‘Get real, Max.’
‘Just a thought.’
‘Right now we need our male lead. We need goddamn King George.’
‘Yuh.’
‘Yuh. Are you with us? On planet earth?’
Brody nodded. ‘I’ve been giving it thought.’
‘And?’
Brody fell into one of his habitual silences. They infuriated Brooker because he could never tell whether his partner was thinking, or had momentarily, in his drug-addled brain, lost the plot. Without their male lead the whole shooting match was in danger of crashing and burning around their ears. At the period of their movie, George IV was in his late twenties, with Maria Fitzherbert six years older. So Gaia was perfect, if a little thin. To get a major male star in the right age range who either was English or who could pass as English, was proving even harder than they had anticipated, and they were running out of options. In desperation, they’d cast their net wide. They weren’t making a biopic, for God’s sake, this was a movie, fiction, George IV could be any damned age or nationality they chose. Besides, weren’t all those Brit royals foreign?
Tom Cruise wasn’t available. Colin Firth had passed, so had Johnny Depp, Bruce Willis and George Clooney. They’d even tried a different tack and put an offer out to Anthony Hopkins, which had come back with a curt no from his agent. That completed the most bankable names on their sales agent’s list. Now, focusing on Brits, they were looking at a wider roster of stars. Ewan McGregor did not want to work outside LA while his kids were growing up. Clive Owen was unavailable. So was Guy Pearce.
‘Gaia Lafayette is screwing some hunk. What about him?’ Brody said, suddenly.
‘Can he act?’
Brody shrugged. ‘How about Judd Halpern?’
‘He’s a drunk.’
‘So? Listen, we got all the presales we need on Gaia’s name – does it matter who plays fucking George?’
‘Actually, Maxim, it does. We need someone who can act.’
‘Halpern’s a great actor – we just have to keep him off the juice.’
Larry’s phone rang. He picked up the receiver. ‘I have Drayton Wheeler on the line for you,’ Courtney said. ‘It’s the fifth time he’s called.’
‘I’m in a meeting. Who is he?’
‘Says it’s very urgent, to do with
The King’s Lover
.’
He covered the mouthpiece and turned to his partner. ‘You know a Drayton Wheeler?’
Brody shook his head, preoccupied with removing the lid of his coffee bucket.
‘Put him through.’
Moments later a voice at the other end of the phone, the tone aggressive and nasty, said, ‘Mr Brooker, do you have a problem reading emails?’
‘Who am I talking to?’
‘The writer who sent you the idea for
The King’s Lover
.’
Larry Brooker frowned. ‘You did?’
‘Three years ago. I sent you a treatment. Told you it was one of the greatest untold love stories of the world. According to
Variety
and the
Hollywood Reporter
you’re going into production. With a script based on my treatment that you stole from me.’
‘I don’t think so, Mr Wheeler.’
‘This is my story.’
‘Look, have your agent call me.’
‘I don’t have a fucking agent. That’s why
I’m
calling you.’
This was all Larry needed today. Some jerk trying to cash in on the production. ‘In that case, have your lawyer call me.’
‘I’m calling you. I don’t need to pay a lawyer. Just listen to me good. You’ve stolen my story. I want paying.’
‘Sue me,’ Brooker said, and hung up.
Eric Whiteley was remembering every second, as clearly as if it were yesterday. It all came back every time he saw a news story about bullying, and his face felt flushed and hot now. Those ten boys sitting on the wall chanting, ‘Ubu! Ubu! Ubu!’ at him as he walked by. The same ten boys who had been on that low brick wall every evening since the start of his second term at the school he hated so much, some thirty-seven years ago. Most of them had been fourteen – a year older than him – but a couple, the smuggest of them all, were his age and in his class.
He remembered the paper pellet striking him on the back of his head, which he had ignored, and just carried on walking towards his boarding house, clutching his set of maths and chemistry books which he’d needed for his afternoon classes. Then a pebble hitting him really hard, stinging his ear, and one of them, Spedding Junior it had sounded like, shouting out, ‘Great shot!’ It was followed by laughter.
He had walked on, the pain agonizing, but determined to get out of their sight before he rubbed his ear. It felt like it was cut open.
‘Ubu’s stoned!’ one of them shouted and there had been more laughter.
‘Hey Ubu, you shouldn’t walk around stoned, you could get into all kinds of trouble!’ another of them had shouted and there were even more guffaws and jeers.
He could still remember biting his lip against the pain, fighting off tears as he carried on along the tree-lined avenue, warm blood trickling down the side of his neck. The main school grounds, with the classrooms and playing fields, were behind him. Along this road were ugly boarding houses, big Victorian mansion blocks, accommodating sixty to ninety pupils, some in dormitories, some in single or shared rooms. His own house, called Hartwellian, was just ahead.
He could remember turning into it, walking past the grand front entrance, which was the housemaster’s, and around the side. Fortunately there had been no boys hanging around to see him crying. Not that he really cared. He knew he was no good, useless, and that people didn’t like him.
Ubu.
Ugly. Boring. Useless.
The other kids had spent all of the previous term – his first in this school – telling him that. John Monroe, who had the desk right behind him in Geography, had kept prodding him with a ruler. ‘You know your problem, Whiteley?’ he said, each word emphasized with a prod.
Whenever he’d turned around he got the same answer. ‘You’re so fucking ugly and you’ve no personality. No girl’s ever going to fancy you. None, ever, you realize?’ He remembered how Monroe’s horsey face would then break out into a snide grin.
After a while, he had stopped turning round. But Monroe used to keep on prodding, until Mr Leask, the teacher, spotted him and told him to stop. Five minutes later, when the teacher began drawing a diagram of soil substrates on the blackboard, Monroe’s prodding started again.
