Chapters 10-19

Chapter Ten

 

Five years to the day after his divorce was finalised, Michael Braithwaite stood on white sand and looked out across an expanse of turquoise sea.

      The fact that it was close to freezing and a gale-force wind was hurling a fine mist of frothing surf across the sand, numbing his extremities and making his ears sing, made the moment slightly less than idyllic, but it was refreshing all the same.

      He scrambled up the rocks towards the outcrop behind which the more sensible Susan was sheltering. He pressed his back into the wet rock alongside her and giggled with relief.

      ‘Bracing, isn’t it?’

      He had no breath to agree, and could only nod, grinning stupidly. His sister slipped a gloved hand in his and passed him a mussel shell, its purple iridescence like a jewel in his palm. He turned it over and over, wondering.

      ‘And you do this every day?’

      ‘When I can,’ she shouted over the sound of the wind. ‘Hugh doesn’t always get back before dark. But I like to get away from the kids and come down here whenever I can.’

      ‘I can see why!’ he bellowed. Out in the bay, the winter sun was low over the incredible colours of the sea and sand. ‘I’ve never seen anywhere like this place! It looks like the Caribbean!’

      She yelled something back, but the wind took it, and she leaned right into the hood of his coat to repeat herself. ‘I said, they have slightly better weather!’

      Braithwaite nodded, beaming. ‘I wouldn’t change it for the world!’ His sister smiled fondly at him and punched him on the arm, the blow softened by affection and the five layers of clothing he was wearing to keep out the cold.

      He scrambled to the top of the rocks, closed his eyes, threw out his arms and let the driving wind blow the stress and strains out of his body. November was never a good time of year for him, the darkening evenings recalling hours spent in solicitors’ offices and long nights alone. And it hadn’t exactly been a good autumn, anyway. The Fame Factory deaths had proved to be rather more than a nine day wonder, thanks to the efforts of Kelly Jefferson and Kyle Pennington, who between them had dreamed up a number of headlines that had ensured his unlooked-for presence in the newspapers had been extended well into the elimination rounds of the competition. He’d had sod-all support from his superiors, either. Richardson had been in a foul mood with him ever since a chief inspector Robinson from Essex constabulary had been invited onto the GMTV sofa to discuss the case by a researcher relying on the cuttings file.

      It had come as a surprise when the Human Resources department called to point out that he had nearly four weeks of leave piling up – since he was no longer able to take Olivia away on holiday, he tended not to bother going at all – but he had decided to take it as a sign and called Susan that evening to ask if she fancied a visit from her fascist brother. Although she did point out that November was perhaps not the ideal time to see the Outer Hebrides for the first time, she said there was nothing she would like more, and when she told him that Hugh refused to have a television in the house and that the only paper they ever took was the West Highland Free Press, the deal was fixed.

      When he was sure that the very last vestiges of London had been blasted out of his body and scattered across every corner of the island – and he no longer had any feeling in his face – he scrambled back down to join a giggling Susan and they headed back to the house across the meadow above the beach, disturbing a flock of dunlin which erupted from the grass just a few inches ahead of his feet. Susan’s eldest, Grainne, came running out to meet them, her sister Aileen waddling after her as fast as she could with her wellies on the wrong feet. Braithwaite scooped both girls up, planting a kiss on two frozen cheeks, and carried them into the welcoming warmth of the big open-plan kitchen and sitting room, where Hugh was holding their six-month-old brother Hector in one arm and stirring a vast saucepan of meaty broth with the other. Before too long, five out of the six of them were tucking into it with relish.

      Two hours later, Braithwaite’s enthusiasm for Snakes and Ladders was all but exhausted, and he was glad to swap the girls, who could quite happily have gone on playing all night, for a bottle of Islay malt which Hugh passed to him as he shepherded his daughters upstairs. He poured three generous glasses and sat nursing one at the battered kitchen table, enjoying the patterns the open peat fire threw on the walls and listening to the sounds of bedtime floating down from above. He would love to bring Olivia up here some time, if Cassie would let him. She used to love the beach, and she had never met her cousins. Grainne, who was four, was intrigued by the concept of having a real life 11-year-old to play with and had asked him at least once every day so far if Olivia was coming, as if he might be keeping her locked up in his luggage as a special treat which he would otherwise forget about.

      ‘You all right, bro?’ asked Susan as she came into the kitchen and took a bottle of formula milk from the fridge.

      ‘Mm. Uh-huh.’ Braithwaite pulled out a tissue and blew his nose. His sister came and stood behind him, a hand squeezing his shoulder. Together, they watched the milk revolve in the microwave.

      ‘They’re lovely kids,’ he told her. ‘You’re very lucky.’

      ‘Oh, they’re all right on a good day.’ The microwave pinged and she headed for the stairs. ‘Put some music on, would you? Something cheerful.’

      Hugh might not have approved of televisions, but his hi-fi system left nothing to be desired: a big old three-speed turntable was attached by a forest of wires not only to a state-of-the art Bang and Olufsen CD player and amplifier, but also to a flat-screen iMac – presumably the very computer on which he had first met Susan, out there in the cold loneliness of cyberspace. His CDs were laid out in alphabetical order on a set of racks nailed to the wall high out of his children’s reach, but it was to the collection of vinyl LPs in crates on top of the sideboard that Braithwaite went. These were ordered more haphazardly, and he spent a happy few minutes leafing through them, recognising some familiar images from his own teenage years: the lunar landscape of Tales from Topographic Oceans, the heraldic crest of A Night at the Opera, even a couple of bikini-clad lovelies promising more than the Top of the Pops albums could ever deliver. And here was a happy memory: Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland, with its group of slightly awkward-looking naked women sitting together in the dark. He had been handed a copy of this album (or the cover at least; he didn’t remember there being any record inside) in the playground during his first year at secondary school and instructed to hide it in his satchel and not let his mum find it. It had obviously been through many pairs of hands before his: it was dog-eared and yellowing and, if memory served, unpleasantly sticky. Somehow, he knew without being told that he was only allowed to keep it for a week or two before it was his solemn duty to pass it on to a younger, smaller classmate. In the event, he didn’t have much choice in the matter: Susan had found it hidden in his wardrobe when she was looking for a spare set of hair rollers for her Girl’s World and shown it to their mother, and that had been the end of that. And now here she was with a copy of it in her own front room.

      He lingered over the record for a second, trying to decide whether he was feeling up to Hendrix’s blend of voodoo and howling feedback, but then spotted a familiar androgynous face lurking behind it. It belonged to someone who had obviously decided that panda eyes and a mass of split ends were not enough of a style statement in themselves and topped off the look by putting what appeared to be a bucket on his head. Beneath it, blocked out in red capitals, was the name that had caused him so much confusion when he had spotted it also adorning packets of lard in his mother’s kitchen: T.REX. It had to be this one. He remembered dancing with Susan in her bedroom to Telegram Sam, their thumbs hooked in the belt-loops of the drainpipe jeans they had persuaded their mother to flare out with triangles cut from old cushion covers, bellowing along at the tops of their voices and, when they were finally told to turn it down, engaging in earnest conversations about how exactly cosmic seas resembled bumble bees and speculating as to why anyone’s uncle might have had an alligator chained to his leg.

      He put it on the turntable and let the irresistible plinky-plonky guitar of Metal Guru fill the room. His foot was tapping even before Marc Bolan began to sing and he essayed a brief boogie as he crossed the room to pick up his drink, thankfully stopping before Hugh came in. He nodded his approval and the two of them sat side-by-side on the sofa, enjoying the music in companionable silence, which suited Braithwaite just fine since, although he liked his brother-in-law a great deal, he found his accent almost completely incomprehensible.

      Susan got Hector off to sleep and joined them during, appropriately enough, Baby Boomerang, taking up a position in front of the fire and downing half her tumbler of whisky in one go. Hugh looked slightly shiftily at her. ‘Er… we usually… er,’ he said, and tailed off.

      Susan shook her head exasperatedly and turned to her brother. ‘Hugh wants to know if he can have a spliff, or if you’ll arrest us.’

      ‘Oh!’ Braithwaite exclaimed, discombobulated. ‘I’m not on duty, so don’t worry about me. Er. It’s fine, honestly.’ He’d been in similar situations before – when he had joined the force at 18, most of his friends from school had been too stoned to notice for several weeks – but it was so long since he had been out socialising with anyone who wasn’t a work colleague that the topic just hadn’t arisen for a while. And he hadn’t been aware that Susan smoked dope, but then again, if she had done, she was hardly likely to have told him, was she? Christ, he felt more like her granddad than her brother. To cover his embarrassment, he reached for the bottle and topped up their glasses. A few more of these and he wouldn’t be bothered about anything.

      Hugh skinned up quickly with a practised hand, and opened the top half of the stable-style kitchen door to smoke it, flicking the glowing ashes out to be carried away by the wind. After a while, he swapped places with Susan, and went to sit cross-legged in front of his records, flicking through them and chuckling occasionally to himself. Braithwaite tried to shake off the feeling of being the uncool kid at the party. He tried to concentrate on the music, and then realised he was tapping out the drum riffs on the arm of the chair and humming along, which made him feel even more self-conscious.

      ‘D’you want any of this, Michael?’ asked Susan in the gap between two songs.

      ‘Oh, no,’ said Braithwaite automatically, and then suddenly felt very, very bored with being a sensible policeman. ‘Yes, actually I really do.’ He crossed to the kitchen door before he could change his mind again and took a deep toke on the remains of the joint, which glowed back into life in his fingers. The smoke hit the back of his throat and made his eyes water, and he coughed harshly.

      ‘Careful, it’s strong stuff,’ said his sister. ‘A friend of ours in Tolstadh grows his own… but I’m not supposed to tell you that, am I?’

      He grinned at her, flapping his hand to disperse the smoke. ‘I can hardly go and arrest him now, can I?’ He took another drag and felt a smooth warmness spread through his body. ‘God, I haven’t done this for –’ he tried to do the calculation, but didn’t feel quite up to it – ‘nearly thirty years.’ He took another long drag, and decided it might be easier to give up talking altogether and just look at the view through the doorway. In the distance the moonlight glittered on the roaring sea. He could hear the calling of seabirds over the sound of the music.

      His sister was laughing at him. ‘I’ve missed you, bro,’ she said, and enveloped him in a hug.

      ‘I’ve missed you, too,’ he told her, and then, with a shriek of ‘Oh, man,’ Bolan announced the arrival of their very own tune. ‘D’you remember this?’ roared  Braithwaite, tucking his thumbs into the belt-loops of his corduroy trousers (he had to suck his stomach in to get to them, which hadn’t been a problem in 1972) and throwing himself into something that was meant to be the funky chicken but actually looked more like a half-stuffed turkey. Susan dissolved into giggles.

      ‘You laugh now!’ he chortled. ‘I remember you crying when Dad wouldn’t let us watch him on Top of the Pops!’

      ‘Oh, God, yeah!’ She reached out to take the joint back. ‘What was it he said? “I don’t pay my licence fee to watch poofters on the telly!”’ She imitated their father’s booming tones.

      ‘That’s it!’ He grinned, delighted that she remembered. ‘And you said, “He’s not a poofter, he’s a Gender Bender!”’

      Her face was alight with remembered outrage. ‘He was! It said so in Jackie!’

      ‘I thought he was going to belt you!’

      ‘I think he would have done if I hadn’t stormed out of the room first!’ She shook her head and took a last toke on the spliff, swearing as it burned her fingers, then wandered off in search of an ashtray, observing as she went that Bobby was all right and just out of sight, around a semi-tone off Bolan pointing out the same thing. He remembered their father’s outraged face. A factory foreman, he had been unable to countenance anything that lay outside the narrow confines of the snug bar at the local and the editorial pages of the Daily Mirror. A bit like Alun Morgan, in fact.

      He wandered back to the sofa and slumped down beside Hugh, who was rolling another joint on the coffee table. ‘What happened to Marc Bolan?’ he asked blearily. ‘Was it drugs that got him in the end?’

      Hugh shook his head, scattering crumbs of tobacco from the Rizla he was licking. ‘Car crash. On Barnes Common.’

      His words cut through the fug in Braithwaite’s brain. ‘Where?’

      Hugh looked confused. ‘It’s in London, isn’t it? I’ve got the details somewhere. Here.’ He passed the now completed spliff to Susan, and crossed over to the CD racks, pulling out a copy of T-Rex’s Greatest Hits. ‘I got it for the bonus tracks,’ he said sheepishly, and passed the booklet across to Braithwaite.

      From the moment he was expelled from school at age 14 to the day his first band John’s Children was banned by the BBC for suspect lyrics in their song ‘Desdemona’, it was obvious that young Mark Feld was a true child of the revolution, he read. He flicked ahead to the last page of text.

      On September 16 1977, just two weeks before his 30^th birthday, Marc was returning from a night out in a South London restaurant when the purple mini driven by his girlfriend Gloria Jones span out of control on Queens Ride, a leafy road in the middle of Barnes Common, and collided with a tree. Marc was killed instantly.

      The LP came to an end and the room was plunged into a sudden silence, broken only by the sound of the stylus arm ticking and gliding its way back onto its holder. Braithwaite suddenly felt very sober. There was a rumbling feeling in his gut, and it had nothing to do with the combination of whisky and dope. He sat and stared at the paragraph in front of him. 16^th September. Barnes Common. A purple mini.

      ‘Why don’t I know this stuff?’ he demanded in frustration.

      ‘Because you were listening to the bloody Partridge Family,’ his sister snorted from the kitchen doorway.

      He turned to Hugh, who was at the sideboard, leafing through his collection in search of something to suit the mood. ‘Crystal Palace!’ said Braithwaite sharply.

      His brother-in-law turned and looked at him quizzically. ‘I haven’t got any. Are they a band?’

      ‘No, no, it’s a place. What happened there?’ He looked round at Susan, who looked bemused but did her best.

      ‘I went on a date in a pub there with that bloke who said he worked in wildlife conservation but turned out to be a taxidermist.’

      ‘No, no, someone died there. A girl. A few weeks ago. And I think someone else might have done. Someone famous. How can we find out?’

      Hugh straightened up, sensing the urgency in Braithwaite’s voice. ‘I can have a look on the net, if you like.’

      ‘Yes. Let’s.’ He scampered across the room and sat down in front of the futuristic-looking machine, but realised he had no idea of even how to turn it on. Hugh reached over his shoulder and pressed a mysterious series of buttons which brought the Google home page swimming into view.

      He typed, crystal palace + died. ‘OK?’

      He counted back on his fingers. ‘Put fourth of October, too.’ They watched as the screen went white, and then obstinately refused to do much else for several seconds.

      ‘Sorry,’ said Hugh, retrieving his glass from the coffee table. ‘Broadband hasn’t quite made its way to the Western Isles yet. Here you go.’

      Together, they scanned the page of results. They consisted almost entirely of football fixtures. Braithwaite sighed in exasperation. ‘All right. Try putting in “famous”. And maybe “musician”.’

      Hugh typed dutifully, but the results that came up were even more random. And there were apparently 372,000 of them. ‘What’s this about, Michael?’ asked Susan.

      ‘I need to know if there were any famous singers who died on the fourth of  October,’ he snapped. ‘It’s really important.’

      ‘Hang on,’ said Hugh. ‘Here, let me in there. I’m sure I can find something.’

      They swapped places, Hugh sitting down at the keyboard and Braithwaite pacing up and down in the space between the coffee table and the fireplace. Susan watched from the kitchen, concerned.

      ‘Here we are,’ said Hugh, after what seemed like an age. He had pulled up a garishly-coloured site on the screen, headed OnThisDay.com^. ‘Fourth of October, 1970. Janis Joplin died of a heroin overdose.’

      ‘That’s it!’ he nearly screamed, bounding across the room and spilling his drink all over the carpet. ‘Where did she die? Was it Crystal Palace?’

      A couple of clicks of the mouse brought the answer. ‘No. In Los Angeles. The Landmark Hotel on Franklin Avenue.’

      The sense of disappointment was crushing. For a few vital minutes there he had thought he was onto something. But it was obviously just the dope talking. God. Three tokes on a spliff and he was behaving like one of those ridiculous old hippies who saw cosmic patterns in everything and insisted that if you watched The Wizard of Oz at the same time as listening to Dark Side of the Moon, you would realise something other than the fact that neither of them was very good.

      ‘Are you OK?’ asked Susan, coming up to him and laying a hand on his arm.

      ‘Yeah. Yeah. I’m fine. I just… it was just an idea. It doesn’t matter. I might go and get some fresh air.’ He brushed past her, embarrassed. He felt such an idiot. He was supposed to be forgetting about work for this week, and instead he had dragged it along, an unwelcome guest who had spoiled the party. And besides, he had spilt whisky all over his sleeve.

      Outside the kitchen door the island lay still in the moonlight. Somewhere out to sea, a lighthouse was hurling its rhythmic signal out across the horizon. He breathed deeply, filling his lungs with the fresh, ice-cold air and gazing up at the vast canopy of stars that glittered above him. At least this couldn’t be more different to London. All he could see out of his own kitchen window was the sodium glow of streetlights and the red lights on the radio transmitter at the top of the hill.

      The Crystal Palace radio transmitter.

      The one you could see all over South London.

      The one that might be several thousand miles from Los Angeles, but was absolutely and undeniably a Landmark.

      Braithwaite burst back into the sitting room and reeled to the peg where his jacket and fleece were hanging. He tore them down and began to search frantically through the pockets. ‘My mobile… I need my mobile!’

      ‘You’ll never get a signal,’ warned Susan, but her brother was gone, out into the howling wind that was battering the island, leaving the couple sitting bewildered by the fire.

      

Chapter Eleven

 

Chief Superintendent Claire Whitehead strode down the fourth-floor corridor of the Hotel Bellemaison in Park Lane, her kitten heels making no sound on the plush patterned carpet. She rounded a corner, startling a uniformed constable who had been studying a bland print on the wall and trying to work out if the fishing boats depicted were a deliberate attempt at a faux-naif style or just really badly drawn. He jumped to attention and stepped back in front of the door of room 421, which was ajar. Aiming a withering look at him, not for any particular misdemeanour but because she had found that was generally the most useful way to interact with junior ranks, Whitehead took the polished handle of the door in her right hand and shoved it hard.

      The Chief Superintendent liked to make an entrance into any room, but in this case she was to be thwarted. The door only yielded about an inch before pressing back against her hand and a volley of expletives erupted from behind it.

      She peered through the six-inch gap between the door and the frame and saw a pair of hairy, naked legs stretched out on the carpet. About five and a half feet above and perpendicular to the legs, a face appeared – a face belonging to a very disgruntled pathologist.

      ‘You’ll have to squeeze through like everyone else,’ said the woman sharply. ‘The body’s already been bashed about quite enough without every police officer in London doing their best to walk straight through the poor sod.’

      Whitehead narrowed her eyes into a scowl, but the head had already disappeared behind the door again. She straightened her back and breathed in deeply, noting in passing the pleasing effect this had on her Wonderbra’d bosom, and slid sideways through the gap, stepping gingerly over the hairy legs which she could now see were attached to a body which was jammed against the back of the door. She had a perfect view of a shrivelled set of genitals hanging out of a baggy pair of blue boxer shorts, but the action of opening the door had rolled the man’s torso over and she was unable to see his face, just a mop of blond hair above a tight white T-shirt designed to show off a muscular body. She moved round the squatting pathologist to get a better view, and crooked her head to one side to look into the corpse’s bloated face. The pathologist was in the process of loosening a leather belt that was bound tightly around its neck. She looked up at the top of the door, where the brass arm of the automatic door-closer had torn away from the doorframe and now bent out uselessly into space.

