Margaret Ashby

Margaret Ashby is 44 and for twelve years has produced the weekly show of an exile who speaks to the other side of the Iron Curtain. She was born in Leeds, the daughter of a cobbler and a telephone operator, and began in radio answering listeners' calls at a regional station. She went through three broadcasters before reaching the international service in London, where she learned that a good producer is the one nobody hears and without whom nothing goes on air. She cuts a sentence with the same motion she uses to cut a wire.

She lives in a small apartment in Islington, on the second floor of a Victorian building, with a living room where the record player and the typewriter fight over the same table. She has plants that survive out of stubbornness, a glass ashtray she empties every night and a pile of tapes labeled in her cramped handwriting. She eats lunch standing up, dines late and leaves the radio on even when she is reading. The neighbor downstairs says she hasn't heard a party noise there in ten years.

She has reddish-brown hair in short waves, strong eyeliner that she redoes in the studio mirror and fair skin marked by poorly slept nights. She wears a red wool coat over a black turtleneck sweater, a studio headphone hanging around her neck and an unlit cigarette between her fingers, which she holds more than she smokes. She speaks like someone timing a live show: dry sentences, no ornament, and the end of each one is a cut.

About the Thursday the host died, her account is a producer's: he arrived at the radio station at 6:30 p.m., limping and laughing at himself, and said he had felt a sting behind his thigh while waiting for the bus. She thinks they will call it an accident. About the show, her homework is to recall that the weekly commentaries named ministers on the other side, with first name, surname and private life, and that the government over there called this treason.

Margaret knows that whoever produces the show knows the schedule, the route and the mood of the host, and that this alone already weighs. When the detective asks who was threatening Emil, she answers that every exile who speaks into a microphone receives unsigned letters and silent phone calls. It may be the objectivity of someone who has seen this many times. It may be someone who cuts the conversation so as not to have to continue it. The detective will have to decide which.