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sent me the project Bible, and I had churned some tongue in cheek opus out. Even as I finished it, I knew already all the elements required were present but it had no heart, was just an exercise in style. Shouldn’t even have put it in the post to her. She was a pernickety and fastidious editor and tore my contribution to pieces and suggested we meet up so we could discuss her numerous suggestions for the rewrite.
    My initial reaction was to chuck the whole thing, accept the kill fee and move on to better things. There was this publisher in America who was keen on my tale of erotic adventures set in New Orleans, a place I knew well and inspired me to much literary excess. I was eager to get started on that story. It was closer to my heart than some damn whodunit set in the Home Counties where the butler didn’t do it (it was actually the priest – who wasn’t really a priest – I’d made into the culprit).
    But I agreed to meet her.
    Call it gut instinct or fate or whatever you believe in when it comes to matters of the heart, lust and the flesh. I was sort of curious to see the face behind the voice and that decidedly old-fashioned, conservative name. Although nothing could ever have prepared me for what was to happen.
    Edwina O’Callaghan.
    Fiction editor.
    Just call me Eddie, she had said.
    A few days later, we were in bed together. The middle of the day. August sun blazing beyond the lace curtains of a hotel room in a concrete monstrosity of a building near one of the main railway stations.
    We had become lovers.
    Lust at first sight, you might say.
    Oh yes, she was married.
    At that stage, blind as we were and slaves to our desires, just a fairly minor consideration.
    I suppose I have to provide you with more details. Intimate ones. Personal stuff and all that. Or you just wouldn’t understand my reasons. For the assassination.
    I suppose so.
    Well, Eddie was special.
    Very special.
    What can I say? That I was consumed by her like no one before. That the initial fire of lust soon changed into mad love, beyond any border I had ever crossed before when it had come to women. That she was different, like a dream literally come true.
    No, I haven’t a photo of her. She insisted I return all of them after we split.
    You wouldn’t understand, anyway. These sort of things are so irrational, I realise. Beauty is so much in the eye of the beholder.
    You’d tell me she was too slim, didn’t really have much in the way of tits. 34A, actually, which for 5ft 9 isn’t that opulent. That the way she wore her hair, in a frizzy perm, was no longer in vogue, even if it ever had been. That her arse was maybe a bit too large and square. That she walked a touch funny, bent forward. That there was a scar on her left cheek and she should have worn some form of make-up to minimise its presence. That her teeth were crooked.
    And if you knew, which you would have eventually, what with all your investigative powers, that she shaved her pubic hair, you would have said, no doubt, that women with smooth crotches have a sluttish nature.
    But also, it’s all in the details, you see, there are things in a woman that are beyond description. They match your own emotional make-up and when the respective elements line-up together it just goes boom, quietly, boom, forever, boom, boom there goes my heart.
    Silly, no?
    I fell in love with Eddie and there was no safety net.
    I think she fell in love with me too, initially.
    It’s so difficult to explain.
    Eddie’s nipples. That shade of pink beyond paleness that moved me so hard, delicate, sad, unique, touching. They never did get very hard, instead as we made love the pinkness spread in concentric orbs outwards until the whole area from breast to throat was flushed in a strong hue of desire.
    Eddie’s eyes. A brown-eyed blonde. The dark colour like a pool of sorrow in which my eyes would lose themselves attempting to reach the sheer depths of