Not Dead Yet (Roy Grace 8) (18 page)

‘That’s me!’ he said.

‘Thanks for calling us. We’re casting for extras now. We start shooting on Monday and we’d need you every day next week until Saturday evening. Would you be free?’

‘Absolutely,’ he replied.

‘We’re shooting crowd scenes outside the Pavilion, weather permitting. I’ll give you the address to come for costume fitting.’

‘Are you filming inside the Pavilion, too?’

‘Yes, a lot, but there won’t be any requirement for extras there.’

‘Ah, right,’ he said, slightly disappointed. But the information was helpful, he decided, although he wasn’t sure why. He filed it away. Sometimes his brain felt like a junk room where the light bulb had blown and no one had replaced it. You had to root around with a torch for stuff you wanted; and each year as he got older the torch got smaller and the batteries dimmer. There was stuff he’d filed away in there that he had long forgotten about and probably never would retrieve now. Mostly the place was guarded by the snakes that rose, their tongues flicking, each time he looked in there.

After he ended the call, he went down into the lobby of the hotel and approached the reception desk. He asked for information about the Brighton Pavilion: what time did it open and close, were there guided tours, did you have to book?

The man behind the desk, who was wearing a smart grey uniform, opened a leaflet and showed him the hours of opening, and the times of the guided tours.

Drayton Wheeler thanked him. It was pelting with rain outside; he decided this would be a good afternoon to spend doing something cultural indoors. What could be better than a visit to Brighton Pavilion?

‘Goddamn rain! Goddamn English weather. Shit!’ Larry Brooker, huddled beneath an umbrella, stood on the lawn of the Royal Pavilion, his Gucci loafers sodden from the wet grass. He checked the weather forecast on his iPhone for the tenth time today, as if somehow, miraculously, at any moment the grey images of rain that filled all six days were suddenly going to turn to sunshine. The cameras didn’t start rolling until next Monday, but they were on a tight schedule for these final days of pre-production and this lousy weather was not a help.

The film’s director seemed impervious to the stuff plummeting down from the sky. Unshaven, with a shoulder-length mane of white hair and a perpetual worried frown, Jack Jordan was wearing a long-peaked baseball cap and an old flying jacket over jeans and sneakers. The two-times Oscar nominee, as well as a BAFTA winner, stood like some ancient soothsayer who had just foretold the end of the world, staring up at one of the onion domes framed by minarets, with his group of acolytes around him – the Location Manager, the Line Producer, the Production Secretary, the Production Designer, the Director of Photography, the First Assistant Director, his Personal Assistant – who it was an open secret he had been shagging for years – and two other people Larry Brooker didn’t know, but had no doubt he was paying for.

Jack Jordan pointed out something on the rooftop; the DP nodded and his PA wrote herself a note. Jack Jordan raised a small camera and took a picture.

Brooker hadn’t slept last night. There was another big hiccup with the production finance. Gaia was arriving in town tomorrow from London, so was their male star, Judd Halpern; they were in full pre-production, building sets up at Pinewood for some of the interiors, ninety-three people on the payroll burning through cash. His partner Maxim Brody had called him from Los Angeles last night, very kindly at 1 a.m., to tell him about the new problem.

Quite a big problem, actually.

The whole production was going to fall over in three days’ time if their backer, Californian internet billionaire Aaron Zvotnik, didn’t come up with the money he had promised. And Zvotnik, it was all over the news, was in trouble himself, with a big lawsuit launched against his company by Google for some infringement; his stock had plunged. He had warned Brody he was facing cash calls for his own stock purchases and could no longer guarantee to honour his commitment.

And just how great was that, thought Brooker? At this late stage his and Maxim’s only option was to dig into their own pockets to save the production until they could find a replacement for Zvotnik’s cash. Brooker was almost broke, but Maxim Brody, luckily, had deep enough pockets to keep them going for a few weeks. Long enough, with a star of Gaia’s stature on board, to find someone to bail them out, but it would almost certainly mean going cap in hand to one of the major studios, and being royally screwed.