      ‘He was hanging from that?’

      ‘Looks like it,’ grunted the woman without looking up. ‘Apparently the maid tried to come in and clean this morning and couldn’t get the door open. Got a porter to come up and help her, he put his shoulder to it and this chap dropped down behind. Then you and all your colleagues gave him a good bashing just to make sure.’

      Whitehead ignored the jibe and crossed to the armchair on the far side of the double bed, picking up the pair of jeans that lay there and working her way through a series of pockets in increasingly unlikely areas of the garment before finding what she was looking for; a wallet, complete with a driving licence photocard. A handsome face stared out at her from beneath an unruly mop of blond hair. The name on the licence matched the one she had taken from the room register downstairs. Paul Waterhouse. Part of a block booking from 20^th November until tomorrow morning, Sunday, the 23^rd, in the name of Portmanteau Ltd.

      ‘That’s interesting.’ The pathologist was studying the corpse’s neck. ‘Look at this. The marks on his neck.’

      Whitehead crossed the room and obliged, but the livid marks on Waterhouse’s neck meant nothing to her – as the pathologist had known very well they would not. ‘What about them?’

      ‘They mean he was hung, not hanged. I had a similar case a couple of months ago, but this is much clearer. Look, the bruises would be up round here if he was hanged.’ She directed her biro at the backs of the man’s ears. ‘See? Nothing. Whereas here… That means he was strangled with the belt, and then hung up from the door after the blood had stopped pumping.’ She straightened up and looked around the room. ‘Which leaves you with a classic locked room mystery, doesn’t it.’

      ‘Hmm.’ Whitehead strolled across the room to the French windows. A gentle push sent the panes swinging outwards and the muslin curtains billowing into the room. She gave a mirthless smile. ‘Or not’, she said, and stepped out onto the balcony.

      One of the hotel’s cheaper rooms, this one did not get the sweeping vista of Hyde Park that was granted to the more affluent guests. Its balcony looked out over the back streets of Mayfair, but it was not this view that interested the policewoman. Instead, she turned and scanned the wall of the building, quickly finding what she was looking for. Just a few inches from the balustrade on the right hand end of the balcony was another window: this one had no balcony and its glass was frosted. She leant across and attempted to push the sash upwards, but it was locked, and all she got for her pains was a set of black fingers. Taking care not to transfer any of the grime on to her Jigsaw trouser suit, she walked back through the room, slid through the gap in the door into the corridor and turned left past the nervous constable. Yes, it was what she thought: a linen cupboard, its door unlocked, its walls lined with shelves bearing piles of pristine white sheets and towels of unimaginable fluffiness. The shelves extended in front of the window, too, but a pile of towels had been shifted to provide access to the panes and room enough to crawl through. The sash was covered with a thick layer of dust – from the looks of it, this window stored all the dirt that had been so ruthlessly excised from the rest of the hotel – but the lock had been wiped clean by a recent set of fingers. There was a drop of probably a hundred feet outside the window: Whitehead wouldn’t fancy going out that way, but she figured clambering back through from the balcony would be less nerve-wracking just as long as the route had been properly prepared beforehand. She might make one of her junior officers try it out later on, after the area had been dusted for prints. Even if they didn’t learn anything from the exercise, it would be worth it for a laugh.

      She emerged into the corridor, wiping her hands on a monogrammed hand towel. The constable was waiting outside. ‘They just radioed up from downstairs, ma’am. Apparently there’s someone in reception asking for him.’ He jerked his head towards room 421.

      ‘All right, I’ll go down. I want that linen closet dusted for prints as well as the room. No one’s to touch anything.’ She handed him the smeared towel and headed up the corridor towards the lifts.

      Four floors below, Milly Jenkins was getting edgy. She had to have all the contestants at the studios by ten, ready for the technical run-through for tonight’s live show, or her life would not be worth living. Half a dozen of them were here, lolling about on the sofas in the hotel’s plush reception. Another three stood smoking outside the revolving doors at the entrance, their carefully-selected TV outfits eyed with distaste by the uniformed and top-hatted doorman. The coach driver was fuming at her on her mobile, warning that he couldn’t park on the red route outside forever and if she didn’t get the passengers on board in the next two minutes, he would be leaving without them. But Paul bloody Waterhouse – the bane of her life – was nowhere to be seen.

      She had thought the job of shepherding those contestants who lived outside London between their hotel and the rehearsal rooms and studio would be a relatively easy one – certainly better than the weeks of tedious paperwork Kyle Pennington had had her doing during pre-production – but it was turning out to be a nightmare. The contestants might have been staying in the lap of luxury, but Portmanteau didn’t stretch to the same privileges for their staff, and Milly still had to get up before dawn at her parents’ house in Reading to ensure she was in Park Lane, clipboard in hand, in time to ensure that room service had managed to rouse all her charges, serve them breakfast in bed, and stop Sara Minsky from going straight to the toilet to throw it up afterwards. And the worst thing was that the little sods (at 22, Milly was actually the same age as some of the contestants, but a few months of sub-minimum wage trudgedy laughably described as an internship made all the difference) were so ungrateful. Milly would have given her right arm to have stayed somewhere like this with someone else picking up the tab, but most of the contestants seemed to think the lifestyle of the rich and famous was their God-given right, apparently believing they were genuine celebrities rather than just sad saps enjoying their fifteen minutes of mild public interest at the whim of a set of premium-rate phone lines. Look at Chris Farlowe, the bleach-blond eighteen-year-old who had spent the last three days with a succession of increasingly desperate voice coaches attempting to coax the high notes in Loving You, which he insisted on performing for this week’s show, from his evidently inadequate vocal chords. He was sprawled on a sofa, his booted feet plumped squarely on the polished top of a mahogany coffee table which probably cost more than Milly earned in a month, his arm slung round the shoulders of fellow contestant Samantha Woodside, a hand absently groping her breast while he nodded along to the beat of the tune on his iPod. Arrogant bastard. God, she hoped he got voted out tonight.

      And Paul Waterhouse was even worse. His unlikely dalliance with ageing pop icon Tina Pringle – and Milly could tell you a thing or two about her – had elevated him to a state of semi-celebrity several notches above the temporary Z-listing of his fellow contestants, thanks largely to the couple’s habit of regularly falling out of the Met bar when they knew the paparazzi would be waiting outside. If they timed their exit wrong and were not greeted by a sufficient number of flash bulbs, they had been known to go back inside and do it again half an hour later. He had even told a Daily Star reporter last week that he was thinking of quitting Fame Factory because he was ‘really more into writing his own material, not being some kiddy pop star’, though the previous Saturday’s show had seen him defer to Lennon and McCartney for an insipid version of Yesterday that had lit up the phone lines and made him a clear leader in the viewer vote. She bet he had stayed over at Tina’s last night, rather than at the hotel. It would be typical of them not to tell her, and leave her waiting down here like a lemon as the clock ticked inexorably towards a bollocking from Kyle.

      A frightening-looking middle-aged woman in a black trouser suit was approaching from the reception desk. Milly had got to know most of the hotel’s front-of-house staff over the last eight weeks, but she didn’t recognise this woman. Which could only be bad news. She must be some kind of senior manager. What had the little sod done now?

      ‘Are you here to meet Paul Waterhouse?’

      ‘Yes.’ If he had trashed his room, the wannabe rockstar was bloody well paying for it himself.

      ‘You’re from Portmanteau?’

      ‘Yes. I’m a runner on Fame Factory. I’m supposed to be taking him down to the studios with all of this lot.’

      ‘Well, I’m afraid Paul won’t be going anywhere. He’s dead.’

      ‘What?’ Milly’s legs went all wobbly beneath her and she clutched her clipboard closer to her chest. ‘How?’

      ‘It looks as if he was murdered. Did all your party stay in the hotel last night?’

      ‘Yes,’ stuttered Milly. ‘I mean … I wasn’t. But all of them were.’ She indicated behind her to the group of contestants, some of whom had overheard and were nudging their companions. Even Chris Farlowe had been persuaded to take his headphones off.

      ‘Then we’ll need to interview all of them. I’m afraid you’ll need to phone the studios and tell them you’ll be late.’

      Milly shuddered at the thought, convinced that Pennington would somehow find a way to make this her fault. ‘But… shouldn’t we call the police?’

      The woman looked at her quizzically. ‘I am the police. I’m Chief Superintendent Claire Whitehead. They called me in as soon as they identified the body. It seems dying is becoming something of a habit among your contestants.’

      Six feet away, Samantha Woodside, who had never yet come across a drama she could not put herself at the centre of, stood up and turned to her companions, her hands clamped to the side of her head.

      ‘Oh, my God!’ she shrieked, putting eight weeks of vocal training to good use by projecting her voice to every corner of the cavernous hotel reception. ‘We’re ALL GOING TO DIE!’

     

Richardson wasn’t quite sure how he had ended up sitting in the corridor outside the Bellemaison hotel’s Clement Atlee Room (still bearing signs for the British Metallurgists’ Guild National Convention, despite the fact that the heavy metal fans had been banished when Whitehead had commandeered the room for interviews that morning) alongside a group of nervous Fame Factory contestants, but the look that the chief super had given him when he poked his head round the door had almost frozen his blood, and he had quickly decided that meekly waiting his turn was the only option. Whitehead was an almost mythological figure in the Met, occupying a similar space to the Furies in ancient Greece, Boudicca in Roman Britain or Margaret Thatcher in the Conservative Party. She was also rumoured to have the commissioner’s ear – possibly, going by most accounts of her, in a box in her desk – which meant she was very definitely worth keeping on the right side of. He waited meekly until a sniffling Sara Minsky emerged into the corridor (where she was quickly enveloped in the arms of three of her competitors, seemingly unaware that this time there were no cameras around to catch their spontaneous display of emotion), before screwing his courage to the sticking place and striding over to the double doors.

      ‘Erm… good morning, ma’am.’

      The chief superintendent looked up briefly from the notes on the table in front of her. ‘Oh. It’s Richardson, isn’t it. Thanks for coming over.’

      ‘Not a problem, ma’am.’ He crossed the room hesitantly and put down the heavy folder he had been carrying on the table in front of Whitehead. It contained the reports on the deaths of Gareth Morgan and Dawn Mackenzie, documents he had very much hoped he would never have to look at again. Whitehead opened it and started to leaf through its contents.

      ‘Bit of a cock-up announcing they definitely weren’t connected, wasn’t it?’ she said icily.

      ‘Well, er, that was an operational decision taken by the officer in charge of the case really,’ spluttered Richardson.

      ‘Which, according to this, was you,’ said Whitehead, extracting the covering letter from the top of the file.

      ‘Ah, nominally, of course.’ Richardson could feel his face burning. ‘But of course, in an operational sense, decisions were taken by…’

      ‘”Because of the obvious sensitivities involved in such an investigation, I decided to take personal control of the case, and it is my considered opinion that Gareth Morgan took his own life while the balance of his mind was disturbed,”’ read Whitehead. ‘Look, you’ve signed it and everything.’

      ‘Yes, well, I…’

      ‘And here’s another one: “The suggestion that the death of Dawn Mackenzie is in any way connected to that of Gareth Morgan was strongly refuted bySsuperintendent Richardson’ – there you are again! – ‘who instructed that this line be disseminated to the media with immediate effect.”’

      Richardson opened and closed his mouth a few times, but nothing emerged but a small whimper.

      ‘Are you aware that last night’s killing had an almost identical M.O. to Gareth Morgan?’

      ‘Really?’ squeaked Richardson in a voice high-pitched enough to throw passing bats off-course.

      ‘Yes. He was throttled, and then hung from the back of a door. I think even you would have spotted that this one was murder.’

      ‘Right. Oh.’ Richardson stared down at his hands. He was alarmed to see that even his fingers appeared to be blushing.

      Whitehead sat back in her chair. ‘The commissioner has asked me to set up a central investigation. Codename Ringo. He’s very concerned about press interest.’

      Richardson swallowed hard. ‘Of course, ma’am.’

      ‘I’ll want the officers that were working on the cases transferred. Will that be a problem?’

      The superintendent took a deep breath. ‘Well, I’ve a few diary commitments I’ll have to clear, but of course if the commissioner wants…’

      ‘Not you,’ said Whitehead bluntly. She ran a finger down the page in front of her. ‘This Inspector Braithwaite. Did he have any bright ideas about the case that aren’t in here?’

      Richardson saw one last glint of hope shining in the gloom. If he was going down, he could at least take all hands with him. ‘Well, to be honest, ma’am, rather the opposite. I had a call from Inspector Braithwaite last week – he’s on leave at the moment – with a very outlandish theory. I could hardly make head or tail of it.’

      ‘Not really saying much, is it?’ said Whitehead, smiling sweetly.

      ‘No, but… I mean, it was rather far-fetched.’ The message he had found on his voicemail had been so convoluted and overwrought that he had thought for a moment that Braithwaite was on something. He also appeared to be calling from the middle of a wind tunnel. He had told his secretary to delete it and not bother to call back. ‘He seemed to think that Morgan and Mackenzie had been murdered by someone imitating the deaths of a couple of famous musicians. Scott Joplin, I think one of them was. It hardly seemed likely.’

      ‘Neither does the suspicious death of three contestants in the same TV show.’ Whitehead steepled her fingers and gazed over them at the file on the table in front of her. ‘I think I should have a word with Inspector Braithwaite as soon as possible. You say he’s on leave?’

      ‘He’s back on Monday – tomorrow,’ croaked Richardson.

      ‘Good. Tell him to report to Scotland Yard. And we’d better have his sergeant, too. And we’d better find out if anyone famous died on the twenty-second of November.’

      Unsure if this was a personal order or just a rhetorical thought, Richardson decided to remain non-committal. ‘Ma’am.’ Whitehead returned her attention to the files, and after sitting in silence for a few seconds he decided it was probably time to beat a retreat with the few shreds of dignity he still had.

      He made it all the way to the door before she dealt the final blow.

      ‘See you next week, superintendent.’

      ‘Ma’am?’ It came out as a strangled croak.

      ‘Yes. Didn’t you know? I’m on the interview panel for the SCD job. See you there.’

      Richardson stumbled out into the corridor, his hands shaking. The Fame Factory contestants were still locked in each others arms, sobbing over the death of their friend.

      ‘You think you’ve got problems’, he snarled at them, and stalked out of the hotel.

Chapter Twelve 

 

As he passed the famous revolving sign when arriving for his first day working at New Scotland Yard, it was all that Vic Nelson could do not to break into a little song and dance routine.. This – bar the fact that he had arrived by tube rather than Gran Torino – was the scene he had had in mind ever since deciding to join the police at the age of ten, and now he had achieved it less than three years of active service. OK, so he might have slightly glossed over the subtle difference between promotion and temporary attachment when breaking the news to his mother the previous evening, but only in the knowledge that any such nuance would be thoroughly excised as the news was spread throughout south London and large parts of Nigeria. In fact, knowing his mother, there were probably some distant cousins in Port Harcourt who were under the impression that he had just been elected Prime Minister.

      As he passed through the glass doors into the building he was hit by a sudden panic that the whole thing was a cruel joke and he was about to be sent back to Battersea and the cruel laughter of his colleagues, but the uniformed constable on the front desk knew exactly who he was, and was even friendly enough to give him a beaming smile and a set of directions to Operation Ringo’s headquarters in the Major Investigations centre on the eleventh floor which were so precise that he found it on only the third attempt. The newly requisitioned office was a neat and tidy space, begging to be filled with the clutter and dirty coffee cups every self-respecting CID officer needs to aid his or her mental abilities, but for now it contained only a short, thickset and alarmingly ginger man who rose and stuck out a hand in his direction.

      ‘You the sergeant from Battersea? I’m DCI Spall.’

      ‘Right. I’m Vic Nelson.’ He realised his facial expression was more appropriate to a five-year-old on his first visit to Alton Towers than an experienced professional on his first day in a new office, and attempted to amend it.

      ‘Your guvnor’s already here,’ continued Spall, gesturing Nelson towards the smallest desk, furthest from the window. ‘He’s been in with DCS Whitehead for the last half hour.’

      That was enough to remove the inane grin from Nelson’s face. If there was a downside to his sudden elevation, he had a feeling that the woman whose name he had first heard uttered in hushed tones while he was still at Hendon Training College was likely to be it. He was expecting something like Medusa, so he was fairly surprised when a petite woman with a well-coiffed blonde bob where her snakes should be walked in a few minutes later and announced that the first meeting of the Operation Ringo squad would take place in exactly one minute’s time, and anyone who wasn’t there for it would be fired.

      ‘This is a bit of a turn-up for the books, isn’t it, sir?’ remarked Nelson to Braithwaite, who had wandered looking slightly shell-shocked in the wake of the chief superintendent. Around them, a handful of officers were scrambling to retrieve notebooks and pens and find somewhere to perch that would make them look keen and attentive but not bring them directly into the boss’s line of sight.

      ‘Yeah,’ muttered the inspector. ‘Yes, I think it could be.’

      Whitehead clapped her hands together once, and the room fell silent.

      ‘Good morning. As you all know, we’re here to investigate the deaths of Gareth Morgan, Dawn Mackenzie and Paul Waterhouse, all of whom were contestants in the TV series Fame Factory. Two of them were asphyxiated with ligatures before their bodies were hanged from a tree and a hotel door respectively. One of them died from a heroin overdose. Inspector Braithwaite, who’s joining us from South London CID, thinks he knows why. Take it away, inspector.’

      Much to everyone’s surprise – including Braithwaite – Whitehead sat down and crossed her legs with an expectant look in his direction. He gazed round at the sea of unfamiliar faces, and the tourists’ eye-view of central London that lay outside the vast windows behind them.

      ‘Right. Hello everybody,’ he said haltingly, his mouth dry and his heart thumping. ‘Well, hopefully, you’ve all heard of Marc Bolan, the singer with T-Rex…’

     

Braithwaite had expected to be spending the morning at his new desk researching how Paul Waterhouse might fit in to his theory, but to his surprise the chief superintendent had delegated this task to Nelson instead and ordered him to come with her and interview Tina Pringle, Waterhouse’s girlfriend. Maybe she had spotted some rare talent in him that was lacking in all the rest of her team, and was about to make him her new protégé.

      In fact, Whitehead wanted Braithwaite out of the office so she could test how well his thesis held up without him giving things a generous shove in the right direction: it hadn’t taken her long to spot during their meeting that the inspector’s theories owed as much to wishful thinking as to solid evidence and that he was capable of convincing himself that any fact, however slight or contradictory it might be, fitted his thesis. If someone else could come up with a convincing link to Paul Waterhouse without Braithwaite breathing down his neck, she would start really taking it seriously.

      For now, though, it was a case of plodding on with the bog-standard police work. The weekend’s inquiries had come up with only one possible sighting of the killer: the Bellemaison was far too respectful of its patrons’ privacy to have CCTV anywhere other than in the car park, and the chances of staff identifying anyone in the fourth floor corridor who shouldn’t have been there was lessened by the presence of the raucous wedding party of a minor aristocrat, many of whose guests had been found in all sorts of unlikely corners of the hotel in the early hours of Saturday morning. An American tourist whose room was on the same corridor as Waterhouse had been returning to his room at around eleven p.m. and recalled seeing a stranger knocking on the door of one of the rooms: a thin man in a black jacket with short brown hair, which tallied with the description given by the barmaid at Barnes rugby club more than two months previously (though the man seemed quite offended at being asked to complete the match by giving his opinion of the suspect’s bottom).

