Alternative outcome Read online

  He listened carefully and nodded, apparently satisfied. “Good stuff.” He looked at me inscrutably for a moment, then abruptly unclicked his pen, put the notebook away and sat forward in his chair. The formal interview had begun.

  * * *

  As always with Ashton, the session went well. You couldn’t help feeling beguiled by his plain-talking charm. He made it seem that running a major parcels company was something anyone with a modicum of intelligence could do – and if you had any suggestions about how he could do it better, he was more than happy to hear them.

  He was also good value. His company was currently under fire in the press and the Twittersphere for poor service levels and frequent mis-deliveries, but he was ready to acknowledge all these problems before boasting about solutions. He understood the goodwill value. It meant I could write what looked like a frank, informed interview, even though we both understood that it was largely choreographed by him and his people, and my ultimate message would be broadly the one he wanted to convey.

  After fifty minutes the three of us adjourned to the hotel’s elegant restaurant: small and even cosy, though it had been made to seem spacious through judicious use of mirrors, white walls, brushed steel pillars and soft grey accents.

  I’d wondered if Ashton would skip this bit, given that I was a stand-in today, but he seemed committed to going the whole nine yards. Before long we were sipping Sauvignon Blanc and putting the world to rights.

  As we chatted, a man in a grey suit materialised by our table.

  “Richard,” he said, addressing Ashton, “what a pleasant surprise to see you here today.” But he didn’t seem especially pleased; his expression was difficult to read, but his tone suggested heavy irony. His accent was hard to place: not British, not discernibly from anywhere specific. I couldn’t glean much from his appearance either. He was a tallish, well-toned white man in his mid to late forties, perhaps with middle European features. He had immaculate slicked-back black hair and an open-neck shirt.

  Ashton looked up at him, apparently undaunted. “Janni, good to see you.” He turned to me. “Mike, this is Janni Noble.” He pronounced Janni with a soft J, like “Yanni”. He added, “Our folks up in the North West have been doing some business with him.”

  Of course. Janni Noble. I knew the name, though I’d only ever seen him in photographs until now. Peripherally, he’d been involved in an article I’d written several years before, though we’d never met.

  The man looked at me enquiringly. Ashton said, “Janni, this is Mike Stanhope, an associate of mine from the business press. We’re just putting the world to rights.”

  I reached out my hand. He hesitated for a moment, regarding me coolly, then gave me a light, almost reluctant handshake. “I know you from somewhere.” It was a neutral comment, yet somehow from this man’s lips it also sounded like a threat. “It will come to me.”

  He turned back to Ashton and they exchanged a few more words. Then he turned back and gave me another long look. I could see a flicker of recognition dawning in his eyes. “So you are Michael Stanhope, and you are a journalist?”

  “Correct.”

  He nodded to himself. “This is interesting.”

  I raised my eyebrows, but he declined to elaborate. He turned instead to rejoin his colleagues at another table, glancing back at me a final time as he walked away.

  “A powerful presence,” I commented to Ashton.

  “You think so?” He glanced after the man. “A useful colleague. He came to our rescue up in the north last year when we needed some extra fleet resources.”

  I marvelled to myself at the way powerful men like Ashton could seem so unimpressed when they encountered others like them. To me, it felt as if a chill had just passed over our table. Without being invited, I poured myself another glass of wine.

  Chapter 3

  “What’s your book about?” John grinned at me amiably over Joanna’s improvised goulash.

  He was a happy soul; with his florid complexion, upstanding red hair and thickset build, he looked exactly like the rugby player he had been until recently, and he radiated a rugby player’s confident goodwill. He had just returned from a trip that involved trying to sell British-designed hand dryers on the Continent, which I didn’t envy him; but his lifestyle seemed to suit him well enough.

  I said, “It’s a mystery story based round a robbery from a security van. Most of the gang are caught, but one of them escapes and disappears off the face of the earth. The main part of the story is about a man who tries to track him down many years later.”

  John looked at me expectantly, so I added, “I based it vaguely on a real robbery back in the nineteen eighties.”

  “Right.” He pondered this a moment. “And will it be published in print as well as online?”

  “Huh! I doubt it. There’s too much competition.”

  He nodded, perhaps searching for something else to ask. “So in real life, were all the thieves caught?”

  I’d had this same reaction from one or two other people who’d asked about the book. For some reason they seemed more interested in the real story than in what I’d made of it in my novel.

  Barely swallowing my frustration, I said, “Well, no one really knows. According to folklore one of them did get away, but there’s no definitive evidence. I’ve simply hypothesised that he did.” I paused, then said with exaggerated patience, “It was the underlying idea that interested me, not the real-life specifics.”

  I caught Joanna giving John a warning glance, and immediately felt guilty. These were good friends. I shouldn’t be allowing my jaded attitude to upset them.

  John merely said, “Ah, OK. So what happens in your story then?”

  I was tempted to say “Read the book”, but this time I managed to bite my tongue. I’d already reached the conclusion he was never going to, so what was the point?

