“Sunday in New York” is ultimately a story about trust, and what happens when a marriage is stretched to its limits.
When Harry Steele attends a lunch with his manager, Barclay, to discuss a promotion that any junior executive would accept in a heartbeat, it is the fact his wife, Alison, who previously professed her reservations about Barclay, also agreed to attend, that casts a small element of doubt in his mind.
From that moment, his life, in the company, in deciding what to do, his marriage, his very life, spirals out of control.
There is no one big factor that can prove Harry’s worst fears, that his marriage is over, just a number of small, interconnecting events, when piled on top of each other, points to a cataclysmic end to everything he had believed in.
Trust is lost firstly in his best friend and mentor, Andy, who only hints of impending disaster, Sasha, a woman whom he saved, and who appears to have motives of her own, and then in his wife, Alison, as he discovered piece by piece damning evidence she is about to leave him for another man.
Can we trust what we see with our eyes or trust what we hear?
Haven’t we all jumped to conclusions at least once in our lives?
Can Alison, a woman whose self-belief and confidence is about to be put to the ultimate test, find a way of proving their relationship is as strong as it has ever been?
I reviewed the CCTV tapes and worked out who the countess’s bodyguards were in the hotel, and remarkably traced them leaving the hotel by the back entrance, passing only one camera, one I suspect they didn’t know was there. The reason, it did not belong to the hotel but the owner of the building behind the hotel.
They did not leave with the countess, so the question was, why?
I called the office and asked them to do facial recognition on the two, and then trace their movements, and if they left the country by conventional means.
There was no sign of anyone leaving before or after them. Not for two hours on either side of their departure time. It was another lead, which might lead nowhere.
I called Cecilia to ask her how her investigation into Vittoria was going. She didn’t answer, so I sent her a text message arranging to have coffee at a French Pastry café near where I believed I would find Juliet.
I was still working out how I was going to bump into her.
The auditorium was off the Strand near Charing Cross station not far from the Victoria Embankment Gardens, and of course, a French Pastry café in Charing Cross Road I found quite by accident when looking for Foyles Bookshop.
I was still working on that plan when I stopped to have a coffee and a Mille Feuille.
The best idea is just to go and see if she is there and talk to her. I doubt that she would believe that I just happened to be in the same place at the same time, and perhaps if I just told her the truth…
Whatever approach I made; it was going to be a surprise.
I stood outside the building for a few minutes, thinking if I waited, she might just turn up but she didn’t. If anything, she would be inside, setting up for the following day.
Enough prevaricating, I couldn’t wait any longer. I crossed the road and went in. I hoped that it catered for visitors. At the front desk, I asked whether the organiser of the session that was running in one of the lecture rooms was available, I was attending and had some questions, and she directed me to the hall.
When I entered the room I saw her standing on the dais, fiddling with a control that was in the process of displaying slides on the screen behind her. She looked different to when I last saw her, and I couldn’t help but notice she had a presence about her, even if she was flustered.
Then she must have sensed someone had entered the room and looked up. She recognised me immediately.
“Evan? Is that you?”
“It is.”
I walked down the steps and stopped just short of the dais.
“What are you doing here?”
Good question. I was still not prepared for this moment.
“I read in the paper you were leading a discussion on your pet subject of car accident victim’s trauma, where it was, and I didn’t feel we ended things back in Venice very well. I was surprised to learn you were in London, and I was at a loose end.”
She looked me up and down with a curious eye.
“Someone I don’t think that’s, exactly true Evan. I was told, in a roundabout way, that you were responsible for getting my brother out of the fix he was in, and coincidentally solved my problem too. He was a rather creepy little man who was acting strangely. Please, sit down.”
She crossed to the front row of seats, chose one and sat. I sat two seats away.
“Yes, he needs to work on his people skills.”
“Then you are not who you purport to be. Are you still living in Venice?”
“No. There is nothing to keep me there. I have a place here. For the time being.”
“Are you working?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“Does it involve me?”
“Why would you think that?”