      Whoever he was, he had arrived at the room unannounced, since the only calls Waterhouse had received on his mobile that day were from his mother and brother in Bristol, and the hotel’s records showed that the only call he had received in his room was from Pringle. Which is why they were on their way to see her now. The woman had pronounced herself too distressed to be interviewed over the weekend (her show had even had to be replaced with a repeat showing of When Pets Attack) but she was the most likely person to be able to tell them what his plans had been for the evening when he died.

      If they ever got in to see her, that was. The royalties from Pringle’s pop career in the early 1990s had been invested in roughly equal proportions in plastic surgery and a small mews house, and her second wind in the noughties as a television presenter and tabloid staple had given her enough cash and sufficient ego to install an expensive security system to protect all four. It was through this that the two officers were now attempting to negotiate entry. ‘We need to talk to you about Paul Waterhouse,’ Whitehead repeated for the third time, stooping down to peer into the intercom camera, which had been installed at a height which suggested Pringle was particularly worried about being harassed by dwarves.

      ‘I told you guys yesterday, I’m only talking to OK!. The contracts are all signed, so there’s no point you even trying.’

      Whitehead straightened up so that the camera could not catch her look of pure fury, which would probably have been enough to ensure they never gained entry, and indicated that Braithwaite should take over. He stooped down to the camera, determined to do his best. ‘Miss Pringle? I think you’ve misunderstood us. My colleague and I are police officers. We’re investigating Paul’s death. We need to ask you a few questions.’

      ‘Yeah right. They tried that one yesterday, too.’

      Braithwaite straightened up and fished in his jacket pocket. ‘Ms Pringle, I’m holding up my warrant card to the camera now. My colleague is Chief Superintendent Whitehead, who is heading the investigation into the death of Paul Waterhouse and the other contestants in Fame Factory. I believe your personal assistant spoke to her on the phone yesterday. Could you please let us in?’

      There was a pause, during which Braithwaite kept the warrant card in front of the camera, and then a doubtful voice said, ‘I’ll have to phone my agent.’

      He sighed. ‘By all means.’

      ‘All right, hold on.’

      Three minutes later, the door opened and a sheepish Tina Pringle stepped aside to allow them inside. Dressed in a sloppy purple tracksuit and without her mask of TV make-up, she was barely recognisable and Braithwaite couldn’t help thinking, rather uncharitably, that either people were lying when they said the camera added ten pounds, or there were an awful lot of hidden cameras somewhere in the hallway. He stepped aside to allow Whitehead in ahead of him, and followed the two women into a rather poky lounge painted an alarming shade of salmon pink, its walls covered in memorabilia of its owner’s days of pop stardom – posters, artwork from record covers and a gold disc in its own frame. Braithwaite had never seen one close up, and always wondered if they were really made of gold and if you could play them on a normal record player, but it didn’t feel like an appropriate moment to ask.

      He let Whitehead lead the questioning, rather enjoying taking a back seat for a change. She quickly established that Pringle had only been going out with Waterhouse for just over a month, although they had met at the beginning of October when the first live round of Fame Factory was broadcast. ‘The papers were banging on about us being a couple from the start, as if you can’t go out and have a drink with a friend who happens to be a man,’ she pouted. It was obviously a well-rehearsed line.

      ‘And I understand from Paul’s parents that you spent a lot of your time together during the past month?’

      Pringle rolled her eyes. ‘Oh God, you’ve spoken to them, have you? His mum never liked me, just because of the age difference. It’s only twelve years. Yes, he used to stop over here quite a bit. Those big hotels are so… impersonal.’

      Whitehead, whose experience of hotels extended no higher than the Holiday Inn, added this to the already substantial list she was compiling of reasons to dislike Tina Pringle. ‘But you didn’t stay together on Friday night?’

      ‘No,’ said Pringle defensively. ‘I had to go through my script for the next day’s show. I’ve got a hell of a lot of lines to learn, you know. I was up till two.’

      This came as something of a surprise to Braithwaite, who had been forced to sit through two more editions of Fame On! by Olivia, and had come to the conclusion that the entire thing was made up on the spot, so shambolic was its production. An entire interview with the highest-voted contestant the previous week had been broadcast in silence because no one had thought to give him a microphone, though Pringle had helpfully compensated by holding her own mic close enough to her earpiece for the anguished squawking of the director to be clearly audible to viewers.

      ‘Would you say Paul got on well with his fellow contestants in the show?’ asked Whitehead.

      Pringle eyed her suspiciously. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

      ‘I just wondered whether there were any problems in the group. Everyone I spoke to on Saturday was very quick to assure me they all got on ‘brilliantly’. I wondered what your view was.’

      ‘That’s bullshit. They’re very good at putting on the sweetness and light and hugs and kisses act, but they’re all competing for a record contract, and not one of them forgets that for a second’.

      ‘Is there anyone in particular you think might have wished Paul harm?’

      Braithwaite half expected Pringle to feign shock at the suggestion, but she had evidently been in the business too long, and considered it evenly. ‘Well, Samantha Woodside would do almost anything to win, but I can’t see her killing anyone, not unless she gave Eric a heart attack pointing her tits at him. He was probably the biggest threat to Chris Farlowe. They were the most similar in style – you know Paul wrote a lot of his own material? And Richard Golding gets a lot of the girlie votes, although he’s not half as good-looking as Paul… was. Sara couldn’t attack anyone, she’d snap in half. Simon’s weird – you know, that bloke that was going out with Dawn? I always thought it was a bit funny how she got through and he didn’t, and then the next thing you know she’s dead and he’s in. You lot should look into that. And you can forget about Douggie and Tim, because they aren’t that bothered about winning since someone at Chinawhites told them they’re going to be the new Ant and Dec.’ She sniffed. ‘As if. TV presenting’s not bloody easy, you know.’

      As you make very evident, thought Braithwaite.

      ‘So when did you last speak to Paul?’ Whitehead asked.

      ‘On Friday night. I called him at the hotel to… just to say goodnight.’

      ‘Oh, right.’ Whitehead pulled a sheaf of papers out of the large handbag she had brought in with her. ‘Yes, here it is, in the records we got from the hotel. You called him at ten thirty p.m. That’s very early to be saying goodnight.’

      Pringle pouted, uncertain of herself. ‘Well… he… I don’t know. I just wanted to talk to him.’

      ‘About anything in particular?’

      ‘No. Just a chat.’ Pringle was avoiding their eyes, fiddling with the tassels on a cushion on her lap.

      ‘Because according to this, you were on the phone to him for nearly forty-five minutes. That’s quite a long time to spend just chatting, especially as you were telling us you had all your lines to learn.’

      ‘Well, I…’ Pringle brushed her fringe away from her face, disturbing the artfully arranged haircut and displaying the dark roots beneath. ‘Look. You work for the police. Do you just do murders and that?’

      Whitehead and Braithwaite exchanged glances. ‘Come again?’

      ‘I mean, it’s different police who look into fraud, isn’t it?’

      ‘There is a serious fraud squad, yes.’

      ‘But you wouldn’t necessarily have to tell them stuff, would you? I mean, you’re just interested in finding the murderer, aren’t you? So if you came across a serious fraud, you could just keep quiet about it, couldn’t you?’

      Whitehead leaned forward and spoke sternly. ‘That would depend entirely on the nature of the crime, Miss Pringle. Have you got something to tell us?’

      ‘Oh shit.’ Pringle took a deep breath and looked up at them both. ‘Yes. And it’s about as serious as you can get. Eric Lestrade was trying to help Paul win Fame Factory.’

      There was a short silence. In the distance, Braithwaite could hear the traffic passing by at the end of the mews.

      ‘Right,’ said Whitehead briskly. ‘That’s probably not really a matter for the police, but…’

      ‘But it is,’ wailed Pringle, tears bursting forth in the relief of her confession. ‘That’s what I’m telling you! He’d been giving Paul secret coaching and advice behind the backs of all the other contestants!’

      Whitehead looked slightly more interested. ‘And you think one of them might have found out?’

      The woman’s eyes widened in shock. ‘I hadn’t thought of that!’ She clutched the cushion to her chest, her lip quivering. ‘Oh, my God, do you think one of them killed him?’

      The chief superintendent looked as if she might thump the woman any second. Braithwaite decided to intervene. ‘What was it that made you tell us this, Tina?’

      She turned to him in relief. ‘That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you! It’s all I’ve been able to think about all weekend. When I spoke to Paul on Friday, he told me he was expecting a visit from Eric at the hotel that night!’

     

As soon as they were outside, Whitehead strode across the cobbles until she was out of the view of Pringle’s windows and leaned against a wall, sparking up a cigarette and inhaling heavily. ‘I don’t like getting the smell in the car,’ she explained briefly, and Braithwaite, who neither smoked or expected to be asked for his opinion, shoved his hands deep in his coat pockets and stood looking glumly around at everything except Whitehead’s legs, which she had decided today to show off to disconcerting effect in an A-line skirt from Whistles.

      ‘I thought we might ask her about her own movements on Friday night,’ he ventured after a while.

      Whitehead exhaled and shook her head. ‘No point. Waterhouse was eleven, probably twelve stone. There’s no way she could have hauled him up and hung him on the back of a door.’

      ‘Are you sure?’ Pringle had looked quite beefy to him.

      ‘Certain. It’s a skill I picked up way back when I was on the beat. Women will always go for a female arresting officer first. I got into the habit that whenever I meet anyone new, I size them up to see if I could have ‘em.’ She flashed her shark-like smile at Braithwaite, leaving him in no doubt that felling him would be absolutely no problem.

      ‘And Lestrade didn’t say anything about going round to the hotel when you questioned him on Saturday?’

      ‘Nope. Said he hardly knew the boy; thought he was talented but couldn’t tell me much about him as he didn’t have much to do with them outside the studio.’

      ‘The lying shit.’ According to Pringle, Lestrade had been meeting Waterhouse regularly at her own house for extra singing lessons and advice on what songs he should choose to get ahead in the competition. He had even told the lad that he could expect a record contract from his own company whether or not he emerged victorious from the TV show – that, apparently, was the news which Waterhouse had been relaying to his girlfriend during what turned out to be the last phone call he would ever take.

      Whitehead crushed her cigarette end beneath her heel and slid behind the wheel of the car. Braithwaite’s mobile rang as got into the passenger seat. He glanced at the screen, saw that it was Nelson calling, and slid the phone into the hands-free cradle so that they could both listen in.

      ‘I’ve got our man, sir. Michael Hutchence.’

      ‘Who?’ Whitehead and Braithwaite spoke in unison.

      ‘From INXS. Hanged himself in a hotel room in Sydney on the twenty-second of November, 1997.’

      ‘In Excess?’ Whitehead sounded as clueless as Braithwaite was. God, he felt old.

      ‘Yes Ma’am. They were Australian. They were a pretty big band.’

      ‘What songs did they do?’

      There was an audible sigh at the other end of the line. ‘Um… quite a few. Need You Tonight? Baby Don’t Cry? Listen Like Thieves?’

      Braithwaite and Whitehead exchanged a blank glance. ‘Sing it,’ barked the Chief Superintendent.

      There was a long silence. Braithwaite squirmed inside. Whatever duties the sergeant might have thought awaited him at Scotland Yard, he would bet crooning down the phone in the middle of a crowded CID office was not one of them. From the phone came a slightly strangulated version of the Australian rockers’ 1986 hit which would not have passed muster at even the most low-rent karaoke evening. It left Whitehead none the wiser.

      ‘No, no good. How did he die?’

      The relief was audible in Nelson’s voice as he moved back onto firmer ground. ‘Found by the maid in his hotel room, hanging from the spring lever on the back of the door with a leather belt. The coroner’s verdict was suicide, but his girlfriend always claimed it was auto-erotic asphyxiation gone wrong. You might recall her, ma’am – Paula Yates?’

      Braithwaite butted in. ‘Oh, I remember her.’ He did. A nice girl who used to be on the telly. He thought he had quite fancied her, but he might be thinking of Maggie Philbin. ‘I thought she was married to that Ethiopian chap?’

      Nelson didn’t even try to disguise his sigh this time. ‘Bob Geldof, sir. She left him for Michael Hutchence. It was quite a big story at the time. He was going out with Helena Christensen, the model.’

      ‘Who was, Geldof?’

      ‘No, sir, Hutchence. Him and Paula Yates had a baby called Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily, and there was a big row over who would get custody of her other kids.’

      Whitehead snorted. ‘I’m not surprised. Give a kid a name like that and I’d definitely put it on the at risk register. I remember her. She died, too.’

      ‘Yes ma’am. A couple of years later. An overdose.’

      ‘What date?’

      The clicking of a computer keyboard could be heard before Nelson spoke. ‘Er… September the seventeenth, two thousand.’

      ‘So, it looks like our Tina’s off the hook, at least until next September. Listen, sergeant, do me a favour and call me back with Eric Lestrade’s home address, would you? We need to pay him a visit.’ She clicked the phone off, and sat staring out through the windscreen, deep in thought.

      ‘You think we’re on the right track with the anniversaries then?’ asked Braithwaite, as much to break the silence as anything.

      ‘Yes, inspector, I think you’ve cracked it. The Rock’n’Roll Killer.’ She rolled the syllables round her mouth. It didn’t look as if she appreciated the taste of them.

       ‘So what now?’ he asked, after the moment of silence had extended to such a length that it was obviously not going to be filled with any expression of gratitude for his deductions.

      She smacked her lips. ‘I’m just trying to work out what on earth could have made Eric Lestrade move from murdering tunes to murdering singers.’

Chapter Thirteen

 

Eric Lestrade shifted the gun barrel an almost imperceptible amount to the left, squeezed the trigger, and blew another one out of existence.

      ‘Nice shot,’ he muttered to himself, since there was no one else around to tell him so. He split the shotgun, leaving the spent cartridges where they fell, and reloaded, shouldering the gun again and waiting for another one of the plump forms to show itself on the fringes of the distant copse. Less than a minute after the feathers of the last victim had settled, another appeared, picking its way dumbly through the undergrowth a few yards away, intrigued by the corpse of its companion. Lestrade got the bird in his sights, tracked it for a few seconds, and whispered, ‘Say goodbye,’ as he increased the pressure on the trigger.

      ‘Aren’t you supposed to give them a chance to fly away?’

      The gun jumped to the right as Lestrade fired, and the partridge fluttered safely back into the trees as the deafening retort echoed around the valley. Dropping the weapon to his side, he spun round to look for the source of the interruption. About twenty feet away, a woman and a man were approaching from the direction of the house, smartly dressed, their hands buried deep in the pockets of long overcoats. He recognised the woman as the police officer who had questioned him at the studio two days previously.

      ‘So my neighbours tell me. I say my field, my guns, my birds to do what I want with.’ He broke the gun again and added two more spent cartridges to those already scattered on the immaculate lawn. He nodded towards the house at the bottom of the hill. ‘He tell you I was up here?’

      ‘Yes, your assistant told us to come on up,’ Whitehead replied. She looked Lestrade up and down. Thin. Brown hair, though she would bet it was grey underneath the dye job. She was relieved to see that he was making no move to reload the weapon. ‘We need to ask you some more questions about Paul Waterhouse.’

      Lestrade picked up the ammunition box and began to walk down the hill. ‘Tragic business. I really don’t think there’s much more I can tell you than what I said on Saturday.’

      ‘Oh, I think there might be.’ Whitehead fell in by his side, her pace matching his own as they walked down the steep lawn. ‘Why didn’t you tell us you had been giving him extra coaching sessions?’

      Lestrade stopped and turned towards her, his deep-set eyes regarding her shrewdly. Then he slowly smiled. ‘You’ve talked to Tina. OK, you got me bang to rights.’ He raised his hands in the air, a theatrical gesture that was slightly more menacing than he intended, given that he was still holding the shotgun. ‘I’m a dirty cheat. D’you think I’ll get life?’

      ‘That’s not our primary concern, Mr Lestrade.’

      ‘No, I didn’t think it would be.’ He continued down towards the house, Whitehead and Braithwaite scuttling in his wake. ‘In my defence, we’d decided it was probably best if Paul didn’t win. It would have damaged his credibility. We’d agreed we were going to sell him as the real deal who wrote his own material, and that crowd don’t take kindly to shows like Fame Factory. The plan was to get him voted out in week nine or ten, get him to do some interviews slagging the whole thing off and then have a single ready to go the week after the final before everyone had forgotten who he was. I’ll probably sign up a couple of the other finalists, too, just to hedge my bets. But he was the one I had the highest hopes for. Boybands are over. It’s singer-songwriters that are going to be big next year.’ He led them across a wide terrace and went in to the house through a set of open French windows without pausing to remove his boots, and bellowed, ‘Angel!’ at the top of his voice.

      Braithwaite was unsurprised to discover that the house was just as vulgar inside as out – the room they entered was dominated by a set of enormous leather sofas and a flat screen TV so vast it wouldn’t have looked out of place in the local Odeon, flanked by a pair of life-size porcelain panthers. Lestrade crossed the room, leaving a trail of mud and leaves across the thick cream carpet, and handed the gun to the very pretty young Mexican whom they had met on their arrival, and who had appeared in the interior doorway. ‘Clean it and put it away, entiende? And make sure you lock the cabinet.’ He plumped himself down on one of the sofas and eyed the two of them suspiciously. ‘So, what do you want?’

      Whitehead remained standing. ‘Where were you on Friday night, Mr Lestrade?’

      ‘I told you. I got back from the rehearsals at about six, and spent the evening here.’

      ‘On your own?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Angel doesn’t live here?’

      Lestrade curled his lip. ‘No, he doesn’t. He helps me out in the studio I’ve got out back and does some cooking and housework, and I’m not, as you seem to assume, fucking him.’ He was a little put out that the policewoman had obviously not read his interview in that week’s Sunday Express, in which he claimed to have ‘bedded’ (the paper’s choice of words) more than two thousand women during his years in the music industry. It had been trailed on the front page and everything. ‘He turned up here a couple of years ago with some tapes of him and his brother playing guitar and wanted me to make him a star. I told him I had all the stars I wanted but I was looking for someone to clean my bathroom, and he seemed happy enough. What’s this about?’

      ‘You had an appointment with Paul Waterhouse on Friday night.’

      Lestrade didn’t blink. ‘Yes.’

      ‘Which you failed to tell us about.’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Why?’

      He shrugged, entirely unruffled. ‘Because I didn’t think it was relevant. Given that I didn’t actually see him.’

      ‘But you admit you went round to his room in the hotel?’

      ‘No.’ He smiled, obviously enjoying himself.

      ‘But you said…’

      ‘I’m not stupid. I can’t go anywhere without being recognised these days. Half the public want to give me a smack in the mouth for being the most loathsome man on TV since Pol Pot. I was hardly likely to go wandering into the hotel myself and risk being seen by all the other contestants, was I?’

      Braithwaite decided to go back to basics. ‘What arrangement had you made with Paul Waterhouse on Friday, exactly?’

      Lestrade turned his unblinking stare in his direction. ‘I had some tracks I wanted him to listen to. Possible debut singles. I got Angel to drop them off at his hotel room on his way home, and then I was going to call him on his mobile and find out what he thought of them.’

