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

by Simon J. Townley

  Kiera drove like a chauffeur, smooth, steady and slow, heading into the south west of the city. She was clearly on her home turf and knew the roads. She pulled into a residents-only car park and had the card to get her through the barrier. It was connected to a set of flats in an elegant town house. Not the kind of place where writers usually lived. Not in Tom’s world, at any rate.

  She ditched the Audi and they walked around the corner to the pub. She recommended the sausages and mash, a speciality, and ordered for them both. Then they settled into a quiet corner, Capgras with a pint of bitter, and Kiera Roche with a strong Belgian lager.

  She finally shed her red coat to reveal a sober pair of jeans and a pink jumper. They made small talk while waiting for the food. But they kept drinking, with the nervousness of a man and a woman getting to know each other. Tom was on his second pint by the time the meals arrived, and his third by the time he finished. Once dinner was done, Kiera turned back to business. “I need to know what you know. Where is Middleton? What’s he planning?”

  “I don’t have any idea. I can’t be certain if he is the killer. The more I think about it, the more far-fetched it seems.”

  “Apart from the police, have you told anyone about your suspicions?”

  “Not really.”

  “That means yes, but you don’t want to say.”

  “You’re not being all that forthcoming yourself.”

  “I have my reasons.”

  “So do I.”

  She downed the last third of her drink and went to the bar. She returned with a pint for each, and a whisky chaser.

  “Are you trying to get me drunk, hoping I’ll talk?”

  “Will you?”

  “Probably not. Depends how drunk you get me. You seem to be matching me though.”

  “I don’t have to drive home.”

  Capgras had already made that calculation.

  She leaned forward, took his hand. “Let me help you. We can work together. Be a team. I know the criminal mind.”

  “Arthur Middleton is no Adam Worth,” Capgras said. “He’s certainly no master villain.”

  She gave him a sly look. “You Googled me.”

  “I even ordered the book.”

  “On Worth? Read it yet?”

  “Not had the time, sorry.”

  “Too busy investigating? But still no firm evidence. Two deaths, and no one even suspects foul play, except us. Middleton’s doing something right. He must have planned this well.”

  “Three deaths, actually.”

  “Three? My god. Who else?”

  Capgras checked himself. She was getting information out of him, slowly but surely.

  “Tell me. I need to know.”

  He drummed his fingers on his temple. There was no going back now. Nothing for it. He related what he knew about the book blogger.

  “How did you find this?” she asked.

  “Someone left a comment on my blog.”

  She laughed. “Not so much of a super sleuth after all!”

  “I move with the times. Use the power of the crowd.”

  “It’s a good blog, to be sure,” she said. “But it draws a small audience.” Her eyes lit up with an idea. “We need a bigger stage. Go public. Put something in the press. They’ll buy this, surely. Famous crime writer linked to three deaths.”

  “There’s the law of libel to worry about.”

  “You’re skilled at getting around that. We’ll not accuse him of anything, after all.”

  “We?”

  “Present it as a mystery: the fictional crimes that have crossed over to the real world. Make it as a puzzle, with Middleton a tragic figure in the centre of it all. And flush him out.”

  “The ‘conscience of the king’ and all that?”

  She put her hand on his arm as her mouth gyrated into an I-see-what-you-did-there smile. “Don’t try to out-clever me, young Tom Capgras.” She pulled away from him, but the tension remained, as though a bungee cord had been stretched tight and longed to rebound, hurling them together.

  “It’s agreed then,” she said, “we publish and let Middleton sue if he wants. He won’t dare though. All that evidence coming out in court.”

  “Editors might not be so phlegmatic. Newspapers don’t like being sued as a rule. It gets expensive, even if you win.”

  “There must be a way to word it.”

  “If there was, and I’m not certain about that, then it’s still a bad idea.”

  “Why so?”

  He stared into his pint of beer and swilled it around in the glass. How much should he tell her? “There’s the question of motive.”

  “Revenge, surely. For being slighted and cast off.”

  “You heard about that?”

