Gone to Ground (11 page)

"You see what I mean?" the lawyer said to Helen. "Never takes anything seriously."

"Shall we get on with it?" Helen said.

Sober-faced, McKusick told his version of the after-dinner argument with Stephen Bryan, less dramatic than that told by Jack Rouse, but basically the same. He admitted he had been drinking unusually heavily and blamed his behaviour on that. It had been, he claimed, entirely out of character.

Closely questioned, he resolutely denied having visited Bryan's house on the day of his death. He had not as much as spoken to him, never mind seen him, for weeks. The inspector was right, he had lost his temper on the night that he and Bryan had argued, back in November, but that had been the one and only time.

"Ask anyone else who knows me," McKusick said. "Anyone who knew Stephen and I at all well. They'll tell you the same." He looked first at Will and then at Helen. "I'm sure you have already."

"I'd just like to confirm," Christine Costello said, "there is no evidence, physical or otherwise, which places my client at the deceased's premises at or around the time he died?"

"That's correct," Will said, after a beat. Not joking now.

"Very well, then," Costello said, rising to her feet. "We're through here, I think."

Helen looked for a sign of a smirk on McKusick's face as he walked past, but there was nothing, not even relief. Somehow, he'd regained control, not just of himself but the situation.

"How close were we?" she asked, when they were alone.

"Don't ask," Will said. "Just don't ask."

When Lesley had arrived in Langar, a small village east of the city, she had found Crawford's house without difficulty. A seventy-three-year-old former pilot who was beginning to be troubled by osteoarthrosis, Crawford's mind was still sharp as a tack. And he was in no doubt as to what he'd seen: a Boeing 737 with the registration number N313P had come in to land in the early hours of the morning and taken off again ninety minutes later.

"Why here?" Lesley asked.

"Refueling, most likely," Crawford said.

He presented Lesley with photographic evidence to support his claims and pointed her to half a dozen Web sites where, he assured her, she would find conclusive proof that the CIA was using Britain as a landing stage in the process of flying prisoners to eastern Europe and North Africa.

"Why would they do that?" Lesley asked, naive questions being sometimes the best.

Crawford screwed up his face. "To get information about terrorism. Information they can only get through torture. And this way they can keep their hands clean, hold them up and swear by God Almighty they never took a step out of line, knowing there's them in Egypt or Romania with a lot less scruples."

"And you believe this? You believe this is what's happening? And the government knows?"

"Sweetheart," he said, covering her hand with his. "If I know, an old bugger with no more resources than two good eyes and a decent camera, don't you think MI5 or the security services know what's going
on, too?
I should think the chap who wipes the Prime Minister's backside knows, wouldn't you?" He winked. "Admitting it, of course, that's a different matter. Involves an old-fashioned strategy called telling the truth."

Lesley left with forty minutes of material that she could probably whittle down to four, and which she thought Alan Pike might not even agree to use; and if he did, then Roger Hart, the station manager, might well find a reason for wielding his veto.

She had scarcely been back in the newsroom a couple of minutes, not time enough to shed her coat, than Pike appeared, brandishing a copy of the
Evening Post.

"Look at this. Natalie Prince, too uptight to give us an interview, but here she is, splashed all over two pages of the bloody
Post.
"He dropped the paper, disparagingly, on Lesley's desk. "How come they could get it and we couldn't?"

He didn't wait for an answer.

Lesley pushed her coat onto the back of her chair and started to read. The third paragraph stopped her cold.

Natalie Prince is here in the city to discuss starring in a remake of
Shattered Glass,
a cult film from the nineteen fifties that originally starred her great aunt, Stella Leonard.

19.

EXT. HOUSE. NIGHT.

Evening. A roadster pulls up in the driveway of a substantial country house. PHILIP jumps out and hurries round to open the car door for ALMA.

Getting out of the car, ALMA smiles and starts to walk toward the door, taking her key from her bag as she does so. Opening the door, she stands aside and smiles at PHILIP again, letting him enter the house before her.

20.

INT. HALLWAY. NIGHT.

