by Peter James
He covered the mouthpiece and turned to his partner. ‘You know a Drayton Wheeler?’
Brody shook his head, preoccupied with removing the lid of his coffee bucket.
‘Put him through.’
Moments later a voice at the other end of the phone, the tone aggressive and nasty, said, ‘Mr Brooker, do you have a problem reading emails?’
‘Who am I talking to?’
‘The writer who sent you the idea for The King’s Lover.’
Larry Brooker frowned. ‘You did?’
‘Three years ago. I sent you a treatment. Told you it was one of the greatest untold love stories of the world. According to Variety and the Hollywood Reporter you’re going into production. With a script based on my treatment that you stole from me.’
‘I don’t think so, Mr Wheeler.’
‘This is my story.’
‘Look, have your agent call me.’
‘I don’t have a fucking agent. That’s why I’m calling you.’
This was all Larry needed today. Some jerk trying to cash in on the production. ‘In that case, have your lawyer call me.’
‘I’m calling you. I don’t need to pay a lawyer. Just listen to me good. You’ve stolen my story. I want paying.’
‘Sue me,’ Brooker said, and hung up.
10
Eric Whiteley was remembering every second, as clearly as if it were yesterday. It all came back every time he saw a news story about bullying, and his face felt flushed and hot now. Those ten boys sitting on the wall chanting, ‘Ubu! Ubu! Ubu!’ at him as he walked by. The same ten boys who had been on that low brick wall every evening since the start of his second term at the school he hated so much, some thirty-seven years ago. Most of them had been fourteen – a year older than him – but a couple, the smuggest of them all, were his age and in his class.
He remembered the paper pellet striking him on the back of his head, which he had ignored, and just carried on walking towards his boarding house, clutching his set of maths and chemistry books which he’d needed for his afternoon classes. Then a pebble hitting him really hard, stinging his ear, and one of them, Spedding Junior it had sounded like, shouting out, ‘Great shot!’ It was followed by laughter.
He had walked on, the pain agonizing, but determined to get out of their sight before he rubbed his ear. It felt like it was cut open.
‘Ubu’s stoned!’ one of them shouted and there had been more laughter.
‘Hey Ubu, you shouldn’t walk around stoned, you could get into all kinds of trouble!’ another of them had shouted and there were even more guffaws and jeers.
He could still remember biting his lip against the pain, fighting off tears as he carried on along the tree-lined avenue, warm blood trickling down the side of his neck. The main school grounds, with the classrooms and playing fields, were behind him. Along this road were ugly boarding houses, big Victorian mansion blocks, accommodating sixty to ninety pupils, some in dormitories, some in single or shared rooms. His own house, called Hartwellian, was just ahead.
He could remember turning into it, walking past the grand front entrance, which was the housemaster’s, and around the side. Fortunately there had been no boys hanging around to see him crying. Not that he really cared. He knew he was no good, useless, and that people didn’t like him.
Ubu.
Ugly. Boring. Useless.
The other kids had spent all of the previous term – his first in this school – telling him that. John Monroe, who had the desk right behind him in Geography, had kept prodding him with a ruler. ‘You know your problem, Whiteley?’ he said, each word emphasized with a prod.
Whenever he’d turned around he got the same answer. ‘You’re so fucking ugly and you’ve no personality. No girl’s ever going to fancy you. None, ever, you realize?’ He remembered how Monroe’s horsey face would then break out into a snide grin.
After a while, he had stopped turning round. But Monroe used to keep on prodding, until Mr Leask, the teacher, spotted him and told him to stop. Five minutes later, when the teacher began drawing a diagram of soil substrates on the blackboard, Monroe’s prodding started again.
11
Detective Sergeant Glenn Branson was struggling to insert his thirty-three-year-old, six-foot-two, nightclub bouncer’s frame into a white protective paper suit. ‘What is it with you and weekends, boss?’ he said. ‘How come you always manage to screw them up for both of us?’
