by Peter James
He stared at Whiteley’s image on the screen. One thing he knew for sure: someone who was capable of killing once was well capable of killing again. And again. His mind was spinning. Whiteley had not showed up for work all day. He turned to Glenn Branson.
‘Glenn, you spoke to Eric Whiteley’s boss a few days ago, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, chief.’
‘Do I remember right that he said the man was a bit of an oddball but a very reliable employee?’
‘Yes. Said he was a loner, but yes, totally reliable.’
‘So him not showing up for work all day without contacting the office, or having an outside appointment in his diary, is out of character?’
‘It would seem so, but we do know that he occasionally works away from the office at the premises of clients.’
Grace was liking this less and less. Hopefully the man was sick, in bed. But in his bones he didn’t think so. He called Guy Batchelor. ‘How are you doing?’
A blast of expletives came back down the phone, followed by, ‘That sodding bus lane! Sorry Roy, but we’re sitting in gridlock from Roedean all the way through to Peacehaven.’
‘Okay, let me know when you are on site.’ Grace immediately radioed the Ops 1 Controller again. ‘Andy, do you have a unit in the Peacehaven area?’
‘I’ll check.’
‘Send the nearest one straight to Eric Whiteley’s house. I need to establish if he’s at home – top priority.’
‘Leave it with me.’
Grace was suddenly craving a cigarette. But he didn’t carry any on him these days, and he didn’t have time to find someone to bum one from – and even less time to go outside and smoke it. Please God, let Whiteley be at home.
And if he wasn’t?
He was thinking of Gaia, she seemed to be a sweet and fragile person behind her tough public persona. He liked her, he was utterly determined to do all he possibly could to protect her and her son. After the incident with the chandelier, the consequences of any similar occurrences were not worth thinking about. Neither morally, nor career-wise.
He glanced at the serials – the log of all incidents in Sussex that was updated constantly. So far it was a quiet afternoon, which was good because that meant most of the officers on duty would be available if needed. He was thinking ahead. Clearly Andrew Gulli had not managed to convince Gaia to leave town, as the production’s call sheet, which he had requested and was lying in front of him, required her in make-up at 4 p.m. and on set at 6 p.m.
Andy Kille called him back. ‘Roy, I’ve got a Neighbourhood Policing Team car at Whiteley’s house now. They’re not getting any response from the doorbell or knocking and they can’t see or hear any signs of movement inside the house.’
Grace was tempted to instruct them to break in. If Whiteley was unconscious or dead, it would change the whole dynamics. But the fact the man had not turned up for work wasn’t sufficient grounds. They needed the warrant.
Twenty anxious minutes later, Nick Nicholl called him to say he had the warrant signed by a magistrate who lived close to Whiteley’s house in Peacehaven, and he was standing by, two streets away, with DS Guy Batchelor, DC Emma Reeves and six members of the Local Support Team. The POLSA and four Specialist Search Unit officers were minutes away.
‘Send the LST in,’ Grace instructed, urgently. ‘Now!’
111
Eric Whiteley’s house, 117 Tate Avenue, was near the top of a hill, in a network of streets filled with post-war houses and bungalows, all fairly tightly packed together. It was a quiet area, with the cliff-top walk above the sea a quarter of a mile to the south, and the vast expanse of farmland and open grassland of the South Downs just two streets away to the north.
Number 117 had a rather sad look about it, Guy Batchelor thought. It was a modest, drab 1950s two-storey brick and wood structure, with an integral garage, and fronted by a tidy but unloved garden. A sign on the garage doors, in large red letters on a white background, proclaimed, DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT PARKING HERE.
He waited on the pavement with DCs Nicholl and Reeves as the six officers from the Local Support Team went down the drive, two peeling off and hurrying down the side alley, past the dustbins, to cover the rear of the property. All six were in blue jump suits, with body armour, and military-style helmets with the visors down. One carried the cylindrical battering ram. Another two carried the hydraulic jamb spreader, and its power supply, which was used for forcing apart the steel reinforced door frames that drug dealers were increasingly fitting to slow down entry of any police raid. A fourth officer, the Sergeant in charge of this section, carried the search warrant.
