Game Ten: A gripping conspiracy thriller, page 4
‘Well, I’ll think about it,’ she said, ‘and by the way, I’ll need to get the desk changed around a bit.’
Jane had never had one of her staff tell her she’d think about an assignment before, and wasn’t quite sure how to respond. Someone came through the doors into the production office outside and she looked up gratefully through the glass, grabbing the excuse. She jumped to her feet, banged on the glass and beckoned. ‘Oh look, there’s Harry now. I’ll get him in.’
Claire had time to watch him approaching. About her age, long brown hair which flopped over his forehead, pale skin and the look of a man used to inspecting the teeth of gift horses. Intelligent but detached from his surroundings. Then he opened the door and leant into the office, keeping his feet outside and looking at Jane rather than Claire with an expression of polite enquiry.
‘Yes Jane,’ he said. ‘Was there something?’
‘I just wanted you to meet Claire,’ said Jane. ‘Claire Merrick, this is Harry Chaplin.’
Now he did look at her, and for a second she met a pair of intelligent eyes before they hooded into some pre-determined posture of reserve. He came right inside and she stuck out a hand. This, at least, was a grown-up.
‘Hallo Harry,’ she said.
He took her hand after a momentary delay. ‘Claire Merrick,’ he said and nodded, looking at her closely. ‘Oh yes, of course.’ Then just as she began to let her face relax into a smile, he went on. ‘You must tell me. I’ve always wanted to know why ITN fired you.’
*
The partition between the two cubicles shook violently, dislodging a photocopy of next week’s shooting schedule at which Harry had been staring glumly. He stuck his head round the side to look at Claire but all he could see was her backside sticking out from under the desk, and a pair of feet.
‘Mind my wall,’ he said. ‘If you break the building you have to buy a new one. Gilligan’s rules.’ They were the first words he’d spoken to her since their brief introduction.
She crawled out backwards, colliding with the partition again as she did, and sat up, pushing her hand through the heavy bob of shining dark hair. It had a touch of purple in it, he thought. She looked at him coolly and he looked back. It struck him that she had an old-fashioned and wholly English face, somewhat literary, with its high forehead and straight nose. Her eyes were wide-set, greenish brown, and only the fullness of her wide mouth softened the determination of her chin. This wasn’t the two-dimensional image he was used to. ‘Have you lost something?’ he said.
‘No, I’ve found a whole heap of rubbish which I would have thought someone might have cleared out before I arrived.’ She was bone-weary with depression and her voice took on the harsh buzz-saw edge for which she was famous. He mistook it for aggression and his eyebrows rose in surprise that looked like cynicism and they were off into a closed loop of mutual hostility.
‘If you want to help,’ she said, ‘tell me where I can find a secretary or someone to get rid of it all.’
‘Ah . . . Herman didn’t tell you we’re a low-overhead operation, then?’ She looked at him impassively. ‘I mean, we’re expected to do things like that ourselves.’ He got up from his chair and looked at the pile of stuff she’d emptied out of the drawers on to the desk. ‘Hey, careful what you throw away. That’s Paul’s stuff. If you find any white powder, I’ll have it.’
She shook her head and rubbed her forehead with both hands. ‘Never mind. I’ll manage.’
‘Don’t be like that. I can help. Really.’
‘Yes? How?’
‘I saw a big cardboard box out by the kitchens. You go out of the door over there and . . .’
Claire turned her back on him and collapsed back into her seat. He smiled to himself. She sat there, sick at heart, aware of surreptitious looks from around the big room. The phone buzzed.
‘Claire? It’s Jane Bernstein. Are you free for a few minutes to pop in to my office?’
She was free. She’d done nothing all day except rearrange paperclips and try to look busy, trapped in her claustrophobic box under all the inspecting eyes. As she went to the editor’s office she would have given anything for the financial freedom to go straight past, to get out of the building and never return.
Jane looked at her with trepidation. This was a very unhappy woman who shouldn’t have been left hanging around. Herman’s advice came back to her. Give her something to do. Get her out and about. She’s a warhorse, not a riding-school nag.
