Not Dead Yet

41

Anna sat in her Gaia shrine, dressed in the turquoise, feathered ball gown Gaia had worn on stage in her Save The Planet tour. She had showered before putting it on earlier this evening, not wanting any of her own body smells to contaminate her idol’s perfume and perspiration, which she believed she could still detect in the ten-year-old garment.

She was busy revising. Re-reading parts of Gaia’s authorized biography, after having spent the first part of this evening testing and re-testing herself on Gaia’s song history, to make sure she had absolutely every single title, and in the right order, and the date it was first performed. It really would not do, when they finally met tomorrow, for her to make a silly mistake. She wanted to be perfect for her idol.

And she was pretty confident she did have them all right. She was good at dates, always had been. She’d excelled at history at school – she could remember the dates of every king and queen of England; and every battle; and just about all the other important dates. Some of her fellow pupils had called her a swot. So? She didn’t care. What did they know about the world? How many of them today, all these years later, had a Gaia collection like this?

Huh?

‘How many do you think, Diva?’ she said to the cat.

The cat sat at the foot of a glass display cabinet, which contained framed concert tickets and racks of programmes. It did not respond.

She checked her watch. 8.55 p.m. It was time to go downstairs to watch one of her favourite programmes, Crimewatch.

True crimes. With luck there would be a murder on the show; perhaps a reconstruction. She replaced the cat litter on a couple of pages torn from Sussex Living, a free magazine that she never bothered reading but was good for this purpose. Then she went into the living room and switched on the television.

She liked the filmed reconstructions, the more violent and gruesome the better. So much more powerful than in a TV drama or a movie, because you knew they were for real. She could close her eyes and imagine the victim’s fear; the pain; the desperation. It aroused her. Sometimes Gaia played around with bondage in her stage acts. She loved that. That really aroused her too.

Maybe Gaia would tie her up tomorrow? She could suggest it to the star, couldn’t she? She shivered, deliciously, at the thought.

Twenty minutes into the show the presenter Kirsty Young introduced a tall, black detective dressed as if he had just come from a funeral. On the screen appeared the caption, Detective Inspector Glenn Branson, Sussex CID.

Anna took a delicate sip of her Gaia mojito. Sussex. Something local, even better! In the Argus and on the radio and television news there had been coverage about a body found on a chicken farm in East Sussex. Not much had been said about it so far, but it sounded very sinister. Deliciously sinister. She hoped he might be going to talk about that now.

Moments later there was a film clip of the detective standing by a metal gate, with a sign beside him saying STONERY FARM. He looked very nervous.

Yes! Oh yes! Thank you, Detective! She was so excited she slopped some of her mojito over the rim of her cocktail glass.

‘Sussex police were called to this free-range chicken farm last Friday morning, where a male torso was discovered by workers cleaning out the waste tank of the chicken shed,’ Kirsty Young said.

The film cut to show a huge, single-storey shed, a good hundred yards long, with clapboard walls and a row of roof vents, and tall steel silos beside it. The television camera pulled back to reveal this was on a screen in the studio; the detective pointed, saying, ‘The body was found in here, and we believe he had been here for between six and nine months, could be longer. We have no DNA, no fingerprints and no dental records. We need to identify this man. There is no case colder than the one in which the victim is unidentified. And tonight we are asking for your help.’

Anna sipped her drink and watched eagerly. Oh yes, this was her kind of stuff!

‘The man is estimated to have been between forty-five and fifty years old, five feet six or seven inches tall, of slight build,’ the detective continued. ‘At some point in the past he suffered two broken ribs, either from being involved in an accident – could have been a sporting injury, or sustained in a road accident, or indeed a fight.’ He smiled, but it could just as easily have been a nervous twitch, Anna thought.

‘Help from the public is vital to us in this case. We cannot start a murder investigation in earnest until we know who that body is. One thing that may be significant in helping to jog the mind of someone out there is the gentleman’s stomach contents. He ate a last meal which probably included oysters and wine.’

What kind of oysters? Tell us? Anna urged, silently. Colchester? Whitstable? Blue Point? Bluffs? What kind? Tell us, tell us! Colchester? Colchester are the best!

Now the detective was pointing at two ragged pieces of fabric that were stuck to a whiteboard. Next to them was a complete male suit in the same material, on a shop-window mannequin. ‘Something that may be significant to our enquiry is these two pieces of cloth found in the vicinity of the body. We believe they come from a suit similar to this one.’ He pointed at the mannequin.

The screen filled with a blow-up photograph of the two pieces. It was a distinctive yellow ochre and red and dark-brown check. Anna listened to the detective’s voice, taking another, larger sip of her drink.

‘This is a tweed suit material, in a heavyweight cloth from the quality manufacturer Dormeuil,’ DS Branson said. ‘You can see this is a very bold and distinctive design. You’d remember if you saw a suit of this pattern, or if you knew someone who had a suit like this.’

Anna did. She drained the rest of her drink in one gulp then set the glass down. The numbers to call for the Incident Room and the anonymous number for Crimestoppers came up. But Anna did not call either of them.

Instead she made herself another drink.