The Ink Black Heart, page 16
‘Well,’ said Yeoman, turning to Strike and Robin, ‘it’s very good of you to meet us.’
‘We’re happy to be here,’ said Strike.
‘I know Edie would be glad we’re meeting, too,’ Yeoman continued sombrely. ‘As you can imagine, this has been an appalling shock for all of us – and for Grant and Heather, of course, a personal tragedy.’
‘How’s the police investigation going?’ Strike asked Grant.
‘We haven’t had an update for a week,’ said Edie’s uncle, whose voice tended naturally to a growl. ‘But they seem pretty convinced it was someone from this far-right group, this Halving, or whatever they’re called.’
‘Have they got a description of the attacker yet?’ Strike asked.
‘No,’ said Grant. ‘Blay claims he was hit in the back with the Taser. Says he fell face-down, was stabbed on the ground and all he saw was a pair of black trainers running away.’
‘Is there some doubt about his story?’ asked Strike, because Grant’s voice had held a note of scepticism.
‘Well, people online are saying he stabbed Edie,’ Heather said before Grant could answer. ‘Aren’t they, Grub? And, face it, this has all worked out quite well for Blay, really, hasn’t it? He’s been left in charge of everything, hasn’t he?’
‘No, he hasn’t,’ said Grant shortly. ‘We’ll see to that.’
There was a slightly uncomfortable pause.
‘The papers say he was stabbed in the neck,’ Strike said.
‘That’s right,’ said Yeoman before Grant could respond. ‘From what I gather, what saved him was the high collar on his leather jacket. If the knife had gone in any deeper – I believe it was a question of millimetres. Even so, he’s been left with a significant spinal-cord injury and he’s partially paralysed.’
‘He and Edie had fallen out—’ began Grant, but two waiters now re-entered the room with bottles of water and a selection of bread rolls, and he fell silent. Nobody had ordered alcohol. When the man pouring water asked whether they’d decided what they were going to eat yet, Heather gave a little laugh.
‘Oh, I haven’t chosen!’ she said, flipping open the menu and perusing it.
Once she’d ordered, she turned to Robin and said, rubbing her belly, ‘This one’s a boy and can’t I tell! I wasn’t this hungry with either of our girls!’
‘When are you due?’ asked Robin politely.
‘Not till June. Have you got any?’
‘No,’ said Robin with a smile.
‘To be honest, this one wasn’t planned,’ said Heather in a stage whisper. ‘But he’s only got to look at me and I’m pregnant. But who knows, I might be able to afford some help, if…’
She left the sentence unfinished. As she sipped her water, Robin wondered how much Grant and Heather stood to gain from their unexpected inheritance.
Food orders taken, the waiters left again. Once the door had closed, Yeoman said:
‘So, as I explained on the phone, we’re hoping you might agree to undertake an investigation for us. We’ – he indicated himself and Elgar – ‘would be your clients and bear the costs, but we felt it right that Grant should be here today, too, as Edie’s next of kin. Richard, would you like to—?’
‘Thanks, Allan,’ said the American. ‘To give you some background,’ he said, putting his beautifully manicured fingertips together, ‘when Edie died, she and Josh were on the verge of concluding a film deal with us. Josh had already signed and Edie was due to do so at Allan’s office the morning after she was attacked.
‘A few days ago, Josh sent us a message, via his agent, that he doesn’t want to proceed with the movie unless some way of shutting down Anomie is found.’
‘You aren’t Josh’s agent, then?’ Strike asked Yeoman. ‘Only Edie’s?’
‘Correct,’ said Yeoman. ‘Josh is represented by a woman called Katya Upcott. We, ah, should come back to her.’
‘Now, obviously Josh has already signed the contract, so he can’t legally stop the movie,’ said Elgar, ‘but naturally nobody wants to go against his wishes, given what’s just happened.’
