Fashion Victim: A Novel by Sam Baker Hardcover - 2005

Excerpt

“What I don’t understand is why?”

Annie Anderson took a deep breath and began to reply. “Well, the thing is, Mum—”

“You get bored too easily, that’s your trouble.”

Same conversation, same chance of coming out on top.

“Mum! I’m not bored—”

“Why can’t you just stay put? You’ve hardly been there for five minutes and now you’re chucking it all in to work on one of those magazines that make women anorexic.”

The horror with which her mother said this made Annie wince.

“And what about money?” her mother continued, barely pausing for breath. “You always said magazines paid less than newspapers.”

“They’re paying me the same. Not a penny difference.” It was Annie’s first truthful comment since her mother called. Staring at the scruffy woman who stared back from the rain-spattered office window, Annie scowled; her short dark curls looked like she’d just gotten out of bed, and not in a good way.

“So why are you leaving, if they’re not even paying you more?”

Too late Annie realized that a bigger salary might have given her mother a reason for accepting the change. Damn it, why hadn’t that occurred to her ten seconds earlier? Holding the phone away from her ear, Annie began to count slowly: one . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . five . . . six . . .

“Annie,” came the voice. “Are you there?”

Annie forced a smile onto her face in the hope it would carry through to her voice. “Mum,” she said patiently. “This is a great opportunity. And you know I always wanted to work on a glossy. Handbag is really well respected and I’ll get to travel all over the world. New York, Paris, Milan . . . Just think, I’ll see all those amazing cities and it won’t cost me a penny. Anyway, you’re always saying how much you worry about me being lonely since Nick left, now you won’t have to. Maybe I’ll find a good-looking Italian . . .”

It wasn’t hard to interpret the silence swirling down the telephone line. Annie had played the wrong card and she knew it. She could almost see her mother’s face, tight-lipped with disapproval as she sat at the kitchen table, six o’clock news playing in the background, one eye on Dad’s tea bubbling on the cooker, the other focused inward on the mess her younger daughter was making of her life.

Disturbed only by the distant murmur of Trevor McDonald, Annie decided to quit while she wasn’t ahead and took advantage of the lull.

“Got to go,” she said hurriedly. “Can’t be late for my own leaving do. Call you Sunday.”

Annie pressed the button to kill the call before her mother could object and slumped back in her swivel chair, tossing the mobile onto her now empty desk. Without the usual wad of newspapers, Post-it notes, and random cuttings to block its fall, her Nokia bounced away, landing on the industrial gray carpet in the middle of the five desks that made up the Post’s investigations department.

Everyone knew the end of January was a lousy time to change jobs, the worst. Right up there in the Top Ten things everybody knows. It’s inevitably borne out of the post-Christmas blues, and Annie’s festive season had been enough to give anyone those.

Oh, there were countless reasons why she was doing the wrong thing. And Annie had heard them all over the past month. Heaving herself out of her chair, Annie trawled around to the other side of the desk to retrieve her mobile. Everything ached, from her brain downward, with the exhaustion of having to listen to other people’s opinions—about her life in general, about resigning from the Post in particular. Except everyone was wrong, because Annie wasn’t leaving; Ken had talked her out of that. She was taking the easy option, going undercover on a soft job.

Ken’s idea, their secret.

Crouched by her phone in the half darkness, Annie was randomly punching buttons in an attempt to resurrect its ominously blank screen when a voice from behind almost made her drop the thing again.

“What the hell are you doing here, Anderson? Everybody’s waiting for you down at The Swan.”

Her boss, news editor Ken Greenhouse, leaned against a filing cabinet, shirtsleeves rolled up, tie half undone, his heavy eyes troubled. “Sure you want to go through with this Handbag thing?”

As she checked that her mobile was working, Annie nodded. “Yes,” she said, glancing up. “You know why.”

The Yorkshireman shrugged. “You couldn’t have saved Irina, you know.”

“Then I shouldn’t have started,” said Annie, pushing away the memory of a teenage girl, large eyes dark and haunted, devoid of trust. “Saving her was the whole point, surely?” They were talking about Annie’s last story, and not for the first time.

