by Peter James
‘Yeah.’ He drew deeply on the cigarette, then removed it from his lips with his forefinger and thumb. ‘A few times.’
‘And what did you do?’
Roebuck shrugged. ‘Let it drop.’
‘You never had anything that you just couldn’t drop?’
‘It doesn’t work that way in the force. I don’t have enough hours in the day to deal with everything the way I’d like to.’
‘I have something I can’t drop,’ Glenn said.
Roebuck gave him a strange look, part curious, part wary. ‘What is it?’
‘A sudden death I attended last week. Everyone else reckons it’s suicide, but I don’t.’
‘Why not?’
Glenn drank some more of his lager. ‘OK. You know Cora Burstridge, the film star?’
‘She died last week, great actress.’
‘I found her in her flat, with a plastic bag over her head.’
Roebuck wrinkled his face. ‘Sad way to end up. I’ve attended suicides like that. How long had she been there?’
‘A couple of days.’
‘Wait until you get someone who’s been there a couple of weeks.’
Glenn thought, queasily, about the body from Shoreham harbour. ‘Thanks.’
‘Don’t mention it. What’s your problem with her suicide?’
‘Nothing I can convince my DCI on, but there are things that don’t stack up for me. Anomalies. Why did she go out on the afternoon she died and buy an expensive Babygro suit for her grandchild in the US, but never send it? Why did she have an intruder in her flat, who was seen by a neighbour, who didn’t take anything? Why would she kill herself less than forty-eight hours after being presented with a BAFTA Lifetime Achievement Award?’
Roebuck looked at him thoughtfully. ‘There are probably good explanations. Is that all you have to go on?’
‘Tell me, Simon, would you be concerned by that information, if you’d found her yourself?’
‘Concerned by what you’ve told me?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’d want a post-mortem, and I’d have the flat dusted – I’d put SOCO in there for sure. Then I’d see what showed up. I think I would definitely want to satisfy myself that it was suicide.’
‘I haven’t told you the best bit. Cora had a rival years back, an actress called Gloria Lamark. Unless you’re a movie buff, you probably won’t remember her name.’
Lamark. It was ringing a bell but Simon Roebuck could not for the life of him think why. ‘Lamark. How do you spell that?’
Glenn spelled it for him, and noticed the pensive look on the detective’s face. ‘So, she has this rival, Gloria Lamark. In nineteen sixty-six they were both up for a role in a film called Mirror to the Wall. Cora Burstridge got the part, and an Academy Award nomination. I haven’t seen the film in a while, but I managed to rent a copy last night and watch it through. Cora plays an actress in the film who gets horribly disfigured in a car accident, and one of her lines is, “I can no longer look at myself in the mirror.” Those were the exact words used by Cora in her suicide note. That was all she wrote.’
Roebuck studied his face. ‘Do you think Gloria Lamark might have done this?’
Glenn shook his head. ‘Gloria Lamark loathed Cora Burstridge but she certainly didn’t kill her. She died three weeks ago, took an overdose. Odd coincidence, don’t you think? That they died within three weeks of each other.’
Roebuck dragged again on his cigarette. Lamark. Lamark. He had a feeling he knew why the name sounded familiar to him, but he couldn’t be sure. ‘Are you on duty tomorrow, Glenn?’
‘Yes. I’m at Cora Burstridge’s funeral at ten. Otherwise in the office. Why?’
‘I’m tired and I want to go back to the office and take a look at something – sorry to be a party pooper. We’ll talk in the morning. Good meeting you.’
‘Good meeting you, too.’
Glenn took both their glasses back inside and, wondering what the name Lamark had triggered off for his new friend, slowly and with more than a little reluctance, climbed the stairs back to the party.
Chapter Eighty-nine
Michael sat at his desk in the Sheen Park Hospital, with Dr Terence Goel’s file open in front of him, and the telephone in his hand.
The voice-mail answered. ‘Dr Sundaralingham can’t come to the phone right now. Please leave a message and he’ll get right back to you.’
He hung up without saying anything, surprised to get an answering-machine and not a human. Doctors normally had someone to cover when they were off-duty.
He rested his head in his hands.
Dr Terence Goel, you came into my office talking about the loss of loved ones, about a car smash that mirrored the one Katy died in, the dove in the cage, the cellar, the nuclear fallout shelter.
Your name means Avenger of Blood.
Are you just an innocent man with a whole heap of problems and some bizarre parallels with my own life?
Or is there a whole lot more to you that I should know about?
There was a message on the answering-machine from DC Roebuck, saying that he’d been to the cybercafé but, as he had suspected, it could have been any of a couple of hundred customers who had been in that day. If he had a photograph of a face to show, then he might have better luck.
Michael logged onto the Internet, went back to the address of Terence Goel’s website and called it up. Then he copied Goel’s photograph onto a separate file and emailed it to Roebuck.
As the e-mail was going through, he dialled Roebuck’s mobile phone, and got his voice-mail. He left a message telling him the latest information he had about Goel, from Dortmund, and that he had sent him a photograph of Goel for him to try out in the Cybercafé.
Then, something struck him. On his computer he called up the Alta Vista search engine and entered a search command for the name, ‘Dr Terence Goel’.