  “I know many things.” She smirked, in a sensual way that made his eyes follow the play of her lips as though hypnotised.

  He leaned forward. “We have a theory.”

  “We?”

  Don’t mention Hannah. “Myself and my colleagues.”

  “So you have a team already?”

  “We think he might be doing it for the publicity.”

  Her face first flashed with surprise, then disbelief. Then humour. “No. Even Arthur Middleton couldn’t come up with a plan that insane.”

  “He wants to sell books. He needs the exposure. It explains it all: why else the copycat killings, taken from his own books?”

  “I can’t believe it. It’s absurd.”

  “What if I’m right? A story in the press will give him just what he’s after.”

  “He’ll go to prison for life. What good would book sales do him then?”

  “I’m sure he has a plan. Perhaps he’ll disappear, collect the money in Mexico or Brazil.”

  She slugged what remained of her whisky and slammed the glass onto the table with an air of finality. “I think I’ve had enough,” she said.

  Enough for what? He thought it, but said nothing and followed suit, finishing his single malt with a long deep gulp that smouldered in his mouth and throat, as hot and fiery as Kiera Roche’s eyes.

  As they left the pub she hooked her arm through his and half-rested her head on his shoulder, as if she needed help to get home. But she wasn’t that drunk.

  She led him towards the London town house where she lived and insisted he come in for a coffee to sober him up. “We’ll call you a taxi,” she said.

  The stout oak door to the house swung open and she pulled him inside. They flirted like school kids up two flights of stairs. She fumbled with the key to her flat and giggled with the fake innocence of a convent girl when she couldn’t get it in the lock and had to ask Tom to help her.

  Was it all an act?

  She invited him in with a flourish of her arm and pointed him towards a brown leather sofa while she disappeared into a bedroom. Tom crossed the living room and pulled shut the soft velvet curtains, a tasteful powder blue that matched the almond-white walls and stone-grey carpet. Framed photos lined the walls: faces of her family and friends, he assumed, most in black and white, flattering and dynamic, capturing people at the high points of their lives. She was a talented photographer, for sure. And a writer. A smart woman. Attractive, intelligent. Witty. Well-connected. Well off too. This flat must cost a fortune if rented. If it had been bought outright, then she either had an independent income, a secret career that paid extravagantly well, or a sugar daddy who funded it all.

  Or a husband, of course. But there was no sign of one.

  Tom was still inspecting the photographs, looking for clues to her life, when the door to her boudoir swung open. Kiera Roche had discarded the woollen coat and hat. She’d dispensed with the jumper and fashionably faded jeans. She stood in the doorway wearing stockings up to her thighs, a garter, panties and a bra. Red. All red. She crossed the room and threw her arms around him. Onto the sofa they rolled. And they kept rolling. And the rolling only intensified after they made it to the bedroom and ripped off what remained of each other’s clothing.
By the time Tom Capgras finally fell asleep, three hours later, exhausted and spent, he was no longer worried about his bike or the whisky he had drunk, or his editor, or libel. He wasn’t even thinking about serial killers. The only things that concerned him, as he sank towards a deep slumber, was what Hannah might say, or think, or do, if she ever knew; and how to keep a woman like Kiera Roche safe and happy, drunk and impulsive, reckless and alive for ever more.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Afterglow

  Tom’s bike needed no petrol. It flew home on wings of happiness, inspired by the giddy, can’t-believe-my-luck joy in his heart. If he could have bottled the sensation he might have solved the carbon crisis at a stroke: no more dirty fuels dug from deep in the earth. Engines would purr along on the fumes of love and lust.

  Luckily, Tom’s Norton knew the way home, like a trusty dog guiding its owner down a treacherous path after a heavy session in the local. Tom, naturally, was stone cold sober, in the legal sense at least. No alcohol coursed through his blood, yet he wasn’t fully in command of his senses. His thoughts reeled around a night of passion, remembering positions and whispers, murmurings and moans. He grinned to himself, crouched over the handlebars.

