Flint and Ana both stood up and smiled at Shona and then at one another. This was it. They didn’t talk as they made their way behind the upsettingly thin figure of Shona, down a muted corridor. She knocked on a pair of double doors at the furthest end and a brusque male voice said ‘Come.’
It was a huge office with windows on both sides, one set overlooking the street below and the other a fire-escaped courtyard. They looked around them, absorbing the heavy limestone linen curtains, the biscuity calfskin sofas, the custom-made galvanized steel chandelier, the five-foot pewter candlesticks and the screen-printed canvases. It looked more like the bachelor penthouse of an over-bonused city boy than an office.
‘Hi, Ana, nice to meet you.’ A small man emerged from a booth in the corner of the office, smiling minimally. He was slim and well-dressed, with cropped white hair and wire-framed glasses.
He was the man in Bee’s India photographs.
‘Ed Tewkesbury.’
‘Hi,’ said Ana, turning to catch Flint’s eye, ‘this is Flint Lennard – he was a very good friend of Bee’s.’
‘Hi,’ he said grimly, slipping an insubstantial little hand inside Flint’s large paw. ‘Nice to meet you, Flint.’ Flint looked down at him. He didn’t like him. He let his hand drop and put it in his pocket.
‘So,’ said Ed, clasping his hands together and trying to look relaxed, ‘a drink? Tea? Coffee?’
They both shook their heads. ‘Are you sure? No? OK. I’ll have a tea please, Shona – jasmine. Thanks.’ Shona left the room and Ed turned and smiled his painful smile at Flint and Ana.
‘So,’ he began, ‘you’re Bee’s sister are you?’
Ana nodded and perched herself uncertainly on the edge of the calfskin sofa.
‘I’m really, really sorry about what happened.’
‘So you heard then?’
‘Yup. There was a bit in the Times. I was shocked. Absolutely shocked. When you meet someone as alive as Bee, you just can’t even contemplate something like that happening. It’s tragic.’
Ana nodded again. There was a short silence. Ed sat down in his chair, ostentatiously. ‘So. I have to admit to being rather curious about your phonecall. It was all very mysterious. What can I do for you exactly?’ He was still smiling that awful fake smile, and it was blatantly obvious that underneath the smooth exterior, he was absolutely shitting himself.
Flint opened his mouth to say something but Ana had already started talking. He turned to watch her. Her ears were protruding from her straight black hair like little white handles. They were slightly sticky-outy. They were unbelievably cute.
‘Well,’ she began, ‘the thing is, we found Bee’s mobile phone at her cottage in Broadstairs …’
‘I see.’
‘Did you know,’ asked Ana in surprise, ‘that she had a cottage in Broadstairs?’
He puffed and smiled again, ‘Well, yes, she did mention it. I think …’
‘And we went through her directory – and yours were the only two numbers we didn’t recognize.’
He suddenly stiffened. ‘How did you know that it was my number in Highgate?’
Ana shrugged and looked at Flint.
‘We recognized the area code,’ he said.
‘Ah. I see. OK.’
‘So what was your connection? With Bee?’
‘Well,’ said Ed, stretching out on his leather chair, ‘my connection with Bee was rather – er – tenuous you might say. I don’t think I’m going to be of much assistance.’
‘So,’ said Flint, losing his patience now, ‘how did you know her?’
‘On a purely professional basis. We were working on a series of nostalgia shows for Channel 4 – you know – the hits and TV shows and adverts from a certain year. We approached Bee to appear in the 1985 programme. She declined. I took her out for lunch, to try to persuade her. And well – if I’m to be entirely honest, because I really wanted to meet her. I’d had an almighty crush on her when I was younger, you see. So I took her out for lunch and she said, Absolutely no way. The past was the past, she said, and that’s where she wanted to leave it. I got the impression she wasn’t particularly proud of her pop heritage. She struck me as someone who liked to look forward rather than back. So we parted company there and off she went. We made our nostalgia series without her.
‘But then in January we were approached by Sky to produce a similar series – but less documentary-style, this time, and more MTV-video-jock style, and it occurred to me that Bee would make a fantastic presenter. She was a beautiful woman and so charismatic. It surprised me that someone hadn’t already asked her. So I phoned her and couldn’t get through on her mobile. I phoned a number of times during those few days. Really frustrating. You know – we had a deadline, we had to get the project off the ground, and I needed confirmation from Bee that she was interested. But I never managed to get in touch. And,you know, she didn’t have an agent or anything. So I had to leave it. Go with someone else. And the next thing I heard of Bee was that she’d … died.’ He held out his hands, helplessly.