Silent Scream

by Lynda La Plante

  SILENT SCREAM

  Also by Lynda La Plante

  Deadly Intent

  Clean Cut

  The Red Dahlia

  Above Suspicion

  The Legacy

  The Talisman

  Bella Mafia

  Entwined

  Cold Shoulder

  Cold Blood

  Cold Heart

  Sleeping Cruelty

  Royal Flush

  Prime Suspect

  Seekers

  She’s Out

  The Governor

  The Governor II

  Trial and Retribution

  Trial and Retribution II

  Trial and Retribution III

  Trial and Retribution IV

  Trial and Retribution V

  SILENT SCREAM

  Lynda La Plante

  First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2009

  A CBS COMPANY

  Copyright © Lynda La Plante, 2009

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  ® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.

  The right of Lynda La Plante to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

  1st Floor

  222 Gray’s Inn Road

  London WC1X 8HB

  www.simonandschuster.co.uk

  Simon & Schuster Australia

  Sydney

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 9781847375452

  eBook ISBN: 9781847378095

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Typeset in Bembo MT by Rowland Phototypesetting Ltd, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Mackays, Chatham, ME5 8TD

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  To my sister Gilly Titchmarsh.

  Acknowledgements

  My gratitude to all those who gave their valuable time to help me with research on Silent Scream.

  Special thanks go to all my committed team at La Plante Productions: Liz Thorburn, Richard Dobbs, Noel Farragher, Sara Johnson, Hannah Gatward and in particular Cass Sutherland and Nicole Muldowney for their invaluable assistance and advice while working on this book. Many thanks also to Stephen Ross and Andrew Bennet-Smith.

  I give huge thanks to my literary agent, Gill Coleridge, and all at Rogers, Coleridge & White for their constant encouragement. I am also very grateful to my publishers, Ian Chapman and Suzanne Baboneau, and to everyone at Simon & Schuster. I am very happy to be working with such a terrific company.

  Chapter One

  The driver was not her usual one, but as the night filming had been completed ahead of schedule, she had been released from the set in West London earlier than expected. Amanda Delany didn’t mind though; all the unit drivers had become friends of the entire film company. The Mercedes drew up outside her mews house in Belgravia and she jumped out quickly. The driver made sure she was safely inside the house before he drove off. She liked that because the overhanging ivy around her front door made it possible for someone to hide there and she was cautious, although none of her fans knew her new address.

  Amanda loved the little house. She had only really been in residence eight weeks, but she had purchased it eighteen months ago. The renovations and the decoration had been completed before she had moved in, and it still had the lingering smells of new carpets and paint.

  She was tired, it was almost midnight, and she decided to go straight to bed, relieved that she wasn’t still filming until four in the morning – which was when the night shoot usually ended. Tomorrow she would be collected mid-afternoon. They were shooting in summer and it didn’t get dark until almost nine.

  Amanda took a quick shower and got into her bed, new like everything else in the mews house. This was the first place that she had owned, the first time she had lived on her own, without flatmates or boyfriends. She had changed partners almost as frequently as she had filming commitments, which made perfect fodder for the tabloids. Her lovers had invariably been her co-stars and, although she was still only twenty-four years old, Amanda had broken up two marriages. Her last affair, with a famous movie star, had been very public. Amanda was one of a clutch of young, very beautiful actresses about to break into the big time, and her agent had warned her to curb her sexual exploits, or risk damaging her blossoming career.

  She fell deeply asleep straight away but woke up an hour later. For a few moments she was disorientated and reached for the clock on her bedside table, wondering if she had inadvertently set the alarm. Night filming was always difficult to adjust to, and often she found it hard working through the night and catching up on sleep during the day. Had there been a change of schedule? Had it been the telephone that had woken her? Amanda threw back the duvet and went to the window to look into the mews courtyard, but it was empty.

  Back in bed, she snuggled down, must have dropped off again, and then woke with a start. The scream was hideous, a scream of such agony and terror that her heart lurched with fear. She sat up listening, waiting for it to continue, waiting for something to happen. But nothing did. Terrified, she got up again to look from the window into the courtyard. She turned on the lights and went from the bedroom down the narrow hall. All was silent, and from her kitchen annexe downstairs she looked into the back garden, a small paved square with high walls surrounding it. She wondered if it was perhaps a wounded animal she’d heard.

  Returning to her bedroom, leaving all the lights on, she couldn’t stop hearing that terrible single scream echoing in her head. The more she thought about it, the more certain she was that it was a woman screaming. She recalled being cast as the victim of a serial killer in a movie that required her to scream, and when she couldn’t get the right pitch, they had brought in another actress who specialised in bloodcurdling screams. She remembered when she watched the finished film how chilling the moment had been.

