Chapters 30-39

Chapter Thirty

 

‘Arrested?’ Milly Jenkins stared at her colleague, open-mouthed.

      ‘Apparently. Got carted off by that scary woman who’s in charge of the investigation on Friday night.’ Sushi Westerbridge tucked into her blueberry muffin with relish, crumbs cascading down the front of her t-shirt.

      ‘But what for?’

      The PA glanced round the office and leant forward conspiratorially. ‘I shouldn’t tell you this because she swore me to secrecy at the time, but, when we found Kyle’s body, she did some filming before the police arrived. I thought it was a bit gross at the time because I was dead upset, but when you think about it, it makes sense. I mean, if we’re going to do anything on his murder in the future, that’s an exclusive, isn’t it? And Kyle wouldn’t have minded – he’d have done exactly the same.’

      ‘Yes, I suppose he would.’ Not for the first time, Milly wondered if she really was cut out for this industry. ‘So is Jacqui OK?’

      ‘Yeah, she’s fine. They only kept her in for a couple of hours, apparently. She called me from the police station – she was supposed to be having drinks with Baz and Kelvin at the Groucho, and I had to call them to rearrange. You know what those two are like, it’s probably halfway round London by now.’ Since Sushi herself had taken great delight in regaling everyone she had spoken to over the weekend with the details of her boss’s predicament, there was a good chance that the news had travelled even further.

      ‘So is she going to be in today?’

      ‘Yeah, she’s meeting her lawyer first thing, but she’ll be in for the meeting with Tim and Douggie at midday. Their pilot’s recording on Wednesday, isn’t it?’

      Milly grimaced. ‘If I ever get an answer from the insurance people about these stunts they want to do. They’re trying to work out if the standard policy covers swimming with sharks. I’d better go and call them now.’

      As she went to move away, Sushi waved a frantic arm in her direction. ‘Hang on!’ Muffin crumbs showered across the paperwork on her desk. ‘I need to schedule you a time with the policeman.’

      ‘What?’ Milly turned back to the desk, a frisson of fear passing over her face.

      ‘Didn’t I say? They’re questioning everyone about this key thing again, and they want me to schedule all the appointments. Like, as if I don’t have enough to do.’ She gestured at the piles of paper on her desk, most of which on closer inspection appeared to be either magazines or food wrappers. ‘When do you want to see them?’

      ‘But I’ve already talked to someone about that!’ Milly hooked a loose lock of hair back behind her ear, her hand hovering nervously by her neck.

      ‘Yeah, well, apparently now they want to talk to us all about our boyfriends and flatmates and that. Anyone who might have stolen our keys and made a copy, or something. It’s all right, it doesn’t take long: I’ve already done it. I told them James would rather stick his hand in a blender than go anywhere near my handbag! I’ve got a slot at ten-fifteen, if that’s any good to you. Or I can do later, up to you. Milly? Milly?’

     

Braithwaite was always amazed at how quickly things moved when the breakthrough finally came. Spall had called in at ten thirty with the news that they had a potential suspect: Milly Jenkins’ ex-boyfriend, Laurence Burstow, who described himself a ‘freelance music writer’, though she maintained that ‘stoner layabout and part-time drug dealer’ was a more accurate description. She had lost her keys when staying at his flat during a bout of ill-advised post-break-up sex the previous summer, an event which had only taken place because she had been feeling low and nostalgic for her university days when life had seemed simpler and he a romantic proposition. His promise to send them on to her if he located them amidst the detritus of his stinking bedroom, had been the last she had heard from him before he rang her up in November begging for tickets to the recording of Fame Factory for some piece he was planning to submit to the NME. She had ignored his messages until he finally got through to her in person at work and she had given in and put him on the guest list for December 8^th just to get him off her back, even conceding to his request to use a false name – ‘He said they’d throw him out if they realised who he was, which was ridiculous, it’s not like anyone’s ever heard of him’. He had duly appeared as David Chambers on both the list of those allowed to bypass Constable Griffiths’ bag search and go straight to the bar at the studios, and the list of those questioned by Sergeant Nelson after the murder of Richard Golding. No one had made the connection until now.

      An hour later, the police were outside his flat in Ealing: after 20 minutes of hammering on the door, the window opened and a mop of tousled brown hair at the tip of a cocoon-like duvet emerged to ask them what time it was and what they wanted. Half an hour after that, a fully dressed and almost fully conscious Burstow was decanted into the back of a police car, and by one that afternoon he was sitting in an interview room at Scotland Yard opposite Inspector Spall and Chief Superintendent Whitehead, wishing he had not done the second bong the night before and trying hard to concentrate on the questions they were firing at him. By two o’clock he had admitted that he was unable to account for his whereabouts on either the 16^th of September, the 4^th of October, or the 22^nd of November – in fact, he seemed quite amused by the idea that anyone might know what they had been doing on any specific date in the past. He thought that on the 30^th December he might have been attending a gig by something called Rape My Dog at the Barfly in Camden, although Sergeant Nelson was able to ascertain, through a series of rather embarrassing phone calls, that the band had actually appeared on the 29^th. He was, however, happy to admit that he had been at the Fame Factory studios on the 8^th of December, and that he had got there under false pretences – because, he said, he had ‘wanted to, like, go undercover and do a sort of colour piece about how fake it all was and what muppets all the contestants were’. The article, which he maintained a ‘mate at the NME was definitely interested in’ had subsequently failed to appear due to the show’s cancellation, something which Burstow seemed to regard as by far the most unfortunate result of the evening’s events.

      By that evening, the search of his cramped and festering bedsit had turned up several items of interest, in addition to the teetering piles of CDs and back issues of Q, the NME and Mojo which were carefully photographed ready for the courtroom: dog-eared biographies of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, Richey Edwards, Ian Curtis and Michael Hutchence; a bulging folder full of yellowing newspaper cuttings devoted to Eric Lestrade and the early weeks of Fame Factory which had been stuffed down the side of the bed, with several phrases heavily underlined in red ink; two unregistered pay-as-you-go mobiles, one with the Sim card missing, and Milly Jenkins’ keys, which were at the bottom of a cardboard box beneath some home-made mix tapes and several dirty black T-shirts. A pair of leather gloves and a slightly moth-eaten black suit which had been hanging at the back of the wardrobe had been packed up and sent away for forensic investigation, and Whitehead had ordered a team in to take up the floorboards, though she freely admitted that she didn’t expect to find anything and was really just doing it to annoy the neighbours and give the TV crews who were starting to gather in the street outside some decent pictures to put on the evening news.

      ‘It’s not looking good, is it, Laurence?’ said Whitehead at nine p.m., running her finger round the rim of a polystyrene cup half-full of coffee that had long since gone cold.

      Burstow looked pleadingly across the interview room table at her. ‘I promise you, I didn’t kill anyone,’ he said plaintively. ‘I told you, I was doing this article, and that’s what all that stuff was for. I didn’t even know the keys and those phones were in my room. If I had known, I wouldn’t have bothered buying a new mobile. I thought I’d lost my old one.’

      ‘And how do you explain this, then?’ Whitehead licked her fingers and turned the page in a tatty scrapbook which had been brought over from the flat an hour or so earlier. ‘If there was any justice in the world, everyone involved in the production, marketing and promotion of this sort of mindless, sugar-coated, alcopop-bland crotch-rot would be strapped to a chair while six-inch rusty nails were hammered into their ears,’ she read. ‘Sadly, this would still be a more pleasant experience than listening to the latest release from the anal fistula that is the Boomsteppers.’

      ‘That’s just the sort of thing you have to say in single reviews!’ said Burstow desperately.

      ‘OK. How about, Pop’s Burke and Hare return, this time turning their spades in the direction of Sid Vicious, whose rotting corpse they exhume, dress in skater-boy shorts and then spend three and a half minutes joyfully pissing over whilst giggling like special needs pupils on a sugar rush. That’s three and a half minutes of my life that I intend to take back from them with interest should I ever run into them. Preferably with a chisel.’

      ‘But – I didn’t mean it! It’s just a joke!’ There was not a trace of amusement on his face now.

      ‘Listening to this record was like being raped by dogs in a wet alleyway and dumped in a skip – which, curiously, is exactly the fate I would wish on those responsible for it.’

      Burstow looked puzzled. ‘That’s not one of mine.’

      She glanced down. ‘Oh, sorry. Yours is underneath. The one about wanting to slash the soles of their feet with razor blades and seeing if they’re still so bloody keen on dancing afterwards.’

      ‘But – you’re taking them all out of context!’

      ‘Laurence, they’re fifty words long. That pretty much is the context.’

      ‘I…’ He opened and closed his mouth like an asphyxiating goldfish a few times, but said nothing.

      ‘All right.’ She closed the scrapbook and pushed it to one side. ‘Let’s go back to the beginning, shall we? Have you ever been to Barnes Common?’

     

Laurence Burstow was charged with the murders of Gareth Morgan, Dawn Mackenzie, Paul Waterhouse, Richard Golding and Kyle Pennington and with being an accessory to the murder of Samantha Woodside at nine a.m. on the 16^th January. Whitehead was convinced that they had enough circumstantial evidence to convict him of at least the two most recent crimes, and, as the delighted commander pointed out, ‘that’s enough for a double life sentence, which will keep the tabloids happy.’ The barmaid from Barnes rugby club had failed to identify him from a line-up of six black-suited suspects as the man she had seen on the Common exactly four months previously, but they had high hopes of the guest at the Bellemaison, who had long since returned to America but had agreed to report to his local police department in Boise, Idaho, the following morning and cast his eye over a set of photographs of Burstow which had been Fed-Exed across the Atlantic.

      ‘Is that it, then?’ asked Nelson on Wednesday, flicking off the office television after the BBC’s lunchtime news bulletin had exhausted the limited amount of information that contempt of court laws allowed them to divulge and moved onto the next story, about a new computer virus that was bringing offices across Britain to a grinding halt by infiltrating people’s online dating profiles and forwarding them to all their colleagues. ‘Do we just bugger off back to Battersea now and leave the regular squad to do the tidying up?’

      The usual feeling of anti-climax that came with the conclusion of a long-running case was magnified in the sergeant’s case by the agonising fact that he had been oblivious to the whole thing, having finally given in to Chantal’s entreaties after weeks of nagging and taken Monday off to accompany her to the January sales. He was almost personally affronted that, after having evaded the police for four months, the Rock’n’Roll Killer had chosen to get himself arrested on a day he was off duty. Braithwaite suspected that if the sergeant had his way, Burstow would be facing twenty years for this offence alone.

      ‘Not immediately, I shouldn’t think,’ he told him. ‘The forensic report on Burstow’s flat didn’t turn up anything that definitely ties him to the murders, and he’s showing no sign of confessing, so I should think the chief superintendent will want to have us on board for a few weeks yet, picking back over the evidence to see if there’s anything else we’ve missed that can be used at the trial. But we are going to have to go back to Battersea at some point, you know.’ The prospect was even less appealing to him than it was to Nelson. The sergeant obviously had a bright future ahead of him, whereas he had a feeling he was going to find himself heading up the security at Palace away games, or counting the paperclips in the station at Lavender Hill for the rest of his working life. Ah well. Just 14 years to go till retirement.

      A familiar figure passed the door of the office without looking inside. ‘Excuse me,’ said Braithwaite hurriedly, and left the despondent sergeant to his thoughts. Whitehead had got to the end of the corridor and was waiting by the lifts by the time he caught up with her. ‘Claire!’ he called out, and she looked at him sharply.

      ‘I’m just going out to get a sandwich. Whatever it is, it’ll have to wait until I get back.’ Her tone was as cold as the weather outside. He pressed on regardless.

      ‘That’s just it, really. I was hoping you might let me buy you lunch. To say sorry for letting you down the other week.’

      She stared at him for a few seconds, her eyes narrow, before shrugging. ‘No. But you can buy me lunch.’

      ‘OK.’ It had to be the first, almost imperceptible sign of a thaw, though Braithwaite wasn’t going to throw away his winter coat just yet. Not that he’d be able to, come to think of it, because he’d left it in the office. He wasn’t going to risk the moment by going back for it. He did up the buttons of his jacket and got into the lift with her.

      ‘So, are you happy to have finally brought charges?’ he asked, as the illuminated panel counted its way down through the floors.

      ‘I’d be happier if we had a bit more evidence against him,’ she said shortly. ‘The way things are looking, it’s all circumstantial. If we don’t get a sympathetic jury, I might have to go down to the cells and kick a confession out of him.’

      He let out a sudden bark of laughter, but she didn’t join in, and he tailed off into an embarrassed mumble. The lift doors opened, and he followed her clicking heels out across the marble floor of the foyer.

      ‘You can take me to Pizza Express,’ she announced, and they walked up Victoria Street, she huddled in a pashmina, him shivering with his jacket collar turned up against the cold. The restaurant was nearly empty, with only a family of miserable-looking tourists and a group of noisy civil servants hitting the red wine at lunchtime to disturb the awkward silence that had developed between them.

      ‘You must be relieved, though,’ he said, when the waiter had taken their order and departed with the menus. ‘I mean, there’ve been times when it’s seemed like we were never going to get anywhere with this case. Not that I thought – I mean, obviously, we were always going to be all right in the end, but I mean –’

      ‘Do you think we’ve got the right man?’ she asked brusquely, saving him from digging himself in any further.

      He considered her question, taken aback. ‘Don’t you?’

      She rubbed a hand across her tired eyes. ‘Oh, I don’t know. He had the opportunity, he had the means, he fits the psychological profile. I just… I’ve always had the feeling in this case that there’s something we’re missing, some trick our guy’s pulled on us that we’ve not been bright enough to see. I suppose… I mean, I can see how Burstow could have done it, I can even see him doing it, but I still can’t see why. I’ve never been able to see why.’

      ‘Because he’s a nutter?’ he suggested.

      She shook her head. ‘Not good enough. You don’t come up with a plan that elaborate, that difficult to pull off, without a reason. There must have been something that set it off.’

      He considered this in the inordinately long time it took the waiter to present them with a bottle of mineral water and decant it into two glasses. ‘It’s difficult to say without having been in on the interviews,’ he said, when the man had finally departed. ‘He split up with this girlfriend not long after she got a job at Portmanteau, didn’t he? Could it have somehow been a way of getting revenge on her?’

      She wrinkled her nose. ‘Possibly. She said he was very pissed off when she took the job, accused her of selling out and going corporate. They used to work on the student paper together, apparently. Thought they were going to change the world.’

      He rolled his eyes. ‘Oh, one of those. And then she grew out of it, and he didn’t?’

      ‘Either that, or he was just pissed off that she got a job and no one wanted him. Idealism’s quite often a way of covering up inadequacy at that age. That’s what I keep trying to convince Alice, anyway.’ Whitehead had experienced an awful moment in the interview room the day before when, looking at Burstow’s hollow cheeks, sallow complexion and Nirvana T-shirt she had realised that he was probably her daughter’s ideal man. Apparent homicidal tendencies apart, of course. She hoped.

      ‘How is Alice?’ Braithwaite was determined to steer the conversation round to personal matters, if only to get a weight off his own chest. He felt he owed Whitehead an explanation.

      ‘Fine. Well, all right, anyway. Her A-level mocks start next week, and I keep telling her she’s done plenty of revision and she doesn’t need to worry, but she insists she’s “stressed out” and I’m not being supportive enough. I can’t imagine what it’s going to be like when the real ones come around this summer. How about Olivia? Did you get things sorted out the other night?’

      ‘Yes.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Actually, she’s living with me at the moment.’

      The waiter arrived with their pizzas. She looked at Braithwaite with raised eyebrows. ‘What’s wrong with her mum?’

      ‘Well, she’s sort of split up with her partner. All a bit messy. Actually – oh, OK, just a bit, yeah.’ He watched impatiently as the waiter ground pepper in front of him, before moving round to Whitehead’s side of the table, where he was waved away impatiently with a fork. 

