Fatal Act (7 page)

H
e looked irritated when Geraldine asked him if there was anything else he wanted to tell them. He glanced at his solicitor for an explanation. The brief just shrugged, as though to say he had no idea what Geraldine was talking about. Piers turned back to Geraldine.

‘What do you mean, anything else? Her car was in a collision. She’s dead.’

‘Yes, her car was involved in a collision, but Anna didn’t die as a result of the crash, not exactly. She was concussed, and badly injured, but that wasn’t what killed her. Someone gave her a fatal injury after the vehicles collided. That was what killed her. This isn’t a simple hit and run case, Mr Trevelyan.’

P
iers looked perplexed. Already pale and drawn from lack of sleep, his face took on a greyish tinge. There was no mistaking his unease.

‘So the van she drove into –’

‘No, it wasn’t like that. The van deliberately drove into her car.’

‘What?’

‘We’ve got it on CCTV. There’s no question that this was deliberate. Anna was murdered.’

‘Murder? Anna was murdered? You’re saying someone did this deliberately? But why? Who?’

G
eraldine wasn’t sure if he was shocked at hearing that his girlfriend had been murdered, or because the police had seen through a sophisticated attempt to disguise her death as a fatal traffic accident. At her side, Geraldine heard Sam sniff. She glanced around. She could imagine what her colleague was thinking: Piers worked in the world of acting; they couldn’t take anything he said at face value. But Geraldine thought he was genuinely surprised. His solicitor meanwhile looked grave. He advised his client not to say anything. Ignoring his advice, Piers grew strident in his protestations.

‘M
r Trevelyan, think carefully. Is there anyone who might have held a grudge against Anna, anyone who might have hated her enough to do this?’

‘No one hated Anna,’ he replied sternly. ‘If you’d known her, you’d realise how ridiculous that question is.’

‘Who did she mix with? Who were her friends?’

‘Anna had no time for friends. She was a lead character in the series. You have no idea what that means. I don’t think you have the faintest idea how time consuming the profession is, or how hard she worked. People like you think it’s easy, appearing on television. Do you know how little time she was given to learn her lines, or the pressure she was under to deliver?’

‘You mentioned someone she went to drama school with, the friend she asked you to cast in your latest project. Tell me about him.’

‘There’s nothing to tell. Dirk’s a fool. He’s the reason we argued in the first place. If it hadn’t been for that idiot –’

‘Why was she so keen for you to give him a part?’

Piers didn’t answer. He stared stubbornly at his hands, frowning.

‘W
hat was their relationship?’ Geraldine persisted, interested that he had clammed up so suddenly.

‘There is no relationship, there wasn’t, not since I met her.’

‘And before that?’

‘Before that they were together for a while, while they were students. It was all a long time ago and it never meant anything.’

Geraldine sat forward in her chair.

‘Did it bother you that she remained friends with her ex?’

‘They weren’t friends, not exactly. They’d known each other at drama school, but they hadn’t kept in touch, at least not until he wanted to use her to contact me. She was too innocent to understand what he was playing at. I’ve seen it all so many times before.’

‘So you didn’t mind her keeping in touch with an ex-boyfriend who was her own age?’

‘His age didn’t bother me. Why should it? Do you think someone of my stature would be threatened by a talentless young fool who thinks he has some divine right to be turned into a star? Anna was –’

Unexpectedly, he broke off and buried his face in his hands. His shoulders shook with silent tears. Geraldine was reassured by the sight of his distress. His calm reaction to the death of his girl friend had been unnaturally self-controlled until then.

O
N
S
UNDAY
MORNING,
G
ERALDINE
rang Zak’s door bell. She had told Sam she wouldn’t need her for this visit. If Piers’ son had anything interesting to tell them, she would pursue that line of questioning with the sergeant beside her at the station. This was just an initial encounter. Zak had a key to the van that had killed Anna, and she felt a rush of adrenaline as a drowsy voice answered her summons. Every person associated with the case was a potential suspect. If she only kept looking for long enough, widening the circle of people she questioned, sooner or later she would come across the right person. If Senior Investigating Officer Reg Milton was right, they had already met him. The key to it all was recognising the killer when they found him.