Jane reached into her drawer and took out a folder. ‘Here’s some stuff on the story Paul Wade was doing. This is a progress report I asked for three weeks ago, before he went off.’
Claire took it and skimmed through. ‘It’s just a grotty little story about car theft,’ she said incredulously, looking up. ‘Is it really worth it?’
Jane tried a smile on her but it died. ‘Well, yes. It’s not that little. This is the latest crime wave. Nicking hot hatchbacks is dying out, the insurance companies saw to that. Now the joyriders are getting in to “offing”. You’ve heard about it in the papers, I expect?’
‘I haven’t taken that much notice. It’s stealing Range Rovers, isn’t it?’
‘Well, any four-wheel drive off-roader. The latest thing is to see how far off the road they can get before they abandon them, then they usually burn them. Paul said they’ve got all kinds of unpleasant little habits, like supergluing razor blades to the door handles so when the fire brigade come they get their hands slashed trying to get inside. Oh, and they leave hypodermic needles sticking out of the seat upholstery.’
Claire refused to become enmeshed in Jane’s attempt at titillation. ‘Not very interesting, surely?’
Jane thought of asking Herman to come and remind Claire she’d signed a contract, but she gritted her teeth and persevered. ‘Perhaps not, but Paul went a bit further. The crime wave has meant it’s suddenly much more expensive to insure the things. That’s knocked a hole in their second-hand values, and a lot of owners are having trouble selling them. So they’re burning them themselves and pretending they’ve been stolen. Paul said he’d found a scrapyard where you can go and pay them a few quid and they’ll arrange to steal your car, take it apart for spares and put the rest through the crusher. He was planning to go and have a look at it.’
Claire suddenly leant forward with an intent look on her face. ‘You don’t think that’s why he disappeared, do you?’
Jane laughed and shook her head. ‘You don’t need a conspiracy theory to explain Paul Wade vanishing. If you’d met him, you’d know. He’ll blow in one of these days and be surprised to find he’s been fired.’
‘I hope he does. I seem to have half his possessions in my desk still.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘So, is there anything in the progress report which might tell me where to start?’
‘Not really, but he used to talk to Harry about what he was doing.’
‘Ah, well. That’s another thing.’
‘Yes?’ said Jane, warily looking at the set of Claire’s jaw.
‘Harry. He obviously feels threatened or something. He’s not making himself very pleasant.’
Jane sighed. ‘Harry’s all right when you get to know him. He just puts on this world-weary act. Give it a few days. Please? I tell you what, I’ll call him in. It might make it a bit easier if I ask him to help you out on this.’
Harry came into the room full of fake bonhomie and exaggerated politeness to Jane, ignoring Claire entirely.
‘Harry, I’m briefing Claire on Paul’s story. We need a bit of help.’
Harry turned a wide-eyed, innocent stare to Claire. ‘Help? From me? I’m flattered.’
Chapter Three
Friday July 19th
The police arrived in a minibus, wandered into the conference room, and set about the sandwiches. Claire sat out of the way in a corner, ignoring their surreptitious looks, and went through the briefing notes for the show. It was three hours before transmission time and the TV monitors scattered around the walls of the room were showing videofit pictures of desperate men. The last pieces were being put together in the studio for the recorded sections, which would be dropped like reliable cherries into the unreliable cocktail of the live show.
Studio sound was coming through on the speakers. Harry was in full flow, putting a voice track on one of the taped reconstructions.
‘So what we want to know is whether you have seen this man. He’s also wanted for another attempted rape in Bognor. Six foot one, heavily built, with distinctive orange hair and a fringe beard. He . . .’
‘Hold on, Harry,’ said Jane Bernstein’s disembodied voice, ‘he hasn’t got orange hair. Why don’t you stick to the script?’
‘He’s got orange hair in the picture I’m looking at.’
‘That’s just bad colour on the photofit. It says light brown in the description.’
‘Well, what’s the use of showing a photofit with orange bloody hair then?’
‘Just stick to the words. Anyway, he certainly looks like a rapist.’