  It had been lunch-time before they made it out of bed. By Tom’s estimation that amounted to a full sixteen hours of love-making, though in truth there had also been a great deal of sleeping. And cuddling. And talking about nothing much. And breakfast in bed. And mid-morning coffee. In bed. All of it, in bed.

  He parked his bike outside his shipping container, letting the engine ebb to silence with a final throaty growl, like a dog grumbling in its dreams. He opened the metal door and flipped the light. On the table he discovered a note from Ruby, saying she had stopped by, early Monday and that she’d be gone for a few days. He should call if there was anything urgent. The message was terse, and that wasn’t like her. She normally left rambling essays filled with digressions about her life and his work and computers and things she’d found on the internet. He considered calling her to make sure everything was all right but told himself he’d do it later. First, he needed to catch up with the world after two nights away from home.

  He picked up his laptop and slumped onto the sofa. He stared at the computer blankly, scrolling absent-mindedly through news pages, still lost in memories of the night before. His phone bleeped. He checked the text. Kiera! She couldn’t stand to be apart from him, sending him sweet missives already.

  “Write the story,” it said.

  She was a sly one. In the heat of passion, she had cajoled him to publish something, anything on the Middleton murders. He had batted that away easily enough. He had too many other things on his mind. But she was not so easy to shake off. In the calm after battle, she probed and prodded, wheedled and implored, testing his defences, searching out a weak spot. In the end, she begged, insisted she didn’t feel safe and wouldn’t he protect her? It made him swell like Hercules, or Superman. Both of them, mashed together. He relented, agreed to write it up, and she threw her arms around him as if he’d slain a dragon on her behalf.

  What was the connection between her and Middleton? He hadn’t dared to ask. But they hadn’t been lovers. They couldn’t. It was unthinkable: she had too much style.

  But the story. Maybe she was right. There was no other way. He was no detective that was for sure. All this time, instead of running around being seduced by exotic women, he should have been tailing Middleton. He needed spies outside the man’s house, access to police databases and his phone’s GPS. Better still, hack the man’s email and his voicemail, his messages and his dreams.

  But he could do none of these things.

  Ruby might have known a way if he’d asked her nicely. But such activity crossed an ethical line.

  He was no sleuth, and knew it. On the other hand, the power of the press lay at his fingertips but the story required legs. It had to make an impact, and be read and talked about, so it would reach ears that mattered. It needed to shake the ground and whip a wind through high trees. But without revealing too much truth.

  And what would any editor say when handed such a story? The same thing he himself would demand: get a quote. Go back to Middleton. If you want to make accusations, put them to the man and see what he says.

  He’d have to give Middleton another shot at responding.

  And for that, he needed Hannah.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Stakeout

  “I can’t give you a client’s home address,” Hannah said. She stood in the hallway at the bottom of the stairs which led to the offices of Leatherby, So-and-so and The Other One. She’d insisted on meeting him down here, where they could talk freely. The offices were busy, she had insisted, with interns and secretaries, agents and authors bustling back and forth.

  “He’s an ex-client, technically. And it’s for a good reason.”

  “I don’t like you going to see him. It’s dangerous. And it warns him,” she said. “He’ll know we’re onto him.”

  “He already knows. Besides, this will make him happy, if we’re right. If it’s all for publicity.”

  “Then why help him?”

  “Because we have to do something.”

  “By giving him what he wants? That’s stupid.”

  She had a point. But Capgras couldn’t reveal the real reason: he was doing it for Kiera. Because she kept asking. Don’t tell Hannah that.

  The door opened behind Capgras and a young woman, around twenty-five, squeezed past him. She exchanged pleasantries and climbed the stairs. He waited until she was out of earshot. “I’m a fellow author, same agency, it can’t be wrong. Not really. Just write the address on a piece of paper, meet me for lunch, leave it on the table. No one will ever know.”

  “I’ll know,” she said. “It’s unprofessional.”

  “It’s only an address. Why is he so secretive anyway?”

  She shrugged. “Writers. They’re strange.”

