that there wasn't a note under the door. It wouldn't be the first time that messages at the desk and messages under the door had been completely at odds with each other.
There wasn't one.
The message light on the phone was flashing though.
She hit the message button and got the hotel operator.
'You have a message from Gary Andress,' said the operator.
'Yes?' said Tricia. An unfamiliar name. 'What does it say.'
'Not hippy,' said the operator.
'Not what?' said Tricia.
'Hippy. What it says. Guy says he's not a hippy. I guess he wanted you to know that. You want the number?'
As she started to dictate the number Tricia suddenly realised that this was just a garbled version of the message she had already had.
'OK, OK,' she said. 'Are there any other messages for me?'
'Room number?'
Tricia couldn't work out why the operator should suddenly ask for her number this late in the conversation, but gave it to her anyway.
'Name?'
'McMillan' Tricia McMillan.' Tricia spelt it, patiently.
'Not Mr MacManus?'
'No.'
'No more messages for you.' Click.
Tricia sighed and dialled again. This time she gave her name and room number all over again, up front. The operator showed not the slightest glimmer of recognition that they had been speak– ing less than ten seconds ago.
'I'm going to be in the bar,' Tricia explained. 'In the bar. If a phone call comes through for me,' please would you put it through to me in the bar?'
'Name?'
They went through it all a couple more times till Tricia was certain that everything that possibly could be clear was as clear as it possibly could be.
She showered, put on fresh clothes and retouched her makeup with the speed of a professional, and, looking at her bed with a sigh, left the room again.
She had half a mind just to sneak off and hide.
No. Not really.
She had a look at herself in the mirror in the elevator lobby while she was waiting. She looked cool and in charge, and if she could fool herself she could fool anybody.
She was just going to have to tough it out with Gail Andrews. OK, she had given her a hard time. Sorry but that's the game we're all in – that sort of thing. Ms Andrews had agreed to do the interview because she had a new book out and TV exposure was free publicity. But there's no such thing as a free launch. No, she edited that line out again.
What had happened was this:
Last week astronomers had announced that they had at last discovered a tenth planet, out beyond the orbit of Pluto. They had been searching for it for years, guided by certain orbital anomalies in the outer planets, and now they'd found it and they were all terribly pleased, and everyone was terribly happy for them and so on. The planet was named Persephone, but rapidly nicknamed Rupert after some astronomer's parrot – there was some tediously heart-warming story attached to this – and that was all very wonderful and lovely.
Tricia had followed the story with, for various reasons, con– siderable interest.
Then, while she had been casting around for a good excuse to go to New York at her TV company's expense she had happened to notice a press release about Gail Andrews, and her new book, You and Your Planets.
Gail Andrews was not exactly a household name, but the moment you mentioned President Hudson, cream whips and the amputation of Damascus (the world had moved on from surgi– cal strikes. The official term had in fact been 'Damascectomy', meaning the 'taking out' of Damascus), everyone remembered who you meant.
Tricia saw an angle here which she quickly sold to her producer.
Surely the notion that great lumps of rock whirling in space knew something about your day that you didn't must take a bit of a knock from the fact that there was suddenly a new lump of rock out there that nobody had known about before.
That must throw a few calculations out, mustn't it?
What about all those star charts and planetary motions and so? We all knew (apparently) what happened when Neptune was in Virgo, and so on, but what about when Rupert was rising? Wouldn't the whole of astrology have to be rethought? Wouldn't now perhaps be a good time to own up that it was all just a load of hogwash and instead take up pig-farming, the principles of which were founded on some kind of rational basis? If we'd known about Rupert three years ago, might President Hudson have been eating the boysenberry flavour on Thursday rather than Friday? Might Damascus still be standing? That sort of thing.
Gail Andrews had taken it all reasonably well. She was just starting to recover from the initial onslaught, when she made the rather serious mistake of trying to shake Tricia off by talking smoothly about diurnal arcs, right ascensions and some of the more abstruse areas of three-dimensional trigonometry.
To her shock she discovered that everything she delivered to Tricia came right back at her with more spin on it than she could cope with. Nobody had warned Gail that being a TV bimbo was. for Tricia, her second stab at a role in life. Behind her Chanel lip gloss, her coupe sauvage and her crystal blue contact lenses lay a brain that had acquired for itself, in an earlier, abandoned phase of her life, a first class degree in mathematics and a doctorate in astrophysics.
As she was getting into the elevator Tricia, slightly preoccupied, realised she had left her bag in her room and wondered whether to duck back out and get it. No. It was probably safer where it was and there wasn't behind her.
Besides, she told herself, taking a deep breath. if life had taught her anything it was this:
Never go back for your bag.
As the elevator went down she stared up at the ceiling in a rather intent way. Anyone who didn't know Tricia McMillan better would have said that that was exactly the way people sometimes stared upwards when they were trying to hold back tears. She must have been staring at the tiny security video camera mounted up in the corner.
She marched rather briskly out of the elevator a minute later, and went up to the reception desk again.
'Now' I'm going to write this out,' she said, 'because I don't want anything to go wrong.'
She wrote her name in large letters on a piece of paper, then her room number' then 'IN THE BAR' and gave it to the receptionist' who looked at it.
'That's in case there's a message for me. OK?'
The receptionist continued to look at it.
'You want me to see if she's in her room?, he said.
Two minutes later, Tricia swivelled into the bar seat next to Gail Andrews, who was sitting in front of a glass of white wine.
'You struck me as the sort of person who preferred to sit up at the bar rather than demurely at a table,' she said.
This was true, and caught Tricia a little by surprise.
'Vodka?' said Gail.
'Yes,' said Tricia, suspiciously. She just stopped herself asking, 'How did you know?' but Gail answered anyway.
'I asked the barman,' she said, with a kindly smile.
The barman had her vodka ready for her and slid it charmingly across the glossy mahogany.