‘W
ho the hell is it? What do you want? It’s Sunday morning.’

There was a very long pause after Geraldine introduced herself.

‘What’s that you said?’ the voice asked at last.

Geraldine repeated her introduction.

‘Can’t you come back later or something? I’m not even up.’

‘I’m afraid this can’t wait.’

‘What the hell. Oh, hang on then.’

There was some muffled swearing and then the voice asked her, very politely, if she wouldn’t mind waiting for a moment. She guessed he wanted time to put on some clothes and stash whatever drugs he kept in his flat. Finally the buzzer sounded and she went in.

T
he accommodation was hardly what she would have expected of student digs. Piers had bought the flat as in investment, or perhaps as a liberal gift for his twenty-year-old son. Either way, Zak was living in a smart brand new one bedroomed flat in central London, a couple of minutes from Kings Cross station, and barely ten minutes’ walk from his college. Geraldine felt a flicker of envy as the lift rose swiftly and silently, leaving her in a carpeted corridor that looked as though it had just been painted. She could imagine what Sam would have to say about it. Perhaps unconsciously Geraldine hadn’t wanted to bring the sergeant to Zak’s flat, because she suspected it might prejudice the sergeant against the young man. After all, he could hardly be reproached for taking advantage of his father’s generosity. She wondered what his fellow students made of his good fortune. She guessed they were probably all keen to be friends with the son of an influential casting director. In terms of his living conditions and his career, Zak had certainly been lucky. She remembered Zak’s powerful father, and wondered what price the boy had paid for his luxurious lifestyle.

Z
ak had inherited Piers’ straight nose and high cheek bones, although his features were more delicate than his father’s, and his complexion swarthy. He had enormous almond-shaped dark eyes and jet black hair that he wore down to his shoulders, with a long floppy fringe that he continuously flicked out of his eyes. If it hadn’t been for his square chin, Geraldine might have mistaken him for a beautiful girl.

‘You’d better come in and sit down,’ he said, not ungraciously.

Geraldine looked around and hesitated, because there was nowhere to sit in the sparsely furnished room.

A
long one wall, a tall wooden bookcase displayed a short row of hardback books and a few dog-eared paperbacks, a wilting spider plant, one framed photograph of a group of laughing young men, and an odd assortment of wooden boxes and pots that looked as though they might have been collected while he was travelling in the Far East, although he could have picked them up in Camden market. At one end of the room a table stood beneath the window, with a variety of art materials on it: paints, small pieces of wood, curling slips of coloured paper and a handful of pencils and paint brushes. There were more paint brushes in a glass jar on the floor beneath the window, and yet more in front of the book shelves. Other than that, the floor was carelessly strewn with jeans and T-shirts, sneakers and newspapers, empty cigarette packets and beer bottles. A grey anorak had been thrown down beside a dying pot plant, and a few more books lay on the floor in no particular order. This was closer to Geraldine’s preconception of a student flat, and nothing like the elegant public areas of the block.

Z
ak made no apology for the state of his room. Geraldine wasn’t sure he even noticed how untidy the place was. For a student of design, she thought it was a poor show, but she refrained from commenting. She wasn’t his landlady, or his mother.

‘Zak, your father tells us you have a key to his van?’

‘What’s the old tosser gone and done now?’ he asked irreverently.

Geraldine resisted the temptation to remind him that ‘the old tosser’ was paying for Zak’s expensive flat.

‘Just answer the question, please.’

H
e took a step forward, his expression suddenly apprehensive.

‘If my father’s in any trouble –’

‘Nothing that you need to be concerned about.’

‘It’s not just that I’m relying on him for the rent and all that, you know. I mean, I’m half way through my course, and – well, I’m under enough pressure, without having to worry about money on top of everything else. You probably think it’s a doss, studying set design, but you’ve no idea how stressful it is. But the point is, well, he is my dad, and if he’s in trouble, I mean, if there’s anything I can do… ’ He paused and passed his hand over his mouth, seeming embarrassed at having displayed his feelings. ‘Not that he ever needs my help. So, what was it you wanted to know?’