  “What if I ask for an interview, go through official channels?”

  “Then we’ll forward the request to the author. It’s his choice. Send me an email, I’ll pass it on to one of the partners. Let them decide.”

  “All right. I’ll email. And call you. Later. Sometime soon.”

  She paused, and for a moment he thought she might kiss him again, but footsteps on the stairs above killed any hope of that. Capgras headed back into the street, marching towards King’s Cross and the offices of his former newspaper, which he haunted like a restless ghost. There were colleagues there who could help him find an address, or two, even if Middleton was ex-directory and hidden on electoral roles. There were still ways to find them. He’d just have to do it the old fashioned way.

  ✬✬✬

  Capgras was still a familiar face at the newspaper offices. Familiar enough to sail past security with a wave and a few lines of chitchat. He was no longer staff, but as a regular freelance and a former employee, a martyr for the free press and an icon of media belligerence, he could come and go pretty much as he pleased.

  He began his sortie with a visit to the editor of the Books section. What he had written was a colour piece, an isn’t-it-amazing-life-imitating-art innocent sounding puff article about tragedy and coincidence in the publishing world, with only the vaguest of hints that anything might be wrong. No mention of police investigations (there wasn’t one, after all), and certainly nothing to imply Middleton’s involvement in murder. Everything from the manuscript of The Profits of My Death he’d left out, for now, since Middleton denied writing it. He was still waiting for results of the text analysis, and besides, it made sense to hold something back for a follow-up.

  The problem was simple: the story was weak, barely of interest to London’s chattering classes, certainly not to the wider public. Other papers would ignore it. The news editor here wouldn’t look at it.

  He might even struggle to get it into the Books section.

  Capgras sat in a side office, waiting.

 
Fiona McAverty, deputy editor of Books, arrived with coffee and a smile, a handshake and small talk about how good it was to see him and how was he keeping?

  She already had a copy of the article which he’d filed earlier from his laptop.

  “Not sure what we can do with this?” she said. “What’s it driving at?”

  “It could sit alongside a review of his latest novel, which is self-published. I’ll finish it today.”

  She paused, kept pausing, and he knew she was thinking of the right words, a way to let him down easy. “I like it, Tom, it’s just….deaths and suicides. In Books? See if Jon wants it on the newsdesk. We can run the review, same day, cross reference it. I can’t do more than that. I’m sorry.”

  He’d have said the same thing, in her place.

  “Maybe a snippet, tagged on, at the end of a review,” she said. “You know, author grieving for loss of agent. Give his reaction, get him to dedicate the book to her, something like that.”

  Something that would likely as not be cut out, leaving only the stub of a review.

  “There’s more to this, just not yet. It could be a decent story, once the truth comes out.”

  “So tell me now.”

  “The deaths may not be accidents. Or suicides.”

  Her face flashed with interest, but then he read her eyes, as the thought of legal complications dawned on her. “Foul play in the world of crime writing. That could work,” she said. “What do the police say?”

  They say it’s nonsense. “They don’t want anything to go public yet.”

  “It’s best not then…”

  “But they’re wrong.”

  “See what Jon says.”

  McAverty turned to leave, clasping her phone to her ear and waving him away.

  She was right. He could always try Jon Fitzgerald, news editor, Tom’s friend and mentor, his guide and guru. Fitzgerald owed Capgras, plenty. They were comrades in arms and trusted each other’s judgment. But Capgras knew how things worked. Sly pieces, implying something, not able to say what it was: they didn’t work for readers, and they certainly didn’t fly with the news desk. As for the editors higher up the food chain, they couldn’t see the point. And they didn’t like the risks, not when there was nothing worth saying in any case. But there was a chance, all the same. Because Jon had been the news editor, on that malignant day when the police came calling with warrants and forms and talk of state security and interventions from the minister and special dispensation from a judge. Jon had stood by Capgras. He’d sat through preliminary hearings, those that had been held in public. He’d even visited him in prison and defended him when others buckled under pressure.