  Eventually she went back to sleep, aided by two sleeping tablets. She didn’t wake until mid-morning and, brewing up fresh coffee, she wondered if it had simply been a nightmare that had woken her.

  She spent the rest of the day learning her lines in preparation for the night’s filming. Her usual driver collected her mid-afternoon to take her to the set for make-up and hair. He apologised for not being available the previous evening.

  ‘This weird thing happened last night,’ she said.

  ‘Who drove you?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, nothing to do with that. I was in bed and this terrible scream woke me up.’ She frowned and leaned forwards. ‘I don’t know if it was the screaming that woke me –
you know, if it had gone on before – but it was just one long terrible scream and it really scared me.’

  ‘Maybe it was a cat – or one o’ these urban foxes they go on about?’

  ‘No, no, it didn’t sound like either of those. At first, I thought it was maybe an animal but … I think it was a woman.’

  ‘Did you call the police?’

  ‘No, I didn’t because it all went quiet and I couldn’t see anyone outside or in the back garden. I just went back to bed.’

  In the make-up trailer, Amanda repeated the incident to her hairdresser. She told it over again to her make-up artist and it brought forth a slew of stories from the girls about nightmares and how hard it was, working nights, to get to sleep. She told the director about how frightened she had been. His response was to joke that it would probably help her performance. They were about to shoot a scene where she was to be confronted by the arch villain, who attempts to strangle her because he knows that she can identify him.

  The film was yet another version of Gaslight, a Victorian thriller in which a young wife is terrorised by her husband, intent on frightening her to death in order to claim her inheritance. The script had been adapted by a young writer who hoped, with the use of state-of-the-art special effects, to turn it into a successful killer chiller, its dark foreboding style in homage to Nosferatu and early silent horror films. The director, Julian Pike, was only twenty-seven and with just one successful art-house movie to his credit, so a lot depended on this much bigger-budget extravaganza.

  The filming went well, with only a few delays. They were shooting the exterior shots in a manmade cobbled street lit by gas lamps that backed onto a massive hangar where the main set, with its remarkable reconstruction of a Victorian house, was standing. Tonight they were filming the scene where Amanda, cast as the young wife, returns from the opera with her husband and alights from the carriage to enter their house, a mocked-up exterior with pillars and three steps leading to the front door. The door could be opened but led only onto a small platform inside, five feet off the ground. With only enough room for two people on the platform, it was decided that the maid would open the door and step back quickly. An assistant would help her down, leaving enough room for the two leading actors to sweep inside. It was such a simple shot, but they had to do take after take to get it right, and Pike was losing patience.

  In the next scene, Amanda is running from the house in terror. She crosses the road in an attempt to escape, tries to hail a horse-drawn Hansom cab and, failing to do so, is almost run over by a carriage. There were rain machines, and flash lighting to depict lightning; the sound of thunder would be laid on afterwards. As the fog, generated by smoke machines, became thicker, Amanda had to collide with the very man she was afraid of. Then she had to scream. Nothing went smoothly: the horses got skittish with the flash lighting; one take was ruined as the smoke machine made Amanda start coughing. There were altercations between Amanda and the uptight director. By now she was freezing cold.

  The costume department were having a hard time keeping the mud off Amanda’s dress, with its heavy hooped velvet skirt and boned corset, and the ringlets were dropping out of her wig. Amanda and the director then had yet another stand-up argument, both shouting at each other in front of the entire crew.

  When the time came for the close-up of Amanda screaming, she was in such a bad temper, the scream sounded more like one of anger than of terror. The director yelled at her to try and do the scream she’d heard the night before. Finally he called it quits for the night, even though he knew he hadn’t got the sound he wanted. He told Amanda to have a good night’s sleep; she would be wanted on set for the first shot of the day and he needed her in a better mood.

  Amanda, with her usual driver, did not get home until four-thirty the next morning. By this time, she was exhausted. The tight corset and heavy hooped skirt had given her backache, and she had a headache from trying to scream. She was also feeling chilled, as it had been so cold on set and the rain effects had soaked her through to the skin. She sat hunched in the back of the Mercedes on the drive home, saying little. Her driver had helped her from the car and walked her to her front door, making sure she was inside before he drove away. As he reversed, his headlights caught her opening her front door; she turned and waved to him. He was struck by her beauty. Tired as she was, with her make-up wiped off and her face pale, she had almost a translucent quality. She gave him the sweetest of smiles.