      ‘So she’s walked out on him, too, and left you holding the baby? God, the woman’s got some cheek.’

      He was about to protest, but he had a mouth full of pizza, and she continued. ‘Some people are just unbelievable, aren’t they? I hope you’ve told her the whole world doesn’t revolve around her love life. She can’t just dump her daughter on you whenever she feels like it.’

      He swallowed. ‘Well, she hasn’t really – ’

      She was in full flow. ‘No, Mike, it’s not fair. Alice was devastated when her dad moved abroad. She convinced herself it was all her fault, that he didn’t want to see her any more. How’s Olivia supposed to feel, being passed around like a parcel every time her mother decides to walk out on her responsibilities? Honestly, Mike, you’ve got to put your foot down. She’s using you. It’s not fair on Olivia and it’s not fair on you. You’ve got your own life to lead as well.’ She sat back, and looked at him expectantly, her American Hot untouched.

      He looked down at the mangled disc of his own Giardiniera. ‘It’s not quite like that,’ he said quietly. ‘She’s sort of living with me as well.’

      There was a bray of laughter from the party of civil servants by the window. The waiter hovered by their table. ‘Is everything all right with your meal, sir-madame?’

      Neither of them looked up. ‘Yes, it’s fine thanks,’ said Braithwaite mechanically. ‘Delicious. Look, it’s not what you think. We’re not sleeping together or anything – ’

      ‘Oh, wel l that’s fine then.’ Whitehead gulped heavily at her mineral water. ‘Not a problem. You’ve obviously got a very different definition of your marriage being over than I have.’ She scrabbled in her handbag for her cigarettes, remembered just in time that she wasn’t allowed to smoke indoors any more, and slammed the packet down on the tabletop so hard that the cutlery rattled.

      ‘No – I mean – it is over. We’re not getting back together. I don’t think either of us wants to. It’s just that – she turned up at the flat with Olivia and she was really upset because she’d found out Rupert – that’s the bloke she – he was cheating on her, and she didn’t know where else she could go, and… it’s just a temporary thing. I think.’

      ‘What, just until she finds someone else and decides to move on again? That’s good, because for a second there I thought she was taking advantage.’ She fingered the cigarette packet enviously, biting down on her lower lip so hard that it hurt.

      ‘No, it’s not like that. I… it’s hard to explain.’

      ‘So you thought you wouldn’t bother.’ Her eyes narrowed in suspicion. ‘How long has she been there? Were you living together at New Year’s? Does she just let you go out on the pull on special occasions, when she doesn’t need a babysitter?’

      ‘No!’ he exclaimed, flapping his hands in a manner that was supposed to be reassuring. ‘She arrived last Saturday night. That’s why I had to cancel on you.’

      ‘Oh, so you get so many women throwing themselves at you that you can pick and choose!’ said Whitehead, scornfully. ‘Lucky you.’

      ‘Look, it’s not like that. Honestly.’ Braithwaite had not expected her to get so upset. He hadn’t even known that she and he had been a definite proposition. But she seemed to think otherwise. She had used the phrase, ‘on the pull’, for goodness’ sake! He did his best to reassure her: ‘There’s no reason why she should get in the way of anything happening with us. It’s a totally separate thing.’

      She gave him a look that could have killed at ten paces. ‘Yeah, I’ve had married men tell me that before.’

      Now she was being ridiculous. ‘I’m not married!’ he protested, slightly too loudly. ‘I just happen to be sharing a house with my wife!’

      The background music, which had been tinkling away since their arrival in the restaurant, naturally chose precisely this moment to stop, and the party of civil servants swivelled round as one to look with interest in their direction. The waiter also chose exactly this moment to come over to their table and enquire if there was a problem with madame’s untouched pizza.

      ‘Yes, the man who’s paying for it,’ spat Whitehead. She rose, scooped the offending disc from its plate and frisbeed it with unerring aim over the heads of the intervening diners and back into the kitchen. ‘Don’t bother coming back to the office this afternoon, Inspector Braithwaite. In fact, just stay out of my way completely. Take some leave. I’m sure you’ll want to spend some time with your family.’ She flung her pashmina round her shoulders, nearly taking the waiter’s eye out in the process, and stalked out of the restaurant and up Victoria Street towards House of Fraser. The only thing that could possibly improve her mood right now was some seriously expensive lipstick.

      Back in the restaurant, Braithwaite sat for a while looking at the rapidly cooling remains of his own pizza. After ten minutes had passed and the party of civil servants had realised there was no more entertainment forthcoming and had paid up and staggered off to carry on running the country, he pulled his mobile out of his pocket and dialled Cassie’s work number, which he had recently re-programmed into its memory.

      ‘Hi, it’s me,’ he said when she picked up. ‘Listen, I’ve got the afternoon off – can I meet you before Olivia finishes school? I think we need to talk.’     

 

Chapter Thirty-One

 

‘It is you, isn’t it!’

      Chris Farlowe put the cheese and onion pasty back on the shelf and turned towards his interrogator with a weary smile.

      ‘It is you! I was sure it was, but Sharon – this is my daughter – said it couldn’t be. Gosh, this is so exciting. Ooh, look at me, I’m shaking!’ The woman clasped his arm to demonstrate. ‘We don’t get to see many famous people, you see. What on earth are you doing here?’

      ‘I’m on my way back home. Seeing my family.’ Farlowe detached himself from the woman’s grip, his smile not faltering. Her purple fleece was slightly greasy to the touch. She smelt of wet dogs.

      ‘Of course you are. Don’t tell me. It’s Monmouth you’re from, isn’t it? I was thinking of Birmingham but that’s Tim, isn’t it?’ Oh, you must sign something for Sharon. She’s so excited.’

      He transferred his smile to the pony-tailed girl who was hovering behind her mother’s shoulder, as if afraid to come out fully into the open. She returned it shyly, revealing a set of braces, as her mother scrabbled in a bum bag and produced an old envelope which she thrust in his direction.

      ‘What would you like me to write?’

      ‘Oh, can you put for Sharon and Maggie? Put with love from the Service Station or something if you like, you don’t have to. Oh, my husband will think this is funny. He’s outside in the car, he won’t come in these places. We only came in to get some sweeties. I’m so glad we did, aren’t you, Sharon? No one will believe us, I’m glad we’ve got this!’

      His face was beginning to hurt from the pressure of smiling so much. He hoped they would go away soon. The girl stretched up to whisper something in her mother’s ear. ‘What’s that? No, of course you can’t. He doesn’t want to have his picture taken. She’s asking if she can take a picture of you. She’s got one of those cameras on her phone. Would you mind? It’s just that no one will believe us otherwise.’

      ‘Of course.’ Farlowe turned round and backed into the space they had made for him in between them, and the girl held up her mobile and snapped a button on his right, his worse side, worse luck. That would probably end up in heat now.

      ‘Oh, thank you so much, you’ve been very good. You must get a lot of people coming up to you.’

      He nodded. ‘Well, less since the show finished.’

      ‘Oh yes, that was such a shame, wasn’t it? But they’ve caught the chap now, haven’t they? That must have been such a relief for you. So what are you doing now? We keep looking out for your record!’

      His smile faltered for just a second. ‘Well, that might be a while. I don’t want to rush into anything too soon after the show. I want to wait till I’ve got some material I’m really happy with.’

      ‘Oh, very wise. Very wise, I’m sure. We enjoyed Tim and Douggie’s show on Saturday, didn’t we, Sharon? Will you be going on that?’

      ‘Maybe, yeah.’ Farlowe gritted his teeth. When Tim and Douggie’s programme had been at the planning stage, Portmanteau had made much of the idea of having a different one of their fellow contestants from Fame Factory on to sing each week. They seemed to have gone off the idea now it was on the air. And both the presenters had long since stopped answering his calls.

      ‘Ooh, it was ever so good, did you see it? They had Wolf from Gladiators on, and Brian Conley. And I couldn’t believe it when Tim went down in that shark cage. I thought he was going to back out of it, I really did! Do you think they know about the stunts before they pick the envelopes?’

      ‘I don’t know.’ Farlowe had refused to watch the programme, instead spending Saturday evening working his way through a bottle of cider and ringing up old friends from school to bitch about why he hadn’t got a recording contract. After a while, most of them had stopped answering his calls as well.

      ‘Well, it was ever so good, anyway. And this week they’ve got to learn to fly an aeroplane, and Douggie’s scared of heights!’ She made a grab for his arm again, and howled with laughter. ‘Anyway, we must let you get on. Are you just going home for a visit?’

      ‘Yeah, just for a few days,’ Farlowe nodded. ‘I haven’t seen my mum and dad for ages.’

      ‘Oh, yes, I’m sure you must be very busy down in London. They’ll be ever so pleased to see you. They must be so proud. Lovely to meet you, we won’t keep you any longer. Come on Sharon, leave the poor man alone. B’bye Chris! B’bye!’

      He watched her back out of the shop, waving all the way, much to the amusement of everyone in the queue at the counter, and turned around with an embarrassed smile. When he was sure no one was looking, he pulled the coins out of his pocket and counted through them. One pound sixty-seven. Not enough. With a sigh, he trudged out of the shop, across the foyer, and out into the watery sunlight, keeping a wary eye out for his biggest fan. She was over by a Fiat Uno in the disabled section, talking excitedly to its unimpressed driver. When she saw him, she waved. He raised a hand in her direction, scanned the car park and set off towards a BMW convertible that was parked in the far corner. As he crossed the exit road, a coach went past him on its way back on to the motorway. A shout of, ‘Oi, wanker!’ made him look up. A hairy backside was pressed up against the back window. Beside it, a cackling teenager in a football shirt was running through his repertoire of abusive hand gestures. He stared down at the asphalt and carried on.

      When he was sure the Fiat had left the car park, he came out from his hiding place behind the BMW and followed it down the slip road, where he wound his scarf round the bottom of his face and pulled a handwritten sign that read MONMOUTH from his rucksack. He had run out of money two days previously, and left his London flat before his landlord or his flatmates discovered that there wasn’t enough cash in his bank account to cover the last month’s rent. A quick phone call to his old boss had used up the last of the credit on his phone: after several minutes of laughing and saying, ‘Well well,’ he had assured him that he would be welcome back in his job at the chicken factory whenever he felt like coming in. So here he was, hitching his way home and hoping desperately that no one else recognised him along the way.

      The sun was low in the sky, reflecting in the windscreens of the cars in the eastbound carriageway and dazzling him as he stood facing the flow of the traffic on the slip road from the service station. It was bitterly cold. The first of February. The first day of the rest of his life. And it was going to be exactly like the one he thought he had left behind for ever.

      He was so lost in self-pity that for a moment he did not realise that the black car that was approaching him was slowing down. As it halted beside him, he shouldered his rucksack and leant into the window which was sliding open. ‘Hi, I need to get to – oh, bloody hell, hello, I didn’t recognise you! What are the chances of that?’

      ‘Where are you going, Chris?’ asked a familiar voice.

      ‘Er, Monmouth.’ He pointed to his sign with a grin. ‘Going back to my parents, actually. Just for a visit, you know.’

      ‘I can take you as far as the Severn bridge. Jump in.’

 

Chapter Thirty-Two

 

‘Oi! Oi mate! Oi mate!’

      Simon Trachtenberg closed his eyes and gripped his pint glass slightly tighter, hoping that when he opened them again the bloke would have just faded away. But he was not in luck. A hand clapped him on the shoulder and he was forced to look round into a red face, full of beery concern.

      ‘I saw you sat there and I couldn’t go without saying sumfink.’ The speaker slid his bulk onto the barstool next to Trachtenberg, slopping lager down the front of his tracksuit. ‘Iss just – I seen on the news they arrested some bloke for murdering your missus and all them others, an’ I just wanted to ‘pologize.’ He fixed him with a beady eye, full of contrition.

      ‘What for?’ Trachtenberg asked softly, avoiding his gaze and staring down instead at the man’s mucky work boots.

      ‘Well, iss just – me and some of me mates from the site, after you got arrested, you know, when everyone thought you’d dunnit, like – we done that spray painting on the front of your house.’

      Trachtenberg looked up, his eyes fiery. ‘That was you?’ He had returned from his mother’s house the day after the police had given their press conference clearing him of any involvement in Dawn’s death, to be confronted by the words, MURDRING SCUM in bright blue letters across the front of the building. It had taken the council a week to get it off.

      The bloke let go of his shoulder, reeling back uncertainly. ‘Yeah, well, not just me. Like I said, it was some of me mates. But everyone thought you was guilty then, di’n’t they?’

      ‘The police didn’t!’ protested Trachtenberg, thumping his pint glass down on the bar.

      ‘Yeah, well, it was in all the paper’s that you’d been arrested and that, wannit?’ asserted his accuser, before remembering he was on a mission of peacemaking. ‘Anyway, look, we know now it wa’n’t you that killed Dawn, so it’s all right, innit. Let me buy you a drink to say sorry, yeah?’

      Trachtenberg’s hands were balled into fists, though he was horribly aware he was about half the size of this Neanderthal, not to mention his smirking mates on the other side of the bar. ‘I had my windows put in because of that graffiti!’ he yelped angrily. ‘I had dogshit through my letterbox! Or was that you and your mates as well?’

      ‘Nah, nah,’ said the builder reassuringly. ‘We just done the graffiti, innit. And Ricky, he emptied your bins out. But that was all. Anyway, look it’s in the past now, so why don’t we shake hands and forget about it?’ He extended a pockmarked slab of meat towards Trachtenberg, and looked at it expectantly.

      ‘I’m not shaking your fucking hand!’ shrieked Trachtenberg, rising from his bar stool. ‘I had kids spitting at me in the street because of you! You accused me of killing the one thing I loved, the one girl that’s ever mattered to me, and you expect me to stand here and have a drink with you? Get the fuck away from me!’

      The man’s monobrow darkened. ‘All right, you little cunt. I said I was sorry, didn’t I?’

      Behind them the landlord loomed. ‘We’ll have no trouble please, gentlemen.’ He flinched and put out a protective hand towards the rounders bat under the bar as the thug reeled round on him.

      ‘Trouble? You talk about trouble? You don’t want trouble in your pub, you shouldn’t let smackheads like him drink in here! Try’n’ give him a civil apology and he chucks it back in my fucking face!’

      The entire pub was now watching the altercation with interest. Trachtenberg turned to face them, his whole body shaking. ‘I’m not a smackhead,’ he announced, his voice cracking. ‘I’m not a smackhead, and I never killed anyone. I loved Dawn, and I would never do anything to hurt her. I just miss her so much…’

      ‘All right, Simon,’ said the landlord quietly. ‘Time to go home, now, mate.’

      Trachtenberg turned back to him, his eyes brimming. ‘You’re chucking me out?’ he asked incredulously.

      ‘Not chucking anyone out. I think you’ve just had enough for today.’ The landlord pointed firmly towards the door.

      For a second, Trachtenberg looked like he might argue, but the fire suddenly went out of him. ‘Oh, you can stick your fucking pub,’ he muttered, and stalked out of the door, leaving a quarter pint of frothy Guinness untouched on the bar.

      ‘Sorry about that, mate,’ said the builder, who knew better than to make an enemy of the owner of a place where he quite enjoyed drinking. ‘Here, put another one in there, and have one for yourself.’ He fumbled a roll of notes out of his tracksuit pocket and passed a creased tenner across the bar.

      ‘Don’t worry about it,’ said the landlord as he flicked the pump down on the Stella. ‘He gets like that most times he comes in here. Sad, really. His girlfriend, that Dawn, was a lovely girl. Used to come in here on karaoke nights before she was famous. Lovely singing voice. Tragic, it was. Mind you, you know what they say. No smoke without fire.’

