She didn’t just resemble Grace Kelly, she was Grace Kelly. Slightly bustier and heavier of frame, but she could have easily passed for her in her prime. This had always been a weapon in her line of business, her initial assault usually a fraction of a second faster than it should have been because her victim was subconsciously thinking ‘Fucking Hell! I’m being attacked by Grace Kelly, star of Hitchcock’s classics Rear Window and To Catch A Thief!’ before being floored by a well-aimed blow to the throat.
The four BNP thugs didn’t know who Alfred Hitchcock or Grace Kelly were, just that a strikingly beautiful blonde woman in leather had screeched up beside them on a very large BMW motor bike, leapt off and put one onto the ground with the heel of her hand to his windpipe.
The second one went down with a roundhouse kick to his nose, exploding it in a bloom of blood. The third one pulled a knife, spinning to face her just as she placed her Sig Sauer automatic pistol into his right eye socket.
“Let’s see who’s faster, shall we? You, judging by your breath, full of a very cheap lager or the good people of SIG Sauer who have been making firearms for over a century.”
The accent was very refined, very BBC pre-1980. Cut glass felt a bit rough around this accent.
The knife clanked against the pavement, as the fourth thug felt a primeval urge cut through the alcoholic mist surrounding what passed for his consciousness, and he proceeded to run very quickly away.
A police car, lights flashing, was on the scene in moments and the two unarmed officers bravely out of their car, confronting her. She calmly put the gun away and flashed them official identification, before helping Julian off the pavement.
“Dr. Tredestrian, the Prime Minister suggested I keep an eye on you. I’m Captain Olivia Olerenshaw-Bradley. My friends call me Boo.”
• • •
Lady Olivia Olerenshaw-Bradley confounded pretty much everyone in their expectations of her. She had been born into a landed family that had realised things were changing in the late nineteenth century and smartly diversified out of land-based wealth into industry and banking. By the early 21st century the Olerenshaw-Bradleys had managed to remain a very wealthy family, not having to resort to opening their country seat to coach loads of American tourists asking them had they ever met Shakespeare or why there was not a Burger King on the estate. Boo, blessed with stunning looks and the not unnoticed resemblance could have easily married whomever she wanted. Alternatively, she could have utilised her inheritance to set herself up with one of those tiny boutiques that sell handbags and shoes to other trust fund daddy’s girls. Instead, upon leaving Cambridge fluent in five languages, Boo surprised everyone by joining the Royal Marines.
Her father had been surprised, but not shocked. He’d known that Boo wanted to do something tangible and of substance with her life and being the breeding vessel for some inbred Hooray Henry was not going to be her thing. Crawling up a beach with a dagger in her mouth had admittedly not been on the short list, but it curiously did fit her and he had enthusiastically applauded when she had passed through the Royal Marine training and accepted her commission as a first lieutenant. It was then that the problems started. Boo applied to join the elite Special Boat Squadron, the RM counterpart to the SAS, and whilst she passed the entrance exam, she then discovered that the senior military were less than enthused about bringing women into the SBS and were particularly peeved that Boo had passed the exceptionally vigorous entrance exams, dislocating the shoulder of her unarmed combat instructor in the final test.
It was then that the Secret Intelligence Service, now at the frontline of fighting modern terrorism and therefore less fussy about excluding talented and particularly language skilled individuals, stepped in and offered Boo the opportunity of an even greater challenge. In return for pushing through her entry into the SBS and her promotion to the rank of captain, Boo accepted secondment to a special troubleshooting unit operating out of the Cabinet Office, created by Alexander Fairfax himself. The purpose of the unit was to gather intelligence for the Prime Minister directly, act as a secret channel to other world leaders, and occasionally intervene in a forceful but discreet manner in areas of national security. Most importantly, the unit was small but well resourced with little unnecessary formality. The PM was interested in results as opposed to Boo’s penchant for the odd leather or velure catsuit and whereas the stuffier elements of the SIS or the Security Service frowned upon her homage to Mrs. Peel, there was little they could do about it. She was professional when and where she needed to be and more importantly, Boo was now The Girl from No. 10.