‘Jane, everyone we’ve ever shown on this show looks like a rapist. If we showed a photofit of St Francis of Assisi, he’d come out looking like a rapist. Mind you, if I lived in Bognor, I’d probably be a rapist.’
There were a few sniggers from around the room and Claire turned her attention back to the police. They seemed to carry with them a heavy weight, from which a rugby club sense of humour occasionally surfaced like dark gouts of diesel oil from a sunken submarine. Sitting just a few chairs away was Chief Inspector Derek Palmer, the show’s resident policeman who, with a glamorous WPC, did the regular introductions to the ‘Where are they?’ sections, short clips of mugshots, videofits and security camera glimpses of the ungodly. A year on the show had turned him into some sort of hybrid; already a quarter media person.
She looked around again. The man nearest her, shiny dark blue suit, white shirt, dark blue tie, short dark hair, was talking to his neighbour, whose marginally less shiny suit was the only difference in appearance between the two. She cocked an ear, hoping for an extra insight.
‘Done this before, have you?’
‘Not this one. I’ve done Crimewatch and that one they do in Birmingham.’
‘Worth it?’
‘You get chicken legs at the BBC.’
‘See that thing they did on the telly last night? The one about the undertaker?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Know what I always say?’
‘What?’
‘Show me a woman with lots of diamond rings and I’ll show you an undertaker’s wife.’
Jane Bernstein walked into the room, followed by Harry and the show’s anchorman, Russell Mackay, a silver-haired ex-game show host fallen on thin times, now working hard on being taken seriously as the concerned crime fighter for the two days a week in his contract.
‘Good evening, everybody. Welcome to National and to Crookbusters for those who haven’t been before, which, looking around, is most of you,’ Jane said. ‘We’ve got a lot to run through tonight. Just before we start, I’d like to introduce you all to our new reporter . . .’
Oh no, Claire groaned to herself, why does she have to do this?
‘. . . who I’m sure you will all recognize. Claire Merrick, who’s just joined us after a prominent career in television news.’
There was a buzz of whispered conversation of the ‘I said that’s who it was’ variety, as they all turned to grin at her.
‘We’ve got three reconstructions tonight,’ Jane went on. ‘The ram raid and murder in Solihull, the bank manager hostage story from Wigan and the very much delayed story on the Swansea abduction and rape. We’ve had to hold it over for four weeks now, so thanks very much to the Swansea team for their patience and I’m glad we can finally run it tonight.’
There had been a lot of heart-searching over whether it was acceptable to run Paul Wade’s old story, with its less than satisfactory voice track. They couldn’t re-edit it because his face appeared in three pieces to camera. Without Wade there, the only alternative was the expensive one – sending someone else to re-shoot it from scratch. Herman had vetoed that.
A researcher came into the room, looked around, then walked over to Chief Inspector Palmer. ‘Telephone,’ she said, ‘outside.’
He got up and followed her.
Jane went on with the business of the day. ‘Can I just make a point to you all,’ she said. ‘Remember, when we’re on the air, you can be seen a lot of the time. You’re there in the background, sitting at the desks. Please try and look busy. There won’t be any phone calls to start with, so just pretend you’re answering the phone if you have to. Quite a lot of the early calls will be nutters. I know they can be very funny but if you’re all rocking with laughter and sharing a joke in the background, it doesn’t look too good if the audience can see you grinning like idiots while we’re telling a tragic story, right?’ She looked around. ‘Now, remember you’re each here because you’ve been working on one of the stories, but the incoming calls come through unsorted, so you need to know about all the cases. Let’s go through them, so you all know what to do. I’ll hand you over to Chief Inspector Palmer to talk us through the Swansea story, because Paul Wade’s no longer employed by us.’ She looked around. ‘Where’s Derek?’
Palmer came back at that moment, went to the front of the room and spoke quietly in Jane’s ear. She started and looked at him with her mouth open, then nodded and sat down in a chair as if pole-axed. Claire’s interest quickened.
