Silent Scream

by Lynda La Plante

  ‘You all right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, call this guy, he’s special – and get back to work when you feel you can. You can have seven days’ uncertified sickness before you need a doctor’s note.’

  ‘I will.’ Anna wrote down the number on the pad on her bedside table.

  ‘If you need anything, just call the station.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  He hung up and she rested back, closing her eyes. She must have fallen asleep because it was after midday when she woke. She eased herself out of bed, feeling less achy. After lunch she took two more painkillers, beginning to feel more like herself.

  She called the station to ask Joan about the unit driver Tony James. Joan confirmed that she had run the check and there was no police record. ‘Barolli was also mentioning him,’ she told Anna.

  ‘Really? What did he say?’

  ‘He wanted to know why you were asking about him, I think.’

  Anna was fazed, wondering how Barolli had got onto the unit driver. She had her suspicions.

  ‘My brother had his neck in a brace for weeks. Didn’t do any good; in the end he threw it away,’ Joan chattered on.

  ‘Well, I’m still wearing mine.’

  ‘What you need is a good massage.’

  ‘I’ll think about it. Thanks, Joan.’

  ‘That’s OK. We’re trying to get the smell of sick out of your office. You know you threw up all over your carpet.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Just call if you need anything. Bye now.’

  Anna lay staring into space, then leaned over to look at the number of Dr Berry, the chiropractor Langton had suggested. She phoned and got through to Berry’s receptionist, who asked who had made the recommendation. When Anna gave Langton’s name, there was a soft laugh.

  ‘Is it urgent?’ the woman asked.

  ‘Sort of. I think I have whiplash.’

  She booked Anna in for a late session at 6 p.m.; the address was a private clinic on Marylebone High Street. That done, Anna went into the lounge to go through the thick files piled up at the table. In one was a list of the film crew she and Simon had interviewed. Beside each name and job description was a tick. Anna looked down the list. The actors she was familiar with as they had both interviewed them, so she paid more attention to the rest of the crew whom Simon had questioned. There were over fifty names, ranging from executive producers and script editors to floor-runners and gaffers. None of them, according to Simon’s notes, could be linked to Amanda Delany’s murder.

  On the last page was a list of drivers: the extras van driver, the costume and make-up drivers and the grip-truck driver. Lastly, underlined by Simon, were four unit drivers, their names and addresses listed. Two were the brothers they had met on set: Harry James, the unit driver allocated to Amanda Delany, and his younger brother Tony who, Simon had noted, covered for his brother when required. The third was a guy called Bruce Mason. What surprised Anna was the name of the fourth and last standby driver: Lester James. In brackets Simon had written (another brother). Anna had not heard his name mentioned before; she had no idea if he was connected to any of the other films.

  She checked Lester James’s address and phone number, and eased herself onto her feet to use the telephone. First she rang Bruce Mason, who answered almost immediately.

  She hadn’t quite worked out what she was going to ask him.

  ‘Mr Mason?’

  ‘Speaking.’

  ‘I hope you don’t mind me calling, but I am part of the police team investigating the death of Amanda Delany and I wondered if I could ask you a few questions?’

  ‘I’ve got a POB right now. Gimme your number and I’ll call you back.’

  ‘Thank you.’ She replaced the receiver, wondering if POB meant passenger on board. Either way she’d wait. She called Joan.

  ‘I need a favour. Run three names through the Police National Computer for me, would you? And, Joan, just keep it quiet for the time being, eh?’

  ‘Whatever.’

  Anna, having been given a ‘no previous record’ for Anthony James, supplied the names of Harry and Lester James, and Bruce Mason, and then hung up.

  It was over two hours before Anna heard back from Bruce Mason. In the interim she had arranged for her car to be fixed and called her insurance company to learn that the van driver had contacted them: apparently on closer inspection, he had found damage to his exhaust and rear bumper. The damage to her own car was going to cost, at a low estimate, two thousand pounds – plus she would lose her No Claim bonus.

