by Peter James
He kissed her, then slowly fell into troubled sleep.
84
At 1.45 a.m. Anna Galicia walked along New Road, Brighton, across the street from the Theatre Royal, wearing a bomber jacket and jeans and a baseball cap pulled on tight against the blustery wind. She stopped by a low wall, screened by some shrubs, watching the activity in the Royal Pavilion grounds wind down for the night. Two police officers strode along the pavement and she turned her face away from them. There was a tantalizing smell of frying bacon coming from the catering truck that still appeared to be open.
A short while ago, burning with hatred, she had watched Gaia leave her swanky trailer and step up into the back of a black Range Rover. The car had swept out of the grounds in a presidential-style convoy of identical vehicles.
You don’t care about the environment really, do you, Gaia? Anna thought, her anger tinged with sadness. Your whole persona, your act – and even your bloody name – is all a lie, isn’t it? Do you really need five Range Rovers just to transport you less than half a mile from the set to your hotel and back?
Do you?
You are such a hypocrite.
Someone has to teach you a lesson.
Then Judd Halpern, Gaia’s co-star playing King George IV, emerged from his trailer. He was looking the worse for wear from drink – or drugs, in all probability – and had to be helped down the steps by two minions, and guided into the back of a Jaguar. A security guard, standing outside the main entrance, lit a cigarette. She watched it glow bright red for an instant.
Several other vehicles also left, carrying away, presumably, some of the supporting cast and senior crew. A number of unit members were still working, switching off lights on stands and humping equipment around. She stepped forward and walked nonchalantly across the Pavilion lawns, being careful not to trip over any cables. No one appeared to take any notice of her. Good.
She made her way over to the cluster of trucks and motorhomes, heading as discreetly as she could towards Gaia’s trailer, which was parked close to the gatehouse building on Church Street. Just in case anyone had noticed her, she meandered as nonchalantly as she could towards the archway, as if she were just Ordinary Joe taking a late-night stroll before bed. But just as she reached the shadows on the far side of Gaia’s trailer, she ducked down, pulled her iPhone out of her handbag, then switched on the Torch app.
She could not believe her luck.
Legend had it that King George had had a secret underground passage built, connecting the Royal Pavilion with Maria Fitzherbert’s house in the Old Steine, so that he and his mistress could have their trysts in secret. But this was not true, she knew from her research. There was a secret passage, but it was built by the king for a very different reason. It was because, an immensely vain man, he was embarrassed by how gross he had become – weighing twenty stone – and did not want the public to see him. He could walk to the stables out of sight, and enter his coach in privacy. All the public would see of him would be his face at the window.
The stable block had been rebuilt by Queen Victoria, and moved several feet to the north. The original exit from the secret passage was now a sealed trapdoor, overgrown with grass. Gaia’s trailer was parked, she could see from the slight marking on the grass, backed up almost on top of it.
Deliberately? To make it up to her? It had to be a signal.
How good was that?
Then she walked stealthily around the vehicle. Rental mobile homes like this must have some kind of discreet advertising on them, she figured. Then she found it, on the front right, a square metal plate. AD MOTORHOMES LTD. Beneath was a website address, an email address and a phone number.
She wrote down the company’s number and the registration plate of the vehicle.
85
At the Tuesday morning briefing of Operation Icon, Bella Moy reported on her conversation with Stephen Feline, the senior partner of the accountancy firm where Eric Whiteley worked. Feline said that Whiteley was a bit of an oddball who kept to himself, but an exemplary employee, hard-working and totally trustworthy.
‘He’s an oddball all right,’ Glenn Branson said. ‘We went to his house after the briefing last night. He was obviously in, we saw someone moving behind the curtains, but no one answered his door. We rang the bell several times. Then we dialled his home number. Someone answered – sounded like him, and we told him we were outside. He hung up without saying anything. We rang back and we could hear it ringing – and we saw curtains twitch upstairs. But it went to answerphone each time we tried ringing again.’