Ken allowed himself a small sigh, deciding not to go there. Instead he summoned a half smile. “Get a move on, love,” he said.

“Five minutes,” said Annie. “Let me put my face on.”

“Five minutes.” Collecting his jacket from the back of his chair, Ken Greenhouse strode across the office, stopping off briefly at the night editor’s desk as he passed. At the lift he turned and glanced back to where Annie stood.

“Anderson!” he yelled, showing her the spread fingers of one hand. “The Swan. In five.”

Annie nodded and watched him thin to nothing as the lift doors closed.

Her face would have to wait, she decided. That glimpse of her reflection in the office window had already confirmed that her pale skin and eyes rimmed gray from lack of sleep needed more than a simple touch-of-mascara-and-dash-of-lippy repair job. And she could always do it in the pub loo, use it as an opportunity to escape.

Not that it would make a blind bit of difference. Annie without makeup looked much the same as Annie with, except for the bright red lips; a shortish woman in her late twenties, not bad looking but for the scowl and a mouth she’d learned the hard way to keep in check.

Annie’s PC blinked reproachfully as she clicked on shut down. Its dark screen and her desk, empty save for several years of coffee rings, brought home the enormity of her decision.

She’d always had a desk at the Post, always known she wanted to come back. But this time was different, and besides, she had to be seen to resign. She could hardly expect to be welcomed with open arms at Handbag if there was any suggestion she was still working for the Post.

Aware that she’d undoubtedly exceeded her five minutes, Annie grabbed her coat from the stand behind her desk and made herself turn slowly, taking in the entire floor. It was half empty at that time of night. Sky News was playing in the background and Derek, the Post’s night editor, was giving some junior hack hell for whatever he had or hadn’t done. No change there then.





Rain was sheeting against plate glass as Annie stepped into the foyer. Was it worth bothering with an umbrella? She decided against—her coat already bore the signs of a hard winter, and her reflection in the window upstairs had reminded her there was little about today’s very bad hair worth protecting.

“ ’Bye, Joe,” she called, as she walked past the security man on night shift.

He beamed. Joe was her favorite, a vocal old Irishman with strong opinions on everything and a willingness to share them with anyone who’d listen. His all-time favorite was that the Westbourne Grove end of Notting Hill, Annie’s stomping ground, was an overpriced hellhole and no amount of money could induce him to live there. Apparently the council had tried to move him there once, about thirty years earlier, but Joe was having none of it. He was right, of course, Notting Hill was a hellhole, just not for the reasons he thought.

Be nice to Joe, Annie had long ago discovered, and you had an ally for life. Consequently, there were many times he’d helped her “borrow” her colleagues’ prebooked taxis when she had been running late. She owed him. Big time.

“Ah, ’bye Annie. You’ll be back, surely.”

“Maybe, who knows?” said Annie, and bundled herself through the revolving door.

Turning left, Annie headed down Old Street, clinging as closely as possible to the walls in the hope of gaining shelter from any overhang. She could have run there in seconds, but Annie wasn’t ready to face her workmates yet. Walking slowly from one doorway to the next, Annie watched the windows of The Swan grow closer. It was one of those renovation jobs that fancied itself more wine bar than pub and as a result almost everyone on the paper professed to hate it. But everyone still went there, convenience getting the better of stylistic preferences.

Ken had hired the upstairs bar, a Victorian room that retained traces of the nineteenth-century pub The Swan had once been. Doubtless the brewery would get around to ruining the second floor, too, but they hadn’t yet.

From where she stood in the rain, Annie could see enough shadows reflected against the upper windows to make her feel sick. Parties were okay and she liked free alcohol as much as the next person—that was practically a prerequisite for the job. At least it was if you worked for Ken Greenhouse. Birthdays, engagements, promotions, and leaving dos . . . All were fine with Annie as long as one crucial box was ticked: They belonged to someone else.

By now she was standing in the door of a twenty-four-hour newsagent, scarcely ten feet from the pub, rain dripping onto her head and trickling down the side of her face. “Come on,” she told herself. “Usual rules: Get in there, get it over with, get out again.”

