Helen pondered. “Not necessarily, I suppose. Authors tend to get involved in negotiations if they want to write the script themselves or if they want to have a fair bit of input into the end product. But some of them just want to take the money and run, in which case they leave it up to their agents to do the business and they never actually meet the people who are planning to make the film.”

“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.”