‘Yes.’
She could feel herself perspiring. Her armpits were damp. She hoped she had applied enough Gaia Nocturne Roll-On.
He looked down at the list and shook his head. Then he dialled a number, and after a few moments said, ‘I have Anna Galicia in reception to see Ms Lafayette.’
While he waited for the reply, Anna took the opportunity to try to read the names on his list, upside down. She saw Daily Mail.
The receptionist turned back to her after some moments, and said, ‘I’m sorry, you are not on their list.’
She reddened. ‘Um, yes, well, that’s probably because I’m a freelancer on the Daily Mail, not on staff, but I’m here from the Mail – to do a feature on Gaia.’ She fumbled inside her handbag and produced the false press card she’d made herself some years ago; it was useful for getting into the VIP areas of Gaia concerts.
That made sense to him; she looked a little kooky, the way some female journalists did; he’d seen plenty of journalists interviewing stars in here, and in the Lanesborough, where he worked previously, in London.
He took the card and read it, then said, ‘They’re expecting someone with a different name.’
Anna shrugged as if butter would not melt in her mouth. ‘I was asked to substitute at the last minute.’
‘Please go up to the first floor.’
As she turned away, knowing this had all been pre-planned by Gaia – just a little test for her! – she saw a group of people, three women and two gay guys she knew, fellow serious Gaia collectors, seated on a pair of sofas, all clutching record sleeves and CD booklets.
‘Anna, come and have a drink!’ one of the guys, Ricky – whose eBay identity was Gaia Slave – called out to her.
‘Thank you, but I’m actually on my way to meet Gaia,’ she replied, very smugly.
‘Never!’ said the youngest of the group, a girl in her early twenties. Her name was Kira Ashington, and she had purple streaks in her hair. Kira had a dog-grooming business and, to Anna’s fury, frequently outbid her in online auctions for Gaia memorabilia. It was delicious now to be able to take such sweet revenge.
‘I actually have a personal invitation from Gaia,’ Anna said, trying to look nonchalant.
‘How – how – how did you get that?’ Ricky was so chewed up with envy he could barely get the words out.
‘Because I’m her number one fan! She recognizes that.’
‘God, you are so lucky! Couldn’t her number two fan come with you?’ Kira asked.
‘Not tonight, Josephine.’ Anna blew her a kiss.
‘Have a wicked time!’ Ricky said.
‘Thank you.’ With her head held very high, Anna walked towards the lifts. She had never felt so proud in all her life.
*
Some moments later, as the lift doors opened, Anna stepped out on to the carpeted corridor. Two hulks, each wearing an earpiece attached to a cord, stood either side of a door, backs to the wall. They gave Anna a hostile look, like she was a herpes virus.
Walking up to them, feeling decidedly unstable on her heels now, thanks to that vodka, she announced herself and produced her press pass.
‘You ain’t expected, lady,’ the one on the left said, his lips barely moving.
‘Oh yes, I am expected. I’m Anna Galicia. Gaia’s expecting me.’
He looked down at her with big eyes, as expressionless as barren planets. ‘Not tonight, lady, she ain’t. She ain’t taking no more interviews.’
‘She is expecting me, she most definitely is!’
The giant on the right stared at her morosely. The one on the left said, ‘The boss is tired, she’s just flown the Atlantic. She’s done with interviews tonight. You want to make an appointment to interview her, call her in the morning.’
‘You don’t understand!’ Anna said. ‘I’m not interviewing her – we – we’re having a drink together! She invited me!’
‘You Anna Galicia?’
‘Yes I am!’
‘Your name ain’t on the list, lady.’
Anna felt frustration building inside her. ‘Fuck the list!’ she said.
He shrugged. ‘You wanna see the boss, you have to be on the list.’
‘There’s been a mistake! Really, a mistake. Please, ask her! Tell her Anna is here! Anna Galicia! She will know me! She’s expecting me. She’ll be mad at you if you don’t let me in, I promise you!’
He spoke quietly into his mouthpiece. Anna lip-read what he was saying. He was asking for confirmation. Her chest was heaving with frustration. Gaia was in there! The other side of that door. She was just feet away from her number one fan. For God’s sake, just feet away! Gaia wanted to meet her, she’d made that very plain, and now these morons were stopping her!
