Mirror Mirror: A shatteringly powerful page-turner

by Nick Louth

  MC: But it’s not all good, is it? Tell me about that incident in Copenhagen.

  MR: Ah, that. (Smiles wistfully) Back in February, I was in Denmark for a product launch. Someone managed to get into my hotel room when I wasn’t there and waited for me. I didn’t get back until nearly midnight, exhausted and he waited until I was getting ready for bed. I opened the closet door, in my underwear, and there was this zombie, he even had the black contact lenses…

  MC: Oh my god! That sounds awful…

  MR: I screamed the place down. I’d never been so terrified in my life. Fortunately, the guy was basically harmless. He rolled up in a ball when I started throwing things at him. Hotel security was quickly on the scene.

  MC: How do you feel about zombies now?

  MR: Look, I appreciate that most of my fans originally saw me because of Village, and the clips on YouTube, and of course Instagram which is where I have the most fans. I really enjoy knowing that there are lots of enthusiasts who like to dress as Qaeggan, and if it wasn’t for them and their support I wouldn’t be where I am now. But obviously (long pause)…

  MC: Nobody wants to open a wardrobe door and see a six-foot zombie there, right?

  MR: Exactly. Of course, I now have to employ people like Portia here to look after this whole online and fan thing for me. (Turns to PR woman)

  MC: So your first modelling calls followed the TV show?

  MR: Not my first. I was scouted as a model when I was sixteen in a shopping centre in Manchester, and did a few shoots in London and New York, but basically I’m only five nine, not quite tall enough for the catwalk, and with the preference for size zero models coming on I wasn’t getting much work…’

  MC: And then came Village of the Dead…

  MR: Yes, it changed my life. I’ve got all this work, and I get sent more clothing, bags, couture, you name it, than I could ever use. Life has become much busier, but of course that doesn’t mean it’s always easy. Things are challenging when you are in demand, just in a different way from when you’re not. But my god, I have to be careful of everything I say and do!

  MC: I know you don’t like to discuss your private life, but I have to ask you about the footballer rumours. You have been photographed with Lawrence Wall. Is there something significant in your life you would like to share?

  MR: Well, it’s hard to have anything private, isn’t it? (Laughs) Lawrence and I have had a few dates, that’s all I can say. He’s great fun and has a kind of energy about him, which I think many women find very attractive.

  MC: Sergei, our photographer, was very excited about the shoot you did for us. He said ‘I’ve never seen a model who gives so much to the camera, especially close up. This woman gives you her soul. No wonder all the greats want to shoot her.’

  MR: (Laughs) I never know how to react to compliments! I’m very flattered, of course, but I can only be me. I don’t know how to be anyone else.

  MC: I think the shots we’ve published for this issue of Marie Claire bear out your promise. Thank you.

  MR: Thank you too!

  (Marie Claire magazine – September 2014)

  * * *

  Virgil had never read so many women’s magazines. In close protection, getting to know the client is essential, and you can’t do that without understanding the world they operate in. There he was, sitting in his mum’s lounge, flicking through Cosmopolitan, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Harpers and a load of others he’d been given by Thad. They included the copy of GQ in which Mira had been voted the world’s most desirable woman. His mum, set up for the evening with The Jeremy Kyle Show and You’ve Been Framed had laughed at him when he dropped the magazines on the coffee table.

  ‘You’re not hiding Mayfair in there are you?’

  ‘God, Mum, I’m not fifteen. This is work.’

  She looked over his shoulder at the magazine. ‘ “Teach your guy to find the G-spot” –what kind of work is this, Virgil?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s close protection work, Mum.’

  ‘Sounds a bit too close to me.’

  ‘I’m researching my client,’ he said, flicking away from the article she’d seen.

  ‘You guarding a model then?’

  He looked up and shrugged. ‘Maybe.’

  She roared with laughter. ‘What are you guarding her against, son? Name calling, tittle-tattle, all nail scratching and hair-pulling?’

  He sighed. ‘It’s a bit more serious than that, Mum. And it’s secret, right?’

  ‘My big soldier son, bodyguard for a girl. I never did…’ she laughed.

  ‘Alright, Mum. Look, the other news is that now I’m getting some money I should be able to move out.’

