Peter James - Not Dead Yet

‘I’ll get Jason Tingley on it right away.’

‘What do we know about Gaia’s current love life?’

‘She has a lover in Los Angeles. A fitness instructor. Detective Myman said he was interviewed after her assistant was killed and cleared. Sounds like their relationship is fine.’

‘I’d like to get this email analysed by a psychologist,’ Grace said. ‘There may be some subtext we’re not aware of.’

‘Good idea. Meantime I’m going to step up her protection.’

‘Definitely,’ Grace said. ‘Do we know her movements today?’

‘They’re filming a big interior scene at the Pavilion tonight. She’s free during the day. She’s promised to take her son on the Pier and to the beach. I’ll make sure we don’t let either of them out of our sight.’

‘I think my young god-daughter is going to join them,’ Grace said.

‘We’ll have a ring of steel around them, Roy.’

Grace thanked him and hung up. Emails were tumbling into his inbox faster than he could read them. A whole bunch of stuff about the police rugby team he was running, and had to deal with, on top of everything else. And in twenty minutes’ time he had to drive over to Sussex Police HQ at Malling House, to brief his boss ACC Peter Rigg on Operation Icon .

Gaia would be fine, for now, in Graham Barrington’s hands. He hoped.

The phone was answered on the second ring. ‘AD Motorhomes.’

Putting on an American accent, because she thought it might sound more convincing, Anna Galicia said, ‘I’m calling from Brooker Brody Productions. We have mislaid the key to the motorhome our star, Gaia, is using and need another one urgently.’

‘Oh dear,’ the woman said. ‘We’ll have to get a spare couriered to you.’

‘You’re in St Albans, Hertfordshire, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘We have someone up in that area picking up some props. I’ll direct them to come to you for the key – they’ll be there in about two hours.’

‘Yes, okay, fine, it will be waiting in reception.’

Anna thanked her and hung up.

They began setting up for the big scene an hour before the Pavilion closed for the day. A call had been put out for extras, but Drayton Wheeler had not responded.

From his position right at the top of the wooden slats that formed a concave staircase up the inside of the dome, he could look straight down through a gap beside the metal shaft that supported the chandelier, into the Banqueting Room.

And he could listen. Thanks to the baby monitoring system he had bought in Mothercare. The radio microphone was underneath the mahogany table down in the Banqueting Room. The speaker was switched on beside him. He could hear everything perfectly, except for the occasional irritating whine of feedback.

It was 4.30 p.m. Nearing the end of the day that had felt like it would never end. He sat perched up here, watching stupid tourists shuffling around the exterior of the room. A plush rope prevented them from getting near to the actual banqueting table itself. He wasn’t bored any more now.

It was remarkable how simple the fixings of the chandelier were. A cross-beam of four metal poles, attached to wooden struts, each secured by a large bolt. In the centre of the cross-beam was welded a single, thick aluminium shaft, three feet long, to which one and a quarter tons of chandelier, with its 15,000 lustres, was attached.

He tied the hotel towel tightly around the shaft.

Then he grinned.

Ready to rock and roll!

Down below he could see doubles for Gaia and Judd Halpern being seated at the banqueting table, for the Director of Photography to light them.

Etiquette had it that the king and his paramour were seated first. The rest of the guests would file to the table.

Timing was going to be the big issue. If he got really lucky, it might not be just Gaia and Judd Halpern that the chandelier landed on. It could be another ten people, either side of them and opposite. Some big names in the supporting cast. Hugh Bonneville, from Downton Abbey , was playing Lord Alvanley and Joseph Fiennes was playing the king’s friend, Beau Brummell. Emily Watson was cast as the Countess of Jersey, who had for some years usurped Maria Fitzherbert, and was about to usurp her again in this ludicrous, totally historically inaccurate scene. None of them should have taken these roles; they were all conspiring to alter history. No one had any right to do that. For sure, they did not deserve to do that and live!

If luck really went his way, he might get all of them.

From his rucksack he very carefully retrieved the San Pellegrino screw-top bottle. Its contents looked like water. But if you were to drink it, death would be agonizing and not instantaneous. It contained mercuric chloride acid. A substance powerful enough, from the experiments he had already carried out, and his calculations that had followed, to eat through an aluminium shaft, six inches in diameter, in twenty-five to thirty minutes.

He could see Larry Brooker’s bald dome. He was pacing around shouting at people so loudly, Drayton had to turn down the volume on the baby monitor. Crew were scurrying everywhere, frenetically busy. A dozen extras were seated around the banqueting table, which was laid out for a feast, doubling for the cast as the Director of Photography and his underlings were making final lighting adjustments. The sound boom was being manoeuvred into place.

All getting set for the big scene.

Gaia would be in her trailer. Having her make-up and hair done, and reading through her lines once more, no doubt.

His lines .

Judd Halpern would be in his trailer, staring at his lines, and doing several lines of a different kind – coke, washed down with bourbon, if past form was anything to go by.

Larry Brooker was saying something to a young man who looked like he might be the First Assistant Director, who was nodding vigorously.

Do you realize why you are all here? It’s because of a screenplay called The King’s Lover that you are making. If I hadn’t written it, none of you would have a job on this production.

Are you grateful to me?

You don’t even know who I am, do you?

But you will soon .

‘The time is 6.30 p.m., Tuesday, June the fourteenth. This is the twentieth briefing of Operation Icon ,’ Roy Grace said to his team. ‘We have some developments.’ He looked at Potting. ‘Norman, can you tell us about your search of Myles Royce’s house?’

‘I took DC Nicholl with me, as well as POLSA Lorna Dennison-Wilkins and Crime Scene Photographer James Gartrell to record our search. Royce’s mother wasn’t exaggerating when she said her son was a big Gaia fan. The place is so full of her stuff you can hardly move in there. I’ve never seen anything like it. Almost every room’s crammed with cardboard cut-outs of her, dresses, records, souvenir programmes, piles and piles of press cuttings on the floor, and some of them pasted on the walls. In my view he wasn’t just a fan, he was a total obsessive. Just to be clear, I’m talking about an oddball. You can’t open the door fully to some of the rooms, there’s so much stuff piled in there. If we need it, Lorna can bring in more of her team tomorrow to catalogue everything.’

‘People like this bother me,’ Grace said. ‘Obsessives are fanatics, and unpredictable. The one thing that really worries me right now is that we have a Gaia obsessive dead, and Gaia is in town. It might be a total coincidence. But this has to be an important line of enquiry for us to find out which other Gaia fans Royce associated with.’ He looked down at his notes, then continued.