Draper laughed. ‘Too much like the interrogation room, eh?’ Now he turned to me. ‘Shoot.’
I suppose he meant I could start asking questions.
‘We’d like to know a little more about Ms Ricks, her family, colleagues, any possible enemies she may have had.’
‘Well, none of her colleagues was an enemy. Lainie had a first-rate reputation. All her fellow journalists admired her. I dare say a few TV people were preparing knives, but only in the figurative sense.’
‘How do you mean?’
He opened his hands. ‘She was going to be a star. She was a natural on TV.’ He looked at Bel again. ‘Know why? Because she didn’t trust the medium. And that came over, that honesty, that sense that she wasn’t going to put up with any manure.’
‘But she hadn’t actually made any programmes?’
‘That’s true, I’m talking about the mock-ups we do beforehand, especially with a tyro. Lainie breezed it. It was like she was walking on water. I knew when we got her on the screen, she’d start to make ... not enemies exactly, but there’d be jealousy from other presenters, because she was going to show them how the job should be done.’ He shook his head and calmed a little. ‘She’s a big loss.’
He sounded like he was thinking of her in financial terms.
‘What about her family?’ I asked. ‘Did you know them?’
‘Oh yes, I suppose I knew them as well as anyone can.’
‘Meaning?’
Draper sighed, like he didn’t gossip normally, but since we were the police how could he refuse?
‘Freddy’s not an easy man to like, Inspector. I mean, his star’s so low it’s sweeping up leaves. And that doesn’t sit easy with Freddy. He still wants to act the soap star. Did you ever see him in Stand By Your Man? It wasn’t exacting stuff. Also, it was ten years ago, something Freddy doesn’t seem to realise. He sees all this “vintage” comedy being repeated on the box, and his stuff isn’t there. No surprise to anyone else, believe me. Meanwhile he sees his wife breaking into TV and there I am telling her how wonderful she’s going to be. You can see it’s not easy for him.’
‘Yes, I can imagine. Did they have arguments?’
‘All the time.’
‘What about?’
‘Everything under the sun. You want an example?’ I nodded. ‘Okay, Freddy blew their savings on a trip to Hollywood. He was out there looking for work, but all he came back with were a tan and some books of matches from expensive restaurants. Lainie was furious with him.’ He paused. ‘Look, there’s no way Freddy would put out a contract on Lainie, that’s not what I’m saying here. They had arguments, but they were never physical. They didn’t even really have screaming matches. They just smouldered and wouldn’t communicate for weeks on end. All I’m saying is, they did not have the perfect marriage. But then who does?’
Bel had a question. ‘Did you like Ms Ricks as a person, Mr Draper?’
‘Like her? I loved her. I’d’ve liked nothing better than ...’ He stopped and shook his head. 'I don’t know.’His eyes were growing moist, but then he’d been around actors all his working life. Some tricks must have rubbed off.
‘She had a son,’ I nudged.
‘That’s right, a useless streak of sham called Archie. I say that, watch this, he’ll be a millionaire at twenty-one.’
‘What does he do?’
‘He’s in a band, programmes music samples, that sort of thing.’
‘Electronics.’
‘Yeah, I can’t see the band doing much. I listened to their stuff as a favour, in case we could use any of it as backing to our programmes. Forget it. But Archie’s a genius, in a limited sort of way. I see him moving into production, and that’s where he’ll make his pile.’
‘Mr Draper, I know you’ve been asked this question before by my colleagues, probably by the media too, but can you think of anyone who would have wanted Eleanor Ricks dead?’
He shook his head. ‘It had to be a mistake. The bastard was obviously after Prendergast or the foreigner. Got to be.’
‘You sent Ms Ricks to interview Molly Prendergast?’
‘No, it was Lainie’s idea. I mean, she was running the whole show. It was her story right down the line, minimum input from me. She’d say she wanted to go in a certain direction, we’d talk about it, and she’d go off and do it. She was the driver, me, I was somewhere in the boot, like luggage. I hardly saw the light of day.’