ALMA
Hello? Is anyone home?

Moving further into the house, she pauses outside a door before turning the handle and pushing it open.

21.

INT. DRAWING ROOM. NIGHT.

RUBY is standing in front of the fireplace, her back to the door. Unlike ALMA, whose clothes are neat and utilitarian, the dress RUBY is wearing suggests worldliness and a degree of sophistication.

As the door opens, RUBY looks upward into the mirror above the fireplace, so that, in its reflection, we see the upper part of her face and, from her POV, ALMA and PHILIP entering the room.

ALMA
(to PHILIP)
This is my sister, Ruby.

RUBY slowly turns to face them and we register the astonishment on PHILIP's face as he sees the almost total resemblance between them, one a more sophisticated, highly made-up version of the other.

ALMA
Ruby, this is Philip.

RUBY
(a smile playing round the
corners of her mouth, as she
sizes up PHILIP approvingly)
Really?

NATALIE PRINCE HAD THE DISTINCTION OF BEING THE only girl to have been expelled from the Nottingham High School for Girls twice. The first punishment—the culmination of many and diverse warnings—was for sneaking up on stage during assembly, while the head teacher was delivering a sombre lecture on responsibility, and mooning the entire student body. By dint of a large donation to the school fund, her father secured her reinstatement. On the second occasion, she was caught with a sixth former from the nearby High School for Boys on the bandstand of the adjacent Arboretum, smoking dope and indulging in a degree of rather public sexual exploration. She was fifteen at the time and in—and somewhat out of—her school uniform. There was nothing Daddy could do, aside from hiring a pride of private tutors for Natalie, who took and passed her GCSEs early, stormed through Clarendon College for the next two years, and at eighteen was offered a place at several universities, all of which she turned down.

By then, Natalie, a couple of inches short of six foot and skinny, had been spotted by a model agency and was quickly immersed in a world of photo shoots and fashion shows and yes, every female model's favourite slimming aid—aside, of course, from Diet Coke and Marlboro Lights—an elegant sufficiency of cocaine.

Kate Moss she was not.

Elle McPherson she would not become.

But photographers liked her cheekbones and they liked her attitude; when she worked she worked hard, didn't put on airs, let them get the shots they wanted with a minimum of fuss. Her face, sometimes framed by a raven wig, sometimes set off by her own spiky hair, became familiar to readers of the glossier weekend supplements and magazines such as
Heat
and
Red
and
Marie Claire.

Television beckoned. Chat shows with the likes of Graham Norton and Lorraine Kelly. A notorious occasion on which, taking offense at an innocuous remark by Michael Parkinson, she shouted, "Bollocks, Granddad!" then upended a water jug and pranced off.

She took a small part in
Casualty,
another in
The Bill;
for eight weeks she was a running character in
Coronation Street,
before an altercation with one of the featured actors necessitated her character's convenient demise, a dive from a twelfth-story balcony onto concrete.

An all-too-public affair with the lead singer of an alt-country band called Sow's Ear, ended when Natalie punched him out on stage at the Borderline in front of several hundred sweaty fans. Natalie was held overnight by the police and released with front-page pictures in the tabloids and a caution.

Which was when Orlando Rocca contacted her and offered her the lead in
Black Bullet,
a British-Portuguese-Romanian art-house thriller which tickled the critics' fancy and led to
Electric,
in which Rocca cast her as a low-level drug dealer and single mother who finds herself in debt to Albanian gangsters in east London. It was a role which won her a Best Actress award at Sundance and a couple of other nominations.

Since which time Natalie had been linked with numerous projects, ranging from a modern dress version of
A Midsummer Night's Dream
to
Slowdive,
a biopic based on Siouxsie Sioux of Siouxsie and the Banshees. And now, according to no less an authority than the
Nottingham Evening Post,
she was going to be starring in a retread of
Shattered Glass,
a film very few people had heard of, never mind seen.