      Whitehead cut back in, her voice icy. ‘You’ll appreciate that this means Angel was probably the last person to see Paul Waterhouse alive?’

      That same infuriating smile. ‘No, it doesn’t.’

      ‘Why not?’

      ‘Because he didn’t see him, either. He phoned me from the hotel and said Paul wasn’t answering his door. I told him he should take the CD home with him and forget about it.’

      ‘And what time was this?’

      ‘About half past eleven.’

      ‘An odd time to be making a delivery?’

      ‘The tracks were by a couple of guys I’ve got working for me over in Sweden. They work funny hours. I’d mentioned to Paul that they’d promised me some new material on Friday, and he said he wanted to hear it as soon as it arrived. I burned a copy for him as soon as they emailed it over.’

      ‘And you didn’t try to contact Paul to find out where he was?’

      ‘No. If he couldn’t be bothered to stop in and wait like we’d arranged, then sod him. It wasn’t my problem.’

      Something struck Braithwaite. ‘I thought you said Paul was going to write his own stuff. Why were you getting songs in from other people?’

      Lestrade gave him a withering look. ‘Have you heard any of his material? It’s crap. The kid thought he was Bob Dylan. All drivel about world peace and guff like that, minor sevenths all over the shop. No, these guys have written for most of my artists, and they were happy to give him a co-writing credit as long as he only changed a couple of lyrics.’

      ‘And he was happy with this arrangement?’

      He snorted with laughter. ‘Well, I didn’t put it to him quite like that. I told him the best song-writing team in the business were so impressed with his music they wanted to co-write with him, and he jumped at the chance. We’d probably have put some of his solo stuff out eventually if he went on about it. A B-side or something. It’s standard practice in this business. Change a Word, Claim a Third. Not that Paul was going to be on anything like that generous a rate.’

      ‘Right,’ said Whitehead, who found this enlightening but hardly relevant. ‘Inspector Braithwaite will need to talk to Angel.’

      ‘Be my guest.’ Lestrade extended his arms. ‘You’ll find him somewhere around the place. He’s usually in the kitchen stuffing his face. Are you finished with me?’

      ‘Oh no, Mr Lestrade,’ said Whitehead with a terrifying grin. ‘You and I are going to have a little chat about wasting police time.’

     

Angel, who Braithwaite found raking leaves from the surface of the guitar-shaped pool in Lestrade’s garden, could add little to his boss’s account of the evening, though he did offer to play the policeman a tape of himself singing which, he insisted, ‘Mr Eric gonna make record one day.’ Lestrade had asked him to stay on after work on Friday, and he had spent much of the evening watching DVDs in the lounge – there was a lengthy digression at this point into the celluloid career of someone called The Rock, who had previously escaped Braithwaite’s attention – before being given the package to take round to the Bellemaison at around half past ten.

      It had taken him the best part of an hour to get in to central London on his motorbike – Lestrade’s mansion was in the heart of the Buckinghamshire countryside, alongside those of several other household names who found the area handy both for commuting when they were in the country and keeping the taxman happy when they weren’t – and he had gone straight up to room 421 as instructed. Five minutes of fruitless hammering later, he reported his lack of success, and was soon back in the flat in Mill Hill which he shared with his brother, several cousins, and by the sounds of it, half the migrant population of Mexico, all of whom could verify his story. He was also fairly plump and had shoulder-length black hair, which meant he definitely wasn’t the man seen at either crime scene. It was possible that the brown-haired Lestrade had departed for London straight after him, but he would have been hard-put to beat the gleaming Honda that was parked in the driveway down the M40. Or, of course, it was possible that the two of them had cooked the whole tale up together and both – or either – of them had done considerably more than wait in the corridor outside Paul Waterhouse’s room that night. Phone records would be useless, since Angel had called Lestrade’s mobile rather than his home phone from the Bellemaison (‘It is first one comes up in menu’), which meant the phone company would only be able to pinpoint the record producer to somewhere within a 50 mile radius when he took the call.

      He found Whitehead leaning against one of the ionic columns which supported the round portico above the front door of the house, a Marlboro in her mouth, and ran through his findings. She didn’t look impressed. ‘He’s got no alibi for the night of the Morgan killing, either – says he was so knackered after the auditions that he came straight back here and got his head down – and the night Dawn Mackenzie died he apparently went to some gig and stayed over in town.’

      ‘So do you think he could be our perp?’

      She blew smoke out over the garden. ‘I’d be happier if I could see some motive. He’s pretty much the face of Fame Factory. Why would he piss on his own parade?’

      ‘I guess there could be some sort of split personality thing going on. Or he set the whole thing up to select his victims.’

      Whitehead shook her head, staring at the shrubbery on the other side of the drive. ‘No, it wasn’t his idea. Apparently, Kyle Pennington came up with the format for the programme, and Eric was only brought in at the last minute when they realised the two judges they had weren’t going to cut it on television. That’s why he was told to camp it up so much. Hold this, would you?’

      Braithwaite took the half-smoked cigarette from his boss, and watched in amazement as she strode across the driveway, gravel crunching underfoot. The rhododendron bushes seemed to convulse as she approached, but Whitehead darted in amongst them and three seconds later emerged with her arm around the neck of another woman – a thin, shrieking woman in leggings and a long grey cardigan, clutching a package wrapped in an Asda bag with one hand and vainly scratching at Whitehead’s face with the other.

      ‘Get that for me, would you, Braithwaite?’ gasped the chief superintendent as he sprinted across. He wrestled for a moment for possession of the bag – the woman’s grip was surprisingly strong, and his fingers scrabbled for purchase on the slippery plastic – but as the trio reeled back into the foliage, the package split and its contents fell out onto the damp earth. With this, the fight seemed to go out of the woman and she stopped her high-pitched keening and stood panting in the shrubbery.

      ‘It’s ruined now!’ she complained.

      It was a teddy bear, a rather badly-knitted one made from pale blue wool. His appearance had not been helped by his participation in their tug of war: he had a ripped ear and one of his button eyes was hanging at the end of a long thread. He wore an ill-fitting white t-shirt, on which the slogan I © GOOD ERIC was sketched in badly-applied glitter pen.

      ‘And who the fuck are you?’ enquired Whitehead.

      ‘I was just going to leave it on the doorstep for him!’ wailed the woman, looking panic-stricken. ‘I wasn’t going to try and speak to him! I promise! Please don’t call the police!’

      ‘Madam, we are the police,’ said Braithwaite, before he realised quite how ridiculous it sounded.

      The woman’s mouth gaped open in horror, and she started to snivel, a snot-bubble forming on her right nostril. ‘I only wanted to give him a present! I know I’m not supposed to come to his house, but I couldn’t help it! I thought he’d be so upset about another one of the contestants dying, and I just wanted to make him feel better.’

      ‘With this?’ Whitehead stooped and picked up the sorry-looking bear.

      ‘I made it myself,’ sniffed the woman.

      ‘Yes, I can tell.’ She passed it over to Braithwaite, wiping her hands on her jacket. ‘Look, am I to understand that you’ve been in trouble with the police about this sort of thing before?’

      The woman looked from one to the other, her mouth gaping open like a goldfish. ‘They took me to court! They said I was causing him “harassment and distress”. How could I be? All I was doing was giving him presents. They wouldn’t even let him come to court to see me.’ She wiped a fresh outpouring of snot on the arm of her cardigan.

      Whitehead glanced at Braithwaite, and then back at the house. No one had emerged. ‘Look, what’s your name?’

      ‘Victoria Lestrade.’

      ‘What is it really?’

      ‘Victoria Brooking.’

      ‘Victoria, have you been hanging round this house a lot recently?’

      ‘No!’ the woman looked at her wide-eyed. ‘I really haven’t! I hadn’t been down here for ages until last week. It’s just that I’ve been having a difficult time at work, and – ’

      Whitehead cut across her prattling. ‘Were you here on Friday night, Victoria?’

      She sniffed. ‘Not the whole night.’

      ‘Look, Victoria, this is really important. If you tell me the truth now, this doesn’t have to go any further. I’ll even make sure that Eric gets your gift. Was he here on Friday night?’

      ‘Yes.’ The woman nodded towards the outbuildings that housed Eric’s recording studio. ‘He was working in there for most of the evening, and then he came out at about ten thirty wearing his red shirt, and he went into the house and that boy who works for him that everyone thinks is his boyfriend but they’re just being stupid because he’s not gay, drove off on his motorbike, and then he watched TV for the rest of the evening and went to bed at about half past twelve. The bathroom light came on at about one thirty. He usually needs to have a pee at about that time.’ She smiled fondly at the memory.

      ‘And you’re absolutely sure about those times?’

      ‘Oh yes,’ she said earnestly, producing a child’s exercise book from inside her cardigan. ‘I wrote it all down in my book.’

      Whitehead leafed through the pages, which were covered in spidery handwriting, until she reached the last entry but one. It was just as she had said. She had even written down what programmes Lestrade had watched on the television, which meant she must have been considerably closer to the lounge windows than the shrubbery where they had found her. There were entries for a number of other dates in the book too, though a quick flick revealed that neither the 16^th September nor the 4^th October were amongst them. She pocketed the notebook all the same.

      ‘All right, Victoria. We’ll say no more about it this time, but if I find you’ve been breaking the terms of your exclusion order again, we’ll come down on you like a ton of bricks. Got that?’

      The woman nodded eagerly. ‘I’ll try really hard. And you’ll make sure he gets Teddy?’

      ‘Of course I will. Now get out of here.’

      They sat in the car and watched the woman until she reached a battered Vauxhall Astra which was parked a few hundred yards down the road and drove out of sight. Then Braithwaite said, ‘That was very generous of you, ma’am.’

      ‘What was?’ Whitehead started up the engine and put the car in gear. ‘I don’t remember anything just happening, do you?’

      ‘No, ma’am.’ Braithwaite smiled as he tuned in the radio to check for messages.

      ‘And sing out if you see a bin anywhere, won’t you? I want to dump this piece of crap as soon as possible.’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Fourteen

 

Doctor Andy Pemberton was cursed with such a youthful physiognomy that he had had to grow a beard in an attempt to make his patients take him seriously. Sadly, he was also incapable of growing a convincing one, which meant that they laughed at him behind his back even more. His boyish good looks evoked envious thoughts in Nelson, nostalgic ones in Braithwaite and in Whitehead, ones which were frankly unprintable.

      He had been called in at short notice to give what the chief superintendent insisted on calling the trick-cyclist’s view of the figure that the team now universally referred to as the ‘Rock’n’Roll Killer’, the term having passed within the space of 24 hours from the healthily ironic to the merely utilitarian. Given just 16 hours to consider the evidence, he had had no time to prepare any visual aids or handouts, which discombobulated him: they usually provided a handy shield to hide behind when his lectures at the nearby medical school turned nasty, and the audience gathered in the special investigations room looked considerably more sceptical and infinitely more wide awake than most of his students did at nine o’clock on a Tuesday morning. He uncorked a felt-tip board marker, took a deep breath, and began.

      ‘Something like ninety per cent of serial killers are male, and I understand that tallies with the possible sightings in this case. He’s probably single, certainly working alone. He obviously has an obsessive interest which has come to dominate his life – to such an extent that it’s likely he has difficulties with basic social interaction and communication, and a lack of emotional reciprocity.’

      ‘That sounds like almost every bloke I’ve ever met,’ commented Whitehead acidly. ‘Can you tell us why he’s doing it?’

      ‘I can give you some ideas,’ said Pemberton pedantically. ‘I think it’s likely that he’s trying to compensate for his feelings of inadequacy and his difficulty establishing a role for himself in the present day by attempting to rewrite the past. He’s taken a series of accidental, avoidable deaths and given himself the dominant role within them, the power of dealing out life and death – effectively, he’s rewriting history in the second best way he can.’

      ‘Second best?’ queried a frowning inspector Spall.

      ‘The best being stopping Marc Bolan, Janis Joplin and the rest from actually dying, which would obviously be impossible. It’s not uncommon for fans whose behaviour is considered relatively normal to fantasise about having a role within their idol’s life – as lover, friend, or, surprisingly often, someone who manages to save their life by being in the right place at the right time and earns their eternal gratitude. He’s taking that a stage further.’

      Nelson thought back to an idle five minutes a few weeks previously which, prompted by a snatch of My Love is Your Love drifting from a passing car window, he had spent considering how different Whitney Houston’s current circumstances would be if she had chosen him as a husband over Bobby Brown. ‘But he’s not saving them. He’s doing the exact opposite,’ he said out loud.

      Pemberton ran a hand across his damp forehead. ‘Exactly. Because he knows deep down that the people he’s picked on are not Michael Hutchence, or Janis Joplin, or whoever. They’re false idols – specifically, they are people who aspire to hold the positions that his own idols once held. So in a way he’s punishing them, taking revenge on them for not being worthy of that position.’  

      ‘Why would he think that?’ asked Whitehead.

      There was a stirring amongst the men who surrounded her. Spall spoke up before Pemberton could answer. ‘It’s obvious, isn’t it? I mean, they’re crap, aren’t they!’ All around him, his colleagues were nodding in agreement.

      ‘Are they?’ Whitehead was bemused.

      ‘Well, yes. I mean, it’s all manufactured rubbish, isn’t it? They’re not proper musicians. Not like in the old days.’

      She turned to face him. ‘Aren’t they? I watched some of the tapes last night, and some of them seemed to be rather good singers.’

      ‘Yes, well, they might be all right singers, but it’s not like they’re proper musicians, is it?’ spluttered Spall. ‘I mean, they’re just puppets, aren’t they? They’re just going to record what the record company tells them to.’

      ‘Is that not what most musicians do when they’re given a contract?’ Whitehead glanced around the team, who all seemed to be in agreement with Spall.

      ‘But they’ve not had to work at it, have they?’ chipped in one of the sergeants. ‘I mean, they’ve not been out there doing gigs, have they?’

      ‘They’re performing every weekend in front of several million people. I would have thought that was practice enough.’

      Nelson piped up. ‘But in the end it’s just a beauty competition, isn’t it? It’s the best-looking ones who get through, not the most talented.’

      ‘And is that not how the music industry usually works?’ Whitehead smiled. They had got rather off the point, but she had a feeling she was getting some interesting insights into the killer’s mindset nonetheless.

      ‘Well, they’re hardly going to find the next Beatles, are they?’ said Spall, and sat back with his arms folded as if this concluded the discussion.

      ‘Who, as I recall, only really found success when Brian Epstein sacked the ugly one, gave them all haircuts and put them in matching suits. But never mind. Our killer obviously thinks like you lot do, and that’s what matters. So what does he want? To get the show taken off the air?’

      ‘Possibly,’ said Pemberton. ‘But I think it’s more complicated than that. It’s not like he’s trying to hold us to ransom – he hasn’t made any kinds of demands at all, or tried to initiate contact with us, or with the producers of the show itself. Whatever his plan is, it’s between him and the people he’s killing. If he wanted to destroy the show entirely, he could have just blown up the studio during the first episode, or taken a gun along to the auditions. Instead, he’s picking certain contestants – not even necessarily the successful ones: Gareth Morgan didn’t get through to the second round – according to his own criteria. He probably feels he’s working according to some kind of higher purpose, according to a framework that’s been worked out for him – that’s why he’s sticking to the anniversaries – and I think it’s likely he feels that the victims are selecting themselves, or somehow being selected for him. Dawn Mackenzie’s heroin addiction, for instance, or Paul Waterhouse’s relationship with Tina Pringle echoing that of Michael Hutchence and Paula Yates: these were coincidences that he could not possibly have arranged himself. Presumably, he just took them as a sign that he was on the right path. Our problem is that these signifiers are probably only apparent to him, so, even armed with the foreknowledge that he’s working according to anniversaries, it’s going to be hard for us to second-guess his next move.’

      ‘Right.’ Whitehead stood up and moved round to stand next to Pemberton in front of the wall, where pictures of the three victims were displayed alongside posters of their corresponding rock stars, like some bizarre travesty of a teenager’s bedroom. ‘That doesn’t mean we’re not going to try. Braithwaite and Nelson, I want a list of anniversaries from you. Any singers who died in unusual circumstances during November or December, any time over the last forty years. If you’re in doubt as to whether they count as “proper musicians” or not, just check with Inspector Spall, he seems to be an authority on such matters. Spall, I want you to go back to the beginning. The information about Dawn Mackenzie and Paul Waterhouse was in the public domain: it wouldn’t have been hard for anyone to have tracked them down from what was shown on television. Apparently, they do an “at home with the contestants” bit each week, and they’ve been plugging the Bellemaison regularly in return for a reduction on the room rates. But Gareth Morgan was killed before a single frame of Fame Factory was broadcast: our guy must have met him at the auditions. Morgan attended on the sixteenth of September. I want you to find out exactly who he came into contact with: Portmanteau will have records. I want anyone who was there interviewed: auditionees, any family and friends who came along, the TV crew, venue staff, the lot. If a tramp was begging on the pavement outside, I want a statement from him on my desk by the beginning of next week.’

      ‘Eric Lestrade was present,’ said Braithwaite quietly.

      ‘Thank you, Inspector Braithwaite, I was coming to that.’ Whitehead briefly ran through the details of their trip to Buckinghamshire the previous afternoon, leaving out the encounter in the shrubbery: she merely said that Lestrade’s alibi checked out.

      ‘So could it have been his little helper then?’ asked Nelson. ‘Angel? He’s got plenty of reason to feel pissed off with the Fame Factory contestants if he’s been slaving away as Evil… as Lestrade’s servant for years in the hope of a record deal.’

      Whitehead shook her head. ‘Apparently, he spent most of September back in Mexico visiting his sick mother. Lestrade paid for the flights. It’s possible that they’re in it together – that Lestrade was responsible for the first two killings, then sent Angel in to do his dirty work with Waterhouse, but so far we can’t tie anything to either of them. I want a close eye kept on Lestrade, though. You’ll all have plenty of opportunity to keep tabs on him, since Portmanteau have requested police protection for the contestants during the rehearsals and broadcasts of the rest of the series.’

      An audible gasp ran round the room. ‘They’re going ahead with it?’ Spall exclaimed.

      Whitehead nodded. ‘The feeling at ITV is that if the series was cancelled, the killer would have got his way. The commissioner agrees.’ She did not elaborate on the lengthy discussion process that had led to this decision, a process which had included the passionate declaration from Kyle Pennington that the situation was ‘exactly the same as nine-eleven – we can’t give in to terrorism’, the assistant commissioner threatening to resign if more than five per cent of his manpower was tied up providing security for ‘a fucking TV show’, or her own strong feeling that Portmanteau’s main interest was not so much ensuring the safety of their contestants as insuring their production as cheaply as possible. Hers not to reason why, hers but to organise, and she had spent much of the previous evening drawing up a duty roster which covered Portmanteau’s schedule for the whole of the next month. She pinned it to the whiteboard now, ignoring the grumbling of the men behind her, and then turned back to give them her sweetest, most ruthless smile. ‘Spall, you’re in charge of the squad that will take care of this Saturday’s episode. Braithwaite, you’re doing the eighth of December. I do hope you didn’t have plans.’

     

‘What d’you mean, you can’t do it? She’s been looking forward to it!’

      Braithwaite attempted to huddle closer in under the tiny porch which sheltered his ex-wife’s doorstep from the pouring rain. ‘I know, Cassie, I’m really sorry. It’s just that something’s come up at work…’

      ‘That sounds familiar.’