‘We should say, it’s very much in Josh’s best interests for the film to be made,’ added Yeoman. ‘If his paralysis doesn’t resolve, he’s unlikely to be able to animate again. He doesn’t come from a wealthy family. We want to set his mind at rest about Anomie so he can focus on his recovery. He’s feeling a lot of guilt about accusing Edie of being Anomie – torturing himself, Katya says—’
‘Well, imagine accusing her of that,’ interrupted Heather indignantly. ‘As if anyone would do that to themselves, putting personal things about themselves online! We’re having a taste of what she went through right now – aren’t we, Grub?’ she said, glancing sideways at her husband. ‘As soon as Edie was dead, this Anomie started churning out private things about me and Grant on Twitter!’
‘Really?’ said Strike, pulling out a notebook. ‘Would you mind if we take notes?’
‘No, of course not,’ said Heather, who seemed rather excited at the prospect. ‘He’s got some things wrong – he said Grant was out in Saudi, not Oman, and that I was Grant’s secretary, which I wasn’t, I was PA to another guy, and he’s claimed Grub and I had an affair while he was still married, but his first marriage was—’
‘Over in all but name,’ said Grant, more loudly than was necessary.
‘He’s been going for us non-stop for a month, because Grant’s going to have a say now in what happens with the cartoon!’ continued Heather. ‘I’m keeping track of all these so-called fans coming on our Facebook page and writing terrible things. I can give you the names, if you like.’
‘Thank you, that’d be very helpful,’ said Strike, not particularly sincerely. ‘Interesting that Anomie knows private details about you as well as Edie. Could he have got them online – from your Facebook page, for instance? Or does he know things that aren’t in the public domain?’
Grant and Heather looked at each other.
‘I s’pose some of it’s on our Facebook page,’ said Heather, as though this thought had only just occurred to her. ‘But he knew Laura’s got lupus. I don’t see how he could have known that, do you, Grub?’
‘Laura’s my ex-wife,’ Grant explained. ‘No, I can’t see how he’d have known that. I was in Oman when Edie’s mother, my younger sister, died,’ he continued, and Strike suspected they were about to hear a prepared speech. ‘I was unmarried at the time and working all hours – there was no way I could’ve taken in a small child. By the time I met my first wife, Edie was settled with a good foster family. It would’ve done more harm than good, disrupting her life and her education to drag her abroad. Then, after we moved back to London, Laura got ill. It was all she could manage, looking after Rachel, our own daughter. I mean, I checked in with Edie to see how she was doing’ – he gave an aggressive upwards jerk of the chin – ‘but given my personal situation – simply not practicable to have her to live with us.’
‘And she was doing drugs and all sorts later,’ said Heather, ‘wasn’t she, Grub? We wouldn’t have wanted that around the kids.’
Elgar, who’d maintained an expression of mild interest while the conversation had entered this side route, now returned to what, for him, was clearly the main point of the meeting.
‘As Allan says, we all want to do the right thing by Josh, but we’ve got sound business reasons for closing down Anomie as well. Anomie’s very much against our movie and he’s whipping up the fandom against it. He’s got a well-established track record of creating animosity towards any change in the franchise he doesn’t approve of.’
Yeoman, whose mouth was full of bread roll, nodded and said thickly,
‘When the show moved to Netflix, Anomie orchestrated hate campaigns against the voice actors and animators. A couple of people resigned because of the harassment Anomie was inciting against them online. In terms of the overall brand, The Ink Black Heart is starting to be almost as well known for the aggression of the fandom as for the cartoon itself. Nobody wants the property to become a byword for online toxicity, but I’m afraid that’s where we’re headed, unless something changes.’
‘Which is a shame,’ said Elgar, ‘because we’ve got high hopes for the movie adaptation. We’re planning a mixture of live action and CGI. A gothic love story mixed with a dark comedy, full of funny, appealing characters.’
Robin thought the last line sounded as though it had been lifted directly from a press release.
‘Presumably,’ she said, ‘Maverick would get the rights to produce digital games, if this film deal’s concluded?’
‘Hammer hit on head, Ms Ellacott,’ said Elgar with a wry smile. ‘Anomie’s game will have a lot of competition once we get gaming rights. We think that’s the primary reason he’s determined to stop the cartoon becoming a film.’
‘Where did Blay get this idea that Edie was Anomie, do any of you know?’ asked Strike.
Yeoman sighed.
