Blood Read: Publish And Be Dead (The Capgras Conspiracy Book 1)

by Simon J. Townley

  “Not successfully.” Tom scowled at Ollie. “Who, what, when? Give us more.”

  “There’s a group, four of us. We wrote a leaflet years ago. But we didn’t even write it, we put our names to it.” She produced a crumpled letter from a pocket of her bleached, baggy cotton trousers.

  “How long ago?”

  “Ten years.”

  “No problem,” Ollie reached out to take the paper. “They have six years from publication. It fails. Stop worrying.”

  Not so, she told them. The pamphlet was posted on a website two years before, as part of the on-going campaign against the company.

  Ollie scanned the letter. “What did you accuse them of doing?”

  “Cruelty to animals, environmental damage from chemicals at the plant, toxins in the food chain, corruption.”

  “That’s libellous all right.” Ollie waved the letter in Tom's general direction. “You didn’t miss much.”

  “What do I do?”

  Tom snatched the letter from his brother’s outstretched hand. “Fight it, put the evidence in court. Don’t give in to them.”

  Ollie raised a hand to silence his brother. “You’ll never prove any of it. Settle out of court. You can’t afford the lawyers fees never mind the damages, and they’ll both be heavier if you drag it through a trial.”

  “She can’t afford to settle either,” Tom said. “How come they’re suing four people? Who wrote it?”

  “It was a group I was part of at the time. Eight of us signed it. I think they can only find four.”

  “But who wrote it?” Tom twirled an empty wine glass in his fingers.

  “None of us, really. We sort of all had a go. But then Rob wrote it up properly. Made it stronger. Much stronger. He didn’t sign it, but he wrote it.”

  “Which Rob?” Tom and Ollie asked in unison.

  “Rob Rob.”

  “Ben’s dad?”

  She didn’t have to answer. Her face told the tale. Ben’s dad wrote the pamphlet. Ben’s dad, the man ten years older than her. The man who seduced her when she was fifteen. Got her pregnant at sixteen. And who disappeared out of her life without warning, or any clue as to where he had gone, or why.

  Ollie had tried to trace him through his law firm. Tom had used his press contacts and his various ways and means. The man had vaporised so thoroughly and comprehensively it was as though he had never existed in the first place.

  Tom had not liked the man from the start, or trusted him – hanging around the young girls on the fringes of the eco-protest groups like a vampire at a blood bank. He’d been all mouth about the groups and causes he was connected to, always making more trouble than was needed, but somehow staying out of it himself.

  “I’m surprised they’re bothering to sue you,” Ollie said. “You’ve got no money. What’s the point?”

  Tom pushed the letter back across the table towards Emma. “It’s all about corporate reputation. To stop anyone repeating the accusation. Lay down a marker. Intimidate the protest movement. Impress potential investors.”

  “You’re screwed then,” Ollie said. “They want to stick the knife in. Get a good lawyer. But a cheap one.”

  “A free one would help.”

  “Sorry, not my field. You need a specialist. “

  Emma slumped into a chair, limp and defeated. “What am I going to do?

  Tom walked around the table and sat next to Emma, his hand on her shoulder.“Have you talked to the others? What do they say?”

  She shook her head and mumbled something. She seemed close to tears. “Joe and Suzy moved to Wales. John’s in Brighton last I heard.”

  Tom gave Ollie a long, hard, meaningful stare. “We’ll help you out, with paperwork and stuff. Ollie will know someone. I’ll ask around in the newsroom.” And do some digging, he thought to himself. Perhaps there was a good story in all of this, a chance to stick one to the corporations. “We’ll see you through it, somehow.”

  “Don’t tell mum and dad,” she said, “not ever. They worry.”

  They worried all the time. It was their main weapon of attack, their only way of exerting influence over their offspring. They would have to know sometime. But not yet, perhaps. Not today, certainly.