  When I’d embarked on the book, I had naively assumed that all my friends and acquaintances would be pressing me for sight of it as soon as it was ready, but I’d soon found that many of them seemed resoundingly underwhelmed by the idea. I hadn’t decided yet whether this was simply because they weren’t interested in mystery thrillers, or because they couldn’t conceive of a world in which I would be capable of writing one that they would want to read.

  I took a deep breath and made an effort. “Well, the book follows the fortunes of the man who escaped, and his family.” I hesitated. “I based the family on real life too, but the people I had in mind had nothing to do with the actual robbery. It was a family I came across on holiday when I was young. I tried to contact them years later, but no one knew what happened to them. They seemed to have disappeared. It seemed like a cue for a mystery story.”

  Joanna shot me an accusing look. “You never told me about that.”

  “I don’t tell you everything.”

  * * *

  Later, helping Joanna to stack the dishes in the kitchen, I said, “Sorry I was a bit defensive earlier.” I glanced over at the door to make sure we were alone. John had gone upstairs to check his emails. “Sometimes people don’t seem to get the idea of this book. They focus on the wrong things. I should be more patient.”

  “John doesn’t mean any harm, but he can be a bit of a philistine. I wouldn’t take any notice if I were you.”

  I smiled. Joanna had supported my idea of writing a book from the start. I knew she saw it as therapy for me. She thought I’d taken too long to get used to my ex-wife Sandy’s departure, and needed a distraction. She was probably right.

  She said, “So who were these people you modelled your fictitious family on, and why were they such a big secret?”

  I considered this for a moment, trying to decide how to shuffle my thoughts into a coherent form. Finally I said, “To be honest, the whole idea for this book came from a tiny incident a couple of years ago. I’d just got off a train at Euston station, and I bumped into a woman I thought I knew. Afterwards I fantasised that she might be a girl I used to fa
ncy from afar when I was a kid, when we were on holiday in Falmouth.”

  “How sweet.”

  I ignored this. “I had a look to see if I could track down her family, but I couldn’t find any trace of them. Then it occurred to me that there must be a story in it, and I realised the robbery theme fitted in rather well with it.”

  She leaned back against the sink, absorbing this and smiling at me reflectively. “So these people that you knew as a child – how far did you get with tracking them down?”

  “I didn’t get anywhere. I tried to contact the hotel where we all stayed, but it went out of business years ago. I didn’t know the family’s name, just that the girl was called Trina. Maybe Catrina? With a C or a K. Something like that. So the trail went cold straight away.”

  “Couldn’t you have pushed it a bit further? People don’t really just disappear. They must be out there somewhere.”

  I shrugged. “I wasn’t really that bothered. I was concentrating on the book. I was more interested in the narrative possibilities than the actual people.”

  “Narrative possibilities.” She smiled mockingly at me. “You’re beginning to sound like the Times Literary Supplement.”

  “Very funny.”

  She looked at me speculatively. “You ought to try looking for them again. See if you really can track them down. I can definitely see the makings of something here.”

  “Huh! Bit late now. My novel is already finished and self-published, in case you’d forgotten.”

  “Maybe you’ll get some ideas for the follow-up. You could develop this into a series.”

  I scowled at her. “Stop making fun of me.”

  “Not at all!”

  She started preparing the coffee, then turned to me again. “That woman you saw at Euston station – do you think she really was the same person you knew as a child?”

  I shrugged. “I very much doubt it. It seems a bit unlikely, don’t you think?”

  “I suppose so. But just imagine if it really was her!”

  “What – you reckon we would fall gratefully into each other’s arms? I don’t think so.”

  She laughed. “OK, fair enough.” She clattered three coffee mugs on to a tray. “But you could do with shaking up your love life a bit, Mike. It’s too long now since Sandy.”

  Ah, we had to get round to my marriage break-up in the end. I said, “Thanks for reminding me.”

  She wouldn’t let it go. “You’re not a bad looking guy, Mike. Plenty of my girl friends would be more than happy to step up to the plate.”

  “Huh. Flattery will get you nowhere. Anyway, I suspect I’m a bit ragged round the edges these days.” I made for the kitchen door. “Can we talk about something else please?”

  * * *

  As I walked home I wondered again about John’s question: would my book ever be published in print? I had strong memories of an abortive visit I’d paid to a literary agency a few months before.

  It was one of two dozen who had already rejected the book, and by chance I happened to spot their street address in central London. I managed to talk my way in, only to find there was no one around except the office administrator, a slim woman in her mid-forties with severely-cut greying hair and an aura of nervous energy. She knew nothing about my book, but proved unexpectedly willing to talk about the company in a general way.

  “To be honest, hardly any speculative submissions are accepted,” she admitted confidentially. “It might be different at other agencies, but that’s how it is here.” He lowered her voice. “You probably know it’s sometimes called the slush pile.” A brittle laugh. “Not very flattering.”

  I left my response hanging in the air, and after a moment she added, “It’s not as if we want to reject people’s work. We want to discover great new literature. That’s what we’re here for.”