He stared moodily at the building. It was one of the most extraordinary places he’d ever seen, and as an inveterate traveller, he’d seen a lot. It was the only building that measured up, in his memory, to the Taj Mahal. Although, to be fair, he’d only seen that at 6 a.m. with a blinding hangover and stomach-cramps from diarrhoea.

The Pavilion was designed in the style of an ornate Indian temple, completely over the top, like some vast, garish wedding cake. Yet it worked, it was quite stunning and majestic, and the interior, decorated with an equally exotic and lavish chinoiserie, was even more extravagant. Developed from a farmhouse in 1787 by the Prince Regent as a seaside retreat for trysts with his mistress – and later his secret wife – Mrs Maria Fitzherbert, the Royal Pavilion was designed and expanded for several decades afterwards by John Nash. It was
the
defining icon of the city of Brighton and Hove, and one of England’s most famous landmarks.

To his relief, Jack Jordan and his entourage were now moving inside, out of the rain. When Larry Brooker had put his first movie together, twenty-five years ago, he’d seen himself living the LA dream. Within a few years, he had planned, he would have his mansion in Bel Air, his fuck-off yacht on the French Riviera, and his private jet. But it hadn’t worked out that way. He’d made a decent living so far, and would be a rich man if such a big chunk hadn’t gone up his nose and an even bigger chunk to his ex-wives. He felt like he was on a constantly nerve-racking ride, but as yet he was not playing in the league he’d hoped for, and if this film did collapse his and Brody’s reputations would be in tatters. They had to keep it going somehow.

A security guard nodded at them. Brooker followed his director and crew along a corridor and into the Banqueting Room. As he looked around him, he decided that if this movie became the global smash hit they anticipated, he would build himself a dining room in that Bel Air mansion that was a replica of this one. It was on a scale that was even more opulent than it looked in the photographs, and so beautifully ornate. He stared in awe at the painted canvas walls, and up at the domed ceiling with its massive centrepiece of plantain leaves in bas-relief, from which hung several immense and fabulous chandeliers.

The central one, the biggest of all, reminded him of a sky-burst firework. It was a good thirty feet high, seemingly held in the claws of the dragon in the apex of the dome. It hung high above a dining table, laid for thirty people, with elaborate candelabra, gold vessels, fine china and crystal goblets.

‘I guess this is where George and Maria had their intimate little dinners,’ the Production Assistant said, with a grin, to Jordan.

Several of them laughed, but not Brooker who was too wrapped up in his thoughts. He was extremely glad they had decided to shoot here on location and that they hadn’t attempted to replicate this room in a studio.

‘Actually, no it isn’t!’ a tall man in a business suit said, walking across to them. ‘I’m David Barry, the Curator of this building. It’s very interesting, but George wasn’t at all happy sitting at this table – he was always terrified the chandelier was going to come crashing down.’

All of the team looked up at it. ‘I don’t think there’d be much left of anyone that landed on,’ Jordan said.

‘Quite!’ the Curator agreed. ‘It weighs just over a ton and a quarter!’

‘How do you keep it clean?’ someone asked.

‘It’s done every five years,’ he replied. ‘It has fifteen thousand individual glass drops, or lustres, each of which has to be removed, washed, polished and put back.’

‘Hope it’s – ah – well supported,’ Brooker said, only half in jest.

The Curator nodded. ‘It is indeed. Queen Victoria was concerned about its safety, and had new supports constructed in what was one of the first introductions of aluminium to this country – it was the strongest material in the world at that time.’

No one noticed the tall, gaunt man in a wet mackintosh, with a camera slung around his neck, carrying a small umbrella in one hand and a Royal Pavilion brochure in the other, who appeared to be admiring a painting on the wall. But he wasn’t remotely interested in the picture. He was listening to their conversation.

Tommy Fincher’s wake had been going on for over three hours now in the upstairs private room of the Havelock Arms. But Roy Grace didn’t mind the wait. He sat patiently in his car across the road from the pub, in the pelting rain and failing light, making calls and emailing on his BlackBerry. And watching. He hoped it would continue for a couple of hours yet. The darker the better.

