by Peter James
‘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 drive 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.
It was remarkable how simple the fixings of the chandelier were. A cross-beam of four metal poles, attached to wooden struts, each secured by a large bolt. In the centre of the cross-beam was welded a single, thick aluminium shaft, three feet long, to which one and a quarter tons of chandelier, with its 15,000 lustres, was attached.
He tied the hotel towel tightly around the shaft.
Then he grinned.
Ready to rock and roll!
Down below he could see doubles for Gaia and Judd Halpern being seated at the banqueting table, for the Director of Photography to light them.
Etiquette had it that the king and his paramour were seated first. The rest of the guests would file to the table.
Timing was going to be the big issue. If he got really lucky, it might not be just Gaia and Judd Halpern that the chandelier landed on. It could be another ten people, either side of them and opposite. Some big names in the supporting cast. Hugh Bonneville, from Downton Abbey, was playing Lord Alvanley and Joseph Fiennes was playing the king’s friend, Beau Brummell. Emily Watson was cast as the Countess of Jersey, who had for some years usurped Maria Fitzherbert, and was about to usurp her again in this ludicrous, totally historically inaccurate scene. None of them should have taken these roles; they were all conspiring to alter history. No one had any right to do that. For sure, they did not deserve to do that and live!
If luck really went his way, he might get all of them.
From his rucksack he very carefully retrieved the San Pellegrino screw-top bottle. Its contents looked like water. But if you were to drink it, death would be agonizing and not instantaneous. It contained mercuric chloride acid. A substance powerful enough, from the experiments he had already carried out, and his calculations that had followed, to eat through an aluminium shaft, six inches in diameter, in twenty-five to thirty minutes.
He could see Larry Brooker’s bald dome. He was pacing around shouting at people so loudly, Drayton had to turn down the volume on the baby monitor. Crew were scurrying everywhere, frenetically busy. A dozen extras were seated around the banqueting table, which was laid out for a feast, doubling for the cast as the Director of Photography and his underlings were making final lighting adjustments. The sound boom was being manoeuvred into place.
All getting set for the big scene.
Gaia would be in her trailer. Having her make-up and hair done, and reading through her lines once more, no doubt.
His lines.
Judd Halpern would be in his trailer, staring at his lines, and doing several lines of a different kind – coke, washed down with bourbon, if past form was anything to go by.
Larry Brooker was saying something to a young man who looked like he might be the First Assistant Director, who was nodding vigorously.
Do you realize why you are all here? It’s because of a screenplay called The King’s Lover that you are making. If I hadn’t written it, none of you would have a job on this production.
Are you grateful to me?
You don’t even know who I am, do you?
But you will soon.
90
‘The time is 6.30 p.m., Tuesday, June the fourteenth. This is the twentieth briefing of Operation Icon,’ Roy Grace said to his team. ‘We have some developments.’ He looked at Potting. ‘Norman, can you tell us about your search of Myles Royce’s house?’
‘I took DC Nicholl with me, as well as POLSA Lorna Dennison-Wilkins and Crime Scene Photographer James Gartrell to record our search. Royce’s mother wasn’t exaggerating when she said her son was a big Gaia fan. The place is so full of her stuff you can hardly move in there. I’ve never seen anything like it. Almost every room’s crammed with cardboard cut-outs of her, dresses, records, souvenir programmes, piles and piles of press cuttings on the floor, and some of them pasted on the walls. In my view he wasn’t just a fan, he was a total obsessive. Just to be clear, I’m talking about an oddball. You can’t open the door fully to some of the rooms, there’s so much stuff piled in there. If we need it, Lorna can bring in more of her team tomorrow to catalogue everything.’
‘People like this bother me,’ Grace said. ‘Obsessives are fanatics, and un
predictable. The one thing that really worries me right now is that we have a Gaia obsessive dead, and Gaia is in town. It might be a total coincidence. But this has to be an important line of enquiry for us to find out which other Gaia fans Royce associated with.’ He looked down at his notes, then continued.
‘Right, from the High Tech Crime Unit’s examination of Royce’s computer, so far, he would appear to have been one of a small group of obsessive Gaia fans who exchanged information and constantly bid against each other for everything that came up for auction. And it seems that he had one particularly acrimonious rivalry with a character called Anna Galicia. Which is where this gets interesting for us.’ He looked down at his notes. ‘This rivalry developed into an email slanging match with this woman. A really nasty, bitchy exchange over some item of Gaia’s they had both been bidding for that she wore in one of her shows. The High Tech Crime Unit’s still working through the email trail. But meantime I asked Annalise Vineer to run a name check on Anna Galicia, and she got a hit.’ He nodded at her.