Annie was about to follow her own advice when the pocket of her coat vibrated against her hip. It took a few seconds to untangle the Nokia from the used tissues and taxi receipts that filled her coat pocket. Two words flashed on its screen, jane, home. For all of a second Annie contemplated answering, then she punched the red button to reject Jane’s call. Her older sister would already be leaving a message on Annie’s voicemail and her voicemail would call and then text Annie to inform her of that fact. It was a system designed to persecute call evaders, and Annie didn’t need to play back any message to know exactly how it would go. She’d heard it all before.





“Anderson!” Ken bellowed, and every head in the bar turned toward her. “Call that five minutes! It’s a wonder you ever met a fucking deadline!”

There was a ripple of laughter as Annie’s colleagues readied themselves for one of Ken’s stand-up specials at Annie’s expense. But it never came.

Struggling out of her coat, Annie dumped it on top of a precarious pile of about fifty others on a table just inside the door and fixed her air-hostess smile firmly in place as a photographer from the sports desk pushed a glass of lukewarm Sauvignon Blanc into her hand. As she took it, Annie noticed his hand lingered on the stem a second longer than was strictly necessary. She looked at him inquiringly and then remembered. He’d e-mailed her several times a day afterward, seemingly unable to read between the lines of her nonexistent replies. Annie had been bloody glad to be sent to Glasgow after that. By the time she’d returned he’d been in Tokyo for the World Cup and that had been the end of it.

“Come on, Anderson, get over here!” Ken was gesticulating wildly from his position by the bar.

Annie flashed him the grin he was expecting and burrowed through the crowd. She knew what was coming; better let him have his fun.

“Oi, you lot!” he yelled into the racket. “Shut the fuck up! I’ve got a few words to say.”

To Annie’s astonishment, everyone did.

“Right, everybody here knows Annie. And if you don’t, get out ’cause you’re not having another round at my expense.”

There was a polite smattering of laughter.

“I won’t keep you long, because as you all know I’m not given to flowery words.”

More laughter, far less polite.

“I want to pay tribute to one of the best chief investigative reporters I’ve ever had.”

Thrown, Annie caught the smile before it dropped from her face. She’d been expecting ten minutes of Ken’s gags about her appalling timekeeping, nonexistent tea-making skills, and weird dress sense; those she could cope with. Plaudits weren’t part of the deal.

Christ, she thought, not the unedited highlights, please.

“I remember Annie’s first day,” Ken started. “We thought we’d give her a girlie job, see what she was made of, and sent her out in a skirt that looked more like a belt, told her if she wanted to be an investigative journalist she could investigate a few building sites. A few of you will remember that feature. And Annie, the boys from the sports desk have asked me to give you this.”

It was a card, mocked up by one of the designers. A very much younger and slightly plumper Annie stood next to scaffolding, a yellow hard hat crammed onto unruly curls. She wore a child-sized Bob the Builder T-shirt so tight that even her breasts looked large in it and steel-capped boots several sizes too large. Annie was five feet four, not exactly stumpy, but next to the foreman—six feet plus and sixteen stone—she looked tiny.

There were snorts of laughter, and Annie felt her face grow warm. Of course she remembered that bloody feature, how could she forget? It had been pinned on the production editor’s wall for years afterward. Annie Anderson in a skirt so short you could practically see her knickers, scowling for the camera.

“Annie soon proved she had real balls and over the years she’s made me proud I took a punt on her. Thanks to Annie, cowboy cosmetic surgeons have been struck off, premiership footballers out on the shag before a big match have been caught with their pants down, and a top London hotel that best remain nameless found itself in very deep shit for employing illegal immigrants. And let’s not even mention how Glasgow city council feel about us after Annie’s investigation into homelessness in their fair city—”

“Yay!”

“Go Annie!”

“Good one!”

The news desk contingent had clearly been drinking a little longer than everyone else. Grateful for the momentary diversion, Annie took the opportunity to tear her eyes away from her feet and glanced around. Almost everyone was looking at her, some staring, others whispering.

Get a move on, Ken, she thought, for Christ’s sake.

“But that’s not all,” Ken continued on cue. “Because Annie’s last story for the Post was her greatest coup yet.”

Annie’s eyes returned to her feet.