‘And what direction was she travelling in?’
He sighed. ‘It’ll probably never get made now.’
‘We’ve spoken with Ms Ricks’s solicitor, a Mr Johns. He mentioned something about religious cults?’
Draper nodded. ‘Prendergast’s kid was in a cult for over a year. In the end, Prendergast mounted a commando-style raid to snatch her back. This was a couple of years back, it made the news at the time. The daughter’s not too bad now, it was her we wanted for the programme, but her mother said no, if we wanted to speak to anyone it would have to be her. Lainie set up the meeting partly to get Prendergast’s story, and partly to make her change her mind. We thought once Prendergast met Lainie, she might melt a bit.’
‘So it was a programme about Prendergast’s daughter?’
‘God, no, she was just a sentence, a phrase, in a much bigger book. No, Lainie was looking at the cult itself.’
‘Which one?’
‘The Disciples of Love. Sound like a band out of the 60s, don’t they? You can see them opening the show at Monterey.’
‘What sort of ... tone was the documentary going to take?’
‘It was basically an expose of how the group is run. They’ve got one of these charismatic leaders, you know, like at Waco or the Children of God. But most sects go for your wallet before they try to snatch your soul, and the Disciples aren’t like that. They take in poor people.’
‘I don’t see the problem.’
‘Well, they won’t say how they’re funded. Lainie reckons it takes thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands a year to keep them operating, and their total income can’t even be half that. So where does the money come from?’
‘Did she try asking them?’
‘They didn’t so much stonewall her as put up the Great Wall of China. She got some financial wizards to do some sniffing. We got a bill from them that nearly killed us budget-wise, but they couldn’t tell us anything about the Disciples.’
‘Do you have anything here about the project? I mean, something I could take away with me?’
‘Sure, I’ve got a few copies of the Bible.’
‘Bible?’
He smiled again. ‘That’s what we work from, it’s a sort of blueprint of the shape the documentary’s going to take. We use it to get backers interested.’ He opened a cupboard. It was full of bulging files and reams of typed paper, scripts and the like. It took him a few seconds to find what he was looking for.
‘Here we go, take one each.’
The Bible was loosely bound with a cardboard cover and a thin plastic sheet protecting it. There were holes in the cover through which appeared the name of the project, Draper’s and Ricks’s names, and a few other details.
The project was just called Disciples of Love, but with a question-mark.
‘I appreciate this, Mr Draper. I’ll see these get back to you.’
He shrugged. ‘Keep them. The whole thing’s history without Eleanor Ricks.’
‘One last thing, did she have any favourite colour of clothing?’
The question threw him, so I smiled reassuringly. ‘We’re still wondering if maybe the assassin mistook her for Mrs Prendergast.’
‘I see what you mean, Lainie wearing the kind of clothes Prendergast would normally wear.’ He nodded to himself. ‘Well, I know one thing, she did like to empathise with her interviewees, and that could sometimes mean dressing like them. As to favourite colours ...’ He shook his head. ‘The best I can come up with is bright colours, reds, blues, yellows. Primary colours.’
&nb
sp; I nodded. I’d been told to look for yellow and blue. I stared at Draper, trying to see something behind his eyes, some inkling of guilt. But where was his motive? No, there was nothing there.
‘What about Mrs Prendergast?’ Bel inquired suddenly.
‘What about her?’ Draper asked back.
‘She’s a public figure, and she’s tough, plus she’s got an interest in the cult.’ Draper still didn’t get it. ‘She might be persuaded to take over where Ms Ricks left off.’
Draper leapt to his feet. I thought he was going to vault the desk, but he just leaned over it towards Bel.
‘Brilliant!’ he shrieked. ‘That’s fucking brilliant!’ He slapped the desk with both hands and shook his head wildly. He was somewhere in the hinterland between laughter and tears. ‘That is just so brilliant. Why didn’t I think of it?’
Bel’s look towards me confirmed she thought this a tautology. Draper couldn’t get us out of there quick enough, but all the time trying to be polite. He had his hand on Bel’s shoulder and one on my back. He was telling her to think about fronting his documentary series.