      Outside, Trachtenberg stood blinking in the bright winter sunshine. The afternoon traffic was beginning to build up round the Crystal Palace one-way system. At the end of the street the radio transmitter stood up like an admonishing finger. Dawn’s last memorial. He turned his back on it and trudged towards their flat.

      It was cold inside. The heating had been cut off the previous month, and the only reason he had gone to the pub in the first place was to try and get some warmth in his bones. He sat on the rug in front of the sofa and pulled the paisley-patterned throw round his shoulders, dragging cushions, dirty mugs and an ashtray onto the floor along with it. The tears that had been gathering at the back of his eyes since the confrontation in the pub overwhelmed him, and he sobbed into the thin material, convincing himself that he could still smell her on it.

      It had got dark by the time he moved again. He rose stiffly from the floor and walked over to the doorway, flicking the light switch up and down a few times. Nothing happened. He went into the bedroom and picked up the phone. The dial tone was still there. He sat for a while on the bed listening to its reassuring drone, and it was only when the electronic voice of a lady told him to please replace the handset and try again, and then repeated her instructions, that he plunged his hand into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper. Written on it was a number he had sworn he was never going to ring.

      There was an agonising wait before the phone was picked up. ‘Hello?’ said a reassuring voice.

      ‘It’s me. Simon. Simon Trachtenberg.’

      ‘Simon. This is a surprise.’ There was no trace of pleasure in the voice.

      ‘You said I could call you. If I ever… I’ve been trying to get through this by myself. Getting out, going to the pub like you said. But it just gets harder. I can’t do it any more. I just want to get away from it all. I want… I want to forget about her.’

      ‘You’re sure?’

      There was an edge of panic in Trachtenberg’s voice. ‘Can you do it? You promised!’ Having come this far, he couldn’t turn back now.

      ‘No, calm down, I can do it.’ The voice remained curiously emotionless. ‘Are you at home?’

      ‘Yeah. Do you want me to come round?’

      ‘No, stay there. I’ll come to you. There isn’t anyone else there, is there?’

      ‘No.’ Tears prickled in Trachtenberg’s eyes again. ‘Who else would there be? I’m all on my own now.’

      ‘I’ll be round in twenty minutes. Stay there.’

      The phone clicked down, and the comforting burr of the dialling tone was all that was left in the darkness.

 

Chapter Thirty-Three

 

‘Hurry up, Mum! School starts in ten minutes!’

      ‘All right, all right.’ Cassie pulled the flat door to, realised too late that she hadn’t checked if she had her keys with her. She  scrabbled desperately through the contents of her handbag with her one free hand, failed to find them, thought sod it and scurried down the street after her daughter.

      ‘Oh, I’m in the back, am I?’ she said, as Olivia clambered into the front seat of the car that was waiting at the corner.

      ‘I always go in the front with Daddy in the morning,’ announced Olivia, pulling her seatbelt around herself.

      ‘D’you want her to swap?’ Braithwaite twisted round in his seat.

      ‘No, no, get on, we don’t want to be late. I’m not sure if I’ve got my keys, I might have to borrow yours.’

      ‘Don’t lose those, will you? They’re my only spare set. Leave it off, please, Livvy.’

      ‘But Dad…’ She looked at him pleadingly, her finger on the volume button of the CD player.

      ‘Come on, you know all the words now. And besides, I want to talk to your mother.’

      ‘What if I forget them?’

      ‘You’ll be fine,’ Cassie reassured her from the back seat. ‘Miss Reynolds says she’s feeling very confident and pleased with you all.

      ‘And you will be there, won’t you? Both of you?’

      ‘Yes. Daddy’s meeting me this afternoon to look at some houses, and then we’re coming straight on afterwards. I’ll be there in time to help with the make-up, and Daddy’s said he’ll do a turn selling programmes.’

      In the rear-view mirror, Daddy grimaced at the prospect. Olivia eyed him doubtfully. ‘But you’ll still be in the audience, won’t you?’

      ‘Don’t worry,’ he smiled at her. ‘I’ll make sure I put reserved signs on two seats in the very front row for us.’

      ‘Good.’ She nodded with satisfaction and looked out of the window at the streets of South London slipping by.

      ‘Where am I meeting you?’ he asked Cassie.

      ‘Oh, it’s the North Dulwich one, I think.’ She slid the pile of estate agents particulars out of the file on the seat beside her and began to flick through them. ‘If that one in Norwood is as good as it looks, I’ll try to book a second appointment for this afternoon so you can come and see it.’

      ‘Will we have time?’

      ‘Yeah, we should do. What time can you get out of work?’

      ‘Oh, I’m really just going in to sort things out and pick up some stuff. We’ve got to clear out the office today. There’s a new inquiry moving in.’ Operation Ringo had finally been evicted from the largest room on the eleventh floor to make way for a new squad investigating a spate of brutal murders on tube trains in the East End which had apparently been provoked by their victims listening to their iPods at too high a volume.

      ‘Do you know when you’re starting back at Battersea yet?’

      He shook his head. ‘No. The new superintendent said he’d let me know what’s going on by the end of the week. I’ll chase him up if I haven’t heard anything by tomorrow. I don’t think he’s that desperate to have me back. I got the feeling he’d forgotten all about me when he rearranged the divisional structure, and I’m just going to mess up his plans.’

      ‘He’s mad.’ Cassie stared out of the window.

      They drew up outside Olivia’s school a few minutes later. A large hand painted banner had been hung on the railings: ANNIE – JUNIOR SCHOOL PLAY – THURSDAY 3^rd, FRIDAY 4^th, SATURDAY 5^th FEBRUARY – TICKETS AVAILABLE FROM SCHOOL OFFICE.

      ‘’Bye,’ said Olivia briefly, attempting to get the door open and leave the car almost before it had stopped moving.

      ‘Oi! Hang on! Don’t I get a kiss goodbye?’ demanded her mother from the back seat. Braithwaite, who had been told in no uncertain terms that this was a no-no on the first day he had dropped Olivia off at school, hid a smile behind his hand as she turned unwillingly and leant back over the headrest to give her mother a perfunctory peck on the cheek. ‘I suppose I should say break a leg,’ Cassie added.

      ‘Whatever,’ muttered Olivia, escaping her grasp and sliding out of the car.

      As the door swung shut, something left behind caught Braithwaite’s eye. ‘Hang on!’ he called. It was the penknife he had given her for Christmas, its pink casing standing out against the black surface of the seat. Olivia held out an impatient hand for it, but he held it back. ‘What are you doing with this?’ he asked.

      ‘I always carry it round with me,’ she told him, crouching down in the hope that none of her classmates would see her in such an embarrassing situation. ‘Come on, I’m going to be late for registration.’

      ‘You can’t take this into school. If one of the teachers caught you with it, you’d be in all sorts of trouble.’

      ‘No, I won’t!’

      ‘Oh, you would, love,’ Cassie chipped in from the back seat. ‘Have you really taken it in before?’

      ‘I always do!’ She looked at them scornfully.

      ‘Well, I’ll look after it for now. But it stays at home from now on, all right? Now get on, or you will be late.’ He slipped the knife into his jacket pocket, and winced as Olivia slammed the door shut.

      ‘That daughter of ours…’ he said as he drove off.

      ‘She won’t be told, will she?’ said Cassie. ‘Can’t imagine where she gets it from.’

      They drove in silence for a few minutes as Cassie leafed through the file. ‘Where do you want dropping off?’ he asked as they pulled onto the high street.

      ‘Oh, it’s the one up on the left past the traffic lights. Total Move Solutions, I think it’s called. Listen, you are sure about this, aren’t you?’

      ‘Yes! How many times!’ He chuckled.

      ‘It’s just – I don’t know. People will think it’s weird.’

      ‘So let them. I don’t care what people think. Look, it makes sense. You can’t afford somewhere on your own, and my flat’s tiny. If we buy together, there will be plenty of room for all of us.’

      ‘Yes, I know. It’s just – ’

      ‘What?’ He looked at her in the rear-view mirror. She was worried, fretfully curling a strand of her hair round and round her finger. He knew the gesture well.

      ‘Look. Mike. You really do know there’s no chance of us getting back together, don’t you?’

      ‘Oh, please.’ He drew up outside the estate agents, put the handbrake on and turned around to face her. ‘Cassie, we’ve been through this. We had our chance. Things didn’t work out. That was nearly five years ago, and believe it or not, I haven’t spent the whole of the time since pining for you and wishing I could live my life over. Things happened. There were faults on both sides, I’m sure there were, but I don’t see why things that happened in our past should spoil Olivia’s future. This is the best thing we can do for her, right now.’

      She nodded, biting her lip in a way that reminded him of Whitehead. ‘It’ll just be weird having you in the granny flat.’

      He snorted. ‘Hey, you’re the one that’s going to be in the granny flat. I’m going to have a penthouse suite.’

      ‘A bachelor pad, more like. Somewhere you can entertain all these women that are going to be throwing themselves at you.’ She chuckled, but he didn’t join in.

      ‘Would it bother you if I did?’

      She looked at him seriously. ‘I think I threw away my right to object to that a long time ago.’

      He nodded. She looked out of the window at the estate agents and shrugged. ‘Well, it worked for Andy and Fergie, didn’t it? Why shouldn’t it work for us?’

      ‘Exactly. Now go on, or you’ll be late for your first appointment.’

      She leant forward and pecked him on the cheek. It felt like the sort of kiss a sister might give her brother. It felt right. ‘Wish me luck.’

      ‘Surely I should say break a leg?’

      She laughed. ‘All right. You break a leg today, too.’

      ‘I’ll do my very best to.’ He was smiling as he drove away.

     

Richey Edwards of the Manic Street Preachers vanished as Nelson scrubbed at the whiteboard in the investigations room with a filthy cloth. ‘Just as well we caught him when we did,’ he remarked to Longford. ‘This would have been a busy week for him.’ He slid the cloth downwards, cutting a vertical stripe through Sid Vicious on the 2nd February, Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens today, and Karen Carpenter on the 4th.

      Longford looked up from the cardboard document box into which she was packing files and loose papers. ‘I know. I used to feel sick when I looked at this week on the calendar. Can you imagine?’

      ‘Hmm.’ Nelson extinguished the remains of the late rockers, and the frame around them, with a few more strokes of the cloth. ‘I was kind of keen to know how he was planning on doing Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens, though. I think a plane crash might have been beyond even our guy’s abilities.’

      ‘He’s still not talking, then?’ Longford carefully folded a poster of Michael Hutchence and slid it into the box beneath the black and white Herb Greene print of Janis Joplin that had been on the investigations room wall alongside it. She was planning on nabbing that for her bedroom later on when there was no one around.

      ‘Apparently not. I think Whitehead was hoping a couple of weeks on remand would loosen him up enough to confess, but she’s had no joy.’ He scrubbed out the last remains of the calendar he had taken such care constructing ten weeks before and dumped the rag in one of the bin bags that were scattered round the office floor, looking at his ink-stained fingertips with distaste. ‘But the editor of the NME says none of his staff ever discussed any piece on Eric Lestrade with Burstow, so that blows away his excuse for being backstage at the Fame Factory studios. And Forensics reckon they can get some firearms residue on something in his wardrobe, so we should be fine.’

      Longford pulled the last photographs down from the wall and began to pick Blu-tack from the back of Marc Bolan’s head. ‘So what will you do now? D’you know what’s happening about your transfer?’

      ‘Apparently CID are expecting me back at my old nick on Monday,’ said Nelson, gazing sadly out of the window at Westminster Abbey and Parliament beyond. He would miss this view. The CID office at Battersea looked out on the back wall of an Indian restaurant.

      ‘And what about your guv’nor?’

      ‘Braithwaite? I’m not sure yet. There’s been a couple of promotions while we’ve been here, apparently, so his old job’s disappeared. I don’t think he knows what they’re doing with him yet.’

      ‘Oh.’ The constable rolled the last of the Blu-tack into a ball and studied her fingernails. ‘I was wondering if he had gone back already. I’ve not seen much of him recently.’

      ‘No, he’s had some time off because of stuff going on at home. Apparently, he’s moving back in with his ex-wife. They’ve sorted everything out and they’re buying a place together. Oh, morning, ma’am.’

      Whitehead was standing in the doorway, ashen-faced. Longford looked at her, concerned. ‘We were just clearing everything up, ma’am. We’re nearly done. Er… is everything all right, ma’am?’

      ‘No,’ said the chief superintendent quietly, reaching out a hand to steady herself against the doorframe. She bit hard on her lower lip, and the pain seemed to recall her to the room. With a glare at the two junior officers, normal service was resumed. ‘No, everything is not all right,’ she barked. ‘Where the fuck is everyone? It’s nearly half past nine. This is still an active investigation, for Christ’s sake.’

      ‘I think they’re – ’ began Nelson nervously, but she cut him off.

      ‘You’ll have to do for now. Take a look at that.’ She hurled a copy of Broadcast onto the desk in front of him. It had today’s date on it, but for a moment he couldn’t see anything else significant. Then he spotted it. A brief story in the bottom left hand corner of the front page.

     

Fame Factory Goes to Four

Portmanteau, the company behind last autumn’s reality sensation ‘Fame Factory’, have been commissioned by Channel 4 to make a 90-minute one-off documentary on the series of brutal murders which caused the show’s cancellation in December. Pete Spanton, head of factual programming at Channel 4, said yesterday: ‘Portmanteau had unparalleled access both behind-the-scenes of their own production and to the police investigation, and while the legal process is now taking its course, we wanted to strike while the iron was hot. We’ll hopefully have something ready to be scheduled soon after the trial, if not on the actual day the verdict is announced.’ Portmanteau Acting MD Jacqui O’Riordan, who will executive-produce the show, provisionally titled, ‘Fear in the Fame Factory’, said it would be ‘a unique perspective on the killings, right from the inside, with personal testimony from those involved’. The show will feature unscreened footage from the making of the series featuring the victims, as well as exclusive footage of the crime scenes, and promises to be a highlight of the channel’s winter season, which will also feature Justin Lee Collins-fronted game show ‘Tits or Face’, in which contestants compete to win the plastic surgery procedure of their choice, controversial documentary ‘The Gay Jesus’, and the return of the ‘Naked Royalty’ strand. The commission will come as a blow to ITV, who commissioned the original ‘Fame Factory’ series and are currently airing Portmanteau’s ‘Saturday Night’s All Right’, a spin-off featuring contestants Tim Campbell and Douggie McGovern, which began last week with a strong showing and a 34% share in the early evening slot. A spokesman for ITV said, ‘We look forward to continuing to work with Portmanteau on Light Entertainment projects, which we feel are their strong suit.’

 

      ‘Oh. Right.’ said Nelson, passing the newspaper over to Longford and wishing there was someone more senior present to indicate how he should react. ‘Well, I suppose as long as they wait until after the trial, there’s no…’

      ‘They are not going to get to the fucking trial,’ shrieked Whitehead. ‘Those tapes belong to us until we choose to release them. I knew she must have squirreled away some copies. Well, if that bitch thinks she can get one over on me, she’s got another think coming. I want search warrants for both the Portmanteau offices and O’Riordan’s home. We’ll turn the place inside out if we have to. Tell Spall to get on it as soon as he gets his sorry arse in here. And what the fuck time do you call this?’ This last was directed towards Braithwaite, who had arrived clutching a double cappuccino in one hand and his mackintosh in the other. Sensing which way the wind was blowing, he immediately held both out as a gift and let her choose which one she wanted.

      ‘Thank you,’ muttered Whitehead, snatching the cardboard cup and stalking out of the room and up the corridor. ‘Nelson will fill you in. And don’t bother hanging that up, ‘cos we’re all going out again.’

      Braithwaite waited until he had heard the door of her office close safely behind her before he turned to the sergeant and the constable. ‘What was all that about?’ he whispered.