“The rumors had been circulating for months. We had a pretty good idea Eastern European kids were being imported straight into prostitution under our noses, right here in Kings Cross. Could we prove it? Could we fuck. Plenty of far more experienced journalists than Annie tried and failed. Even the Met couldn’t get the evidence they needed, until we put Annie on it. Annie and her team blew it wide open and saved a few kids’ lives in the process. I think we all know this is where the Post’s next British Press Award is coming from.”

Ken looked genuinely proud as he stared at her, like Annie’s father had looked the day he’d walked up the aisle with his oldest daughter wearing a dress like a meringue. Annie, on the other hand, really did not want to think about those damaged teenagers, not now, not at all.

“So, Annie . . .” Ken was smiling warmly. “Even though you’re abandoning us. Sodding off to some bloody poncy magazine to teach them about proper journalism, better known as putting your feet up and pocketing the freebies—”

More uproarious laughter and Annie joined in, confident that the worst was over.

“—we’ve got a little something for you to remember us by.”

Reaching behind him, Ken took a large flat parcel from where it had been lying, facedown on the bar. Annie knew what it was; she’d been to enough leaving dos over the years, and it was always the same. A couple of fake headlines, her face imposed on someone else’s body. The usual.

Only it wasn’t.

Ripping off the paper, Annie found a framed page from the Post. A front page from the previous October dominated by one haunting image. The face of Irina Krodt, barely sixteen but looking far younger, devastatingly pretty with sallow skin and dark hair. It was Irina’s eyes that haunted Annie, dark and dead, staring flatly out of the page, making everyone who looked into them culpable.

exclusive! screamed the tag. post smashes child prostitution ring! Underneath, the byline read another post exclusive by annie anderson.

Innocent life lost in process, Annie thought bleakly. Funny how they hadn’t mentioned that on the front page.

A Post-it note stuck to the back of the frame read, I’ll be here, call me—and then Ken’s home number scrawled in blue biro.

As if she didn’t already know it by heart.

“Speech!”

“Yes, come on, Anderson, speech!”

Clinging to the frame as if it were all that held her up, Annie gazed around, searching for something to focus on. Anything would do. Fifty-odd faces were turned toward her, all willing her to speak. Annie swallowed hard and settled her gaze on an old beer poster above the heads of the people at the back. As she did so, she caught the eye of the Post’s fashion editor, Lou McCartney, who winked and gave Annie a supportive wave.

Lou, as ever, was immaculately dressed, her Prada coat perfectly offsetting thrift shop boots. Anyone else would have looked like a bag lady but Lou just looked, well, like Lou . . . It was Lou who had helped Annie get an in with Handbag magazine.

“Th-thanks,” Annie stammered. “I’ve, uh, had a wonderful time at the Post. It’s been fantastic. I’ve loved every minute of it. Well, not every minute obviously . . .”

She knew she should be gushing Oscar-style about her talented team, the fantastic paper, those career-making awards, how much she owed Ken Greenhouse. She’d had a speech all planned in her head before she even entered the pub, but now she couldn’t think of anything but Irina, couldn’t see anything but Irina’s haunted eyes. In the absence of any better idea, Annie opted for humor.

“Er, I’ll miss you all more than you can possibly realize. Even whatshisname on the sports desk.”

“Yeah right!” muttered a girl in the corner and there was a burst of relieved laughter, the tension subsiding as quickly as it had surfaced.

“Sure you will!” yelled another woman.

“You know where to find us when you can’t fit any more free gear in your wardrobe!”

Raucous chatter filled the room.

“Attention span of gnats, that lot,” Ken said. “Let me put this somewhere safe for you.” He eased the frame from her fingers. As he did so he gazed down at the page.

“Good story, that,” he said. “And, for the record, Anderson, what happened wasn’t your fault. Whatever you think.”

Annie wished she could believe that.





For the first time since entering the bar, Annie was no longer the center of attention. She took in the faces around her. The last five years of her life were in this room.

The news desk hard core were propping up the bar, knocking back bottles of Becks with Bells chasers and irritating everyone in the immediate vicinity by reenacting old snatches from The Office. Only their choice of sketches had changed in the time Annie had known them: One year it had been League of Gentlemen, another The Fast Show.