As before, there was just one hit. The address of Goel’s web page. Nothing else.
If Dr Goel was such an eminent man, why weren’t there more mentions of him on the Internet? Why only one? Surely there would be links to other sites. Maybe not to the highly secretive GCHQ, but surely to Nature magazine? To the Scripps Institute? To USC? To MIT?
He entered a search command for Nature magazine. When the index came up, he typed a search command for Dr Terence Goel. Nothing appeared.
He repeated the process with the Scripps Institute website. Nothing there either. Nor could he find anything at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He closed his eyes against a headache down the front of his forehead that was growing increasingly acute, then popped two paracetamol.
He dialled Directory Enquiries, and asked if there was a number for GCHQ. A little to his surprise, there was. But when he rang the number, he got a recorded voice telling him the office was closed until nine o’clock the following morning.
He checked his e-mail. The usual mountain of incoming messages, most of it to do with work, and one from his brother in Seattle telling him that he and the family were planning a visit – and was Michael aware that the year after next was their parents’ golden wedding anniversary?
While he was logged on, another e-mail came through. It was a reminder about the tee-off time for his golf match on Saturday. Golf, he thought. How the hell was he going to be able to concentrate on a golf game?
He read through Dr Terence Goel’s file again, word by word. The letter of referral from Dr Sundaralingham. The new patient form on which Goel had filled in only his name, address and cellphone number. He dialled it and instantly heard Goel’s recorded voice.
‘This is Dr Terence Goel. Please leave a message and I’ll get back to you.’
Michael hung up, then dialled Directory Enquiries, gave the operator Goel’s address and asked for his home number. She told him it was ex-directory.
Michael replaced the receiver, cradled his forehead in his hand, and squeezed his temples. Then he looked up. The sky was dark against the
window. Twenty-five past ten.
He stared back at Goel’s notes. Fallout shelter.
A cold flush of fear churned in his gut.
Fallout shelter.
. . . some kind of chamber, maybe a vault.
Fallout shelter?
He stood up, walked around his office, then he went outside and paced the empty corridor. Dr Goel was obsessing him.
The Avenger of Blood.
What was he avenging?
He looked at his watch again. Half past ten. Cheltenham was a good hour and a half’s drive, he remembered, from the last time he’d been there a few years back to give a talk.
He went back into his office and looked at the man’s address again. A flat. A flat with a cellar or a vault or a fallout shelter?
It was possible.
He closed Dr Terence Goel’s file and slipped it into his briefcase. Ten minutes later he was in his Volvo, on the South Circular road, heading towards the M40 for Oxford and Cheltenham. His eyes hurt in the oncoming lights. He was dog-tired and the night air was stiflingly warm. This was madness. He should phone Roebuck, tell him his thoughts, then go home to bed. Instead he drove on.
An hour later he pulled into a motorway service station, bought himself a tired-looking burger, soggy fries and a beaker of coffee. He sat at a table by a window and stared out at the grey ghost in the glass that was staring back at him. The ghost’s hair was dishevelled. Even through the oval tortoiseshell glasses he could see huge black rings around the ghost’s eyes.
But from inside those rings determination stared back at him.
Chapter Ninety
A Mandelbrot Set screen saver was busily drawing crop circle designs, wiping each one when it was complete before moving on to the next. Complex fractals, concentric circles, linked star clusters. Simon Roebuck stood in the doorway of the Tina Mackay incident room on the second floor of Hampstead police station, watching a new design appear on the screen. A series of smaller hexagrams clustered around a larger central one, which in turn grew smaller hexagrams.
Patterns, he thought. If he hadn’t gone into the force, he would have liked to have taught mathematics. Sometimes he envied the intellectual satisfaction that his friend, Sarah, who taught maths and physics at a comprehensive, got from her work. He didn’t find enough intellectual challenges in policing, not even in the CID. It was mostly steady plodding, using a mixture of bureaucracy, observation, common sense, intuition, perseverance and sheer hard slog.
Each small portion of a fractal is a reduced scale replica of the whole. There was an elegance about mathematics and about fractals that Simon Roebuck liked. Police work was rarely elegant. It was gutty. Grubbing around against the clock and the budget for clues, for tiny bits of a puzzle, and when you did find them, sometimes you had to bash them with a mental hammer to make them fit.
He was tired. It would be nice to go home now, have a cool shower, and curl up in bed with Briony and talk about his day and listen to hers, then make love to her, fall asleep in her arms, and start tomorrow fresh and alert.
Instead, at half past ten on this hot, sticky oven of a night, he was back at the station, entering the incident room, hoping against hope he could do something for two women he had never met. Tina Mackay and Amanda Capstick. Hoping that, God forbid, if anything ever happened to his beloved Briony Donnelly, some other detective, in some other incident room in some other police station, would work just as hard for her.
The room had an abandoned feeling about it, as if it had been evacuated in a hurry. All six computer screens were still on, unfinished paperwork lay on the desks, a half-eaten Mars bar poked out of its torn wrapper on the top of one in-tray. One filing-cabinet drawer was half open. Busy. Bedlam. He doubted if any of the team had finished before ten tonight. They were a hard-working lot. Caring men and women. Caring desperately for two strangers.