      ‘Oh, that was nothing, sir,’ said Longford, suppressing a giggle. ‘You should have seen her when she came in. I thought she was going to pass out, she looked so angry!’

Chapter Thirty-Four

 

Braithwaite looked up at the terraced house. It was a brick-built two-storey Victorian worker’s villa, identical to all the others in the street, apart from the fact that its stucco was painted a rather unpleasant shade of yellow. Bile colour. Although that was not the name that Dulux referred to it by. All the curtains were closed.

      ‘The curtains are closed,’ observed Nelson helpfully.

      ‘Yes, sergeant. And from the fact that we’ve been hammering on the door for the last ten minutes without an answer, I think we can probably deduce that she’s not in.’

      ‘What should we do then, sir?’ asked Nelson, figuring that if the inspector wanted to talk to him like an idiot, he might as well live down to his expectations.

      ‘Well, this says we’re allowed to use reasonable force to gain access to the property.’ He brandished the warrant that a harassed Spall had pushed into his hands as they left Scotland Yard half an hour earlier.

      ‘D’you want me to give Brixton nick a call and get them to bring a door ram over?’ asked Nelson, his mobile at the ready.

      The inspector looked at his watch. Past half eleven already. He was supposed to be meeting Cassie at half two. Give it an hour and a half, two hours to search the house – O’Riordan was hardly likely to have left the tapes anywhere obvious – and they were already pushing it. He looked at the front door. Yale lock and a couple of panels of nicely etched glass, probably original, certainly expensive to replace. Oh well. ‘I don’t think we need to,’ he told Nelson, taking off his coat and wrapping it a couple of times round his left arm. ‘Here, hold the warrant and keep an eye out for the neighbours.’

      The glass broke on his first blow, which was satisfying. Keeping the coat wrapped round his arm he groped inside for the lever, flicked the door open and stepped inside, glass crunching under his shoes. ‘Should always have a deadlock on an old door like this,’ he told Nelson. ‘First thing we used to tell the neighbourhood watch groups.’

      The hallway was dark, and smelled musty. He barked his shin on what he assumed was a bicycle leaning against the wall, but when he flicked on the bare light bulb at the top of the stairs, he saw it was actually a wheelchair, folded up and stacked neatly beside a couple of what looked like oxygen cylinders behind the front door. The tiles on the floor were cracked and dirty, the walls decorated with a drab and nicotine-stained woodchip wallpaper.

      ‘Not what I expected,’ he commented.

      ‘It doesn’t look much like her, does it?’ agreed Nelson as he peered into the darkened lounge. A sagging sofa bed and two armchairs were arranged facing a big old television in the corner. There was an upright piano behind the sofa, its lid closed and covered in a film of thick dust.

      ‘No. Not what I expected at all. You sure we’ve got the right address?’ He had been on more than one dawn raid which had achieved nothing more than to frighten the life out of some blameless herberts in their pyjamas while giving the next-door neighbours plenty of warning that it was time to flush the drugs down the toilet.

      Nelson re-read the front of the warrant. ‘It’s what it says here. 94 Glamring Avenue. Residence of P and J O’Riordan. I don’t know who P is.’

      ‘Well, whoever he is, I don’t think much of his taste in interior decoration.’ The only picture that was hanging in the lounge was an oil painting of a thin-faced man with a guitar in his lap and a glass of whisky in his hand. Either he had put away an awful lot of the stuff before that one, or the artist just thought purple was a good colour for faces.

      ‘No. I thought from the way she dresses, her house would be more sort of… feminine,’ mused Nelson as they walked through the dark hallway to the kitchen at the back of the house.

      ‘Well, people often give out a different image to the world from what they’re actually like at home, don’t they?’ said Braithwaite vaguely. ‘Jesus, look at this!’

      The work surfaces in the kitchen, the table and about half the available floor space were crammed with bottles. Wine bottles, beer bottles, whisky bottles, every one of them empty. Some appeared to have been washed out and gathered together in boxes and carrier bags ready for recycling. Others, judging by the overpowering smell of stale alcohol, had not.

      ‘She hides that habit well,’ commented Braithwaite.

      Nelson wrinkled his nose. ‘Yeah. I do remember her going off for a drink at lunchtime one time, though,’ he said, a disapproving tone in his voice. Braithwaite looked at him shrewdly. He had long suspected that at least some of O’Riordan’s obvious attraction to the sergeant had been reciprocated. But no more. Nelson liked his women to be ladies, as had been obvious when he brought Chantal along for a celebratory drink after the charging of Burstow. He had only let her have one glass of champagne in case she embarrassed him in front of his colleagues, although, from where Braithwaite had been sitting, it hadn’t looked as if his male colleagues were paying much attention to what was coming out of her mouth.

      ‘Well, she’s full of surprises,’ said Braithwaite. ‘There was a pile of videos under the telly in the sitting room. Why don’t you start there while I check upstairs?’

      He had only made it up the first few steps before his mobile trilled in his breast pocket, the novelty ring tone that Olivia had programmed in for him almost giving him a heart attack, though since she had also thoughtfully set it to vibrate, it provided its own defibrillation.

      It was Whitehead. She sounded worried. ‘Inspector? Are you in?’

      ‘Yeah. No sign of O’Riordan, though.’

      ‘No, she’s out filming on location, they’re saying here. Look, I’ve just had a call from Gwent Police to say Chris Farlowe’s gone missing. Apparently he set out from London on Tuesday to hitch home to his parents, and never turned up. Last anyone saw of him was at a service station on the M4.’

      ‘Shit. Look, I’m sure it’s not related. He’ll turn up.’

      ‘I bloody hope so. I’ve been trying to get hold of the other contestants, just to make sure they’re ok – Sara Minsky’s at home and she’s fine, Tim Campbell and Douggie McGovern are out on the same filming trip as O’Riordan, but I can’t get hold of Simon Trachtenberg. He’s not picking up his phone. Listen, I’m not going to be able to spare anyone from here – there’s an entire fucking room of tapes we’re going to have to go through, and the staff are all kicking off. His gaff’s only round the corner from where you are. Could one of you head round there and check he’s ok?’

      ‘Yeah, it’s fine, I’ll send Nelson,’ Braithwaite assured her, conscious of how stressed she sounded and feeling absurdly pleased that she had turned to him for help. ‘Look, don’t worry, I’m sure everything’s fine. Farlowe’s probably just stopped off at a girlfriend’s his parents don’t know about, or spotted a nice looking sheep by the side of the motorway, or something.’

      ‘Thanks Mi – inspector. Get Nelson to call in as soon as he’s located him, won’t you?’

      ‘Of course.’ He switched off the phone and looked down at Nelson, who was standing in the sitting room doorway with a handful of video tapes and a quizzical look on his face. ‘You can put those down,’ he told him, descending. ‘You’ve just got yourself another job. Super’s checking up on all the Fame Factory contestants, and she wants you to call in on Trachtenberg. He’s up in Crystal Palace, it should only take you twenty minutes or so.’

      ‘OK.’ Nelson had not exactly been relishing the prospect of packing videotapes into boxes for the next hour, and was only too happy to get out into the fresh air. ‘Have you got the car keys?’

      Braithwaite passed across the fob and watched the door close behind the beaming sergeant. A shaft of bright winter sunlight cut through the broken pane, picking out the dancing motes of dust in the hallway. He sighed. The search would take even longer with just one pair of hands. He hoped Trachtenberg proved easy to track down and Nelson could get back here soon, or he was definitely going to be late for Cassie.

      He headed upstairs, past a damp-smelling bathroom with an ancient avocado suite which he figured O’Riordan probably thought was ironic, and peered through the open door of the front bedroom. Here, at least, there were signs of the owner’s presence – colourful clothes hung from an open rail that stretched the full length of one wall and the overflow was piled on the unmade bed. He jumped, thinking for a second that the woman herself was standing in the corner, but it was only a tailor’s dummy wearing that strange corset thing he remembered her wearing on their first meeting, along with a vast pink puffball skirt. Scattered across a dressing table was enough make-up for a dozen women: lipsticks, powders and paint, most with their lids missing, a vivid palette of colours spilling out and mingling with one another. It looked like the time a toddling Olivia had emptied the contents of Cassie’s handbag onto the bedroom floor and then crawled around in the result, only on a monumental scale. This lot obviously belonged to a woman who didn’t feel able to go out in public without putting a mask on first.

      He turned and tried the closed door to the other bedroom. At first, he thought it was locked and he was going to have to test his housebreaking skills again, but when he shook the handle it yielded slightly and he realised it was merely jammed. When he put his shoulder to it, it gave way easily, and he hurtled forward into darkness, his feet connecting with something which cracked nastily underfoot. He groped for a light switch, but when he flicked it nothing happened. He could only make out vague shapes in the little light which spilled around the edges of what looked like war-issue blackout curtains on the window, but he realised with a sinking feeling that the room appeared to be filled with boxes and bin liners, stacked almost waist high. Oh, bollocks. He was never going to be able to meet Cassie at this rate.

      Braithwaite picked his way across the room, testing each footstep and trying not to step on anything that seemed likely to give way beneath him. By the feel of them, the bags were mostly filled with clothes or material, though a resounding clank and a tinkle revealed there were more bottles in here as well. He wondered if O’Riordan was one of those secret hoarders who squirrel away all their rubbish for years and refuse to let the council take it away, but, judging by the smell, there was nothing organic in here – just dusty, and old, and neglected. He finally made it to the window, skidding slightly on something that rolled away under his right foot and threatened for a horrible second to leave him doing the splits, and tore aside the material, bringing light and a view of the overgrown back yard flooding into the room. He turned and surveyed the treasures he had exposed.

      The end wall of the room was dominated by a vast poster for the Isle of Wight festival, an original by the look of it, its swirly psychedelic writing making his eyes swim as he scanned the list of names which covered half its length. Jimi Hendrix. The Doors. Joan Baez. Leonard Cohen. Sly and the Family Stone. Free. The Who. Donovan. Jethro Tull. And beneath them, in smaller and even more difficult-to-read type, the names of bands he had never seen before, or long forgotten: Fairfield Parlour, Good News, Cactus, Black Widow, Cat Mother, Richie Havens, Rosalie Sorrells, Padraig O’Riordan. Beneath it were three or four cardboard boxes full of LPs: the one nearest the door had split and spilled its contents onto the floor, and it was one of these that he had stepped on. He picked his way back gingerly to the doorway and stooped to pick up the shattered vinyl that was rattling loose inside its cardboard cover. It bore a picture of a face he recognised. He might have had a long goatee beard and a more realistic skin tone here, but there was no mistaking it, he was the same man as in the portrait downstairs. The record’s title was spelt out in block letters above the picture: Journey To the Astral Brain. Beneath it was the name of the artist: Padraig O’Riordan.

      ‘Shit,’ said Braithwaite softly. The father. He had died – when had she said, last year? – and she had obviously hoarded away everything that was precious here in this musty room, only for him to come blundering in here with his clumsy copper’s size tens. By the terms of the warrant, they were obliged to make good any damage to the property being searched. How the hell was he going to replace this?

      Maybe he wouldn’t need to. He could probably just hide it instead. He bent down and started to flick through the other records in the nearest box, figuring he could slide it in the middle somewhere, but a double-take stopped him short. Every one of them was by O’Riordan. Most were solo albums, some with a band called the Fighting Foxes. One, a ’45, was an EP called Ireland’s Dreaming, and featured tracks by four different artists, including O’Riordan and – blimey! – Van Morrison. He had obviously been quite big news in his time.

      Next to the records was another box full of yellowing press cuttings. Clearing a space in front of it and wincing at the twinges in his legs, Braithwaite squatted down and pulled out a sheet at random. He was supposed to be searching the place, after all.

      It was a report from Record Mirror in 1969. O’Riordan, the writer reckoned, was making a deserved breakthrough from the underground, where for a year or more he’s been causing quite a stir with his own hip blend of progressive blues mixed with trad folk beats and it recommended that readers try to catch him on new nationally networked TV show, ‘Time for Blackburn’, this coming Thursday. The next piece Braithwaite extracted, a review from Melody Maker in 1972, was less complimentary, dismissing his latest effort, Gardeners Swirl as a disappointment: ploddingly efficient but lacking in that sense of majestic urgency which made his early work so vital. Ten Troubadour’s Tales got even shorter shrift from Sounds in 1974: and so a bad dream ends, with a flurry of self-indulgent dirgery in 11/8 time. Right at the back of the box was an entire edition of Q from 1992. At first, Braithwaite could not see why it had been included – it dated from a good 15 years after anything else in the collection – but flicking past the cover feature on Shakespear’s Sister and a large article asking Who The Hell Alan Clarke Thought He Was, he found what he was looking for.

 

Whatever Happened To… Padraig O’Riordan?

Multi-instrumentalist Padraig O’Riordan arrived in London from his native Dublin in late 1967 at the vanguard of the folk-rock progressive movement which flowered at the turn of that decade. His 1970 single, ‘Sunshine Skylark Serendipity’, hailed by John Peel as ‘the tallest sunflower in the summer’s crop and that most ripe for plucking by any passing faerie’, enjoyed success on both sides of the Irish Sea, and the follow-up LP, ‘Beltane Braces’, earned him a two-week sojourn at the top of the hit parade and a coveted Friday slot at that year’s legendary Isle of Wight Festival, where he warmed up the crowd for Procul Harum before joining the band themselves on stage to add his distinctive fiddle to ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’, receiving an ecstatic response from the audience. While ‘Braces’ and some of his other early work stands comparison with contemporaries Jethro Tull and Tyrannosaurus Rex, O’Riordan’s star quickly faded in a self-indulgent series of follow-ups, and an ill-judged and self-financed attempt to jump on the retro-celtic bandwagon ridden so successfully in the late’70s by bands like the Dubliners with his band the Fighting Foxes, (notable for briefly featuring a young Jenna Mcmanaman on drums before she found solo success behind the microphone,) served to expunge most memories of his former glories. The death of his wife Caitlin during what was rumoured to be an experimentation with LSD aimed at producing lyrical inspiration for his fourth album, 1973’s ‘Fly On The Plain’, left him a single father to daughter Jacquelynne (who had featured in the artwork to ‘Beltane Braces’, above, as the naked child holding the sword in the middle of the stone circle). His last reported appearance in public was at a Pogues gig at the Marquee in 1987, when he was removed for heckling, prompting an incredulous Shane MacGowan to comment that, ‘He’s even more pissed than me’, testimony to a long-term drink problem that had been in evidence as early as a sodden appearance on The Old Grey Whistle Test in 1973. He is thought to be living in London.

      

      ‘Bloody hell,’ breathed Braithwaite. He had settled into a cross-legged position with his back to the door, hemmed in by boxes and completely absorbed in what he was reading. The silence was suddenly shattered by a piercing noise from directly behind him.

 

Chapter Thirty-Five

 

Nelson pulled Braithwaite’s Rover into the parking space that had played host to the massed hordes of Fleet Street the last time the police had been round to see Simon Trachtenberg, and looked up at the outside of the building without much enthusiasm. The exterior displayed the shabby indifference of all buildings where the residents bore no responsibility for the communal parts; it was also coated with a thick black dust belched out by the main road which ran along its front, though a cleaner strip about ten feet long had, for some reason, been scrubbed through the grime at ground floor level. He got out of the car, strode over to the front door avoiding the puddles and crisp packets which littered the front path, and pressed the bell for the ground floor flat, hammering on the door for good measure.

      No one came. Well, that confirmed it, then, according to the inspector. He wasn’t in. And he could be anywhere. Nelson, who had only met the guy once, in the green room of the Fame Factory studios, didn’t have a clue where to start looking. He peered up and down the road, but apart from a few pensioners waiting at the bus stop and an unattended Doberman squeezing out an epic turd on the pavement outside Costcutters, there was nothing to give him a clue. Plunging his hands into the pockets of his thick winter coat, he picked his way round to the narrow alley at the side of the house, clenched himself as tight as possible to squeeze past the bins without getting anything on his suit, and peered through the first grubby window he came to.