“Annie . . .” A hand settled on her shoulder and she turned to find Al, her partner on the investigations team, standing so close she could feel his breath on her face. Carefully she inched away.

“There’s still time to change your mind,” Al said. “I mean, why would anyone give up all this . . .” He gestured to the pile of damp coats steaming gently in one corner, the alcohol-slicked floor, steamed-up windows, raised voices, and drunken laughter.

“Why would anyone give up this for posh frocks and champagne parties in the fashion capitals of the world?”

It was disconcerting, she thought, how you could have a passing acquaintance with every single person in a room and still not have anyone to talk to. There was barely a face she didn’t recognize, but scarcely one she felt she really knew, except Ken. And Lou.

Lou and Annie had joined the Post in the same month and were the same age. Only their star signs and hair colors were different—Annie’s dark brown hair had always resisted her halfhearted attempts at DIY bleach, while Lou’s came out of a professional’s bottle and was topped up every six to eight weeks. They’d hit it off instantly, a rare occurrence for Annie and one that hadn’t been repeated since. She could count the people she regarded as real friends on less than one hand. Life was easier that way.

Making a beeline for the spot where she’d last seen Lou, Annie saw the top of her friend’s blond head, damp hair piled haphazardly on top, soggy tendrils hanging down her neck. Lou hadn’t moved from beneath a real ale poster, where she was locked in conversation with a subeditor Annie couldn’t put a name to and one of the senior reporters, Colin Green.

“I mean, it’s obvious, isn’t it?” Green was saying. “The woman’s got a Messiah complex. It’s never just a story to her, oh no. She’s got to save everybody. I mean what’s with that?”

“Shhhh! For God’s sake, someone will hear you.” The voice was Lou’s, but Colin Green continued.

“She’s bottled it,” he said. “One tough story, one job that doesn’t go according to plan, and she’s out of here.”

The subeditor was nodding fervently in agreement.

Annie froze. The noise, the chatter, the laughter, the knackered old jukebox playing “Dancing Queen” all swirling to a halt around her.

“Going into fashion?” Green said. “I ask you. The woman’s meant to be an award-winning journalist. What’s she going to investigate there? Skirt lengths?”

“Oi!” Lou’s familiar voice said. “What’s wrong with fashion?”

Standing motionless in the crowd behind them, Annie heard the sub snort derisively and slam what sounded like an empty pint glass down on the windowsill next to him, but Lou persevered.

“You’re just jealous,” Lou said to Colin. “Because Annie broke that Kings Cross story when you couldn’t even get close. You think it was easy befriending those kids, listening night after night to tales of abuse while putting herself in danger at the same time. And then when that girl died . . . well, you can’t blame Annie if she needs a break. She deserves one.”

Annie wanted to scream, I’m not cracking up. I fancy a change, that’s all. Deal with it! She knew she shouldn’t give a toss what they thought, but it still galled her. Christ, even her best friend on the paper thought she was copping out, and Lou worked in fashion.

Unable to bear another word, Annie glanced around to make sure no one had been watching her watching them and crept away. But by the time she’d fought her way to the pile of damp coats by the door, her resolve had hardened and she kept going, heading downstairs toward the ladies for some long-overdue face repair.

Let no one say Annie Anderson had lost her nerve.

chapter two “Dumbass!” shouted the man. “You wanna get yourself killed, lady?”

Annie threw herself sideways, narrowly avoiding being kneecapped by a battered yellow taxi, and stepped straight into her umpteenth puddle of slush that evening.

Lexington Avenue was heaving. New Yorkers spilled off the sidewalk into the bumper-to-bumper traffic, filling the February night air with a cacophony of excited babble accompanied by blaring horns and cursing taxi drivers.

“Bloody groupies,” Annie muttered as she picked herself up and pushed through the jostling fashion students, paparazzi, and “standing-onlies” forced to queue in the icy temperatures outside. “Anyone would think it was a rock concert, not a fashion show.”