Shouting, ‘POLICE! OPEN UP, POLICE!’ the first officer banged on the door, rang the doorbell and banged hard on the door again. He waited some moments, then turned, looking for a signal from his Sergeant, who nodded. Immediately, he swung the battering ram at the door. It burst open on the second strike, and three LST officers rushed in, bellowing, ‘POLICE! POLICE!’ while the Sergeant held back, in case their intended target tried to do a runner out of the garage door.
Guy Batchelor, Emma Reeves and Nick Nicholl stayed outside, until they got the all clear, confirming that the rooms had all been checked and there was no threat. Then they entered.
And stopped in their tracks in astonishment.
Nothing about the exterior of the house had given them any hint of the quite astonishing room they had stepped into.
There was a marble floor that would have looked more at home in an Italian palazzo than an urban annexe of Brighton and Hove. The walls were ceiling-to-floor mirrors, decorated with Aztec art and posters of Gaia. Batchelor stared at a signed monochrome of the icon in a black negligee – one of her most famous images. But it was ripped through several times with what must have been a knife blade, so that parts had peeled away and were hanging down. In angry red letters across it was daubed, BITCH.
He looked uneasily at Emma Reeves. She pointed to the left, above a white leather armchair. At another huge framed poster, in which Gaia was wearing a tank-top and leather jeans, captioned GAIA REVELATIONS TOUR. Across it was daubed in the same red paint, LOVE ME OR DIE, BITCH.
Above the fireplace, clearly in pride of place was a blow-up of the icon’s lips, nose and eyes in green monochrome, captioned, GAIA UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL. It was also personally signed. It too was slashed to ribbons in parts, and painted across, again in red, was the word COW.
One of the Specialist Search Unit officers, gloved and wearing black, was opening drawers in a chest on the far side of the room. Batchelor stared at each of the posters, at the violent rips, at the red paint, feeling deep, growing unease. He glanced out of the window; it was a grey, blustery afternoon and he could see a neighbour’s washing flapping in the wind, in front of a breeze-block garage. Something flapped in his belly. He had been in a lot of bad situations in his career, but he was experiencing something new to him at this moment. It was an almost palpable sense of evil. And it was spooking him.
A shadow moved, making him jump. It was a small Burmese cat, back arched, eyeing him suspiciously.
‘Take a look up here!’ another Search Unit officer called down to them from upstairs.
Batchelor, followed by Emma Reeves and Nick Nicholl, charged up the stairs, and, following the direction he was signalling, entered a room that felt like a cross between a museum and a shrine. And in which there had been a recent explosion of anger.
Shop window dummies lay on their sides on the floor, wearing dresses covered in clear plastic, and daubed in red paint. More autographed posters on the walls were ripped and daubed. CDs, tickets to Gaia concerts, bottles of Gaia’s mineral water, a smashed Martini glass and a fly-fishing rod snapped in two were among the other detritus that lay on the floor streaked, like blood, in red paint.
Some items remained in their glass display cabinets, but many of these were barely visible behind the furious red words all over the glass. BITCH. COW. DIE. LOVE ME. I’LL TEACH YOU. FUCK YOU.
>
DC Reeves was looking around, wide-eyed. ‘What an incredible collection.’
‘You a Gaia fan?’ Nick Nicholl asked.
She nodded vigorously.
‘Sir!’
They all turned. It was one of the Search Unit officers, Brett Wallace, and his face was ashen. These officers, he knew, saw everything and it took quite a bit to shock any of them. But this officer was definitely shocked at this moment.
‘This house has just become a crime scene. We’re going to have to lock it down and not disturb anything else.’
‘What have you found?’ Batchelor asked.
‘I’ll show you,’ Wallace said.
They went back downstairs, and followed him into the kitchen, a spotless room with dated furniture and appliances. Two other Search Unit officers were standing in there, both looking uncharacteristically uncomfortable. Wallace pointed at an open door, and Batchelor, followed by the other two, walked across to it. Beyond was a tiny pantry, mostly filled with a chest freezer, the lid of which was raised. A few supermarket ready meals lay on the floor, along with several packets of frozen sausages, and three picnic freezer blocks.