“I have been involved in several shall we say enterprises because of circumstances, all of which I have tried to put in the past. I am not that person anymore, and thankfully some of the ghosts are just that. You and I though, I’m not sure what we are? Would you like to buy me dinner and talk about it?”
Was it an invitation I couldn’t refuse?
“Can you drag yourself away from this?”
“I have a computer guru. I’ll call him and ask him to make it work. You can tell me what you’re up to, and why you need my help. I’m assuming that’s why you’re here?”
Yes, we have to go way back in time to the days when Charles Dickens and other classic English writers wrote their stories in episodes, and yes, they had to have a cliff-hanger ending for each so the readers would be back to read the next instalment.
It was a novel way to get people to buy newspapers.
It was also a chance for the writers to get income by publishing a weekly instalment in either the newspapers or magazines.
Of course, at that time, a lot of people couldn’t read or write, so there was a large percentage of the population missing out.
Imagine my dismay when I decided to write my stories in episodes and publish them in my blog, thinking it was a really great idea, and then discovering the idea had been around for hundreds of years.
Mine were, and are, a little more erratic, sometimes each day, but other times a week apart. Sometimes it’s difficult to write continuously like that, and three or four different stories. If you want to read some, they are the stories I called ‘The Cinema of my Dreams’, and there’s one about an interlude in WW2, one about a rescue in Africa, one about a Treasure Hunt, one about an aspiring spy, one that starts in Venice, and one in outer space
Imagine what Charles Dickens would have thought of having the internet to publish his stories. He’d get more readers than for all of his novels, whether published in book form or episodes, in his lifetime.
And, of course, when the books were published, it wasn’t just one copy for the whole story; it was published in three, four or more volumes.
Of course, the movie moguls couldn’t let a good idea get past them either, and started making serials in episodes, each with a cliff-hanger ending to run before the main feature, thinking they would get the fans hooked into coming every week.
Notable heroes who turned up in Hollywood serials were Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, Zorro, and the Green Hornet, nearly all of comic book fame.
Day 120 – How can a writer be compared to a magician
…
The Art of the Illusion: Why Every Writer is a Magician
We’ve all had that experience: you open a book, and suddenly, the room around you vanishes. You aren’t looking at ink on paper or pixels on a screen anymore; you are inside a character’s mind, feeling their heartbeat, smelling the rain on a distant street, and racing toward a conclusion you didn’t see coming.
When a story works, it feels like magic. But as any professional magician will tell you, the more effortless a trick looks, the more gruelling the preparation behind the curtain was.
The legendary Toni Morrison once perfectly captured this tension:
“[Handle writing] so the reader is only aware of the rabbit that comes out of the hat, and doesn’t see the false bottom—that’s where the hard work is.”
As writers, we are the magicians of the page. Here is why writing is the ultimate sleight of hand, and why hiding the “false bottom” is the most important part of the craft.
The Rabbit: The Seamless Experience
In Morrison’s metaphor, the “rabbit” is the finished story. It’s the emotional payoff, the sharp dialogue, and the plot twist that leaves the reader breathless.
When a reader picks up a book, they don’t want to see the writer’s struggle. They don’t want to notice the clunky sentence that took four hours to fix or the structural gap that required a total rewrite of Chapter Three. They want the wonder. They want the rabbit to appear out of thin air, vibrant and alive.
If the reader starts thinking about the writer’s technique while they are reading, the spell is broken. The “rabbit” becomes just a prop, and the magic fades.
The False Bottom: The Mechanics of Craft
The “false bottom” is everything that happens before the reader ever turns page one. It is the invisible infrastructure of a story. This includes:
Structural Scaffolding: Building a plot that feels inevitable but not predictable.
The “Ugly” First Draft: Chasing ideas through a mess of bad metaphors and inconsistent pacing.
The Editing Grind: Removing every “very” and “suddenly,” killing your darlings, and refining the rhythm of a sentence until it sings.
Research: Knowing ten times more about a subject than what actually makes it into the book, just to ensure the world feels sturdy.
This is where the “hard work” Morrison mentions resides. It’s the sweat, the frustration, and the endless hours of refinement. It is the mechanical, often tedious labour required to create an object that looks like it was born, not made.
