs. Jesmond came in with a tray—tea, biscuits, nervous comfort. The heightened flush of her face was noticeable in a frame of over-bleached hair. She fussed over him. “Shall I get you a pillow? Are you warm enough, Edward?”

  He sensed
something. “Mrs. Jesmond, is something bothering you?”

  She stopped, rubbing her hands up and down the skirt of her apron. Twice she started, but no words came. And then, “I can’t stay. You’ll have to find someone else…I’m so sorry.”

  Edward asked her to sit, and tried to pour her a cup of tea. She took the pot from him and poured the cups herself. “You really shouldn’t use that arm, darlin’. Not until your shoulder is healed.”

  “Do you feel unsafe here, Mrs. Jesmond?”

  “It’s not me as much as my Burt. He says it’s too dangerous.”

  “Yes, of course he would.” Edward took a deep sip of tea. “I can’t ask you to come here if you or Mr. Jesmond feel at all uneasy.”

  “But what will you do?”

  “I’m a grown man, Mrs. Jesmond.”

  At this she smiled.

  He smiled too. “I’ll hire another housekeeper, just until you’re ready to come back.”

  “I’m not sure Burt will ever be ready, darlin’. And when I think of what happened in my kitchen…”

  “We can deal with that as we come to it. Let’s just say you’re taking a leave of absence for now. I’ll keep paying your salary, of course. Please, just don’t take another job until you’re absolutely sure.”

  Mrs. Jesmond’s glasses fogged and she removed them, blinking furiously. “I feel so bad…to leave you on your own.”

  “I’m not on my own,” Edward said without thinking. Of course, he was. “Anyway, until the police find these men, I’d be happier knowing you’re not going to be dragged into it.”

  “Do they have any idea who…?”

  He shook his head. He really didn’t want to alarm her any further, but he told her the truth. “They didn’t take anything…that I’ve noticed, anyway. Bourke thinks it may have been some sort of professional hit. They wore gloves except for when they…well, they didn’t leave any prints. In fact, aside from what they did in the kitchen, they were surprisingly neat.”

  Mrs. Jesmond stared at her hands, inspecting a chip in the pearlescent polish. “How will you manage? That hospital should have kept you…the way they shuffle people out these days…”