‘Sorry, lady, they’re telling me they don’t know who you are.’
Anna began drawing shorter and shorter breaths as her anger surged. ‘I’m not just another reporter, I’m her number one fan!’ she said. ‘Her number one fucking fan! If it wasn’t for me she’d probably be turning tricks in a seedy massage parlour – and you’d be totally somewhere else! She wants to see me. Now!’
The two guards exchanged a glance. Then the one she was talking to said, ‘I’m sorry, lady, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.’
‘Over my dead body,’ Anna said.
Then, to her astonishment, she saw a door open along the corridor and a woman, wearing a baseball cap, dark glasses, a crimson jogging suit and fancy trainers, emerged.
It was her!
‘Gaia!’ she called out, and began stumbling towards her. ‘Gaia, it’s Anna!’
Moments later both her arms were seized, gently but firmly, and her idol was engulfed by a platoon of bodyguards also in jogging suits and baseball caps, who swarmed out of the door.
‘Let me go!’ Anna shrieked at the two hulks restraining her.
The lift pinged and she saw the entourage enter.
Anna wriggled furiously. One of her shoes came off. ‘You have no right to do this. Let me go!’ she yelled.
The lift doors closed, and then they released her. Anna’s brain was racing. There must be an exit! Doors! Fire doors! Staircase! She saw it down to her right. A green FIRE EXIT sign. She knelt and grabbed her shoe, but without wasting time putting it back on, she broke into a hobbling run, holding the shoe in one hand, along the corridor, through the fire exit door and down the concrete stairs.
LOBBY LEVEL, she read, in small letters, and pushed open the door. She was in an unfamiliar part of the ground floor, with a sweeping staircase right behind her leading up to what looked like a conference level. Where was the lift she’d gone up in?
Then she saw the entourage stepping out across the hall. The cluster of jogging bodyguards, and in their midst she caught a glimpse of Gaia. She ran forward, still holding her shoe, calling out, ‘Gaia! Gaia! It’s Anna! Wait!’
She dodged past a small group of Japanese men, each towing a wheeled suitcase, and caught up with the entourage yards from the revolving door. ‘Gaia! It’s me, Anna!’ she called out again, racing to reach the door ahead of them, but two of the guards elbowed her aside.
‘Hey!’ she said indignantly, and pushed back, almost getting past them, and suddenly Gaia was right in front of her! Her face inches from her own. So close she could smell Gaia’s perfume, and was a little surprised it was not her idol’s own brand. ‘Gaia! It’s Anna! Hi—’
For a fleeting instant, Gaia raised her sunglasses, gave her a hard, blank, icy stare, then turned away and was gone, through the revolving door.
‘Secret fox!’ Anna called out desperately. ‘Gaia, it’s me, Anna! Anna! Secret fox!’ She lunged towards the door, but two of the tracksuited guards grabbed her arms, holding her back.
‘Let go of me!’ she yelled.
They continued holding her, so hard they were hurting her arms. She dropped her shoe. She wriggled like a wildcat, broke free, lost her balance and fell backwards to the floor, right on top of her fallen shoe which dug pa
infully into the small of her back.
She looked up, dazed and confused for an instant, and saw the five fellow Gaia collectors all looking at her. Ricky – Gaia Slave – came over to help her, but a hotel porter reached her first, knelt and asked if she was all right, then gently held her arm as she got back to her feet. Everything was spinning inside her head. Somehow she got her shoe back on. She saw the five collectors staring at her.
‘We thought you were her number one fan, Anna!’ Kira, the girl with the purple streaked hair, said mockingly.
All five of them laughed.
Anna walked out through the revolving doors and stood on the pavement. She was breathing in short, hard, angry bursts. The paparazzi, she could see, were running across the road, chasing after the pack of joggers that was heading away along the promenade.
‘Can I get you a taxi, madam?’ the doorman asked.
