“Or a superfan,” Majors said, not having time for my subtlety. “Adulation is fine, but it’s a question of where the line is crossed that makes it unhealthy. It’s got more to do with the stalker than the person they’re following. The stalker might picture themselves having a certain relationship with this person. A connection that only they see. They insert themselves into a world they aren’t actually a part of and justify their actions in very improbable ways. I was just making sure you were safe by following you home, for example. It’s the inability to distinguish their own desires from those of the victim. Misinterpreting politeness for flirting, welcoming for need. That kind of thing.”
“So it’s the viewpoint that’s dangerous. Because the victim’s decisions can feel like they affect, or are even targeted toward, the stalker, even when they have nothing to do with them?”
“Precisely. Say I get my dream job and move across the country. Totally innocuous, totally personal. Someone with that view of me might see it as an attack on them. They don’t like change.”
Change, I thought. Like not writing certain books anymore, perhaps. It was something to chew on. Something else she’d said fluttered up in my consciousness. “What did you mean when you said Wyatt’s going to make a lot of money?”
“Oh, bags of it. Henry’s books sell, sure, but this will make his last novel a literary event. You know when they dig up half a manuscript from a long-dormant writer, like Go Set a Watchman with Harper Lee, or like Stieg Larsson, who died before his Millennium series was finished. That’s the spin. This is the last one. No more. You better read it. Plus”—she waved a hand—“the rereleases, the new covers, the publicity of a genius”—she basically gagged on this word—“gone too soon. It’s a gold mine. McTavish’s death is one of the best things that could have happened to Wyatt Lloyd.”
“And—”
“Hang on. My turn.”
I tore off a piece of damper and stuffed it in my mouth. It was chewy and buttery, like a scone. “Okay.”
“This isn’t about justice. This is about proving yourself.”
“That’s not a question.”
“Wasn’t it? Oh. Well, I’m right. If I can give you some advice . . . You want to be careful about how you look at this whole thing, because right now you want it to be a murder. You want it so badly, you might ignore the real facts to make it fit what you want. And part of that’s because you need a story and you’ve got a hundred grand on the line—”
I threw my hands up. “How the hell does everyone know—”
“And part of it is that you want to prove yourself to the rest of us: Wolfgang, Royce. Those who think you’re too commercial or just lucky.”
She tilted her glass at me and I refilled it from the bottle in the middle of the table.
“But most of it is that you need to be useful. Because if you didn’t survive what happened to you last year to help someone now, why did you survive at all? That’s why you wrote the first bloody book. To find some purpose in what happened. Here’s your question, then: am I close?”
My silence answered it for her. She nodded: I could continue with my own questions.
“It’s quite an eclectic group of people for this festival,” I ventured. “Handpicked?”
“I needed a balance of established names, up-and-comers, and headline grabbers. Wolfgang helps get the funding through—grant committees love a bit of pedigree. Though I didn’t think we’d get quite so many headlines, per se. I’d say I did a pretty good job, wouldn’t you?”
So that was Wolfgang’s invitation explained. Royce and I were still the disconnected outliers. “It’s got nothing to do with the fact that you, Lisa and McTavish were at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2003?”
Her shoulders straightened at this. The wine paused near her lips, and her breath fogged the glass. “I think now would be a very disrespectful time to comment on such matters,” she said finally.
“Why’d you invite me then?”
“I didn’t invite you,” she said cruelly, clearly retaliating for my previous question.
I ignored the barb but wondered: if she hadn’t invited me, who had? “You clearly wanted McTavish here. There’s a rumor that he stole the plot of Off the Rails from you. Any truth to that?”
She bristled. “I’m not about to give you motive. But that’s interesting—you do think it’s murder?”
“Royce thinks poison.”
She snorted at this.
“What?”
“Royce thinks.” She used her thumb and pointer on each hand to pretend to draw the words in a box in the sky, the way you’d pretend a title was on a marquee. “The oxymoron of the day.”
“He used to be a forensic pathologist.”
“Is that what he told you?”
“It’s in his bio.”
“You know that’s worthless, right? You can put anything you want in there.”
“But he did work in a lab? He has a degree? You can’t lie about that.”
“Sure, but he was, like, a graduate or an intern or whatever. Made photocopies, fetched coffees. It’s all marketing. Wyatt knew it would sound good so they ran with it on the first book and now, eleven books later, I think Royce’s even started to believe it himself.”
I’d hinged my entire investigation on Royce’s deduction that heroin was the murder weapon, so these words made my stomach plummet. I managed to say, “He’s been quite helpful, actually.”
“You want a profile on Royce? We don’t have time. We couldn’t unpack his issues if we had the rest of the train journey. Of course he’s interested in the murder, he’s finally got a chance to live up to a version of himself that’s always been mostly a lie. I am a registered psychologist—I’ve kept up my credentials. Sure, Royce must have had training somewhere, but I’d think twice about letting him diagnose me. Research is just theoretical. You think Lisa hot-wires cars like her character?”
Mentally, I was still trying to salvage the credibility of my evidence. Even if Royce had plumped up his credentials, there was no denying that he’d researched eleven novels (and three novellas, lest I forget), so he must have had a nose for it. He had also mentioned researching heroin specifically for one of his books. Could I trust that? Or was I seeing what I wanted to see? On that, Majors was undeniably correct: I was desperate to be useful.
I opened my mouth to ask another question but she snapped a hand closed in front of me. “Well, that’s about all the time we have for today’s session, Mr. Cunningham.” She spoke in a singsong voice, breathy and quite deliberate, the way she addressed, I imagine, only her most insane patients. “I think it would be best that we continue your growth exercises another time.” She gestured to an imaginary door in an imaginary office. “I’ll leave you to make a booking with my receptionist on your way out.”
Fires had been lit in steel drums around the circumference of the cottages, and as the band got louder the dust on the dance floor rose with excitedly stamped feet. The stars were magnificent, bright pinpricks in the clearest sky I’d ever seen. Juliette was no longer at her table, and I was looking around for her near the ice tubs when a heavy hand fell on my shoulder. I turned to see Douglas Parsons, rosy cheeked, out of breath, as much tapping me on the shoulder as he was leaning against me to stay upright.
“Ernest!” he yelled with a tone of surprise, like I was an old friend he’d spotted across the supermarket and not someone he’d approached himself.
“Douglas.” I nodded, as hello felt a little formal, and besides, addressing him by name gave him another notch on the tally, and he was looking a little low at the moment.