Chapter Twelve

TWELVE

Miriam thought she might not make it back to the boat. She thought she might pass out right there on the towpath; she could feel it coming, the crashing wave of panic, her field of vision narrowing, darkness crowding in, chest tight, breath coming in gasps, heart pounding. She crashed down the stairs into her cabin and collapsed onto the bench, head hanging, chin to chest, elbows on her knees, trying to regulate her breathing, trying to slow her racing heart.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. She should never have gone over there to see him—who knows what might have happened? He might have called the police, he might have claimed she was harassing him—she could have ended up jeopardizing everything she’d been working toward.

She had given in to her desire, her impatient desire to see Myerson, just to catch a glimpse. She was getting no joy at all from the news: two days had passed since her call to Detective Barker and she’d yet to hear anything about anyone new being questioned in connection with Daniel’s death.

She had started to wonder—perhaps they hadn’t taken her seriously? It wouldn’t be the first time someone had claimed to have her interests at heart, had pretended to listen to her and then had dismissed her out of hand. Perhaps Myerson had said something about her, something to discredit her? That was why she needed to see him, to see his face, to see written on it fear or stress or unhappiness.

And she knew exactly where to direct her gaze: up at the window looking out over the garden. That was the window to his study, in front of which stood the stout mahogany desk at which Theo Myerson toiled, head bent over his laptop, cigarette burning down in the square glass ashtray as he crafted sentences and conjured images. As, in an affront that felt like an act of violence, he wrote Miriam out of her own story.

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When Miriam pictured Myerson in his home, at his desk, wandering down to the kitchen to fix himself a snack, pausing, perhaps in front of the framed picture in the hall of him and his wife, young and vital and wreathed in smiles, she was not conjuring these details out of thin air. She had visited Theo’s beautiful Victorian house on Noel Road; she had walked through the entrance hall and into a dark corridor, painted some fashionable shade of ash or stone, mole’s breath or dead fish. She’d admired the paintings on the walls, the jewel-colored Persian rug laid over original wooden floorboards, the drawing room lined with bookshelves groaning under the weight of first editions. She’d noticed, with a sharp twinge of pity, the silver-framed photograph on the table in the hall, of a smiling dark-haired toddler.

Miriam had been working at the bookshop for no more than six months the first time Myerson appeared, strolling along the towpath with his dog, a small terrier, a tiresome yapper whom he would tether to a mooring while he browsed the books. Myerson and Nicholas, Miriam’s boss, would gossip about what was selling well and what was bombing, about who was getting savaged on the pages of the London Review of Books and who was in the running for the Booker. In the shadows behind a shelf, Miriam eavesdropped, unseen.

She’d read his books—most people had. His first, published back in the mid-1990s, had moderate sales and good reviews; the second was a runaway bestseller. After that, he disappeared, not just from the bestseller lists but from bookshops altogether, his name cropping up in the odd Saturday supplement feature, the great literary success story of the nineties undone by personal tragedy.

Miriam had always considered his writing overrated. But she found that even she was not immune to the glamour of a brush with celebrity—it was odd how quickly one began to reassess the quality of someone’s work once its creator was no longer an abstract, no longer just a smug photograph on a book jacket but a living, breathing person with a shy smile and a smelly dog.

One day, a Wednesday morning in early summer, perhaps six months after he’d first started visiting the shop, Myerson turned up while Miriam was minding the shop alone. He tethered the dog as usual, and Miriam brought it a bowl of water. He thanked her graciously, asking whether they had in any copies of the new Ian Rankin. Miriam checked and discovered that it wasn’t published yet; it was due in the following week. She’d set aside a copy for him, if he liked. He replied that he would, and they began to chat. She asked if he was working on something new and he said that he was, that in fact he was thinking of trying his hand at crime. “Really?” Miriam was surprised. “I wouldn’t have thought that was your cup of tea.”

He bobbled his head side to side, a wry smile on his face. “We-ell,” he said, “it’s not really, but I seem to find myself in something of a rut.” It was true, more than a decade had passed since he’d published anything substantial. “I was thinking I might try something completely different,” he said, tapping at the side of his temple with his forefinger. “See if I can shake something loose.”

The following week, when the new Rankin duly arrived, Miriam set aside a copy. Only Theo didn’t turn up to fetch it, not that day, or the next, or the next. She had his address—they’d mailed books to him in the past—and she knew exactly where he lived, it wasn’t very far from her narrowboat, less than a mile farther along the canal, so she decided to deliver it by hand.

She wasn’t sure if this would be an intrusion, but in fact, when he opened the door, he seemed genuinely pleased to see her. “That’s so kind of you,” he said, inviting her in. “I’ve been a bit under the weather.” He looked it. Dark circles under his eyes, whites yellowing around the pupils, his face flushed. The house reeked of smoke. “Difficult for me,” he said, his voice cracking, “this time of year.” He didn’t elaborate and Miriam didn’t probe. Awkwardly she laid a hand on his arm and he pulled away, smiling, embarrassed. Miriam had felt such tenderness toward him, when first she got to know Theo Myerson.