  I nodded. “But there isn’t a lot of it about.”

  “Exactly. People think they know how to write a best seller, but they don’t.”

  I asked how the firm handled unsolicited submissions. She said, “Our readers work through them when they get the opportunity.”

  “Who are the readers?”

  “Experienced specialists.” She declined to elaborate.

  “Do you ever reject any books and then find they’ve been taken up by another agent or publisher, and they’ve become big sellers?”

  “Certainly. That’s why we usually tell writers to keep trying. Some of them do, and in the end it sometimes pays off.” She pushed her chair back from her desk and stretched. “But not often.”

  Concise treatment

  1988

  The white waterfront houses of Polperro gleamed in the sun. From my clifftop vantage point I gazed down at the picturebook town, nestling in the cove like some artist’s dreamscape.

  Mixed emotions surged through me. Polperro looked simply splendid, and seemed to underpin the simmering joy I felt. She was in the world, and what’s more she was in my world. That knowledge gave me an inner glow, and Polperro itself seemed to feel it.

  But she was leaving tomorrow. Her second week had overlapped our first – I was certain of that. Six days wasted, only one more left. Too little time to step forward, to become an active player in her story, not just an onlooker.

  Polperro mocked me. The joy it radiated was not mine. It was a joy other people felt; I seemed condemned to remain always the outsider. Her presence was a constant reproach for my inaction. I would be glad when she was gone.

  I picked myself up and started back to rejoin my parents at the car, but I misjudged the narrow path. Nettles brushed my bare legs, an angry rebuke, and instant tears stabbed at the back of my eyes: not just from the stinging, but also from my inner turmoil. I blinked them away angrily.

  Never mind; at least I would see her over dinner tonight, across the restaurant or somewhere out in the grounds. She would remind me of a world of infinite possibilities.

  Chapter 4

  There was something wrong with my web site.

  I didn’t notice at first. I was examining the site a couple of mornings after seeing John and Joanna – trying to view it as a stranger might. Did it make my book sound irresistible? Did it convey the right balance of readability, intrigue and menace? Would I want to read the book myself if I saw a description like this? Joanna had reminded me the other day that I needed to get this kind of thing right if I really wanted to ratchet up my sales.

  Then I noticed a curious black panel at the very top of the browser window, obscuring part of the page and pushing other parts slightly out of position. This certainly wasn’t part of the intended design.

  There was some tiny, nearly-illegible grey text on the panel. I leaned forward and zoomed in. It looked like some sort of computer code. I clicked through to some of the other pages, and realised that the intrusive black panel appeared on all of them.

  What the hell? I logged into the administration site – the place where I normally changed the page contents or uploaded text to my blog. There was something wrong here, too. There was no black panel this time, but some of the normal sections of the page had been nudged slightly out of position.

  I sat back abruptly and let go of the mouse as if it was too hot to handle. I felt as if the site was tainted, and I shouldn’t be touching it. Had it been hacked? Or was Kevin, my web designer, simply playing around with it?

  I grabbed my phone and scrolled down to his number. Kevin, a freelancer, had once worked for the magazine publisher where I’d been assistant editor, and had completely rebuilt my old, simplistic web site for next to nothing to help me promote my book. He owed me the favour from a time I’d helped him rewrite the text of a site for one of his customers. The downside of our arrangement was that I never knew quite how much support he was prepared to throw in as part of the deal.

  Fortunately he answered my call immediately.

  “Kevin, it’s Mike Stanhope. About my web site.”

  “What’s up, mate?” He had that classic tecchie’s tone
– apparently helpful, but at the same time guarded.

  “Have a look. There’s a weird panel at the top of all the pages. I wondered if you were doing some more development work on it or something.”

  “Not guilty. As far as I’m concerned the site is finished.” His tone said it all; the debt was repaid, and he had no further obligation to me.

  “Fair enough. But the fact is that something’s gone wrong with the site.”

  “Let me have a look.”

  There was a pause, then he said, “OK, I’m looking at the home page now. That doesn’t look right, does it?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And you haven’t been uploading some bizarre content to the site, have you? Custom Javascript or something like that?”

  “You must be joking. I wouldn’t know how to.”

  “OK, well I’ll need to get into the site and have a look round. Leave it with me. I’ll ring you back in a few minutes.”

  * * *

  He was as good as his word.

  “You’ve been hacked, mate. Have you been handing out your password and username or something?”

  I swallowed, trying to keep my patience. “Of course not. Why would I do that?”

  “I dunno. It’s just that this kind of attack is quite simplistic. It usually starts when spammers or hackers get hold of your FTP logins. That allows them to put anything they want on your site, basically.”

  “Well I can’t see how it could be down to me.” I paused. “What have they actually done, anyway?”

  He hesitated, perhaps trying to reduce the message to simple terms. “It’s an iframe injection attack, so far as I can see. Basically a bit of some other web site gets incorporated into your pages. It means that if someone clicks something on your site, it might send information back to the attacker’s web server instead of yours.”