      He couldn’t see anything. As well as the film of black grime on the outside, the window had been draped with what appeared to be a bed sheet, a double layer considerably more opaque than net curtains. The sheet was hanging loose at the top, leaving a four or five inch gap through which he would be able to peer – if he was about a foot and a half taller. With a sigh, Nelson trudged back to the end of the alley, rolled his coat sleeves down over his hands, gripped the handles on the most sturdy looking of the bins, and carried it back to place it under the window. Pressing down on the lid to check it was firmly attached, he climbed awkwardly on top of it and pressed his eye to the glass.

      There were no lights on inside, but Trachtenberg’s choice of curtain let in more than enough daylight for the interior to be visible. He could see a stretch of red carpet, a wardrobe, and the end of a bed. And the leg of someone lying on it. They were wearing jeans, but the bare foot that stuck out from the end did not look a healthy colour.

      Nelson banged on the window with his knuckles, adding a layer of traffic grime to the filth, and the blotches of indelible ink he had been unable to remove despite ten minutes scrubbing in the gents at Scotland Yard. ‘Simon!’ he called. ‘Simon, can you hear me? It’s the police!’ The last clause was added more for the benefit of any passing pedestrians than Trachtenberg, who he was fairly certain was not in a position to listen to anyone.

      There was no reaction. Nelson sighed and, steadying himself on the bin, slipped off his jacket and wrapped it round his arm as he had seen Braithwaite do earlier. He drew back his elbow, shut his eyes and slammed it against the pane of the double glazed window with all his strength. A jarring pain ran up his arm as it bounced back, the bin overbalanced and he fell full length on the floor, bashing his head on the fence and sprawling beneath an avalanche of putrid rubbish which spilled out of the toppled bin all over his shoes and trousers.

      Vowing that if Trachtenberg wasn’t dead, he was going to get a hefty dry cleaning bill, the sergeant scrambled up and stomped his way back to the front of the building. This time, in addition to the bell for the ground floor flat, he held down all the others as well. A minute or so later, the front door creaked open and an elderly West Indian woman looked out.

      ‘Yes?’

      He held out his warrant card and pushed past her without pausing. ‘Police. I need to get into the ground floor flat. I’m looking for Simon Trachtenberg, have you seen him?’

      ‘I don’t know,’ said the woman, looking doubtfully at his filthy trousers. There was a baked bean and what looked like some grated carrot stuck to his knee.

      Nelson tried the door at the back of the hallway, but it was firmly locked. ‘This is his flat, yeah?’

      ‘I don’t know,’ said the woman, who had lived on the floor above for the past five years.

      Nelson passed a hand over his eyes, and tried one last time. ‘They were a couple. The girl died. She was on telly.’

      The woman’s face lit up in recognition. ‘Oh, Dawn’s boyfriend! Yes, he lives in there. Have you come to arrest him?’

      ‘Something like that,’ muttered Nelson, and applied his shoulder to the door. It was made of considerably less sturdy stuff than the windows, and burst open after only a few blows. He took in the wreckage of the lounge with a glance – sheets, coffee cups, cushions and ashtrays scattered all over the floor – and as soon as he had got his bearings, he headed left into the tiny hallway and on into the bedroom, the curious neighbour trailing in his wake.

      Trachtenberg was on the bed. His face was the same giveaway grey colour as his feet. He had obviously been dead for some time.

      Nelson had to go through the motions, anyway. He bent over the corpse, his ear to its blue lips, his fingers searching for a pulse in the cold neck. At the same time his eyes scanned the bedside table. There was a teaspoon lying there, its bowl blackened by the flame of the lighter beside it. On the bedspread was a syringe, the tip of its needle still red with blood.

      There was a gasp from the doorway. The woman from upstairs was standing there, both hands clamped to her mouth, her eyes wide with fear. ‘Go back to your own flat, please,’ Nelson told her firmly. ‘Don’t touch anything. I, or one of my colleagues, will be up to talk to you soon.’

      ‘Is he dead?’ she gasped, oblivious to what he was saying.

      ‘Yes, he is.’ Nelson stood up and put a hand on her trembling shoulder, attempting to shepherd her out of the room.

      ‘But how long has he been there?’ she asked, craning her head round, unable to take her eyes of the corpse.

      Nelson thought back to the chart on the investigations room wall. Sid Vicious had died on 2^nd February, while awaiting trial for the murder of Nancy Spungen. ‘Since yesterday, I’ve got a horrible feeling,’ he said, and shut the bedroom door firmly behind her.

      There was a phone on the beside table, next to the spoon and the crumpled paper packet which still bore a few crumbs of white powder. Nelson snatched up the receiver. He needed to get an ambulance crew over to confirm death as soon as possible, before ringing Whitehead to tell her just how badly they appeared to have fucked up. But something stopped him. He looked at the handset. There was a redial button beneath the nine. A few minutes wouldn’t make any difference. He pressed it.

      The phone rang for a long time before anyone picked it up.

 

Chapter Thirty-Six

 

‘Hello?’

      ‘Hello, who’s this speaking?’

      ‘Who’s this speaking?’

      ‘I asked first.’

      ‘Nelson?’

      Braithwaite nearly dropped the phone in surprise. It had taken him long enough to find the thing, buried as it was under a bin liner full of clothes, only its horribly amplified shrill peal guiding him through the morass of junk that was piled up in the box room.

      ‘Inspector?’ Where are you?

      ‘I’m exactly where you left me. Why are you calling me on this line?’

      ‘I don’t know. I’m at Simon Trachtenberg’s. I picked up his phone and did last number redial, and it was you at the end.’

      Braithwaite felt that familiar swilling sickness in the pit of his stomach again. He already knew the answer, but he had to ask. ‘Nelson, is he dead?’

      ‘Yeah. It looks like a heroin overdose.’

      Braithwaite nodded grimly, looking down at the records and cuttings he had left scattered on the floor. Things were starting to make sense now. A horrible, senseless kind of sense, but there was no doubt that the pieces were falling in to place.

      ‘Nelson, listen to me. You spent more time with Jacqui O’Riordan than any of us. How would you describe her?’

      There was a pause. ‘I don’t know, sir. She was always very helpful.’

      ‘Physically. What does she look like?’

      ‘Well, she’s…’ The sergeant didn’t know quite what to say. ‘She’s quite good-looking, I suppose, in a kooky sort of way. Always very nicely turned out.’

      ‘Precisely. Have you ever seen her without lots of make-up on?’

      ‘No.’ Now that he came to mention it, Nelson hadn’t. To be honest, he had always found O’Riordan’s style a bit much for his tastes. Not that he had ever given it as much thought as the Inspector seemed convinced that he had.

      ‘What colour’s her hair?’

      ‘I’m not sure, sir. I think she’s got it black, now, hasn’t she?’ Nelson was starting to wish he had phoned the ambulance first, after all. With Trachtenberg’s corpse beside him, it didn’t seem like the appropriate time to be discussing beauty routines.

      ‘Yes. But the first time we met her, she was blonde. And it was cut really short, she’s only started growing it out recently. Do you see?’

      Nelson didn’t, but thought it was probably best to go along with it. ‘She had red hair that time I went to talk to her about Pennington, too. I think she’s just one of those women who likes to try different things.’

      ‘Oh, I think she’s that all right,’ said Braithwaite grimly. ‘What about her tits?’

      ‘I beg your pardon, sir?’ Nelson was shocked.

      ‘She’s got pretty small tits, hasn’t she? Don’t tell me you didn’t look.’

      ‘Well, I…’ The vision of a sexual harassment suit floated through the sergeant’s mind. ‘I don’t think I…’

      ‘Look, for Christ’s sake, sergeant, just answer the question. It’s important. You’ve spent more time with her than me. She wears these outfits that show off her figure to its best, but there’s not much there to speak of, is there? If it wasn’t for all the make-up, and the clothes, and the flirting, what are you left with?’

      ‘I don’t know, sir,’ said Nelson limply.

      ‘Of course you don’t. Because it was you she did the biggest job on. How did we know about Kyle Pennington’s cash from the phone lines? How did we know about that doorway through to the lighting rig backstage being open? And who got the full effect of the “oh poor me I’ve found a body” routine?’

      Nelson, humiliated and bewildered, put up one last show of resistance. ‘It wasn’t just me,’ he protested. ‘You seemed pretty impressed with her that time we went in to look at the tapes!’

      ‘The tapes!’ shrieked Braithwaite. ‘Bloody hell, Nelson, we’ve been idiots. We’ve been letting her lead us up the garden path from the beginning! It was her who showed us the bloody tapes!’

     

‘I’ve got it,’ announced Whitehead, leaning around the doorway of the tape library and brandishing a yellow plastic container in Spall’s direction.

      The inspector gave her a grateful smile and began to rise from his aching knees. ‘Where was it?’

      ‘Locked in the bottom drawer of her desk.’ She held out the tape box so he could see the sticky label attached to it: Fame Factory: The Truth – Rough Edit.’

      ‘Brilliant. All right, guys, we’re done here.’ He turned towards constables Longford and Robbins, but Whitehead held up an admonishing finger.

      ‘Uh-ah-ah! There might be more copies. You just keep looking. You’re doing a grand job.’

      Enjoying the sighs of frustration that accompanied her exit, she strode down the corridor towards the editing suite. A surly Portmanteau employee with a beard and a T-shirt several sizes too small for him was sitting inside. ‘I’ll have a look at this one, if you don’t mind,’ she told him. He obviously did.

      ‘It’s bloody ridiculous, this,’ the man muttered, as he slid the cassette into the machine. ‘Whatever happened to freedom of the media? We’re not a bloody police state.’

      ‘Yes, you’ve made your feelings on that very clear, thanks,’ said Whitehead, with a disarming smile. ‘In fact, if you don’t stop going on about it I’m thinking of giving you a little demonstration of exactly how the police in, say, Burma deal with dissenters.’

      The man threw a filthy look in her direction but rewound the tape with no further comment. Footage from outside the auditions flashed up on the bank of screens as a time code began to count down. ‘Did you help O’Riordan put this together?’ asked Whitehead, her brow furrowed.

      ‘No, she’s been staying behind late recently and working on it herself,’ said the man brusquely. ‘She’s pretty good on the software.’

      Whitehead nodded, her attention fixed on the screen in front of her. A slow pan down the line of hopefuls waiting in a car park had zoomed in on the familiar figure of a podgy, long-haired young man in a yellow T-shirt and baggy jeans. He was belting out a song that it took her a moment to recognise as Children of the Revolution, thanks to the way that he inserted several extra syllables into the last word, turning it into something like, ‘Revvy-ol-li-yew-shun.’ Thankfully, he stopped after a single chorus and stood smiling bashfully at the camera from behind his greasy curtains of hair.

      ‘What’s your name?’ asked O’Riordan’s voice from behind the camera.

      ‘G-Man. It’s short for Gareth Morgan.’ He smiled nervously.

      ‘And how much do you want to qualify for Fame Factory?’

      ‘Oh, so much.’ Morgan’s Welsh accent conveyed his passion, but for good measure he clenched his fists and furrowed his brows in an effort to express the strength of his desire. ‘I’ll tell you how much this means to me, right? I’ve lied to my parents about where I am, right, in case they try to talk me out of it. I’ve come all the way from North Wales, and they’ve just told me I’m not even gonna get seen until after the last train has gone, because there are so many people here, right? But there’s no way I’m missing my chance, so I’m going to stay here and I don’t even care where I stay tonight: I’ll sleep in the park like a tramp if I have to.’

      ‘Really?’

      ‘Yeah.’ He nodded emphatically, but there was fear in his eyes.

      ‘We can’t have that.’

      Now the fear turned to outright panic. ‘No, no, please don’t ban me; I’ve got to audition, please!’

      O’Riordan chuckled. ‘Don’t worry; I’m not going to stop you auditioning. But we can’t have you sleeping rough. You can stay at mine. I’ve got a spare room.’

      Morgan shook his head, shocked. ‘Oh, no, I couldn’t do that.’

      ‘Oh, don’t be silly. Honestly. Even if it’s just for the sake of my conscience. I couldn’t let you sleep rough just for the sake of our programme. It would be unethical. And besides, you’d hurt my feelings if you refused.’

      A sly look came into the teenager’s eyes as they flicked up and down the camerawoman’s body, the prospects of his night in the big city improving by the second. ‘Well,’ he said liltingly. ‘I suppose… if you really want me to.’

      ‘Absolutely. Meet me out here after the end of the auditions. And – hey – don’t tell anyone else about it, yeah? I don’t want to end up putting up half the crowd.’

      ‘No, of course. You’re sure, yeah?’

      ‘I’ve never been more certain of anything.’

     

Braithwaite stood in the middle of the room breathing heavily, thoughts running higgledy-piggledy through his head. Cross-dressing. Gender-bending. She had left them a massive clue, right at the outset, and they had failed to spot it. He squatted down and tore open the bin liner nearest to the door. A man’s black suit spilled out. Single-breasted, slightly worn and shiny at the crotch, but nicely cut for a man of about six foot and slim build. Or a tall woman without much bust or hips to speak of. Jacqui O’Riordan had obviously taken after her father.

      There was something else in the bag underneath the suit. A pair of blue jeans. Baggy, the way kids were wearing them these days. The ones she had slid off Gareth Morgan’s body before wrapping and fastening a purple miniskirt, probably one from her own collection, around his hanging body.

     

Dawn Mackenzie’s head and shoulders filled the screens in the editing suite as she inhaled unselfconsciously on a cigarette. Whitehead regarded her enviously. It was so much easier to put your thoughts in order with a fag in your hand. Especially when they were racing away like hers were now.

      On the screen, the girl dissolved into giggles as she spotted the camera on her. ‘Are you filming this?’ she asked in that soft Scottish accent.

      ‘Yeah,’ came the voice of the unseen O’Riordan.

      ‘Oh, God.’ She ran her fingers through her hair. ‘I look terrible.’

      ‘You look great. Now, tell me a bit more about how it feels to have got through the first round of Fame Factory.’

      ‘It couldnae be better.’ She smiled shyly. ‘I couldnae believe it, I mean, I wasn’t even going to go in for it, but Simon, my boyfriend, brought back the advert and said we should do it. And the judges said I was through straight away, and I thought they must just be putting everyone through, but then I saw what they were like with some of the others, and I just can’t believe I was so lucky.’

      ‘But it’s doubly hard for you, isn’t it? I mean, you’re not just dealing with the pressure of the competition. You’re still trying to get over an addiction, too.’ The camera zoomed in to catch the shadow of doubt that swept across Mackenzie’s face.

      ‘Aye. Well. You just have to take each day as it comes.’

      ‘It must make it harder, though. Knowing you could just blot it all out, forget about everything for a while. The temptation must always be there.’

      The girl was looking visibly distressed now. ‘Well it… sometimes… you wonder if you could just… Look, do we have to talk about this on camera? It’s just, I don’t think people really understand how hard it is.’

      ‘Sure. Sorry.’ The camera did not budge, though O’Riordan’s voice did. It became softer, more intimate. ‘It’s just that… I do, you know.’

      Dawn looked up doubtfully. ‘Do you?’

      ‘Yeah. I’ve been there. Still struggling with it, to be honest. And I know how well you’ve done to get this far. I envy you. That’s all I’m saying. It wouldn’t be the end of the world if you let yourself have a little treat once in a while. We’re all only human, you know.’

      The girl’s eyes, in close-up now, were wide with shock. But there was something else there, too, something undeniable that the camera picked up on. A hunger. A hunger that was ready to take over the minute she let her guard down. Or someone persuaded her to.

      O’Riordan broke the spell. ‘Anyway, we can’t stand around talking all day, can we? We’ve got some serious shopping to do.’

