“I fancy you, but my face hurts too much. Not to mention the crucial damage to upper arm and elbow . . .” Lindsay smiled sadly.

“Not the pathos again, please, spare me the pathos! Do you fancy coming downstairs now?”

“In a bit,” Lindsay said. “There are some other files on here that I want to have a look at. Look, these ones that end .LET. They’re probably letters. And these other ones. God knows what they are. Probably nothing to do with anything, but you never know. I might as well finish while I’m stuck here.”

“Glutton for punishment,” Sophie said, rumpling her lover’s hair and pulling a face. “Perhaps a bath wouldn’t be a bad idea later. Blood, sweat and tears is not a great recipe for hair care.” She went downstairs and investigated cupboards, fridge and vegetable rack. Half an hour later, she was about to deglaze the caramelized onions with balsamic vinegar when she heard Lindsay’s voice shouting urgently.

Hurrying to the bottom of the stairs, Sophie called, “What is it?”

“I said, I think I’ve found it,” Lindsay yelled.

Chapter 20

Chapter 20

Lindsay pointed to the screen. “Look there,” she said, indicating with the cursor what she wanted Sophie to pay attention to. “It wasn’t the manuscript of Heart of Glass that the killer was after. It was the notes for the next one. ‘Structure: five sections, alternate POV between Sam McQueen and Martha Denny: The Invisible Man, The High Cost of Living, The Ghost Road, The Information, Crime and Punishment,’ ” she read out. “One of the few pieces of paper left in the flat had those titles written on it. I thought it was a reading list when I first saw it, but she was obviously starting to think about a new novel. She was going to call each of the sections after a book.”

Sophie nodded. “Yeah, so far so clear. But what’s that got to do with Penny’s death?”

Lindsay scrolled down further. “Outline,” Sophie read over her shoulder. “Chicago??? NYC??? Sam McQueen: early thirties, Irish/Italian, third-generation respectable face of the Mob, has legitimate front business—???magazine publishing??? Hits on a way of cleaning up the lives of serious criminals. He turns his publishing house into a money laundry. Step one—makes Mob figures respectable; hires them as commissioning editors on huge salary. Every month, the company pays their salaries into offshore accounts, then the money comes back into their US-based accounts from the offshore bank. But what really happens is Sam’s firm pays the money into an account in Sam’s name offshore. And the ‘employees’ bring in their own dirty money from offshore into their domestic bank account, thus making dirty money look clean. Not only that, but they are legitimized in the eyes of the government—they pay taxes, they have Social Security numbers, they pay insurance, and they earn hugely inflated salaries because they are shit-hot editors—ho, ho, ho!”