‘The behaviour of someone who has something to hide,’ Grace said.
‘With his reluctance to see us, me and Bella decided it would be better to talk to his neighbours, see what we could find out about him before we tried him again.’
‘And?’
‘They confirmed he’s one of those people who keeps himself to himself. A couple of them said they’ve never seen him. One said she’s seen him several times go off to work on his bicycle and come home at night and he’s nodded at her a few times, but that’s all. One said she’s seen a tarty-looking woman come to the house a couple of times.’
‘Sounds like a call girl,’ Grace said. ‘He lives alone?’
Glenn Branson nodded. He looked down at his notebook, open on the first page of the interview with Whiteley. ‘Well, the thing was, boss, we were focused on his work connection with Stonery Farm and the angling club. That was a hard enough struggle. We didn’t get much into his private life. But yeah, definitely single.’
‘So none of the neighbours ever talked to Eric Whiteley?’
‘All the immediate neighbours we talked to are elderly, a couple of them pretty infirm. All pleasant enough but no one seems to know or care too much about anyone else. It’s sort of a weird little enclave where he is.’
Grace made a note. ‘This man is not making me feel all warm and fuzzy. I want to know more about him. Why would he hide from you, unless he had something to conceal?’ He looked at Glenn then, pointedly, at Bella. ‘Any thoughts?’
‘I don’t know, sir,’ she said.
‘This is a murder enquiry, Bella. “Don’t know” is not an answer I want to hear. Go back to his office in the morning and get in his face. Is that clear?’
‘Yes, sir,’ she said, and blushed under his uncharacteristically withering glare.
Grace turned to the indexer. ‘Annalise, anything on your check on the serials about Eric Whiteley?’
‘I have one thing, sir. Almost two years ago exactly, he reported a bicycle theft from outside his office.’
There were a couple of sniggers. One from a recent addition to the team, DC Graham Baldock, and the other from Guy Batchelor. Grace glared at them both. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t find having a bicycle stolen funny. It may not be the kind of major crime we deal with in this branch, but if you have a bike you love that gets nicked it’s pretty distressing. Okay?’
Both detectives nodded apologetically.
‘It sounds like Whiteley was pretty difficult then. I spoke to DC Liz Spence at John Street who was dealing with bicycle crime at the time. He was pretty aggressive towards her over it. Didn’t feel the police were doing enough, that they should have made it their major priority. She was sufficiently concerned back then about his level of aggression to put background checks on him.’
‘And?’ Grace asked.
She shook her head. ‘Nothing came up.’
‘If you want my opinion, sir,’ Bella Moy said abruptly, ‘he’s just a harmless saddo.’
Grace looked at her for some moments. ‘You may be right, Bella, but you have to remember something. Criminals escalate. The sicko who starts off as a seemingly harmless flasher can turn into a serial rapist twenty years later.’
‘Yes, sir, I understand,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to be frivolous.’
Grace saw his BlackBerry was flashing red at him. New emails. He tapped to check them as he asked, ‘Norman, anything b
ack yet from the High Tech Crime Unit on Myles Royce’s computer?’
‘No, chief, not so far.’
He glanced through the emails. The second was from the Chief Superintendent of Brighton Police, Graham Barrington.
Roy, call me urgently after your briefing.
86
Drayton Wheeler looked at his watch. 9.03 a.m. Time was passing slowly. Ordinarily, with just six months or so left of it, he might have been grateful. But not up here, lying on this hard wooden floor inside the dome that supported the chandelier, surrounded by mouse droppings, and goddamn seagulls screeching outside.
The battery on his fucking Kindle was running out. In his calculations he hadn’t figured that would happen, but he’d left the thing switched on to wireless, which ate up the battery life. Great. He had about nine hours to kill, and an hour of reading time left. So much for his ambition to finish War and Peace before he died. He laughed. His own private joke. With six months to live, he had to be choosy about what he read. Did it matter what he had and hadn’t read in his life? In six months’ time would anyone care that Drayton Wheeler had not read War and Peace?