Why We Hide the Work
You might ask: If I worked so hard on this, why shouldn’t I let the reader see it?
In magic, if the audience sees the trapdoor, the wonder is replaced by logic. They stop feeling and start calculating. Writing is the same. To evoke a true emotional response, the mechanics must remain invisible.
We hide the “false bottom” because we want the reader to believe in the reality of the world we’ve built. We want them to believe the characters are making choices of their own free will, not because a writer is pulling their strings from behind a curtain.
Embracing the Invisible Labour
If you are a writer currently struggling with a difficult chapter or a plot hole that won’t close, remember Morrison’s words. The fact that it feels hard doesn’t mean you’re failing; it means you’re building the false bottom.
The goal isn’t to write something that is easy; it’s to write something that feels easy.
Next time you produce a piece of prose that flows so naturally it feels like it wrote itself, take a moment to look back at the “false bottom” you spent weeks constructing. The reader may never see it, but they will feel the magic it allows to happen.
After all, the best magic tricks aren’t about the rabbit—they’re about the secret the magician keeps to make the world feel a little more wondrous.
What happens when your past finally catches up with you?
…
Christmas is just around the corner, a time to be with family. For Will Mason, an orphan since he was fourteen, it is a time for reflection on what his life could have been, and what it could be.
Until a chance encounter brings back to life the reasons for his twenty years of self-imposed exile from a life only normal people could have. From that moment, Will’s life slowly starts to unravel, and it’s obvious to him that it’s time to move on.
This time, however, there is more at stake.
Will has broken his number one rule: don’t get involved.
With his nemesis, Eddie Jamieson, suddenly within reach, and a blossoming relationship with an office colleague, Maria, about to change everything, Will has to make a choice. Quietly leave, or finally, make a stand.
But as Will soon discovers, when other people are involved there is going to be terrible consequences no matter what choice he makes.
There’s something to be said for a story that starts like a James Bond movie, throwing you straight in the deep end, a perfect way of getting to know the main character, David, or is that Alistair?
A retired spy, well, not so much a spy as a retired errand boy, David’s rather wry description of his talents, and a woman that most men would give their left arm for, not exactly the ideal couple, but there is a spark in a meeting that may or may not have been a setup.
But as the story progressed, the question I kept asking myself was why he’d bother.
And, page after unrelenting page, you find out.
Susan is exactly the sort of woman to pique his interest. Then, inexplicably, she disappears. That might have been the end of it, but Prendergast, that shadowy enigma, David’s ex-boss who loves playing games with real people, gives him an ultimatum: find her or come back to work.
Nothing like an offer that’s a double-edged sword!
A dragon for a mother, a sister he didn’t know about, Susan’s BFF who is not what she seems or a friend indeed, and Susan’s father, who, up till David meets her, couldn’t be less interested, his nemesis proves to be the impossible dream, and he’s always just that one step behind.
When the rollercoaster finally came to a halt, and I could start breathing again, it was an ending that was completely unexpected.
Day 120 – How can a writer be compared to a magician
…
The Art of the Illusion: Why Every Writer is a Magician
We’ve all had that experience: you open a book, and suddenly, the room around you vanishes. You aren’t looking at ink on paper or pixels on a screen anymore; you are inside a character’s mind, feeling their heartbeat, smelling the rain on a distant street, and racing toward a conclusion you didn’t see coming.
When a story works, it feels like magic. But as any professional magician will tell you, the more effortless a trick looks, the more gruelling the preparation behind the curtain was.
The legendary Toni Morrison once perfectly captured this tension:
“[Handle writing] so the reader is only aware of the rabbit that comes out of the hat, and doesn’t see the false bottom—that’s where the hard work is.”
As writers, we are the magicians of the page. Here is why writing is the ultimate sleight of hand, and why hiding the “false bottom” is the most important part of the craft.
The Rabbit: The Seamless Experience
In Morrison’s metaphor, the “rabbit” is the finished story. It’s the emotional payoff, the sharp dialogue, and the plot twist that leaves the reader breathless.