She had been a little weary at answering directly to a politician and had fears of being a British Nixon-style ‘plumber’, spending her days tapping the phones of the Prime Minister’s political rivals, but Fairfax had reassured her quickly. He didn’t go in for that nonsense and whenever she found herself spying on other politicians, it was gathering evidence of corruption that was then promptly handed over to the Director of Public Prosecutions. The fact that Fairfax did not even attempt to cover up the time two of his Ministers were caught licking honey off Saudi Arabian provided call girls in return for Typhoon EuroFighters boosted him in her eyes.
When the PM assigned her to protect Julian, she had been sceptical as to the need to protect him. Who could possibly want to harm someone as innocuous as Julian? Wiping a racist thug’s blood clotted teeth off the end of her boot with a paper tissue, she wasn’t quite so sure now.
• • •
Susan Fisher was Janet. That is to say, she was the thirty two-year-old single working woman whom Big Cake were afraid of losing and they were right to be afraid. Susan was desperately lonely, spending her evenings alone with her Marks and Spencer meal for one, her Private Practice, Grey’s Anatomy and Sex & The City DVD boxsets in her small but cosy and fragrant candle illuminated flat. It wasn’t that she didn’t have friends but somehow The One had passed her by and now she moved in circles of the smugly coupled, all taking an awkward interest in her non-existent love life.
The juxtaposition with her professional life was stark. She was a talented, good looking woman, a qualified accountant who worked hard at her job, arriving in ahead of her boss and leaving after him and, being far more competent than he was, made him look very good. To his credit, he was well aware of this and he was also aware of the fact that she could easily run the department instead of him and probably more efficiently. As a result, he made sure to remember her birthday and Christmas and be forthcoming with tasteful presents and a good annual review with as many bonuses as were in his power to dispense and always a kind word. The sad thing was that she knew she could replace him if she wanted in one of those underhand corporate back-stabbings but she didn’t and the reason made her smile, such was its pathetic nature.
He was, in short, the most significant man in her life. Susan found that she even subconsciously dressed to please him, noticing from his looks at other women in the office and the photos of his family that he had an eye for a shapely leg. Thankfully her legs were her best feature, and so tight, slightly tantalising skirts featured prominently in her office wardrobe, if only to get the approving eye of a man.
She was well aware of the ridiculousness of it and certainly was not angling for an affair. She did not even find him that attractive. But she knew the truth. If he had made a move on her as they worked late one night, or as they attended one of the many mind-numbing conferences she accompanied him to, she would almost certainly surrender to his desires.
Susan so wanted someone to hold her at night. When she would pluck up the courage to go out with ‘the girls’, she would occasionally get so drunk that she would end up giving herself to some boorish salesman from Scunthorpe if only for that brief moment where a man actually wanted her before he debased her and fell asleep in a mixture of alcohol, sweat and flatulence.
She had dismissed the ads from the NCA as soon as she had seen them. It stank of desperation and it wasn’t for her. But the NCA had been ver
y specific in their commissioning of their ads and they knew whom they were aiming at — it was Susan Fisher and women like her. She soon found herself absentmindedly browsing their website during her lunch-break, and then filling in the online application, just for fun of course.
It was after one lonely evening eating alone in a restaurant and watching a young couple practically exchange bodily fluids in between courses that she had sent in the application after arriving home and putting away a half bottle of red in front of Emmerdale.
Susan had been genuinely surprised when, two weeks later, she had received an email informing her that she had been selected to partake in the first batch of NCA clients. The email informed her that she was requested to attend an all day session at a processing centre not too far from her flat two Saturdays hence.