  ‘You don’t have to, Virgil. It’s been lovely to have you here, just like when you was a boy.’ She rubbed his shoulder, her bony fingers, calloused by years of scrubbing washbasins, gripping him with surprising strength.

  ‘I need a bit of space, Mum, and so do you. Shan’t go far, promise. I’ll still call round.’ He looked up and risked a quick smile.

  ‘Okay, you go your own way.’ Her eyes were moist.

  Virgil, feeling the full weight of guilt that she had intended, retreated into the hall, and balanced his laptop on the tiny rickety telephone table. It was the only place he could get online, by piggybacking on next-door’s wi-fi signal. Internet access was something he’d have to have at his new place.

  It was midnight by the time Virgil had finished reading the Lawrence Wall background report. Chacewater Associates had obviously been on the hurry-up, because it was to Virgil’s eye a botch job. Most of the material they had e-mailed was culled from Wikipedia or the tabloids.

  Born in a working class neighbourhood in Bury, Greater Manchester, Lawrence Leonard Wall was the oldest child in a family of five kids. His mother was a care worker at a nursing home, who had brought up Lawrence alone for the first three years of his life before marrying a pipe fitter. An online fan magazine covered uneventful school days in Manchester’s industrial relic of Dukinfield, skating over what seemed to be a poor academic record, and an expulsion from one school for fighting. The trajectory of his footballing career was there in great depth, the clubs, the goals, and everything that a fan might want, but not much help on Lawrence Wall the man. The many fights, on the pitch, and in pubs and nightclubs, were enthusiastically covered in the tabloids. Only at the time of his divorce, a couple of years ago, did his personal life get a scandalised airing. A drunken hellraiser, he was brilliant on the pitch, but wild outside it. The Sun had termed him the ‘Dukinfield Dreadnought.’ The tabloids seemed to praise his serial adultery, cheerfully showing two women photographed in lingerie who’d claimed he was a demon in bed, and “unbelievably well-endowed”. Flicking past the salacious verbiage, Virgil looked for the finer details, some of which came out after the failed manslaughter prosecution over the cyclist incident in 2011.

  The Guardian had a long story which documented fans’ harassment of the witness who had claimed to see Wall reverse over the cyclist. Mostly these attacks were vented online by trolls, but paint had been thrown on the witness’s car, and a brick hurled through the window of his home. After the trial, it was disclosed that Lawrence Wall had previous convictions for drunk and disorderly, affray and common assault. There were no details of the sentences.

  Virgil went online to learn more. Lawrence Wall. Six-one, two hundred and five pounds, a man who at twenty-seven could still run a hundred metres in eleven and a half seconds. His three million pound home was in the posh Manchester satellite village of Wilmslow, where he lived with a Rhodesian ridgeback called Kipper. He had a three-year-old daughter named Danielle from his short marriage to Michelle Canavan, but she lived with the mother.

  YouTube clips showed Wall in only a few ‘best goals’ collections, and many more vignettes of the passing and tackling skill which made his reputation. But the faraway winner was ‘Stopped by the Wall’ with 12.6 million views. This was a collection of sixteen fouls over the last seven years in
which the majority of victims were stretchered off the pitch. There was a rap soundtrack, and enthusiastic captions which gave the medical outcomes, from strained hamstring to a broken femur. The final one, repeated over and over, was a brutal and gory headbutt on a non-league goalkeeper who’d had the temerity to snatch the ball away from Wall’s head during an early round cup-tie. For all the fact that it was a pretty slickly produced video, put together by ‘TheWallBoys’, Virgil found the glorification unsettling.

  Nevertheless, it was one thing to see the ferocious creature that Lawrence Wall was on the pitch, and quite another to extrapolate that behaviour to his private life. What was he really capable of? What was he thinking now? Only Mira herself could tell him that, and he had yet to meet her.

  * * *

  It was almost midnight when Virgil turned to the password he’d been e-mailed by Stardust Brands to the online Mira fan mail database. It allowed access to the raw feed of messages about her culled by specialist software from the most popular social media websites, and a separate file of potentially threatening messages collated over the last year by intern Kelly Hopkins.

