A Bed of Scorpions by Judith Flanders

at all.
    When they sat down, I let Jake take his first mouthful of wine before starting. I told him about Lucy, and the gallery representing Stevenson, who had recently reappeared as another potential suicide. As Helena had guessed, if Jakehad seen the news of the finding of Stevenson’s body, he hadn’t remembered it. And as I had guessed, he was not happy to hear about it from me.
    He rubbed his head and stared at me angrily, as though I’d done it to spite him. ‘You couldn’t have told me this morning, or last night, when I would have had time to get moving on this, send some emails to the States?’ Then he looked away. Not cross now, just thinking out what to do. He stood. ‘I’ll make some calls, send some emails. I’ll need an hour before dinner.’ Even I could interpret the don’t-call-us-we’ll-call-you click to Mr Rudiger’s front door.
    That was interesting. He was upset that I was involved, which I had expected, but he didn’t think what I had told him was worth going back to the office for, which I hadn’t. Or perhaps he just had a mad passion for my lamb stew.
    I shared this possibility with Mr Rudiger, who laughed out loud. I guess my stew isn’t as good as I think it is.

C HAPTER F IVE
    I N THE MORNING , Jake had left for work before I got back from my run. That almost never happened, and he usually told me beforehand if he had to go in early. I didn’t take it as a particularly good sign. He’d been quiet when I came down from Mr Rudiger’s, not irritated anymore, but absent-minded.
    Most people now, when you say ‘absent-minded’, are absent, but not terribly minded. Usually they (OK, me too) are mentally absent because they’re checking emails and texts, playing on Twitter or Facebook, giving the real people around them half their attention, or less, and scattering the remainder among a range of electronic distractions. I know that, truthfully, the only time I am entirely focused is when I’m editing. Then I shut down my email and Twitter altogether, and concentrate absolutely on one thing. It’s an inanimate thing when it’s a manuscript. When I’m working on a new book face-to-face with an author, it’s thesame focus, but on a person, and my mind is split in two, with a constant assessment, like a voice-over, running in my head alongside, but separate from, whatever I am saying out loud: is s/he receptive now, if so, it’s a good time to hit him/her with that major reservation I have about the first chapter; s/he is on the defensive now, so I’ll fall back and go through the things I like and think really work. I am aware that I’m doing this – and I’m really good at it, if I do say so myself – but the focus is entirely on that other person, and I never think about me, much less about email, or anything else at all. If you listen to the way fishing enthusiasts talk about fly-fishing, it sounds the same: you end up concentrating so hard, you’re part of the river, and of the fish, and you somehow feel what they feel.
    It sounds really wanky, I know. I assume most editors do, and think, the same, although I’ve never asked. But now I realised that this aspect of my job matched Jake’s. Agreed, I don’t generally mix with people who think violent death adds that vital soupçon of flavour to the day’s routine, but when Jake interviews witnesses – and I know this from first-hand experience – he has the same honed-down concentration, and I’m sure if I asked him he’d say there was the same split-voice commentary. The only difference is that Jake also has levels of antagonism to overcome. Most witnesses don’t want him to know what they are thinking. Even if they are not guilty of anything worse than not waiting for the little green man before crossing the road, there are always things that are no business of the police. Authors might be antagonistic too – might? Hell, they definitely are – but they mostlyrecognise that we want the same things: for their book