  High-pitched shrieks of excitement erupted from the living room, Ben’s voice louder, for once, than all the rest, though Ollie’s son and daughter were doing their best to out-do him. The despairing pleas of the grandparents, for calm and for quiet, were clearly falling on deafened ears.

  “I guess Dad’s finished his stories and broken out the toys,” Ollie said. “Shall we?”

  They rose as one and hurried back to the family gathering, instinctively forming a protective phalanx between the rumbustious and the wearied generations of the Capgras clan.

  Chapter Twenty

  Life, Death And Ice-Cream

  Ben Capgras sat at the family dinner table with his grandparents, his mother and uncles and cousins, toying with his food while contemplating life, death and ice-cream.

  Specifically, he was perturbed by the concept that the number of dollops of ice-cream was finite. No more than two, his mother insisted, as if the world supply was running dry, even though there was plenty more and his grandmother wanted him to have it. It brought joy to her face to see him tucking into the food. Rarely is it so easy to make someone smile. Why spurn the chance, he argued silently to himself, why waste such an opportunity?

  There was very little ice cream served at home. His mother didn’t eat sweet foods, and lived with a passionate suspicion of added sugars and e-numbers. Dairy produce was consumed with a sense of over-riding guilt.

  Ben made up for these strictures by indulging in as many worldly pleasures as he could pack in during school meals. His mother had told the teachers he was a vegetarian, and meat-free options were indeed available. He chose the sausages, however, the bacon, the chicken, the lamb stew, and followed it up with treacle tart and custard or apple pie and as much cream as he could coax out of the dinner ladies with his bright green eyes and innocent, eleven-year-old smile.

  Under his mother’s watchful gaze, ice-cream and other deserts were rationed, if allowed at all. Like life: you only get so much and then it’s gone. Ben had been aware of this impending impasse for a number of years. He remembered the first time it hit home. Lying alone in the dark, in his warm bed, aged six, the realisation had come to him that though he was at this moment a person with a name and thoughts in his head, one day he would not exist any more. The lights would go out. There would be no more waking up in the morning to find a bright new day. In time there would be no more thoughts. No more Ben Capgras. And though his mother gave credence to a wide array of assorted beliefs cherry-picked from the world’s faiths, cults, gurus and self-help seminars, Ben himself remained a sceptic at heart. A rationalist. An atheist, even. He didn’t believe in an afterlife, or reincarnation, or heaven and hell. Those were silly things to Ben Capgras. It puzzled him that so many people in the world fervently believed them one minute and blatantly ignored them the next. He had long ago worked out, however, that human beings are extremely strange. And he didn’t just mean his mother’s friends.

  “How is your ice-cream?” his grandmother asked.

  Ben scraped the dish studiously. He held it up for inspection, empty and clean, like a latter-day Oliver Twist pleading for more.

  His mother intervened, as he knew she would, and the adults resumed their discussion of politics or some such. His mind refused to pay attention. This was Ben’s super-power: he could tune out all human speech until it became no more than a background babble, a stream flowing over stones, rising and falling, relentless and never-ending, but easy to ignore, if you had more important things to do.

  His thoughts wandered, following the sound of barking from outside. More than anything in the world, he wanted a dog of his own. But Mark, his mother’s latest, didn’t like them in the house. He said they were dirty. Though Ben had met lots of dogs over the years and all of them wer
e cleaner than Mark and most of his friends. And they didn’t drink either, or smoke. Or burn toast.

  One day, Ben promised himself, he would have a place of his own and he would fill it with dogs. Cats too. And many other creatures. He could own a zoo, except that was cruel and he didn’t feel comfortable with animals being kept in cages or made into spectacles for people to stare at. He wanted to live wild alongside them.

  That was the plan: run away and become Tarzan. Or David Attenborough. Or that man on the television who lights fires with moss and damp sticks. One day he would run free with a pack of wolves. Or a herd of elephants. Or float across oceans as a jellyfish. One day, he told himself. One day soon.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Unchaste Action

  The email which arrived through the contact form on his blog was short and to the point. “Tom, can we talk? I need your help. Kiera.” She supplied her mobile phone number.