      It was a low blow, and he could see she was aware of it. He straightened his back, determined to receive her brickbats with dignity, and a rivulet of rain ran down from his hair and splashed on his nose. ‘That’s unfair, Cassie. This is the first time I’ve tried to rearrange this year. I wouldn’t ask now, except that we’re in the middle of a big investigation and I’ve been specifically ordered to work this weekend. I’m not asking to cancel, just to rearrange things so I… look, can I come in?’

      Cassie looked for a second as if she might banish him into the deluge, but then her shoulders sagged and she stepped aside to allow him into the hall. ‘All right. I’ll get the calendar. And keep your voice down. It’ll only confuse Olivia if she knows you’re here.’

      Keen not to aggravate the situation, he made sure he had wiped his feet thoroughly before slipping out of his dripping coat and following her into the kitchen. ‘Rupert not in?’

      ‘No, he’s working. One of the salsa instructors left without giving notice, and he’s had to take on extra classes.’ Sighing, Cassie lay the calendar – Kitten Friends, Olivia’s choice presumably – out on the worktop and scored a line through the entry for the weekend of the 8^th and 9th. ‘I suppose at least this means I won’t be sat in on my own.’

      Smiling, he pulled one of the stools up to the breakfast bar. ‘That’s good then. Did you have plans for the weekend after?’

      ‘No, it’s fine.’ She sketched a new entry on the calendar, and rubbed a hand across her eyes. ‘Look, I’m sorry I had a go. Things are just a bit difficult at the moment.’

      ‘Anything I can help with?’

      She shook her head. ‘No, I’m just tired. D’you want a cup of tea?’

      ‘If you’re making,’ he said pointlessly, and she carried the kettle over to the sink. He picked up an exercise book which lay on the work surface and leafed through Olivia’s history homework. Apollo 11 was launched on July 16 and on July 20 it landed on the moon and Neil Armstrong said one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind, he read. He remembered hearing those words himself, coming out of the tiny black and white screen in the corner of his parents’ lounge. He would have been the same age Olivia was now.

      ‘How can this be history?’ he said, amazed.

      Cassie put teabags into mugs. ‘I know. Next week they’re doing Mrs Thatcher, she told me.’

      He shook his head, grinning. ‘Is she getting on all right at school?’

      ‘I think so. She’s decided she doesn’t like Susie this week, but I don’t think that’ll last. She must have told you about trying out for Annie?’

      He nodded. Olivia’s drama teacher had been inexplicably unmoved by her heartfelt rendition of Tomorrow – a setback which she blamed squarely on her mother’s refusal to let her dye her hair ginger in preparation for the audition – and she had had to settle for a part as one of Miss Hannigan’s lesser, non-speaking orphans, a role she was approaching with as much rigour and determination as Olivier tackling Hamlet. He was still trying to get It’s the Hard Knock Life out of his head nearly a fortnight on from her last visit. ‘Is she still determined it’s an actor’s life for her?’

      Cassie wrinkled her nose. ‘I think she’s finding life in the chorus isn’t quite as glamorous as she thought it would be. She’s still holding out for Annie going sick at the last minute so they’ll have to ask her to step in and save the show.’

      ‘We’ll have to keep an eye on her before the dress rehearsal. Make sure she doesn’t walk down any flights of stairs or near any buses behind the star.’

      This got a smile from Cassie at last. It took years off her.

      ‘And how’s work? Dobbs still maintaining the galaxy’s last line of defence?’

      Dobbs was her boss, a figure of fun during their marriage for his quiet conviction that aliens were poised to infiltrate human society and that Croydon Council’s Trading Standards Department would be one of their prime targets. Cassie jumped at the chance to recall his latest excesses – he was currently campaigning to have mobile phones banned from all council buildings because of the risk of subliminal Martian messages being beamed into vulnerable civil service minds – and before long they were both roaring with laughter across the breakfast bar.

      ‘How about you? What’s the crime that’s big enough to have you working weekends?’

      Braithwaite paused, swirling the remnants of tea that he had allowed to go cold in his mug. He had made it a point of principle never to discuss ongoing cases with Cassie during their marriage, partly out of a simple desire to leave work behind at the office door and partly – particularly after Olivia was born – because talking about the sort of scum he had to deal with felt like injecting poison into the heart of his family. He had had no desire to invite criminals into his home, or even allow their shadows to fall across it. He toyed for a moment with the thought of telling Cassie about the Fame Factory case – it would be nice to discuss it with someone from outside and, quite frankly, he could do with a bit of appreciation for his own role in cracking the killer’s motivation, because he certainly wasn’t getting it from his colleagues. But he was horribly aware of how popular the show was (it had put on three million extra viewers since news of the new, more gruesome elimination process had leaked out) and the temptation to gossip might be hard for his ex-wife to resist. She didn’t really owe him her silence any more.

      ‘Oh, it’s nothing. It doesn’t matter,’ he said.

      Cassie straightened up. ‘Are you finished with that?’ She took the cups over to the sink and turned the water on hard. When they had first got together, she had interpreted Braithwaite’s reticence as a rather glamorous air of mystery. After a few years of marriage, she had begun to suspect it was more of an unwillingness to share, and finally, encouraged by some over-zealous self-help books, a number of single friends and several bottles of Chardonnay, she had decided it was evidence that her husband underestimated her intelligence and had problems with both commitment and communication. And now, five years on from the divorce, she was letting him pop round in the evenings just to make her feel bad about it all over again.

      Sensing that he had outstayed his welcome, Braithwaite picked up his still-dripping coat. ‘Right. So I’ll see you next Friday, then?’

      She slammed the cups, scoured to within an inch of their lives, onto the draining board. ‘I’ll see you out. Oh…’

      Braithwaite turned to see what she was looking at, but before he spotted the cause of her concern it barrelled at full pelt head first into his stomach.

      ‘Daddy!’ Olivia threw her arms around him. ‘You’re here!’ Her voice was muffled as she buried her head in the damp folds of his jacket.

      ‘I’m – I’m just visiting, love,’ he said, shooting an apologetic look at Cassie. She returned it with one of pure fury, and he extracted himself from his daughter’s clutches, affecting sternness. ‘What are you doing up?’

      ‘I couldn’t sleep.’ Olivia brushed down her Winnie the Pooh nightdress and looked at her mother suspiciously. ‘Where’s Rupert?’

      ‘I told you, he’s working late,’ Cassie snapped. ‘Your dad just popped in to sort something out, and now he’s leaving. Back to bed. Now.’

      The last order seemed to be aimed at him as much as Olivia, and Braithwaite was on the doorstep again within seconds. The rain hadn’t abated.

      ‘I’m sorry,’ he told Cassie.

      ‘It’ll just confuse her,’ his ex-wife hissed through the gap in the closing door. ‘She needs a bit of order in her life right now. She needs to know where she stands.’

      Don’t we all, thought Braithwaite as he trudged back to his car through the downpour.

Chapter Fifteen

 

‘You can’t stand there.’ The floor manager, a young man in a T-shirt bearing a slogan as fashionable as it was indecipherable, glared at Braithwaite over the top of his call sheet. ‘That’s one of the main camera runs for the contestants’ entrance. You’ll be sent flying.’

      ‘Oh. Right. Sorry.’ Braithwaite, who had already been moved on from three different positions around the studio, sighed. ‘Where can I go then?’

      ‘Well, do you need to be out here at all?’ asked the exasperated floor manager.

      ‘Yes,’ said Braithwaite wearily. ‘I’ve got officers backstage, but I need a good view of the audience while the show is on air. I’ve been through this all with Kyle Pennington.’

      ‘Oh well, all right,’ said the young man, who had been distracted by someone shouting in his earpiece. ‘Go over there then. And don’t move.’

      Braithwaite stepped gingerly over a large coil of cable and back into the position he had been standing in five minutes earlier, behind the side panel of one of the series of receding silver arches that made up the Fame Factory set. They looked a lot larger and more impressive on television. From here, he could see their plain plywood backsides, decorated with nothing more than marker-penned notices reading, FLAT 17, SECURE TO TOWER and the marginally more interesting, JONTY MAGUIRE IS A COCK. At the front of the stage, where the ice-blue floor sheet stopped and the filthy, scuffed concrete of the studio began, polo-shirted stewards were ushering the last audience members up to their places on the serried ranks of plastic seats. Some of them had been queuing outside in the drizzle when Braithwaite arrived early that afternoon; despite the fact that they all had tickets guaranteeing them a place in the studio, they liked to turn up early just in case they could catch a glimpse of the contestants through the blacked-out windows of the cars that swept them in to the building three hours before the beginning of the show.

      This had been a particular area of worry for Braithwaite. Today was the 8^th December, the date in 1980 on which John Lennon had been shot by an over-zealous fan outside the Dakota Hotel in New York. While the anniversary of his fellow Beatle George Harrison’s death (cancer, Los Angeles, 29^th November 2001) had been safely and with much relief crossed off on the calendar on the wall of the investigations room, Braithwaite had a nasty feeling they weren’t going to be so lucky this time. Whitehead had even considered putting the seven remaining contestants under full police protection for 24 hours, but her inquiries about the various safehouses the Met maintained throughout the capital had been fruitless: most were currently fully occupied by a rash of penitent Islamic militants who had decided to forego the promise of 72 virgins in order to remain alive and inform on their former colleagues, and the largest, a penthouse in a rather desirable part of Chelsea, was the residence of an IRA supergrass who had been there so long he had claimed squatter’s rights after the 1994 ceasefire. Instead, she had done the best she could with what was available: police drivers had been provided to transport all the contestants to the studios and had instructions to be prepared to take evasive action if necessary; autograph hunters had been warned they would be treated with extreme prejudice, and a constable had been posted on the front gates of the studio since lunchtime with instructions to keep his eyes peeled for any suspicious-looking men hanging around, particularly ones carrying a copy of The Catcher in the Rye. With the audience all now safely inside, their bags searched at the door and found to be entirely free of both weaponry and literary classics, the least he could do was bring the poor sod in out of the cold. He pressed the button on his radio, winced as its crackle echoed around the cavernous studio, and spoke. ‘Nelson, this is Braithwaite, come in?’

      Backstage, in a long corridor decked with framed photographs of Cilla Black, Anthea Turner and Jeremy Beadle, Sergeant Nelson pressed down the button on his own handset. ‘Receiving, sir.’

      ‘How are things going with the contestants?’

      ‘I’ve got most of them out of makeup and back into the green room now, sir.’ Nelson glanced down the corridor to the closed door, behind which Samantha Woodside was insisting that the correct application of blusher was as much of a matter of life and death as her safe passage between the dressing room and the studio. ‘Just waiting on one.’

      ‘Good.’ Braithwaite edged further back behind his archway, out of sight of the warm-up man who had arrived on stage and was busy demanding that the audience show him just how much noise they were capable of making on the count of three. ‘You’d better get everyone in place. I think things are about to kick off in here.’

      ‘You should probably switch your radio off now, shouldn’t you, sir?’

      ‘OK. Best of luck, then, sergeant,’ replied the inspector, but the warm-up man chose that moment to demand that the audience boo if they hated Evil Eric, and his good wishes went unheard.

     

Braithwaite found watching Fame Factory from the comfort of his own sofa unpleasant enough, and standing throughout the entire thing in the heat and discomfort of the studio did not improve matters. As the show cut to another ad break and the warm-up man took to the stage to whip the audience up to a yet higher level of frenzy, the inspector shifted his weight onto his left leg in an attempt to shake off the cramp that was developing in his right foot, and looked at his watch. 50 minutes had passed since the opening theme tune had been all but drowned out by the banshee-like screaming of the audience, which meant there were just ten minutes of the show left. So far, eight of the nine remaining contestants had performed: all but one had turned in competent renditions of what the programme called ‘soul classics’, despite the fact that they appeared to have had their souls surgically removed somewhere between Motown and the studio.

      The exception was Simon Trachtenberg, still miraculously maintaining his position in the competition despite polling in the bottom three in every week’s phone vote since he had taken over Dawn Mackenzie’s place, who had gurned and growled his way through a version of Easy Like Sunday Morning which proved beyond all doubt that it wasn’t.

      Each singer’s performance had been preceded by a brief film of their rehearsals and preparation during the week, all of which had been carefully vetted by the police to ensure that they revealed as little as possible about their homes and personal circumstances, for fear of further inspiring the killer. The ensuing blandness had been enlivened by a longer film dropped in to the show at the half-way point – described as ‘a treat for all you fans of Evil Eric out there’ – of the judge at home and in his recording studio, where he boasted of his ability to turn ‘any old crap into a number one’ and bitched about the paucity of talent among the many acts he had once represented but had now acrimoniously parted company with. Braithwaite had watched with interest as Lestrade gave the cameras a guided tour of the mansion he had been in himself so recently, pointing out the porcelain panthers – ‘a present from Elton’ – and the swimming pool, which he had apparently bought with the proceeds of the first single by an actor from Neighbours, which he pointed out was, ‘ironic because apparently he’s now working as a lifeguard.’ The camera also panned over a couple of platinum blondes whom Lestrade appeared to have added as extra ornaments since Braithwaite’s visit. Perhaps they were a present from Elton, too.

      Lestrade displayed the same insouciant arrogance on film as he had during their interview: Braithwaite ached to bring the smug sod down a peg or two, though, professionally speaking, he was frustrated to admit that he didn’t have any reason to. Yet.

      With a flurry of music and another burst of applause, the show was back on air. After a brief, surreal film clip during which Richard Golding, the final contestant, attempted to forge a link between his current occupation and his dream one – ‘music is like carpet-fitting, you’ve got to have a good underlay, and I know that however successful I am, my family will always provide that for me’ – he arrived on stage to deliver a strangulated version of Prince’s, Kiss. From where Braithwaite was standing, he could see Eric Lestrade jotting down insults on a notepad ready for use at the end of the performance: he had done the same during all eight performances so far, and the inspector was starting to suspect that the rumours in the papers that he was fed his catty putdowns through his earpiece by an unseen scriptwriter were true. His fellow judges certainly seemed to be envious of his way with a one-liner: more than once he had spotted Matthew sneaking glances at Eric’s notepad before scribbling something down on his own.

      The song ended and the studio lights cycled through their now familiar routine – down on the singer, a sweep across the audience as they applauded, and up on the judges’ desk with a dramatic drum roll. Golding stepped into the spotlight in front of the trio and, as usual, Eric led the attack.

      ‘Well, all I can say is I can’t see that making anyone want to kiss you. Prince changed his name to a squiggle so that people wouldn’t know who he was, and after that performance, I’d advise you to do the same.’

      His words were drowned out by a chorus of boos from the audience, which may not have been unconnected to the fact that the floor manager was holding up a large sign which said: BOO. Julia joined in wholeheartedly, laying a restraining hand on Lestrade’s arm. ‘I don’t know how you can say that, Eric. He’s a great looking boy, he’s got some sexy moves, and there’s plenty of girls out there who would just love to give him a big snog.’ The crowd did not need encouragement to cheer this sentiment.

      ‘Julia, darling, we’re all well aware that you fancy him,’ spat back Eric, ‘but it doesn’t change the fact that the boy can’t sing. He’d be better off joining the Chippendales and taking off his clothes in front of menopausal women like you who ought to know better. Anything, just as long as he kept his mouth shut.’ The audience cheered and wolf-whistled, and Golding, who had chosen a sleeveless white vest specially to show of his arm muscles under the studio lights, beamed.

      ‘Matthew, what did you reckon?’ Eric asked.

      ‘Well, son, I’m actually old enough to remember Prince when he was just a duke,’ grinned the last judge, and paused, waiting for a laugh that never came. He was thrown, and stuttered through the remainder of his judgement – basically that Golding could have done better, only in a lot more words.

      At this point, all the other singers had undergone what was called the ‘walk of shame’, which led them past the judges’ desk, through an illuminated door within a few feet of Braithwaite’s hiding place and through the backstage area into a corridor which led to the green room, where their fellow contestants (and another cameraman) were waiting with desperately insincere hugs and congratulations, the whole thing relayed live to the audience at home. The final judgement, however, led straight into a series of clips of the evening’s performances, with a voiceover from Lestrade giving the numbers for viewers to call to vote for their favourite. Golding hovered nervously on the darkened stage for a moment before the floor manager, who knew better than to allow anyone to come between the dragon and his autocue, ushered him off the opposite side of the stage to the judges’ table.

      Braithwaite watched in horror as the lad disappeared behind through the audience exit on the far side of the studio. That hadn’t been in the rehearsal. He had officers waiting in the green room – Nelson and a WPC, provided after a near disaster at last week’s show when a single male officer had been assigned to keep a close eye on all ten contestants, all of whom were suffering from stage fright and the unfortunate effect it has on the bladder – and Constable Griffiths round the front, but no one was covering the backstage route that Golding had just been sent down. Could he get over there himself? He edged forward and peered round the edge of the archway. There was a camera pointing straight at him from the other side of Eric’s desk, the red light on top flashing live. He pulled his head back swiftly, catching the frantic gestures of the floor manager from the corner of his eye. No exit that way. The backdrop behind him was thick and impenetrable. Damn. He was trapped.

     

High above, in the crowded studio gallery, Kyle Pennington saw Braithwaite’s head pop into view on one of the bank of monitors in front of him, and reacted instantly. ‘Cut to camera five. What the fuck is he playing at? It’s all right Eric, ten seconds. Jacqui, take over here. I’m going to go down and see what the hell that idiot copper thinks he’s doing.’ He stood up and left the room.

     

‘What am I doing? What am I doing first? Is it a recap of the phone lines or a chat with the judges?’ Tina Pringle arrived on the studio floor through the audience entrance, her finger on her earpiece and her heart in her mouth.

      ‘It’s chat to the judges, Tina love, then through to the green room to meet the contestants,’ said the soothing tones of Jacqui O’Riordan. ‘Don’t worry. Live show crew prepare to stand down, please, Fame On crew to positions. Five seconds everybody. And bags first in the loo, I’m desperate for a pee.’

     

‘Nelson! Nelson, can you hear me?’

      In the green room, the sergeant turned reluctantly away from Samantha Woodside, who had been questioning him with great interest about how he had got to be a police sergeant when he was so young, and clicked on his radio. ‘Loud and clear, inspector. What’s the problem?’

      ‘It’s Richard Golding!’ hissed Braithwaite, who was doing his best to tear his way through the backdrop at the back of the set. ‘He’s gone the other way! Get out there and make sure he gets to the green room safely.’

      Nelson recoiled from the sudden blast of noise that erupted from the handset. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he said. ‘I missed that. Is that the title music playing? Is it all over?’

     

‘If anyone needs to use the toilets, can I ask you to make your way out of the exits behind your seats as quickly and quietly as possible and follow the directions given by the stewards in the corridor outside? We’re going live with Fame On! in three… two… one.’

      As half the audience members rose and began to shuffle along the rows of seating with careful tiptoe movements that did nothing to actually reduce the noise of their departure, Tina Pringle hoisted herself up onto the stage, located the camera with the red light on, and strode determinedly towards the judges’ table. ‘Hello and a big welcome to ITV2 viewers, welcome to Fame On! Our nine remaining contestants have just finished their sensational performances, and it’s time to find out what the judges really thought of the – where’s he off to?’