Aside from her laundry, watering her herbs on her windowsill, and ironing her laundry, Susan had quite a large opening in her social diary. Time was not short but did she really want to go through this? Was this not just a confirmation of where her life was? Another ad for the NCA appeared in the ad break. Just how much were they spending on advertising anyway? This ad stressed the fact that the whole process was sensitive, understanding, and completely voluntary. An applicant could drop out at any time.
Alone in her cold bed, arms wrapped around a cold pillow and pondering a life accompanied by the permanent stench of cat pee, Susan resolved to go have a look. Where was the harm?
• • •
The Stoat was angry with himself. Bloody furious in fact for making the stupid assumption that Dr. Tredestrian would not have had government protection. He had observed the doctor himself, but had been looking for the usual two inspector plods from Counter Terrorist Command who made their presence known as a deterrent. That striking woman was not fresh from Hendon but somewhere else and he wouldn’t make another lazy assumption again, he assured himself.
He had been professional about everything else. The BNP thugs who had been arrested on the scene had only been able to supply the police with an alias and a description that matched his carefully applied make-up and disguise. The police would quickly find that trail going dead and whilst he had hoped that the normal police would have then just dismissed the attack as yet more moronic neo-nazi tactics, the intervention of Boo had caused him to be skeptical. If some other state agency was involved, as it seemed to be, they might also be skeptical, especially as the Prime Minister himself had so much invested in the NCA project. Still, he shrugged the setback off. At least he had gotten to see a white supremacist get his head kicked in by a very large and very black police officer after he suggested the officer return to the place of his forefathers and the officer shared with the dim witted racist a little nugget of his culture, giving him a Glasgow kiss which split the racist’s lip in three places and shook at least temporarily his belief in the primacy of the white race.
The Stoat was as entitled to a laugh as anyone else.
• • •
The profiler was an attractive psychologist attached to New Scotland Yard and Switzerland had taken to her immediately. She had reviewed the files and spoke in clear tangibles as opposed to the happy-clappy-touchy-feely-huggy-wuggy nonsense he was expecting. The DCI was weary of psychologist assistance in cases as he had found many of them to be as useful as Counsellor Troi in Star Trek: The Next Generation who, when the ship would be under attack from a Klingon battle fleet, would announce that the crew were feeling stress. Likewise, Switzerland was sceptical of someone telling him that his serial killer was “almost certainly an anti-social male aged between eighteen and forty nine who would be psychologically unbalanced. Or maybe not.” No shit. Having said that, unlike old school Met officers, Switzerland was open to new techniques and profiling was in his experience useful as a means of narrowing the field. When accompanied by old-fashioned police work, of course. This profiler seemed much more aware of what he needed in terms of information. The fact that she looked like a cross between Teri Hatcher and a prim bespectacled librarian didn’t do any harm either.
The investigation was proceeding in a number of directions. As per standard practice, each individual victim was being examined to see if an associate or family member had a motive, but both Switzerland and the media were not taking that track too seriously. Having said that, Switzerland still clung to the first rule of Lieutenant Columbo which was to never accept basic assumptions without testing them first. After all, he thought, wait until 2027 and the files on a certain car crash in Paris were released, revealing a jilted lover who had plotted to kill her cheating boyfriend who happened to be a chauffeur to the rich and famous and worked for a wealthy Egyptian family.
The real direction was the assumption that these were all killings committed by the same person, a view heavily leaned toward by the profiler.
“Which means one of two possible motives,” she suggested, peering at her notes. “Either some sort of political or social statement, or else a personal agenda.”
“If it is political, could it possibly be some sort of terrorist group?” the DCI asked.
“I doubt it. If such an avant-garde group existed then their primary purpose in committing these acts would most likely be to publicise their beliefs. I suspect they wouldn’t be able to resist the massive media potential, unless of course they are so anti-western culture that they actually choose to remain secret and away from the media as a protest itself. Not feeding the beast, if you will, but I think that’s unlikely. The publicity shy terrorist is not a concept that is likely to emerge any day soon. No, I think this is personal. Whoever is doing this has a personal grudge. As to whether it is against these individual celebrities or against celebrities in general I can not help you I’m afraid, Chief Inspector.”