  For Virgil, who had rarely used social media, a dip into the raw feed was a revelation. Under the popular Twitter hashtag #Miramostbeautiful one fan had pleaded for guidance on becoming an underwear model. Yet the photo seemed to show a girl who was barely twelve. This was just one among hundreds just in the last month, all wannabe teenage models. Men used the same hashtag to speculate on the size of Mira’s breasts, whether she shaved her pubic hair, and musings on intimate sexual preferences. And these people were her fans. Her detractors, scores of them active on Facebook, casually ran down everything about her, criticised her choice of clothing, her body, her weight and impugned her morals. Protected by relative anonymity, they felt free to treat her as a public product, no different from a second-hand appliance traded on eBay. Mira’s fans, and some of those self-styled as #QaeggenBoys, replied in kind.

  He switched to the threats file. There, pasted on various Word documents were threads of Twitter or Facebook conversations where containing quite explicit threats against Mira. Most of these were sexual, and some stomach-turning. Kelly had marked those that had been referred to the police with a reference number. Though there were few details, this was clearly something he’d have to chase up.

  Virgil was just about ready to turn in when his phone rang. ‘Mr Bliss? Sorry to disturb,’ a male voice said. ‘Battsersea Harbour here.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Battersea Harbour. I’m the night manager. We’re under instructions to call you about any incidents regarding Ms Roskova’s apartment during her absence.’

  ‘Oh, right. So has something happened?’

  ‘There was an unauthorised attempt to gain access to her apartment a few minutes ago. A well-known footballer and several male colleagues arrived here…’

  ‘Lawrence Wall?’

  ‘Yes. They were all a little the worse for wear, drink-wise, demanding to see her.’

  Virgil silently cursed himself. Wall would obviously have been in London tonight for the away league fixture against Arsenal. If he hadn’t been reading women’s mags, he would have watched it on TV.

  ‘They’ve gone now. They weren’t able to get beyond the foyer.’

  ‘Did they cause any trouble?’

  ‘A little damage, nothing serious. A cracked glass door panel, a broken bottle and a chipped mirror. Although Mr Wall did threaten me.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

  ‘As per the agreement, I didn’t call the police. We’ll send Stardust the bill, okay?’

  ‘If that’s the arrangement they made, fine. What kind of threat did Mr Wall make?’

  ‘Oh, he threatened to glass me with the champagne bottle he was carrying if I didn’t unlock the lift. His colleagues eventually persuaded him to leave, but on his way out he threw the bottle at the foyer mirror. Fortunately it’s toughened glass. But what a waste of Krug.’

  ‘Thank you for letting me know,’ Virgil said, and hung up. He walked out to the balcony and looked across the sodium-lit streets of South London. Tonight’s incident was a warning to him. He’d have to track Wall’s movements a lot better when Mira was back.

  * * *

  For Jonesy Tolling, first thing in the morning was ten-thirty, never earlier. Everyone at the office knew that. So getting a call at home at nine-thirty, before he’d had the day’s first Bloody Mary was never popular. Especially when the caller was his old sparring partner Nigel Carr, celebrity editor at The Sun.

  ‘Good morning, Jonesy.’

  ‘What’s effing good about it, Nigel?’ Jonesy croaked. He rubbed his eyes, sat up in bed and looked around in vain for the woman who he’d been sure went to bed with him last night. That at least was what he’d paid her to do.

  ‘We’d like your comment on a juicy story about Mira Roskova.’

  ‘Course you would.’ Jonesy eased himself out of bed, tucked the cordless phone into his neck and reached down to the floor for a stained dressing gown. ‘You’ve been trying to dig something up on her ever since she arrived on the scene, haven’t you?’ He donned the gown then gingerly picked up a moist rubber object from the floor and dropped it into the bin.

  ‘I won’t deny it. But we do have something this time,’ Carr said. ‘We’re trying to stand up a report that Lawrence Wall was staying with her in a holiday cottage in the Forest of Bowland last weekend, beat the crap out of her, after which she ran out half naked in search of help.’

  ‘You’re barking up the wrong tree, mate.’ Jonesy laughed, an oily sound like trying to start an old car with a duff battery. He walked down the stairs, stepping first over a pair of his discarded underpants, then trousers. In the kitchen he finally found his spectacles, and propped them on his nose. ‘Are we off the record?’