Nor anything by Dostoyevsky. Nor Proust. He hadn’t read much Hardy either. Just one Scott Fitzgerald. Two Hemingways. All people you were supposed to read to make you a more rounded human being. And the more rounded you were, the easier it was for some bastard to stick a pin in you and deflate you.
Well, he sure as hell would not be fretting about it in his grave. Fade to black. Good riddance.
At least today’s Times had downloaded. He could cheer himself up with the last of the Kindle’s battery life by reading all the shit that was going on in the world. Palestine. Libya. Iraq. Iran. North Korea. Hey, you know what, sort yourselves out, world, you’re going to have to learn to get by without me.
Dying. With every single one of his damned ambitions unfulfilled. Thanks to people like Larry Brooker and Maxim Brody who had screwed him. Everyone had screwed him. Life itself had screwed him.
He was a genius, he knew that. He always had the ideas first. And some other bastard always got there before him, or stole them. He’d had the idea of writing about a child wizard. Fucking JK Rowling got hers out first. He’d had the idea about a young teenage girl falling in love with a vampire. Some Mormon called Stephenie Meyer wrote her books ahead of him.
Now The King’s Lover. This time, he knew, no one was there ahead of him. He had the surefire formula.
And it had been stolen from under his feet.
Sue me.
Oh sure, Larry Fucking Brooker. I could sue you. If I had a million bucks in the bank and ten years to live, I could wipe your ass for you with legal paperwork.
He munched angrily through his breakfast of a stale Marks and Spencer egg and bacon sandwich and an over-ripe apple, washed down by cold coffee. Breakfast of Champions!
He had that book on his Kindle. Written by one of his favourite authors, Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut was a cynic too. The book was all about a great visionary writer called Kilgore Trout who found one of his science fiction novels being used as toilet paper in a motel lavatory. That was pretty much how Wheeler felt about his own career. He was a genius constantly pissed on from a great height. Well, smug little baldy Larry Brooker and fat toad Maxim Brody, you’re about to get pissed on from a great height back! Hope you’re looking forward to shooting the banqueting scene tonight.
I’m looking forward to it a lot.
87
The opening day of the Carl Venner trial at the Old Bailey had gone as well as could be expected, Roy Grace’s Case Officer, Mike Gorringe, who was attending for the whole duration, had reported. The hearing was set to run for three weeks and Grace would not be needed until the middle of next week at the earliest, which suited him well. He had plenty of other issues to deal with here in Sussex at the moment. The most pressing one, as he sat at his desk, staring at his computer screen, was the email Chief Superintendent Graham Barrington had just forwarded him.
It had been sent to Gaia’s published email address last night, read by an assistant who vetted all of her fan mail, and immediately forwarded to her head of security Andrew Gulli.
I still cannot believe how you cut me dead. I thought your whole point in coming to England was to see me. I know you love me, really. You’re going to be sorry you did that. Very sorry. You made me look a fool. You made people laugh at me. I’m going to give you the chance to apologise. You are soon going to be telling the whole world how much you love me. I will kill you if you don’t.
He rang Graham Barrington’s direct line. It was answered instantly. ‘What do you think, Roy?’ Even though Barrington had been a police officer for nearly thirty years, his voice was still full of an infectious, boyish enthusiasm, and Grace loved that, because it was how he felt, too – most days at any rate.
‘I guess we need to assess whether this is a harmless nutter or a serious threat. In the first instance, are we certain this isn’t from the perp in Los Angeles, Graham?’
‘Well,’ the Chief Superintendent replied, ‘it’s in a similar vein, but I spoke to our contact there, Detective Myman – I just woke him up, it’s 1 a.m. local time – and he assures me that the man they have in custody has no internet access. I’ve forwarded it to the High Tech Crime Unit to see if they can find the source for us. What’s your view, Roy?’
