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Chapter Thirty-Eight

THIRTY-EIGHT

The weather had turned again, the freezing air of the past week suddenly banished by a blessed breath of warmth blowing up from the Mediterranean. Two days ago, Miriam had been huddling in front of her log burner with a coat and scarf on; now it was warm enough for her to sit out on her back deck, drinking her morning coffee and reading the newspaper.

What was in the newspaper might well have been the stuff of fiction: Theo Myerson had been released from police custody, although he still faced charges for wasting police time and for perverting the course of justice, while his wife was the one now facing murder charges after the police were furnished (by an unnamed source) with a dramatic recorded confession.

So, after all that, it turned out that the person Miriam had been trying to frame for the murder of Daniel Sutherland actually was the person who had murdered Daniel Sutherland. How about that? Didn’t say much for Miriam’s framing skills.

The stuff of fiction! Miriam couldn’t help but laugh: Would Myerson try to wrangle a novel out of this mess? Perhaps she, Miriam, should try to wrangle a novel out of it. How would that be for a worm turning? For Miriam to take his life story and use it as material, to twist it any way she liked, to rob him of his agency, of his words, his power.

Then again, there was perhaps an easier—and almost certainly more lucrative—way forward: What about a quick phone call to the Daily Mail? How much would they pay for the inside scoop on Theo Myerson? Quite a bit, she imagined, Myerson being precisely the sort of person—rich, clever, sophisticated, leftish, metropolitan-elite-made-decadent-flesh—that the Daily Mail loathed.

She finished her coffee and pottered down to her kitchen table, where she opened her laptop and had just begun to type “how to sell a story to the newspapers” into Google when there came a knock at the window. She looked up and very nearly fell off her stool. Myerson! Bent over on the towpath, peering through her cabin porthole.

Warily, she made her way out onto the back deck. Theo stood a few yards away, hands thrust into his pockets, expression glum. He’d aged since last she saw him, being led away by the police. Then he was still his portly, red-faced self; now he looked thinner, wrung out, hangdog. Miserable. Her heart twitched in her chest. She ought to be jumping for joy—wasn’t this what she wanted? To see him brought low, to see him suffering. Why on earth did she find herself feeling sorry for him?

“Look,” he said. “Enough’s enough. All right? I just . . . I’m sure you realize that I’m going through something.” He shrugged. “I can’t even put into words what I’m going through. Yes, I see the irony. In any case, the point is, I don’t want to get the police involved. I’ve had quite enough of them over the past month. Enough to last me a lifetime. However, if you continue to harass me, you really will leave me no choice.”

“I beg your pardon? Harass you? I haven’t come anywhere near you, I—”

Theo sighed, an exhausted sound. He pulled from his inside jacket pocket a piece of paper, which, slowly and with great deliberation, he unfolded. He began to read from it in a flat voice, devoid of intonation. “Not responding to my letters is rude, it tells me you are very arrogant. That story wasn’t yours to tell, it was mine, you had no right to use it in the way you did. You should have to pay people for using their stories, you should have to ask permission. Who do you think you are to use my story . . . et cetera et cetera. There are half a dozen of them like that. Well, not quite like that, they started off as polite expressions of interest in my work, clearly designed to bait me into saying something about my inspiration for the story, but they quickly deteriorated. You get the gist. You know the gist. You wrote the gist. They’re postmarked Islington, Miriam, for God’s sake—I can see that you’ve tried to disguise who you are, but—”

Miriam gawped at him, mystified. “That is not from me. Perhaps you stole someone else’s story? Perhaps you do it all the time.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.”

“It’s not from me!”

Theo took a step back, exhaling in one long, shuddering breath. “Is it money you want?” he asked her. “I mean, you say here, you should have to pay people, so is that it? How much would it take? How much would it take for you to just leave me . . .” His voice cracked and Miriam was horrified to feel tears spring to her eyes. “To just leave me alone?”

Miriam quickly wiped her face with her sleeve and climbed down off the boat. She held out her hand. “Could I see those, please?” she asked. Theo handed the pages over without question.

The paper was thin, of poor quality, the handwriting careful but childlike.

Myerson,

Why won’t you answer my letters? The problem with people like you is they think their above everyone. That story wasn’t yours to tell, it was mine. You had no right to use it in the way you did!!! You should have to pay people for using their stories. You should have to ask permission. Who do you think you are to use my story without asking. You didn’t even do a good job. The killer in the story is weak. How would a weak man do what he did? What would you know about it anyway. You didn’t show respect.

She was shaking her head. “This isn’t from me,” she said, turning the page over in her hand. “You can’t possibly think this is from me—this person is barely literate.”

She started on the next one.

The police took you away so maybe your not so much better than everyone else after all? Maybe I should talk to the police about you taking my story. There should be a fee at least but the thing that’s really bugging me is how you knew about Black River.

Miriam’s breath caught in her chest.

I will leave you alone and wont’ write anymore if you tell me how you knew about Black River.

Beneath her feet, the earth shifted.

She read the line out loud. “Tell me how you knew about Black River.”

“It’s a song,” Theo said. “It’s not a reference to the place, it’s—”

“I know what it is,” Miriam said. The world was turning black, the darkness closing in too fast for her to push it back. She opened her mouth but she could draw no air into her lungs; her muscles weren’t working, not her diaphragm nor the muscles in her legs or her arms. She was trembling violently, her vision gone almost altogether; the last thing she saw before she collapsed was Theo Myerson’s startled face.