She was late, she was cold, and, worst of all, she was spattered with slush from head to toe. When Annie had tried to hail a taxi on the corner of West Broadway and Grand Street, the driver’s response had been to accelerate through the nearest sludge-filled pothole, spraying her coat and boots. As she’d stood there, debating whether to go back to her hotel to change and be even later than she already was, a group of guys hanging on the sidewalk had actually laughed. Not just sniggered, roared.

“Welcome to Noo Yoik!” one of them yelled.

She yelled back, but nothing she could have repeated in front of her gran.

That was forty-five minutes earlier, before she started the toe-numbing thirty-eight-block trudge to Lexington and 26th Street. If this was her new life, they could keep it.

Annie wanted to weep. She’d been in her new job barely a fortnight and in Manhattan, to cover next season’s autumn/winter shows, less than four hours. Four disastrous hours notable only for the delayed flight, mislaid hotel reservation, no-show taxi, and knee-high sludge that had conspired to make her miss every appointment so far. And now she was late for her most important appointment of all. Thirty-five minutes late to meet up with her new boss, Rebecca Brooks, the one person she really had to impress.

Whipping off a woolen beanie hat that broke every style law in the book, Annie stuffed it into her enormous shoulder bag in the vain hope that no one would notice and scanned the crowd in the Armory’s entrance hall, praying not to see anyone she knew. Not that anyone of note knew her. The initial announcement of her appointment as fashion features editor of Handbag, at the age of twenty-eight, had been greeted by the fash pack with a derisory chorus of “Who?” and then instantly forgotten. Annie grinned. She couldn’t help but be amused that they regarded newspapers with precisely the same contempt the national press held for them.

“ID,” demanded an immaculately groomed blonde at the entrance desk, one of an army of black-clad staff murmuring darkly into headsets and wielding clipboards. Annie handed over her passport to be checked against her ticket and her ticket to be checked against the guest list.

So much for my fifteen minutes, she thought grimly, glancing nervously at her watch. More like fifteen seconds if I carry on like this.

“You can go in.”

The blonde nodded curtly and handed back Annie’s passport, giving her a none-too-friendly once-over as she did so. One that said, They let you work on Handbag?

Annie suppressed a shudder. Now she knew what Lou had meant by “that fashion feeling.” Practically the last piece of advice Lou had given Annie before she left the Post was that the plummeting sensation in Annie’s stomach would become her constant companion throughout the shows, as comparisons with the glossy women around her found her wanting.

“You’ll get used to it,” Lou had said. “Just remember, half of us feel precisely the same way. The other half aren’t worth bothering about.”

Annie tried to see herself as the blond PR saw her. The weather was not what you’d call “fashion-friendly.” Subfreezing temperatures, compacted snow, and slow-thawing drifts had been trampled into mushy gray by a constant procession of tires and boots. By the time Annie had completed the obstacle course from terminal one at JFK to downtown Manhattan and then convinced the Donna Karan–clad receptionist at the Soho Grand that she did indeed have a reservation, there’d been no time to transform herself into Annie Anderson, Fashion Editor.

So her new season’s wardrobe, the result of a bank-balance-busting trolley dash around Selfridges, had remained crumpled in her trolley dolly suitcase, where it had been for the best part of eighteen hours while Annie did a speed-of-light change. Off came the black rollneck she’d worn to fly, on went a finer, cleaner version. Annie just hoped her favorite Gina boots—spike-heeled, leopard-skin, full-on sex kitten—would carry her jeans through one more night. The very same boots whose eye-catching leopard-skin print was now invisible under a sodden layer of gray goo.





A barrage of noise assailed Annie as she stepped through the main doors. She adjusted her eyes to the darkness that shrouded the outer edges of the enormous room and began maneuvering her way through the crowd, her bag catching people’s legs as she went, earning her irritated glances.

Firetrap, Annie thought, instinctively scanning the area for exits, then cursed her mother for her sensible streak and cursed herself for thinking of her mother.

Despite the sheer weight of numbers, it was freezing inside the cavernous space that formed the hub of the old Armory, a huge, echoing chamber with arced ceilings some thirty feet high. Heating in here, had anyone bothered to try, wouldn’t have stood a chance. By now, though, Annie’s gaze had fallen on the dazzling centerpiece. Running practically the full length of the room, flanked on both sides by a bank of galvanized steel bleachers eight rows deep, stood the point of it all: the runway. With a seventy-foot river of industrial-strength plastic protecting the pristine white catwalk beneath, it almost seemed to ripple under the intense glare of a hundred spotlights set on rails attached to the ceiling high above.