‘All right,’ she said, ‘I’ll think about it.’
‘You’d be a great loss to the force,’ I told her as we left.
Outside, I headed for the first newspaper kiosk I saw, and bought up several of the dailies. I wanted more on the Tottenham shoot-out. I didn’t think Harry would have said anything, but how could I be sure? Without a trip to Tottenham, the answer was, I couldn’t.
I told Bel she deserved some time to herself, and managed to press £50 on her, which in Knightsbridge would just about pay for a passable lunch. Then I headed north. I knew this was one of the most stupid things I’d ever done, but I couldn’t talk myself out of it. One thing I did know was that if I was going to meet Hoffer, I didn’t want Bel around. No matter that she was my best form of camouflage, I’d promised she wouldn’t be in danger. Before we separated, she made me make a phone call. Afterwards, I said I’d see her back at our hotel. She kissed my cheek, and I pressed a finger to her chin. She didn’t tell me to be careful, but I knew what she was thinking.
All the way to Tottenham, I found myself doing something I never ever do. I thought of the past. Not the distant past, I don’t mind that, but the more recent past, and my life as an assassin. Well, what else was I going to do with my life? I’d never fancied being deskbound, but the Army weren’t going to have me. As a teenager I was clever but easily bored, and I was frustrated that I couldn’t play football or rugby. I did try to take part in games sometimes, but the other kids knew about me, and they wouldn’t come near. They were being kind in their way, I suppose, but I couldn’t see it at the time. All I saw was that I was different. I started to spend more time on the gun range, and I acquired a marketable skill.
My father had started me off, despite my mother’s warnings. He was a top-class target shooter himself. He started me with air pistols and air rifles, then we moved up to real ammo, small calibre at first. Funny to think those afternoons of bonding had led me here.
Here, thinking about my victims.
I had never had much of a conscience. Like I say, everyone bleeds. But then I’d missed a target and killed an innocent girl. That was when word started to go round that I was losing it. I’d cried about that girl. I’d sat by a hotel swimming pool in the Bahamas and played it through in my head, over and over again, the New York cold, that icy step, that single slip ...
They called me the Demolition Man, but all I’d ever really demolished were lives. You could buy a new dustbin, new windows, you could repair walls with fresh bricks and mortar. But I’d noticed something in Draper’s office, I’d noticed his pain. He’d lost someone, and the loss, for all my glibness at the time, was not merely financial. He’d lost someone he loved. He might be a hard-nosed businessman, a schemer, a ruthless capitaliser on rumour and grief. I’d seen the clips from some of his programmes; they concentrated on the tearful close-up and the hounding of interviewees. But he was human too. He could feel what his victims felt. He was feeling it now.
See, that’s why I like to get away from the scene. I never go back. I don’t buy the papers or anything, I don’t read about myself and cut out my exploits to stick in some scrap album. I do the job and I get the hell away. I never think about it afterwards. I drown the memories in alcohol and travel.
Well, here I was stone-cold sober, and travelling towards something, not away from it. I wasn’t even armed, and I knew Hoffer would be.
I got the cab to drop me on the High Road, and walked the few hundred yards to Harry’s street. The front door was still waiting to be repaired. I could see where the lock had been wrenched open, but there were no signs of leverage, no marks left by a crowbar. No footprints on the door either, which meant it had been a shoulder charge.
There was noise on the stairs. A black man came down, on his way out. He glared at me.
‘What happened here?’ I asked. He ignored me. ‘I’m a friend of Harry’s.’
He gave me a look brimming with distrust. ‘He ain’t in, man.’
‘What happened to the door?’
‘Some big white fucker rammed it.’ If he’d been a dog he’d have been sniffing me. ‘Cop?’ I shook my head. He looked around him, up and down the street. A train which had been sitting at the station started to move past us, way up the embankment. ‘Some big guy, right? Kicked the door in, kicked in Harry’s door. We came back and thought someone was ripping us off, right? So in we go, and this guy’s got a gun out and he’s standing over Harry. Harry’s looking like he’s going to croak, right? So we chased the fucker off.’
