“So what you’re saying—let me get this straight—is that Penny’s agent could have been working out the terms of this deal without Penny ever having had to meet the other parties? And that’s normal?” Lindsay asked, feeling slightly like Alice in Wonderland.

“Penny might not even have known there were negotiations going on. Quite often, agents just don’t mention negotiations to their client authors till they’re a long way down the road. TV and film companies are always scouting around for stuff. Out of every hundred approaches an agent gets from a film company, they might actually sign five options. And out of every hundred option contracts that get signed, maybe five get made. With those kind of odds, you can see why agents let things move quite a long way down the road before they mention them to authors. Otherwise their phone lines would be permanently clogged with clients demanding to know what the latest was on the deal and how soon they were going to be able to buy the house with the swimming pool. And then nobody would ever get any work done.”

“It also makes the agents look good,” Lindsay said.

“How do you work that one out?”

Lindsay shrugged. “If the only time you hear from your agent is when she’s calling to tell you about the great deal she’s got to offer, you don’t know how many approaches she’s had and fucked up, do you?”

“How did you get this cynical?” Helen demanded, full of mock outrage.

“I hung around with you at a crucial age. What kind of money are we talking about, by the way?”

“For the options, say five grand a book, and there’s how many books?”

“Twenty-six, twenty-seven, something like that.”

Helen’s eyes swivelled up at an angle as she did the mental arithmetic. “About £130,000? Then for each one that gets made, say fifty grand. For the first series, we’d be talking options for the lot, plus rights for six—call it £450,000. And these are not high end figures, by the way. For US and UK rights, you could easily be talking double that.”

Lindsay whistled softly. “So we could be looking at a million-pound scenario where your mate Kes made Penny’s agent an opening offer she couldn’t refuse. Catriona Polson—that’s the agent—knows how Penny feels about TV and film deals, but she decides that this is too good to miss. She figures that she’ll go with it and see if she can talk it up into a deal that’s so wonderful that even Penny will abandon all her artistic principles and bite their hands off. How does that sound?”

“So far, so good. I like it. Nothing makes me happier than the sight of one of life’s Ms. Ten Percents getting stitched up,” Helen said enthusiastically.

“Only problem is, Penny throws her hands up in horror and says she’d rather eat razor blades than betray her readers and her masterworks in such a tawdry, money-grubbing way. And bearing in mind that agents usually charge more for TV and film deals, Catriona sees the thick end of 150 grand flying out of the window,” Lindsay theorized.