Vesta - Painworld by Jennifer Jane Pope Page A

even more talented Sonia Hughes, who had succeeded him just after Paul and Lianne had finally managed to escape Naylor’s fiendish clutches and the even more fiendish attentions of his amazonian henchwoman.
    With a barely audible sigh Paul opened a drawer at random, picked out the first file his hand encountered and flipped it open. With a grin, he recognised the manuscript as one of the very first he had ever produced for Nadia. The story line had been developed, enacted by a willing cast that included Gavin, Hazel and a couple of other girls who were no longer involved - it would still be another two and a half years before Lianne had become part of the team - photographed from all angles and videoed too, by Simon Prescott, and the final panels produced with meticulous care by Naylor.
    The very first Della de Linkwent cartoon strip; probably a collector’s piece by now, Paul realised, especially in its original artwork form. Not that he had the original artwork. All of that was kept carefully under lock and key in Nadia’s specially constructed vault in the cellar complex; each completed strip, once scanned for printing, sealed in its own fireproof box, inside a fireproof safe, inside a fireproof, bombproof vault of nine inch steel walls and outer jacket of two feet of reinforced concrete.
    â€˜This lot will be worth millions, some day,’ Nadia had once told him, confidently, but Paul knew such lavish security precautions were not there simply to protect the fruits of their combined creative genius. Nadia was very rich - very rich - and did not trust too much to banks. Not simply because they were liable to be robbed, because the average bank was more than secure enough in that respect nowadays, but because, in common with a lot of other incredibly wealthy people, she preferred not to share too much of her fortune with the taxman. And in that way, unless you kept a numbered account in Switzerland, banks were far less secure.
    Paul had occasionally tried to estimate what Nadia was really worth, but had given up the attempt each time, for to call her affairs complicated would have been doing them a grave injustice. He knew she had inherited this huge estate and that it had been in her family since the time of Cromwell, at least, and that there were other properties dotted around the country, including at least two hotels, an international shipping company, several magazines and a company that specialised in manufacturing everything from latex suits to pony girl tack; an astonishingly lucrative enterprise to a one time naive young writer.
    Nadia Muirhead was worth millions, and she was also generous to her friends and employees. Della de Linkwent and Mary Lou were a terrific commercial success, but Paul doubted whether the strip and its spin-off videos and Internet episodes made enough to justify the huge salaries that most of them now received.
    Of course, he could be wrong in that assumption, he supposed. After all, none of them ever had any dealings with the financial end of things, Nadia preferring to handle everything herself, closeted away with her team of three personal accountants for three or four days in every month. She never mentioned money directly and none of the elite team ever broached the subject themselves. Della de Linkwent and Mary Lou just were, and that was that.
    Closing the file, Paul replaced it in the drawer and slid it shut on noiseless, well lubricated runners. He wondered whether he would still be standing here in this room in another ten years time, or even five, for he had a dreadful suspicion that the computerised age was fast beginning to make creative writers redundant.
    Marlon’s bloody VESTA machine was probably only the tip of the iceberg, crazy though that might seem. Paul could remember his own first computer, a cumbersome black box with two floppy disc drives on the front and a total memory storage and processing ability that an average modern personal computer could