‘Has anyone spoken to Gaia about this?’
‘Not yet, she’s still asleep, I understand.’
‘Someone needs to talk to her as soon as she’s up.’
‘Maybe you should – I think she’s quite sweet on you, Roy!’
‘Probably a good reason why I shouldn’t then!’ Then, being serious again he said, ‘We need to find if she has any idea who this could be. Has she had a confrontation with any of her fans since she’s been here?’
‘I’ve asked Gulli that question. There was a middle-aged woman in The Grand Hotel who tried to push past the security guards, and then made a complaint to us about their brutality.’
‘Oh? How was it followed up?’
‘Uniform attended. They took a statement from her and then interviewed a couple of the security guards later. Seems the woman lied about being a journalist to try to get into Gaia’s suite, then chased after her. We’re not taking her complaint any further.’
Grace wondered why no one had thought to notify him about this incident. Then he looked at the email again. One possibility going through his mind was whether this could be Amis Smallbone winding them up? He read the words and did not think so. There was something sad about them, a desperation. A wounded lover? A stalker deluded that Gaia was in love with him? Or her?
‘I think we need to know more about this woman at The Grand, Graham. Can you get someone from your CID team to go and talk to her?’
‘I’ll get Jason Tingley on it right away.’
‘What do we know about Gaia’s current love life?’
‘She has a lover in Los Angeles. A fitness instructor. Detective Myman said he was interviewed after her assistant was killed and cleared. Sounds like their relationship is fine.’
‘I’d like to get this email analysed by a psychologist,’ Grace said. ‘There may be some subtext we’re not aware of.’
‘Good idea. Meantime I’m going to step up her protection.’
‘Definitely,’ Grace said. ‘Do we know her movements today?’
‘They’re filming a big interior scene at the Pavilion tonight. She’s free during the day. She’s promised to take her son on the Pier and to the beach. I’ll make sure we don’t let either of them out of our sight.’
‘I think my young god-daughter is going to join them,’ Grace said.
‘We’ll have a ring of steel around them, Roy.’
Grace thanked him and hung up. Emails were tumbling into his inbox faster than he could read them. A whole bunch of stuff about the police rugby team he was running, and had to deal with, on top of everything else. And in twenty minutes’ time he had to dr
ive over to Sussex Police HQ at Malling House, to brief his boss ACC Peter Rigg on Operation Icon.
Gaia would be fine, for now, in Graham Barrington’s hands. He hoped.
88
The phone was answered on the second ring. ‘AD Motorhomes.’
Putting on an American accent, because she thought it might sound more convincing, Anna Galicia said, ‘I’m calling from Brooker Brody Productions. We have mislaid the key to the motorhome our star, Gaia, is using and need another one urgently.’
‘Oh dear,’ the woman said. ‘We’ll have to get a spare couriered to you.’
‘You’re in St Albans, Hertfordshire, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘We have someone up in that area picking up some props. I’ll direct them to come to you for the key – they’ll be there in about two hours.’
‘Yes, okay, fine, it will be waiting in reception.’
Anna thanked her and hung up.
89
They began setting up for the big scene an hour before the Pavilion closed for the day. A call had been put out for extras, but Drayton Wheeler had not responded.
From his position right at the top of the wooden slats that formed a concave staircase up the inside of the dome, he could look straight down through a gap beside the metal shaft that supported the chandelier, into the Banqueting Room.
And he could listen. Thanks to the baby monitoring system he had bought in Mothercare. The radio microphone was underneath the mahogany table down in the Banqueting Room. The speaker was switched on beside him. He could hear everything perfectly, except for the occasional irritating whine of feedback.
It was 4.30 p.m. Nearing the end of the day that had felt like it would never end. He sat perched up here, watching stupid tourists shuffling around the exterior of the room. A plush rope prevented them from getting near to the actual banqueting table itself. He wasn’t bored any more now.