G
eraldine asked him about the van.

‘My dad’s van? With all his money, you’d think he’d just give it to me, wouldn’t you? It’s not as if I’ve got a car. He says I don’t need one, living in London. Like he would know. We have to travel to Pimlico next week. And sometimes we’re out rehearsing until quite late.’

He raised his fine eyebrows. Geraldine wondered if he plucked them, they were so neat. Sam had been right about one thing. Zak was spoiled. He was possibly the most spoiled youngster she had ever met. Yet for all that, he was somehow likeable. She could understand his father indulging him and wanting to look after him, especially if he felt he had to compensate his son for his mother’s death. Although he was so young, she was conscious that Zak might also be a suspect. Beautiful people could be psychopaths, like anyone else, and narcissists were frequently callous.

‘Y
our father told us you have a key to his van?’

‘That’s right. Dad gave it to me ages ago but he hardly ever lets me use it, so I don’t know why he bothered.’ He gave a sulky scowl.

He didn’t seem particularly curious about why Geraldine had come to his flat on a Sunday morning to question him about his father’s van.

‘Where were you on Friday night?’

‘Friday night? What? You mean the Friday that’s just gone?’

‘Yes.’

He frowned, thinking.

‘I was out, in London.’

‘What time?’

‘What time are you talking about?’

‘Where were you between one and two in the morning.’

‘I was with Jackie and Ron on Friday.’

‘Who are Jackie and Ron?’

‘They’re on the set design course with me. We spent the night together.’

‘Here?’

‘Hardly.’ He giggled. ‘Why on earth would we want to stay
here
all night? No, we went up town.’

‘Where?’

He named a club in Leicester Square.

‘What time was that?’

‘I suppose we got there just before midnight, and it must have been about three when we left, maybe three thirty. It was after four when I got back here. Oh, it’s all right,’ he added with a grin, ‘I wasn’t needed on set yesterday.’

Geraldine wrote down the details of Zak’s fellow students, Jackie and Ron, before she left. Zak showed her to the door without even asking the reason for her visit. One thing was sure, if he was guilty, he hid it well.

‘T
HAT
’
S
ALL
WELL
AND
good, but that’s just my point,’ Geraldine protested.

She was standing in Reg’s office, frowning at him across his desk.

‘You think he’s innocent because he’s so obviously a suspect?’ The detective chief inspector frowned. ‘I’m sorry, Geraldine, but you’ve lost me. The man is obviously guilty –’

‘No. We can’t go jumping to conclusions like that.’

‘Give me one good reason why you think he’s innocent. And please don’t tell me again it’s because everything points to him. I’m not sure on what level that makes sense.’

Geraldine took a deep breath and tried to explain that it was precisely because Piers was so obviously in the frame that she didn’t believe he had been driving the van when it crashed into Anna’s Porsche.

‘T
here are so many reasons why this doesn’t feel right.’

‘Doesn’t feel right? Oh, Jesus. All right, Geraldine, give me just one of the reasons for this “feeling” because they seem to have escaped my notice while I’ve been busy studying the facts.’

Ignoring her senior officer’s jibes, she continued.

‘For a start, Piers would have been injured if he’d been driving the van on Friday night. He was given a thorough medical examination and the doctor found no sign of any injury.’

‘He could have been lucky.’

‘No sir, it’s impossible.’

The detective chief inspector growled at her formal term of address, but she didn’t stop to apologise. The habits she had acquired while working in Kent still crept up on her when she wasn’t careful. Instead, she ploughed on with her argument.

‘S
econdly, there’s no credible motive. Piers was the one with all the power in this relationship. He went from one young woman to another, picking them up, screwing them for a while, helping them with their careers, before discarding them and moving on to the next rising starlet.’

Reg was listening now.

‘If she’d rejected him, or threatened to leave him, he might have reacted violently,’ he suggested.