‘Somebody took him a dossier of supposed proof. I haven’t been able to talk to Josh yet, so that’s all I know, but… well, he’s quite a heavy consumer of cannabis and alcohol. Relations between him and Edie were very poor by the end; there was a lot of bitterness, paranoia and acrimony. I don’t think he’d have needed a lot of persuading that Edie was up to no good.’
‘Your agency turned Edie down because you don’t do a lot of cyber-investigation, is that right?’ Elgar asked Robin.
‘And because our client list was full at the time,’ explained Robin.
‘Well, you should know the interested parties represented at this table have probably exhausted the cyber-investigation route,’ said Elgar.
‘Really?’ said Strike.
‘Yes. We were all acting independently,’ said Yeoman, ‘and it’s only since Edie died that we’ve pooled information. Grant—’
‘Yeah, I’ve had a good friend of mine looking into this Anomie these last few weeks,’ said Grant with another aggressive upward jerk of the chin. ‘Len heads up a cybersecurity firm. Met him out in Oman. Len says the security around this game of Anomie’s is top notch. He hasn’t managed to dig up anything on who’s behind it.’
‘Just to clarify a point,’ interjected Robin, ‘there are two people credited with creating this game, aren’t there? Not just Anomie?’
‘That’s right,’ said Yeoman. ‘The other calls himself Morehouse and—’
‘They’re the same person,’ said Heather with absolute confidence. ‘I’ve been looking into it all online. They’re the same person.’
‘Well, maybe – I don’t know,’ said Yeoman tactfully. ‘Morehouse, if he’s a real person, keeps a very low profile. He doesn’t tweet a lot and he never hounded Edie, as far as I know. It’s Anomie who’s become the power in the fandom and who’s widely credited with the game.’
‘And you two have both tried to investigate Anomie online as well?’ Strike said, looking from Yeoman to Elgar.
‘Yes,’ said Elgar. ‘As we were getting closer to a deal, the negativity coming from the fandom was starting to concern us. Anomie was pumping out a particularly pernicious mix of fact and fiction.’
‘He knew things he shouldn’t have done?’ asked Robin.
‘He did, yeah,’ said Elgar. ‘Just odd details, nothing major, but enough to make me wonder whether I wasn’t harbouring Anomie at our studio. I went to a cyber-investigation firm we previously used to look into a leak from our studios. They had no more success than Grant’s contact. Anomie and Morehouse have done a very good job of protecting themselves and their game. As a matter of fact, my guys don’t think they can be amateurs, whatever they pretend online. But we did satisfy ourselves that Anomie wasn’t tweeting from inside the company, which was something.’
‘Anomie and Morehouse claim to be an ordinary pair of fans, don’t they?’ said Robin.
‘That’s right. They’re assumed to be young, though they’ve never explicitly stated their ages, as far as I know,’ said Yeoman. ‘Everyone also talks about them as male, though obviously we have no idea whether that’s true either.’
‘You tried to find out who Anomie was, too, Allan?’ Strike asked the agent.
‘I did,’ said Yeoman, nodding. ‘I didn’t tell Edie, didn’t want to get her hopes up. I’d been advising her to ignore Anomie. She engaged with him a few times on Twitter, and it didn’t help – in fact, it made things worse. But it’s one thing advising a client to ignore social media, and another making them do it.
‘So yes, six months ago I asked someone at my agency to do what he could. Benjamin does all our cyber-security, he’s quite a whizz-kid. He looked into how Anomie’s game’s being hosted, he even – between ourselves – tried to breach its security, to hack into the administrator’s account and get himself onto the moderator channel, but got nowhere. As Grant says, whoever made the game is very clever.’
The door opened again and the waiters returned with their food. Strike, Yeoman and Grant had all ordered the Wagyu beef, Elgar and Robin salads, whereas Heather had chosen risotto.
‘This is a treat,’ said Heather happily and Robin, who’d been fighting her feeling of dislike, silently stopped resisting. They were here in this sleekly appointed club, eating this delicious food, because of the brutal death of Heather’s niece by marriage. Even if Heather had barely known her, as seemed to be the case, her frank enjoyment of her fancy lunch and her persistent eyeing-up of Strike seemed both inappropriate and distasteful to Robin.
When the door had closed behind the waiters, Robin asked:
‘Did anyone ever try to reach out to Anomie? To reason with them, or fix up a private meeting?’
