Not Dead Yet (Roy Grace 8) (40 page)

Both detectives nodded apologetically.

‘It sounds like Whiteley was pretty difficult then. I spoke to DC Liz Spence at John Street who was dealing with bicycle crime at the time. He was pretty aggressive towards her over it. Didn’t feel the police were doing enough, that they should have made it their major priority. She was sufficiently concerned back then about his level of aggression to put background checks on him.’

‘And?’ Grace asked.

She shook her head. ‘Nothing came up.’

‘If you want my opinion, sir,’ Bella Moy said abruptly, ‘he’s just a harmless saddo.’

Grace looked at her for some moments. ‘You may be right, Bella, but you have to remember something. Criminals escalate. The sicko who starts off as a seemingly harmless flasher can turn into a serial rapist twenty years later.’

‘Yes, sir, I understand,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to be frivolous.’

Grace saw his BlackBerry was flashing red at him. New emails. He tapped to check them as he asked, ‘Norman, anything back yet from the High Tech Crime Unit on Myles Royce’s computer?’

‘No, chief, not so far.’

He glanced through the emails. The second was from the Chief Superintendent of Brighton Police, Graham Barrington.

Drayton Wheeler looked at his watch. 9.03 a.m. Time was passing slowly. Ordinarily, with just six months or so left of it, he might have been grateful. But not up here, lying on this hard wooden floor inside the dome that supported the chandelier, surrounded by mouse droppings, and goddamn seagulls screeching outside.

The battery on his fucking Kindle was running out. In his calculations he hadn’t figured that would happen, but he’d left the thing switched on to wireless, which ate up the battery life. Great. He had about nine hours to kill, and an hour of reading time left. So much for his ambition to finish
War and Peace
before he died. He laughed. His own private joke. With six months to live, he had to be choosy about what he read. Did it matter what he had and hadn’t read in his life? In six months’ time would anyone care that Drayton Wheeler had not read
War and Peace
?

Nor anything by Dostoyevsky. Nor Proust. He hadn’t read much Hardy either. Just one Scott Fitzgerald. Two Hemingways. All people you were supposed to read to make you a more rounded human being. And the more rounded you were, the easier it was for some bastard to stick a pin in you and deflate you.

Well, he sure as hell would not be fretting about it in his grave. Fade to black. Good riddance.

At least today’s
Times
had downloaded. He could cheer himself up with the last of the Kindle’s battery life by reading all the shit that was going on in the world. Palestine. Libya. Iraq. Iran. North Korea.
Hey, you know what, sort yourselves out, world, you’re going to have to learn to get by without me
.

Dying. With every single one of his damned ambitions unfulfilled. Thanks to people like Larry Brooker and Maxim Brody who had screwed him. Everyone had screwed him. Life itself had screwed him.

He was a genius, he knew that. He always had the ideas first. And some other bastard always got there before him, or stole them. He’d had the idea of writing about a child wizard. Fucking JK Rowling got hers out first. He’d had the idea about a young teenage girl falling in love with a vampire. Some Mormon called Stephenie Meyer wrote her books ahead of him.

Now
The King’s Lover
. This time, he knew, no one was there ahead of him. He had the surefire formula.

And it had been stolen from under his feet.

Sue me.

Oh sure, Larry Fucking Brooker. I could sue you. If I had a million bucks in the bank and ten years to live, I could wipe your ass for you with legal paperwork.

He munched angrily through his breakfast of a stale Marks and Spencer egg and bacon sandwich and an over-ripe apple, washed down by cold coffee.
Breakfast of Champions
!

He had that book on his Kindle. Written by one of his favourite authors, Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut was a cynic too. The book was all about a great visionary writer called Kilgore Trout who found one of his science fiction novels being used as toilet paper in a motel lavatory. That was pretty much how Wheeler felt about his own career. He was a genius constantly pissed on from a great height.
Well, smug little baldy Larry Brooker and fat toad Maxim Brody, you’re about to get pissed on from a great height back! Hope you’re looking forward to shooting the banqueting scene tonight.

I’m looking forward to it a lot.

The opening day of the Carl Venner trial at the Old Bailey had gone as well as could be expected, Roy Grace’s Case Officer, Mike Gorringe, who was attending for the whole duration, had reported. The hearing was set to run for three weeks and Grace would not be needed until the middle of next week at the earliest, which suited him well. He had plenty of other issues to deal with here in Sussex at the moment. The most pressing one, as he sat at his desk, staring at his computer screen, was the email Chief Superintendent Graham Barrington had just forwarded him.

It had been sent to Gaia’s published email address last night, read by an assistant who vetted all of her fan mail, and immediately forwarded to her head of security Andrew Gulli.

He rang Graham Barrington’s direct line. It was answered instantly. ‘What do you think, Roy?’ Even though Barrington had been a police officer for nearly thirty years, his voice was still full of an infectious, boyish enthusiasm, and Grace loved that, because it was how he felt, too – most days at any rate.

‘I guess we need to assess whether this is a harmless nutter or a serious threat. In the first instance, are we certain this isn’t from the perp in Los Angeles, Graham?’

‘Well,’ the Chief Superintendent replied, ‘it’s in a similar vein, but I spoke to our contact there, Detective Myman – I just woke him up, it’s 1 a.m. local time – and he assures me that the man they have in custody has no internet access. I’ve forwarded it to the High Tech Crime Unit to see if they can find the source for us. What’s your view, Roy?’

‘Has anyone spoken to Gaia about this?’

‘Not yet, she’s still asleep, I understand.’

‘Someone needs to talk to her as soon as she’s up.’

‘Maybe you should – I think she’s quite sweet on you, Roy!’

‘Probably a good reason why I shouldn’t then!’ Then, being serious again he said, ‘We need to find if she has any idea who this could be. Has she had a confrontation with any of her fans since she’s been here?’

‘I’ve asked Gulli that question. There was a middle-aged woman in The Grand Hotel who tried to push past the security guards, and then made a complaint to us about their brutality.’

‘Oh? How was it followed up?’

‘Uniform attended. They took a statement from her and then interviewed a couple of the security guards later. Seems the woman lied about being a journalist to try to get into Gaia’s suite, then chased after her. We’re not taking her complaint any further.’

Grace wondered why no one had thought to notify him about this incident. Then he looked at the email again. One possibility going through his mind was whether this could be Amis Smallbone winding them up? He read the words and did not think so. There was something sad about them, a desperation. A wounded lover? A stalker deluded that Gaia was in love with him? Or
her
?

‘I think we need to know more about this woman at The Grand, Graham. Can you get someone from your CID team to go and talk to her?’

‘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.