Roy Grace, perched alongside him on the rear tailgate of the unmarked silver Ford Focus estate car, was struggling equally hard to get his protective suit up over his clothes. He turned to his protégé who was dressed in a shiny brown jacket, even shinier white shirt, a dazzling tie and tassled brown loafers. ‘Lucky you never chose farming as a career option, Glenn,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t have been your style.’
‘Yeah, well, my ancestors were cotton pickers,’ Branson retorted with a broad grin.
Glenn was right about the weekend, Roy thought ruefully. It seemed that every damned murder he had to deal with came in just when he had his weekend all sorted out.
Like now.
‘What did you have planned, matey?’
‘The kids. One of the few weekends Ari is letting me have them. I was going to take them to Legoland. Now she’ll have something else to use against me.’
Glenn was going through a bitter divorce. His wife, Ari, who had once encouraged him so hard to join the police, was now using the unpredictability of his hours as part of her argument for not agreeing contact arrangements for the children to see him. Grace felt a sharp twinge of guilt. Perhaps he shouldn’t have requested Glenn join him. But he knew his marriage was doomed, whatever happened. The best favour he could do his friend was to ensure his career came out of it intact. ‘You think taking the weekend off would help save your marriage?’
‘Nope.’
Grace grinned. ‘So?’
‘You ever see that movie, Chicken Run?’
He shook his head.
‘You’ve lived a sheltered life.’
‘Lot of sex in it, was there?’ Grace retorted.
‘Yeah, right.’
They put on face masks, raised their hoods and snapped on protective gloves. Then the pair of them signed in on the scene guard’s pad, and ducked under the blue and white police crime scene tape. It was a fine, blustery day. They were high up on the ridge of a hill, with open farmland stretching for miles in all directions, and the glinting blue water of the English Channel visible on the horizon to the south, beyond the Downs.
They walked towards a long, single-storey shed with clapboard walls and a row of roof vents that stretched away into the distance, two tall steel silos standing beside it. Grace pushed the door open. They went inside to the glare of artificial lighting, to the sour stench of confined animals, and the din of thousands of protesting hens.
‘Had eggs for breakfast, old timer?’ Branson asked.
‘Actually, I had porridge.’
‘Guess at your age, cholesterol matters. Low fat milk?’
‘Cleo’s put me on soya.’
‘You’re under her thumb.’
‘She has pretty thumbs.’
‘That’s how every relationship starts. Pretty face, pretty thumbs, pretty damned everything. You love every inch of her body and she loves every inch of yours. Ten years on, you’re struggling to remember one damned thing about each other that you once liked.’ Branson patted him on the shoulder. ‘But hey, enjoy the ride.’
Roy Grace stopped and Branson stopped beside him. ‘Matey, don’t become a cynic. You’re too good for that.’
‘I’m just a realist.’
Grace shook his head.
‘Your wife vanished on your thirtieth birthday – after you’d been together several years, right?’ said Branson.
‘Uh huh. Getting on for ten years.’
‘You still loved her?’
‘As much as the day I met her. More.’
‘Maybe you’re an exce
ption.’
Grace looked at him. ‘I hope not.’
Branson stared at him, his face full of pain. ‘Yeah, I hope not too. But it hurts. I think of Ari and the kids constantly, and it hurts so much.’
Grace stared down the length of the shed, with its gridded steel floor, a section of which, towards the far end, had been lifted. He could see, suited up, the stocky Crime Scene Manager David Green; three SOCOs including the burly, intensely serious Crime Scene Photographer James Gartrell; DS Simon Bates; the Duty Inspector Roy Apps, and the Coroner’s Officer Philip Keay.
‘Let’s rock and roll.’ Grace stepped on to the grid.
‘Not sure I feel much like dancing,’ Glenn Branson said.
‘So, you and the dead body have something in common.’
12
The dead body was very definitely not dancing. Partly on account of the fact that it was embedded in several feet of chicken excrement, partly because its legs were missing, and partly because it had no hands or head, either. Which would have made co-ordination difficult. A cluster of blowflies buzzed around, and the stench of ammonia was almost overpowering.