When a reader picks up a book, they don’t want to see the writer’s struggle. They don’t want to notice the clunky sentence that took four hours to fix or the structural gap that required a total rewrite of Chapter Three. They want the wonder. They want the rabbit to appear out of thin air, vibrant and alive.
If the reader starts thinking about the writer’s technique while they are reading, the spell is broken. The “rabbit” becomes just a prop, and the magic fades.
The False Bottom: The Mechanics of Craft
The “false bottom” is everything that happens before the reader ever turns page one. It is the invisible infrastructure of a story. This includes:
Structural Scaffolding: Building a plot that feels inevitable but not predictable.
The “Ugly” First Draft: Chasing ideas through a mess of bad metaphors and inconsistent pacing.
The Editing Grind: Removing every “very” and “suddenly,” killing your darlings, and refining the rhythm of a sentence until it sings.
Research: Knowing ten times more about a subject than what actually makes it into the book, just to ensure the world feels sturdy.
This is where the “hard work” Morrison mentions resides. It’s the sweat, the frustration, and the endless hours of refinement. It is the mechanical, often tedious labour required to create an object that looks like it was born, not made.
Why We Hide the Work
You might ask: If I worked so hard on this, why shouldn’t I let the reader see it?
In magic, if the audience sees the trapdoor, the wonder is replaced by logic. They stop feeling and start calculating. Writing is the same. To evoke a true emotional response, the mechanics must remain invisible.
We hide the “false bottom” because we want the reader to believe in the reality of the world we’ve built. We want them to believe the characters are making choices of their own free will, not because a writer is pulling their strings from behind a curtain.
Embracing the Invisible Labour
If you are a writer currently struggling with a difficult chapter or a plot hole that won’t close, remember Morrison’s words. The fact that it feels hard doesn’t mean you’re failing; it means you’re building the false bottom.
The goal isn’t to write something that is easy; it’s to write something that feels easy.
Next time you produce a piece of prose that flows so naturally it feels like it wrote itself, take a moment to look back at the “false bottom” you spent weeks constructing. The reader may never see it, but they will feel the magic it allows to happen.
After all, the best magic tricks aren’t about the rabbit—they’re about the secret the magician keeps to make the world feel a little more wondrous.
It’s still a battle of wits, but our hero knows he’s in serious trouble.
The problem is, there are familiar faces and a question of who is a friend and who is foe made all the more difficult because the enemy if it is the enemy, doesn’t look or sound or act like the enemy.
Old friends, new tricks.
Genial tone, trying to win my confidence. I wasn’t going to ask, but wait for an explanation. Asking would be like leaving the door ajar.
He sat after pulling the chair closer to the table and put his clasped hands on the table.
“This is a secret military operation known only to very few, apart from the team that is in situ. Commander Breeman has been, against very specific direct orders, trying to find out what we are doing here.” He stopped.
I think this was the moment I was supposed to ask, what was going on here.
If it was secret, then I didn’t want to know, and he was not going to tell me anyway.
I just looked attentive.
“You have been caught up in a jurisdictional issue. It’s not hard to assume that you were sent here, with the pilot of that helicopter, to do an off the book search for this camp. That, in itself, would be impossible, but the flyover coincided with a provedore run. Just plain bad luck.”
For Joe, the pilot, it was. Or not, if he had been given specific verbal orders, making it out to be a training run. And the odds of me being on board at the same time, given my association with Breeman?
One coincidence too many.
And if it was as the man before had said, they knew everything, then Bamfield would know of my connection to her.
“You said you had no idea where you were when you were shot down?”
Time, I guess, to speak. “No, I didn’t. The desert looks all the same to me.”
“You will forgive me if I say I find that hard to believe. I know you are better than that, Alan. Who sent you out here?”
“I was along for the ride. Standard operating procedure. A helo goes up, someone like me has to be on board in case of trouble. More conventional trouble than rockets.”
“But you specifically?”
“I don’t make the rosters, I just go where they tell me.”
Bamfield frowned. I think he’d finally noticed I was not addressing him as ‘sir’. Until I knew what side he was on, I considered myself a prisoner of war.