‘I don’t want a fucking taxi,’ she said, smarting with humiliation and shaking with rage, struggling to open the clasp of her handbag. Then she rummaged inside it and pulled out her mobile phone. ‘I’ve been assaulted, I want the police.’
58
For the first time since Ari had thrown him out, Glenn Branson was in a sunny mood. He left MIR-1 feeling like a man on a mission. He would surprise Bella, he thought. Cheer her up. He knew that visiting hours at the hospital would be over shortly.
He drove to his local Tesco Express, bought a bunch of sweet-smelling flowers and a box of Maltesers. Then he stopped by an off-licence he favoured, Mullholland’s Wines on Church Road, and selected a bottle of chilled Sauvignon Blanc from the cooler, which he remembered her telling him in Cardiff that she liked.
He drove down to his lodgings in Roy Grace’s house off Church Road, had a quick shower, brushed his teeth and sprayed himself with his current favourite cologne, Chanel Blue. He fed Marlon and hurried back out to his car. Remembering Bella’s address from having dropped her home once before, he entered it in the satnav stuck to the dash of his ancient Ford Fiesta, and was just reversing out of the drive when his phone rang. It was 8.25 p.m.
He stopped, debating for a moment whether to ignore it. But in his new, elevated status of deputy SIO he was on call round the clock. Ignoring it was not an option. ‘Glenn Branson,’ he answered, somewhat reluctantly, hoping to hell, just at this moment, that there wasn’t an urgent new development on Operation Icon.
It was Roy Grace.
‘Yo, old timer, you’re up late for a man of your age!’
‘Very witty. Not interrupting you, Glenn, I hope?’
‘Nah, I was just discussing the meaning of life with Marlon.’
‘He should get out more. Come to think of it, so should you.’
‘I’m working on it.’
Grace’s tone became more serious. ‘Okay, we have a development.’
Shit, Branson groaned inwardly. ‘We do?’ he said, trying to sound enthusiastic.
‘The Specialist Search Unit have located a human head. They think it might be Berwick Male’s head.’
This time Branson’s enthusiasm was genuine. ‘Where?’
‘It’s in a shallow grave in a ditch, about a quarter of a mile west of the lake where they recovered the limbs earlier today. Because there’s no Home Office pathologist free tonight, we have one coming tomorrow morning at seven, Ben Swift. Can you meet him at the site? I’ll cover the morning briefing.’
‘Of course, chief.’
Grace’s voice sounded a little strange, a lot more formal than usual, as if he were considering his words carefully. ‘Okay, I’m going to give you the compass co-ordinates. Got something to write them down on?’
Branson pulled his notepad out of his pocket. ‘Ready.’
Grace repeated the directions, which Glenn already knew, to the West Sussex Piscatorial trout lake, near Henfield. He was a little surprised at the elaborate directions the Detective Superintendent gave him, as if Grace did not realize he had already been there for much of today. But all the same, he dutifully wrote them down, and the precise co-ordinates.
‘We’ve been lucky so far that the press haven’t cottoned on. Hopefully we can recover the head before we have to worry about the next stage of our press strategy,’ Grace said.
‘Guess we’re lucky that Spinella’s away on honeymoon,’ Branson said.
‘Clearly there is a God!’
*
Worthing was the next coastal town west from Brighton and Hove. With its Victorian pier, faded Regency buildings and wide promenade, it had a generally calm air, compared to the edgy vibrancy of its racy neighbour to the east. Glenn Branson had always liked the place, despite its reputation as a major retirement centre and the sobriquet that went with that, of ‘God’s Waiting Room’.
The satnav took him on a route that bypassed the town itself, and down into a suburb, Durrington, and into a broad network of streets lined with postwar bungalows, two-storey houses and shopping parades. The kind of pleasant, utterly civilized open area, peppered with yellow Neighbourhood Watch signs in front windows where, you felt, nothing bad could ever happen to any of its residents.
He slowed to 28 m.p.h. as he approached a speed camera, then made a right, followed by a left, obeying the dictatorial commands of the woman’s voice from inside his TomTom, then made another right on to Terringes Avenue. It was a quiet street of neat red-brick houses; he drove along, peering through the twilight at the house numbers.