  When her mobile phone rang, she snatched it up. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Bruce Mason. You called earlier.’

  ‘Ah yes, I did. I wanted to clarify exactly what a unit driver’s job is.’

  ‘It’s a bit bloody obvious, isn’t it?’

  ‘Pardon?’ Anna was taken aback by his rudeness.

  ‘A unit driver is hired by the film company to chauffeur their actors around. Is this some kind of joke?’

  ‘No, it isn’t, Mr Mason. We can have this discussion now or, if you would prefer, you could come into the station to assist our enquiries.’

  ‘Tell me who you are again,’ he said.

  ‘Detective Inspector Anna Travis of the Metropolitan Police.’

  ‘You having me on?’

  Anna sighed with impatience.

  ‘I’d like to see who I’m talking to; this sounds a bit unethical to me,’ Mason continued.

  Anna arranged to meet him at 5 p.m. in a café close to the chiropractor’s surgery on Marylebone High Street.

  Sitting outside the café, the plastic collar round her neck, Anna realised that she had no idea what Bruce Mason looked like. Then she saw a Mercedes park up just outside the café, and the driver got out, and looked around. She signalled to him.

  ‘You the Detective?’ Mason asked, as he joined her.

  ‘Yes.’

  He fed the parking meter, sat down opposite and smiled. ‘What’s with the collar?’

  ‘Whiplash.’

  ‘Oh yeah? High-speed chase in a patrol car, was it?’

  When Anna showed him her ID, he loosened his coat and seemed to accept her as bona fide.

  Mason was heavy set, broad-shouldered, with thinning hair, good-looking in a rugged sort of way. He was also smartly dressed; beneath his coat he wore a suit and tie. His fingers were thick and stubby and he sported a heavy gold wedding ring.

  Anna chose her words carefully to make him feel at ease, to draw him out. Mason explained that the unit drivers belonged to a company and were hired out by the film units to be on call for whichever actor they had been assigned to.

  ‘We pick them up, take them to locations or the film set, and drive them home when they’ve wrapped for the day.’

  ‘So is all your work through the company?’

  ‘Not always. When it’s quiet we do some private clients – bodyguards, you name it. I did Madonna last year, was part of her entourage. It’s about supply and demand. If the stars get to like you they’ll use you as personal chauffeurs. When the film industry is quiet, which it has been of late, we get what work we can.’

  ‘Tell me about the James brothers.’

  ‘The James brothers?’ Mason gave a shrug of his wide shoulders.

  They were quite a formidable team, he said, often taking the cream of jobs. The eldest brother Harry had money in the company, so it was always first come first served for them. They were a team you didn’t want to mess with, but they always saw to it that he did all right. Although he was on the drivers’ unit, he didn’t get to drive the top stars – the brothers always took them. If one or other of the brothers couldn’t make it, they would bring in someone like himself.

  ‘Amanda Delany was a top star. Did you drive her?’

  ‘No, the brothers always handled her and did work for her when she was not attached to a film.’

  ‘Which one of them drove her most frequently?’

  He s
hrugged, unable to say. He insisted that they were a highly professional team, who knew their place. Anna asked if he could tell her some stories about Amanda. At first Mason hesitated, then gave a few instances of occasions she had had to be carried out of certain clubs, how the drivers often had to go to various hotels to collect her for filming. She was a naughty girl and had even had sex in the back of the cars.

  ‘But you never drove her?’

  ‘No, like I said, the brothers were around her, very protective of her, especially the youngest, Lester. He’d known her for years ever since she did her first movie so she trusted him, and there were times when he had to fight off the paparazzi. But he could handle himself.’

  ‘What do you mean, handle himself?’

  ‘Lester was a British karate champion. Nobody messed with the kid, but he was quite a handful and I often heard his brothers havin’ a bit of a fit over what he’d got himself into.’ Bruce held up his own big hand. ‘With someone who had as high a ranking as Lester, his hands were classified as lethal weapons, at least in the States.’

