Not Dead Yet

  In his experience the movie directors themselves were among the worst offenders. He’d never worked with one who hadn’t moaned about the length of time he had to get a crucial scene in the can, or about the lack of budget for special effects, or the shooting schedule he was meant to stick to. Why did every fucking film director he’d ever worked with need a wet nurse?

  ‘What kind of a problem, Jack?’ he responded.

  ‘Well, a bit of a technical problem with the script.’

  Just from the way Jordan spoke, Brooker got the sense he was about to be mightily pissed off. In his baggy black T-shirt, even baggier jeans and his signature black Gucci loafers, he looked his director squarely in the eyes. ‘What technical problem, exactly?’

  All of Jordan’s acolytes stood around him, like he was some kind of deity. The Location Manager, the Line Producer, the Production Secretary, the Production Designer, the Director of Photography, the First Assistant Director, and his Personal Assistant.

  ‘With the script? What kind of technical problem?’

  ‘Looks like whoever researched it has screwed up, big time.’

  ‘Perhaps I could explain, Mr Brooker,’ said Louise Hulme, the Royal Pavilion’s resident historian who had been assigned to the production. She was a pleasant, academic-looking woman, with long fair hair clipped back, wearing a pink summer dress and sensible white shoes. ‘You have this scene in your script which is a key moment in the relationship between King George and Maria Fitzherbert. It’s when he ends their relationship by telling her he doesn’t love her any more.’

  Brooker squinted at her, not liking her school-marmy manner. ‘You gonna tell me their relationship never ended?’

  ‘Not at all, it did indeed end. But in your script, George tells Maria when they are seated next to each other at a banquet at this table.’

  ‘Uh huh,’ Brooker said. His phone vibrated. He pulled it out of his pocket, glanced at the display. INTERNATIONAL was all that was there. Probably someone calling about money he owed. He killed the call and turned his focus back to Louise Hulme.

  ‘Well, the first problem is one of historical fact, Mr Brooker. You see, during the time when George the Fourth and Maria were lovers, this building was only a modest farmhouse. All the grand building works, such as this Banqueting Room, weren’t started until a considerable time later. This room was actually completed five years after their relationship ended, so it is impossible that that conversation could have happened in here.’

  She delivered the information with an assured, know-all smile that profoundly irritated Brooker. This room was stunning, it looked a fitting place for a king to dump his mistress. Who cared about historical accuracy? A handful of academic pedants, that was who. No one in a movie theatre in Little Rock, Arkansas, or Springfield, Missouri, or Brooksville, Florida was going to give a shit whether this room had been built then or not.

  ‘I guess we’ll have to take a bit of artistic licence there,’ he said. ‘This is a movie, it’s entertainment, not a documentary.’

  ‘Quite,’ Louise Hulme said, with a smile that masked a frown of disapproval. ‘But you do have another historical inaccuracy in your scenario.’

  ‘What’s that?’ He shot a glance at Jack Jordan, whose gloom seemed to have deepened further, as if the world were now in the final seconds of countdown to self-destruct.

  ‘Well, the thing is,’ Louise Hulme continued, ‘George did not have the courage to end the relationship face to face. So he did it in what I suppose would be the contemporary equivalent of an email, or even a tweet.’

  ‘What did he do?’

  ‘Well, he held a very important banquet in honour of the King of France – and did not invite Mrs Fitzherbert. In the court etiquette of the day, that was as formal a signal that a relationship was at an end as you could give.’

  ‘Lady, I respect you know your history,’ Brooker said. ‘But that’s just not something that translates cinematically. This is one of the biggest scenes in our movie. It’s the emotional climax of our whole story! They’re seated, centre stage at the table, surrounded by all these grand people, his friend Beau Brummell just opposite, and he drops the bombshell.’

  ‘It’s just not how it happened,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, well, it’s how it’s gonna have to have happened! Just look at this room; look around it! This is one of the most stunning rooms I’ve ever seen. I can just imagine the light from the candles on the table and the chandelier playing on her face as she turns from delight to abject misery!’

  ‘There’s another problem, Mr Brooker,’ she said, her tone becoming increasingly acid. ‘About Prinny.’