They took their tea out onto the little patio outside his kitchen and talked books. It was the start of summer, evenings lengthening, the smell of wisteria heavy in the air, music playing softly on a radio somewhere. Leaning back, eyes closed, Miriam felt an immense sense of contentment, of privilege. To be sitting here, in this gem of a London garden, right in the middle of the city, conversing on myriad topics with this distinguished writer at her side! She glimpsed, opening up in front of her, the possibility of a quite different life from the one she currently led, a far richer (in the cultural sense), more peopled life. Not that she imagined anything romantic, not with Theo. She wasn’t stupid. She had seen pictures of his wife; she knew that she did not compare. But here he was, treating her as an equal. As a friend. When she left that evening, Theo shook her warmly by the hand. “Drop by anytime,” he said with a smile. And, foolishly, she took him at his word.

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The next time she came to see him, she had an offering. Something she thought might draw them together. A book, her book, telling her own story, a memoir she had been working on for years, but that she had never had the courage to show to anyone because she had never trusted anyone enough to let them see her secret truth. Until she met Myerson, a real writer, a man who also lived with tragedy. She chose him.

She chose badly.

She believed she was entrusting her story to a man of integrity, a man of good character, when in fact she bared her soul to a charlatan, a predator.

You’d have thought she’d be able to recognize them by now.

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The first predator Miriam ever met was called Jeremy. Jez for short. On a stifling Friday afternoon in June, he picked them up, Miriam and her friend Lorraine, in his pale blue Volvo estate. They were hitchhiking—people used to do that in the 1980s, even in Hertfordshire. They’d bunked off the last two periods at school and were headed into town to hang out, smoke cigarettes, try on clothes they couldn’t afford to buy.

When the car pulled up, Lorraine got into the front seat, because why wouldn’t she? She was the slim one, the prettier one (although to be honest they were neither of them lovely). She was the one he stopped for. So, she got the front seat. Miriam climbed into the back, sat behind Lorrie’s head. The driver said hello and told them his name and asked for theirs, but he never looked at Miriam, not once.

In the footwell of the car, empties rattled around Miriam’s feet, beer bottles and a whiskey bottle. There was an odd smell, underneath the smoke from Jez’s and Lorraine’s cigarettes, something sour, like old milk. Miriam wanted to get out of the car almost the second she got in. She knew they shouldn’t be doing this, knew it was a bad idea. She opened her mouth to speak, but the car was already moving, accelerating hard. Miriam wondered what would happen if she opened the door—would he slow down? Most likely he’d think she was mad. She wound down her window, breathed in the hot summer air.

A song came on the radio, a slow one, and Jeremy reached out to change the station, but Lorraine put her hand on his arm. “Don’t,” she said. “I like this one. Don’t you like this one?” She started to sing.

For the time I had with her, I won’t be sorry

What I took from her, I won’t give back

Jez didn’t take them into town; he took them back to his place, “for a smoke.”

“We have cigarettes,” Miriam said, and Lorrie and Jez both laughed.

“Not that sort of smoke, Miriam.”

Jez lived in a shabby farmhouse a few miles outside town. The house was at the end of a long lane, a winding road to nowhere, the tarmac getting narrower and narrower until by the time they’d got to the gate, it had dwindled all the way to nothing and they were bumping along a dirt track. Miriam’s stomach was in knots; she thought she might actually shit herself. Jez got out of the car to open the gate.

“I think we should go,” Miriam said to Lorraine, her voice quivering, urgent. “This is weird. He’s weird. I don’t like this.”

“Don’t be such a wuss,” Lorrie said.

Jez drove the car into the driveway, parked next to another car, an old white Citroën; when Miriam saw it, her heart gave a little leap. Her mother used to have a car like that. It was the sort of car middle-aged women drove. Perhaps his mum was here, she thought, and then she noticed that the car’s tires were flat, the chassis resting on the ground. Despite the heat, she shivered.

Jez got out of the car first; Lorraine followed him. Miriam hesitated for a moment. Perhaps she should just stay in the car. Lorraine looked back at her, widening her eyes. Come on! she mouthed, gesturing for Miriam to follow.

She climbed out, her legs trembling as she walked toward the house. As she stepped from bright sunlight into shadow, she saw that the house wasn’t just shabby, it was derelict. The windows to the upstairs rooms were broken, the downstairs ones boarded up. “You don’t live here!” Miriam said, her tone indignant. Jez turned, and he looked at her for the first time, his face blank. He said nothing. He turned away, taking Lorraine by the arm as he did. Lorraine glanced back over her shoulder at Miriam, and Miriam could see that she was frightened.

They walked into the house. It was filthy, bottles and plastic bags and cigarette packets strewn over the floor. There was a strong smell of shit, and not animal shit either. Miriam put her hand over her nose and mouth. She wanted to turn back, to run back outside, but something prevented her from doing so; something kept her moving forward, one foot in front of the other, walking behind Lorraine and Jez, down a hallway, past a staircase, into what must have once been a living room, because there was a broken-down sofa pushed up against a wall.

Miriam thought that if she acted normal, then maybe everything would just be normal. She could force it to be normal. Just because this felt like the kind of thing that happened in a horror movie didn’t mean it would be like a horror movie—quite the opposite. In horror movies, the girls never saw it coming. They were so stupid.

They were so stupid.