‘Last Wednesday evening,’ Annalise Vineer said, ‘uniform attended a Grade 3 call at The Grand Hotel. It was a woman complaining she had been assaulted by two of Gaia Lafayette’s security guards. She gave her name as Anna Galicia. Following the information of the link between her and Royce from the High Tech Crime Unit, two uniformed officers were sent to her address to interview her. But it doesn’t exist. She gave a false address.’
Glenn Branson frowned. ‘Why would she have done that if she was making a genuine complaint?’
‘Exactly,’ Roy Grace said. ‘By all accounts she was pretty angry. So why give a false address?’ He looked around at his team. ‘Any ideas?’
‘Doesn’t make sense to me,’ Graham Baldock said.
‘Nor me,’ Guy Batchelor said. ‘If you’re making a complaint, you’re making a complaint. If you have something to hide you don’t make a complaint in the first place. I mean, do you?’ He shrugged.
‘I’m not at all happy about this person,’ Grace said. ‘We need to find her quickly. Very quickly.’
91
‘How can I make my multi-million-dollar movie with a goddamn lead actor who’s off his goddamn face, for fuck’s sake!’ Larry Brooker yelled at the top of his voice, across the floor of the Banqueting Room, at the hapless Third Assistant Director, Adrián González. ‘You wanna tell me?’
González raised his hands in a gesture of despair. His role was to deliver Gaia, Judd Halpern and the other principal actors to the set, and escort them back to their trailers when they weren’t required. He was an earnest, fresh-faced twenty-eight-year-old, with a shock of short, unruly ginger hair, dressed in a blue T-shirt emblazoned in white with the words THE KING’S LOVER, tatty cargo shorts and trainers. He wore a headset with an earpiece and microphone, had a mobile phone and a pager clipped to his belt, and was clutching a call sheet. He shrugged helplessly at Brooker.
There was a pathetic ego thing going on between the two stars, who had taken an instant dislike to each other from day one. Halpern had already kept Gaia waiting twice, so now she refused to come out of her trailer, for any scenes she was doing with him, until it was confirmed to her that he was on set and ready.
The director, camera team and the rest of the crew watched Larry Brooker’s latest tantrum. The bald, tanned producer, in a black Versace shirt open halfway down his chest, displaying his gold medallion, black chinos and Cuban-heeled boots, strode over towards González, like a pocket dictator, and gripped him by the front of his T-shirt. ‘What the fuck’s going on? Thirty minutes we’ve been waiting for this goddamn asshole. We have a schedule to keep to. We’ve got two busloads of extras sitting out there!’ Still gripping González’s shirt he turned to the Line Producer, Barnaby Katz, a short, tubby man in his early forties, with a barren dome rising from a sparse tundra of fuzzy hair, who looked close to a nervous breakdown. He was dressed in a shapeless lumberjack shirt, baggy jeans and old desert boots. ‘What the fuck are you doing standing there with your thumb up your ass?’ he shouted at him. Then he released González, who stood still for a moment, as if unsure what to do next.
‘I’ll go and have a word with him,’ Katz said.
Brooker tapped his chest. ‘No, I’m going. Okay?’
He stormed out of the Banqueting Room, left the building and strode across the grounds towards the trailers. Along the street, beyond the Pavilion lawns and the cordon manned by the security guards and the row of trucks, was a large crowd of people waiting to catch glimpses of the stars – mostly waiting for Gaia, he guessed.
Judd Goddamn Halpern. Jesus, how he hated actors. Judd Halpern didn’t do public transport, his agent had informed them. Which meant they’d had to put in the budget 150,000 bucks to fly the jerk, his assistant, and some girl he was currently screwing, over to London in a goddamn private jet. Then, because he was, apparently, a method actor, he had demanded that there was unpasteurized milk on the plane, as King George would have drunk, so he could get himself into character.
Fuckwit.
He strode up to Judd Halpern’s motorhome and banged on the door. Without waiting for an answer he pulled it open and stormed up the steps. Inside was a fug of cannabis smoke that took him back to his student days. Through it he could see Halpern, seated at his dressing table, staring bleary-eyed into the mirror that was lit all the way round with bare light bulbs. Today’s script pages, lime green, lay fanned out in front of him, with markings all over them, like a corrected school essay. A bottle of bourbon sat on the desk, alongside a plastic ballpoint pen with the nib and ink tube removed.