Switzerland wasn’t too disappointed, in that even getting a good idea as to where not to look was something. If there was a tangible link between all these celebrities, maybe a jealous paparazzi or a sacked agent, maybe that was the link.
The profiler took off her glasses.
“Just one other thing. If it is someone who just has it in for the concept of celebrity, you could seriously have your work cut out for you, Chief Inspector. For example, it probably wouldn’t be a celebrity stalker, as they tend to be bitter that they are not part of the celebrity circle, as opposed to being against the concept of celebrity status itself. Your man, or woman, could well be a perfectly normal functioning member of society who has never appeared on a database anywhere. If so, we’re not talking needle in a haystack here. We’re talking about finding a space in a haystack that someone may or may not put a needle into.”
• • •
Leeza snorted up another line of cocaine, sniffed, rubbed her nostrils and rose from the floor of the hotel room bathroom. THE GERMAINES lead singer adjusted the strategically attached slips of fabric that helped keep her smooth, tight and slightly orange body a few millimetres outside of the public indecency law, checked herself in the mirror and walked out into the hotel suite.
It was quite possible that Leeza McWhiddy was the most famous woman in Britain. She had a traffic-stopping pretty face and a killer body if your taste extended to women with the bodies of forcibly starved thirteen year-old boys with cleavage created by a miracle of underwear engineering. And that giant head inside the giant hair, of course, which gave her the appearance at times of being a refugee from the set of Thunderbirds.
THE GERMAINES were the biggest girl band in the country and the self-proclaimed leaders of girls taking control of their own lives. Or at least that was what the men, who wrote their songs, choreographed their dance sets, designed their videos and managed them, told them to say. Occasionally, when one of the girls started to believe the image and got stroppy with the group’s manager, an aging but brilliant impresario and ‘creator of talent’, she’d find herself out of the band. One doomed solo album later and she was appearing as a guest gang-banger on the Adult Channel. As it happened, not one of the band had been a member of the ori
ginal band, a fact that the band’s fans did not seem to either notice or care about. In fact, the aging impresario had turned this into a positive, kindling a tiny spark of almost impossible hope in the hearts of every teenaged girl fan that there might one day be room for her in the band and so she had better start throwing up now.
There had been one ex-member of the band who had managed to maintain her position in the Celebsphere, by marrying a very successful, good-looking and notoriously quick-tempered Premiership footballer. She discovered two things quickly. One, questions about where he had spent his nights and whose perfume was that were not appreciated and indeed prone to cause a temper tantrum and two, make-up artists who were good enough to cover up bruises and cut lips were not cheap. But then, evenings spent cowering and bleeding on the floor of the kitchen and mornings spent on her knees on the cold bathroom tiles vomiting into the toilet after having a low fat yogurt, that was the price of living the dream, wasn’t it?
The band’s image was described by the tabloids as ‘raunchy’. Their PR people suggested that people should have a positive and healthy attitude to sex, which apparently meant spending large amounts of time in public exposing ones’ genitals and dressing like a particularly low rent hooker. But to Leeza, in her twenty first year, this was all normal. This is what she wanted with her life.
She had gone into the bathroom out of habit rather than any shame about her rapidly expanding coke habit and given the activities in the room, it certainly wasn’t out of any sense of inappropriate behaviour. The band had finished a concert three hours ago and with enough alco-pops on board to fuel a Land Rover had picked up a couple of likely fellas in the hotel nightclub. One was a Premiership hopeful while the other two were lads-about-town who officially dabbled in drugs while unofficially made their money from child porn. Premiership Hopeful was being orally pleasured by one of her band-mates while another ‘friend’ (which meant she really did not know her too well) was being taken roughly from behind whilst bent over a sofa. She looked not so much overwhelmed with sexual bliss as semi-conscious. Then Leeza saw the stream of vomit running down the seat.
The Ministry of Love Page 5