Authors: Peter James
Gaia was coming to Brighton! Coming back to the city where she was born. Brighton’s most famous living star was coming back here 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 Norma. Her biggest fan.
Her Number One fan!
The star of stars was arriving next week. They would meet face to face! She would be there to greet her. Finally, after years of adoring her, Norma would have the chance to meet her in person. To touch her idol’s hand, perhaps. Maybe speak to her and get her autograph with a personal message! She had rehearsed that moment a million times over, in her mind. Struggled with her doubts.
This wouldn’t be too much to ask for her Number One fan would it?
Of course not!
Gaia was famed for adoring her fans. And she would love to meet the one who had spent her entire inheritance from the sale of her late mother’s house, and every penny she had ever earned – over £275,000 – collecting Gaia memorabilia!
Norma 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 each of her smash hit West End musicals:
Florence
, the life of Florence Nightingale.
Sainted!
The life of Mother Theresa.
Souled
, the life, and shoes, of Imelda Marcos.
And of course she always sent Gaia an apologetic email if she was going to be unable to attend. Wishing her well. Hoping the evening would be fine without her.
Norma Smith sat, dreamily, in her house in Peacehaven, near Brighton. Inside was her shrine. The
Gaia Museum
! Every inch of wall and shelf space was covered with images and souvenirs of her idol. Autographed posters, stacks of her CDs, a silver balloon, which she kept continually inflated, printed with the words
GAIA INNER SECRETS TOUR.
Framed tickets of every UK concert she had ever done, labelled bottles of her health-giving mineral water and a treasured collection of her personalized monogrammed coat hangers.
She sipped from a martini glass the ‘Gaia special’ cocktail she had lovingly mixed from the recipe Gaia had published. A mohito with loganberries added for their health-giving properties and guarana for energy. Her idol’s greatest hit played at full blast,
Here To Save The Planet Together!
She raised the glass to toast her favourite image of all, the greenish-grey monochrome close-up of lips, nose and eyes, entitled,
GAIA UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL.
‘I love you, Gaia,’ she whispered. ‘I love you so much. If only you knew just how much! And of course, soon you will, because I will tell you in person, face to face here in Brighton! Next week! Just six days time.
It was all over the news that someone had tried to kill Gaia in Los Angeles two days ago. Mercifully, the murderer had screwed up and shot dead a personal assistant, instead.
Incredible.
How dare anyone try to kill the greatest living human being?
Although maybe that would be the ultimate trophy a true fan could have. A trophy to die for.
The partially complete skeleton lay on the steel table, bathed in a ghostly shine from the glare of the overhead lights of the postmortem 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 outta here!
Grace was ten weeks shy of his fortieth birthday, and in his twentieth year with Sussex Police. Just under five feet, eleven inches tall, he kept his figure in shape with relentless exercise. His fair hair was cropped 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, at 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.
But despite his years working on homicides, human skulls always spooked him.
Most police officers claimed they got used to dead bodies, in whatever form, and that nothing bothered them except for dead 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 someone, however fleetingly that might have been for some.
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 way of staying sane in this job. Their emotional carapace.
All the component parts of the dead man that they’d recovered 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 IKEA with some key bits missing, he thought 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 probable in Grace’s view, he may have left the country and could now be anywhere in the world, living under one of the host of aliases he was known to use, or, more likely, a new one.
One week 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 most of his team down, retaining just a small workforce to liaise with the US. But there was one more element of the operation that remained – and it 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 of part of the week for the Specialist Search 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, but had been unable 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 that inflicted by a heavy instrument or a knife or a gunshot, the chances of identifying the cause of death were slim.
Several members of the investigating team were in the room, gowned up like himself in green pyjamas. Cleo Morey, his fiancée and thirty-one weeks pregnant, was the Senior Anatomical Pathology Technician, as the Chief Mortician was officially termed. Her green PVC apron was draped over the bulge of their child, as she slid a body wrapped in white plastic sheeting out of a door in the floor-to-ceiling bank of refrigerators, eased it onto a trolley, and wheeled it through into another section of the room, to prepare it for post-mortem.
