She turns the TV off. From the bathroom comes the sound of Ian honking into a flannel. She closes the door and picks up the phone, moulding her mouth into a congratulatory smile and in an empty flat in Belsize Park the answering machine picks up. ‘So — talk to me!’ says Dexter, and Emma goes into her act. ‘Hey you! Hiya! I know you’re at the party so just wanted to say, well first of all, thank you for the flowers. So beautiful, Dex, you shouldn’t have. But mainly — Well! Done! You! You were fantastic, just really relaxed and funny, I thought it was fantastic, just a really, really, great, great show, really.’ She hesitates: don’t say ‘really’. If you say ‘really’ too often it sounds like ‘not-really’. She continues. ‘I’m still not sure about that t-shirt-under-suit-jacket-thing, and it’s always refreshing to see women dancing in cages, but Dexter, apart from that, it was just excellent. Really. I’m really so proudof you, Dex. In case you’re interested, Oliver!went alright too.’

She senses her own performance is losing conviction now, and decides to bring it to a close.

‘So. There you go. We’ve both got something to celebrate! Thanks again for the roses. Have a good night. Let’s talk tomorrow. I’m seeing you Tuesday, is that right? And well done, you. Seriously. Well done you. Bye.’

At the party afterwards Dexter stands alone at the bar, arms crossed, shoulders hunched. People cross to congratulate him but no-one lingers long and the pats on the shoulder have come to feel like consolation or, at best, well done on missing that penalty. He has continued to drink steadily but the champagne seems stale in his mouth and nothing seems to lift the sense of disappointment, anti-climax, creeping shame.

‘Wahey,’ says Suki Meadows in a contemplative mood. Once the co-star, now clearly the star, she sits next to him. ‘Look at you, all mean and moody.’

‘Hey, Suki.’

‘So! That went well, I thought!’

Dexter is unconvinced but they chink glasses just the same. ‘Sorry about that. . booze thing. I owe you an apology.’

‘Yes you do.’

‘It was just something to loosen me up, you know.’

‘Still, we should talk about it. Some other time.’

‘Okay.’

‘Because I’m not going out there again with you off your tits, Dex.’

‘I know. You won’t. And I’ll make it up to you.’

She leans her shoulder against his, and puts her chin on his shoulder. ‘Next week?’

‘Next week?’

‘Buy me dinner. Somewhere expensive, mind. Next Tuesday.’

Her forehead is touching his now, her hand on his thigh. He was meant to be having dinner with Emma on Tuesday, but knows that he can always cancel Emma, she won’t mind. ‘Okay. Next Tuesday.’

‘Can’t wait.’ She pinches his thigh. ‘So. You gonna cheer up now?’

‘I’ll try.’

Suki Meadows leans over and kisses his cheek, then puts her mouth very, very close to his ear.

‘NOW COME AND SAY HELLO TO MY MUUUUUUM!’

SATURDAY, 15 JULY 1995

Walthamstow and Soho

Portrait In Crimson

A novel

by Emma T. Wilde

Chapter 1

DCI Penny Something had seen some murder scenes in her time, but never one as as this.

‘Has the body been moved?’ she snapped

The words glowed in bilious green on the word-processor’s screen: the product of a whole morning’s work. She sat at the tiny school desk in the tiny back room of the tiny new flat, read the words, then read them again while behind her the immersion heater gurgled in derision.

At weekends, or in the evenings if she could find the energy, Emma wrote. She had made a start on two novels (one set in a gulag, the other in a post-apocalyptic future), a children’s picture book, with her own illustrations, about a giraffe with a short neck, a gritty, angry TV drama about social workers called ‘Tough Shit’, a fringe play about the complex emotional lives of twenty-somethings, a fantasy novel for teenagers featuring evil robot teachers, a stream-of-consciousness radio play about a dying Suffragette, a comic strip and a sonnet. None had been completed, not even the fourteen lines of sonnet.

These words on the screen represented her latest project, an attempt at a series of commercial, discreetly feminist crime novels. She had read all of Agatha Christie at eleven years old, and later lots of Chandler and James M. Cain too. There seemed no reason why she shouldn’t try writing something in between, but she was discovering once again that reading and writing were not the same — you couldn’t just soak it up then squeeze it out again. She found herself unable to think of a name for her detective, let alone a cohesive original plot, and even her pseudonym was poor: Emma T. Wilde? She wondered if she was doomed to be one of those people who spend their lives tryingthings. She had tried being in a band, writing plays and children’s books, she had tried acting and getting a job in publishing. Perhaps crime fiction was just another failed project to place alongside trapeze, Buddhism and Spanish. She used the computer’s word-count feature. Thirty-five words, including the title page and her rotten pseudonym. Emma groaned, released the hydraulic lever on the side of her office chair and sank a little closer to the carpet.

There was a knock on the plywood door. ‘How are things in the Anne Frank wing?’

That line again. For Ian, a joke was not a single-use item but something you brought out again and again until it fell apart in your hands like a cheap umbrella. When they had first started seeing each other, approximately ninety per cent of what Ian said came under the heading of ‘humour’ in that it involved a pun, a funny voice, some comic intent. Over time she had hoped to get this down to forty per cent, forty being a workable allowance, but nearly two years later the figure stood at seventy-five, and domestic life continued against this tinnitus of mirth. Was it really possible for someone to be ‘on’ for the best part of two years? She had got rid of his black bedsheets, the beer mats, secretly culled his underpants and there were fewer of his famous ‘Summer Roasts’, but even so she was reaching the limits of how much it’s possible to change a man.

‘Nice cup of tea for the lady?’ he said, in the voice of a cockney char.

‘No thanks, love.’

‘Eggy bread?’ Scottish now. ‘Can ae do you some eggy bread, ma wee snootch?’

Snootch was a recent development. When pressed to justify himself, Ian had explained that it was because she was just so snootchy, so very, very snootch. There’d been a suggestion that she might reciprocate by calling him skootch; skootch and snootch, snootchy and skootchy, but it hadn’t stuck.

‘. . wee slice of eggy bread? Line your stomach for tonight?’

Tonight. There it was. Often when Ian was working through his dialects it was because he had something on his mind that couldn’t be said in a natural voice.

‘Big night, tonight. Out on the town with Mike TV.’

She decided to ignore the remark, but he wasn’t making it easy. His chin resting on her head, he read the words on the screen.

‘ Portrait in Crimson. .’

She covered the screen with her hand. ‘Don’t read over my shoulder, please.’

‘Emma T. Wilde. Who’s Emma T. Wilde?’

‘My pseudonym. Ian—’

‘You know what the T stands for?’

‘Terrible.’

‘Terrific. Tremendous.’

‘Tired, as in sick and—’

‘If you ever want me to read it—’

‘Why would you want to read it? It’s crap.’

‘Nothing you do is crap.’

‘Well this is.’ Twisting her head away, she clicked the monitor off and without turning round she knew he’d be doing his hangdog look. All too often this was how she found herself with Ian, switching back and forth between irritation and remorse. ‘Sorry!’ she said, taking his hand by the fingers and shaking it.