Blood Read: Publish And Be Dead (The Capgras Conspiracy Book 1)

by Simon J. Townley

  No windows looked out onto the world. The only opening in the stark sheets of metal were the original doors, a hole for the chimney of a wood burner, and a cat-flap. Mod-cons were present in abundance, however: from electricity and plumbing for shower and toilet; to landline, internet connection and even satellite TV (the receiver perched on the roof like a feline ear, listening intently to the stars).

  The container reeked of the sea, of salt spray and barnacles. Capgras had scrubbed it and pressure-washed and aired it thoroughly, but the scent clung to the walls with the stubbornness of an octopus in love. It was this smell that greeted Tom as he swung open the metal doors, leaping at him like a demented puppy.

  The first thing he did was to call for Khan. There was no answer. That didn’t surprise him. The local warehouses, most of them empty, ruined and long-abandoned, were fertile hunting grounds for a fully grown cat, and Khan was a fearsome predator.

  Tom flipped the light switch then slung his bag off his shoulder and placed it on the table. After retrieving a bottle of cheap French lager from the fridge he slumped onto a battered sofa (retrieved from a skip) and kicked off his shoes.

  Setting up home in a freight container was not without its compensations. There was no need to worry about damp, or leaking roofs, or having visitors around for tea. Parents were unlikely to call and if they did, they certainly wouldn’t stay. The same applied to old friends who had been chucked out of home by their spouse, or returned from three years travelling in Asia without two pennies to rub together.

  Neighbours didn’t pop round unexpectedly. There were few door-to-door salesmen and getting rid of the double-glazing variety was, in any case, refreshingly straight-forward. In all his time living in the shipping container, and it had now been more than a year, he had never once encountered Jehovah’s Witnesses at the door or any similar denominations, sects or cults.

  There were, of course, downsides. While it would be theoretically possible to cut holes in the metal and install windows - and indeed, many container dwellers have done this successfully - the procedure was not without its problems. Chief among these was compromising the engineering integrity of the box, which is what made it so strong in the first place.

  Capgras harboured a deep, abiding respect for engineering integrity. It was based largely on ignorance, a refusal to do the math or get his head around the technicalities, but it was respect all the same.

  The container, eight feet and six inches wide and forty feet long, was divided into three rooms: a bedroom at the back; a cramped toilet and shower room set behind plywood and plasterboard; and his office and living space at the front. This area also served as a workplace for various itinerants who, for a variety of reasons, none of them clear, sometimes turned up to help Capgras in his enterprises, invariably without any form of monetary compensation.

  Chief among them was Ruby. She had left him a note on the arm of the sofa, where she knew he’d find it. “Update your blog. It’s been two weeks. It’s starting to stink.”

  He hadn’t had the heart, not since finding Joanne. That was news, something to write about for sure, but too close to home to be just a ‘story’. All the same, it needed doing. He used the blog to keep in touch with his tribe. He had posted on there about the possibility of the book deal and told the world that the meeting was set. Then silence.

  Ruby was right. She was always right.

  He rested the laptop on his knee and wrote a post. Then rewrote it a dozen times. And then a dozen more. The wording never seemed right on this one. He had covered global events and filed copy off the top of his head, over the phone, printed and live in the paper or on the website by the time he’d made it back to the newsroom. Capgras could fling a first draft of an article down in minutes, in a frenzy of fingers and keys, more manic than Horowitz barnstorming his way through Rachmaninov’s third. And yet...

  He re-read the post for the umpteenth time. It told of the meeting with Joanne, how he’d turned up and found her hung from a beam. He avoided detail, didn’t name her, and made no mention of Evelyn Vronsky or his agreement to investigate the death. To even hint at it seemed like vainglorious folly. Hubris.

  Who was he kidding? He was no private investigator. As a reporter, his targets were the big guys: the state, the police, the government, organised criminals. Especially cliques that fell into all those camps. But finding a solitary killer who acted alone, seemingly without purpose: how should he do that?

