Alternative outcome Read online

  Alternative Outcome

  Peter Rowlands

  Topham Publishing

  Alternative Outcome

  © Peter Rowlands 2016. All rights reserved.

  Topham Publishing, London

  www.tophampublishing.com

  Peter Rowlands has asserted his right under the Design and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters are imaginary, and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Certain real organisations and locations are mentioned, but all characters, events and activities relating to them are entirely fictitious.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or stored in a retrieval system, existing or yet to be invented, whether printed, digital or analogue, or be transmitted in any form or by any means, whether electronic, mechanical, wireless, optical or using voice or data recording, save in the form of short extracts for review, without the express written permission of the author.

  Build 2.55h

  To Fleur, who never doubted that it would be worthwhile

  Table of contents

  Table of contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Acknowledgements

  About the author

  Prologue

  Stepping off the train at Euston was never inspiring. However smart the trains or swift the journey, the dimly-lit platforms were always an anticlimax.

  I negotiated the obstacle course of pillars, impelled as always to outpace the dozens of other travellers heading the same way. Why? Was it a race?

  Up the long ramp and into the thronging station concourse, I threaded my way over to the sliding glass doors leading out to the forecourt.

  As I approached them I nearly collided with someone coming the other way: a woman in her thirties. About my height, straight shoulder-length dark hair, attractive face.

  We both side-stepped in the same direction, then again the other way. The woman smiled briefly in acknowledgement, then stopped abruptly, looking at me.

  We stared at each other for a long moment. Did we know each other? I was on the brink of asking, but I felt sure the answer was no. Yet her look was so intense, the exchange so protracted, that we seemed bound to speak. So what else were we going to say? What conceivable subject would match up to the moment?

  Finally she seemed to give a little shrug – almost as if to say, “Well, I gave it my best shot.” Then she was moving again, she was gone. I watched her disappear amongst the mass of people crossing the concourse.

  It was nothing, yet immediately I felt a sense of loss. I should have spoken up, and now the opportunity had passed.

  Had I known her after all? This puzzle nagged at me as I walked across the forecourt. She’d stirred some distant memory in me, but I couldn’t tap into it.

  Then it came to me. She reminded me of a girl I’d met on holiday as a child. At the time I couldn’t have been more than eleven or twelve years old.

  Surely not. Would she still be recognisable after all these years? It seemed ridiculous. More to the point, would I? That was even harder to believe.

  I tried to conjure up the face I remembered from the past. Was there really any correspondence? I couldn’t tell. I hadn’t thought about the girl from my childhood for years. Yet I couldn’t altogether dismiss the idea.

  Unsettling memories now trickled to the front of my mind. The girl I’d known in the past wasn’t just any girl, she was someone who had fed my adolescent romantic aspirations long after our encounter, and at the same time had helped define my sense of the fragility of expectation.

  The notion that I’d actually known her was largely wishful thinking. I’d wanted to know her, that was for sure, but I’d been too shy to follow through. Our brief and inconclusive encounter, and others like it, had blighted my adolescent years. No wonder I’d shunted this one to the back of my mind.

  I headed on towards Euston Road.

  PART 1

  Chapter 1

  Two years later

  “Here’s to your first million – and ten weeks at the top of the best-seller list.” Joanna lifted her glass and clinked it against mine, smiling encouragingly.

  “Here’s to it.” My smile was a little more forced than hers, but her enthusiasm was infectious. “But maybe ten weeks is a bit optimistic. Let’s agree on eight.”

  She settled into a corner of the sofa without being asked and held out her glass for a top-up. “But just a small one. I don’t want to be reeling when I pick Jeremy up.” She studied the diminutive glass I’d given her. “Unlikely, I should think.” She looked up again. “John sends his regards.”

  John, her husband, was a friend of mine from college days, but since they’d married a few years back I seemed to have seen more of her than him. By coincidence they’d ended up living just a few streets away from me in south London, and she’d taken to making unannounced visits like this in the middle of the afternoon, usually on her way to collect her young son from school. Since I worked from home, I was usually here when she called.

  I wondered idly, at moments like this, whether Joanna sought out my company because I was now single and she was attracted to me, or for the opposite reason – because she regarded me as safe enough not to make any moves on her. At such times I was also uncomfortably conscious that if I’d been having this discussion with her, she would have been chiding me for such cynical, self-doubting thoughts. “Can’t I just be a friend?” she would have said.