  ‘And you know for sure that Lester drove Amanda Delany?’

  ‘Yeah, often.’

  ‘What about on Gaslight?’

  Mason shook his head. As far as he knew, Lester wasn’t on that movie, just Tony and Harry. He himself had been brought in for a couple of days towards the end of the shoot.

  ‘After Miss Delany’s death?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right. It was a bit of a downer, you know. Everyone felt that maybe they should have closed the film, but that’s money.’

  Anna checked the time. It was almost six, time for her appointment, so she would have to leave. As she walked Mason to his car, she asked if he knew if Lester could have worked on Gaslight without him knowing. It was possible, Mason responded; the director was a wanker and often didn’t keep to the schedule, which was always a nightmare for the drivers.

  ‘Why you so interested in Lester?’ he concluded.

  ‘We’ve interviewed everyone but him who worked on the film.’

  When she thanked him, he gave her a card. If she ever needed a driver, someone with experience as a bodyguard, he said, she should call on him.

  As soon as Mason saw Anna leave, he called Tony James. He’d had a weird interview with a detective from the Met, he told him, a woman attached to the murder investigation of Amanda Delany. In no way had he said anything derogatory about the brothers, he reassured Tony; he just wanted him to know that a policewoman was sniffing around.

  ‘Was it Anna Travis?’ Anthony asked.

  ‘Yeah. Detective Anna Travis.’

  Anna headed into an old building on Marylebone High Street that had once housed exclusive apartments. The clinic was in the basement.

  ‘You must be Anna.’ A pretty, dark-haired girl was at the reception desk. ‘Dr Berry’s actually ready to see you, but could you first fill in this form, please?’

  Anna had almost completed it when the door to one of the surgery rooms was flung open. She glanced up to see an attractive and youngish man with wild curly hair wearing a white medical coat. He clapped his hands, turning to Anna.

  ‘Anna? Yes? Come on through.’ Dr Berry turned to his receptionist and said she could close up for the night. With a hand on the small of her back, he guided Anna into his surgery. It was a large, all-white room with a massage bed in one corner. There were arrays of candles, and lists of the therapy choices in frames on the wall: hot stone massage, therapy massage, Indian head and shoulder massage, Thai foot massage and manual lymphatic drainage.

  ‘I’m Gordon,’ he said. ‘First, let me take this contraption off you. I hate them and they often do more damage than good.’ He undid the collar and tossed it onto a low chair. ‘Now, tell me exactly what happened.’

  He had long slender fingers, with straight-cut nails, and had to bend slightly towards her as he was so tall. He gently felt the side of her neck and then up to her skull, putting a little pressure around the nape of her neck. He lit two perfumed candles and turned on a stereo unit; the music was sweet and low, and sounded like water and flutes. Next, he took out some small bottles of oils from a glass-fronted cabinet and uncorked them.

  ‘Take off your coat and let me see what you have on underneath.’

  Anna was wearing a T-shirt and jeans. He asked her to remove her trainers and shirt and lie on the massage bed, face down.

  Anna felt uneasy; she remembered hearing Berry tell the receptionist that she could leave.

  ‘It’s just my neck,’ she said, and he turned and smiled at her.

  ‘You have a problem about being here with me?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘It’s up to you. But I’ll be using oils and don’t want to mess up your clothes. Also, I want to massage your shoulders and down your back. You’ll find towels behind the screen.’

  He still had the smile on his face and, blushing, Anna went quickly behind the screen to undress.

  While she was thus occupied, Gordon Berry laid fresh towels along the massage table.

  ‘I don’t think you have any damage other than muscle strain,’ he said. ‘Nothing seems to be out of line, on the contrary. Often these minor types of injuries cause discomfort – it’s Nature’s way of saying ouch, but I think the stress of what happened has made you stiffen and we can remedy that easily.’

  Anna wrapped a soft white towel around herself and came from behind the screen. He had his back to her and was testing the heat of the stones he was going to use on her.