It was no surprise this establishment had been chosen for the wake. It was one of the city pubs where villains were known to hang out. He’d recognized at least fifteen familiar faces arriving, all of them frequent fliers with Sussex Police. A couple were huddled half in and half out of the doorway now, having a smoke. Inside they’d be drinking their respects to Fincher – and no doubt networking. None of them trusted each other, but the turf wars of old, slugged out in the streets and alleyways of this city with knuckle dusters, razor blades and bottles of acid, had for decades now been a thing of the past. These days the local villains had bigger problems to worry about than each other. Encroachment by the Chinese triads and the Albanian and Russian Mafias was already hitting the pockets of British criminals hard. The drugs trade, prostitution, porn, contraband booze and cigarettes, fake designer goods, and the growing business in internet scams, were all markets being taken over by invisible poachers with even more brutal reputations than their local counterparts, and mostly offshore bases.

In that respect, Brighton and Hove had been fortunate. The city did not have the gun and knife crime that blighted so many places in the UK. But Grace was ever wary that nothing stayed the same, and you could never afford to be complacent.

He couldn’t afford this time he was spending tonight either, but in truth he was rather enjoying himself. This was taking him back to his early days in the CID, when he’d spent two years on a surveillance team, much of that following and watching known local drugs dealers – several of whom were here today. He’d once spent thirty-six hours sitting inside a specially converted fridge in the back of a rusty old delivery van. It was made to look like it had been abandoned, but had actually been carefully sited a short distance along the street from a suspected drug dealer’s house in Moulsecomb. Grace had been there round the clock, with a supply of food and water, unable to step out, having to relieve himself into metal containers, filming the comings and goings through a spy hole in the side of the vehicle.

It was in that fridge that it had first occurred to him that being a detective was like fishing, that you needed a lot of patience to land a big fish, an analogy he used today whenever he did training work with student detectives.

He looked at his watch. 8.35 p.m.

Among the faces he had not been surprised to see was a real old lag, Darren Spicer. A career burglar, in his early forties but looking a couple of decades older. There weren’t many night-time – or
creeper
– burglars left these days, fortunately, Grace thought. They could make more money far more easily as drug dealers or internet fraudsters. In recent years Spicer would probably have been one of Tommy Fincher’s best customers – when he wasn’t inside.

He was distracted from his thoughts by a track that had begun playing. ‘Mr Pleasant’ by the Kinks. He had long thought this group wrote some of the greatest lyrics of all time, and this particular song was one of his favourites. It had a sinister, nasty undertow that perfectly suited the assembled company across the road, behind that steamed-up first-floor window. And in particular, one man. Smallbone.

Mr Pleasant
.

Or rather, Mr
Unpleasant . . .
Grace thought. He could smell sweet whiffs of the cigarette smoke from across the road, and suddenly really fancied one himself. And a drink to go with it, a malt whisky – or maybe a cold lager because he was thirsty. But no chance of either; he daren’t risk leaving the car and missing his target, and he hadn’t any cigarettes with him.

He was also hungry, having missed lunch because he’d worked flat out on preparing some extra documents the prosecuting counsel had requested for the Venner trial, needing to get them despatched before heading to the funeral. The only thing he had in the car was a KitKat which had been in the glove locker for months; the chocolate had gone all lumpy from having melted several times in the sun, and was covered in white speckles. He took the wafer bar out, removed some of the foil and bit a piece off. It tasted stale and crumbs dropped in his lap. But he needed to eat something, and he could be here a long while yet, so he forced it down, grimacing with each fresh bite, and cursing for not having planned ahead.

But in reality he’d had no plan, other than cancelling tonight’s briefing on
Operation Icon
because of Glenn’s absence, and to free himself up. He had just intended turning up at the funeral to find Smallbone, but without having decided how he would confront him. Anger at the man was pent up inside him. A deep rage at what he had done – or had arranged for someone to have done – to Cleo’s car. He was in danger of doing something stupid and he knew he needed to keep a lid on it somehow. But he wasn’t sure, when he finally met Smallbone face to face tonight, whether he would be able to. No one was ever, ever, ever going to threaten or scare his beloved Cleo.