      Dawn grinned. ‘Yeah. Yeah, I’m looking forward to this. Really looking forward to it.’

      ‘You clever bitch,’ said Whitehead quietly.

     

The heroin was in one of the cardboard boxes towards the back of the room, wrapped in a clear plastic bag. There was a hell of a lot of it: several thousand pounds worth at Braithwaite’s reckoning, probably more, since it was so much purer than most of the stuff on the streets. Next to it was a blister pack of syringes, probably one of the late O’Riordan Senior’s prescriptions, put to a use his daughter thought he would have approved of. Two of them had been removed.

     

Paul Waterhouse was sitting on the sofa in a rehearsal room, strumming an acoustic guitar and trying to look as soulful as possible, while Tina Pringle draped her arms around his shoulders and stroked his long blond hair. The scene, which Whitehead remembered from an episode of the programme, was so obviously staged for the cameras that it came as no surprise when someone off screen yelled, ‘Cut!’ and the lovers broke away from one another and from the instrument. The camera, however, continued to roll, and caught the figure of Eric Lestrade wandering across to the pair in shirtsleeves. Looking around to see whether he was observed or not, he pulled an envelope from the back pocket of his trousers and passed it across to Waterhouse, who quickly secreted it in his guitar case beneath the instrument which he was packing away. Lestrade and Pringle exchanged a few words; the woman nodded and glanced at her watch. The camera was too far away to catch what they were saying, but Waterhouse nodded his agreement, too before the couple wandered off together, hand in hand. Lestrade stood and watched them go.

     

Another bin liner yielded a bath towel embossed with the monogram of the Bellemaison Hotel. Its whiteness was sullied by thick streaks of black dirt; the sort of grime someone who went climbing in and out of windows in central London might expect to gather on their clothes.

     

Richard Golding sat behind the white grand piano in the Fame Factory rehearsal rooms, his arms folded on its top the better to display his bronzed muscles, smiling confidently into the camera.

      ‘So, you’re singing Kiss by Prince on this week’s show?’ asked the unseen O’Riordan.

      He flashed a set of pearly white teeth. ‘It’s been one of my favourite songs since I was a kid. I think he’s such an amazing artist.’

      ‘And you’ve drawn the short straw and you’re going to be the last to perform. Does that bother you?’

      He shook his immaculately coiffured head. ‘Not a bit. It just means my performance will be the freshest in the audience’s mind when they’re voting. Mark my words, people are going to remember what I do tonight.’

     

Another bag. A pair of black leather gloves. A crowbar. Two spare shotgun cartridges, tucked away just in case they were needed.

     

Samantha Woodside stood in the rehearsal room in front of a lyric book on a music stand. Trying to get one of the high notes in Reach For The Stars. Failing. Eric Lestrade came into shot, stood next to her, pointed to the book, put his hand on his diaphragm. ‘Can you show me?’ she pouted, all kittenish eyes and cleavage. Clearly uncomfortable, he placed his hand gingerly on her chest and she clamped both her own over it, never once taking her eyes off his face.

      ‘Try it again,’ he mumbled and, blushing, broke free and made his way back to the piano. She watched him go with a smile of triumph on her face.

     

The Sim card was sitting on top of one of the cardboard boxes along with a mobile phone. Braithwaite knew without checking that it would be a pay-as-you-go model, unregistered, untraceable. And that it had a fatal invitation stored in its sent messages folder.

      He might as well see what else was on there. He flicked it on, and the service provider’s logo swam across the screen as the handset emitted the familiar reassuring set of major chords. When the screen cleared, he pressed 1-2-1 and clamped the handset to his ear.

      ‘You have one – saved – message,’ the electronic lady told him, before an all-too-familiar voice took over.

      ‘Jacques, it’s Kyle. I’m back. The break’s done me fuck all good, I don’t know why I let you talk me into it. Waste of bloody time and money, and, then, can you believe it, when I said I wanted to come home early, the bastards made me pay a fortune for a new ticket! Fucking daylight robbery. I’ll need you to countersign it on expenses. Anyway, that’s not why I’m calling, I’m desperate for a toot, have you got any? Pete’s let me down, the useless prick. But you’ve probably buggered off out of London and all. Fucking hell. I think I’ll swing by the office, I’m sure I left some gear there. Look, call me if you get this, will you?’

     

At last came the money shot: Kyle Pennington’s body, spread out on the desk at Portmanteau in a room not twenty feet from the edit suite where she was sitting. The camera panned slowly up his body from the feet, still in their holiday plimsolls, up the jeans and on to the jagged hole in his torso in a sweep familiar to her from the tape she already had under lock and key back at Scotland Yard. But there was a difference. In this version, the blood was still pumping, oozing out of the wreckage of his chest and flowing over the desktop and down onto the floor of the office. The lungs she could see through the pink crust of his ribcage were still desperately inflating and deflating, sending jets of blood fountaining out from his gaping mouth and nostrils. As the camera moved in for a close-up of his twisted, horrified face, a gobbet of blood landed on its lens, splashing its giant, vivid redness across the bank of screens in front of her. She recoiled from them in illogical horror. Beside her, the editor had fallen silent, his eyes wide, transfixed in horror. ‘His eyes are still open,’ he said in a shaky voice. ‘I can see his eyes. His eyes are still open!’

      They both jumped as Whitehead’s mobile rang.

 

Chapter Thirty-Seven

 

‘Whitehead speaking?’ She sounded shaken.

      ‘It’s Jacqui O’Riordan, Claire. It was her all the time.’

      ‘I know.’ She couldn’t tear her eyes away from the screen, which was now showing a loving, indulgent close-up of Kyle Pennington’s terrified eyes as they glazed over for the last time. A few miles across London, Braithwaite was standing over the last plastic bag in the room. Torn open, it revealed an overcoat, thick jumper and jeans, all of them stained with thick dried blood. A vicious, ten-inch carving knife lay on top of them, its blade and handle coated with gore.

      ‘Claire, she’s already killed Simon Trachtenberg and Chris Farlowe, though I doubt we’ll ever find his body. He was supposed to be Richey Manic. Trachtenberg’s Sid Vicious. She’s due two more today, Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens. Where is she, Claire? We have to find her!’

      Whitehead turned to the man by her side. ‘Where’s Jacqui O’Riordan?’ she said sharply. ‘She’s out filming today. I need to know where she is.’

      He didn’t even hear her. His eyes were fixed on the screens. She slammed her fist down on the control panel, hitting enough random buttons to ensure that the carnage was wiped from the monitors, if not from either of their minds. ‘Tell me where Jacqui O’Riordan is!’ she yelled.

      ‘I… I don’t know. She’s out doing something for Tim and Douggie’s show, I think.’

      ‘I know that. Christ. Hang on, Mike.’ With the phone to her ear, Whitehead ran out of the edit suite and up the corridor into the open plan office. ‘Where’s Jacqui O’Riordan?’ she demanded of the dozen or so surly faces which turned in her direction. ‘Come on, it’s important!’

      ‘Why, so that you can go and hassle her as well?’ asked Sushi Westerbridge, with a pout.

      ‘So we can stop anyone else being killed!’ bellowed the chief superintendent, at a volume that nearly deafened Braithwaite at the other end of the line.

      Westerbridge looked shaken. ‘She’s filming for Tim and Douggie’s show. They’re in Croydon.’

      ‘Where?’

      ‘At the airfield. They’re doing the stunt for this week’s Douggie’s Dares. Looping the loop in an aeroplane.’

      ‘Mike, did you hear that?’ said Whitehead desperately into the phone. ‘Did you hear, Mike? Are you there?’

      The line was dead.

     

Braithwaite took the stairs two at a time and burst out through the swinging front door into bright winter sunshine. He looked up and down Glamring Avenue. Parked cars lined each side of the street. None of them were his. His was a few miles away, parked outside Simon Trachtenberg’s house, and the keys were in Nelson’s pocket.

      About twenty houses away, a Ford Focus was double-parked with its engine still running. A young woman carrying a surfeit of Sainsbury’s bags was just disappearing behind a nearby hedge. Householders in this area had been advised not to leave their cars running while they unloaded their shopping, after a series of opportunistic thefts the previous summer. He knew this because it was he who had drafted the leaflet that had been put through their doors. Thankfully, it looked like she hadn’t bothered to read it.

      Braithwaite sprinted towards the car, slamming the boot on the remaining bags as he passed its rear end. ‘Police!’ he yelled to the startled face he could see in the periphery of his vision. ‘I need to commandeer your vehicle!’ Faintly aware that it had taken him twenty-five years in the force to get round to doing anything even approaching this impressive, he leapt into the driver’s seat and slammed both the door and the accelerator.

      Brixton to Croydon Airfield. He could have done it in twenty minutes, if he had his own car and as long as he had remembered to pack the blue light in the glove pocket. Still, the Focus showed a good turn of speed as he accelerated down Glamring Avenue and swung right into Brixton Hill, to the evident and vocal displeasure of a bus driver who appeared to be under the impression that he had the right of way. He ought to be able to cover the ground in half an hour if he took the back routes, just so long as nothing else delayed him.

      He had got nearly as far as the junction with Streatham High Road before he noticed the baby in the back seat.

     

‘Nelson?’

      ‘Yes, ma’am.’

      ‘Where are you?’

      The sergeant gulped. It looked like he was going to be the one who got to break the bad news to the chief superintendent after all.

      ‘I’m, er, at Simon Trachtenberg’s house, ma’am.’ He stood aside to let the ambulance men past him in the narrow hallway. They were pushing a collapsible trolley with a body bag laid out ready on top of it. ‘I think it’s possible that we may have a problem.’

      ‘You’re not wrong. Nelson, listen to me,’ said Whitehead, an unfamiliar note of urgency in her voice. ‘Brathwaite’s on his way to Croydon. You’ve got to go after him.’

      ‘Pardon?’ asked Nelson. His heart sank. She must be talking about his reassignment. What the hell had he done to deserve Croydon?

      ‘Look, I can’t tell you everything right now,’ gasped Whitehead, her voice full of panic. ‘He’s on his way to Croydon Airfield. For God’s sake stop him before he does something stupid!’

     

The car screeched to a halt at the end of Glamring Street, where a small crowd had gathered. Braithwaite leaped out, pulled open the back door and began to scrabble desperately with the clasps on the child seat. ‘I’m sorry,’ he gasped. ‘I’m really, really sorry, I just didn’t see him there.’ He gave up on the seat and straightened up just in time to see a fist barrelling out of the depths of a baggy cardigan sleeve and into his face.

      ‘Ah. Right. I see,’ he said, when the little glimmery lights had stopped swimming in his field of vision enough for him to be able to look up at the woman who towered over him from his prone position on the pavement. She had flicked open the clasps on the child seat with ease and was now clutching the baby – which, it had to be said, looked none the worse for its unscheduled outing – to her breast, staring down at him imperiously.

      ‘She,’ she said furiously, ‘is a little GIRL.’

      ‘Oh. Good,’ he said vaguely as he scrambled to his feet. The crowd watched with interest. It was fairly unusual to see a mother lay out a policeman with one punch in the middle of the day, even in Brixton. ‘Look, anyway, you’ve got her back now, and I’m terribly sorry, but I really am going to have to take your car.’ He flashed his warrant badge and an apologetic smile which was slightly marred by the blood running down his teeth, jumped back into the Focus and drove off again. He just hoped he wasn’t too late already.

     

Tim Campbell grasped the yoke firmly with both hands, feeling the power of the plane judder through his body. He stared intently at the horizon ahead of him and, at a nod from the pilot, flicked the switch on the instrument panel and assumed control of the plane.

      ‘That’s it, nicely done,’ said the man next to him. Both of them were staring so intently at the altimeter in front of them that they failed to notice Jacqui O’Riordan slide out of her seat behind them.

      ‘Bring her up just a couple of inches. That’s perfect,’ said the pilot. ‘Can you see the runway lights down there? Try to keep the nose lined up with the centre of them.’

      A few feet behind them, O’Riordan crept forward, pulling an object from her pocket. With an apologetic glance towards Douggie McGovern, she slipped her spare hand onto the handle of the cabin door, opened it and stepped outside.

      ‘I don’t see why we have to do this,’ piped up McGovern, watching her leave the simulator and walk off across the floor of the hangar, punching a number into her mobile phone as she went. ‘I mean, all we’re going to be doing in the air is the stunt stuff. You’re going to do the take-offs and landings, innit?’

      Captain Graeme Webb, who, in 15 years as a flying instructor, had never wanted to push anyone out of a plane quite as much as he did McGovern and his pal Campbell, passed a weary hand across his eyes. ‘I’m afraid you have to have the full briefing before I can let you in the air. Our bosses have been a bit funny about pupils who want to skip the landing routine ever since nine-eleven.’

      ‘Whatever.’ McGovern sighed theatrically. In front of him, Campbell checked his airspeed indicator, dipped the nose of the aircraft and slid back the throttle, his eyes fixed on the pixellated runway below.

      Clive Bonham, the cameraman, was standing outside the hangar, smoking. ‘Oh, you’re there; I was just about to call you,’ said O’Riordan, putting the phone back in her pocket. ‘I think they’ll be ready in about ten minutes, so we might as well go and get set up.’

      ‘Right you are,’ grunted Bonham, crushing his cigarette beneath his Doctor Marten and setting off across the hangar with the producer. ‘And you’re sure you want to do the steadicam stuff on board?’ he said dubiously.

      O’Riordan sighed. ‘Yes. It’ll be fine. I have used one before, you know.’

      ‘Yeah, I know, it’s just…’ The pair emerged into the bright daylight of the airfield and started to walk towards their van which was parked nearby, a huge Portmanteau logo splashed across its side. ‘We only get one go at this, don’t we?’

      ‘All the more reason why you should be on the ground capturing the really spectacular stunt footage.’ O’Riordan slid open the side door of the van, revealing large crates and fixed shelves of equipment inside. ‘Look, the interior stuff is a piece of piss. I’ll just lock the camera off and as long as we get a couple of decent shots of the ground going up over their heads we can dub on the ‘wooahs’ and the sound of them throwing up later.’

      ‘OK,’ said the cameraman, but he still sounded doubtful.

      She turned to him and laid a hand on his arm. ‘Look, Clive, next time we do anything like this, I promise you’ll get to be the one who goes up in the plane.’ She grinned.

      ‘It’s not that, it’s just…’ he spluttered for a second, and then returned her smile. ‘Oh, all right. As long as you promise. I’ll take one of those tripods and head down to the end of the runway to set up.’ He flipped open the lid of a black crate half the size of a coffin and pulled out several pieces of equipment. ‘Just make sure you remember to take the lens cap off, yeah?’

      He dodged an affectionate boot in the arse as he walked off up the tarmac. She was a nice girl, O’Riordan. Not much of a looker, and Christ knows why she had to doll herself up like that all the time, but he didn’t mind her. She knew her way round a camera, which was more than could be said for a lot of producers in the business.

      Back at the van, Jacqui gripped the edge of the crate and stared down into the empty blackness of its interior, unseeing. Her work was almost done. Nine down, three to go. Then she would have reached her goal, the dirty dozen, the 12 steps her father had never quite been able to master in his drink-sodden lifetime, and he could finally rest in peace, free-jammed into his own personal rock’n’roll hall of fame by an all-star backing band. And she would never hear his voice again.

      She could hear a car engine approaching. She turned around and watched with no surprise as a silver Ford Focus sped along the access road at the edge of the airfield at something over eighty miles an hour. As it drew level with the Portmanteau van parked by the side of the runway where the little blue and white plane stood waiting, there was a screech of brakes and the driver slammed the protesting vehicle into reverse. Jacqui watched dispassionately as he executed a clumsy three-point turn and then drove as fast as he could at a set of padlocked gates in the chain link fence. They burst open in exactly the manner the driver had hoped for, but the impact brought the car to a sudden halt and his head into collision with the airbag, which suddenly bloomed from the steering wheel in a manner his study of similar manoeuvres on film and television had not led him to expect.

