style="font-size:15px;"> ‘No, no. Nearly there, actually. Just got to think of the pay-off.’
‘Oh marvellous.’ Michelle sounded ironic, the way she often did on Wednesday nights. ‘That’s dandy.’ There was a pause.
‘Far be it from me,’ she said sweetly, ‘but have you mentioned that he writes in his shed? And that this explains the repeated use of weed-killer as a murder weapon in the books? You know what I mean: he looks up from his rude desk of logs for inspiration, and there’s the weed-killer, next to the bone-meal. In the one I took on holiday last year, he killed off the prime suspect with a garden rake. One blow to the back of the neck, and that was it. Nasty. In the latest book, I understand, someone is dealt the death-blow with a pair of shears.’
‘What are you talking about? Who do you mean?’
‘Trent Carmichael. This week’s “Me and My Shed”. The crime writer.’
Osborne thought a minute, thought another minute, remembered everything – in particular the bestselling author laughing apologetically, ‘Well, er, the cat got locked in the shed once, but no foul play was suspected!’ – and said, ‘I’ll call you back.’
Things were looking bad. He unlaced his shoes, took them off, and on bended knee started to scrub them upside down on the carpet, hoping to remove the worst of the whitener while deciding what to do next. He looked up to see Michelle standing beside him.
‘No, you’ve got it wrong,’ he said, keeping his eyes on the floor, his pulse pounding in his neck. ‘Trent Carmichael is next week. You wouldn’t know whether this stuff washes out, would you?’
‘So who is it this week?’
‘Angela Farmer,’ he mumbled.
‘Who?’
‘Angela Farmer.’
‘No. Are you sure?’
‘Of course I’m sure.’
‘That’s very odd.’
‘No, I met her on Monday. Not odd at all. Nice woman.’
Michelle narrowed her eyes as though to contest the point, and then decided not to bother. She stretched her arms instead; this conversation clearly had nowhere to go.
‘How nice,’ she said. ‘I’d better not hold you up, then. Have you mentioned she’s got a tulip named after her?’
‘I thought it was a rose.’
‘No, tulip.’
Osborne looked like he might be sick. ‘Tell you what,’ said Michelle. ‘It’s been a hard day, I’ll look it up for you.’
Osborne sat in his stockinged feet, stroking the keys of his typewriter and staring into space. In all his years as a journalist, he had never before written up an interview that had not taken place. Why ever had he believed Tim? Tim didn’t know. How, moreover, could he extricate himself now he had gone so far? Not only had he cast all Trent Carmichael’s faint and unamusing witticisms into a broad American slang, but he was now also stuck with sentences referring to (a) love being like a red red tulip, and (b) a woman who viewed the world through tulip-tinted spectacles.
In fact, he was so absorbed in his confusion and dismay that he did not hear the phone ringing, nor hear Michelle answer it. What he did hear, however (and quite distinctly), was Michelle informing him that it had been Angela Farmer phoning to apologize. She would have to postpone their appointment for the following Monday, making it Tuesday instead. She suggested that since she lived in the West Country, he might like to use Monday as a travelling day and stay overnight at a local hotel, details of which she had passed on to Michelle.
‘She sounded very nice,’ said Michelle, studying Osborne’s pole-axed expression.
‘That’s lovely,’ said Osborne.
‘Oh, and she hoped it wasn’t too inconvenient – to ring so late in the day.’
Osborne dunked a piece of peanut brittle in his coffee and reflected. Perhaps it was time to bail out of this shed business before serious damage was done. From his favourite breakfast corner in his local Cypriot dossers’ café on a bleak November Friday (his belongings tucked around him like sandbags against a blast) he looked mournfully at the bright, mass-produced pictures of mythical Greek heroes adorning the walls and asked himself whether the cutting edge of outhouse journalism had not finally proved too much for him. A vision of Michelle sending him home two nights ago on a tide of unreassuring platitudes (‘It could happen to anyone, Osborne; but funny how it happened to you’), and then expertly recasting his article with firm unanswerable blue strokes (and well-informed references to Trent Carmichael’s favourite horticultural murder weapons), rose unbidden to his mind and gave him torment. He stared at a picture of Perseus amid the gorgons and emitted a low moan.
‘Me and My Shed’ had had its sticky moments in the past, but nothing ever like this. In the course of a dozen years’ trouble-shooting around celebrity gardens Osborne had been exposed to a variety of dangers – hostile rabbits, wobbly paving and possibly harmful levels of creosote – but none had shaken his confidence to a comparable degree. Not even when he was mistaken for the man from The Times and treated to a lengthy reminiscence of a painful Somerset childhood (none of it involving sheds, incidentally, or outbuildings of any kind) had he felt so pig-sick about himself, despite the extreme embarrassment all round when that particular ghastly mistake was finally uncovered. (It had been a terrifying example of cross purposes at work, incidentally, since for a considerable time the interviewee supposed that Osborne’s repeated prompting ‘And did that happen in a shed?’ was evidence of a deep-seated emotional disturbance almost on a par with his own.)
Osborne did not particularly relish recalling his past humiliations, but while he was on the subject he was compelled to admit there had been few things worse than the time he was locked in a shed by a hyperactive child, who then cunningly reported to its celebrity father that ‘the man in the smelly coat’ had been called away on urgent business. Luckily, an old woman had let him out, but only after four hours had passed. Interestingly, this was the incident Osborne generally called to mind when he overheard people say, ‘We’ll probably laugh about all this later on’ – because he had learned that there were certain miseries in life which Time signally failed to transform into anything even slightly resembling a rib-tickler, and spending four unplanned hours hammering on the inside of a Lumberland Alpine Resteezy was definitely among them.
‘All right, mate?’
A man in a tight, battered baseball cap touched Osborne by the sleeve, and he jerked out of his reverie – which was just as well, because it was turning grim.
‘What’s that?’
‘All right, are you, mate? Your coffee’s got cold.’
‘Thanks. Right. Oh bugger, yes,’ said Osborne, and stirred his coffee very quickly, as though the frantic action might jiggle the molecules sufficiently to reheat it.
In front of him on the table lay his morning’s post, still unopened, and he looked at it with
