Peter James - Not Dead Yet

Once more he clocked the two detectives exchanging a glance. Like some secret code.

Like school bullies.

Branson looked directly at him again, staring into his eyes. ‘Does the name Myles Royce mean anything to you?’

He did not like the bullying stare from the detective and looked down at the table. ‘Myles Royce? No, I don’t think so, why?’

‘You don’t think so?’ Glenn Branson asked. ‘You don’t think so or are you certain?’

The detective’s manner was making him agitated. He was feeling flushed again, his face getting hot. He wanted to be out of this room and back in the sanctuary of his own office. ‘How certain can any of us be of anything in life?’ Eric replied, eyes still fixed on the table. ‘I don’t want to give you a wrong answer. This firm deals with lots of clients and each of them in turn employs lots of people. The name doesn’t mean anything to me today, but I can’t guarantee I’ve never met someone of that name. I wouldn’t want to be accused of misleading you.’

‘I’m not exactly clear,’ Glenn said, speaking very slowly and firmly. ‘Are you saying you’ve never met someone by the name of Myles Royce? Myles Terence Royce?’

Eric closed his eyes for some moments. He was shaking. Then he glared defiantly back at Branson. ‘I will not be bullied. Do I make myself clear?’

As Drayton Wheeler clambered down the steps of the coach into the blazing June sunshine, he was perspiring heavily and his wig had become even itchier. A young man, wearing a yellow tabard over a T-shirt and ripped jeans, was bellowing through a megaphone.

‘All extras proceed to the assembly area opposite the front entrance of the Pavilion!’

The street was lined with production trucks and there were heavy-duty cables trailing everywhere. A camera mounted on a dolly sat on a long length of track on the Pavilion lawn. There were gantries of lights high up off the ground; harassed-looking grips and gaffers were working feverishly. The Director of Photography was standing near the camera, taking light measurements and issuing instructions to his crew. To the left, on the tarmac area in front of the Dome, was a cluster of large motorhomes with slide-outs, and it was easy to spot Gaia’s, which was the size of a house, and Judd Halpern’s, only marginally smaller, parked alongside it, power cables and water hoses trailing from each. A huge crowd of onlookers was gathered behind a tape cordon manned by several security guards.

Gathered to watch the filming of scenes he had suggested and which Brooker Brody Productions had stolen.

Oh, they were going to be sorry.

The young man, the third, fourth or fifth Assistant Director, continued to bellow instructions.

Drayton scowled. He shuffled along in the line of extras in their equally hot and uncomfortable costumes.

A hawk-eyed young woman came running up to him, her hair in a messy ponytail, a headset with earpiece and microphone clipped to her head. ‘Sorry,’ she said, holding out her hand. ‘You can’t have that rucksack with you!’

‘I’m a diabetic!’ he snapped back. ‘It has my medication.’

‘I’ll look after it for you – if you need anything in it, just let me know – I’ll be around.’ She reached for the bag and he gripped it tightly.

‘I’m not letting this out of my sight, young lady. Okay?’

‘It’s not okay. People in 1810 did not carry rucksacks!’

Wheeler pointed at the building. ‘Yeah? Let me tell you something. You see that building?’

‘The Pavilion?’

‘Uh huh. You’re telling me rucksacks didn’t exist in 1810?’

‘That’s right!’

‘Yeah, well let me tell you something else. This goddamn fucking Royal Pavilion didn’t exist in 1810 either.’

‘Well,’ she said, smiling, unfazed. ‘This is a movie – we have to cut a little slack here and take some licence with exact dates.’

Gripping his rucksack tightly in his fist he said, ‘Yeah, right. Well, that’s what I’m doing too, I’m cutting a little slack. So fuck off.’

They glared at each other for some moments. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’ll be right back!’

He watched her hurry off. Then he hastily pushed his way past the long line of costumed extras in front of him and reached the front entrance of the Pavilion. A security guard stepped into his path. ‘Sorry, sir, ticket holders only.’

‘I have to use the toilet,’ Drayton Wheeler said.

The guard pointed to his left, towards the catering truck and the cluster of motorhomes. ‘The toilet facilities for extras are over there, sir.’

He pointed to his rucksack. ‘The AD told me I could put my rucksack inside. I’m a diabetic you see. She said I could store it in the back room where the wheelchairs are. I need to take a shot.’

The guard frowned. Then, conspiratorially he said, ‘Okay, be quick.’

Wheeler thanked him, and hurried inside. The corridor was deserted. He stopped by the the closed, ochre-painted half-gate at the top of the stone staircase that led down into the basement of the building, and looked around. No one in sight. He slipped the bolt as he had done previously, closed the gate behind him, then descended the steps and hurried along the underground brick-floored corridor. He stopped outside the decrepit green door, with the yellow and black DANGER – HIGH VOLTAGE sign, and yanked it open. He stepped inside, into the familiar fusty smell and pulled the door shut behind him.

Then he flicked on his torch. He checked out the wall of fuses and electrical switchgear, and the pipework that looked like it was lagged in asbestos. A pair of bright red eyes shone back.

A rat, the size of a small cat. Then with a scratching, scurrying sound it was gone.

‘Fuck you!’

He shone the torch around, checking every crevice. Listening to the humming sound and the rhythmic click-tick-click-tick of the electrics. It felt even warmer in here than before. He shone the torch around again, warily. He hated rats. He hated spiders. He hated enclosed spaces.

In six months’ time his body would be in an enclosed space. A coffin.

He smiled.

The last laugh, oh yes. He would have that all right.

He’d left instructions in his will for his ashes to be flushed down the toilet of Brooker Brody Productions offices on the Universal Studio lot.

As he pulled off his horrible wig, and wriggled out of the rest of his clothes, he just hoped there was an afterlife, so that he could get to witness it.

Particularly to see the face of that bitch, his not quite ex -wife, when she heard about those instructions.

He opened his rucksack and started to take out his normal clothes and provisions. Okay, so this wasn’t the greatest place to spend the next twenty-four hours, and they didn’t do room service. But compared to the coffin awaiting him in six months’ time, this was a suite at the Ritz Carlton.

‘The time is 6.30 pm, Monday, the thirteenth of June. This is the eighteenth briefing of Operation Icon ,’ Roy Grace said to his team. ‘We’ve made some good progress since this morning.’ He turned to Potting. ‘Norman?’

Potting had a smug smile on his face that made him look like a gross Buddha, Glenn Branson thought, staring at the old warhorse, still unable to believe this man was now, unknowingly, his love rival.

‘We have a report back from the lab,’ Potting said, smugly, in his rural burr. ‘The DNA from the hairbrush and toothbrush I took from the home of Myles Royce matches the DNA from the torso recovered from Stonery Farm, and the limbs recovered from the West Sussex Piscatorial Society. No question, it is the same person.’

The atmosphere in the room changed perceptibly.