‘Yes: Edie herself,’ said Yeoman, now vigorously cutting up his beef. ‘She asked Anomie over Twitter to meet her face to face. He never answered.’
‘Couldn’t you have done something with copyright law?’ asked Strike. ‘What’s the legal position, if his game’s using all Ledwell and Blay’s characters?’
‘Grey area,’ said Yeoman, now through a mouthful of steak. ‘You could argue infringement, but as the fans liked it and nobody was making any money, we thought it wisest not to be heavy-handed. If Anomie had started monetising it, then yes, we’d have had a copyright violation. We imagined fans would eventually tire of it, thereby diminishing Anomie’s influence, but that hasn’t happened.’
‘Ordinarily,’ said Elgar, ‘we’d be looking to bring him on side, as an influencer – you know, a superfan with a following within the community. Tickets to early screenings, face-to-face meetings with the writers and actors, that sort of thing. But it wouldn’t be possible in this case, even if we were minded to be generous. Anomie seems to treasure his anonymity, which to me suggests he knows it would hurt him to be unmasked.’
‘This is obviously an uncomfortable question,’ said Strike, turning to Grant, ‘but given that Anomie seems to have a lot of inside information, it must have occurred to you that he might be a family member, Grant?’
‘It definitely isn’t anyone in the family,’ Edie’s uncle said at once.
‘Nobody in the family really knew her,’ said Heather. ‘You barely did, did you, Grub?’
‘I was abroad,’ Grant repeated, glaring at Strike, ‘and my ex-wife was ill. My parents are dead, as are both of Edie’s parents. The only other relatives are my kids and none of them ever met her. It’s definitely not anyone in our family.’
‘I made discreet enquiries at the agency,’ said Yeoman, ‘because it naturally occurred to me that I might be harbouring Anomie, but as far as I could find out, nobody there ever had so much as a coffee with Edie outside work. And while someone might have known about developments with the cartoon, they simply can’t have known all those private details about Edie’s past. In my view, Anomie has to be someone who’s been in Edie’s immediate circle at some point or – more likely – in Josh’s.’
‘Why d’you say it’s more likely to be someone in Josh’s?’ asked Robin.
Yeoman set down his knife and fork, swallowed a mouthful of food, and said,
‘Well, for one thing, Anomie’s never targeted Josh,’ he said. ‘It was always Edie he fixated on and abused and harassed. That’s one of the things that drove a wedge between Josh and Edie: Josh was being treated very kindly by the fandom and Edie was being blamed for everything they didn’t like. But as I’ve said, Josh has a history of drinking far more than he should and smoking a lot of pot. I’m afraid he’s a poor judge of character, too. We had quite a few problems with some of the original cast, who were mostly his friends, which, um, brings us back to Katya Upcott.’
Yeoman glanced at Elgar, who made a small movement with his fork that indicated that Yeoman should go on, so the agent said,
‘I didn’t invite Katya to this lunch because she’s fiercely protective of Josh – which, of course, is an entirely honourable sentiment, especially given his present condition. But we can talk more freely without her here.’
‘Does Katya have her own agency?’ said Strike.
‘Er… no. She’s a – a very nice lady who runs a crafting supplies business from home. Katya met Josh and Edie a few years ago, at the art collective where they were living. Katya was taking evening classes there. She’d worked in PR before she set up her own business, so she gave Josh and Edie advice on how to handle themselves when The Ink Black Heart started attracting fans.
‘After a while, she started acting as their de facto agent . In 2012 Edie decided to find a professional agent, and I took her on. Josh remained with Katya. It isn’t unusual, you know, for people who have a surprise hit to cling to familiar people. There’s loyalty, of course, but also fear. It can be hard to know who to trust when you suddenly become hot property. Katya’s a perfectly nice, well-intentioned woman,’ he emphasised, ‘and she knows I’m calling in private detectives to try and find Anomie and she’s said she’ll give any help she can. She’ll know far more than I do about Josh’s friends and close contacts, but you’ll need to tread carefully, because she’s deeply resistant to the idea that Josh, through naivety, carelessness or lack of good judgement, could be partly responsible for the Anomie mess.’