50 photographs, 50 stories, of which there is one of the 50 below.
They all start with –
A picture paints … well, as many words as you like. For instance:
And, the story:
Have you ever watched your hopes and dreams simply fly away?
Everything I thought I wanted and needed had just left in an aeroplane, and although I said I was not going to, I came to the airport to see the plane leave. Not the person on it, that would have been far too difficult and emotional, but perhaps it was symbolic, the end of one life and the start of another.
But no matter what I thought or felt, we had both come to the right decision. She needed the opportunity to spread her wings. It was probably not the best idea for her to apply for the job without telling me, but I understood her reasons.
She was in a rut. Though her job was a very good one, it was not as demanding as she had expected, particularly after the last promotion, but with it came resentment from others on her level that she, the youngest of the group, would get the position.
It was something that had been weighing her down for the last three months, and if she noticed it, the late nights, the moodiness, sometimes a flash of temper. I knew she had one; no one could have such red hair and not, but she had always kept it in check.
And then there was us, together, and after seven years, it felt like we were going nowhere. Perhaps that was down to my lack of ambition, and though she never said it, lack of sophistication. It hadn’t been an issue, well, not until her last promotion, and the fact that she had to entertain more, and frankly, I felt like an embarrassment to her.
So, there it was, three days ago, the beginning of the weekend, and we had planned to go away for a few days and take stock. We both acknowledged we needed to talk, but it never seemed the right time.
It was then that she said she had quit her job and found a new one. Starting the following Monday.
Ok, that took me by surprise, not so much that it was something I sort of guessed might happen, but that she would just blurt it out.
I think that right then, at that moment, I could feel her frustration with everything around her.
What surprised her was my reaction. None.
I simply asked who, where, and when.
A world-class newspaper in New York, and she had to be there in a week.
A week.
It was all the time I had left with her.
I remember just shrugging and asking if the planned weekend away was off.
She stood on the other side of the kitchen counter, hands around a cup of coffee she had just poured, and that one thing I remembered was the lone tear that ran down her cheek.
Is that all you want to know?
I did, yes, but we had lost the intimacy we used to have, where she would have told me what was happening, and we would have brainstormed solutions. I might be a cabinet maker, but I still had a brain, was what I overheard her tell a friend once.
There’s not much to ask, I said. You’ve been desperately unhappy and haven’t been able to hide it all that well, you have been under a lot of pressure trying to deal with a group of troglodytes, and you’ve been leaning on Bentley’s shoulder instead of mine, and I get it, he’s got more experience in that place, and the politics that go with it, and is still an ally.
Her immediate superior was instrumental in her getting the position, but unlike some men in his position, he had not taken advantage of the situation like some might. And even if she had made a move, which I doubted, that was not the sort of woman she was, he would have politely declined.
One of the very few happily married men in that organisation, so I heard.
So, she said, you’re not just a pretty face.
Par for the course for a cabinet maker whose university degree is in psychology. It doesn’t take rocket science to see what was happening to you. I just didn’t think it was my place to jump in unless you asked me, and when you didn’t, well, that told me everything I needed to know.
Yes, our relationship had a use-by date, and it was in the next few days.
I was thinking, she said, that you might come with me; you can make cabinets anywhere.
I could, but I think the real problem wasn’t just the job. It was everything around her and going with her that would just be a constant reminder of what had been holding her back. I didn’t want that for her and said so.
Then the only question left was, what do we do now?
Go shopping for suitcases. Bags to pack, and places to go.
Getting on the roller coaster is easy. At the beginning, it’s a slow, easy ride, followed by the slow climb to the top. It’s much like some relationships; they start out easy, they require a little work to get to the next level, followed by the adrenaline rush when it all comes together.
What most people forget is that what comes down must go back up, and life is pretty much a roller coaster with highs and lows.
Our roller coaster had just come out of the final turn, and we were braking so that it would stop at the station.
There was no question of going with her to New York. Yes, I promised I’d come over and visit her, but that was a promise with crossed fingers behind my back. After a few months in the new job, the last thing she’d want was a reminder of what she left behind. New friends, new life.