  ‘Go on, you old sod, just for old times’ sake.’

  ‘Right.’ He padded to the fridge, unscrewed a nearly empty bottle of vodka and tipped the last of it into last night’s dirty glass on the draining board. ‘I don’t know where Mira was most of last weekend. But I do know that she was in Milan on Sunday night, and had a big photo shoot there yesterday.’ He slopped in a hefty glug of tomato juice, and a dash of Lea and Perrins. Finding no cutlery in the drawer, he stirred the mixture with a pair of nail clippers he’d found in his pocket.

  ‘She could have got there from the nearest airport,’ Carr said.

  ‘It’s not that, Nige, it’s that if she’d just had her lights punched out as you claim the only photographers interested would be from Wifebeater’s Weekly.’

  Silence.

  ‘And if he’d hit her, she’d have rung the Old Bill, straightaway. Then her lawyers. Then me. Except she hasn’t.’ he swilled the drink around his mouth. It felt good.

  ‘You’re very clever, Jonesy, but you’re in denial. It’s a strong story.’

  ‘Who’s the source?’

  ‘Oh, come on mate,’ Carr chuckled ‘I’m not going to disclose that.’

  ‘Okay, but it’s not come from her, has it? It’s not from the Old Bill, and I imagine it’s not Lawrence Wall’s people either.’

  ‘Sure they denied it. But the denial I got yesterday evening from Harvey Cohen at Sports Management seemed a little too well prepared to me. A Monday evening and they weren’t caught by surprise. They’ve already got a spin on it.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘No, no, no, my friend. You’d better call Harvey yourself for that.’

  ‘With friends like you, Nige, who needs enemas?’ Jonesy chuckled as the heat of the vodka soothed his throat. Fencing with Nige was one of life’s great sources of comradely pleasure. ‘Cut to the chase, Nige. This is all waffle. If something happened you better tell me what it is and I’ll see if I can get a reaction for you.’

  ‘Okay. The owner of the holiday cottage sent us pictures of the damage. A bathroom door smashed down and a settee hurled out through the french windows downstairs. The cot
tage was booked in a false name, but the woman recognised them both when they arrived.’

  ‘That doesn’t prove that Lawrence Wall hit Mira.’

  ‘No, but what does Mira say?’

  ‘I’ll have to ask her.’

  ‘Ah. But you already have, Jonesy. I know for a fact The Sunday Mirror called you about it yesterday afternoon. We aren’t the first to ask.’

  He was right. Jonesy hesitated for just a second too long. Nige would pick that up. ‘Nige, I wasn’t able to speak to her. She wasn’t returning calls.’

  ‘Which is just what would happen, if she didn’t want to hear from him after being smacked a big one,’ Carr said.

  ‘That’s desperate speculation, Nige, and you know it.’ They both laughed. ‘Alright. Here’s what I’ll do. We were aware that someone was spreading wild rumours. Not ones any professional journalist would believe, of course. Now if you force me to go on the record, I’ll tell you that no such thing happened, and I’ll place a detailed denial in The Daily Star tomorrow. I’ll let them have a picture of her lovely unmarked face, dated yesterday, which won’t make you look very clever.’ Jonesy picked up a plate of half-eaten food and found a packet of Rothmans underneath. He stuck one in his mouth. ‘You can go with it, but it ain’t a very good story, is it? Unless you actually have a picture of the alleged bruises.’ He lit the fag and inhaled greedily. ‘Which you don’t, do you? Otherwise you wouldn’t be whining around me.’

  Silence.

  ‘However, if you are a good little boy and spike this pile of horseshit, I’ll be able to offer you something a bit tastier. Exclusive.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘We’re getting some exclusive Mira stills from an upcoming skincare product launch.’

  ‘I’d prefer lingerie, to be honest. Or topless.’

  Jonesy started laughing which turned into a coughing fit of a good half minute. ‘For Christ’s sake, Nige. This is Mira Roskova, as pure as driven effing snow. Okay, there are a few rather daring stills where she isn’t wearing anything, but they are tasteful. Limbs arranged just so.’