Halpern was dressed in bulbous white pantaloons, a velvet, gold-braided jacket with a high collar and a cream neck ruff secured with an ornately jewelled brooch. His wavy black wig sat on the dresser in front of him. A female make-up artist was working on his face, while a joint burned in the ashtray. Standing in front of them, as if trying to block his path, was Halpern’s effete personal assistant, and behind him, slumped over a table, with a cocktail glass in front of her, and a Grey Goose vodka bottle next to it, was a scantily clad girl of barely legal age.
By the relatively tender age of forty-two, Judd Halpern had already blown his career twice. The first time was after being the child star of a global hit US television series, Pasadena Heights, when he had become so impossibly arrogant, no one would work with him. Then, having recovered from that in his early twenties, helped by his almost absurdly handsome looks, which had been compared to those of silent screen star Rudolph Valentino, and his unquestionable acting talent, his career had been reborn with two successful movies. Then it hit the skids after a series of drug convictions ending in a four-year spell in jail, when once again he had become a Hollywood pariah.
Now, according to his agent, he was clean, over it, remorseful about his past, anxious to make a fresh start, and had just made a movie with George Clooney that was a slam-dunk to totally relaunch his career. Which was how Brooker Brody Productions had secured an actor with A-list history for only a couple of hundred thousand dollars above scale.
‘Judd,’ Brooker said, more civilly than he felt. ‘Like, we’re all waiting for you.’
‘Ready when you are, CB!’ Halpern said, staring back, with dilated pupils, at his own handsome, if borderline flaccid, reflection in the mirror. He reached for the joint, but before his fingers touched it, Brooker snatched it and crushed it out in the ashtray, stubbing it, snapping it, then stubbing it again for good measure.
‘Hey, man!’ Judd Halpern protested.
‘You have a problem?’
Halpern glared at him. ‘Yeah, I have a problem.’
‘Yeah? Well I have a problem, too. My name isn’t CB, it’s LB. Larry Brooker.’
‘It was a joke!’ Halpern said. ‘CB. Cecil B. DeMille. Right? Ready when you are, CB!’ He frowned. ‘You don’t know it?’
‘If I’d wanted jokes, I’d have hired a goddamn comedian.’ Brooker pulled out his handkerchief and folded the broken joint into
it. ‘I have a problem too. I suggest you take a look at your contract. The clauses on how you can be fired. Taking drugs is one of the first.’
The actor shook his head. ‘I’m just smoking a cigarette, man. I like to roll my own.’
‘Yeah? And you know what? I’m the fucking pope.’
The two men glared at each other, Halpern having a hard time focusing. Brooker tried hard to contain his rage. He had a movie to make and bring in on a tight budget, and it was getting harder every day as the schedule slipped. ‘You want to tell me your problem?’
‘Sure,’ Halpern slurred. He picked up the pages, scrunching them. ‘This is not what I signed up to.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I took this role because I kinda liked the idea of King George the Fourth. He was an innovative dude. He had a great and tragic love affair with Maria Fitzherbert.’ Halpern lapsed into silence.
Brooker waited patiently and then, as a prompt, he said, ‘Uh huh.’
‘I was assured the script was historically accurate.’
‘It is,’ Brooker said. ‘George screwed Maria for several years then dumped her. What’s your problem?’
‘He was twenty-eight – I’m forty-two.’
‘So why did you take the part?’
‘Because I was told Bill Nicholson was doing a rewrite, that’s why I agreed to this. He’s quality, man.’ He pointed at the script pages. ‘He didn’t write this, surely?’
Brooke shrugged. ‘We had a bit of a problem at the last minute.’
‘You mean you didn’t want to pay his fees, right?’ The star pulled open a drawer, lifted out a pack of cigarettes, pulled one out and lit it. ‘The comedian who wrote these pages doesn’t seem aware that this Pavilion wasn’t even built at the time this scene was supposed to happen. That’s another problem.’
‘You want to know my problem?’ Larry Brooker said.
Halpern shrugged at himself in the mirror. Then he watched himself draw on his cigarette. ‘No,’ he replied, finally, curling his lips, attempting – and failing – to blow a smoke ring.