     

Braithwaite noticed Eric Lestrade disappearing through the contestants’ door as the final notes of the Fame Factory theme faded too, but he thought nothing of it. All his energy was focused on reaching the opposite side of the stage and the exit that Richard Golding had gone through. Tina Pringle had other ideas, however. Thrown by the absence of her first target, and not knowing what else to do, she grabbed at the man who came thundering towards her across the stage and spun him round to face the camera. ‘Hi! Tell us what you thought of the performances tonight?’

      Braithwaite stared into the black void of the camera lens. ‘Well, I, er… I really…’ he said.

      A shot rang out from behind the stage.

Chapter Sixteen

 

‘Daddy!’ exclaimed Olivia excitedly.

      Her mother sat there, open-mouthed, a slice of Hawaiian pizza poised half way between her plate and her mouth. On screen, Braithwaite wrestled his way out of the vice-like grip of Tina Pringle and raced off the stage through the illuminated competitors’ entrance behind the judges’ table. The camera followed him out of sight, its focus swimming horribly, before pulling back and locating the face of a bewildered Tina Pringle. She looked like a rabbit which has just found itself caught in a set of headlights.

      ‘Oh, he’s gone now,’ said Olivia in an entirely matter-of-fact tone, and returned to her pizza. ‘Why was daddy on the television, Mum?’
     ‘I… I don’t know. He… I…’

      A sticky gloop of ham and pineapple silently detached itself from the wilting pizza and dropped into her lap.

     

‘All units, come in. Shots have been fired in back corridor behind studio. Lock down your areas. Do not let anyone leave. Backup required. Repeat: shots fired.’ Braithwaite sprinted down the passageway behind the set and burst through the double doors at the back of the studio. Terry Wogan grinned back at him from the wall opposite. To his left were the doors which led through to the green room and the annexe which housed the contestants’ dressing rooms. To his right, the corridor stretched away in the direction of make-up, the bar and the staff canteen. Thirty feet down there was another set of double doors. And halfway through them lay Richard Golding, his blood spreading out and soaking in to the thin grey carpet tiles. There was blood on the walls, too: blood spattered on the paintwork and forming a scarlet patina on the glass of the picture frame above his body, through which Hughie Green continued to grin.

      Braithwaite sprinted to the body and knelt down, his hands on Golding’s neck, searching for a pulse. There was one there, very faint and intermittent, but still there. He spoke into his radio: ‘Get me an ambulance to the corridor behind Studio Two.’ The boy was lying on his front, a single blackened puncture in his back oozing blood. There was a smell of burning hanging in the air. ‘Gunshot wound to back. I’m attempting CPR.’ He grasped the boy’s arm and shoulder and rolled him over on to his back as gently as he could, but not gently enough. With a sickening slurping sound that he would remember for the rest of his life, much of the contents of Golding’s chest spilled out through the massive exit wound in his front and slithered to the floor, accompanied by a great gush of blood which pooled around Braithwaite’s knees and soaked into his trousers. With the gentlest of exhalations, Richard Golding died.

      Braithwaite fell backwards and sat heavily on the floor, his hand over his mouth. Behind him, the doors of the studio crashed open. He turned and saw Kyle Pennington standing there. The producer had already gathered his breath to aim some eye-watering profanities in the policeman’s direction, but the sight that confronted him rendered him speechless for almost the first time in his life.

      This unusual state of affairs only lasted a few blissful seconds, and Pennington swiftly returned to his favourite position – the offensive. ‘I thought you pricks were supposed to be looking after them!’ he shrieked.

      The inspector stood up. ‘Mr Pennington, get back inside that studio, and don’t come out again until one of my colleagues tells you to.’

      The producer pulled himself up to his full five foot eight inches, and stabbed a finger in the policeman’s direction. ‘Don’t you tell me what I can and cannot do. This is my fucking programme, and I – ’

      ‘Right you are,’ said Braithwaite briefly. He strode up to Pennington, grabbed him, spun him round and locked a pair of handcuffs on his wrists. ‘I’m arresting you for attempting to interfere with a crime scene and obstructing a police investigation. Now, get back in there and do as you’re bloody told.’ He shoved the producer hard and he disappeared head first back through the double doors with a loud thump that Braithwaite found enormously satisfying.

      He strode back up the corridor, through another set of double doors, and kicked open the door of the green room. Eight pairs of frightened eyes looked back at him from the sofas. ‘Constable Metcalf, lock this door and stay here,’ he barked. ‘No one goes in or out. Nelson, you’re with me’. When the sergeant had joined him outside the room and the door was safely closed behind them, he spoke in a lower voice. ‘Richard Golding is dead. It looks like he was shot at close range with a shotgun. It’s imperative that we find Eric Lestrade. He left the studio a few seconds before the murder. You search the dressing rooms; I’ll go the other way. And be bloody careful. Assume he’s armed and dangerous.’

      Nelson’s heart was thumping in his chest. He had heard the gunshot, both in the corridor and then a few seconds later, as a muffled thump on the monitor in the corner of the green room which relayed the slightly delayed TV feed from the studio. The last two minutes had been spent desperately trying to calm the contestants and convince them that nothing could happen to them as long as they remained calm and stayed in the room with him and Metcalf. Strictly speaking, the correct procedure now would be to lock down all secure areas and wait for a firearms team to arrive and search the building, but he knew there was no way Braithwaite was going to stand around doing nothing while Eric Lestrade might be wandering around with a shotgun. And he was right not to.

      This didn’t really make Nelson feel any better as he crept down the corridor which led to the contestants’ and judges’ dressing rooms. In his fantasies about moments like this, he had always been wielding a .45 Magnum, and feeling rather less like he might wet himself. He gripped his telescopic baton firmly, took a deep breath, and twisted the handle of the first door on the left. The bright white lights around the mirrors on the wall revealed several large piles of women’s clothing and nothing more dangerous than an electrical socket overloaded with sets of hair straighteners. He moved across the corridor to the boys’ dressing room, where the fug of deodorant and aftershave fumes made his eyes water. Even more hair straighteners, but no one in here, either. On a monitor in the corner, a heavily sweating Tina Pringle could be seen talking to Julia and Matthew, who looked as if they had twigged that something was up. The empty chair next to them at the judges’ table was very apparent.

      The next door down the corridor bore a sign that read: Lead Male Artist Dressing Room. Someone had Blu-tacked a gold paper star, probably an old Christmas decoration, above it. If Lestrade was anywhere, this was where he was likely to be. Nelson paused to consider his tactics. Should he knock on the door and alert Lestrade to his presence, in the hope that he came out with his hands up? Or should he just burst in and hope to overpower him before he had a chance to reload his weapon? So far, the killer had restrained his murderous instincts to specific figures who fitted his own crazy plan, but Nelson wasn’t desperate to be the one who proved he was willing to break his own rules under pressure.

      All things considered, the sergeant figured he would rather tackle a gunman who didn’t know he was coming than one who did, and so, after firing off a brief mental message to both God and Chantal (neither of whom he really believed would receive it), Nelson put his shoulder to the door of Eric Lestrade’s dressing room and burst in.

      He wasn’t there. The room – which was considerably larger and more luxuriously equipped than the one next door which all five male contestants had to share – was empty apart from a suitcase on wheels, a bottle of champagne chilling in a bucket, and a huge bouquet of white roses dumped in a vase with the plastic wrapping still on. On the polished surface of the dressing table was a pile of small change, some keys and a mobile. Oh, and a shotgun.

      Nelson stooped down to sniff at the barrel of the weapon. The acrid smell of warm cordite filled his nostrils. He held his radio on up to his mouth. ‘Inspector Braithwaite, this is Nelson. I’ve located the weapon. It’s in Eric Lestrade’s dressing room. No sign of him yet, though.’

      Braithwaite pushed through a noisy crowd of audience members who had massed outside the ladies and gents toilets in the corridor at the front of the studio. ‘All right, sergeant, well done. He doesn’t seem to have passed this way, either. So where the hell is he?’

      His finger on the send button, Nelson paused. His eyes widened as he watched the monitor in the corner of the dressing room.

      ‘And here he is at last! Nice of you to join us!’ Tina Pringle was saying as an entirely unruffled Eric Lestrade slid nonchalantly back into his seat behind the judges’ table.

      ‘Sir, I think you should get back up to the studio.’

     

‘Daddy’s on again’, called out Olivia as Cassie rooted in the cupboard under the kitchen sink for a sponge with which to remove the greasy stain on her skirt. She straightened up, yelping as she smacked her head on the edge of the work surface, and ran back into the living room.

      ‘Um, for those of you watching at home, this is… er, why don’t you introduce yourself?’ said Tina Pringle, looking desperately around for anyone that could tell her what was going on. The camera zoomed in on Braithwaite’s face as he strode straight past her and, in a move which delighted those in the studio gallery, stopped on the exact spot where the contestants stood to receive the verdicts on their performances. The spotlight was quickly switched on. Cassie was slightly disappointed to notice that it reflected rather unflatteringly on her ex-husband’s bald spot.

      ‘Eric Lestrade, I am arresting you on suspicion of the murder of Richard Golding,’ said Braithwaite, in a moment of TV gold which was spoiled only by the fact that he was not wearing a microphone and his words were therefore only audible to those in the studio. ‘You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence against you.’

      Eric Lestrade’s reply went out loud and clear to all 1.5 million people watching at home, a fact which would later result in the largest fine ever administered by the broadcasting authorities. ‘What the fuck are you talking about, you cunt?’ he drawled.

      The cameras cut abruptly back to Tina Pringle, who was opening and closing her mouth like a goldfish. She started as if she had been given an electric shock. ‘Let’s go to an ad break,’ she said, and burst into tears.

 

Chapter Seventeen

 

The interior of the police car was lit by the stroboscopic glare of hundreds of flash bulbs as they drew up outside the police station. The press pack had sprung into action within minutes of Lestrade’s arrest, as night editors across the capital scrambled to redraw their front pages in time for Sunday’s second editions. The last minute change of direction – to Belgravia police station rather than the Yard – had not shaken off the handful of photographers who had followed them from the studios, and a larger group, tipped off either by their motorcycling colleagues or by tuning in to the police’s own radio frequencies, were waiting outside. Above them hovered a helicopter which had been scrambled by Sky News within seconds of the shooting, in order to bring its viewers the very latest on the state of the asphalt and the number of dead pigeons on the roof of the Fame Factory studios.

      The driver slowed to a walking pace as they surged forward, and Braithwaite found himself just inches away from a battery of telescopic lenses which were pressed right up against the glass of the window. He twisted round to look at Lestrade, sitting silent and motionless in the back. The harsh light of the flash bulbs threw the wrinkles that were so expertly disguised on TV into sharp relief; the remnants of his studio make-up did little to disguise his deathly pallor. The newspapers which had printed fawning interviews with him in the preceding weeks, had all happily wielded the airbrush on the accompanying portraits: Braithwaite suspected such contractual niceties would be forgotten in tomorrow’s coverage.

      ‘OK, we’re here,’ the inspector announced as they finally drew up at the station’s back entrance. ‘Would you like us to cover your face on the way in?’

      ‘No, let them get their pictures,’ muttered Lestrade. ‘It’ll be all the more evidence for me when I sue your arses off.’

      Braithwaite nodded and opened the door on a wall of sound: the clicking of shutters was almost drowned out by a wave of unintelligible questions yelled in his direction. He ignored them all, and walked up the ramp behind Lestrade and the uniformed constable he was handcuffed to. The station’s interior, already bustling with the usual Saturday night crowd of drunks and disorderlies, seemed blissfully quiet by comparison.

      Whitehead was standing by the door in the custody suite. He didn’t recognise her for a second. She was wearing a grey cashmere coat over what looked like tracksuit trousers. ‘Book him in and fingerprint him for me,’ he told the constable, and walked over to greet his boss.

      ‘Well, you’ve certainly been getting yourself noticed,’ she said acidly.

      He blushed. ‘Were you watching, ma’am?’

      ‘No, I was not. Some of us have got better things to do on a Saturday night.’ The statement was undeniably factually accurate, though she wasn’t sure that lying on the sofa watching Johnny Depp on her daughter’s Pirates of the Caribbean DVD actually qualified her to make it.

      Braithwaite filled her in on events at the studio.

      ‘And Lestrade had the time to do it?’

      ‘If he was quick. He practically ran off the stage.’

      ‘Could it have been anyone else?’

      He wrinkled his nose. ‘No one from outside. PC Griffiths was in the lobby throughout the recording, and nobody passed his way. The problem is, it was during the changeover between the two shows, so half the audience and most of the production crew were on the loose. Still, we counted them all in, and we’ll count them all back out again.’ He had left instructions with Nelson that every member of the show’s production staff and audience – some three hundred and fifty people – should be questioned before anyone was allowed to leave the building.

      ‘Right.’ Whitehead chewed her bottom lip, a bad habit she had picked up since the law had stopped her aiding her thought processes with Marlboro Lights. ‘So why d’you think he came back to the studio afterwards? He must have known we’d catch him.’

      Braithwaite shrugged. ‘I suppose he didn’t care. Pemberton said he was probably working to a preordained plan, killing victims that he felt were selected for him – so perhaps he’s trusting that same higher power to look after him and ensure he doesn’t get arrested. Or perhaps he actually wanted to get caught. There’s no better way to guarantee that than murdering someone on live television.’

      ‘Except he didn’t, did he? He did it off-stage, where nobody could see him. And he carefully went and got rid of the gun before he came back in to the studio. So it’s hardly being caught red-handed, is it?’

      It was an unfortunate choice of phrase, bringing a sickening memory of Richard Golding’s spilled innards into Braithwaite’s mind. He exhaled heavily.

      ‘Where does he say he went?’ asked Whitehead, sensing the inspector’s discomfort.

      ‘So far, he’s refused to say anything.’

      ‘Well, we’ll see about that.’ She strode over to the custody desk. ‘Which interview room have you put us in?’

      ‘Number two, ma’am,’ said the plump-faced duty officer, cradling a telephone receiver on his shoulder. ‘Is one of you Inspector Braithwaite?’

      ‘That’s me.’

      ‘I’ve got a Detective Sergeant Nelson here, sir. Asking if you arrested a chap called Kyle Pennington earlier.’

      ‘Oh shit.’ Braithwaite’s stomach did a somersault, and he plunged his hand deep into the pocket in which he usually kept his set of cuffs. It was empty apart from a small key.

     

‘Mr Lestrade, are you the owner of a twelve-bore Purdey shotgun?’

      ‘No.’ He studied his fingernails, affecting boredom. The two officers exchanged glances.

      ‘Mr Lestrade, Inspector Braithwaite and I visited your home on the twenty-fourth of November and witnessed you using a shotgun. Are you – ’

      ‘I don’t own a twelve-bore Purdey,’ drawled Lestrade, staring up at the ceiling. ‘I own two twelve-bore Purdeys. Both of which I have a licence for, and both of which I have only ever used for shooting birds, perfectly legally, on my own land.’

      Whitehead rubbed a hand across her brow. Lestrade had refused a lawyer, presumably on the grounds that he was sufficiently qualified in hair-splitting and oily evasiveness himself.

      ‘Where are your guns now?’

      ‘Well, I should imagine they are where I left them, in the cabinet in my study, safely under lock and key as the law says they should be.’

      ‘You did not bring one of your guns along to the Fame Factory studios this afternoon?’

      Lestrade glared at her.

      ‘For the benefit of the tape, Mr Lestrade is declining to answer.’

      ‘For the benefit of the tape, Mr Lestrade thinks it’s an insultingly stupid question to ask. No, of course I didn’t. Why would you think I did?’

      ‘Because your shotgun was found in your dressing room at South Bank Studios at seven-o-four this evening,’ said Whitehead. The serial number that the forensic team had provided from the studios matched that on the copy of Lestrade’s firearm licence which she had had faxed over from his local police station. ‘It appears to be the one that was used to kill Richard Golding. Would you care to comment?’

      Lestrade opened and closed his mouth a few times, but said nothing. Whitehead allowed herself a smile.

      ‘Where did you go when you left the stage at the end of the broadcast of Fame Factory, Eric?’ she asked.

      ‘I’m not telling you.’ Lestrade sat back and folded his arms, his eyes full of thunder.

      ‘Why not?’

      ‘I’m not telling you.’

      ‘You understand that, by refusing to tell us, you are placing yourself under suspicion of the murder of Richard Golding?’

      ‘I didn’t kill him. I don’t know anything about it.’

      ‘Then where did you go when you left the studio?’

      ‘I’m not telling you.’

     

After two hours of this, Whitehead was ready for a break. The station’s canteen had long since closed, and Braithwaite had to settle for a cup of powdery minestrone from the vending machine in the station foyer. It was at least hot, which was a blessing, since Whitehead insisted he accompany her outside to the freezing car park to watch her smoke.

      ‘What the hell is he playing at? Anyone would think he wanted to be charged.’

      ‘Maybe he does. Maybe this is all a cry for help.’

      She looked at him balefully. ‘I wish he’d cry a bit louder then, and make a bloody confession.’

      ‘We’ve got a positive ID on his prints on the shotgun,’ pointed out Braithwaite, in an effort to cheer her up.

      ‘Well, it’s hardly surprising, is it? It’s his bloody gun!’

      ‘No, ma’am.’ The vapour from Braithwaite’s breath was competing with the steam from his soup and the smoke from Whitehead’s cigarette. They watched as a police car drew in to the car park and disgorged the evening’s latest arrest. He was so paralytic he could barely walk, and two uniformed officers had to practically drag him up the ramp and into the station.

      ‘What does that lardbucket want?’ asked Whitehead. Through the door, the officer on the custody desk was waving in their direction and pointing at the telephone in his other hand.

      ‘I’ll go,’ said Braithwaite.

     

‘I was talking to your boss earlier – DCS Whitehead,’ said the sergeant from Beaconsfield nick breathlessly down the phone line. ‘She’s a one, isn’t she! Anyway, she was asking about Eric Lestrade’s shotgun licence and I got one of our blokes to dig it out for her. You got it OK, did you? Great. Well, the thing is, its probably nothing, but our boys do a regular patrol up round Denham and Chalfont, we’ve got our own little millionaire’s row up there you know, Cilla and Del Boy and Paul Daniels and the Osbournes, we’ve been called out to their place more than once, I could tell you. Well, anyway, you know some of them might not exactly be A-list but they still attract a few oddballs, so like I say we generally have a look up there on the weekends to check everything’s all right. And it turns out there had been a break-in, which I didn’t think anything of, really, until the name came up on the computer. He’d had some trouble before, actually, with a stalker, had to get a court order, otherwise our lads would probably have driven straight past, but you never can tell with these people, can you? Anyway, I thought you’d like to know.’

      ‘Know what, exactly?’ asked Braithwaite, whose head beginning to spin.

      ‘Well, you’ve got him there, haven’t you? Here, you’re not the one that arrested him, are you? They showed it on the news earlier, it was brilliant!’

      ‘Are we talking about Eric Lestrade’s house?’ said Braithwaite weakly.

      ‘Well, yes, that’s what I’m trying to tell you, aren’t I? It looks like he got broken into sometime this afternoon. The neighbours said they would have heard something if it had happened this evening, but they’d been out for the day. He’s in banking, apparently. I didn’t know the name.’

      ‘Listen, would you mind if I sent someone up? I don’t want to tread on your toes, but this could be important.’

      ‘No, of course not. Will it be yourself coming? My wife’s mad about Fame Factory, I’ll have to get your autograph for her. What’s it like in the studio?’