  ‘Prinny? Who’s Prinny?’

  The woman looked at him reproachfully. ‘That was King George’s nickname – the name everyone called him by.’

  ‘Ah, okay.’

  ‘You don’t seem to have done your research very well,’ Louise Hulme said. ‘If you don’t mind my saying.’

  Keeping a lid on his anger, Brooker replied, ‘Lady, you need to understand this is a movie, okay? I’m not a historian, I’m a movie producer.’

  ‘Well, the thing you should know is that Prinny became very nervous about the chandelier – he refused to sit directly beneath it.’

  He stared up at the vast crystal sculpture, suspended from the claws of a dragon beneath the domed ceiling. It was wonderfully dramatic. This was going to make an amazingly visual scene. ‘Yeah? Well in my movie, he’s gonna sit beneath it,’ he said, defiantly.

  Across the room, on the far side of the blue ropes that kept the public to a restricted route through the building, a lanky, cadaverous man in a baseball cap, who seemed like just another of the hordes of tourists that passed through this building daily, and was listening to the altercation, looked up at the chandelier, studying it intently.

  54

  ‘The time is 6.30 p.m., Wednesday, June the eighth. This is the tenth briefing of Operation Icon,’ Roy Grace said to his team in the packed Conference Room in the Major Incident Suite. ‘I will now summarize where we are.’

  He was feeling in a good mood. He’d had a call from the estate agents, Mishon Mackay, to say they’d had some viewings of his house today. One, a woman, with a small boy, had seemed interested.

  Looking down at his notes, he began his summary. ‘Four limbs – two arms and two legs – were recovered in separate locations from the West Sussex Piscatorial trout lake near Henfield, West Sussex, this afternoon. They are currently at Brighton and Hove City Mortuary, awaiting examination tomorrow by Home Office pathologist Nadiuska De Sancha. DNA from each of them has been sent for analysis to see if there is a link with the torso recovered from Stonery Farm.’

  ‘Good to know our investigation might now have a leg to stand on,’ quipped Norman Potting, who was immediately silenced by a forbidding glare from Grace; but only for a brief moment.

  ‘Sorry, Roy, didn’t mean any ’arm.’

  There was a titter of laughter, and Grace himself grinned, too. ‘Shut it, Norman, okay?’ He noticed an exchange of glances between Potting and Bella Moy, and waited for some withering comment to Potting from her, but she stayed silent so Grace pressed on.

  ‘Darren Wallace at the mortuary, who has more experience than any of us in these matters, told me that the limbs seem very cold – far colder than they should be even allowing for the fact that they have been immersed in lake water. He surmises that they may have been frozen. I’m sure all of you who can cook know how long it takes to thaw a frozen leg of lamb?’

  There were several nods.

  ‘All I can say at this stage, from the initial mortuary report,’ Grace went on, ‘is that the jagged nature of the severed bones of the limbs bears a visual match with the corresponding areas of the torso, which gives us a timeline problem. It is possible that they’ve been kept refrigerated until now. This is far too early to be sure that we have found the missing limbs, but we could be looking at this lake as a second deposition site.’

 
‘And if we haven’t, chief,’ Nick Nicholl said, ‘then we have another murder enquiry on our hands?’

  ‘Exactly,’ Grace said. ‘But I don’t want to go there at this stage. My personal hypothesis is that the perpetrator got panicked by the appearance of the cloth on Crimewatch last night and decided to dispose of the remains in his possession. But at this stage this is highly speculative.’

  ‘And does not explain the victim’s head, which is still missing,’ said DS Lance Skelton, the Office Manager for the investigation.

  ‘Why would the perpetrator have retained the limbs, chief?’ DC Jon Exton asked.

  ‘I have no idea. That’s our job to find out.’ He looked down at his notes again. ‘Right, missing persons. Norman, anything to report?’

  ‘I have the outside enquiry team working through all mispers in Sussex, Surrey and Kent who correspond to the estimated date “Unknown Berwick Male” was killed, and to his build and estimated height. But I have nothing to report so far, boss.’

