The Vanity Game (21 page)

If only
they
, the bastard gutter press, knew how bad I really am… They'll be out there now, camped at the end of the drive, hoping for a grainy shot of one of us leaving the house. They'll be laughing at me, wondering how I could be that stupid, but if only they knew…

My ring tone kicks in. I stare at it as it flashes up 'Serge mob'. Fuck. I think about ignoring but decide I want to know what the fucker has to say for himself.

"Alright, mate. I presume you've seen the press this morning." He sounds uptight, worried. Just hearing his voice makes me shake.

"Yeah, I've seen them."

"Jesus Beaumont. What were you thinking? How's she taken it?"

"Okay, you know, considering." ...Considering you've got her fucking number you bastard, I say to him in my head.

"Yeah, well she ain't gonna leave you over it or anything is she?"

"Oh God, Serge, I don't know. What is this? It was just some whore that came onto me…"

I can't control my anger any longer, and I'm shouting down the phone.

"Okay, okay keep your hair on. Listen, I was just ringing to see if there was anything I could do, but you go and talk to Stella, son, sort things out with the missus. I'll fake your sig on that Franco Visconti contract yeah?"

"Yeah, whatever, Serge, I've got to go," I tell him, and hang up.

The fucking nerve of the bastard, asking how the missus is when he's arranging a hit on her, I can't believe it. Why's he so bothered if she stays or not, wouldn't it make his life easier if she left me? But, wait a minute…shit, of course it wouldn't. If Stella leaves me it would cock-up his little plan good and proper. Krystal McQueen would be a free agent and nothing to do with me any more, so no profit for him. I think it over again, and it's true – he needs me and Stella to stay together. But say she did leave me, decide to give this fame game up and disappear for real this time because she can't cope with my cheating. That's it! I'm a fucking genius. Felicity could kill off Krystal McQueen for good and save Stella. I know a couple of sports hacks and they, and Krystal's agent, Georgia, could help me get the story out. Looking at the whole thing now, the kiss and tell couldn't have come at a better time. Thank you Felicity, you horny little slut, you've just saved my girlfriend's life.

"Stella! Stella?"

I'm running up the stairs, calling out to her. She's lying curled up on the bed, still crying. I feel for her, the poor girl doesn't deserve to be caught up in this horrible mess.

"Stella," I whisper as I kneel by the bed with my face close to hers.

"That was Serge on the phone, wasn't it?" she croaks.

"Yeah it was… Listen though, it could all turn out okay. I've had an idea."

"Oh yeah?" she sniffles and sits up against the headboard.

"This Felicity business…" – I ignore her snort – "…I know it looks bad, well, it is bad, but maybe we can use it to our advantage."

"What?" she asks, screwing up her face, which is all red and blotchy like a baby's.

"Well Serge was asking if you were gonna leave me, he was really worried. 'Cos you see, if you were to leave me it would ruin his plans big style."

I'm sitting on the bed now, staring at the carpet and it feels like I'm reading lines in a play, "He wouldn't be able to control it any more, so I thought: 'what if Krystal was to go missing again, on the back of this?' You could just disappear."

"Disappear?" she says, sounding pretty pissed off, "Where the hell would I go, Beaumont? And what about us… I mean, I don't know what's even going on with us now, but you…can't you disappear too?"

"You could go anywhere you want, start afresh. I can't go though… I…." but I can't really think of a reason other than that I can't turn my back on this life, however hellish it is, and the thought of living with her, this strange girl that's ended up as my girlfriend in the most random way, in total ordinariness is a fucking scary prospect.

"…I can't let the fans down."

"Oh my God, Beaumont, that's such a shit excuse. You don't love me do you?"

I'm back staring at the carpet, "Course I do, darling."

"Well, look at me then."

So I turn and look at her, take her hot face in my hands and stare into her watery blue eyes.

"I do love you, and I'm so sorry … for last night and for everything," I whisper, the sound of those very words making me wonder if I am actually sorry at all.

She doesn't say anything back and there's an uncomfortable pause.

"If I go as well he'll – they will – come looking for us," I say finally, and after she doesn't reply to that either, "besides, I can't just disappear from the public eye… People would recognise me wherever I go but you … you could go back to being yourself, being Stella."

"You could change too, anyone can disappear," she says, but there's a sense of defeat in her voice and I know now she's accepting that she's got to go alone. She's the one who has no choice.

"We can keep in touch, and maybe when it's over…"

"When will it be over though, Beaumont?" she interrupts, "You'll carry on living as you are, going to parties…" – she pauses and frowns, like she's thinking of something bad – "and fucking anything that moves."

That's a bit out of order, but what can I say? Actually I don't have the slightest urge for casual sex after everything that's happened.

"I'll behave, I promise, and I won't forget about you," I say, stroking her hair. Then she throws her arms around me and hugs me, weeping into my shoulder. I've got to admit, over the last few months I've grown to like the girl, a lot, no lie, and I start to feel a little emotional myself.

When she pulls away from me she looks a bit more together, committed to the task in hand.

"I guess I could go to Australia… Sydney. I've never told you this but my mum lives out there. We're barely in touch but I guess now would be the time to make things up with her."

I nod. Perfect. Brand Beaumont and Krystal hasn't really hit Australia so she could easily go incognito, as they say. She's still got a passport in her own name, I think, so all she has to do is withdraw the money from Krystal's accounts and then get on a plane. Draining the accounts will make it look like Krystal really has decided to do a runner. Stella will need to sort things out fast though, she's got to be on that plane in less than four day’s time, or else. Then we get the friendly hacks to break the news that Krystal has gone for good, and Serge's plan will be up in smoke, guaranteed.

