Shouting, ‘POLICE! OPEN UP, POLICE!’ the first officer banged on the door, rang the doorbell and banged hard on the door again. He waited some moments, then turned, looking for a signal from his Sergeant, who nodded. Immediately, he swung the battering ram at the door. It burst open on the second strike, and three LST officers rushed in, bellowing, ‘POLICE! POLICE!’ while the Sergeant held back, in case their intended target tried to do a runner out of the garage door.
Guy Batchelor, Emma Reeves and Nick Nicholl stayed outside, until they got the all clear, confirming that the rooms had all been checked and there was no threat. Then they entered.
And stopped in their tracks in astonishment.
Nothing about the exterior of the house had given them any hint of the quite astonishing room they had stepped into.
There was a marble floor that would have looked more at home in an Italian palazzo than an urban annexe of Brighton and Hove. The walls were ceiling-to-floor mirrors, decorated with Aztec art and posters of Gaia. Batchelor stared at a signed monochrome of the icon in a black negligee – one of her most famous images. But it was ripped through several times with what must have been a knife blade, so that parts had peeled away and were hanging down. In angry red letters across it was daubed, BITCH.
He looked uneasily at Emma Reeves. She pointed to the left, above a white leather armchair. At another huge framed poster, in which Gaia was wearing a tank-top and leather jeans, captioned GAIA REVELATIONS TOUR. Across it was daubed in the same red paint, LOVE ME OR DIE, BITCH.
Above the fireplace, clearly in pride of place was a blow-up of the icon’s lips, nose and eyes in green monochrome, captioned, GAIA UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL. It was also personally signed. It too was slashed to ribbons in parts, and painted across, again in red, was the word COW.
One of the Specialist Search Unit officers, gloved and wearing black, was opening drawers in a chest on the far side of the room. Batchelor stared at each of the posters, at the violent rips, at the red paint, feeling deep, growing unease. He glanced out of the window; it was a grey, blustery afternoon and he could see a neighbour’s washing flapping in the wind, in front of a breeze-block garage. Something flapped in his belly. He had been in a lot of bad situations in his career, but he was experiencing something new to him at this moment. It was an almost palpable sense of evil. And it was spooking him.
A shadow moved, making him jump. It was a small Burmese cat, back arched, eyeing him suspiciously.
‘Take a look up here!’ another Search Unit officer called down to them from upstairs.
Batchelor, followed by Emma Reeves and Nick Nicholl, charged up the stairs, and, following the direction he was signalling, entered a room that felt like a cross between a museum and a shrine. And in which there had been a recent explosion of anger.
Shop window dummies lay on their sides on the floor, wearing dresses covered in clear plastic, and daubed in red paint. More autographed posters on the walls were ripped and daubed. CDs, tickets to Gaia concerts, bottles of Gaia’s mineral water, a smashed Martini glass and a fly-fishing rod snapped in two were among the other detritus that lay on the floor streaked, like blood, in red paint.
Some items remained in their glass display cabinets, but many of these were barely visible behind the furious red words all over the glass. BITCH. COW. DIE. LOVE ME. I’LL TEACH YOU. FUCK YOU.
DC Reeves was looking around, wide-eyed. ‘What an incredible collection.’
‘You a Gaia fan?’ Nick Nicholl asked.
She nodded vigorously.
‘Sir!’
They all turned. It was one of the Search Unit officers, Brett Wallace, and his face was ashen. These officers, he knew, saw everything and it took quite a bit to shock any of them. But this officer was definitely shocked at this moment.
‘This house has just become a crime scene. We’re going to have to lock it down and not disturb anything else.’
‘What have you found?’ Batchelor asked.
‘I’ll show you,’ Wallace said.
They went back downstairs, and followed him into the kitchen, a spotless room with dated furniture and appliances. Two other Search Unit officers were standing in there, both looking uncharacteristically uncomfortable. Wallace pointed at an open door, and Batchelor, followed by the other two, walked across to it. Beyond was a tiny pantry, mostly filled with a chest freezer, the lid of which was raised. A few supermarket ready meals lay on the floor, along with several packets of frozen sausages, and three picnic freezer blocks.
‘Take a look inside,’ Wallace said, indicating for him to go in.
Warily, Guy Batchelor took a couple of steps forward and peered down. Instantly he stepped back a pace, in shock.
‘Oh shit,’ he said.
112
‘Where – the – fuck – is – she…?’ Larry Brooker glared at Barnaby Katz, the Line Producer, his voice tight with fury. They were standing by the doorway, inside the Banqueting Room of the Pavilion. Thirty actors, including all the rest of their stars – Judd Halpern, Hugh Bonneville, Joseph Fiennes and Emily Watson – were seated around the table, waiting and looking increasingly impatient as they grew hotter and sweatier in their costumes and wigs. All the film lights were on, bathing everyone at the table in a surreal glow – and roasting them at the same time.
The table had been temporarily botched back together. Above it was a small but gaping hole in the dome, where the chandelier had been hanging just twenty-four hours ago.
Katz raised his arms in a shrug of helplessness. His hairline appeared to have receded a couple of inches in the past few days of constant stress.
‘I knocked on her trailer door twenty minutes ago and someone shouted she’d be out in a few moments.’ He adjusted his headset then spoke urgently into it. ‘Joe, any sign of Gaia?’
Brooker checked his watch. ‘Not twenty minutes ago, Barnaby. That was thirty minutes ago. Prima donnas! God I hate them. Goddamn actresses! Thirty fucking minutes she’s kept us.’ He turned to the director, Jack Jordan. ‘You know what thirty minutes costs us, don’t you, Jack?’
Jordan gave a benign shrug, long used to being messed around by out-of-control egos on both side of the lens. With his mane of white hair flowing from beneath his baseball cap, the veteran filmmaker looked as ever like an ancient soothsayer and, true to that persona, was keeping his calm. He needed to. This was the most important scene in the movie and with every single one of the stars featuring, the most expensive. The money shot.
Brooker banged his fists together. ‘This is ridiculous. Has someone pissed her off today or what?’ He glared at Jordan. ‘Have you had another argument with her over her lines?’
‘Darling, I haven’t had a peep out of her since yesterday. She was as good as gold last time we spoke. Just give her a few more minutes. She has to be patient for her heavy make-up and her wig is damned uncomfortable, it tickles her face, poor love.’
Poor love, Brooker thought, cynically. Gaia was getting paid fifteen million bucks for just seven weeks’ work. He could put up with his face being tickled for seven weeks for that kind of dough, he thought.
‘Goddamn ridiculous wig,’ Brooker said. ‘Can hardly see her face. Makes her look like a sheep in a corset. I’m paying all this goddamn money to have Gaia, and we could have had anyone inside that dress and hair.’ He looked at his watch again. ‘Five minutes. If she’s not on set in five minutes I’m gonna – I’m gonna…’ He hesitated, wary of making a fool of himself and of upsetting the icon. The truth was, when you worked on a small independent production with an actress as big as Gaia, you had to tread carefully. Irritate her and she might start to slow down even more and run you days – if not weeks – over schedule, with all its crippling consequences. There had already been a couple of occasions during this past week when Gaia, turning suddenly imperious, made Brooker realize that, without ever saying as much, she knew very well that there was only one reason he had managed to get this movie into production. That all of them were only here making this movie for that same one reason.