      This did not delay events for long, however. Pausing only for the airbags to deflate, the car limped forward, sloughing off its front bumper and one of its wing mirrors as it came, and pulled up beside the Portmanteau van. A shambolic figure half-climbed, half-fell out of its driver’s seat.

      ‘Inspector Braithwaite. How nice of you to join us.’

      He looked rather different to the last time she had seen him in the interview room at Scotland Yard. For one thing, his nose was pointing in an entirely new direction, although this did not appear to be in any way impeding the impressive flow of blood from his nostrils. His chin and shirtfront were already soaked in the stuff. The skin around his left eye was so livid and puffed-up that he could barely open it, and by the look of his suit, he had spent some time rolling around in the road before deciding to join her.

      ‘Jacqui, it’s over,’ he said in a shaky voice. ‘We know it was you.’

      ‘Me?’ she smiled, giving him the full effect of her carefully-volumised little-girl eyelashes. ‘But how could it be me? I’m the nice one, remember? The one that everyone trusted. The one that was different to all those cold-hearted media bastards. The one that was everyone’s friend!’

      He wobbled slightly, and had to reach out for the roof of the car to keep himself upright, though he did not for a second take his eyes off the woman in front of him. ‘I’ve been at your house, Jacqui, I’ve seen everything that you kept. I know all about your father.’

      ‘Do you?’ she spat, all softness abruptly disappearing from her eyes. ‘Do you know all about him? Or do you just know about the sad, pisshead old man who spent thirty years going on about his past glories to anyone who would listen, and most of them didn’t believe him and laughed behind his back about the auld fella down the pub who said he once played guitar with Bob Dylan?’ The soft Irish lilt that had always been present in her voice came to the fore as her anger overwhelmed her. ‘You saw what we kept, did you? Did you see any of his instruments? Did you see his guitars?’

      ‘N- no,’ said Braithwaite, who was scanning O’Riordan’s pastel-blue dress to see if she could conceivably have a weapon hidden anywhere in it.

      ‘No, well you wouldn’t have done. He had to pawn them. Every last one of them. He played every instrument on Journey to the Astral Brain, every single one, and for the last ten years of his life he didn’t even have a guitar in the house! How do you think that made him feel?’

      ‘I don’t know, Jacqui.’ He spoke as calmingly as he could as he began to edge round the bonnet towards her. ‘I know he didn’t get the recognition he deserved, and I know you looked after him when he was ill, and you’re trying to look after his memory now, but this isn’t the way, Jacqui. This isn’t the way. It’s time to stop the killing.’

      She kept those wild eyes fixed on him for one more moment, but then the fire seemed to go out of her, and she slumped down onto the step of the open van, her arms dropping back to support herself. ‘Stop the killing?’ she whispered almost inaudibly.

      His shoulders dropped in relief as he moved forward to her. ‘Yes, Jacqui.’

      She nodded. ‘All right. Yes.’ He reached her and put a reassuring hand on her shoulder, just as her hand fastened around the folded tripod she had been groping for in the van’s interior and she brought it round and smashed it into the side of his already wrecked face. Braithwaite gave a grunt and slumped to the ground.

      ‘I’ll just have one for the road, though,’ she told his motionless body.

 

Chapter Thirty-Eight

 

‘So, essentially I’ll be in overall control of the aircraft at all times, until I assign power over to the co-pilot controls and you take over for the aerobatic manoeuvre. It is imperative that you listen to me at all times and do exactly as I say. Are we clear?’

      McGovern nodded meekly. Webb was pleased to see that his bravado was evaporating as they left the hangar and approached the real-life aeroplane.

      ‘Don’t forget you’re supposed to be afraid of heights,’ chipped in Campbell, who was a few paces behind them.

      ‘Yeah, all right, I’ve read the script,’ said McGovern brusquely. The plane looked remarkably small and fragile close-up. Jacqui O’Riordan’s head was level with the roof as she stood beside it, although to be fair she was over six feet tall.

      ‘Here, let me give you a hand,’ said Webb, darting forward to help the producer with the equipment crate she was struggling to manoeuvre into the hatch at the back of the plane. He sagged at the unexpected weight. ‘Blimey, what have you got in here?’

      ‘It’s just equipment I’ll need for the filming during the flight,’ said O’Riordan, slamming down a protective hand on the lid of the crate. ‘Is it a problem?’

      ‘No, no, it’s fine,’ Webb assured her, taking the strain as he heaved the crate into the cramped space behind the seats. ‘These Pipers are actually surprisingly roomy in the back. They use them a lot for private charters, so there’s plenty of luggage space built in. I’ll have to strap it in so it doesn’t go flying about the cabin during the flight. Do you need anything out of it first?’

      ‘No, you’re all right.’ O’Riordan smiled as she stood aside to let the instructor fasten the webbing straps over the top of the equipment case. ‘How are you feeling?’ she asked the two young men who were peering dubiously into the cramped cockpit.

      ‘I’m good,’ said Campbell, beaming. ‘It’s Douggie who’s going first. He’s shitting his pants.’

      ‘That’s good,’ said O’Riordan absently. She shielded her eyes and scanned the airfield nervously. Apart from Bonham with his tripod and camera at the end of the runway, who gave her a quick thumbs-up as he saw her looking in his direction, there was no one to be seen.

      ‘So, you’re gonna, like, pretend that it’s us doing all the flying, aren’t you?’ asked McGovern. ‘I mean, with the two sets of controls and that, people won’t be able to tell we’re not actually controlling the plane, will they?’

      ‘I shouldn’t think so.’ O’Riordan turned and flashed him a reassuring smile. ‘Don’t worry, all eyes will be on you two. I’ll make sure of that.’

      ‘Good.’ McGovern resumed his nervous inspection of the wings. Campbell chuckled nastily behind him.

      ‘Right, well, if everyone’s ready?’ beamed Webb, emerging from the other side of the aircraft where he had been checking on something he actually understood.

      ‘Sure,’ said O’Riordan, with a final glance towards the main gates of the airfield. ‘Let’s get going as quick as we can, yeah? I want to … er, get up there while this light’s good.’

      The four of them clambered on board the plane and Webb began the pre-flight procedures.

     

As Nelson eased Braithwaite’s Rover into the airfield approach road – he had missed the junction the first time round and had to do a U-turn on the dual carriageway, much to the displeasure of the rest of the traffic on the A27 – a small blue and white aeroplane lifted off from the runway and soared across the corner of his windscreen and out of sight. He shifted his rear view mirror to catch it as it dwindled into the clear blue sky, as a result of which he completely failed to notice the mangled remains of two gates hanging from a gap in the chain link fence and drove all the way up to the main entrance of the airfield where an elderly security guard was sitting in a booth reading the Daily Express.

      ‘All right, mate?’ said Nelson with a nod and a flash of his warrant card. ‘Has anyone come through here in the last half hour or so?’

      The man shook his head lugubriously. ‘Only ones we got in today are this lot filming for the telly. They been here since half nine this morning.’

      ‘Right.’ He had succeeded in getting here ahead of Braithwaite, anyway. So what next? He glanced past the security barrier at the hangars and the empty runway beyond. ‘Can I go in and have a word with them?’

      The guard shook his jowls once more. ‘Not unless you’ve got wings, you can’t.’

      ‘You mean…?’

      He stretched a leisurely finger out towards the ceiling of his booth. ‘Took off just before you got here. Probably saw ’em as you came in.’

      ‘Shit.’ Nelson glanced at his watch. Just after half past one. He would have got here in time if it hadn’t been for that traffic jam by the turn-off for Ikea. He had had a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach ever since Whitehead mentioned the word ‘airfield.’ Stepping away from the booth and shielding his eyes with his hand, he began to scan the sky. The plane was still visible. It had banked to the left and appeared to be circling the airfield. Somehow, he had to get a message to the pilot before it was too late. ‘I need to get to the control tower,’ he told the guard urgently.

      The man’s face twitched and convulsed. With infinite slowness, a smile began to creep across its pockmarked landscape. ‘Oh yeah?’ he said in amused tones. ‘How you gonna do that then?’

      ‘What do you mean?’ Nelson craned his neck to watch the plane as it passed overhead.

      The guard’s finger extended once again and roamed across the horizon. ‘Can you see a control tower here?’

      Nelson shot an irritable glance at the ramshackle collection of buildings beyond the security barrier. ‘How do you contact the pilots once they’re in the air, then?’

      ‘You’re not at Heathrow, you know!’ chuckled the guard, who had not yet finished mining this rich seam of comedy.

      Nelson reached through the open hatch on the security booth and took a handful of the guard’s nylon uniform, pulling him forward until his jowls were splayed pleasingly against the inside of the glass and the smile had been crushed off his face. ‘I’ll ask you once more, nicely, and then I’ll pull you straight through this window. How do I get a message to the pilot of that plane?’

      ‘Oo eed um go to va voffony zed!’ exclaimed the guard, misting up the glass. Nelson slackened his grip slightly. ‘You need to go to the telephony shed,’ the man repeated. ‘Over there.’ He pointed to a Portakabin overlooking the runway a couple of hundred yards away.

      ‘Right. Open the gate.’ Nelson released the man’s jacket, sending him plummeting back into his chair, and strode over to the car.

      ‘You have to sign in!’ the guard protested, waving a ring-binder in his direction.

      ‘Do I bollocks!’ spat Nelson through gritted teeth, and revved his engine.

      The guard, who was a fairly good judge of the quickest route towards a quiet life for himself, put a hand on the button which operated the barrier. But he paused as he glanced back down the access road behind the Rover. ‘What about all them?’ he objected. ‘Are they with you?’

      Nelson twisted the rear view mirror back into position. Behind him, lights on and sirens blazing, three squad cars summoned from the Croydon constabulary at the express and urgent orders of chief superintendent Whitehead of the Metropolitan Police were hurtling up the access road to the airfield. The cavalry was coming. And it was only about ten minutes too late.

     

‘OK, we’re now cruising at a height of three and a half thousand feet. How’s everyone feeling?’ Graeme Webb turned and aimed an encouraging grin in the direction of the passengers behind him. Tim Campbell gave a weak smile in return. For all he had been winding Douggie up, he was now the one feeling distinctly uneasy. The plane was juddering about like a leaf in the wind, and the countryside below looked not just a long way away but very hard indeed. It was difficult enough dealing with being suspended this far above it in the capable hands of Webb, who knew what he was doing, but he was about to hand over the controls to Douggie, who not only didn’t, but was also going to attempt to do it upside down. The thought even crossed Campbell’s mind that this might not be worth it even for the sake of appearing on TV, but he quickly dismissed this heresy.

      ‘Come on, Tim, look like you’re enjoying yourself,’ yelled O’Riordan over the roar of the engines. He turned and found himself looking straight into the lens of her camera, and his well-practised smile flicked on like a light bulb.

      ‘This is amazing!’ he enthused for the audience’s benefit. ‘Woo-hoo! It feels so incredible to be this high up, with everything laid out below us. Hey, Douggie, I can see your house from he –  what the fuck was that?’ he clutched at the edges of his seat, his expression switching to a rather more authentic one of pure horror.

      ‘What’s the problem?’ yelled Webb over his shoulder.

      ‘I just heard a noise! What was it?’ yelped Campbell.

      ‘I didn’t hear anything,’ bellowed O’Riordan next to him.

      ‘It’s nothing to worry about,’ Webb told him, in as reassuring a yell as he could manage. ‘The outside panels make all sorts of weird noises with the changes in air pressure. Exactly the same thing happens on commercial flights, only the plane’s so big and so well padded on the inside you don’t notice.’

      Campbell looked unconvinced. McGovern, who was enjoying the flight and the extra security a pair of co-pilot’s headphones gave him, turned in his seat and grinned. ‘You scared, Timmy boy?’

      ‘No,’ Campbell shot back. ‘I’m not the one who’s scared of heights.’

      ‘It’s not so bad once you’re up here,’ yelled McGovern, when he was sure the camera was on him. ‘In fact, right now it’s depths that are bothering me!’ He paused for a few seconds. ‘Did you get that?’

      ‘Yeah, I got it,’ nodded O’Riordan, who hadn’t even bothered to switch the camera on.

      ‘There it is again!’ yelped Campbell. He twisted round in his seat and attempted to squint out of the window at the tail of the aeroplane. ‘It’s coming from the back of the plane! I’m sure I heard something!’

      ‘Everything’s fine, Tim,’ Webb reassured him, glancing across all the instruments. ‘Try to relax.’

      ‘Listen, I swear I can hear something. A banging.’ Campbell was straining against his seatbelt, his face pressed up against the glass. ‘Are you sure there’s not something wrong with the tail?’

      ‘I checked everything before we came out, Tim,’ said Webb. He hated flights like this. If the kid carried on, there was no way he was letting either of them take the controls. He would turn the plane round and take it down, and sod their television programme.

      McGovern was looking worried now, too. ‘Are you serious, mate? Can you really hear something?’

      Campbell nodded frantically. ‘I swear!’

      ‘Maybe we should go down and check,’ the co-pilot suggested.

      Webb shook his head. ‘There really isn’t any point. This plane is in absolutely tip-top condition.’

      ‘There it is again!’ yelped Campbell behind him. He twisted round 270 degrees and looked back into the luggage well. ‘Hang on, it’s coming from in there.’ He looked suspiciously at O’Riordan, who was packing her camera away into its case. ‘What have you got in that crate?’

      O’Riordan said something inaudible without bothering to look up. Campbell leaned across the back of the seats and began to fiddle with the straps holding the plastic crate in its place. ‘What did you say?’

      ‘I said, no one ever remembers the Big Bopper,’ the producer announced, pulling a large hunting knife from her camera bag.

      ‘What?’ bellowed Webb over his shoulder.

      ‘Everyone always remembers Buddy Holly,’ she said, as chattily as if she was imparting information at her local pub quiz. ‘And everyone knows about Ritchie Valens flipping a coin for the spare seat because they’ve seen La Bamba. But no one ever remembers the third passenger on the plane, even though he was just as famous as they were at the time.’

      ‘What are you talking about?’ demanded Campbell. He had managed to undo one of the webbing straps on the crate, from which noises were now undeniably emerging.

      ‘I’m talking about the Big Bopper!’ yelled O’Riordan over the rushing noise of the plane, and plunged the knife into Campbell’s side right up to the hilt.

     

Braithwaite opened his eyes, and immediately assumed that he hadn’t. Everything was black, and the only noise he could hear was a roaring which seemed to come from all directions at once. There was a rhythmic thumping as well, but he suspected that was only his head, which hurt so much it felt like bits of it might not be there any more. Unless – and this was a thought – he had been accidentally assigned to the Buddhist afterlife and was back in the womb awaiting rebirth as something appropriate. Wherever he was, it certainly felt constricted enough. As an experiment, he tried moving his legs, but they were bent up in front of him and he only succeeded in kneeing himself on his broken nose, which set off sufficient paroxysms of pain to convince him that Nirvana was nowhere nearby.

      OK. The womb it wasn’t, but he was definitely lying in a foetal position. When the worst of the agony had dispelled, he attempted to stretch his legs out straight, but his feet were jammed against something solid. His head proved equally immovable, although the way it currently felt, he was quite surprised to find it still attached to his body at all. A pressure was bearing down on his left shoulder, preventing him from shifting his torso more than a couple of inches to either side, and his arms were pinioned beneath him. Something very hard and uncomfortable was digging into his ribs, too, but frankly, that was the least of his problems.

