Not Dead Yet

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.

90

‘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.

‘Right, from the High Tech Crime Unit’s examination of Royce’s computer, so far, he would appear to have been one of a small group of obsessive Gaia fans who exchanged information and constantly bid against each other for everything that came up for auction. And it seems that he had one particularly acrimonious rivalry with a character called Anna Galicia. Which is where this gets interesting for us.’ He looked down at his notes. ‘This rivalry developed into an email slanging match with this woman. A really nasty, bitchy exchange over some item of Gaia’s they had both been bidding for that she wore in one of her shows. The High Tech Crime Unit’s still working through the email trail. But meantime I asked Annalise Vineer to run a name check on Anna Galicia, and she got a hit.’ He nodded at her.

‘Last Wednesday evening,’ Annalise Vineer said, ‘uniform attended a Grade 3 call at The Grand Hotel. It was a woman complaining she had been assaulted by two of Gaia Lafayette’s security guards. She gave her name as Anna Galicia. Following the information of the link between her and Royce from the High Tech Crime Unit, two uniformed officers were sent to her address to interview her. But it doesn’t exist. She gave a false address.’

Glenn Branson frowned. ‘Why would she have done that if she was making a genuine complaint?’

‘Exactly,’ Roy Grace said. ‘By all accounts she was pretty angry. So why give a false address?’ He looked around at his team. ‘Any ideas?’

‘Doesn’t make sense to me,’ Graham Baldock said.

‘Nor me,’ Guy Batchelor said. ‘If you’re making a complaint, you’re making a complaint. If you have something to hide you don’t make a complaint in the first place. I mean, do you?’ He shrugged.

‘I’m not at all happy about this person,’ Grace said. ‘We need to find her quickly. Very quickly.’

91

‘How can I make my multi-million-dollar movie with a goddamn lead actor who’s off his goddamn face, for fuck’s sake!’ Larry Brooker yelled at the top of his voice, across the floor of the Banqueting Room, at the hapless Third Assistant Director, Adrian Gonzalez. ‘You wanna tell me?’

Gonzalez raised his hands in a gesture of despair. His role was to deliver Gaia, Judd Halpern and the other principal actors to the set, and escort them back to their trailers when they weren’t required. He was an earnest, fresh-faced twenty-eight-year-old, with a shock of short, unruly ginger hair, dressed in a blue T-shirt emblazoned in white with the words THE KING’S LOVER, tatty cargo shorts and trainers. He wore a headset with an earpiece and microphone, had a mobile phone and a pager clipped to his belt, and was clutching a call sheet. He shrugged helplessly at Brooker.

There was a pathetic ego thing going on between the two stars, who had taken an instant dislike to each other from day one. Halpern had already kept Gaia waiting twice, so now she refused to come out of her trailer, for any scenes she was doing with him, until it was confirmed to her that he was on set and ready.

The director, camera team and the rest of the crew watched Larry Brooker’s latest tantrum. The bald, tanned producer, in a black Versace shirt open halfway down his chest, displaying his gold medallion, black chinos and Cuban-heeled boots, strode over towards Gonza-lez, like a pocket dictator, and gripped him by the front of his T- shirt. ‘What the fuck’s going on? Thirty minutes we’ve been waiting for this goddamn asshole. We have a schedule to keep to. We’ve got two busloads of extras sitting out there!’ Still gripping Gonzalez’s shirt he turned to the Line Producer, Barnaby Katz, a short, tubby man in his early forties, with a barren dome rising from a sparse tundra of