  Capgras, who lay slouched on his bedraggled sofa in the front section of his shipping container, considered the request thoroughly for almost a minute. He mulled over all the possible permutations: text or call? Email?

  He decided to text. Then he dithered and began to dial.

  He changed his mind, once more, and wrote out a text: “Is anything wrong? How can I help?”

  He paused. She might be in danger. But how pressing could it be if she had time to find his blog and write a message?

  He hit send and regretted it immediately. He should have called her. What was he thinking?

  His phone chimed at him. She’d texted back: “Need advice. Can we meet?”

  “Sure. Where? When?”

  “As soon as possible. Today? Meet you in town?”

  On a Sunday, he might even find a parking spot for the bike. “Where?”

  “Tate Modern? Drink after?”

  “Three-thirty, in the Tate. By the red Rothko,” he texted back.

  “See you there.”

  He scurried around the bathroom, put on cleaner, smarter clothes, then thought better of it and changed back into his biking gear. He hurried out of the door, his head still foggy from the wine the night before. His mother’s birthday bash had gone on into the small hours of the morning, as the Capgras clan had set the world to rights.

  He drove faster than normal and arrived early at the gallery on the south bank of the Thames. He parked his bike close by and spent half an hour wandering the rooms, looking for anything new. And for signs of Kiera Roche. She was nowhere to be found, so he settled in front of the Rothko, on loan from the Guggenheim, and stared at the canvas long and deep.

  Colour, texture. Was there meaning? Undoubtedly, but beyond words, and that made Tom Capgras uncomfortable. There should be words to express every thought and feeling. But there weren’t. He’d read about these paintings, in newspapers, magazine and books of art history, but nothing he had found came close to explaining them. Only one word resonated, from those he had devoured: death. Rothko’s work spoke of mortality, everyone agreed. But that couldn’t explain why it seemed to hum and throb and fill the room with a deep, extended base note of sadness. Sure, death was sad. But not like this. This was worse.

  Kiera Roche slipped onto the wooden bench next to him. She wore a long, red woollen coat and a matching hat from which fronds of reddish brown hair had escaped, highlighted against her pale skin. Tom wondered if she had arranged it that way on purpose – a manicured garden with a wild patch in one corner, to entice a visitor to explore.

  “You a fan of Rothko?” he asked.

  “Bit heavy for my taste.”

  “Too serious?”

  “Too much red. It clashes with my coat.”

  “You could get lost in this room. Or hung on the wall.”

  She took his arm. “Let’s walk. I can’t spend long looking at that. It’s enough to make anyone suicidal.”

  She led him downstairs, making small talk, and bought him a coffee. They sat at a table close to a group of German tourists on one side, some Americans talking too loud on another, and a party of Spanish school kids. Kiera stirred her cappuccino, then looked into his eyes and held her gaze.

  “Do you tell lies, Tom?”

  “I’m a journalist.”

  She laughed. “What does that mean?”

  “You know what it means. I go undercover. How would I do that if I never told a lie?”

  “Would you tell me the truth, if I asked you a straight question?”

  “I might.”

  “Not good enough.”

  “Try me with the question.”

  She stirred her drink once more. It didn’t need stirring. She hadn’t even added any sugar.

  “Was Joanne Leatherby murdered?” She watched his face intently.

  A straight question. It deserved a straight answer. But she’d come to the wrong place for that. “Why would you think so?”

  “I have my reasons.”

  “Who’ve you been talking to?”

  “I thought I was asking the questions.”

  “Is this an interrogation?”

  “It wasn’t supposed to be. Do you answer every question with another question?”

  He smiled back at her: “Does it bother you?”

  “Enough games. I heard that Evelyn Vronsky is paying you to look into Joanne’s death.”

  He could think of only two people that knew: Hannah and Evelyn herself. But there could be others. “Who told you that?”

  “It’s true then.”

