Lindsay drank her water and wondered what to ask about next. Then she remembered the crucial question. “Do you do the incoming post?”

“Nah. That’s Gary in the post room.”

“So you wouldn’t know who had access to the manuscripts that Penny sent in?”

Lauren shook her head as she lit a cigarette, leaking smoke from her mouth like a damaged flue. “No idea. Sorry. Why d’you want to know? I mean, maybe I could find out for you.”

“You know how Penny was murdered the same way one of the victims dies in Heart of Glass? Well, I’m just trying to find out who exactly knew what happens in the book.”

Lauren gave a knowing smile. “You don’t need to talk to the post room to find that out. Everybody knew.”

“What? About the beer bottle exploding?”

“Yeah, everybody knew about that.” Lauren looked very pleased with herself.

“How?”

“They had a bit of an argy-bargy about it. They were talking to Nigel, who does the covers, about what was going on the front of Heart of Glass. Penny told Nigel about the murder method and said the cover should be just the title and her name and a splinter of glass, all on a black background. And Baz said no, she’d been meaning to talk to Penny about that, and the whole thing was just too far-fetched and she didn’t believe in it and she wanted her to come up with a different idea. And Penny said no way, José, it was perfectly feasible and she thought it was dramatic and ironic and it was staying.”

“They got heated?” Lindsay asked eagerly.

“Not really. It was like it was part of the whole arm’s-length thing. Baz just wasn’t prepared to go head to head with Penny. She just backed down and said okay, if it was that important to Penny it could stay. Everybody was gobsmacked, because Baz never backs down with her authors. Like, never. That’s why it stuck in my mind. So you see, everybody at Monarch knew about the murder method. And God alone knows who they went home and told.”

Chapter 10

Chapter 10

Lindsay sat in the swaying tube train, her thoughts swirling in confusion. At breakfast, she’d had two suspects—three if she’d been prepared to include Meredith. But thanks to Lauren’s revelations, she now had dozens. The publishing world was so riddled with gossip that if anything could be guaranteed, it was that half London would know Penny Varnavides and her editor weren’t seeing eye to eye. The disagreement over the bottled beer murder method would have been discussed avidly among publishers, agents and, by now, probably authors too. Rather than narrowing down her list of suspects, Lindsay’s visit to Monarch had swelled it a hundredfold.