At breakfast, Lindsay had moved in for the kill. She’d tried to talk to Sophie, but she’d only reached their answering machine, which informed her that Sophie had been called in to an emergency and that Lindsay should ring her around six in the morning, California time. Rather than kick her heels until early afternoon, she’d hit on the bright idea of using Kirsten’s contacts to dig up background on Catriona Polson. She’d been perfectly prepared to do the research herself, but Kirsten was adamant that she wanted to help out. Lindsay wasn’t sure if it was because she’d had the chance to get to know Meredith the previous evening, or because Helen had warned her not to let Lindsay close enough to her contacts to upset them. Either way, it relieved her of the tension of telling lies convincingly to strangers. Looking at Kirsten grafting away there, she wasn’t sorry she’d been forced to abdicate the responsibility.

“Yeah, right,” Kirsten resumed, blowing out a cloud of smoke from the forbidden cigarette she’d just lit. “Anyway, it seemed to me that the people who must really be coining it in off of this are not the authors, who after all, let’s face it, have probably spent years in abject penury to write that one special book. And it’s not even the publishers, given the balancing act they’re all playing at just now with the ending of the Net Book Agreement and getting to grips with electronic publishing. No, the people who must really be raking it in are the agents . . .” Kirsten made a face, casting her eyes upward and holding the phone away from her ear so Lindsay could hear the yakkety-yak coming from the receiver.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, Clive, but think about it for a minute. All their crap authors get dispublished . . . yeah, I said dispublished, it’s the new Americanism for what happens when your publisher tells you to get a life that doesn’t include book signings. So you’ve got these literary agencies, right, with all their dead weight dropping off their client lists, and let’s not forget that these are the authors who take up a disproportionate amount of time compared to the actual cash they bring in. So what they’re left with . . .” Kirsten leaned back in her chair and mopped her face with a crumpled tissue.