Amis Smallbone.
Just the thought of the creep caused Grace to clench his fists.
To those few people acquainted with Eric Whiteley, he seemed a creature of habit. A small, balding, mild-mannered man, with a wardrobe of inoffensive suits and dull ties, who was always unfailingly polite and punctual. During the twenty-two years since he had joined the Brighton firm of chartered accountants Feline Bradley-Hamilton, he had never taken a day off sick and had never arrived late. He was always the first in the office.
He would dismount his sit-up-and-beg bicycle at the New Road offices, directly opposite the Pavilion gardens, at precisely 7.45 a.m., rain or shine, with a tick-tick-tick sound as he scooted the last few yards balanced on one pedal. He would chain the machine to a lamp post which he had come to regard as his own, remove his bicycle clips, let himself into the premises and enter the alarm code. Then he would make his way up the staircase and along to his small back office on the second floor, with its frosted-glass borrowed-light window that was partially obscured by a row of brown filing cabinets and stacks of boxes. In winter he would switch on the heater, in summer, the fan, before sitting at his tidy desk, booting up his computer terminal, and settling into his tasks.
One thing his colleagues had learned about him was that he was something of a self-taught computer expert. He was normally able to fix most software problems that occurred in the company.
Eric Whiteley liked computers, because he was happier interacting with machines than people. Machines didn’t bully you or make fun of you. And he liked figures, because there was no ambiguity about numbers; there was always a satisfying precision. His job was to audit the accounts for clients of his firm, from the figures supplied to him, to do the company payroll, and occasionally to visit the firms to assist one of the accountants going through the books. He had been doing this job for twenty-two years, and expected to continue for at least another thirteen years until he reached the retirement age of sixty-five. Beyond that he had no plans. ‘We’ll see where the wind blows,’ he replied to work colleagues, on the rare occasions, such as the Christmas party, when someone asked him that question.
He did not like the Christmas party, always stayed the minimum amount of time he needed in order not to appear rude, and avoided conversations with his colleagues. After two decades of working with many of the same people, none of the other employees or partners of Feline Bradley-Hamilton knew any more about Eric Whiteley’s private life than they had on the day he first joined the firm.
He bought his lunch from the same sandwich shop in Brighton’s Bond Street every day of the week, and his menu never varied. Tuna mayo with sliced tomato on wholegrain, two twists of the pepper grinder, one shake of salt, a Twix bar, an apple and a bottle of sparkling water. Then he would buy a copy of the
Argus
from a newsagent and scurry back to the sanctuary of his office, where he would spend the remainder of his lunch hour eating and reading the paper all the way through – except for the sports pages, which did not interest him – and ignoring the phone if it rang.
Today, his eyes were suddenly drawn to the top-right column on the third page. It was an advertisement.
FILM EXTRAS WANTED!
EARN UP TO £65 PER DAY TO APPEAR IN
“THE KING’S LOVER”,
STARRING GAIA & JUDD HALPERN.
PRODUCTION STARTS IN BRIGHTON NEXT WEEK.
There was a phone number, an email address and a website.
He carefully cut out the advertisement and placed it in the middle drawer of his desk. Then he returned to his lunch.
*
The advertisement caught the eye of a number of other people in the city at the same time as Eric Whiteley. One was Glenn Branson, who was sitting on a train with Bella Moy, heading to the
Crimewatch
studio in Cardiff. He was eating a banana and scanning through the newspaper. He wrote down the details excitedly. Sammy and Remi were nuts about Gaia! His estranged wife Ari was doing her best to poison his kids against him. Maybe he could get them roles as extras on the set – how cool would that be? And it would have to be worth a lot of brownie points in his relationship with them.
*
Another person reading the advertisement with interest was the occupant of room 608 in The Grand Hotel in Brighton, who had been going through the newspaper’s small ads in search of a hooker.
He was feeling tired and jet-lagged, and was hyper with too much caffeine, but he didn’t care, he poured himself another cup now, then reached for the phone, checked how to make a local call, and dialled the number given in the advertisement. Moments later he heard the tell-tale delay, after the call was picked up, that he was through to a voicemail recording.
His anger surged. He hated that system, that whole culture of voicemail. That was how people fobbed you off, how they screwed you.
‘
If you’re phoning to register interest in being an extra in
The King’s Lover
, please leave your name, age and a number we can call you right back on. Alternatively you can email us your details, together with a recent photograph and a contact number. Thank you for calling Brooker Brody Productions!
’
For an instant, gripping the receiver hard, he felt the urge to tear it free of its cord, and half the guts of the phone out with it. But then he calmed a little. He hadn’t come all this way to trash a hotel telephone.
Not that he knew, at this moment, precisely what he had come to do. Something, that was for sure. Something a lot of people were going to regret.
He left his name and number and hung up.
Roy Grace liked the design and location of Brighton’s Woodvale Crematorium. In his experience, the typical urban crematorium was a soulless and charmless place, because it existed for one grim function only. Unlike a church, no one got married there, or christened there, or worshipped there, or simply popped in when they were feeling low. But Woodvale, nestling in lush, well-tended grounds on a hill to the north of the city, had a sense of history and a good deal of charm. The central building of twin chapels with a bell tower between them, in Gothic Revival style, had the appearance of a village parish church.