  He thought back to that morning in Joanne’s office. Were there clues? He had no access to DNA tests. He’d taken no photos and had only his memory to go on. Had there been bruises on Joanne’s body, or signs of a struggle? How strong would a man need to be to overpower a woman and hang her like a brace of pheasants? Must he be young and fit, or just determined, with an insane murderous rage? Or would a knowledge of ropes be enough? He pictured the noose, trussed like a work of art.

  Joanne had not tied that knot. He was sure of it.

  But if it had been murder, then it was cold blooded. It was no frenzied stabbing but a meticulous and well-planned execution, made to look like suicide.

  So the killer intended to walk away, a free man. Obvious, perhaps, if your experience of crime comes from TV dramas and mystery tales, where the criminal plays a game of outwitting the valiant detective. Capgras, though, had seen criminals in the flesh, plenty of them, up close: in the dock, in the waiting rooms of magistrates courts, in the pubs and clubs of the towns and cities, where he had worked, the burglars and muggers, the child molesters and drunken brawlers. They weren’t cunning or clever or devious. They didn’t plan ahead or create alibis. They acted on impulse, out of rage or pain or hate. They struck out in fury. They left evidence behind, failed to cover their tracks or think ahead, behaved irrationally, and invariably broke into pieces when the full truth of what they had done hit home. Even the psychopaths, who felt nothing, still made mistakes. But was that a bias? He knew of the ones who were caught. He had sat through their trials, endured the police press conferences, been debriefed by detectives.

  But what about the unsolved murders? And what of the cases, like this, where no one even suspected there was a killer? Where no one asked the hard questions?

  Capgras re-opened his laptop and accessed his blog. He didn’t have detectives, or DNA, or photos of the crime scene. He couldn’t go around demanding answers, threatening suspects with arrest. But he had a network. He had people who listened and came back at him with ideas and information. If he went live with this now, would he warn the killer? Perhaps. But what other way to flush him out?

  Capgras sipped his beer. Then he typed, and kept typing, throwing down his suspicions, never naming names. He knew the law of libel better than most lawyers. When it was done he paused, wondering if this was a story best left to simmer overnight. Damn it. He pressed ‘publish.’ It was done.

  He lumbered towards the bathroom. It had been a long day. The church service, the interment, the wake, the pub afterwards, alone in a strange part of town, settling his nerves with three pints of ale, these things had taken their toll and worn him down at the edges. He was ready to sleep.

  As he brushed his teeth, someone rapped, softly, on the metal door of Tom’s shipping container.

  He froze, the toothbrush jammed into the corner of his mouth. No one called here at this time of night. Not even Ruby, or his sister Emma. And it wasn’t his ex, Julie, because she was in Carlisle.

  The rap was repeated, soft but not so gentle, though still furtive. Was this a trap? Kids messing him? An enemy, come looking for revenge?

  He crossed his front room and pressed his ear against the metal. He waited. No sounds. No more rapping. No rustling or loud breathing. He picked up a torch, turned it on and eased open the door. Whoever had knocked had left, without waiting. He shone the light down onto the ground, looking for clues. Waiting for him on his doorstep sat a package. A book-shaped package wrapped in brown paper, and on it a printed note: ‘Read me’ it said. It was a simple
enough request. So Capgras went back inside, slouched onto his sofa, and turned to the first page.

  Chapter Ten

  Disquietly to Our Graves

  The city slept. If ever London could be said to sleep, it was now. The late bars and clubs had closed, but it was still too early for the morning shift of workers. Night buses roamed deserted roads. Street sweepers coughed and wheezed their way into the nooks and crannies of the city, searching out its detritus. Taxis slumbered while the theatres, shops and fast-food outlets dreamt of long summer days and even longer lines of tourists.

  The people slept: in flats and apartments, in homes and sheds and on the streets. In hotels and B&Bs, under bridges and at the top of mighty skyscrapers.