  The same unit driver returned later to collect her for the end of the night shoot. They would then, thankfully, have the weekend off before returning to the usual daily schedule. It had been a long hard shoot and a few more days remained before they wrapped. The driver rang the doorbell and returned to sit in the car. He waited ten minutes. Often she would keep him outside for even longer; he was used to giving her about twenty minutes. After half an hour, he called her landline and got the answer machine. When he called her mobile phone and she didn’t pick up, he rang the unit to say he was outside Amanda’s mews house but could not get any response.

  The make-up and hair departments were getting impatient. It took at least two hours to do make-up and fit the wig. Then the costume designer appeared, asking for Amanda. She was to wear a very elaborate gown that required not only a corset, but they would need to hand-stitch her into it. The first assistant joined them, hoping that Amanda might have driven herself, as they still had not made contact with her at her home.

  Julian Pike flew into a rage. He had a heavy schedule, but at least he would be able to start filming the only scene that did not require Amanda. Her driver was instructed to keep knocking on her door and, as the actors prepared to film the first scene, the production assistant called Amanda’s agent. Concerned, the latter said she would drive herself to the mews as she had a spare key.

  Two hours later, Amanda’s stunt double was dressed in her costume; the director had made the decision to shoot around any close-ups, so the filming could continue. He was heard to say that they would probably be better off without the ‘bitch’.

  The bitch was lying naked on her new bed. Her hands were tied and her legs spread out, and the blood from multiple stab wounds had stained the sheets in hideous thick pools. Her shocked agent stood frozen as she saw the awful tableau. It was obvious that Amanda Delany had been brutally murdered. Her beautiful face was unmarked, her eyes wide open.

  Chapter Two

  DI Anna Travis had just completed her day in court. The trial had been a long-drawn-out process, but she had held up strongly against a prominent defence team. The murder trial had made headlines; the woman accused of murdering her husband was from a titled family. Lady Melena Halesbury had claimed that she was an abused wife who had shot her husband in self-defence.

  Thanks to Anna’s diligent enquiries, her evidence had become a strong plank for the prosecution. The victim, Lord Anthony Halesbury, was suffering from Parkinson’s disease and at the time of the shooting he would have been incapable of the violent attack of which his wife accused him.

  The defence team had brought in numerous medical witnesses who claimed that physical abuse was possible. However, the star witness, produced by Anna, was the nurse who had been hired to care for the victim. Dilys Summers asserted that the victim’s right arm was virtually immobile and his hand suffered from the debilitating shakes. His wife would therefore not, as she claimed, have had to wrestle the weapon from him and in self-defence shoot him before he tried to choke her.

  Anna had instigated the search for the nurse, who had been relieved of duty two months before the incident. Anna had hunted down Nurse Summers and discovered that she and the victim had been lovers and, although Summers was no longer caring for her patient at his home, they had continued to meet secretly.

  Summers was able to describe Lord Halesbury’s disabilities because she had seen him the day before the shooting. Contrary to his wife’s statement, his illness had improved slightly, but he was still a very sick man.

  The pro
secution claimed that the motive for the shooting was because a divorce was imminent. The loss of her social standing and obvious wealth was enough to drive Lady Halesbury to kill. The jury took only three hours to bring in a guilty verdict.

  The DCI in charge of the case took Anna aside as they packed up the incident room. A big robust man, DCI Vince Mathews was ready to retire, everyone knew it; he was also an ‘old school’ cop and bore no resemblance to Anna’s former boss, DCS James Langton.

  Detective Chief Superintendent Langton was moving up the ranks fast, hungry as ever, based now at Scotland Yard. The Mathewses of the Metropolitan Police were becoming few and far between. Mathews was an old plodder with a big family, and due to his lack of initiative, Anna had done much of the legwork on their case. The team had all been aware of it, but they liked Mathews. He was there for them and always encouraging, even if he did like to get off home early every Friday.

  Mathews sat behind his untidy desk, sipping a coffee.

  ‘It was a good result today, Travis.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘A lot of it was down to you. The Met this year have ninety Chief Inspector posts coming up, and as you’re probably aware, each CID department is allowed to put forward a certain number of Inspectors. We’ve got about nine places allocated to the Homicide Command and the competition will be tough because there’ll be about a hundred officers applying.’

  Anna shifted her weight from one foot to the other, unsure if she was hearing correctly.

  ‘You’re putting me forward, sir?’

  ‘Correct.’ He opened a drawer and took out an application form, placing it in front of her.