“It was on in the car, on the radio. The song. I remember him fiddling with the tuner, he was trying to change the station, but Lorraine asked him not to. She was singing. She was singing, and she said, don’t you like this one? ‘Black River.’ ”

Myerson set a glass of water down on her bedside table and then stood awkwardly, looking down at her. It should have been embarrassing, Theo Myerson helping her up from where she’d collapsed on the towpath, the two of them shuffling like an old couple back to the boat, where he put her to bed, like a child. Like an invalid. Miriam would have been mortified if she’d been capable of feeling mortification, if she’d been capable of feeling anything other than a sort of bewildered terror. She lay on her back, her eyes trained on the wooden slats of the ceiling, trying to concentrate on her breathing, in and out, trying to concentrate on the here, on the now, but she couldn’t, not with him there.

“Who else did you show it to?” he asked. “Your . . . uh, your manuscript. Who else read it?”

“I never showed it to anyone else,” Miriam said. “Except for Laura Kilbride, but that was only very recently, and according to the newspapers she’s not in a fit state to write anyone any letters. I never showed it to anyone else.”

“That can’t be true! You showed it to a lawyer, didn’t you?” Theo said, towering over her, rubbing his big balding head. “You must have done! You showed it to my lawyer, certainly, when you made your, uh, your complaint.” He shifted from one foot to another. “Your claim.”

Miriam closed her eyes. “I didn’t send anyone the whole manuscript. I selected a number of pages, I pointed to various similarities. I never mentioned the singing, even though it was . . . even though it was perhaps the clearest evidence of your theft.” Theo grimaced. He looked as though he wanted to say something but thought better of it. “I didn’t want to mention her singing, I didn’t even want to think about it, about the last time I heard her voice like that, the last time I heard her happy, carefree. The last time I heard her unafraid.”

“Jesus.” Theo exhaled slowly. “Do you mind?” He indicated the bed, and for a startling moment Miriam wasn’t sure what he was asking. He sat, perching his large bottom on the corner of the bunk, an inch or two from Miriam’s feet. “It can’t be, Miriam. He’s dead. Jeremy is dead, you said so, the police said so.”

“I wished him so, and the police made an assumption. People said they saw him, in all sorts of places—Essex, Scotland. Morocco. The police followed up, or at least they said they did, I don’t know how seriously they took any of it. . . . But you know all this, don’t you? It was in the book.”

Theo winced. “There was something about a foot?” he ventured, his face flushing.

Miriam nodded. “Some kids playing on a beach near Hastings found a human foot a few weeks after Jeremy went missing. It was the right size and the right color, it had the right blood type. This was all pre-DNA, so there was no way of checking for sure, but it was assumed that it was him. They thought maybe he’d been dashed against the rocks somewhere, or caught up in a boat propeller. That was the end of it, in any case. They stopped looking.”

“But . . .” Theo was shaking his head. “Think about it. If somehow he’d got away, faked his own death, changed his identity, there would have been others, wouldn’t there? Other girls, I mean, other women. A man like that, a man capable of doing what he did to you, to your friend, he doesn’t just do it once and then stop, does he?

“Maybe he does,” Miriam said. “Where is it written that they all get a taste for it? Maybe he tried it and he didn’t really like it. Maybe it frightened him. Maybe it didn’t satisfy him in the way he thought it would. Or maybe . . .” The boat rocked in some other vehicle’s wake, and Miriam opened her eyes to focus on the ceiling once more. “Maybe he didn’t do it just once. Maybe he did it again and again, and people just didn’t make the connections. It was easier, back then, wasn’t it, for men like him to just keep going, to move around, to exist on the margins, to drift, to carry on for years? He could have gone abroad, he could have changed his name, he could be”—her voice faltered—“anywhere.”

Myerson shuffled along the bed so that he was no longer sitting next to her feet but at her side. He reached over and—she could scarcely believe this—took her hand. “I have his email address,” he said. “The police will be able to trace him using that. I can give them the letters, I can explain, we can explain—we can explain everything.” His eyes met hers. “Everything.”

Miriam withdrew her hand. Everything? He was offering, Miriam understood, an apology. An acknowledgment. If they went to the police with these letters, they would have to explain how it was that Theo came to be their recipient, how it was that the two of them deduced that only one man on earth could know about that song, about its significance, and in doing so, Theo would have to unmask himself; he would have to acknowledge Miriam as the inspiration for his story. She would get everything she wanted.

She blinked slowly, shaking her head. “No,” she said. “No, that won’t do.” She wiped her face with the back of her hand. She propped herself up on her elbows. “You won’t contact the police, you’ll contact him. Respond to his questions. Some of his questions, in any case.” She paused for a moment to think things through. “Yes, you will get in touch with him, apologize to him for neglecting his letters. Arrange a meeting.”

Theo nodded, his lips pursed, rubbing his head. “I could do that. I could ask him to meet me, to talk about his questions. And when he comes, the police will be there, they’ll be waiting.”

“No,” Miriam said firmly. “No, the police won’t be waiting.”

For a long moment, Theo held her gaze. Then he turned away. “All right,” he said.

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