Philip Keay, the Coroner’s Officer, a tall, lean man, with swarthy good looks beneath dark, buzz-cut hair and thick eyebrows, remained dutifully present, although focused at this moment on 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, fashionable glasses and a quietly efficient manner. Grace had worked with her several times in the past, and he was always impressed by her skill. 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, though 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. 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, culminating, as usual, with them falling asleep together 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, to enjoy 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. They had hoped to have their wedding before the baby was born, but 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, which was coming up to Lewes Crown Court in a few weeks.
He turned his focus back to the forensic anthropologist. But within a few minutes, although he tried not to be, 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 removing the body and rolling it on the trolley. Working in a mortuary, it was inevitable she 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 as much jeopardy as their baby’s.
He watched her stop the trolley alongside the naked cadaver of an elderly man she had just finished preparing. The skull cap had been removed, and his brain lay on a Formica tray above his chest.
Cleo was a statuesque beauty. Her long blonde hair was clipped up and she was smiling, despite the constantly grim nature of her work. He still could not believe his luck that, after almost ten years of hell following his wife Sandy’s disappearance, he had found love again. And with someone so gorgeous and such fun to be with.
He used to consider Sandy his soulmate, despite their constant arguments. But since beginning his relationship with Cleo, the word
soulmate
had taken on a whole new meaning. He would die for Cleo, he truly would.
Returning his focus to the forensic anthropologist he asked, ‘Joan, can you give us any indication of his age?’
‘I can’t be too precise at this stage, Roy,’ she replied, moving back to the skull and pointing. ‘The presence of a third molar suggests adult. The medial clavicle fused suggest he is older than thirty.’ Then she pointed at the pelvis. ‘The auricual surface is phase 6, which would put him between fourty-five and fourty-nine. The pubic symphysis is phase V – less precise, I’m afraid – so could put him anywhere from twenty-seven to sixty-six. The wear in his teeth points towards the upper end of this age spectrum.’
She pointed at parts of the spine. ‘There are some osteophytic growths which again are suggestive of an older individual. In terms of race, the skull measurements suggest Caucasian, European – or European region – origin, but it’s difficult to be more precise. As a general observation pronounced muscle attachments, particularly noticeable in the humerus, suggest a strong, active individual.’
Grace nodded. The skeletal remains, along with a pair of partially gnawed sea boots, size 9, had been discovered by chance in a disused tunnel deep beneath the city’s principal harbour, Shoreham. He already had a pretty good idea who this man was, and all that Joan Major had said was helping to confirm this.
An Estonian Merchant Navy sea captain called Andrus Kangur who had disappeared six years earlier after berthing his container ship loaded with timber. Kangur had been under observation by Europol for some years on suspicion of drugs trafficking. The man wasn’t necessarily a great loss to the world, but that wasn’t for Roy Grace to judge. But he did know there was a probable motive. According to information from the Divisional Intelligence Unit, which had had the ship under surveillance from the time it entered the port, following a tip-off, Kangur had tried to double-cross whoever was behind this cargo, and had not been too smart in his choice of whom he had screwed: a high-profile New York crime family.
From the evidence so far gathered, and from what Grace knew about the likely assailant, the unfortunate captain had been chained up in what amounted to an underground dungeon and left to starve to death or be eaten alive by rats. When they had found him, all of his flesh and almost all of the sinews and his hair had gone. Most of his bones had fallen in on each other, or onto the floor, except for one set of arm bones and an intact skeletal hand, which hung from a metal pipe above him, held in place by a padlocked chain.
Suddenly Grace’s phone rang.
It was a cheery and very efficient detective sergeant from Eastbourne CID, Simon Bates. ‘Roy, you’re the duty SIO?’
Immediately Grace’s heart sank. Calls like this were never good news.