We packed her bags, threw out everything she didn’t want, a free trip to the op shop with stuff she knew others would like to have, and basically, by the time she was ready to go, there was nothing left of her in the apartment, or anywhere.
Her friends would be seeing her off at the airport, and that’s when I told her I was not coming; that moment, the taxi arrived to take her away forever. I remember standing there, watching the taxi go. It was going to be, and was, as hard as it was to watch the plane leave.
So, there I was, finally staring at the blank sky, around me a dozen other plane spotters, a rather motley crew of plane enthusiasts.
Already that morning, there had been 6 different types of planes departing, and I could hear another winding up its engines for take-off.
People coming, people going.
Maybe I would go to New York in a couple of months, not to see her, but just to see what the attraction was. Or maybe I would drop in, just to see how she was.
As one of my friends told me when I gave him the news, the future is never written in stone, and it’s about time you broadened your horizons.
Alessandro had his hand on the door handle, the door open, and about to walk out.
“You have to be kidding?”
“I’m not. Their instructions are to drag you out of her with maximum exposure. I did inform several media outlets that there was likely to be a high-profile arrest at this hotel this morning, so it will hit the internet very soon after.”
“There are rules…”
“I don’t play by the rules when dealing with liars, Alessandro. Your last chance to get out of this with some dignity, otherwise it’s out of my control.”
Of course, the number one rule I’d broken was not to play bluff with men like Alessandro because if he called it, I’d be in so deep it would take a week to dig myself out of the shit pile Rodby would throw me in. This was exactly the rogue behaviour he hated.
Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad if Alessandro did, it would get Rodby off my back.
He stepped back in and let the door close.
This was a man who couldn’t afford a shit storm. And whatever it was he couldn’t tell me must have severe consequences.
“Heidi called me the morning of the day she went to the opera and told me she saw me with Vittoria in a newspaper, and said she had information about her, that she needed to see me in person.”
“Before that call, what did you know of Vittoria?”
“Not a lot. She had presented herself, whether it was a deliberate act on her part, or by accident, to me at the casino at Monte Carlo some weeks ago, at a function. She used a different name and looked different then. She said she had seen me in the media talking about one of the charities the family donates to and wanted to know more about it. We met a few times over dinner, but nothing intimate. She once again accidentally ran into me in London, and we had drinks. I perceived her to be trouble.”
“Where were you when she called?”
“In Vienna. I got on the first plane to London and got her about 10pm. I got to the hotel just before she arrived back from the opera. She said she had not expected to see me until the morning. We went up to her room, and she told me basically what you just told me about this Vittoria. I did not know about the daughter of the Count, nor do I think Heidi does.”
“Then what happened?”
“We went down to the bar and had a few drinks, because that news was quite shattering, and I needed a few to steady the nerves. I had yet to arrange a room, which I did when Heidi called it a night and went to her room. She did say she might have to leave early the following morning, but we would meet again at the legal office. That was the last I saw her. And until your fellow officers came to interview me, I did not, and still don’t believe she is missing.”
“Have you seen Vittoria in the last day or so?”
“Once the following morning, and only as she was leaving, very hurriedly I might add.”
“Did she say where she was going?”
“I didn’t ask, and by that time, I didn’t care. Do you know who this alleged daughter is?”
“Only that she has a daughter by the Count and had irrefutable proof. I would get your legal team prepared because it might become an issue because she might become the legal heir in the countess goes missing. After all the terms of the will state that the line of succession is wife, then children, with no specific codicil that the child be legitimate.”
“Which if you said is correct, and I will have it checked, that removes my motive.”
“Unless you are working with Vittoria and the child. You may not be, but appearances can be taken either way. I suggest that you make enquiries as to where the countess might be.”
He still might know, but I was beginning to think he didn’t. Nor did I believe he was working with Vittoria. He made his feelings for her quite clear.
But Vittoria, where did she go?
“Thank you finally for your cooperation. Next time anyone asks you a question, just answer it. Other investigators won’t be as lenient with you.”
Thrills, Spills, and just a dash of Romance 