Then he turned and ran away, back to his car, in a daze.
Gaia was coming to Brighton! The icon coming back to the city where she was born. Brighton’s most famous living star was returning home to play Brighton’s most famous historical female. It was a match made in heaven. A dream for Gaia.
And an even bigger dream for Anna Galicia. Her biggest fan.
Her number one fan!
Only Anna knew the real reason why Gaia was coming here. It was to be with her! The signals had all been very clear.
Unequivocal.
‘She’s arriving next week, Diva, what do you think of that?’
The cat stared at her without any expression she could read.
The star of stars was arriving next week. Anna would be there at the hotel to greet her in person. Finally, after years of adoring her, and of communicating with each other from afar, she would have the chance to meet her. Perhaps touch her hand. Even, if things went really well, she might be invited into her suite, to drink cocktails with her – and then?
Of course you could never tell whether Gaia was into men or women at any given time. She flaunted each new relationship openly. Going through lover after lover, in search of –
the one
! She had been married twice, to men, but that was a long time ago. Anna followed her life online, on television, in newspapers and magazines. And she and Gaia had been flirting secretly with each other for years in code. Their own secret code that Gaia used as her emblem on all her merchandise. A tiny, furtive fox.
Secret fox!
Gaia had been sending more and more signals to her in recent weeks. Anna had the evidence stacked in neat piles of newspapers and magazines neatly laid out, each individually protected in a cellophane folder, on the table in front of her.
She had rehearsed that moment when they would finally meet a million times over, in her mind. Struggled with her doubts. Maybe start with asking for her autograph to break the ice? This wouldn’t be too much to ask for her number one fan, would it?
Of course not.
Secret fox!
Gaia was famed for adoring her fans. And none was as devoted as herself. She had spent her entire inheritance of her late mother’s house, and on top of that, almost every penny she had ever earned collecting her memorabilia.
Anna had always bought the best seats at Gaia’s concerts when she had performed in England. She had made sure she was first in line, either in person, or on the internet. She had secured a front row ticket for every single night Gaia had performed in her smash hit West End musical,
Sainted!
– the life of Mother Teresa.
And of course she always sent Gaia an apologetic email if she was going to be unable to attend because she had not been able to secure tickets. Wishing her well. Hoping the evening would be fine without her. And of course, the sign.
Secret fox!
Anna sat, dreamily, in the upstairs room of her little house in Peacehaven, close to Brighton. In her
shrine.
The
Gaia Museum
! If she breathed deeply – really deeply – ignoring the smells of dried-out cardboard and paper and plastic and polish, she believed she could still detect Gaia’s perspiration and perfume from the costumes her idol had worn at concerts, which she had bought at charity auctions.
Every inch of wall space was covered in images and souvenirs of Gaia. Autographed posters, glass cabinets, shelving stacked with her CDs, a silver balloon which she kept continually inflated, printed with the words G
AIA
I
NNER
S
ECRETS
T
OUR
which she had bought two months ago when the singer had last been in the UK. Framed tickets of every Gaia concert around the world she had ever attended, concert tour schedules, bottles of her health-giving mineral water, and a treasured collection of her personalized monogrammed coat hangers.
Several headless mannequins stood around the room, each wearing a Gaia dress she had bought at online auctions, and encased in transparent covers to protect them – and above all, to preserve the scent and bodily smells of the icon, who had once worn them on stage. More items of Gaia’s clothing lay, in labelled boxes, wrapped in acid-free tissue paper.
There was also a treasured fly-fishing rod that Gaia had been photographed using for one of her G
REAT
O
UTDOORS
G
AL
posters, that Anna had lovingly framed, with the rod beside it. The rod reminded Anna of her father, who used to take her fishing when she was very young. Before he’d abandoned her and her mother.
She sat, sipping from a Martini glass the Gaia special cocktail she had lovingly mixed from the recipe Gaia had published – a mojito, with loganberries added for health-giving properties and guarana for energy – while listening to her idol’s greatest hit playing at full blast, ‘Here To Save The Planet Together!’
She raised the glass in a toast to one of her favourite images of all, the close-up of the icon’s lips, nose and eyes, titled G
AIA
U
P
C
LOSE AND
P
ERSONAL
.
Diva, her small Burmese cat, walked away from her, back arched as if in anger. Sometimes Anna wondered if she was jealous of Gaia. Then she turned back to the cuttings on the table and stared at one, the Spotted section of
Heat
magazine. It was a photo of Gaia, in black jeans and top, shopping in Beverly Hills, in Rodeo Drive. Beneath was the caption:
Gaia shopping for new movie role?
She smiled excitedly. Black! Gaia had put that colour on just for her!
I love you, Gaia, she thought. I love you so much. I know you already know that! And of course, soon I will tell you in person, face to face here in Brighton. Next week. Just five days’ time.
Please be wearing black then, too.
Secret fox!
The partially complete skeleton lay on the steel table, bathed in the glare of the overhead lights of the post-mortem room. Detective Superintendent Roy Grace stared down at the skull, its creepy rictus grin like a final Parthian shot of mockery.
Goodbye cruel world, you can’t hurt me any more! I’m gone! I’m out of here!
Grace was eight weeks shy of his fortieth birthday, and in his twenty-first year with Sussex Police. Just under five feet eleven inches tall, he kept his figure in shape by relentless exercise. His fair hair was cut short and gelled, thanks to his styling guru, Glenn Branson, and his nose, squashed and kinked after being broken in a scrap when he’d been a beat copper, gave him the air, on first acquaintance, of a retired prize fighter. His wife, Sandy, now missing for almost a decade, once told him he had eyes like Paul Newman. He’d liked that a lot, but had never quite believed it. He just considered himself a regular guy, unexceptional, doing a job he loved. Although, despite his years working on homicides, human skulls always spooked him.