Despite herself, Annie held her breath.

For a moment she stood transfixed, not quite believing she was here. The school swat from Basingstoke was in fashion, and not just in fashion but at the very heart of it, the epicenter of an industry that had held a guilty fascination for Annie ever since she was a tiny girl watching her sister put Sindy through her paces on the floor of a bedroom they shared in her family’s semi.

Annie’s reverie was shattered by the abrupt realization that she wouldn’t be “in fashion” for much longer if she didn’t find her new boss and grovel. But where to start? Stunned and not a little intimidated by the studied hipness surrounding her, Annie searched the sea of vaguely familiar faces for anyone who would glance in her direction long enough for Annie to ask about Rebecca Brooks.

The Armory was literally heaving with the great and the good of the industry. Everyone who was anyone in fashion and media—and quite a few who weren’t—had turned out for New York Fashion Week’s hottest ticket, that hip downtown designer beloved of indie actresses and just about everyone else, Marc Jacobs. They moved around the plastic-shrouded runway, waving and air-kissing, scarcely touching and rarely stopping to do more than exchange pleasantries and price each other’s outfits in the space of time it took mere mortals to blink. Magazine executives, fashion editors, buyers and celebrities, models, rock stars, stylists, and photographers, performing an intricate dance of see-and-be-seen to which it seemed everyone knew the steps but her.

“Annie! There you are! Where have you been?”

Having just spotted Liv Tyler chatting to Sofia Coppola a few seats down from A-list but just-indie-enough actress Miranda Lawson and her magazine-magnate boyfriend Robert Dellavecchia, Annie didn’t see her editor until it was too late. The voice was piercing, perfectly pitched so anyone tuned to fashion frequency would hear.

And sure enough, at the sound of it, every head in the immediate vicinity turned to see who had dared to keep Rebecca Brooks waiting.

“I’ve been worried,” Rebecca added, as Annie picked her way across the catwalk, taking care not to snag the heavy-duty PVC with her spike heels. But Rebecca’s expression said otherwise.

Rebecca’s expression said, Where the bloody hell have you been?

It said, You work on Handbag now, so start behaving like it.

What it definitely did not say was, You poor girl, you must be dying for a hot bath and an early night.

“Sorry,” Annie muttered, “my plane . . .”

Running a perfectly manicured hand through tastefully highlighted, shoulder-length hair, Rebecca dismissed the agonies of Annie’s last four hours in an instant. “You should have taken a taxi.”

She had a point, thought Annie; if Rebecca had been in Annie’s boots none of this would have been permitted to happen. The plane would never have dared to be late, the traffic on the Van Wyck Expressway would have parted like the Red Sea, and the concierge would have had her check-in complete before she’d finished wafting through the hotel’s revolving doors. As for the taxi, any taxi driver stupid enough to splash Rebecca Brooks’s brand-new Marc Jacobs trench and waiting-list-only shoes would never live to tell the tale.

“Anyway, never mind that,” said Rebecca. “I’d better take you backstage after the show now. See if you can pick up some gossip on Mark Mailer. You’ll need all the ammunition you can get before your interview with him. He’s notoriously secretive.”

Excitement roiled in Annie’s stomach, reminding her that she hadn’t eaten anything that wasn’t plastic since yesterday, and according to her body clock it was now tomorrow.

“I’ll get what I need,” said Annie.

“You’d better,” Rebecca replied. “We can’t afford to mess this up.”

Media reviews

Advance praise for Fashion Victim

“A fun, pacy, and addictive read.”
–Anna Maxted, author of Getting Over It

“Sam Baker’s novel will give readers an exclusive look into the glamorous world of fashion magazines–and keep them on the edge of their (front-row) seats.”
–Kate White, author of If Looks Could Kill

“Very funny, great escapism, and offering a genuinely fascinating insight into the world of fashion, but with murders thrown in to make it exciting. I really loved it!”
–Emily Barr, author of Backpack and Cuban Heels