The Ghost by Robert Harris

weeks.
    We were halfway down the track when Amelia said, “You haven’t told me what you thought of the manuscript.”
    “Honestly? I haven’t had so much fun since I read the memoirs of Leonid Brezhnev.” She didn’t smile. “I don’t understand how it happened,” I went on. “You people were running the country not that long ago. Surely one of you had English as a first language?”
    “Mike—” she began, then stopped. “But I don’t want to speak ill of the dead.”
    “Why make them an exception?”
    “All right, then: Mike. The problem was, Adam passed it all over to Mike to deal with right at the beginning, and poor Mike was simply swamped by it. He disappeared to Cambridge to do the research and we barely saw him for a year.”
    “Cambridge?”
    “Cambridge—where the Lang Papers are stored. You’ve really done your homework, haven’t you? Two thousand boxes of documents. Two hundred and fifty yards of shelving. One million separate papers, or thereabouts—nobody’s ever bothered to count.”
    “McAra went through all that?” I was incredulous. My idea of a rigorous research schedule was a week with a tape recorder sitting opposite my client, fleshed out by whatever tissue of inaccuracies Google had to offer.
    “No,” she said irritably. “He didn’t go through every box, obviously, but enough so that when he finally did emerge, he was completely overwrought and exhausted. I think he simply lost sight of what he was supposed to be doing. That seems to have triggered a clinical depression, though none of us noticed it at the time. He didn’t even sit down with Adam to go over it all until just before Christmas. And of course by then it was far too late.”
    “I’m sorry,” I said, twisting in my seat so that I could see her properly. “You’re telling me that a man who’s being paid ten million dollars to write his memoirs within two years turns the whole project over to someone who knows nothing about producing books and who is then allowed to wander off on his own for twelve months?”
    Amelia put a finger to her lips and gestured with her eyes to the front of the car. “You’re very loud, for a ghost.”
    “But surely,” I whispered, “a former prime minister must recognize how important his memoirs are to him?”
    “If you want the honest truth, I don’t think Adam ever had the slightest intention of producing this book within two years. And he thought that that would be fine. So he let Mike take it over as a kind of reward for sticking by him all the way through. But then, when Marty Rhinehart made it clear he was going to hold him to the original contract, and when the publishers actually read what Mike had produced…” Her voice trailed off.
    “Couldn’t he just have paid the money back and started all over again?”
    “I think you know the answer to that question better than I do.”
    “He wouldn’t have got nearly such a large advance.”
    “Two years after leaving office? He wouldn’t have got even half.”
    “And nobody saw this coming?”
    “I raised it with Adam every so often. But history doesn’t really interest him—it never has, not even his own. He was much more concerned with getting his foundation established.”
    I sat back in my seat. I could see how easily it all must have happened: McAra, the party hack turned Stakhanovite of the archive, blindly riveting together his vast and useless sheets of facts; Lang, always a man for the bigger picture—“the future not the past”: wasn’t that one of his slogans—being feted around the American lecture circuit, preferring to live, not relive, his life; and then the horrible realization that the great memoir project was in trouble, followed, I assumed, by recriminations, the sundering of old friendships, and suicidal anxiety.
    “It must have been rough on all of you.”
    “It was. Especially after they discovered Mike’s body. I offered to go and do the identification, but Adam felt it was his