Most police officers claimed they got used to dead bodies, in any form, and that nothing bothered them, except for children. But every body he encountered still bothered Grace, even after all his years in this job. Because every corpse was once a person loved by their family, their friends, their lover, however fleetingly for some tragic people that might have been.
At the start of his career he had promised himself that he would never turn cynical. Yet for some of his colleagues, becoming a cynic, alongside gallows humour, was their emotional carapace. Their way of staying sane in this job.
All the dead man’s component parts that they’d recovered so far had been neatly and precisely laid out by the forensic archaeologist, Joan Major. It was like a flat-packed piece of furniture that had arrived from a DIY store with some key bits missing, he thought, suddenly and irreverently.
Operation Violin
, on which he was the Senior Investigating Officer, was winding down. It was the investigation into two revenge murders and an abduction. Their prime suspect, who had been identified by New York detectives as a known Mafia contract killer, had disappeared. It was possible he had drowned attempting to avoid arrest, but equally likely, in Grace’s view, he had left the country and could now be anywhere in the world, under one of the host of aliases he was known to use – or, more probably, a new one.
Nearly four weeks on from the suspect’s disappearance,
Operation Violin
had moved into
slow time
. Back on the roster as Duty SIO for this week, Roy Grace had stood down most of his team, retaining just a small workforce to liaise with the US. But there was one more element to the operation that remained – and lay in front of him now. And time didn’t get much slower than for fully decomposed, and picked clean, skeletal remains. It had taken the best part of a week for the Specialist Search Unit’s team to cover every inch of the massive tunnel and surrounding inspection shafts, and to recover the remains, some of which had been scattered over a wide area by rodents.
The Home Office pathologist, Dr Frazer Theobald, had done much of his painstaking post-mortem in situ, before the remains were brought here last night, without being able to come to any conclusions as to the cause of death. He had departed a few minutes ago. Without any flesh or body fluids, with the absence of any signs of damage to either the skull or the bones, such as from a heavy instrument or a knife or a bullet, the chances of finding the cause of death were slim.
Several members of the investigating team remained in the room, gowned up like himself in green pyjamas. Cleo Morey, Grace’s fiancée, thirty-two weeks pregnant, was the Senior Anatomical Pathology Technician, as the Chief Mortician was officially termed. Her green PVC apron lay draped over the bulge of their baby, as she slid a body wrapped in white plastic sheeting out of a door in the floor-to-ceiling bank of refrigerators, eased it on to a trolley and wheeled it through into another section of the room, to prepare it for a post-mortem.
Philip Keay, the Coroner’s Officer, a tall, lean man, with swarthy good looks beneath short dark hair and bushy eyebrows, remained dutifully present, although engrossed at this moment with his BlackBerry.
This stage of the investigation, which was focused on trying to establish the identity of the dead man, was being led by Joan Major, a pleasant-looking woman, with long brown hair and fashionably modern glasses, who had a quietly efficient manner. Grace had worked with her several times in the past, and he was always impressed by her skills. Even to his experienced eye, all skeletons looked much the same. But to Joan Major, each was as individual as a fingerprint.
She dictated into her machine, quietly but clearly enough so that anyone who wanted to listen, could. She began with the skull.
‘Prominent brow ridges. Sloping forehead. Rounded superior orbit. Large mastoid process. Extended posterior zygomatic arch. Prominent nuchal crest.’
Then she moved on to the pelvis. ‘Narrow sciatic notch. Oval obturator foramen. Pubic bone shorter. Narrow subpubic angle. Subpubic concavity absent. Sacrum curved.’
Roy Grace listened intently, although much of what she said was too technical for him to grasp. He was tired and stifled a yawn, glancing at his watch. It was 11.45 a.m., and he could do with another coffee. He’d been up late last night, playing in his weekly boys’ poker game – where he’d ended forty pounds up. It had been an exhausting few weeks, and he was looking forward to having a curry with Cleo tonight, and kicking back, watching some Friday night junk television, ending, as they usually did, falling asleep watching their favourite talk show host, Graham Norton. And, glorious thought, they had no plans for the weekend. He was particularly looking forward to some time alone with Cleo, enjoying those precious last few weeks before, as he had been warned by his colleague Nick Nicholl who had recently become a father, their lives changed for ever. Originally, they had hoped to have their wedding before the baby was born, but the process for having Sandy declared legally dead, and work, had got in the way of that. Now they had to make new plans.
He also needed the breathing space, after the past hectic weeks, to focus on the vast bundle of trial documents of a snuff movie murder case involving a particularly nasty specimen of humanity he’d arrested, Carl Venner, whose trial was listed to come up at the Old Bailey in the next couple of weeks.
He turned his focus back to the forensic archaeologist. But within a few minutes, although he tried not to be, inevitably he was distracted by Cleo. A few weeks ago she’d been in hospital with internal bleeding. She had been warned not to do any heavy lifting, and it worried him to see her now, removing the body and rolling it on the trolley. Working in a mortuary, it was inevitable you would have to lift things. He was scared for her, because he loved her so much. Scared, because as the consultant had warned, with a second bleed her life could be in jeopardy as much as their baby’s.
He watched her stop the trolley alongside the naked cadaver of an elderly woman she had just finished preparing. The skull cap had been removed, and her brain lay on a Formica tray above her chest. On the white wall chart above there were blank spaces for the dimensions and weight of the dead woman’s internal organs. At the top, the name Claire Elford was handwritten in black marker pen.