  I looked down at her now, considering her dark hair, her warm brown eyes and her slight tendency to excess weight – held in check b
y endless dieting, or so she often told me. The truth was that Joanna wasn’t my type, though I couldn’t easily have said what was my type. If we’d been discussing the matter, she would have made me itemise my must-have features, whereas to me, attractiveness usually hung on some indefinable aura.

  I did value her friendship, though – probably a lot more highly than I realised.

  Belatedly I answered her, “Give John and Jeremy my best.”

  “Remind me, Mike – is it Amazon you’ve published your book on?”

  I sat down beside her. “No, it’s on Endpaper – one of the other online publishers. They seem to offer the best deal for authors – the ones who actually sell any copies, that is.”

  “Sorry, yes, you did tell me.” She sipped her wine. “Well, I think your book is great. You ought to sell loads of copies.”

  I smiled at this positivity. “Well, it’s a crowded market. Many are called, few are chosen – all that. I’m not exactly holding my breath. At least it’s out there now.”

  “You need to promote it. Why don’t you get all your friends to buy it and write glowing reviews? I can be the first. I know I’ve already read it, but I haven’t paid for it yet.”

  “You are too kind.” I smiled at her. “Actually a couple of other friends have promised to look out for it, and they say they’ll pay real money to buy it. But I don’t really want fake reviews. It’s like shouting out ‘I’m self-published.’ It devalues the whole process.”

  “All the more reason to get those reviews written, though. At least it means you’ll be starting on a level playing field with everyone else.”

  I sighed. She was probably right, but I didn’t want to think in that way. The whole idea of writing a book had been to step away from the rat race of commercial journalism, but it had dawned on me long ago that in its own way the literary world was just as cut-throat.

  She wasn’t done yet. “You could have a web site for the book as well, and a blog.”

  “I’ve got a basic web site. Didn’t I tell you? And I’ve got my Facebook and LinkedIn pages set up.”

  “One of those bastard literary agents should have picked up your book and run with it.” She said this with real feeling. I had reported on my progress with them last year, though I now rather regretted doing this. Joanna seemed to feel she had taken a stake in the project, and I wasn’t sure I was quite comfortable with this.

  “There’s a lot of competition. They need to be confident that the publisher will get their investment back. Only outstanding books actually get published in the real world.”

  “Who says yours isn’t outstanding?”

  “Your support is greatly appreciated, even if your judgement is clouded.”

  She reached over and punched me in the arm. “Bollocks! Stop being so bloody self-deprecating. You should have more confidence.”

  “Perhaps.”

  She raised her glass to me again. “Well, today is still a red-letter day, so here’s to you and your book. May it have many grateful readers.”

  I raised mine again in return.

  * * *

  My mobile phone buzzed on the dining table. I apologised and stood up quickly. Freelance writers can’t afford to let any call go unanswered.

  The voice on the other end was economical to a fault. “Mike. Jason. Rick Ashton. Lunch. Tomorrow.”

  I couldn’t resist holding the phone away from my ear melodramatically and mouthing obscenities at it. Joanna raised her eyebrows. I knew exactly what the caller, Jason Bright, was talking about, and it annoyed me. He was the deputy editor of a logistics magazine, and he was telling me he wanted me to interview the head of a national parcels company over lunch.

  I had no complaint about the commission itself, which should earn me a useful few hundred pounds. What grated was that these things were never arranged at such short notice, as he was well aware. Some other journalist must have cried off, and now he was asking me to step in at the last minute. Everyone’s mop-up guy – that was me.

  Perhaps I should have taken it as a tribute to our long-standing familiarity that we could talk in shorthand like this, but to me it merely summed up the imbalance in our relationship. He demanded, I complied.

  I drew breath, mainly to avoid seeming in too much of a hurry. “Should be OK, yes.”

  “Excellent.” He hesitated. “And you’re all right with this, are you?”

  Now he was off the script. I wasn’t sure what he meant.

  “All right? Yes – why wouldn’t I be?”

  “It’s just … never mind, if you’re on it that’s fine.” He started to reel off the place and time for the meeting.

  Joanna stood up and gave me an exaggerated wave, pointing at her wristwatch and then towards the front door. She whispered, “What are you doing on Thursday?”

  I held the phone away from my ear. “Let me see.” I pretended to think. “Nothing.”