‘Take a look inside,’ Wallace said, indicating for him to go in.
Warily, Guy Batchelor took a couple of steps forward and peered down. Instantly he stepped back a pace, in shock.
‘Oh shit,’ he said.
112
‘Where – the – fuck – is – she . . . ?’ Larry Brooker glared at Barnaby Katz, the Line Producer, his voice tight with fury. They were standing by the doorway, inside the Banqueting Room of the Pavilion. Thirty actors, including all the rest of their stars – Judd Halpern, Hugh Bonneville, Joseph Fiennes and Emily Watson – were seated around the table, waiting and looking increasingly impatient as they grew hotter and sweatier in their costumes and wigs. All the film lights were on, bathing everyone at the table in a surreal glow – and roasting them at the same time.
The table had been temporarily botched back together. Above it was a small but gaping hole in the dome, where the chandelier had been hanging just twenty-four hours ago.
Katz raised his arms in a shrug of helplessness. His hairline appeared to have receded a couple of inches in the past few days of constant stress.
‘I knocked on her trailer door twenty minutes ago and someone shouted she’d be out in a few moments.’ He adjusted his headset then spoke urgently into it. ‘Joe, any sign of Gaia?’
Brooker checked his watch. ‘Not twenty minutes ago, Barnaby. That was thirty minutes ago. Prima donnas! God I hate them. Goddamn actresses! Thirty fucking minutes she’s kept us.’ He turned to the director, Jack Jordan. ‘You know what thirty minutes costs us, don’t you, Jack?’
Jordan gave a benign shrug, long used to being messed around by out-of-control egos on both side of the lens. With his mane of white hair flowing from beneath his baseball cap, the veteran filmmaker looked as ever like an ancient soothsayer and, true to that persona, was keeping his calm. He needed to. This was the most important scene in the movie and with every single one of the stars featuring, the most expensive. The money shot.
Brooker banged his fists together. ‘This is ridiculous. Has someone pissed her off today or what?’ He glared at Jordan. ‘Have you had another argument with her over her lines?’
‘Darling, I haven’t had a peep out of her since yesterday. She was as good as gold last time we spoke. Just give her a few more minutes. She has to be patient for her heavy make-up and her wig is damned uncomfortable, it tickles her face, poor love.’
Poor love, Brooker thought, cynically. Gaia was getting paid fifteen million bucks for just seven weeks’ work. He could put up with his face being tickled for seven weeks for that kind of dough, he thought.
‘Goddamn ridiculous wig,’ Brooker said. ‘Can hardly see her face. Makes her look like a sheep in a corset. I’m paying all this goddamn money to have Gaia, and we could have had anyone inside that dress and hair.’ He looked at his watch again. ‘Five minutes. If she’s not on set in five minutes I’m gonna – I’m gonna . . .’ He hesitated, wary of making a fool of himself and of upsetting the icon. The truth was, when you worked on a small independent production with an actress as big as Gaia, you had to tread carefully. Irritate her and she might start to slow down even more and run you days – if not weeks – over schedule, with all its crippling consequences. There had already been a couple of occasions during this past week when Gaia, turning suddenly imperious, made Brooker realize that, without ever saying as much, she knew very well that there was only one reason he had managed to get this movie into production. That all of them were only here making this movie for that same one reason.
Which was, that she, Gaia, had said yes.
113
It took Guy Batchelor a moment to pluck up the courage to step forward again and look back into the chest freezer. The cold air swirling around him felt part of the same ice that was coursing his veins.
A human head lay on the bottom, face up, between several packs of frozen peas, beans and broccoli, like some hideous ornament. A man’s face. The flesh was grey, flecked with frost, and the hair was coated with frost, as if he were wearing a white beanie. The eyes were shrunken, like tiny marbles.
Despite the discoloration and the patches obscured by frost, he recognized the face instantly from the photographs he had seen: Myles Royce, winner of the auction for Gaia’s yellow tweed suit.
As he turned away and stepped back into the kitchen, Brett Wallace said, ‘Is that the bit you’re missing from “Unknown Berwick Male”?’
‘Yes, I’d say it is,’ Batchelor replied.