*
Tony Proctor had taken all possible precautions. He didn’t know whether he was really allowed to be there, or whether the owners would have had him for trespassing if they’d known. Mostly, he didn’t want other passers-by to see him getting out of the car, the container in his hand, and entering the wood. That way, someone might guess what he was up to.
He had parked the car, as usual, behind the bushes on the other side of the road, and looked carefully in both directions to satisfy himself there was nothing coming. Only then did he get the container out and cross over, but before he could climb the wall, he heard the rising note of a wailing engine, and a figure crouched over the tank of a big motorbike appeared round the bend a hundred yards ahead. Tony chucked the container over the wall where it couldn’t be seen and turned to saunter along the verge, bending down to inspect and pick some perfectly harmless weed until the biker was out of sight, then he was up and over the wall in an instant, picking up the box and scurrying into the concealing gloom between the long avenues of trees.
The light made it difficult, crouching under the spiky lower branches and peering carefully left and right all the time, eyes checking, twitching incessantly. There was a sudden noise off to one side, deeper into the trees, and he froze. He was always expecting to be challenged, but perhaps it was only an animal dislodging a stone over by the badger burrows. There was a big reward for all this stealth, so long as no one else knew he was there.
There, off to the left, a gleam of sunlight touched a bulbous, felty, yellow-brown shape, and he knew even at twenty yards it was the first find of the day. He went over and knelt cheerfully to feel down through the pine needles for the fat stem, turning and twisting it to lift it out of the deep cup-like impression left behind. It was a perfect boletus edulis, a cep mushroom, eight ounces at least of the best and just about the most expensive edible fungus in Britain. Ten yards off was another and, as ever, he was relieved and delighted that no one else had found his secret place in the week since his last visit.
By the time he reached the badgers’ setts, their mounds always startling on the otherwise flat floor of the woodland, the big basket, with its racks to stop the mushrooms damaging each other, was just about full to the brim. He’d get twenty quid at least for this lot in town. The deli always sold out his stock within a day. The setts weren’t worth much of a look – the earth was too disturbed for the fragile spores to take root – but he’d found some chanterelles there once or twice so he always gave them a quick scan and he did so now.
There was something right in the entrance to one of the great holes, a small white domed fungus just sticking up through the mulch that filled this hole, clearly abandoned, almost full of pine needles. He bent to look at it. If the habitat hadn’t been wrong he would have said it was an ink-cap mushroom, slightly blue-purple in its whiteness. He grasped it and twisted, registering that it seemed oddly solid just as he felt the hard shape of the toe-nail and saw the whole, dead, discoloured foot come rearing up out of the covering pine needles.
He let go and stumbled, falling backwards as his scream echoed around the wood and a pigeon blundered off, crashing through the high branches. There was dead silence; then, fearfully, he sat up and looked again, a little sideways as though that could diminish the horror. Two legs, leading down to the rest, mercifully hidden in the set. His first unworthy thought was that if he told the police, the secret of the ceps’ wood would be out. His second was that didn’t matter at all because nothing would ever induce him to come here again.
*
Derek Palmer looked around the room.
‘I’m sorry to say,’ he began slowly, ‘that I’ve just been informed that the body of Paul Wade was discovered this morning in woodland outside Sevenoaks. It would appear he had been there for some time.’ His words had little effect on the police but there were horrified gasps from the production staff, and then a babble of voices. Harry looked at Jane who continued to sit there, then got to his feet. He held up his hands for silence. ‘Could the DCI from Solihull please brief on the ram raids? While that’s going on we’ll just have a quick get-together in the ante-room for the production team.’
The detective came forward and began as the team filed out, ‘Er, thank you. It happened on the eighteenth of last month. As you’ll see from the dope sheet, but obviously not for broadcast, we’re holding two men for another similar blag, Jimmy Marriage and Pat Woods. We’re pretty certain they’re down for this one too so any mention of those names will be very useful. Do particularly be aware that we’re not in the business of framing anybody, so do be even handed. Don’t encourage anyone to say more than they would in case we fall short in court.’ He spoilt the effect by grinning and winking.