Glenn, close to retching, turned away. Grace stared down. Whoever had done this had little forensic awareness, and even less finesse. The headless, limbless torso, with desiccated flesh missing in patches, covered in excrement and crawling with flies and maggots, was barely recognizable as human. The skin, which appeared acid-scorched in the patches where it was visible, was a dark, leathery brown, giving it the air of a shop-window dummy that had been salvaged from a bonfire. The rank stench of a decaying body, all too familiar to Grace, rose all around him, making the air feel heavy and cloying. It was a smell that always accompanied you home, in your hair, on your clothes, in every pore of your skin. You could scrub yourself raw, but you’d still smell it again the next morning.
The only person he never noticed it on was Cleo. But maybe Glenn was right, and in ten years’ time he would. He hoped not.
‘Coq au vin for dinner, Roy?’ the Crime Scene Manager greeted him, dressed in a white protective suit, with breathing apparatus, his mask temporarily raised.
‘Not if it does that to you, thanks!’
Both men stared down into the space, four foot below the grid, at the torso. The first thought in Roy Grace’s mind was whether this was some kind of gangland killing. ‘So, what do we have so far?’
In answer to his SIO, David Green picked up a sealed polythene evidence bag from the floor, with an air of pride, and held it up with a gloved hand.
Grace peered inside. It contained two jagged pieces of badly soiled fabric, with an ochre checked pattern just visible. What looked like parts of a man’s suit.
‘Where did you find these?’ Grace asked.
‘Close to the body. Looks like it might have been something he was wearing – for some reason the only parts that didn’t decompose or get taken by rats for a nest. Maybe we’ll find more when we start our fingertip search.’
‘He?’
‘One of the few bits that weren’t cut off, chief, if you get my drift.’
Grace nodded, uncomfortably getting his drift.
‘Must have been a made-to-measure suit,’ Glenn Branson said.
Grace and Green looked at him. ‘Can you tell that from the cut of the cloth?’ Grace asked.
‘No, chief.’ Branson nodded down at the remains and said, drily, ‘I’m imagining they would have had a bit of a problem finding something off-the-peg to fit him.’
13
Inside the house, just like all Gaia’s homes, the floors looked like Italian marble. Just like the stone that had been imported slab by slab from the Fantiscritti quarry in Carrara that, historically, had supplied the Medicis with the marble for their palaces, and in more recent years, one of the Los Angeles landmarks, Hernando Courtright’s Beverly Wilshire Hotel.
The walls were hung with Aztec artefacts and stage shots of Gaia. In pride of place, on the wall facing the sofa, was the signed monochrome photo of her with wild, just-out-of-bed hair, wearing a black negligee to promote her world tour. To the left, above one of the armchairs of the white leather three-piece suite, which was a clone of her one in LA, was another tour poster, also signed. In it she wore a green tank top and leather jeans. Gaia would have felt totally at home here! Okay, so maybe the rear aspect wasn’t as fine as in some of her residences. Gaia probably had a better view from her kitchen window than this one, an old woman’s smalls hanging on a washing line, and a disused breeze-block garage.
Above the fireplace, with fake electric coals burning, was a blow-up of her idol’s lips, nose and eyes in green monochrome, captioned GAIA UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL. Again, personally signed.
One of her favourite items!
She had fought a fierce bidding war on eBay for it. Securing it with just five seconds to spare for £1,750. Money she could not afford. But she had to have it.
Had to.
Like everything else in this small semi, with the irritating street light outside that shone an amber glow every damned night into her bedroom.
Anna had bought the house in daytime, six years ago. It had never occurred to her that street lights might be a problem. Gaia would not have to put up with street lights keeping her awake, that was for sure.
Anna had written to the council, written to the Argus, the West Sussex Gazette, the Sussex Express, the Mid Sussex Times, but no one had replied, no one had done a single damned thing about that street light. So she bought an air rifle, and shot the bulb out in the middle of the night. Two bloody workmen from the bloody council replaced it two bloody days later.