  Grace thanked him then moved on. ‘Acting Detective Inspector Branson,’ he said with emphasis, ‘what can you tell us about the suit recovered at the lakeside?’

  ‘I had to make a decision, boss, between leaving it with the tailor, Ryan Farrier at Gresham Blake, to see what we can learn about its owner from its size and construction, or sending it to the lab for immediate DNA analysis. But I thought in the interests of preserving any possible DNA it should go to the lab first.’

  ‘That’s the right decision,’ Grace said. ‘Maybe you could take this tailor up to the lab and he could examine it there.’

  ‘I’ve arranged that already, for tomorrow morning!’ Glenn said, with a grin.

  Grace smiled back. He was so proud of his protégé. In his methodical manner, eye for detail and the way he thought for himself, Glenn was demonstrating more and more that he had all the makings of a very fine detective. He glanced back down at his notes. ‘A substantial number of quality footprints were found at the site, some in the vicinity of the piece of cloth found on the gorse bush.’ He paused to point to the blow-up and the sample strip pinned to the whiteboard at the end of the table. ‘In particular several matching footprints were found around the perimeter of the lake, and beside the deposition site of the suit.’ He turned to DC Exton. ‘Jon, there were casts and photographs taken; I’m tasking you to find the manufacturer of this footwear. I suggest you start with the National Policing Improvement Agency – their National Footwear Reference Collection.’

  ‘Right away, chief.’

  ‘I’ve asked a forensic podiatrist, Dr Haydn Kelly, who is one of the country’s leading forensic gait analysts, to attend tomorrow evening’s briefing – giving him time to analyse the footprints.’ He looked up. ‘Right, Crimewatch. Do we have any further leads from that?’

  ‘Nothing significant, chief,’ DC Nicholl said. ‘We’ve had seventy-five calls so far, and three names. And a load of crank calls. The usual drunks calling in. One said his dad did it – and then went on to say his dad died five years ago. Another said that Kirsty Young did it. We graded the calls, as usual, A, B and C. The only Grade A was the angler, William Pitcher, this morning.’

  Grace thanked him then asked, ‘Does anyone have anything else to add?’

  Several heads shook.

  ‘See you all tomorrow at 8.30 a.m.’

  As he left the briefing room and headed back along the corridor towards his office, he encountered the figure of Ray Packham, from the High Tech Crime Unit, walking urgently towards him.

  ‘Roy! I’ve just had a chance to take a look at your BlackBerry.’

  ‘Oh?’

  They stopped beneath a large red noticeboard on which was a flow chart headed, MURDER INVESTIGATION MODEL.

  ‘You were right to be concerned. You’ve been hacked.’

  Grace stared back at the analyst, suddenly feeling profoundly uncomfortable. ‘I have?’

  Packham nodded.

  ‘By whom?’

  ‘I’m not sure you’re going to like this. Perhaps we should go to your office?’

  Grace led the way.

  55

  It was a warm evening and the breeze had dropped. Colin Bourner, the doorman of The Grand Hotel, stood proudly outside the front entrance. Across the clogged traffic of King’s Road, and the people strolling or biking along the promenade on the far side, he stared at his favourite view of the sea, flat as a millpond, bathed in the early evening sun. The tide was far out; a handful of fishermen were digging for lugworm bait, and one man combed the wet sand with a metal detector.

  On the pavement, closer to the hotel, a dozen paparazzi hung around, and a few fans strung out alongside them, all hoping for a glimpse of Gaia.

  A turquoise Streamline taxi turned into the driveway and pulled up. One of the many things Bourner loved about this job was that you never knew who might be arriving. All kinds of celebrities – actors, broadcasters, sports stars, politicians and even royalty sometimes. The hotel was bristling with security – and buzzing with excitement – because they had a big celeb here at the moment, Gaia, who had arrived earlier today. Who knew who might be arriving in the back of this taxi?

  He opened the rear door with the same welcoming smile he gave to all visitors to this hotel, and a blonde-haired apparition, caked in far too much make-up, stepped out in a cloud of musky scent. She was dressed in a short black dress that was too tight for her, a silk shawl and dark, wet-look leggings, and stood a little unsteadily on her ludicrously high black suede ankle boots, as if she were having difficulty with them.