  “Doesn’t mean she was murdered though.”

  “And Tony Haslam? Is that connected? I have a right to know.”

  “Why is that?”

  She finally stopped stirring her coffee, looked at the cup as if seeing it for the first time, took a sip and then wiped froth from her lip. “I think I might be in danger.”

  “Why so?”

  “I can’t say. Sorry, please trust me. I can’t tell you. But I could be, if someone is killing people. If it’s who I think it is.”

  Now they were getting somewhere. “And who do you think it is?”

  “You go first, you’re the investigator.”

  “But you’re not the one paying me.”

  “I asked for your help.”

  “I’m here aren’t I?”

  “You’re not exactly helping, though.” She took off her hat, and her face flickered with exasperation. “I told you, I fear I’m in danger. The least you can do is to stop being flippant.”

  Tom slurped his own coffee without taking his eyes off her once.

  “Tell me,” Roche said, “why would Evelyn Vronsky hire a reporter instead of a proper detective? No offence, you understand. But there’s a big difference between getting a quote for an article and gathering real evidence.”

  “You think I’m incompetent?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  Capgras watched her mouth flicker. “I’ve found the killer, if that helps any.”

  She took a long, deep breath. “Have you told the police?”

  “Yes.”

  “What are they doing about it?” Her coffee cup clattered in the saucer as she fumbled it back onto the table.

  “Not much, right now.”

  “Because you have no evidence?”

  “Not enough, perhaps.”

  “I’d like to help.”

  “How? And why? Let’s start with why.”

  “That should be obvious,” she said. “I think I’m in danger. I want the killer found and stopped before he can strike again.”

  “Why would he harm you?”

  She still held a teaspoon in one hand. She looked at it, as if surprised to find it there. Then she wagged it in Tom’s direction. “If Arthur Middleton is behind all this, then I might be next. If that’s not enough to persuade you to help, then I’d better go. Sorry to have wasted your time.”

  She made to get up. Tom waved her back down into her chair. He leant forward and dropped his voice to a whisper. “Who gave you Middleton’s name.”
>
  “No one. I’ve read his books.”

  “Disquietly To Our Graves?”

  “Among others.”

  “So you put two and two together. But it doesn’t prove anything as the police so politely pointed out when I discussed it with them.”

  “You’re still not helping me, Tom.”

  “You’re still not telling me why you should be a target.”

  “There are reasons. I’m not allowed to divulge them. Legally. That’s all I can say.”

  It sounded like the truth. Everything about her body language suggested she was on the level. The German tourists at the next table got up to move. Two businessmen sat down and put their phones on the table. Tom glanced across, wary. “Let’s walk,” he said.

  She took his arm once more as he led her across the great hall and out the main doors. Autumn sunshine slanted over the rooftops of the city. There was less than half an hour of daylight left. “Did you drive?” she asked.

  “Motorbike.” He held up the backpack, with helmet and goggles inside. “Only way to travel.”

  “I prefer a car, if you don’t mind. It’s parked close by. I’d like to take you to dinner, if you don’t object.”

  “Sounds fine to me. Hope you weren’t planning on anywhere fancy. I’m not dressed for it.” Jeans, biker boots and a Belstaff would not get him served in the fancier London restaurants.

  “Are you hungry now? I’m starved,” she said. “I had no lunch.”

  “Nor me. Nothing since breakfast.” That had been one of his mother’s full English breakfasts, though, enough to feed a man for a week, at a pinch. But he could happily eat again, especially in such congenial company.

  “There’s a pub I know,” she said. “Serves food all day.”

  “Sounds perfect.”

  She led him to her car, a two-year-old Audi that must have cost too much for a struggling writer. He settled into the passenger seat, his backpack at his feet, hoping his bike would be safe tucked out of sight down an alleyway behind the Tate and padlocked to iron railings. He’d have to hope. And pray. And burn a few candles. Sacrifice a virgin or two, to the great gods of classic motorcycles.