"I'll go and ring my mum now and look at flights," she says, smiling, like she's actually enthusiastic about it. I feel a bit put out by her keenness, I've got to say.

"Stella," I call after her before she goes out of the room. She turns back to me.

"I'm sorry, again."

"Thanks," she says quietly, then goes.

I mean it, as well, right now, I do.

When she's gone downstairs I lie back on the bed and start thinking about everything that's happened, and every thought ends with Serge, and his fucking betrayal. It makes me wonder if all these years he's been my agent he's been secretly plotting to do me over. I think about him sitting in that café with that gangster, the mysterious Petrov, scheming away when only hours before he'd sat there in his office acting concerned for me and my jeans contract. It's too bad to be true. Then I'm thinking about the party, the grotesque fuck in the hotel room, and then the two guys toasting that Taylor Jones guy. Taylor Jones… Why do I have this nagging thought about him?

I get up from the bed and hurry downstairs to the games room. I turn on the computer that I hardly ever use an sit there, swivelling on the chair while it whirs into life. Soon the Google homepage is there in front of me, so I type in 'Taylor Jones sueside' and hit return.

Did you mean ‘Taylor Jones suicide’?
it asks. I guess I did.

But underneath a whole load of stuff has appeared with the words Taylor, Jones, and suicide highlighted in bold everywhere they appear. It all seems to be links to news stories – there's the one I read in
The Sun
, the day after it happened, the day before Krystal died… Fuck me, the start of everything, so I click on the link to remind myself. As I'm re-reading the story a wave of panic comes over me – he repeated the words 'all is vanity' over and over again, and conspiracy theories suggested a strange religious cult was involved.

Granted, I don't really know what 'conspiracy' actually means but I know it's got something to do with weird shit happening. I go back to Google and add after
'Taylor Jones suicide
' '
conspiracy theory'
. This time a whole load of different results comes up with all sorts of titles I don't understand, but halfway down the list, one catches my eye:

'Taylor Jones: the truth about that mysterious cult'

I click on the link. It's a really crap looking web page, dazzling white with basic looking black text.

"Don't bother bookmarking this page – we have to keep changing the web address so they can't shut us down"
runs the message at the top of the page, and then:

"This is the truth about what happened to Taylor Jones. I can't say how I know all this for fear of revealing my identity but rest assured what you are about the read is 100% true.

Taylor Jones died in a Paris hotel room on 7th July 2009. He streamed the video live to his website. Before he shot himself in the head he made a long, baffling rant.

Firstly, the guy in the video was not the same person as the one performing in Madison Square Gardens a week before. That person was an impostor. The real Taylor was a heroin addict who had been slowly going off the rails. His agent, a guy called Matthew Calvert, was getting pretty fed up. One day a man calling himself Petrov contacts Calvert with a proposal. The proposal was that an organised crime ring, calling themselves The Substitutors would intervene. They would get this guy who looked and sounded exactly like Taylor to replace him, and would get rid of the real Taylor.

So Calvert agrees. Sometime in July the real Taylor was drinking in a bar in Soho, London. He met a guy who told him he was a dealer and they started chatting.

What happened next? We don't exactly know, but we think Taylor was kidnapped, had seven shades of shit beaten out of him and was then dumped in a dark backstreet. His wallet and phone had been stolen and in his pocket he found a passport with his picture in it but a totally random name, and £500 in cash. He tries to get home, but when he reaches his flat there's this thug there with a gun who tells him to go away and never return, so he goes on the run. Meantime, the impostor comes onto the scene. The first interview he does is on MTV where he talks about going through rehab and getting sober, then he's playing gigs round the UK and appearing at parties drinking only mineral water. The guy is an absolute doppelganger of Taylor and everyone just thinks Taylor's got clean.

No-one knows where the real Taylor is at this point, but he must have seen the impostor guy on TV. Somehow he managed to get to Paris, but we know little about his movements before he checked into the seedy Canard Hotel, the scene of his suicide. He was washed up, a nobody and by killing himself so publicly he achieved a Pyrrhic victory over The Substitutors and Calvert."

I sink back into the chair, shaking. It's fucking crazy, sick shit, but it makes so much sense. And there's more to read:

"Where did the impostor come from?

You're probably wondering how these thugs found an exact Taylor look-alike? Well read on…they have agents working for them who recruit people off porn sets, reality TV auditions, game shows, film extra agencies...the detritus of show business, people who will do anything for fame. These people need to bear some resemblance to their famous person but the project does the rest. They're taken to a clinic in an unknown location and put under the knife to get the look just right. Then they are coached to speak and act like the celeb they're replacing.

So who else is an impostor?

That we don't know, but you can rest assured this goes a LOT deeper than Taylor Jones. The Substitutors could have infiltrated every corner of the world of showbusiness."

Fuck me. So Denise K is one of these impostor people, some girl who's so desperate for fame that she'd get involved with these evil fuckers.

I'm shaking so much I can hardly work the mouse, but I manage to go back to Google. I want to see if I can find a list of names, people who might have been replaced, but there's nothing, and when I click back to get to the page I've just read all that appears is a message saying
'The page cannot be displayed'
. I try to go back again and again, but every time it's the same – like the page has been deleted. I try to swallow but my throat is bone dry. They're onto Stella…how long have I got?

I jump out of my skin with fright when Stella calls me and when she comes into the room I try to tell her what I've read. She nods slowly, like she's heard it all before.

"I told you, Dean knew about this stuff. Didn't I tell you that?" she says.

And then I think of Serge, and how the fucker kept asking questions about it when we were trying to move the body. Could he really have been plotting against me all this time?