All of the above Lesley pulled together from a variety of news reports and articles on the Web and a selection of interviews available through the BBC archives. Caught on microphone, Natalie at times sounded older if not necessarily wiser than her twenty-five years, at others she seemed gauche and startled; when she was comfortable enough with the interviewer to relax, her local Nottingham accent came through quite clearly, and it was then that Lesley found herself almost warming to her.

Now the thing to do was talk to her herself.

The piece in the
Post
was under Mel Mast's byline.

"Mel? Hi, it's Lesley, from BBC Radio Nottingham ... Yes, fine thanks. Fine ... Listen, Mel, how the hell'd you manage to get to sit down with Natalie Prince? When we asked for an interview we were told she was only doing national and that was that. No exceptions."

"Let's say I called in a couple of favours," Mast said, and Lesley could almost visualize the smile crossing her face. "It wasn't easy, even so. Her PR people insisted on seeing the final copy, vetting any photographs, real bullshit, you know? Anyone'd think she was Madonna, for God's sake."

"The PR company, that's how you got to her?"

"How else?"

Lesley pitched a guess. "Scott, he still looking after her?"

"Yes." Mel laughed. "Maybe there's a couple of favours of your own you could work on."

Lesley thanked her and set down the phone. That explained what her ex had been doing in the city the other day, all spruced up. She wondered if he were still around.

Calls to Scott Scarman's mobile were being re-routed to his office. "I'm sorry," the woman said in her best estuary English, "Mr. Scarman's with a client and can't be disturbed."

"When he comes up for air," Lesley said, "tell him his ex-wife wants to speak to him, okay?"

Scarman rang back just short of five, while Lesley was working on her plane-spotting interview; now that the Home Secretary had made a statement in the Commons assuring the House that no clandestine CIA flights had taken place, clearly lying to his back teeth, there was a chance her report might find its way into the news after all.

"Lesley," Scarman said, his voice full of easy bonhomie, "you didn't have to call and apologize."

"I'm not."

"Though if you'd care to meet for a drink, we can talk it through. A misunderstanding, you were emotional. After what you've just been through, not surprising."

"Scott, shut the fuck up, okay? And as for apologizing, there's nothing to apologize for. What I want is thirty minutes with Natalie Prince."

Scarman's voice tightened. "You know the drill on that. Just at the moment interviews with Natalie are very restricted, nothing local."

"That was fine until you let her talk to the
Post.
Now it doesn't wash."

"I'm sorry, sweetheart..."

She hated it when he called her that. "Listen, Scott," she lied, "I just got through talking to Carl Peters, the guy from Sow's Ear, the one she used to date. We could run that instead."

Scarman laughed. "One, I don't believe you..."

"Try him, he's back home in Portland."

"And two, that's blackmail."

"Something you'd understand."

This time Scarman's laugh sounded forced. "I tell you what, meet me for that drink and I'll see if I can't talk Natalie into coming along. Six-thirty? Seven? The Poppy Club? We'll talk about it then."

"Seven," Lesley said.

"Fine."

The line went dead.

"Bastard," Lesley said quietly to herself.

The door to the news editor's room was open.

"I think I've got an interview with Natalie Prince."

"How come?" Pike said.

Lesley set her face to one side and smiled. "Natural charm?"

"Get me something for the afternoon show. We can start trailing it on drive time."

"Do what I can."

The decor was upfront without being overwhelming; deep purple upholstery, large orange, red, and yellow poppies on the walls. The background music, a sort of jazz-soul lite, was relatively subdued: Grover Washington, Kenny G. The usual types were lounging around looking cool, mobiles at the ready, drinks in hand.

Scarman, wearing a pale linen suit, was standing up against the bar, with Natalie Prince sitting on a high stool alongside him, heels of her black ankle boots hooked over the top rung of the stool. Lesley saw endless legs encased in silver tights and, above them, a red silk top; somewhere in between, she guessed, there was a wisp of skirt but from where she was standing it wasn't evident.

"Lesley! Great to see you," Scarman said, swinging round.

She allowed her hand to be grasped, an air kiss to pass close to her face.

"So, Lesley, this is the wonderful Natalie. Nat, this is Lesley." Then, with a grin. "The former Mrs. Scarman, no less."