Not Dead Yet

underlings were making final lighting adjustments. The sound boom was being manoeuvred into place.
    All getting set for the big scene.
    Gaia would be in her trailer. Having her make-up and hair done, and reading through her lines once more, no doubt.
    His lines .
    Judd Halpern would be in his trailer, staring at his lines, and doing several lines of a different kind – coke, washed down with bourbon, if past form was anything to go by.
    Larry Brooker was saying something to a young man who looked like he might be the First Assistant Director, who was nodding vigorously.
    Do you realize why you are all here? It’s because of a screenplaycalled The King’s Lover that you are making. If I hadn’t written it, none of you would have a job on this production.
    Are you grateful to me?
    You don’t even know who I am, do you?
    But you will soon .

90
    ‘The time is 6.30 p.m., Tuesday, June the fourteenth. This is the twentieth briefing of Operation Icon ,’ Roy Grace said to his team. ‘We have some developments.’ He looked at Potting. ‘Norman, can you tell us about your search of Myles Royce’s house?’
    ‘I took DC Nicholl with me, as well as POLSA Lorna Dennison-Wilkins and Crime Scene Photographer James Gartrell to record our search. Royce’s mother wasn’t exaggerating when she said her son was a big Gaia fan. The place is so full of her stuff you can hardly move in there. I’ve never seen anything like it. Almost every room’s crammed with cardboard cut-outs of her, dresses, records, souvenir programmes, piles and piles of press cuttings on the floor, and some of them pasted on the walls. In my view he wasn’t just a fan, he was a total obsessive. Just to be clear, I’m talking about an oddball. You can’t open the door fully to some of the rooms, there’s so much stuff piled in there. If we need it, Lorna can bring in more of her team tomorrow to catalogue everything.’
    ‘People like this bother me,’ Grace said. ‘Obsessives are fanatics, and unpredictable. The one thing that really worries me right now is that we have a Gaia obsessive dead, and Gaia is in town. It might be a total coincidence. But this has to be an important line of enquiry for us to find out which other Gaia fans Royce associated with.’ He looked down at his notes, then continued.
    ‘Right, from the High Tech Crime Unit’s examination of Royce’s computer, so far, he would appear to have been one of a small group of obsessive Gaia fans who exchanged information and constantly bid against each other for everything that came up for auction. And it seems that he had one particularly acrimonious rivalry with a character called Anna Galicia. Which is where this gets interesting for us.’ He looked down at his notes. ‘This rivalry developed into an email slanging match with this woman. A really nasty, bitchy exchange over some item of Gaia’s they had both beenbidding for that she wore in one of her shows. The High Tech Crime Unit’s still working through the email trail. But meantime I asked Annalise Vineer to run a name check on Anna Galicia, and she got a hit.’ He nodded at her.
    ‘Last Wednesday evening,’ Annalise Vineer said, ‘uniform attended a Grade 3 call at The Grand Hotel. It was a woman complaining she had been assaulted by two of Gaia Lafayette’s security guards. She gave her name as Anna Galicia. Following the information of the link between her and Royce from the High Tech Crime Unit, two uniformed officers were sent to her address to interview her. But it doesn’t exist. She gave a false address.’
    Glenn Branson frowned. ‘Why would she have done that if she was making a genuine complaint?’
    ‘Exactly,’ Roy Grace said. ‘By all accounts she was pretty angry. So why give a false address?’ He looked around at his team. ‘Any ideas?’
    ‘Doesn’t make sense to me,’ Graham Baldock said.
    ‘Nor me,’ Guy Batchelor said. ‘If you’re making a complaint, you’re making a complaint. If you have something to hide you don’t make a complaint in the first place. I mean, do you?’ He shrugged.
    ‘I’m not at all happy about this person,’ Grace said. ‘We need to find her quickly. Very quickly.’

91
    ‘How can I make my multi-million-dollar movie with a goddamn lead actor who’s off his goddamn face, for fuck’s sake!’ Larry Brooker yelled at the top of his voice, across the floor of the Banqueting Room, at the hapless Third Assistant Director, Adrián González. ‘You