mumbled to herself, nonetheless turning to the next page.
She stopped mid-movement, jolted by what she saw there – a small flyer for her ‘Back to Front’ exhibition lay loosely against the page. She picked it up. A coincidence? Surely not. She had assumed the book ending up in her basket had been entirely random – first when she’d thought a stranger had dropped it, and latterly, too, when Liam had told her about Sam’s publisher’s marketing campaign. But the presence of a flyer for her own exhibition suggested otherwise.
Her eyes fell to the open page behind it and she felt herself start at what she saw there: Sam’s illustration of a curled-up badger had been overwritten in vivid purple felt tip with a message infinitely less reassuring than his.
She frowned, staring at it for several long moments. Was it a joke? For a moment she thought Jasper might have written it, but the certainty in the line of the letters, the desperate, rushed stab of the pen against the paper, told her not. And besides, they weren’t words he would – have cause to – say.
In her old life, she had seen messages written in a hurry, in desperation, before. She had heard these very words countless times. No, this was no prank. She sat up, flicking through the pages more quickly now, scanning for something else that might give her a clue as to who had written it – a name, an address. But there was nothing, just the plea. A desperate shout in a sea of calm.
HELP ME.
‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. She liked the song, but seriously – hearing it all the way through twice, on loop . . . How long did it take a switchboard to find the right number? She had all of twenty minutes left before she needed to collect Jasper from nursery.
‘Come on. Come on.’ She was sitting on the sill of one of her two large square windows that gave onto the canal, one leg bent as she chewed on a nail. A duck was walking across the thickening ice and she could see the fallen leaves that had become trapped just below the surface.
The song clicked off just as Freddie Mercury became a poor boy.
‘Oh hi, yes,’ she said, snapping to attention as a voice came onto the line. ‘Is that the marketing department for—’ She checked the name of the publisher’s imprint on the spine; the book rested face down on her thigh. ‘—Olander Books?’
‘Yes.’
‘Great. Could I please speak to someone who does the marketing campaign for Sam Meyer? Uh, I mean Samuel Meyer. Samuel. Or Jacintha, if she’s there,’ she added, remembering the stroppy PR’s name.
There was a pause. ‘Who is calling, please?’
‘Well, my name is . . .’ She hesitated. She didn’t want this getting back to Sam in any way. ‘My name’s Ms Van Alstyne.’
Huh? Sometimes she amazed herself.
‘With which company?’
‘I’m calling as a private individual, actually.’
There was a pause. ‘Can I ask what this is concerning?’
‘Yes, I need to speak to someone about Mr Meyer’s book distribution campaign – you know, the freebies you put around the city?’
There was a longer pause. ‘And what is it you need to know?’
Lee rolled her eyes. Great, a jobsworth. ‘Well, in the first instance, I’m trying to find out if the number on the top of the title page means anything?’
‘Means anything?’
‘Yeah. I’ve got one of the books and it’s got “276” written in it, in the top right corner of the title page.’ She stared at Sam’s looping script across the body of the page: If you find this . . . may it brighten your day. Well, it hadn’t, she thought with some perverse satisfaction. Quite the opposite.
‘I see. Well, five hundred copies were distributed, so that would mean yours is number 276 of 500.’
‘Okay great, yes, I thought it might be that,’ Lee said, feeling a spasm of hope. ‘So then my next question was whether, when you handed out those five hundred books, did you have some sort of “plan”, like a map of where you were going to leave them? Or was it completely random – you know, an assistant dropping them on park benches on her lunch break?’
There was a stern pause. ‘I’m afraid I don’t understand. Why do you need to know that?’
She could sense the marketing woman’s growing irritation and bafflement. ‘Because I need to find out where my issue – number 276 – was left.’