  “Come and have a meal with us. John should be back from his trip, and he’d love to hear about the book.”

  She slipped quietly out of the room, and I lifted the phone back to my ear. “So you’re definitely all right with this, are you?” Jason was saying again. “Sixteen hundred words by the end of the month?”

  * * *

  I returned the half-empty wine bottle to the fridge and poured myself a whisky instead. A bit early in the day, but so what? I opened the sliding door on to my diminutive patio and stood there a moment, breathing in the unseasonably warm March air. The achievement of getting my book online and on sale had given me a brief buzz, but it wasn’t going to earn me my first million any time soon; and meanwhile I still had to work. Unfortunately, that meant dealing with people like Jason.

  What made matters worse was that two years ago I’d occupied his role – deputy editor of a long-established transport and logistics magazine. Our specialisation: trucks, vans, warehouses, home deliveries – everything to do with getting goods from A to B.

  In an era when print publishing seemed on the way out, the publication still had a respectable circulation, not to mention a lively and popular web site. I’d had a reasonably free rein to call the shots when it came to choosing which articles to write, and I could contact freelances and dump work on them to my heart’s content.

  But I’d badly messed up. Not in any specific way, just in general. It didn’t help when I came back from an interview one day with barely enough material for ten lines of copy, but the malaise ran deeper than that. Somewhere along the line I’d lost my sense of the point of it all, and my discontent must have communicated itself to my employers.

  They were very gentlemanly, of course. They simply explained that they were rationalising, and my role was no longer needed. The press was under fire from the internet, and they had to watch their costs. They would keep me on as a freelance, but I could also work for other publications. I might even end up better off.

  I hadn’t. Two thirds of my work was still for them, and to compound the indignity, a year ago they’d appointed Jason to what had been essentially my role.

  Meanwhile, any other work I picked up seemed to involve articles on increasingly outlandish subjects. It was almost as if my clients were defying me to say no. Then they could cut me loose with a clear conscience.

  To hell with them all. I poured myself another whisky.

  Chapter 2

  “Michael,” Rick Ashton greeted me, his strong Australian accent immediately evident. “Always a pleasure.”

  I tended to be wary of this sort of instant cheeriness. Usually you had to jump through hoops to get interviews with top people like Ashton; then the great man or woman would wave away all the hassle as though it were merely an irritant. It was a game with an established set of rules.

  Today, though, I was simply grateful for his goodwill. I’d woken with a hangover, then wasted far too much time finishing an overdue article. In the end I’d left home almost too late to make it to this meeting, which was being conducted in a discreetly upmarket West End hotel
.

  Ashton beamed at me – a well-groomed figure in his late forties or early fifties with a full head of dark hair and an expression of perpetual amusement. He was perhaps a shade heavier than he should have been, but if so it was a close call, and I always felt there was a natural elegance about him. Although no taller than me, he still somehow managed to tower over me. Today he was wearing a pinstripe suit and a tie.

  “What do you think of the wide tube stock?”

  I stared at him blankly for a moment, glancing for help at Darren McLeish, his young PR man, who was sitting discreetly to one side. He gave an almost imperceptible shrug.

  “On the District line. The latest trains.”

  Enlightenment dawned. I’d known Ashton slightly for at least five years, and for some reason he had gained the mistaken impression early in our relationship that I was a railway enthusiast. Ever since then his ice-breaker had been some sort of observation about trains.

  I prepared to improvise a reply, but then felt a sudden desire to press the metaphorical reset button. Surely we could find something more relevant to pass the time over? “Actually, the big thing with me at the moment is that I’ve just published my first novel. Online, that is.”

  He stopped mid-stream. “You’re a dark horse.” He looked at me with what appeared to be genuine interest. “What kind of book is it?”

  “A mystery thriller.”

  “Just my kind of thing. Where can I get a copy?” To prove he meant this he immediately pulled a tiny leather-bound notebook from an inside pocket and made a show of holding his pen poised. I couldn’t help smiling inwardly. Even his selection of leisure reading evidently had to be approached as an executive decision.

  I told him the publisher’s web address and he wrote it down carefully, asking, “What’s it about?”

  I hesitated. I hadn’t intended to talk about the book to anyone I knew through my job, and I was also wary of giving away too much of the plot. I felt it should speak for itself. However, clearly I’d committed myself now, so I tried summarising the story in a few sentences.