I whistled. He shifted his weight, looking pleased at the part he’d played in the drama.
‘Is Harry all right though?’
‘Dunno, man, he took off. Cops wanted to talk to him, but Harry was gone.’
‘I don’t blame him.’
‘Yeah.’
‘No point trying his door?’
‘The place is picked clean. Cops didn’t put a lock on it, so kids went in and ripped off everything. We had to chase them off, too.’
I nodded, though suspecting that the bulk of Harry’s goods were now sitting in a pile in the flat above his.
‘Thanks for helping him out,’ I said.
‘Hey,’ he shrugged, ‘what are neighbours for, right?’
Back in my room, I lay on the bed and read the Disciples of Love? project. Eleanor Ricks had been planning little less than an assassination of her own. The cult had its roots in the Pacific north-west of the USA, an area I knew, but its branches stretched all around the world. There were more than a dozen communes in Europe, but only one in Great Britain. Prendergast’s daughter had actually belonged to a commune in south-west France, but the focus of Ricks’s investigation was the British enclave on the Scottish west coast. According to some notes added at the back of the file, she’d twice visited Scotland, but was planning a much longer visit once she’d completed what she called her ‘primary research’. Only she’d never been allowed to finish that research.
The funding of the sect seemed to be the key. So long as no one would explain it, you could guess any way you liked: drugs, prostitution, blackmail, coercion. There were press cuttings in the file referring to stories about other cults, not just the Branch Davidian in Texas but the Children of God in Argentina and some Southern Baptist splinter groups in Louisiana and Alabama. As far as I could see, cults in general provided a useful service: they kept the arms dealers in business. Koresh’s group in Waco had stockpiled enough weapons for Armageddon and beyond. I’d visited Texas. To buy a gun, any gun, all you needed was a state driver’s licence and a form you completed yourself stating you’d never been in an asylum and you weren’t a drug addict. They have about four guns in Texas for every man, woman and child. And those are the legal ones. I knew there were plenty of gun dealers who didn’t require any ID from their buyers, just a wad of cash. I’d once bought a night-vision scope from a man with a mil
itary haircut after I got talking to him in a bar in Lubbock. I paid half the market price. It was the only good thing that happened to me in Lubbock, until I met Spike. Spike was, Max and Bel apart, the closest thing I had to a friend in the whole overpopulated world.
And Spike was crazy, gun crazy.
Bel gave her knock and came into my room. She was red-cheeked as she flopped on to the bed beside me.
‘I must’ve walked for miles,’ she said. ‘How did it go?’
‘I don’t think we can hang around much longer.’
‘Well then, that makes it easy.’
‘What do you mean?’
She rolled on to her side and propped her head on one hand. ‘I’ve just spent an hour in a cafe reading through the file.’ She nodded at my copy. ‘And the way I see it, the Disciples of Love are as likely suspects as anyone.’
‘How would they know what clothes she’d be wearing?’
‘They must have had someone watching her, otherwise they couldn’t have compiled all that information they gave you. Maybe the watcher spotted that she wore similar clothes every day, or every interview she did.’
Yes, I’d thought of that myself. ‘Maybe,’ I said.
‘Look,’ said Bel, ‘there’s the jealous husband, the misunderstood teenage son, the producer who wanted to jump into bed with her, the lawyer who might have been just behind him in the queue.’
It was true that the solicitor, Geoffrey Johns, had professed a more than merely professional interest in Eleanor Ricks when we’d talked to him.
‘So we’ve got a lot of possible paymasters,’ I said.
‘Agreed, but none as strong as the Disciples of Love. Look at what she was saying about them. I mean, from those American press clippings these aren’t people to toy with.’
Bel had another point. The Disciples of Love had been in trouble in the USA after a journalist had been beaten up and another pummelled with his own camera.
‘We don’t know they’d go as far as assassination.’
‘We don’t know they wouldn’t. Besides, there’s my final point.’