Not Dead Yet

people, his friend Beau Brummell just opposite, and he drops the bombshell.’
    ‘It’s just not how it happened,’ she said.
    ‘Yeah, well, it’s how it’s gonna have to have happened! Just look at this room; look around it! This is one of the most stunning roomsI’ve ever seen. I can just imagine the light from the candles on the table and the chandelier playing on her face as she turns from delight to abject misery!’
    ‘There’s another problem, Mr Brooker,’ she said, her tone becoming increasingly acid. ‘About Prinny.’
    ‘Prinny? Who’s Prinny ?’
    The woman looked at him reproachfully. ‘That was King George’s nickname – the name everyone called him by.’
    ‘Ah, okay.’
    ‘You don’t seem to have done your research very well,’ Louise Hulme said. ‘If you don’t mind my saying.’
    Keeping a lid on his anger, Brooker replied, ‘Lady, you need to understand this is a movie, okay? I’m not a historian, I’m a movie producer.’
    ‘Well, the thing you should know is that Prinny became very nervous about the chandelier – he refused to sit directly beneath it.’
    He stared up at the vast crystal sculpture, suspended from the claws of a dragon beneath the domed ceiling. It was wonderfully dramatic. This was going to make an amazingly visual scene. ‘Yeah? Well in my movie, he’s gonna sit beneath it,’ he said, defiantly.
    Across the room, on the far side of the blue ropes that kept the public to a restricted route through the building, a lanky, cadaverous man in a baseball cap, who seemed like just another of the hordes of tourists that passed through this building daily, and was listening to the altercation, looked up at the chandelier, studying it intently.

54
    ‘The time is 6.30 p.m., Wednesday, June the eighth. This is the tenth briefing of Operation Icon ,’ Roy Grace said to his team in the packed Conference Room in the Major Incident Suite. ‘I will now summarize where we are.’
    He was feeling in a good mood. He’d had a call from the estate agents, Mishon Mackay, to say they’d had some viewings of his house today. One, a woman, with a small boy, had seemed interested.
    Looking down at his notes, he began his summary. ‘Four limbs – two arms and two legs – were recovered in separate locations from the West Sussex Piscatorial trout lake near Henfield, West Sussex, this afternoon. They are currently at Brighton and Hove City Mortuary, awaiting examination tomorrow by Home Office pathologist Nadiuska De Sancha. DNA from each of them has been sent for analysis to see if there is a link with the torso recovered from Stonery Farm.’
    ‘Good to know our investigation might now have a leg to stand on,’ quipped Norman Potting, who was immediately silenced by a forbidding glare from Grace; but only for a brief moment.
    ‘Sorry, Roy, didn’t mean any ’arm.’
    There was a titter of laughter, and Grace himself grinned, too. ‘Shut it, Norman, okay?’ He noticed an exchange of glances between Potting and Bella Moy, and waited for some withering comment to Potting from her, but she stayed silent so Grace pressed on.
    ‘Darren Wallace at the mortuary, who has more experience than any of us in these matters, told me that the limbs seem very cold – far colder than they should be even allowing for the fact that they have been immersed in lake water. He surmises that they may have been frozen. I’m sure all of you who can cook know how long it takes to thaw a frozen leg of lamb?’
    There were several nods.
    ‘All I can say at this stage, from the initial mortuary report,’ Grace went on, ‘is that the jagged nature of the severed bones of the limbs bears a visual match with the corresponding areas of the torso, which gives us a timeline problem. It is possible that they’ve been kept refrigerated until now. This is far too early to be sure that we have found the missing limbs, but we could be looking at this lake as a second deposition site.’
    ‘And if we haven’t, chief,’ Nick Nicholl said, ‘then we have another murder enquiry on our hands?’
    ‘Exactly,’ Grace said. ‘But I don’t want to go there at this stage. My personal hypothesis is that the perpetrator got panicked by the appearance of the cloth on Crimewatch last night and decided to dispose of the remains in his possession. But at this stage this is highly speculative.’
    ‘And does not explain the victim’s head, which is still missing,’ said DS Lance Skelton, the Office