‘You have arrived!’ the satnav announced.
He saw 280 on his right, 282, then 284.
He felt a sudden flutter of nerves. God, this was how he had felt – how many years back? – when he was first dating Ari!
Number 284 was on a junction. He drove past the house and turned right, drove a hundred yards then made a U-turn and parked.
Calm down!
He could smell the scent of the flowers.
What the hell am I doing here?
His insides were jangling, as if he’d stuck his finger into an electrical socket.
Calm down!
He took some deep breaths.
What if she was out?
What if she told him to get lost and made a complaint about sexual harassment?
For a moment, he was tempted, very seriously tempted, to twist the ignition key, tramp the accelerator and get the hell out of there.
You’re not even divorced, man!
He ruminated on that for some moments.
Yeah, but.
He got out of the car, scooped up the bottle and flowers, and locked the doors. He walked the short distance up to Terringes Avenue, turned left towards Bella’s home, and then froze.
A man was standing outside her front door, clutching a huge bouquet of flowers in his arms. A man he recognized.
He could not believe his eyes. No way, it absolutely could not be him! But it was.
The door opened, and Bella stood there, wearing a short dress, her hair looking like it had just been done, as it had last night.
She looked like she had been expecting him. He said something and she laughed. They kissed, just a fleeting peck. Two people comfortable with each other.
Norman Potting went inside and the door closed behind him.
Glenn stood there, gobsmacked. Then, slowly he walked back to his car, stopping on the way to jam the bouquet into a dustbin.
He drove off at speed, shaking his head in anger, astonishment and self-pity, the wine bottle rolling on the passenger seat beside him. Norman Potting. Incredible! Like, it did not make any sense. What the hell did she see in an ugly old lech like him?
Clearly something.
Or had he totally misread it?
59
‘You bitch! You cut me dead!’ Anna screamed at Gaia.
Her idol stared icily back.
‘You humiliated me in front of so many people. You can’t do that, you can’t treat people like that, do you understand?’ She was gripping the knife in her hand. It was an antique dagger with a scabbard that she had k
ept in her handbag ever since a man tried to attack her outside a nightclub in Brighton, a few years ago.
She had learned from an episode of CSI that it was dumb to use an ordinary household knife to stab someone. Invariably the knife would strike bone and when that happened your hand would slip forward along the handle, and the blade would slice into your hand. As a result you would leave some of your own blood at the scene. A dumb way to get caught. But if you used a dagger with a guard, that would stop your hand sliding forward.
‘You think you can just treat people how your mood takes you? One moment sending them passionate signals and the next cutting them dead? How would you like to be cut dead?’ She raised the dagger, the blade glinting in the overhead light. ‘Do you think all of us who love you would still love you if your face was a mass of scars? How much value would you have then, do you think?’
She stared at her, hatred blurring her vision. ‘All this stuff of yours, this tat, this grot, this rubbish we pay a fortune for on eBay. Do think we’d still pay the same if you had knife cuts all over you? Well, do you? Can’t you speak? Cat got your tongue? How would you like to try singing with your tongue cut out? People did that to their enemies in some countries once. If they got screwed. They’d use red-hot pincers to pull their tongues right out of their throats. You wouldn’t look so damned great going on stage and trying to sing without your tongue, would you? You wouldn’t make much of a lover for King George in this film, would you? You’d be pretty useless at kissing, and you wouldn’t be that great at giving him oral sex. Have you thought about that?’
She waited.
‘Have you?’
She waited again.
Then, screaming at the top of her voice, and shaking with rage, ‘HAVE YOU?’
She slashed the knife forward, ripping across Gaia’s face, right from the side of her forehead, across her right eye, down her cheek. The cardboard cut-out fell off the display stand and tumbled to the floor.
Anna stared down, dagger held high, gripping it even harder. Gaia stared up at her from the beige carpet, the rip clear and even across her face. ‘Listen to me, bitch.’ She knelt, staring down into Gaia’s eyes. ‘No one stays on a pedestal who doesn’t deserve it – no one, not for ever. You’d better understand that. You’d better understand what you did tonight. Look at you now,’ she sneered.