  ‘Good evening, madam, welcome to The Grand Hotel!’

  She smiled back and trilled a lipsticky falsetto, ‘Thenk yew.’

  She paid the taxi then tottered across the pavement very slowly, fluttering her arms, as if she were being careful not to slip on ice, a bling handbag hanging from a shoulder chain. Then as she entered the revolving doors, she adjusted discreetly, but not that discreetly, the hem of her skirt, pulling it down in an ungainly manner.

  Mutton dressed as lamb, Colin Bourner thought, watching her, trying to figure her out. She was dressed like a tart, but he knew all the regular ones who came in here, and this one was too old and too ugly. Blimey! he thought. Twenty-five years at this hotel, broken by a brief stint at another around the corner, and he’d seen it all. Every day provided him, at some point, with a new and fresh freak show. This was definitely today’s highlight in that department.

  Anna walked through into the cavernous hall, feeling very nervous all of a sudden. She had felt fine at home, preparing herself for this moment, thinking of all the signals her idol had given her on Top Gear. But now she was actually here, passing the front desk, looking at the signs ahead pointing to various functions – BRIGHTON BUSINESS CLUB…CRIMESTOPPERS GOLDEN HANDCUFF CLUB DINNER…BRIGHTON AND HOVE MOTOR CLUB…she was feeling the enormity of this place.

  People everywhere. Hotel staff. Couples milling around, men in tuxedos, women in their evening gowns and finery. She felt almost underdressed.

  Would Gaia approve?

  Should she go home and change?

  She paused and took a deep breath. Her hands were shaking, her throat felt dry, everything seemed suddenly to be in a haze, all in soft focus. She needed a drink, she decided. Dutch courage. Something strong but which wouldn’t leave her breath reeking of alcohol. That would not make a good first impression on Gaia.

  She walked through into the bar, and eased herself, very carefully, up on a stool, then ordered a double vodka with tonic. Moments later she changed it to a treble. There was a bowl of peanuts in front of her on the bar. She reached out a hand to take some, then hesitated and withdrew it. She’d brushed her teeth before leaving home, and Gaia might not like the smell of peanuts on her breath.

  ‘Good decision!’ said a portly, rather drunk-looking American sliding on to the stool beside her. ‘Y’ever see that analysis on bar peanuts?’ His voice was slurred and he reeked of tobacco.

  She g
ave him a dismissive smile, then focused on the bartender who was mixing her drink.

  ‘Urine and faeces,’ the drunk continued. ‘Yup. Analysis shows the average bowl of free peanuts on a bar top has twelve different traces of urine and three of faeces. People are goddamn disgusting, they don’t wash their hands properly after using the bathroom.’

  ‘Will you be running a tab, madam?’ the bartender asked.

  Anna shook her head and paid with cash. As she took the change, the American asked, ‘You have dinner plans?’

  ‘I do have plans,’ she said very smugly. She reached for her drink and downed some gratefully, waiting for the buzz. It started coming on fast. She drank some more.

  ‘Thirsty lady!’ her new, unwelcome companion said. ‘Let me buy you another.’

  She looked at her large Panerai Luminor wristwatch, an exact copy of Gaia’s. Except Gaia’s was real, costing many thousands, and hers was a fake she’d bought on the internet for fifty pounds. It was coming up to 7.15 p.m. ‘I don’t have time,’ she said.

  ‘Cool watch!’ he said.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Perhaps we could meet later?’ he persisted, then gave her a wink. ‘Know what I mean? For a nightcap?’

  She grabbed a handful of nuts and shovelled them into her mouth. When she had finished chewing and swallowing them she turned back to him, briefly flashed her teeth at him and said, ‘Thank you, but I don’t think you’d want to kiss me now!’

  She drained her drink, feeling much more courageous, and slid carefully and as elegantly as she could down from the stool, with a contemptuous flick of her Cornelia James shawl. Then she made her way towards the front desk. She would have the receptionist phone up to Gaia that she was here.