But none of that mattered right now. All forgotten for the moment, because Gaia was coming to Brighton! And Anna had now found out where she was going to be staying. In the Presidential Suite of The Grand Hotel. Where else? They should have had an Empress Suite for her. She was the greatest, the queen of rock, the queen of the silver screen, the greatest star of all time. She was an empress! A truly Grand Empress! Returning to the city where she was born. Coming home to her roots. Coming to meet her number one fan!
And Anna really was her number one fan. Everyone conceded that. Gaia herself had! One of her assistants had replied to one of her emails saying, Dear No 1 fan! And of course, all of the other Gaia fans like herself, who shared snippets of information on chatlines, by email, by Facebook and sometimes Twitter, yet who became deadly enemies in bidding wars on eBay, all of them conceded that, as of this moment in time, Anna had them beat. She had the biggest collection, by far.
Number one.
And the secret signals from Gaia confirming their special relationship.
Secret fox!
Gaia had millions of adoring fans. But how many owned one of just six Call Me Your Baby vinyls in the world? How many fans had paid £1,000 for the signed single, ‘Shady Babe’? How many fans had paid £2,500 for a single roll of her acid-free toilet paper? How many had gone to £16,000 against every other damned Gaia fan for a signed jacket Gaia had worn and thrown into the audience during the last night of her world tour?
She had already been offered, and rejected, £25,000 for it.
The world was full of Gaia fans. But just twenty-three of them, like herself, were hardcore, bidding on all and everything that came up. How many were willing to pay everything they had for the smallest trophy? Like the limited edition Corgi Mini car labelled Gaia World Tour Courtesy Car, which she had secured for a mere £500! Or the Gaia health tonic miniature Martini, a bargain at £375. And how many others did Gaia communicate with via coded signals? None, that was how many!
She had spent over £275,000. That might be the equivalent of the earnings from one appearance by Gaia, but it was every penny she had in the world, and every penny she earned went towards this collection.
She was Gaia’s number one fan, no question.
That was why Gaia communicated with her. Their secret!
Anna could barely contain her excitement. She was not only ticking
off the days, she was ticking off the hours, minutes, and sometimes, when she got really excited, the seconds!
‘I love you, Gaia,’ she said. ‘I love you to death.’
14
Roy Grace, followed by Glenn Branson, stepped out of the stench and din of the birds in the chicken shed, into the blustery sunshine, and breathed in the fresh air with relief.
‘Shit,’ Glenn said.
‘Good observation!’
Glenn lowered his mask. ‘Foul play, I’d say.’
Grace groaned. ‘That’s truly terrible, even by your standards.’
‘Sorry.’
‘I’d like you to be my deputy SIO on this. I’m going to get you sanctioned as a temporary Detective Inspector. Does that appeal?’
‘What’s the catch?’
Grace grinned. ‘I have my reasons.’
‘Yeah, well, they’d better be good.’
Grace patted him on the shoulder. ‘I know I can rely on you – you’ve done a good job on Operation Violin. ACC Rigg has noticed that.’
Glenn’s face lit up. ‘He has?’
‘Yes – and I bigged you up on it. I have a feeling this case now could be a runner. Handle this well and it could count a lot in your promotion boards.’
Branson had all the qualities for promotion to the rank of Inspector, and Grace was determined to help his friend up the ladder. With his ongoing marriage problems that had been dragging him down for months, promotion, he was certain, would be the fillip that could really lift Glenn out of his increasingly frequent bouts of depression.
Grace remembered, a few years back, when he’d got that crucial promotion to Detective Inspector, how everything had changed for him. Starting with the surly uniform stores manager, whose whole demeanour had altered the day he had gone in requesting an Inspector’s tunic with the two pips instead of stripes, and that coveted cap with its band of black braid. When you became an Inspector you truly felt you had become officer class, and everyone’s attitude in the police – and public, too – towards you changed.