Detective Sergeant Glenn Branson was struggling to insert his thirty-three-year-old, six-foot-two, nightclub bouncer’s frame into a white protective paper suit. ‘What is it with you and weekends, boss?’ he said. ‘How come you always manage to screw them up for both of us?’
Roy Grace, perched alongside him on the rear tailgate of the unmarked silver Ford Focus estate car, was struggling equally hard to get his protective suit up over his clothes. He turned to his protégé who was dressed in a shiny brown jacket, even shinier white shirt, a dazzling tie and tassled brown loafers. ‘Lucky you never chose farming as a career option, Glenn,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t have been your style.’
‘Yeah, well, my ancestors were cotton pickers,’ Branson retorted with a broad grin.
Glenn was right about the weekend, Roy thought ruefully. It seemed that every damned murder he had to deal with came in just when he had his weekend all sorted out.
Like now.
‘What did you have planned, matey?’
‘The kids. One of the few weekends Ari is letting me have them. I was going to take them to Legoland. Now she’ll have something else to use against me.’
Glenn was going through a bitter divorce. His wife, Ari, who had once encouraged him so hard to join the police, was now using the unpredictability of his hours as part of her argument for not agreeing contact arrangements for the children to see him. Grace felt a sharp twinge of guilt. Perhaps he shouldn’t have requested Glenn join him. But he knew his marriage was doomed, whatever happened. The best favour he could do his friend was to ensure his career came out of it intact. ‘You think taking the weekend off would help save your marriage?’
‘Nope.’
Grace grinned. ‘So?’
‘You ever see that movie,
Chicken Run
?’
He shook his head.
‘You’ve lived a sheltered life.’
‘Lot of sex in it, was there?’ Grace retorted.
‘Yeah, right.’
They put on face masks, raised their hoods and snapped on protective gloves. Then the pair of them signed in on the scene guard’s pad, and ducked under the blue and white police crime scene tape. It was a fine, blustery day. They were high up on the ridge of a hill, with open farmland stretching for miles in all directions, and the glinting blue water of the English Channel visible on the horizon to the south, beyond the Downs.
They walked towards a long, single-storey shed with clapboard walls and a row of roof vents that stretched away into the distance, two tall steel silos standing beside it. Grace pushed the door open. They went inside to the glare of artificial lighting, to the sour stench of confined animals, and the din of thousands of protesting hens.
‘Had eggs for breakfast, old timer?’ Branson asked.
‘Actually, I had porridge.’
‘Guess at your age, cholesterol matters. Low fat milk?’
‘Cleo’s put me on soya.’
‘You’re under her thumb.’
‘She has pretty thumbs.’
‘That’s how every relationship starts. Pretty face, pretty thumbs, pretty damned everything. You love every inch of her body and she loves every inch of yours. Ten years on, you’re struggling to remember one damned thing about each other that you once liked.’ Branson patted him on the shoulder. ‘But hey, enjoy the ride.’
Roy Grace stopped and Branson stopped beside him. ‘Matey, don’t become a cynic. You’re too good for that.’
‘I’m just a realist.’
Grace shook his head.
‘Your wife vanished on your thirtieth birthday – after you’d been together several years, right?’ said Branson.
‘Uh huh. Getting on for ten years.’
‘You still loved her?’
‘As much as the day I met her. More.’
‘Maybe you’re an exception.’
Grace looked at him. ‘I hope not.’
Branson stared at him, his face full of pain. ‘Yeah, I hope not too. But it hurts. I think of Ari and the kids constantly, and it hurts so much.’
Grace stared down the length of the shed, with its gridded steel floor, a section of which, towards the far end, had been lifted. He could see, suited up, the stocky Crime Scene Manager David Green; three SOCOs including the burly, intensely serious Crime Scene Photographer James Gartrell; DS Simon Bates; the Duty Inspector Roy Apps, and the Coroner’s Officer Philip Keay.
‘Let’s rock and roll.’ Grace stepped on to the grid.
‘Not sure I feel much like dancing,’ Glenn Branson said.
‘So, you and the dead body have something in common.’
The dead body was very definitely not dancing. Partly on account of the fact that it was embedded in several feet of chicken excrement, partly because its legs were missing, and partly because it had no hands or head, either. Which would have made co-ordination difficult. A cluster of blowflies buzzed around, and the stench of ammonia was almost overpowering.
Glenn, close to retching, turned away. Grace stared down. Whoever had done this had little forensic awareness, and even less finesse. The headless, limbless torso, with desiccated flesh missing in patches, covered in excrement and crawling with flies and maggots, was barely recognizable as human. The skin, which appeared acid-scorched in the patches where it was visible, was a dark, leathery brown, giving it the air of a shop-window dummy that had been salvaged from a bonfire. The rank stench of a decaying body, all too familiar to Grace, rose all around him, making the air feel heavy and cloying. It was a smell that always accompanied you home, in your hair, on your clothes, in every pore of your skin. You could scrub yourself raw, but you’d still smell it again the next morning.
The only person he never noticed it on was Cleo. But maybe Glenn was right, and in ten years’ time he would. He hoped not.
‘Coq au vin for dinner, Roy?’ the Crime Scene Manager greeted him, dressed in a white protective suit, with breathing apparatus, his mask temporarily raised.
‘Not if it does that to you, thanks!’
Both men stared down into the space, four foot below the grid, at the torso. The first thought in Roy Grace’s mind was whether this was some kind of gangland killing. ‘So, what do we have so far?’
In answer to his SIO, David Green picked up a sealed polythene evidence bag from the floor, with an air of pride, and held it up with a gloved hand.
Grace peered inside. It contained two jagged pieces of badly soiled fabric, with an ochre checked pattern just visible. What looked like parts of a man’s suit.
‘Where did you find these?’ Grace asked.