      ‘I’ll get back to you, sergeant,’ Braithwaite said firmly, and put the phone down.

     

‘Listen, Eric, we’ve got some new information. It could change things. You could be out of here by the morning. But we need you to tell us where you went when you left the studio. Because if you don’t, we can’t let you go.’

      ‘I’m not telling you anything.’

     

Nelson called from the house just after one in the morning. ‘The gun cabinet’s been forced. It looks like they used a crowbar on it. The other shotgun’s still here. There’s nothing else missing that I can see.’

      ‘Any fingerprints?’ asked Braithwaite without much hope.

      ‘There’s one other set in addition to Lestrade’s, but they’re all over the house. My guess is they belong to Angel, his houseboy. Didn’t you say you saw him putting the gun away when you were there?’

      ‘Yeah. I suppose we’d better find him and take a set of prints, anyway.’

      ‘D’you still think they might be in it together?’

      Braithwaite shook his head, then remembered Nelson couldn’t see him down the telephone. Gosh, he was tired. ‘There’s no way Angel could have got in or out of those studios tonight without one of our lot spotting him.’

      ‘And Lestrade still won’t say anything?’

      ‘Nothing at all. Listen, you’d better call it a night. Thanks for heading out there for us.’

      ‘No worries. Good luck with Lestrade.’

      Braithwaite pressed the red button on his phone, and looked at the time on the screen. 01.13 a.m. The message indicator was also flashing. He dialled 121 and waited.

      ‘Mike… it’s Cassie. Listen, we saw you on the TV earlier and I just wanted to say… well, I understand why you couldn’t say anything the other day. I had no idea you were working on the Fame Factory case. Well, it looks like you’ve got him, and… well, I just wanted to say that Livvy’s really proud of you. And so am I. Speak soon.’

      Startled, he pressed the key to repeat the message.

      ‘… Livvy’s really proud of you. And so am I.’

      He walked back up the passage to the interview room, a beaming smile on his face.

     

‘Where did you go when you left the studio, Eric?’

      Lestrade sat in the plastic chair, his arms folded, a look of utter disdain on his face.

      ‘Where did you go when you left the studio, Eric?’

      Braithwaite rubbed a hand across his chin, where a rash of bristles had begun to appear.

      ‘Did you kill Richard Golding, Eric?’

      The grey eyes flicked up to the ceiling again. ‘No.’

      ‘Then where did you go when you left the studio?’

      ‘No comment.’

     

The morning papers were delivered. Braithwaite read them under the harsh strip lights in the station’s foyer. A grainy image of his own face, hastily grabbed from a videotape, stared back from nearly all of them.

      The News of the World printed news of Lestrade’s arrest alongside an interview he had given them a few days earlier, in which he implied intimate knowledge of a Hollywood actress, two weathergirls and a minor member of the royal family, all the while insisting that ‘a gentleman never tells.’ The Express ran the 2000 women claim again, though they now put it under the headline, LADYKILLER.

      Outside, the bored posse of photographers watched Braithwaite reading through the glass doors at the front of the station. It was quite an interesting image, but none of them could be bothered to lift their cameras. It was too cold to take pictures.

     

Whitehead decided to call it a night at three. She scraped her chair back, flicked off the tape recorder, and arched her back elegantly. ‘All right, Eric. I’m going home to my nice, warm, cosy bed now. You’re going down to the cells. I’ll be back at eight o’clock and we can start this all over again. That’ll give me a full twelve hours to carry on asking the same question, and if you haven’t given me an answer I’m happy with by then, I’m quite sure the commissioner will let me have another twelve hours. After that, things get slightly more complicated because we have to start getting magistrates involved, but in a case as serious as this, I can’t see there being a problem. We can stay here all the way till Wednesday, if you like. It’s up to you.’

      Lestrade wrinkled his nose. ‘Wednesday?’

      ‘Uh-huh.’ Whitehead beamed.

      He shuffled slightly in his seat. ‘I’ll need some stuff from home.’

      ‘Oh, that won’t be a problem. The custody officers will be able to sort you out with a toothbrush. Sure, you’ll probably be a bit ripe after the first couple of days, but hey, you won’t be seeing anyone but us, and I’m sure we’ve coped with worse, haven’t we, inspector?’

      Lestrade seemed to slump, his shoulders dropping, the arrogant sneer finally disappearing from his face. They waited while he stared at the table. Finally, he jerked a finger at Braithwaite. ‘All right. I’ll talk to him. But I’m not saying anything with you in the room.’

      ‘Thank you, Mr Lestrade. I knew you’d unburden yourself eventually.’

     

‘A colostomy bag?’ exclaimed Whitehead, like a scatological Lady Bracknell.

      Braithwaite nodded. ‘Poor sod. He had an operation for bowel cancer a few months back. Apparently they need changing every ten hours or so, more in times of stress. Going out live must have got to him.’

      ‘But why didn’t he tell us?’

      ‘Because he was embarrassed, and he was scared we’d leak it to the press. So to speak. It doesn’t exactly do wonders for his image, does it?’

      ‘Not when he’s trying to sell himself as the world’s greatest lover.’ Whitehead had spent several tedious hours in the last fortnight going through Lestrade’s fawning press coverage. She smirked. ‘I always thought he was full of shit.’

      Braithwaite tried hard not to smile. The confession had obviously been a hell of an ordeal for Lestrade – he had been on the verge of tears when he left him in the interview room.

      ‘So where did he go to change it?’

      ‘There’s a disabled toilet at the end of the corridor, beyond the dressing rooms. He always keeps a spare bag in his pocket, just in case. He must have been in there when Nelson was searching, and come out while he was in the dressing room looking at the gun.’

      Whitehead, who had not been to the studios, tried to visualise their layout in her mind. ‘But surely he couldn’t have got back on stage without passing Golding’s body?’

      ‘He would have gone in by the contestants’ entrance. Golding was further down the corridor. It’s a good thirty feet away, and there’s no reason why he should have been looking in that direction. Remember, he was hurrying. He knew he was supposed to be on air.’

      ‘Hmm.’ She looked sceptical. ‘Well, I suppose there’s only one way to check his story out.’

      It was the moment Braithwaite had been dreading. ‘Yes, ma’am. Will you go or shall I?’

      ‘You know what, inspector?’ beamed Whitehead. ‘They’re not lying when they say chief superintendents don’t get their hands dirty. Pick up some gloves from the medical room on your way out.’

     

The studio complex was in darkness, the forensic team long since departed. On a normal Saturday, Braithwaite suspected the single security guard on the gate would have nodded off in his cabin by now. As it was, the man was so excited he looked like he might never sleep again.

      ‘I always thought there was something funny about him, you know,’ he said as they climbed the back stairs to the corridor behind studio two. ‘I mean, you don’t get a name like Evil Eric for nothing, do you? This is where it happened. It’s going to be a bugger to get out, all this blood. Never seen anything like it.’

      ‘But the cleaners haven’t been in yet?’

      ‘Oh no. They don’t get here till about seven on the weekends. And I’ve been told not to let them into the dressing rooms. God knows what they’ll do in the morning: they’ve got this studio booked out for Des O’Connor.’

      The door of Lestrade’s dressing room was sealed with blue and white-striped tape. Braithwaite strode past it without pausing and made for the door at the end of the corridor with its familiar wheelchair logo. The bright white interior made him blink after the subdued security lighting in the corridors.

      ‘Cor, there’s a stink in here,’ commented his companion.

      ‘D’you want to just wait outside?’ said Braithwaite tersely, pulling on his gloves and squatting down in front of the bin.

     

Eric Lestrade hitched up his trousers and brushed down the front of his jacket, wishing there was some kind of reflective surface in the interview room in which he could check his appearance. The door opened and Chief Superintendent Whitehead walked in, a typewritten statement in her hand.

      ‘Read that and sign it,’ she said gruffly, dropping into one of the plastic chairs. It was just before eight on the morning of Sunday, 9^th December, and her skin felt gritty from lack of sleep. Not that she would be getting any kip any time soon. She still had a murderer to catch.

      ‘So, I’ll be off to my nice comfy bed now,’ smirked Lestrade, sliding into the opposite seat. His usual bravado was restored. ‘I’d invite you to come with me, but I’m not in the habit of giving to charity.’

      She glared at him. ‘Your scriptwriter think up that one for you?’

      ‘Oh, I don’t need a scriptwriter, darling. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks. But then you’d know all about that, seeing as you are one.’

      Whitehead leaned across the table and put her face very close to Lestrade’s. Her eyes might have been puffy, but they were still full of menace. ‘Eric, you’ve wasted police time on two occasions now by withholding information from my investigation. You add winding me up to the charge sheet, and the shit’s really going to hit the fans. If you catch my drift.’

      He held her gaze with that strange, reptilian stare. ‘You wouldn’t dare.’

      ‘Try me.’

      They remained eyeball to eyeball as the clock on the wall ticked its way inexorably towards the hour. Finally, Lestrade dropped his gaze to the piece of paper on the table and scrawled an autograph across it.

      ‘Right.’ She scraped her chair back across the linoleum. ‘We’ll let you know the minute we find out anything about the break-in at your house. And if you remember anything else that might be useful, I’m sure you won’t hesitate to give us a call. Your car’s waiting outside at the front of the station. Get in it and piss off.’

      She strode off towards the custody suite without looking back. The fat sergeant was pouring a steaming mug of tea out of a tartan thermos. ‘Is that for me?’ she said, and didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Where’s Braithwaite?’

      ‘In the lavs,’ said the constable grumpily. ‘He said he needed to wash his hands. Again.’

      They watched as Eric Lestrade strolled past them and out towards the foyer. As he reached the glass doors at the front of the station, the press gang outside burst into action. A hundred voices began to cry, ‘Eric! Eric!’

      ‘There’s TV cameras out there and all,’ commented the sergeant. ‘Let’s see if we can get it.’ He clicked on the small television which sat on the corner of his desk, carefully arranged so as to be out of sight of the cells, and flicked through the channels till he reached Sky News. The small area of screen that was not covered with BREAKING NEWS banners and scrolling infobars showed Eric Lestrade standing on the steps of the police station, flash bulbs mingling with the weak dawn light. The interior and front desk could be clearly seen behind him. The constable would have quite liked to wander down to the foyer and get himself on television, but with Whitehead standing beside him, he didn’t dare.

      A tall, blonde woman in a skirt that was far too short for the weather detached herself from the crowd and climbed the steps of the station, where Lestrade held out his arms. As the camera zoomed in, they kissed with what seemed an inordinate amount of passion for that time in the morning.

      ‘Who’s that?’ asked Whitehead.

      ‘She looks familiar,’ shrugged the sergeant. ‘Isn’t it that lass from Hollyoaks? I didn’t know he was going out with her.’ On screen, a bright red banner was announcing: BREAKING NEWS – FAME FACTORY MURDERS: ‘EVIL’ ERIC RELEASED WITHOUT CHARGE.

       ‘Who did he use as his phone call?’ asked Whitehead suspiciously. Unable to tear himself away from the screen, where a pair of tongues were duelling in graphic close-up, the sergeant pushed a file across the desk to her. Whitehead opened it and sighed. On the arrest form some idiot had entered, SURNAME: Eric. FIRST NAME: Evil.

      She found the number Lestrade had used when he finally demanded the one call that was his right at seven that morning, and dialled it on the phone on the custody desk. It rang for a while, then a bright voice said, ‘Good morning, Max Clifford Associates?’ Whitehead put the receiver down with a grimace.

      On screen, the blonde had departed and a set of microphones were now being thrust towards Lestrade’s mouth instead. ‘As I’m sure every person in Britain with an ounce of sense in their heads expected, I have been released without charge, and the police have agreed that I had nothing to do with this horrific series of murders,’ he announced.

      Braithwaite arrived at the desk, his hands scrubbed red raw. ‘What’s happening?’

      ‘A bloody great con trick, that’s what,’ Whitehead growled.

      ‘My arrest simply shows how little progress the police have made in solving these awful crimes that have now deprived us of four talented young people and, if I may say, personal friends of mine. It was obvious from the questions I was asked over the last few hours that the officer in charge of this investigation, Chief Superintendent Whitehead, is simply clutching at straws and that the investigation is no further forward than it was in September when the first of these dreadful deaths occurred. The chief constable of the Metropolitan Police is a personal friend of mine, and you can rest assured that I will be talking to him about this. I also intend to take action against the police for wrongful arrest, for which I expect very substantial damages.’

      ‘I can’t watch this,’ said Braithwaite. ‘I’m going to finish off writing up my report and then head home. Where’s that evidence bag I left here?’

      ‘It’s just – where’s it gone?’ said the sergeant, looking round. ‘Maybe she took it.’ They looked at the empty spot where Whitehead had been standing, and then at the television screen, where a commotion off-screen had caused the cameraman to pull out from Lestrade’s face into a long shot of the police station steps.

      ‘Mr Lestrade! Mr Lestrade, you left this behind,’ said the chief superintendent, when she was sure enough of the microphones were pointing in her direction to pick up her voice. ‘We have a rule that all evidence has to be returned to suspects once they’ve been eliminated from our investigations, and I wouldn’t want to … Oh my goodness, I didn’t realise they burst so easily. I’m terribly sorry.’

      ‘I never want to get on the wrong side of your boss,’ said the sergeant, as the two men turned away from the screen in disgust.

 

Chapter Eighteen

 

The delighted group of Yard old-timers in the investigations room on Monday morning agreed that Whitehead had surpassed even her previous greatest hit, when she had deliberately reversed over a pet cat belonging to the prime suspect in a series of violent attacks on animal research centres. Whether her superiors would see it in the same way – she had an appointment that afternoon in the commander’s office – remained to be seen. In the meantime, she was taking advantage of her current good standing with her team by calling them together and filling them in on the weekend’s events – and passing on her rather reluctant conclusion that Eric Lestrade was not the Rock’n’Roll Killer.

      ‘He was, it seems, otherwise engaged at the moment when Richard Golding was shot,’ she announced, and waited, stony-faced, for the chortles to subside. ‘He also has a rock-solid alibi for the night that Paul Waterhouse was killed.’

      ‘Which is?’ asked Inspector Spall gruffly.

      ‘Just take my word for it. It’s possible that he may have been working with an accomplice – we haven’t yet got a full account of the lad Angel’s movements on Saturday night – but this would directly contradict the profile that Dr Pube – Dr Pemberton drew up for us. We need to concentrate our efforts on the break-in at his property on Saturday afternoon, and on how someone could have removed his gun and got it into the studio without anyone on our team or the studio’s own security staff noticing.’ She carefully avoided Braithwaite’s eye – without difficulty, as he was staring determinedly at a patch of carpet between his feet.

      ‘Why do we think they tried to set Lestrade up?’ asked Nelson.

      ‘Presumably to throw us of the scent until they had made good their own escape from the studios. Am I right in thinking that you ceased your search of the dressing rooms once after you had found the gun in Lestrade’s room?’

      It was Nelson’s turn to glower at the floor. ‘I saw him on the monitor.’ He muttered. ‘My orders were to locate him and report back.’

      ‘Quite right,’ said Whitehead crisply. ‘Which you did, and then made your own way back to the studio. During which time the killer was presumably hiding inside one of the rooms you hadn’t yet searched, before doubling back and rejoining the crowd that was gathering in the studio in the general confusion.’ Which meant, thought Nelson furiously, that the killer had not only slipped through his hands backstage, but that he had probably looked him in the face and taken a statement from him, too.

      ‘All right, we’ve got two areas to concentrate on. Spall, I want you and Benson to go through the details of the break-in at Lestrade’s house with a fine-tooth comb. Liaise with the local station at Beaconsfield, you’ll like them. Nelson, Robbins, Longford, you’re going through the statements from Saturday. If there’s a hole as tight as a gnat’s chuff in a single one of them, I want to know about it. If anyone claims to have been somewhere but no one else remembers seeing them, I want their names. Braithwaite, you’re coming with me to the studios. I want a guided tour. See if there’s anything else you lot missed.’

      ‘She’s very friendly with him,’ commented Inspector Spall as the pair left the investigations room. Nelson looked at him. Was there a hint of jealousy in that florid face?

      ‘I’m sure it’s just because he was first on the scene,’ he said, in as neutral a tone as he could manage.

      ‘No, he wasn’t,’ said Spall bitterly, and wandered off towards the canteen without offering to get anyone else anything.

      Down the corridor, Whitehead waited for the lift doors to close before turning to face Braithwaite. ‘What’s up with you? You’ve been looking at me like a constipated puppy since you got in this morning.’

      ‘It was just – I wondered if it might be worth giving Victoria Brooking a call.’

      ‘Who?’ the chief superintendent’s tone was icy.

      ‘The woman who was stalking – oh, I see.’

      ‘If I knew who you were talking about, which if course I don’t, I’d probably tell you that I’ve already pursued that particular line of investigation. Nothing doing.’

      ‘She wasn’t at the house on Saturday afternoon?’

      ‘No. For some reason she seems to have been scared off; I can’t imagine why.’ Whitehead smiled her sweetest smile, and the inspector suddenly felt very uncomfortable being trapped in a confined space with her. It was a great relief when the lift pinged to a halt on the ground floor a few seconds later, and the doors slid open on the outside world.

     

The blinds were closed, the lights dimmed, the only movement in the stuffy room the rapid flickering of the red light on the answerphone by the man’s motionless hand.

      ‘Eric, I’m in the office,’ barked the voice of Kyle Pennington. ‘We’ve got to talk. Stop sulking and pick up the bloody phone. Oh, suit your bloody self then. Look, just call me.’

      ‘Monday, ten fifteen a.m.,’ added a robotic voice. There was a bleep.

      ‘Eric. Pick up. I can’t get through on your mobile. It says the number’s unobtainable. Call me. I want to speak to you. “Monday, eleven twenty-five a.m.”’

      ‘Mr Lestrade, this is Inspector Spall of the Metropolitan Police. I’d like to have a chat to you about the break in at your house on Saturday. I appreciate that you’ve had a very distressing weekend, but we really want to do everything we can to track down those responsible for putting you through this. Perhaps you could give me a call back. “Monday, twelve-o-four p.m.”’

      ‘Eric, look, for fuck’s sake. You’re not the only one that got arrested, you know. I was in handcuffs for nearly two hours before those fuckwits managed to find the key. Call me if you still want your job, or I’ll find someone else for next weeks’ show. “Monday, three-forty-two p.m.”’

      ‘Eric, hi, it’s Jacqui O’Riordan. Listen, don’t take any notice of what Kyle said, he’s just upset. We’re all really worried about you. Can you give us a call at the office just to let us know you’re all right? “Monday, three forty-four p.m.”’

      ‘Eric, it’s Kyle. I’m going home in half an hour. If you haven’t called me back by then I’ll assume you no longer want to be a part of Fame Factory. You’ve got my number. “Monday, five thirty p.m.”’

      ‘Eric. Kyle here. All right, mate, you’ve called my bluff. I’m prepared to talk about an increased rate for the rest of the series. We want you on board. But I need you to call me. I’m on my mobile. Call me. “Monday, seven-o-five p.m.”’

      In the darkness of his study, Eric Lestrade allowed himself a mirthless smile. They would pay all right. Oh yes, they would all pay. He poured himself another generous tot of whisky and pressed the erase button on the answer machine. Then he stooped down and pulled the phone cable out of the wall for good measure.