      He lay still for a moment, attempting to marshal his energies and ignore the thumping pain in his head, which threatened to flood him with unconsciousness again if he would only surrender to it. His first terrifying thought was that he had been buried alive, but there was no way that six feet of earth could conduct this much noise, or, unless it was slap-bang on top of the San Andreas fault line, vibrate at such a sickening frequency. He was in some kind of vehicle. The answer came to him in a wave of relief: she must have put him in the van after she knocked him out. Which meant she must be driving him somewhere, which meant that for the moment, at least, Tim Campbell and Douggie McGovern were safe.

      The relief he felt at this realisation was rather tempered by the fact that he self-evidently wasn’t. Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens might have got away with their lives thanks to his timely – if not entirely as planned – intervention, but he was now Jacqui O’Riordan’s prisoner, and who knew what she was planning to do with him? Every day that passed brought more commemoration possibilities for the imaginative lunatic: for all he knew, they were on their way to some secret hideout where she was planning to choke him to death on chicken sandwiches, or keep him prisoner on a toilet, force-feeding him burgers until he exploded. He would never get to see Olivia grow up, never see her throw a teenage strop and tell him she hated him, never sit awake at two in the morning worrying about where she was, or have the opportunity to take an instant dislike to any boys she brought home to meet him. He wanted to do all that, and so much more. But instead, he was going to die at the hands of a psychotic transvestite obsessed with music she was too young even to remember the first time around, and worst of all, because it was in the line of duty, Michael bloody Winner would probably insist on doing the eulogy at his funeral.

      He had to get out of… wherever he was. He began to squirm and wriggle his limbs as best he could in the tiny space that was available, heaving his knees upwards and slamming them into the surface a few inches above them. It seemed to yield slightly – he even thought he saw a sliver of daylight appear somewhere down near where he thought his feet might be – but it sprang back as if on elastic. All he achieved was to make whatever it was that was trapped underneath him dig into his side all the harder.

      Well, that at least should be sortable. He attempted to roll his body backwards and shift his right arm from underneath himself, but there wasn’t enough room to move even an inch. It felt as if his left elbow might have a few inches grace, however, and he found that if he stretched out his fingers, he could grab hold of the lapel of his jacket, which seemed to be twisted beneath him. There it was. Now, if he just tugged gently at that, he might be able to – oh, send spasms of pain through his right-hand side, bringing the taste of bile to his throat and a roaring rush of blood to his head which threatened to pitch him straight back into unconsciousness. Well, that went well.

      He lay still for a few moments, listening to his own rasping breaths sending clammy gusts of condensation rushing around the confined space between his face and his knees. Then, figuring that new and exciting self-inflicted injuries at least distracted him from the frankly tedious throbbing in his head, he tried again, arching his back in an attempt to take some of the pressure off the material that was caught underneath him. This time, the hard object in his jacket pocket slid out with only the loss of a couple of inches of skin from his ribs, and he settled back down into his foetal position, satisfied that he had managed to reduce his level of discomfort by, ooh, at least two per cent.

      So what was it that had been bugging him? He explored the lump in the material with his fingertips. It was about three inches long and a couple of centimetres wide, too small to be his phone (worse luck) and the wrong shape for his keys, or the loose change with which he regularly spoiled the line of his suit. What the hell was it? He managed to worm his index finger into the pocket’s interior and touched warm plastic. The answer came to him in a sudden bright flash of memory from that morning, which felt like a century ago: Olivia’s penknife. God bless the child for her rule-breaking. He wouldn’t have her any other way. The thing had 25 tools on it, for God’s sake. There must be one that could help him to get out of here.

      Attempting to open the blades on a penknife one-handed, while bleeding, concussed and stuffed in an agonising foetal position inside a crate in complete darkness, is an experience you really have to try yourself to fully appreciate, but it is probably true to say that the next couple of minutes were as stressful for Braithwaite as they were for Tim Campbell who, although neither of them were aware of the fact, was sitting about twelve inches away from him. It is also, however, probably safe to say that Braithwaite’s disappointment upon finally managing to extend one of the knife’s 25 essential everyday tools to its full length and then discovering through fingertip exploration that the instrument in question was the corkscrew, was probably not quite as great as that of Campbell at almost exactly the same moment, when he succeeded in undoing one of the two straps holding down the lid of the equipment crate only to realise that there was a very large, extremely sharp and undeniably authentic knife blade buried deep in his right kidney.

      ‘What the fuck have you done?’ screamed Campbell, as a glut of blood began to ooze out through his carefully selected Von Dutch t-shirt and run down onto the leatherette seat.

      ‘What’s going on back there?’ bellowed Graeme Webb, who decided at that moment that he was never going to take part in anything involving TV people ever again.

      He was right. Jacqui O’Riordan yanked the knife out of Campbell’s side, making a nasty slithering sound and sending a jet of fresh blood spraying all over the front of her dress, unclipped her safety belt, leaned forward and plunged it into Webb’s neck, severing his spinal column and carotid artery and killing him instantly.

      There is a very good reason why you should always obey the pilot’s orders to keep your seatbelt fastened, as O’Riordan quickly discovered. If he should suddenly slump forward onto the controls, sending the plane nose-diving several hundred feet towards the ground, you are going to find yourself heading just as suddenly upwards in a manner which the laws of gravity would not lead you to expect. The other big danger – as the stewardesses are always careful to point out in the safety briefing if anyone could be bothered to listen – comes from unsecured luggage. If, for instance, a large plastic crate is not properly secured, it is likely to be thrown about inside the cabin and spill its contents.

      Which is why Braithwaite found himself erupting out of the equipment crate, a corkscrew blade clamped in his outstretched hand, and heading very rapidly towards the roof of the plane and an equally surprised looking Jacqui O’Riordan who was pinned there. He had a brief impression of clouds and fields at unexpected angles outside the aircraft’s windows, before his hand plunged into something warm and wet with an unpleasant squelching noise, his already traumatised head connected with the unyielding panels of the aeroplane roof, and he fell swiftly, and not altogether ungratefully, back into unconsciousness.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

 

‘In her eye?’

      Sushi Westerbridge nodded, wiping a dribble of soy sauce from her chin with a tissue. ‘That’s what Clive said. No one knows exactly what happened, but she must have been fighting with that policeman, you know, the nice one, and he had a corkscrew for some reason, and he stuck it in her eye and it went through to her brain and killed her.’ She smiled with relish, and scooped up another forkful of noodles, refusing to let the gruesome imagery put her off her lunch.

      ‘Gosh.’ Milly Jenkins sat back and spun thoughtfully from side to side on her swivel chair. ‘And then Douggie managed to get the plane back down all by himself?’

      She nodded. ‘Well, he’d had the training, hadn’t he? Although Clive said he did overshoot the end of the runway. Nearly hit him and that other policeman, the black one, he said. He had to pull the camera out of the way.’

      ‘So he did get some footage?’ asked Jenkins, perking up.

      ‘Oh yeah.’ With a last regretful look into the noodle box’s now empty interior, Westerbridge hurled it into the bin by her desk. ‘Apparently, the plane was spinning around for ages before he got it under control. At first they thought Douggie had just got a bit carried away with the stunts and stuff.’

      ‘And Tim’s OK?’

      ‘Yeah, he had surgery this afternoon and they reckon he’ll be well enough to record a piece for this week’s show from the hospital. I wonder if we could get him in a wheelchair, with Douggie pushing it? That would be good. They could have races with the other patients.’ She pulled a block of Post-it notes towards her and jotted this brilliant idea down before she could forget it.

      Jenkins looked across the office towards O’Riordan’s bare desk. Her computer and all her personal items had been removed by Whitehead’s team earlier that afternoon. ‘I just can’t believe Jacqui would kill all those people,’ she said, in an awestruck voice. ‘She was so nice to me when I started.’

      Westerbridge wrinkled her nose. ‘Yeah. She always stuck up for me with Kyle, too. I guess she just sort of went off the rails when her dad died. You weren’t here then, were you?’

      Jenkins shook her head. ‘No, I came in September. What happened?’

      ‘Well, she had a lot of time off, because of having to look after him and stuff, and then, when we heard he had died, Kyle got me to send over a big bunch of flowers and a note saying we could easily get someone else in to work on Fame Factory if she didn’t feel up to it. But the very next day, she turned up in the office and said she wanted to just get back into the routine. The thing is, it seemed to sort of bring her out of herself, if you know what I mean. Before, she had been all sort of… dowdy, you know, jeans and T-shirts, and she even used to wear these awful brown dungarees until Kyle started calling her Deputy Dyke. I mean, I don’t want to say anything bad about him ‘cos he’s dead, but you know, he could be quite nasty. But then anyway, then after her dad died, she completely changed her image, and she had her hair done and started to look after herself a bit more, and actually, although I wouldn’t have worn a lot of the stuff she did, I always thought she looked great.’ She pursed her lips thoughtfully. ‘I remember thinking about it at the time. I thought it must just be because her dad was religious, because I mean he was Irish and they are, aren’t they? But I suppose actually it was all part of the same thing, wasn’t it? It’s amazing, really.’ She cast a pensive glance across her desktop, spotted a Twix in her in-tray and began to unwrap it.

      Jenkins sighed. ‘Poor Jacqui. If only she’d talked to us instead of bottling it all up.’

      ‘Huh!’ Westerbridge spluttered through a mouthful of caramel. ‘If you ask me, we’re lucky to still be alive. I mean, if you think about it, I was alone in the office with her when we found Kyle’s body. She could have just done away with me to get rid of the evidence.’ A thought seemed to strike her, and she picked up the Post-it notes again.

      ‘Hmm.’ Jenkins stood up and put on her coat, which had been folded on her lap during their conversation. ‘Well, I suppose I’d better get going. I’ve got to go and make some apologies. It just came up on the BBC website that Laurence has been let out of prison.’

      ‘Ooh, God,’ grimaced Westerbridge in sympathy.

      ‘I know. Are you coming?’

      ‘No, I’ve got loads to do here,’ said the PA, gesturing at the piles of work on her desk. She had spent the last hour waiting for everyone to leave so she could phone up a friend on the News of the World and see if she could get anything for her personal account from the heart of the horror, complete with a couple of photos of Jacqui at the Christmas party that she had nicked from the staff notice board.

      ‘OK.’ Jenkins walked off, but turned back before she reached the top of the stairs. ‘Oh, Sushi, I forgot to ask. Do you know if the policeman was OK?’

      Westerbridge paused, her hand on the phone. ‘Which one?’

      ‘The one on the plane? The nice one?’

      ‘Oh.’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. I forgot to ask. Sorry.’

      As she walked down the stairs, Milly Jenkins realised her work experience had come to an end. She posted her key back through Portmanteau’s letterbox. Perhaps she would go for teacher training after all.

     

The lights had been dimmed in the intensive care unit. The nurses liked to keep a sense of the change between night and day, despite the fact that their charges remained unconscious and indifferent to both, just as they were to the constant background noise of the various machines that were all that was preventing them slipping into a more permanent darkness. The rhythm of their blips and exhalations had lulled Whitehead into a semi-vegetative state of her own: she failed to notice the doors at the end of the ward hissing open and it was only when the shuffling of a pair of sterile-bag covered feet approached the bedside that she started and looked up.

      She was only of secondary interest to the new arrival, anyway. Cassie looked past her to the figure in the bed. ‘Oh, God. Oh Mike, what have you done, you bloody idiot?’ She reached out to take his hand, saw the butterfly needle leading the IV drip into it at the same moment as she recalled the nurse’s warning about passing on infection, and let her own hand fall helplessly to her side.

      ‘I’ll get you a chair,’ said Whitehead, and retired towards the nurses’ station tactfully. When she returned, Cassie was still staring down at the wreckage of Braithwaite’s face – or at least, as much of it as she could see between the bandages which covered his scalp and the breathing tubes which ran into his nostrils and mouth. The skin was a livid purple. It didn’t even look the right shape.

      She mouthed a wordless ‘thanks’ for the seat and slipped limply into it.

      ‘Is your daughter here?’ asked Whitehead.

      ‘No – no – she’s in her school play tonight. I had to arrange for someone else to collect her. I only got the message when I was already there in the dressing room. I’d been cursing him all afternoon for not turning up when he said he would!’ She snorted tears into a tissue she had pulled from her handbag.

      ‘Did they tell you what happened?’

      Cassie looked up, and their eyes met for the first time. ‘They said he was on a plane? How can he have been on a plane? He said he was just going into the office to pick up some stuff!’

      Whitehead looked guilty. ‘He was. I had to send him out on a search, and then… things got a bit out of hand.’ She had arrived at the airfield herself just in time to see Braithwaite, Nelson by his side, being stretchered out of the plane which had skidded lopsidedly onto the grass at the end of the runway. She had paused only to check that O’Riordan was definitely no longer of arrestable status, before turning her BMW round and following the ambulance straight to the hospital.

      ‘But how did it happen?’

      ‘No one’s quite sure. From what we can tell, he boarded the aircraft to stop Jacqui O’Riordan from causing a crash that would have killed two more of the Fame Factory contestants. She managed to injure one of them and kill the pilot, but it seems Mike –Inspector Braithwaite – succeeded in disarming and overpowering her. Unfortunately, he sustained his injuries in the course of the fight. According to Douggie McGovern, who was in the front of the plane, it sounded like she put up a hell of a fight.’

      Cassie let out a juddering gasp. ‘I didn’t think that was the sort of thing that he did.’

      Whitehead looked down at her fingernails. She had chewed them almost down to the quick, ingesting several quid’s worth of Chanel Rouge Noir in the process. ‘No, neither did I,’ she said quietly.

      ‘Is he going to be OK?’ She had already put the question to the nurses, who were in a better position to know, but Whitehead somehow exuded the sort of authority that suggested she might be capable of making that decision.

      ‘I hope so,’ she said, as comfortingly as she could manage. The diagnosis she had received earlier from the neurologist, speaking with the sort of bluntness he reserved for fellow professionals rather than the bedside manner he used on family members, was not brilliant. Braithwaite had been flung around the cabin of the Piper Warrior a great deal as McGovern had struggled to bring it in to land, and there was a strong possibility that the visible injuries to his head, although spectacular by any standards, were nothing compared to those that lurked inside. The fact that he was still with them at all was largely down to Sergeant Nelson having put his first aid training into practise as soon as the plane touched the ground, prioritising the unconscious Braithwaite over the very conscious and noisy Tim Campbell, whose injuries had fortunately turned out to be a good deal less serious than they looked, O’Riordan presumably having bargained that a plane crash would finish the job she had started.

      Shaking such thoughts from her head, Whitehead crossed briskly to the other side of the bed and picked up her jacket. ‘Well, I’d better be going. Rest assured that if there’s anything the Met can do to help, you just have to ask. I’ll call in the morning and – ’

      Cassie shot out a hand to restrain her. ‘Oh, please don’t go,’ she said desperately. ‘I don’t want to be left on my own with him, not yet.’

      Whitehead sat down again, unwillingly. She didn’t really relish the prospect of an hour spent with Braithwaite’s wife, even under these circumstances. She watched impassively as Cassie pulled another tissue from her handbag and pressed it to her face. She had good skin. Nice hair, too.

      ‘I’m not even sure it’s me who should be here,’ she sniffed into her Kleenex.

      ‘No?’ said Whitehead, for the sake of making conversation.

      ‘I’m not even married to him any more. We’re just friends now.’ She folded the tissue neatly and slipped it into her sleeve. ‘In fact, do you know if anyone’s told the woman he’s just started seeing? She’s from work. You probably know her.’

      ‘What?’ Whitehead looked at her sharply across the bed.

      ‘He said it’s early days and he doesn’t think things are going very well, but he’s always been rubbish at reading the signals, and I know he’s really keen on her. I’m sure she’ll want to know. Her name’s Claire. Do you know her?’

      ‘Yeah, I know her,’ said Whitehead, drawing her chair round to sit next to Cassie and smiling. ‘I didn’t know he was that serious about her. Why don’t you tell me all about it?’