One of the other Search Unit officers, who was busily peering beneath a dishwasher with a torch, looked up. ‘Brett’s mum said he was always good at jigsaw puzzles as a kid.’
The DS smiled, then pulled out his phone and called the SIO.
*
Grace listened intently to the news from Guy Batchelor, trying to think clearly through the panic engulfing him, trying to make some fast decisions. The Chief Constable and the Assistant Chief Constable needed to be informed before they found themselves in the embarrassing situation of hearing about the discovery of Royce’s head on the news. But before he did that, Grace had one absolute priority.
He rang the US cellphone number of Gaia’s head of security.
‘Andrew Gulli,’ he answered, almost instantly, as if expecting a call.
‘It’s Roy Grace.’
‘Inspector Grace – I—’ The James Cagney whine sounded uneasy.
‘We have an emergency situation, Mr Gulli. I have a copy of the production call sheet, and see your client’s shooting at the Pavilion this evening. I’m extremely concerned for her safety – I’ve reason to believe there’s a person out there intent on harming her. He’s already killed at least once. We know what he looks like and we know his disguise, and I think we have a good chance of catching him very quickly. But I don’t want to take any risks with your client so what I’d like to do, with your support, is remove her from the set and keep her and her son indoors in her suite, under guard, for the next twenty-four hours. Is that possible?’
‘Hey, Inspector, you and I are on the same page. But I can’t help you. I got fired this morning.’
‘Fired?’
‘I’m flying back to LA tomorrow.’
‘Gaia? Gaia fired you? In the middle of this situation?’
‘Yeah, well, the thing is, I told my client I was insisting on her leaving England right away, today, and flying back to the States – and to hell with the consequences. She wouldn’t have it. So we had a kind of a Mexican stand-off. She told me if I didn’t change my attitude, I’d be fired. I told her, “Ms Lafayette, I’m not risking your life, nor your son’s life. You crazy or something? To hell with the consequences.”’ There was a brief silence then Gulli went on. ‘I tell you, Inspector, she was getting paid peanuts for this film compared to what she earns performing, so what the hell, let them sue, I told
her. Better to be sued than dead. But she wouldn’t have it. I told her, I was not letting her go on set. So she fired me.’
‘Want me to try speaking to her?’
‘Gaia Lafayette does what Gaia Lafayette wants, Inspector. She doesn’t listen to anybody.’
‘I’m going to go talk to her right now,’ Grace said.
‘Good luck. You’re gonna need it.’
He ended the call with Gulli and immediately phoned the Ops 1 Controller Andy Kille, glad that he was still on duty. ‘We’ve found Myles Royce’s head,’ he informed him. ‘And the suspect’s at large with, I believe, real intent to harm Gaia. I’m circulating images of Eric Whiteley and his Anna Galicia persona – I’m printing copies for all officers on duty, and PCSOs. And I want every available officer and PCSO we have, deployed to the Pavilion right away. I want to make it an island site.’
‘I could draft in some Specials as well,’ Kille said helpfully.
‘Anyone you can get,’ Grace replied. ‘Until we’ve got this maniac locked up.’
‘I’m upgrading this to a Critical Incident,’ Kille said. ‘Graham Barrington’s Duty Gold and Nick Sloan’s Silver.’
Grace thanked him and looked at his watch: 6.15 p.m. According to her schedule on the call sheet, Gaia had been required in her trailer for make-up and wardrobe at 4 p.m., two hours before she was due on set. He turned to the forensic podiatrist. ‘Haydn, I want you to go back to the CCTV room – I’ll get anyone who’s available to help you there. I need you to watch the cameras on the streets around the Pavilion for any sign of Eric Whiteley – or Anna Galicia.’
‘Sure – now?’
‘Yes, right away, we have to find him, and fast.’ He looked around. ‘Bella, I want you to blue-light him down there, then meet me at the front of the Pavilion. Okay? Go!’
Bella Moy and Haydn Kelly both stood up hurriedly and headed towards the door. Grace addressed the rest of the team. ‘We all know what Whiteley looks like in both guises – I want as many as possible of us down there looking out for him. I can’t be sure he’s going to turn up, but I’ll be surprised if he doesn’t, and we can’t take the risk of missing him.’