      He had not woken up until lunchtime, his sleep patterns still screwed by the long Saturday night he had spent sitting up pointlessly in that freezing police interview room. He had opened the first bottle ten minutes later, and been sitting here ever since. He hadn’t bothered to open the blinds, and had barely noticed day slowly turning into night.

      Someone was out to get him, that much was clear. Some bastard had set him up for the murder of Richard Golding, and, by implication, all the others. Someone had been in his house, had been through his stuff, had taken one of his guns, the first things he had bought when the success of A*Sxual’s first album had enabled him to finally achieve his life long dream of living as a country gent, and had tried to frame him for murder. And that bitch of a policewoman had gone along with it. In fact, he wouldn’t be surprised if she was behind the whole thing. They hadn’t managed to find anyone for the murders in – how long was it now since that stupid Welsh kid had got himself killed, three months? So they had decided that he could take the rap for it, and set him up. And then, just to add insult to injury, they had decided to humiliate him, not once but twice, on live television. He would never live it down. And he would never go back on TV again. He should never have let that idiot Pennington talk him into it in the first place. He should have stuck to working behind the scenes, pulling the strings, letting his music do the talking. Other people’s actual music, obviously. He had never written a song in his life, couldn’t even read music. But he knew a hit song when he heard one, knew who to give it to, what they should wear and how to make sure that they got to number one. Instead, he had let Pennington turn him into a target for every nutter in the country. First, that crazy witch had started camping out on his front lawn and trying to give him weird presents every time he stepped outside the house, and now this. It was the last time he would trust the police with anything. To think they had the cheek to call him up and ask for his help now! As if he’d ever let a copper in the house again. No, he could look after himself. Let either of those mad bitches come sniffing round here again, and he would make sure they regretted it.

      He upended the bottle over his glass, downed its dregs in one, and trudged off towards the kitchen to fetch another.

     

‘Samantha?’ called Barbara Woodside, muting the television. ‘Are you going out?’

      ‘Um, yeah,’ said her daughter, appearing from the hallway. ‘Helen just called. She’s… er, had a row with Rob and she wants me to go over.’

      ‘Aw.’ Her mother wrinkled her nose in sympathy and held out her arms for a hug. ‘Well, be careful driving, won’t you? I worry about you, you know.’

      ‘Don’t be silly, Mum. It’s not like anything’s going to happen to me out here, is it?’

      ‘Well, you never know. They did a poll on Sky News and eighty-two per cent of people reckon the police don’t have a clue now that Evil Eric’s been ruled out.’

      ‘Oh, whatever,’ said Samantha, whose main reaction to the murder two days previously had been relief that one less rival stood between her and the Fame Factory prize. ‘Don’t worry so much. I’ll probably stop over at Helen’s, yeah?’ She kissed her mother on the cheek and walked out of the house, pulling out her mobile as she got into her Volkswagen Polo, which was decorated with the logo of the firm of estate agents who had kindly agreed to grant her a sabbatical for as long as she remained on the show.

      ‘Helen? It’s me, Sam. Look, if anyone asks, I’m staying at yours tonight, yeah? You’ll never guess who just asked me over!’

     

Staggering slightly, Eric Lestrade walked over to the window, lifted the blind and looked out into the darkness. A pair of car headlights rounded the hill in the distance making the frost glimmer momentarily on the surface of the fields before they were plunged back into darkness. Lestrade stiffened. Had he just seen a movement out there in the bushes by the end of the drive? He squinted out into the blackness, suddenly wishing he hadn’t given Angel the week off when he phoned up yesterday. Not that he would have been here, anyway at – what time was it? It must be gone midnight.

      Shivering, he decided to head downstairs and check on the locks. You couldn’t be too careful. Picking up a bunch of keys from the desktop, he padded across to the door of the study and out into the dark hall, his gait unsteady. Leaning heavily on the carved wood banister, he made his way downstairs, listening carefully for any noise from outside. God, this house was big. What did he need a house this size for? Perhaps he should sell up and move back into London. His neighbours all hated him, anyway.

      All the exterior doors were locked, as he had known they would be. He had done the rounds of the house as soon as he got back from the police station the previous morning, making sure that the halfwit plods hadn’t missed anything. The intruder had come in through the French windows in the lounge; the pane he had broken was now boarded over, but it couldn’t hurt to remove the key from the lock on the inside, could it? He took it through to the kitchen and the cupboard where all the spare keys were kept. He might as well get another bottle of whisky while he was down here.

      There was an empty peg in the cupboard. He stared at it. What normally hung there? His brain was all muddled. He shouldn’t have got so pissed. Think, man. It wasn’t the spare gun cabinet keys, which were here if the burglar had only been bothered to look for them. It wasn’t the studio keys, or the ones for the pool filter unit, or the spare ignition key for Angel’s motorbike which the dozy sod had insisted on leaving here after he lost his jacket that time. They were all there, hanging on the correct pegs where they should be.

      It was the spare front door key.

      Lestrade slammed the door of the cupboard, suddenly sober. They had taken the front door key. The murderer was free to come in and out of his house as he pleased.

      All mistrust of the police suddenly forgotten, Lestrade grabbed for the phone on the kitchen wall, and stabbed at the ‘nine’ key three times. The more he thought about it now, the more that shadow on the driveway had looked like a person. A big person, probably with a knife or a gun in a bag. Or perhaps with all the equipment he needed to keep a man alive but in terrible pain for days and days before anyone missed him, because he hadn’t been answering his phone and he’d told no one to come round.

      The phone was dead. It was an extension of the line upstairs, the one that he had disconnected in his study. The engineer had said that was the best way to do it if he wanted a separate line in the studio block. Bloody idiot. If Eric got out of this alive, the first thing he was doing was switching to cable.

      His mobile phone was on the kitchen table, in the package of stuff that the police had sent over from the studio after his release the previous day. He crossed the room in a single bound and tore the plastic open, sending small change skittering all over the tiled floor. He pressed the button on the top of the phone, waiting an interminable time for the screen to flash on and the tooth-grinding welcome jingle to trill itself to an end.

      INSERT SIM CARD, the screen informed him.

      He stared at the phone in disbelief. What the hell? He slammed it down on the table and used both hands to rifle through the contents of the bag. Change, wallet, painkillers: all the stuff he took out of his pockets so that his suit would hang as well as possible on the telly, it was all here. But no Sim card. And of course there wasn’t: he never took the Sim card out of his phone. He wasn’t even sure what the Sim card was.

      From the far side of the house came the sound of a car pulling up on the driveway. Eric spun round and stood staring out into the hallway. A pair of headlights shone for a moment at full beam through the windows at the front of the house, and then disappeared as the car’s engine cut out. For the first time since his operation, he appreciated just how convenient an item a colostomy bag could be.

      There was the sound of hesitant footsteps on the gravel of the drive. They stopped just outside the front door. 30 feet away, Eric stood frozen in the middle of the kitchen, listening to a strange scraping sound he could not identify. Then a key began to turn in the lock.

      With a turn of speed unusual in one so drunk, Eric Lestrade sprinted across the dark hallway and took the stairs two at a time. Behind him, he could hear the front door opening, and a low voice saying softly, ‘Eric? I’m here!’

      In the darkness, he overshot the top step and fell heavily onto the landing, barking his shins. Hot tears of pain sprang from his eyes as he hauled himself forward and scrambled through the study doorway on all fours. He slammed the door to just as the intruder found the light switch in the hall.

      There was no time to plug the phone back in. Instead, he whipped the key ring from his pocket, sorting frantically through its contents by touch as he crossed the dark room. Just as his fingers closed on the tiny one he was searching for, his toes connected painfully with the leg of a chair and he stumbled, dropping the entire bunch onto the carpet.

      ‘Eric?’ The voice floated up from downstairs. ‘I’ve come.’

      Sobbing, Lestrade groped around in the darkness. He could hear footsteps on the stairs. His outstretched fingers touched metal, and he scooped up the key ring, starting his search all over again. He found the one for the gun cabinet more quickly this time, but when he stabbed at where the keyhole should be, the key only scraped metal. The door had warped when it was forced open. He forced himself to breathe deeply, and ran his fingers over the surface until he found the lock, an inch away from where it should be and twisted at an angle. But it still worked. The key turned first time, and the cabinet sprang open. His fingers slid over the empty clasps where the stolen gun should be – it was still safely locked away at Scotland Yard pending further inquiries – and located its companion. As the door of the study clicked open, he grabbed two cartridges from the box in the bottom of the cabinet, and then dropped down on to the floor behind the vast mahogany desk.

      Samantha Woodside, feeling chilly, uncomfortable and thoroughly spooked, looked into the room and whispered, ‘Eric?’ There was no reply from the darkness. She fingered the front door key in her coat pocket – it had been under the mat, just where he had said it would be in his message – and turned to go back out onto the landing. At which point Eric Lestrade reared up on to his knees in the darkness, pulled the trigger, and transferred Samantha’s entire brain and a significant portion of the top of her head onto the ceiling of his study.

 

Chapter Nineteen

 

‘Sam Cooke’ said Nelson, wiping his feet on the vast doormat inside Eric Lestrade’s front hall.

      ‘Come again?’ asked Whitehead from the top of the stairs.

      ‘Sam Cooke. He died on the night of the tenth of December. So did Otis Redding – bad day for soul singers – but that was in a plane crash so I reckon Cooke’s our man.’ He looked past the chief superintendent to the vermillion-splattered ceiling of the room behind her. ‘It was nineteen-sixty-four. He was shot by a woman whose apartment he had forced his way into. She thought he was a rapist.’

      ‘And was he?’

      ‘Opinions differ.’ He started up the stairs. ‘The woman he was looking for said he was; but she might well have been a prostitute who ran off with his wallet when he was in the bathroom of the hotel they’d booked into.’ He came level with the landing and grimaced. From here, the first thing that met the eye was the top of Samantha Woodside’s head, or rather the lack of it. A few bits of brain tissue still hung to the splintered edges of her skull, while still more was tangled in the blonde hair which trailed across the carpet beneath her, matted with blood. ‘She took his clothes, too, which meant that when he tried to get into the hotel manager’s apartment he was only wearing…’

      He tailed off as he reached the top of the stairs. Whitehead followed his gaze down the girl’s body and completed the sentence for him. ‘A coat with nothing underneath it?’

      ‘Yeah…’ said Nelson slowly.

      ‘Then I think you’ve found the right person.’

      Samantha Woodside had put a lot of work into her body, and she would have been pleased to know that, from eyebrow level downwards at least, she left it looking good. Nelson stared down at the pallid breasts that spilled out from the gaping cashmere overcoat. Last time he had seen them, in the green room just four days previously, they had been Wonderbra’d to the max and pointed very deliberately in his direction. ‘She was… very flirtatious,’ he said sadly.

      ‘She was a prick-teaser,’ snorted Whitehead, whose first thought on seeing Woodside’s naked body had been that she had had work done on her tits and wasn’t even a natural blonde. ‘But I did think this was a bit extreme, even for her.’

      ‘Who are you two, and why have you blocked my car in?’

      A middle-aged man, with black curly hair and a moustache that made him look like a 1970s porn star, had arrived in the hallway and was looking up the stairs. Whitehead descended, giving him one of her most expansive smiles. She was gratified to see that he actually took a step backwards. ‘I’m Chief Superintendent Whitehead. I’m in charge of Operation Ringo. And you are?’

      ‘Inspector Hudson, Bucks CID.’ He extracted his hand from a leather driving glove and offered it to his superior officer, ignoring Nelson completely. ‘The woman who called this incident in was asking for you. Very insistent, she was.’

      ‘Really?’ Whitehead smiled beatifically. ‘I can’t imagine why. Perhaps she’s seen my name in the newspapers.’

      ‘Maybe. You want to be careful. Regular nutter, that one. We’ve had an eye on her for a while. In fact, my first thought when the call came in was that she’d finally flipped and killed Lestrade. She’s been stalking the bugger for months.’

      ‘Really?’ Whitehead didn’t look particularly interested. ‘Did she have anything useful to tell you?’

      ‘No, she was hysterical. Kept going on about how we had to save Eric from a girl who had gone in there and was shooting at him. Refused to believe us when we said it was him that had shot her. So, what were you daft buggers doing letting him go at the weekend?’

      Nelson winced. The chief super’s reputation had obviously not made it this far up the M40. For some reason, however, she let it pass. ‘I let him go because I don’t believe he was guilty of that particular murder. I don’t suppose there’s any doubt about this one though, is there?’

      ‘None at all.’ Hudson shook his head emphatically, his curly locks spilling from side to side. ‘He admits the whole thing, only he says he thought she was an intruder who was attempting to kill him. I asked him why he didn’t call the police, and he said his phone wouldn’t work. Someone had taken the Sim card. And apparently he’d pulled the house phone out of the wall. Doesn’t sound likely, does it?’

      ‘Oh, you get used to that in this case, inspector,’ muttered Whitehead as her own fully functioning mobile sprang into life. ‘Excuse me.’

      It was Braithwaite, calling from his car in a monsoon-like downpour in St Albans.

      ‘I’ve seen the mother. She’s in shock, obviously. Said Eric Lestrade had always been very friendly to Samantha, taken an interest in her singing, complimented her on her clothes at the rehearsals, but no, they definitely weren’t having any sort of sexual relationship. Can’t believe her daughter lied to her about where she was going. Apparently, she said she was going over to her best friend Helen’s. I’m just heading over there now.’

      ‘Right you are. We’ll be finished here within the hour. See you back at base.’

      ‘’Bye.’ Braithwaite flicked the phone closed and glumly watched the rain streaming down his windscreen. He was sick of talking to the grieving parents of kids who had done nothing more wrong than want to be famous, sick of telling them that he and his colleagues were doing their best, sick of the fact that they were no closer to finding the bastard that was doing this than they had been when he had sat and mouthed the same platitudes to Mr and Mrs Morgan in Llandudno three months ago. The set of gaudy Christmas lights that were blinking intermittently across the front of Helen Grieves’ house did absolutely nothing to lift his mood.

     

‘I told her she ought to be careful,’ sobbed Helen, a fat tear dropping from the end of her nose and soaking into the generous slice of Mr Kipling Victoria Sponge on the plate in her lap. ‘I said she shouldn’t go over, that he might be the killer, but she was going on about how she could look after herself and anyway, if he was the killer, how you guys wouldn’t have let him go!’

      Braithwaite looked down at his mug of tea to avoid her accusing gaze. It bore a list of ‘Ten Reasons why Chocolate Is better than Orgasms!’  He shifted it round so that it was covered by his hand. ‘Why did she go to his house, Helen?’

      ‘Because he asked her to! He texted her saying he reckoned he could arrange it so she would win the competition if she came over for the night. It was disgusting. He gave her all these instructions, wanted her to wear a coat with nothing underneath it. He’s a dirty old man. I told her it was just like being a prostitute, but she said being a famous singer was what she’d always wanted and I was just trying to spoil it for her because I was jealous. I went to the auditions with her, see, but I didn’t get picked. I never expected to, though. I just did it for a bit of a laugh.’ She crammed half the slice of cake into her mouth at once and Braithwaite suddenly recalled her audition, one of the minority that actually made it onto the screen. Eric Lestrade had told her she looked and sounded like Miss Piggy.

      ‘So she was happy to have sex with him?’ he asked.

      ‘She would have done.’ Helen brushed sponge crumbs from her ample lap and onto the pile of soft toys and knick-knacks which sat on the coffee table in front of her. ‘Sam never really minded doing that sort of thing. I shouldn’t say anything, but that’s how she got her job at the estate agents, because she started going out with Paul, the assistant manager. Mind you, she split up with him when she got onto Fame Factory.’ She sniffed, perhaps fearing she might be unfairly maligning her late friend’s reputation. ‘She did say she didn’t really want to do it with Eric because he was so old, but she reckoned she could just get away with… doing other stuff.’

      ‘Other stuff?’

      She swallowed. ‘You know. What she actually said was, “The randy old sod’ll probably be happy with a gob job.”’

      They both stared into their respective cups of tea for a moment.

      ‘Had she had… any contact with Eric Lestrade before last night?’ ventured Braithwaite after a while.

      ‘Not like that.’ Helen slurped noisily at her tea. ‘Nothing outside of the show at all. She had this theory that he was giving extra help to one of the other contestants, Paul Waterhouse, and she was dead angry about that. But Eric never seemed all that interested in her, whatever she wore. She was starting to wonder if he was gay after all. She said Matthew, the other judge, was all wandering hands at the rehearsals, but apparently, he was like that with all the other girls, too. Kept finding excuses to drop by the dressing room when they were all getting changed, and that.’

      ‘So Eric’s message last night would have come as a complete surprise?’

      ‘She couldn’t believe it! She was saying how this was what she had been waiting for and now she was finally going to be a star.’

      ‘She was really that keen to be famous?’

      She looked at him bemusedly, as if he had said something stupid. ‘Well, yeah!’

      ‘Did she not realise she could be risking her life? Five of her fellow contestants were dead.’

      ‘It was her dream!’ said Helen, as though this excused everything.

      ‘OK, Helen, thanks for your time. And once again, I’m very sorry for your loss,’ said Braithwaite, looking around for a place on the cluttered coffee table to dump his half-empty mug.

      ‘Here,’ sniffed the girl and helpfully moved the plate with the remaining half of the cake out of the way, electing instead to store it inside herself. ‘I comfort eat at times of crisis,’ she spluttered through a mouthful. ‘Apparently, it’s a very common reaction. And if you can’t do it now, when can you?’ A fresh wave of sobbing engulfed her, and he left her in the kitchen struggling with the lid of a biscuit tin.

     

‘You’ve got it?’ asked Whitehead, as Spall walked into the room carrying a clear plastic envelope.

      He nodded. ‘It was on the back seat of the car with the rest of her clothes. They’ve taken her body to Slough.’

      ‘Just when she thought things couldn’t get any worse.’ Whitehead split the envelope with a scarlet fingernail, rummaged through the contents and removed Samantha Woodside’s mobile, a tiny and fiddly pink affair with a camera attached. ‘Let’s see if she was telling her mate the truth. How do we get to the messages on this?’

      She pressed a succession of buttons, her eyes on the phone’s tiny screen, and then gave a grunt before passing the handset across the table to Braithwaite. Spall’s piggy eyes watched it pass between their hands.

      Sam Darling – Can’t stop thinking of U sexy. U R star + should B winner. Come over 2 mine tonite I want 2CU. We can come 2 sum arrangement. Let yrslf in key under mat. Wear that sxy long coat U wore last week. Nothing underneath. Ill B upstairs. Dont keep me waiting. XX EE. Sender: ERIC Sent: 10-Dec 22:20

      He passed the phone across to Spall. ‘So he used Lestrade’s Sim card, so that the message would look like it was coming from his phone?’

      Whitehead nodded. ‘He must have swiped it from the dressing room when he dumped the gun there. I don’t think even Samantha Woodside would be stupid enough to go and meet someone whose number she didn’t recognise under the current circumstances.’

      ‘God, he’s a clever bugger!’ exclaimed Spall. ‘He didn’t even need to be there. He set everything up on Saturday, and then all he had to do was send a message. Christ!’ He exhaled heavily. ‘He was using them like puppets!’

      ‘Which is exactly what you objected to Eric Lestrade doing with the contestants in Fame Factory a few weeks ago. I think the Rock’n’Roll Killer might be trying to make a point, don’t you?’