  In a shipping container on a self-build site in an unfashionable corner of London’s East End, Tom Capgras didn’t sleep at all.

  It was four in the morning and he still hadn’t gone to bed, despite the beer he’d drunk and the soporific slow heat of the wood burner. He lounged on his sofa, a fleece blanket over his legs, reading, reading, reading. His cat, Khan, slept peacefully beside him.

  A novel had been dumped on his doorstep: Disquietly To Our Graves was an Arthur Middleton mystery featuring his fictional detective, DI Sebastian Lear of the Devon and Cornwall police.

  The story was better than Capgras had expected: competently told in tight and economical prose that didn’t match his perception of Middleton. But good editors can perform wonders. The plot centred around the usual police procedural nonsense that bore scant relation to the way criminal investigations really worked. But that was fiction for you.

  Yet the book had kept Capgras awake all night, turning page after page. He made rapid progress by skimming the descriptions, digressions and chit-chat, the character development sections and the interminable inner dialogue.

  It was the murder that caught his attention. A theatre manager, found hanged in the opening chapter, had surely committed suicide. Even the indefatigable Lear thought as much, at first, but the detective followed hunches, pursued clues and kept digging.

  When the post-mortem reports came back with news of a massive overdose of valium, it looked to all the world as though the man had taken his own life and doubled up on the attempt to make sure. Or in case his nerve failed him. The book wound through intricacies, exploring the victim’s family and work, his friends and enemies, as Lear toured the south Devon town looking for clues that might confirm his nagging doubts. It must be murder, Capgras could see that. A fictional detective can never be wrong about such matters. And so it turned out, in the end. The man had been done to death by a leading actor, a pompous buffoon who insisted he must have the major part in every production. And if the roles didn’t suit his age, or gender, or (surely not?) ability, then a different play must be chosen.

  When the theatre manager finally spurned his star and picked a new upstart to play Hamlet, the luvvy walked out on the company, his heart burning for revenge.

  But the suspect was frail, fat and out of condition. How could he overpower a fit and healthy theatrical manager ten years his junior without leaving any sign of a struggle? Ah, but then there was the valium. The actor poisoned the theatre manager with an overdose and only when he passed out did he hang him by the neck. Murder, made to look like suicide. DI Lear confronted his villain, proved his case and once again won the day for justice and social cohesion.

  Who left the book on Tom’s doorstep, then slunk away not wanting to be seen? Not Arthur Middleton. This wasn’t the novel he was so ardently promoting at Joanne’s wake. This wasn’t his latest, or even a recent publication. No. Someone knew something. They were pointing Capgras towards a stark truth.

  But why? Who wanted him to follow this trail? And what did it imply? That Middleton was the guilty man? Perhaps. But anyone might have read this tale. Did they kill Joanne that way solely to point the finger at Middleton, and deflect suspicion from themselves? If so, then whoever left the hardback on his doorstep was the real killer.

  There was no clue from the packaging, or the book itself, except that it was a signed copy. “Il miglior fabbro” read the hand-scrawled inscription. Latin? Italian, but dated. “The better maker,” was the closest Capgras could come at it. But a Google search returned references to Eliot’s The Wasteland. The epigraph was for Ezra Pound, who helped him craft and hone the poem.

  There was no name on the inscription, merely the three cryptic words. For an editor, perhaps? The novel had been published by Haslam and Haslam, four years before. And it had been the Haslam brothers to whom Middleton had been talking at Joanne’s wake. What a tangled web.

  Capgras set the book aside and resolved to sleep. First, though, before he went to bed, he checked his blog for comments. Twenty five already? That was fast work. His eyes scanned them, looking for spam that had sneaked past the filters. His gaze stopped on a comment half way down. “Take a look at this story. Might be connected?” was all it said. Tom clicked the link. A book blogger from the USA had dropped dead for no apparent reason and her eleven-year-old daughter had been found comatose beside the body.

