The Cross

Chapter Nineteen

London

It was just before midday by the time Alex arrived at the Ritz off Piccadilly and walked up to the desk.

‘Hailey Adams,’ she said to the receptionist, charming but authoritative, flashing her VIA ID too quickly for the woman to scrutinise it. ‘Starburst Pictures. I’m here to see Mr Burnett. The Trafalgar Suite, right?’ It was only fifty-fifty, she thought as the receptionist checked the register, that Baxter hadn’t left his regular London hideaway and headed back home to the States. Life as one of the beautiful people.

The receptionist smiled. ‘Trafalgar Suite, that’s right.’

Alex used the stairs. Lifts were too slow. Arriving at the door to the suite, she pushed straight through with a splintering of wood.

The lavish rooms were just as she remembered them. Except … no Baxter. The only sign of him was the Armani jacket carelessly thrown over the back of one of the Louis XI settees and the laptop sitting open on a marble-topped coffee table. Alex strode across the Persian rug and peered at the screen-saver, a handsome close-up of Baxter’s face, a still shot from one of his Berserker movies — Alex couldn’t remember which. Still, it was definitely his computer.

With a flick of the keys, the screen-saver vanished to reveal Baxter’s opened email program. The last message to have come in was clocked at 10.38 that morning. Its heading was ‘Let’s have lunch’.

The name of the sender, Piers Bullivant, was one Alex recognised. A cinema fan right from the days of silent movies, she’d been there for the heyday of Keaton, Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, all the greats, and must have seen a hundred thousand films since. She rarely missed an issue of Movie Mad magazine, and Piers Bullivant was one of their long-standing writers. Alex had read enough of his articles to know that Bullivant was a savage and vitriolic critic of anything to do with the commercial movie industry, Hollywood in general, and vulgar, untalented and overpaid stars like Baxter Burnett in particular.

Let’s have lunch? It seemed just a little unusual, Alex thought to herself, that Baxter should be in friendly email correspondence with the critic who, more than anyone, seemed to delight in every opportunity to hack and bludgeon him to death with the pen. But then, looking at the message more closely, she saw something even odder. Bullivant’s reply read:

Dear Gwendolyn — Lovely to hear from you again. Yes, I agree, it would be great to meet up. How about lunch today, my place?

Below, Bullivant gave his address in Wimbledon. Seeing that the email had been replied to, Alex clicked into the sent messages folder. The reply from GwendolynCooper@hotmail. com had been posted at 11.46, just a few minutes before she’d got here.

Hi Piers,

It’s a date. See you at 12.30. I’ll bring a bottle.

Gwendolyn xxx

‘Shit,’ Alex muttered as Baxter’s ploy began to dawn on her. She scrolled up and found six more messages from ‘Gwendolyn’ to Bullivant. Attached to the first message was a picture that most definitely wasn’t of Baxter Burnett. The blonde was maybe nineteen or twenty. Low-cut blouse, painted-on jeans, heavy eye-shadow, glossy lipstick, provocative pout, the works. Apparently, she was a final-year media student at London University and a huge fan of Piers’s work, passionate about getting into film journalism; and did he know of any openings coming up at Movie Mad? She’d just love to meet and talk.

‘Come on, Bullivant,’ Alex snorted. ‘Even a human can’t be this easily taken in.’

But, seemingly, a human could. It hadn’t taken much wooing from Baxter before the critic had gulped down the bait.

‘Bugger,’ Alex said, looking at her watch. Baxter must have left just a few minutes ago, but he still had a pretty good headstart on her. She’d little more than quarter of an hour to cut across town to Wimbledon, if she wanted to interrupt the romantic lunch date before it went too badly for Piers Bullivant.

Seconds later, Alex was tearing out of the smashed door of the Trafalgar Suite and running for the stairs.