Tina Mackay’s disappearance had been featured on the national television programme, Crimewatch, earlier in the week and there had been hundreds of phone calls of possible sightings; there’d be another raft of them next week when Amanda Capstick’s name was put out, if she hadn’t turned up by then.
And she wasn’t going to turn up, not of her own accord, he was pretty certain of that. She was going to have to be found. He just hoped she and Tina would be found alive. He hadn’t told the women’s relatives, or Amanda Cap-stick’s psychiatrist boyfriend, but he didn’t think the chances of finding either alive were good.
He walked across the room, and put the capped Styrofoam cup of sweet black coffee down on the desk he had allocated as his workspace up here, then glanced down at the list of actions completed today by the other five team members. Nothing new on either woman. The cap leaked, a dribble of coffee ran down the side of the cup; he caught it with his finger and sucked it. The sweetness tasted good. He turned pages of the report, touched his keyboard to bring the screen back to life, and the Mandelbrot Set disappeared. It was replaced by a list of cases around the country from the Holmes national crime system, in which attractive, successful career women, within Tina and Amanda’s age bracket, had disappeared during the past five years. Still no correlations with other case histories.
He listened again to Dr Tennent’s message about Dr Goel on his mobile voice-mail, then sat in front of his computer screen and tried to open the photograph of Dr Goel that the psychiatrist had e-mailed him.
He failed.
He cursed the computer. Photographs were always a problem: the only person in here who had the knack was the systems manager – he’d get him to do it first thing in the morning.
Turning his attention back to his main reason for being here now, Simon Roebuck walked across to a stack of deep cardboard boxes piled against the far wall of the room, all containing files borrowed from Tina Mackay’s office. Simon Roebuck examined their scrawled labels, and found the two boxes he wanted, one marked, REJECTION LETTERS, JAN-DEC 96, and the other, REJECTION LETTERS JAN-JUL 97. He heaved both of them back to his desk. Tina Mackay’s secretary had told him a week back that they received over a hundred manuscripts a week, which meant some eight thousand letters in these boxes to go through.
He could have done with another pair of hands – and eyes – and debated whether to call one of the team back out, but thought better of it. They were all exhausted, they would work better after some rest. He was aware that he would also, but that wasn’t an option. He’d already scanned through the entire lot once, some days back.
He popped the lid from his coffee. A phone rang and he answered it. ‘Incident room, Simon Roebuck.’
It was a wrong number. Someone wanting a taxi. He hung up, selected the 1997 box first, and began working through it letter by letter, glancing at the name of the addressee, looking for just the one name blinking away inside his head.
He might be mistaken. The spelling might be different. His brain might be playing tricks. The letters were banded together in wodges of one hundred. He finished the first lot, placed them face down on the floor, then started on the second bundle. Nothing. Nor the third bundle. A moth flew erratically around the room. Tiny black flies swarmed across the ceiling. A mosquito whined past him and he attempted to swat it, without success. Traffic passed outside.
He phoned Briony, told her he was going to be late and she said she’d wait up for him. He told her to go to bed, he had no idea how late he’d be, he might be all night. She told him she loved him and he told her he loved her too, more than anything in the world, and he did. Then he hung up and concentrated on the rejection letters.
The letters had a sadness about them. They contained bad news, most of them flat, bald statements with empty hope.
Dear Mr Witney,
Thank you for submitting your manuscript, Twice Nightly, to us. After careful reading, we regret we are unable to consider this for publication on our lists.
We hope you will be successful with it elsewhere.
Yours sincerely,
Tina Mackay, Editorial Director.
>
Months, years, maybe even a whole lifetime of work dismissed in three lines. Eight thousand possible suspects, double that if he went back a further year and a half. An impossible task to investigate them, to interview them all on just a long-shot hunch.
But whittle this lot down to just one, and that would be different.
A few had short, handwritten notes at the top, presumably by either Tina Mackay or one of her assistants. Some said the author was a friend or relative of so-and-so in the publishing house. Others were comments about the authors themselves, if they had been pushy, or it was suspected that the manuscript had been plagiarised from somewhere else, anything that might be useful for future reference. He was sure the one he was looking for now had a note at the top.
He flicked on through the names. Page after page of Pelham House Publishing Group headed notepaper. Word-processor typing. All kinds of names, male, female, British, foreign. Some titled names. Simon Roebuck dreamed of writing a book one day. He wondered if he, too, would get letters like this.
Then he stopped. He had found it.
Thomas Lamark,
47 Holland Park Villas,
London W14 8JJ
Dear Mr Lamark,
Thank you for submitting your manuscript, The Authorised Biography of Gloria Lamark, to us. After careful reading, we regret we are unable to consider this for publication on our lists.
We hope you will be successful with it elsewhere.
Yours sincerely,
Tina Mackay, Editorial Director.
At the top of the letter, in handwriting he presumed was that of Tina Mackay’s secretary, were the words: ‘Phoned several times, quite aggressive’.
The detective made a photocopy of the letter. He put the original back into the box. He folded the copy and slipped it into his jacket pocket.