  What connection? There was nothing in the article to suggest one. Capgras found the woman’s book blog and searched for Middleton. He scanned the review of the last Sebastian Lear novel, Nuptial Breaches, published barely six months before. Tom smiled to himself as he browsed the inflammatory critique. The woman didn’t pull her punches. He winced as he skimmed through the row that erupted in the comments. Middleton furiously denounced the blogger, threatening her with poorly considered words of rage there for all to see, impossible to take back.

  Was she murdered? Police would not discount it.

  All commenters on his blog had to leave an email address. Tom checked the one that had been supplied. Clearly fake. But the name of the commenter, Victoria Hilton, seemed familiar. He flicked through the novel he had been reading. It was in there, somewhere. Everywhere. WPC Vicky Hilton was a foil for Sebastian Lear, pointing out his errors, laughing at his many foibles, helping him with clues. Flirting with him whenever the plot sagged.

  Once again, he was being steered towards an inevitable conclusion. Whoever it was, they were familiar with Middleton’s books and had an ear to the book-world and what was happening, even to bloggers in the USA. Did they hold a grudge against Middleton? Or know of his guilt? Why not go to the police? Why tease Tom Capgras with it? And how did this person know that he was interested? Or investigating?

  He slapped shut the lid of his laptop, tucked in the wood-burner for the night, scooped Khan up into his arms and carried the cat, purring, towards bed.

  Chapter Eleven

  Selfsame Metal

  Emma Capgras woke with a blurry head and a sense of dread that something was terribly, irrevocably wrong with the world. Then she remembered where she was, and the times she was living through, and the feeling intensified towards blind panic. She reached for the bedside table, moving aside a pair of knickers draped over the alarm clock to dim its light, and checked the time. Too early to get up. Too late to be worth all the effort of going back to sleep. She rolled over to face the other way. Mark had his back to her. She breathed in his familiar scent, wondering, as she often did, why he always smelt of soil though she’d never once seen him gardening. The warmth of his body filled the bed and she snuggled closer to him. In his sleep he edged away.

  Though she knew he didn’t mean it, and he wasn’t awake, part of her heaved with despair. Did he love her? Sometimes he seemed to. At others, he was so distant she felt she didn’t know him from a stranger in the street. As if he were, at the same time, two completely different men.

  Then there were the nights when he went missing. He needed time in his own flat, he insisted. Though he never took her there. Was he seeing someone? Already? They were twelve months into a relationship, not bad going for her, but he’d still not met her family. Not even her brother Tom, who virtually lived at Emma’s house at times. Mark always found an excuse to be somewhere else.
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br />   From the room next door she heard the sound of her son Ben creeping out of bed and getting dressed. His door squeaked open. A floorboard on the landing squawked. Mark mumbled in his sleep and rolled onto his back. She checked the time again: five thirty. Ben’s feet padded on the wooden stairs, going slow, trying not to wake her. He was a good kid. He had a good heart. But he was hard work.

  Emma slithered from under the duvet and fumbled in the dark to find her clothes. She grabbed a pile of them, slipped out of the bedroom onto the landing and dressed by the dim glow of a nightlight.

  She padded down the stairs after Ben, found him in the living room, staring out of the front window at the darkness outside. His shoulders twitched as she approached but he didn’t turn. She crouched and wrapped her arms around him. “Can’t sleep?”

  He mumbled a “yes.”

  He was only eleven, but he was already showing signs of becoming ‘difficult.’ That would make life interesting. But she sure of one thing: Ben Capgras would never be a typical teenager. He’d never been a typical anything.

  “Worried about class?” Ben had recently started at ‘big school’. It was a tough change for him, his entrance to a hard world. She longed to protect him and had considered teaching him at home. But she’d have no time, no life left of her own.

  “Come and watch television, take your mind off things.”

  “Don’t want to.”

  “Computer games? If you keep them quiet, it’s all right. Don’t wake Mark.”

  “Don’t want that either.”

  What did he want? The boy was taciturn and stubborn. A bit like his father. Wherever he was.

  “You can read, or …”