Silent Scream
Authors: Lynda La Plante
Also by Lynda La Plante
Deadly Intent
Clean Cut
The Red Dahlia
Above Suspicion
The Legacy
The Talisman
Bella Mafia
Entwined
Cold Shoulder
Cold Blood
Cold Heart
Sleeping Cruelty
Royal Flush
Prime Suspect
Seekers
She’s Out
The Governor
The Governor II
Trial and Retribution
Trial and Retribution II
Trial and Retribution III
Trial and Retribution IV
Trial and Retribution V
Lynda La Plante
First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2009
A CBS COMPANY
Copyright © Lynda La Plante, 2009
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.
The right of Lynda La Plante to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 9781847375452
eBook ISBN: 9781847378095
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Typeset in Bembo MT by Rowland Phototypesetting Ltd, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Mackays, Chatham, ME5 8TD
To my sister Gilly Titchmarsh.
My gratitude to all those who gave their valuable time to help me with research on
Silent Scream.
Special thanks go to all my committed team at La Plante Productions: Liz Thorburn, Richard Dobbs, Noel Farragher, Sara Johnson, Hannah Gatward and in particular Cass Sutherland and Nicole Muldowney for their invaluable assistance and advice while working on this book. Many thanks also to Stephen Ross and Andrew Bennet-Smith.
I give huge thanks to my literary agent, Gill Coleridge, and all at Rogers, Coleridge & White for their constant encouragement. I am also very grateful to my publishers, Ian Chapman and Suzanne Baboneau, and to everyone at Simon & Schuster. I am very happy to be working with such a terrific company.
T
he driver was not her usual one, but as the night filming had been completed ahead of schedule, she had been released from the set in West London earlier than expected. Amanda Delany didn’t mind though; all the unit drivers had become friends of the entire film company. The Mercedes drew up outside her mews house in Belgravia and she jumped out quickly. The driver made sure she was safely inside the house before he drove off. She liked that because the overhanging ivy around her front door made it possible for someone to hide there and she was cautious, although none of her fans knew her new address.
Amanda loved the little house. She had only really been in residence eight weeks, but she had purchased it eighteen months ago. The renovations and the decoration had been completed before she had moved in, and it still had the lingering smells of new carpets and paint.
She was tired, it was almost midnight, and she decided to go straight to bed, relieved that she wasn’t still filming until four in the morning – which was when the night shoot usually ended. Tomorrow she would be collected mid-afternoon. They were shooting in summer and it didn’t get dark until almost nine.
Amanda took a quick shower and got into her bed, new like everything else in the mews house. This was the first place that she had owned, the first time she had lived on her own, without flatmates or boyfriends. She had changed partners almost as frequently as she had filming commitments, which made perfect fodder for the tabloids. Her lovers had invariably been her co-stars and, although she was still only twenty-four years old, Amanda had broken up two marriages. Her last affair, with a famous movie star, had been very public. Amanda was one of a clutch of young, very beautiful actresses about to break into the big time, and her agent had warned her to curb her sexual exploits, or risk damaging her blossoming career.
She fell deeply asleep straight away but woke up an hour later. For a few moments she was disorientated and reached for the clock on her bedside table, wondering if she had inadvertently set the alarm. Night filming was always difficult to adjust to, and often she found it hard working through the night and catching up on sleep during the day. Had there been a change of schedule? Had it been the telephone that had woken her? Amanda threw back the duvet and went to the window to look into the mews courtyard, but it was empty.
Back in bed, she snuggled down, must have dropped off again, and then woke with a start. The scream was hideous, a scream of such agony and terror that her heart lurched with fear. She sat up listening, waiting for it to continue, waiting for something to happen. But nothing did. Terrified, she got up again to look from the window into the courtyard. She turned on the lights and went from the bedroom down the narrow hall. All was silent, and from her kitchen annexe downstairs she looked into the back garden, a small paved square with high walls surrounding it. She wondered if it was perhaps a wounded animal she’d heard.
Returning to her bedroom, leaving all the lights on, she couldn’t stop hearing that terrible single scream echoing in her head. The more she thought about it, the more certain she was that it was a woman screaming. She recalled being cast as the victim of a serial killer in a movie that required her to scream, and when she couldn’t get the right pitch, they had brought in another actress who specialised in bloodcurdling screams. She remembered when she watched the finished film how chilling the moment had been.
Eventually she went back to sleep, aided by two sleeping tablets. She didn’t wake until mid-morning and, brewing up fresh coffee, she wondered if it had simply been a nightmare that had woken her.
She spent the rest of the day learning her lines in preparation for the night’s filming. Her usual driver collected her mid-afternoon to take her to the set for make-up and hair. He apologised for not being available the previous evening.
‘This weird thing happened last night,’ she said.
‘Who drove you?’ he asked.
‘Oh, nothing to do with that. I was in bed and this terrible scream woke me up.’ She frowned and leaned forwards. ‘I don’t know if it was the screaming that woke me – you know, if it had gone on before – but it was just one long terrible scream and it really scared me.’
‘Maybe it was a cat – or one o’ these urban foxes they go on about?’
‘No, no, it didn’t sound like either of those. At first, I thought it
was
maybe an animal but . . . I think it was a woman.’
‘Did you call the police?’
‘No, I didn’t because it all went quiet and I couldn’t see anyone outside or in the back garden. I just went back to bed.’
In the make-up trailer, Amanda repeated the incident to her hairdresser. She told it over again to her make-up artist and it brought forth a slew of stories from the girls about nightmares and how hard it was, working nights, to get to sleep. She told the director about how frightened she had been. His response was to joke that it would probably help her performance. They were about to shoot a scene where she was to be confronted by the arch villain, who attempts to strangle her because he knows that she can identify him.
The film was yet another version of
Gaslight
, a Victorian thriller in which a young wife is terrorised by her husband, intent on frightening her to death in order to claim her inheritance. The script had been adapted by a young writer who hoped, with the use of state-of-the-art special effects, to turn it into a successful killer chiller, its dark foreboding style in homage to
Nosferatu
and early silent horror films. The director, Julian Pike, was only twenty-seven and with just one successful art-house movie to his credit, so a lot depended on this much bigger-budget extravaganza.
The filming went well, with only a few delays. They were shooting the exterior shots in a manmade cobbled street lit by gas lamps that backed onto a massive hangar where the main set, with its remarkable reconstruction of a Victorian house, was standing. Tonight they were filming the scene where Amanda, cast as the young wife, returns from the opera with her husband and alights from the carriage to enter their house, a mocked-up exterior with pillars and three steps leading to the front door. The door could be opened but led only onto a small platform inside, five feet off the ground. With only enough room for two people on the platform, it was decided that the maid would open the door and step back quickly. An assistant would help her down, leaving enough room for the two leading actors to sweep inside. It was such a simple shot, but they had to do take after take to get it right, and Pike was losing patience.
In the next scene, Amanda is running from the house in terror. She crosses the road in an attempt to escape, tries to hail a horse-drawn Hansom cab and, failing to do so, is almost run over by a carriage. There were rain machines, and flash lighting to depict lightning; the sound of thunder would be laid on afterwards. As the fog, generated by smoke machines, became thicker, Amanda had to collide with the very man she was afraid of. Then she had to scream. Nothing went smoothly: the horses got skittish with the flash lighting; one take was ruined as the smoke machine made Amanda start coughing. There were altercations between Amanda and the uptight director. By now she was freezing cold.