Although his work revolved almost entirely around the deaths of other people, he tended to avoid dwelling excessively on his own mortality. He still had not come to any decision about what he believed in, and kept a totally open mind. On a few occasions, working with psychics in the past, he’d had astonishing results – but many failures too. When he used to discuss it with Sandy, and more recently with Cleo, he would say what he truly felt – that there was a spiritual dimension to existence, and he believed there was something beyond this world, but not in a Biblical sense. In his heart, he profoundly hoped there would be something else. But then he would see some terrible atrocity on the news – or get called out to one himself – and on those occasions he’d think gloomily that maybe it was better for the human race to restrict all its evil to this planet and the mercifully short lives of its inhabitants.
One decision he had not yet made was his own funeral. Sandy had said she wanted a woodland burial, in an environmentally friendly coffin, but he had always shied away from dwelling on the subject: it disturbed him too much to think about it. Although, after a case he had been on some months back involving the trafficking of human organs, he had finally taken the plunge and done something that Sandy had urged him to do years ago. He’d signed up as an organ donor. But that was as far as he’d got with confronting his own mortality.
He looked out at the scene through the driving rain that conveniently turned his windscreen opaque, concealing him. A black hearse and a cortège of limousines waited some distance from one chapel, like planes stacked on a runway.
A sudden chill rippled through him, making him jump.
Someone walking over your grave
, his mother used to tell him. He smiled, sadly and fondly for a moment at her memory, and felt a guilty twinge that he had not been to either of his parents’ graves for a long time.
People were coming out of the chapel from the previous service. The usual mix of ages. No one hung around in the late afternoon rain. One group climbed into the back of an undertaker’s limousine, the rest all hurried off to their cars.
The waiting hearse, followed by the cortège, moved to the chapel door. The doors of the first limousine were opening. People stepping out, ducking under umbrellas that the undertakers held for them. He gave the wipers a quick flick to clear the screen – and saw him almost immediately. Stepping out of the first limousine.
Amis Smallbone was here, just as Terry Biglow had predicted.
He would have recognized the runt from a hundred miles away, he reckoned. Smallbone’s ramrod straight posture and his elevator heels made him seem a bit taller than his five feet, one inch. Although masked a little by the rain, he didn’t seem to have changed much in the past twelve and a bit years since Grace had last seen him, across a courtroom, where he had given the evidence that had played a crucial role in putting him away.
Evil was too big a word to use for Amis Smallbone. To have called him
evil
would have been to flatter him. He wasn’t smart enough to be truly evil. He was just nasty. A very
nasty
little man.
After a few minutes, the pall-bearers opened the rear door of the hearse and slid out the coffin containing, Grace presumed, the body of the dead fence Tommy Fincher. He grinned irreverently at the thought that the old rogue might have some last stolen item with him, that he planned to offer to God at a knockdown price.
He saw Terry Biglow emerge from the second limousine, a frail-looking figure, heavily reliant on a stick, and couldn’t help feeling sad for the man. It wouldn’t be long before the former racketeer’s funeral would be taking place, and he must be thinking about that now, very acutely, Grace thought. At least Biglow had something endearing about him, despite being a total scumbag, which was more than he could say about Smallbone. Biglow was a man he had always been able to do business with when he wanted information, and he would miss him.
An entire rogue’s gallery of Brighton’s underworld hurried by in front of him, through the rain, and in through the chapel entrance. Grace recognized almost all of the faces. Most of them were male, but there were a couple of significant females, too, notably brothel queen Gloria Jouvenaar, and alongside her an elderly lady on a stick, Betty Washington, who in her time had been the wiliest of all the city’s madams.
While he waited in his car for the cremation service to be over, he called Glenn Branson to wish him luck at the
Crimewatch
recording. The DS sounded nervous as hell. Grace did his best to calm him down.
‘Can I ask you a favour?’ Branson said.
‘Try me.’
‘The movie with Gaia. I don’t suppose there’s any chance of my getting a few days off – like – taking some annual leave – so I can take my kids – and be extras? I’ve no idea if we could even get to become extras, but it would mean an awful lot to them.’
‘Matey, just think that through, will you? You’re the deputy SIO in the early days of a brutal homicide enquiry, and you’re suddenly stepping away to become a film extra? Hello?’
There was a long silence. ‘Yeah, thought you’d say that,’ he replied finally.
Grace felt his friend’s pain. He knew just how shitty life had been for him this past year, but if you wanted a career in Major Crime, your work was always going to have to come first. ‘Look, tell you what I’ll do – no promises – but I imagine I’ll be meeting her sometime in the next couple of days to review her security here. I’ll see if she’d be willing to meet you and your kids for a couple of minutes. What do you think?’
Branson sounded elated. ‘You know, old timer, sometimes you’re not at all bad – for a white man.’
‘Sod off!’ Grace replied with a grin.
Then people began to emerge from the chapel. The service was over fast. Clearly not too many eulogies for Tommy Fincher. He ended the call and sat watching, waiting. Smallbone came out holding the arm of a woman he did not recognize.
He watched them climb back into the black limousine, then after some moments the car moved off. Grace started his engine and began to follow, keeping a safe, discreet distance behind.
He couldn’t believe it! They were calling him back from the production office of
The King’s Lover
, less than an hour after he had phoned. A young woman with an irritatingly cheerful voice, like she wanted to give him the impression she was his
new best friend
.
‘Jerry Baxter?’
He did not like her tone one bit. He was tempted to ask her if she had seen the news today on television, about the famine in Africa. Heard it on the radio? Read it in a newspaper? He wanted to ask her how she could sound so happy with the knowledge of that terrible thing happening out there in the world.
Our world. Everyone’s world. Was she totally stupid?
The snakes were rising. Stuff was getting all tangled up inside his head as it often did when he got angry. He needed to focus, remember why he was here, why he had phoned the production office in the first place.