  ‘Have you ever had hot stone massage?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s James Langton’s favourite, and I have to say we’ve seen a lot of progress with his leg injury. Often, having knee surgery makes you limp and it throws the back out of line. Although James had some serious internal injuries, we’re making great moves forward. I know he finds the sessions very relaxing.’

  He turned to her. ‘Is he a close friend of yours?’

  ‘No, he’s my boss actually.’

  ‘Ah well. Up you get, face down and rest your head in the ring here.’

  It felt strange staring down at the floor. The piped music was very faint and she closed her eyes.

  ‘You’re a detective?’

  ‘Yes,’ she murmured.

  He moved the towel away, and inched down her jeans to feel the base of her spine.

  ‘You’re very tense around the shoulders, so just relax and I’ll get started.’

  The oil smelled slightly of liniment and he was quickly onto the area that was painful. He explained that he would be placing the stones down her back; if they were too hot, she just had to tell him. It was extraordinary how good the heat felt. Now he was using the perfumed oils and applying more pressure, massaging her back and sides.

  ‘He’s quite a character, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, he is.’

  ‘I actually met him through his wife, who’s been a regular client for many years. It took quite a lot of persuading for him to come to me, but now he’s here twice a week and I think he’s found it very beneficial. That was some injury. We’ve also been working on the scars on his chest.’

  Anna said nothing, surprised that Gordon had referred to Langton’s wife. She wasn’t sure if he had remarried, further proof of how little she really knew about Langton in the passing months since they had parted. She put the thought out of her head and began to relax.

  ‘Ah, that’s better. Now you are giving up to me,’ Gordon said softly.

  ‘I have been a bit stressed out, actually.’

  ‘I suppose it’s part of your profession. Are you working on any specific case?’

  Without going into details, Anna told him about the constant pressure the team was under to produce a result in big cases, how much time it took for them to eliminate suspects, how she was always in trouble for going it alone and not sharing her findings with the team.

  ‘Well, in every business there are rules and sometimes it’s hard to adhere to the
m, especially if you are onto something you feel is going to be productive.’

  ‘Yes, it just sort of takes over your life. You go to bed thinking about who did what, trying to remember everything, and then when you suddenly find a link, it gets exciting. I don’t seem able to share things until I have dug deeper, re-questioned, tracked down information – and so I’m constantly in hot water.’

  ‘I bet old James can be a hard taskmaster.’

  ‘That’s very true.’ Anna closed her eyes as Gordon moved behind her to gently massage her scalp and face. It felt wonderful and she sighed.

  ‘Maybe you’re not a team player.’

  ‘Mmmm …’

  ‘What, besides work, do you enjoy doing?’

  ‘Not a lot. In fact, I don’t really seem to find the time to do anything.’

  ‘You should – it’s always good to be able to stand aside for a time. You should make it a priority to have what I call private time.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Yes, I play polo. I ride out at Ham Gate in Richmond and play for their team. I don’t own a horse, not got the finances for that, but every weekend I ride or play squash, try and catch a show in town. You like the theatre?’

  ‘I haven’t been since …’ She couldn’t recall the last time she had been to see a West End show.

  ‘Movies?’

  She closed her eyes and told him how many films she had been watching recently connected to her investigation.

  ‘Ah, but that’s still work. So what case are you on?’

  Anna hesitated and then described the case. By now he had laid a warm facecloth over her forehead and more hot stones around her shoulders. He placed one in each hand.

  ‘Shush now, just relax, and when you feel ready you should slowly sit up. I’ll be back in a moment.’

  Anna lay in a blissful state, her breathing shallow and calm. When he returned, he removed the facecloth and gently brushed her hair from her face with his hands.

  ‘Feeling better?’

  She smiled up at him and nodded. He took the stones from her hands and she sat up slowly, feeling a little dizzy but incredibly relaxed. She laughed.

  ‘Good, that’s a nice sound,’ he said, watching as she swung her legs down from the bed, one arm holding the towel in place around her chest.