Dead Letter Drop Read online

  To Georgina, my bride of one novel,

  for courage, for strength, for patience

  and above all for love

  Does the Eagle know what is in the pit

  Or wilt thou go ask the Mole?

  WILLIAM BLAKE

  CONTENTS

  FOREWORD

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  DEAD SIMPLE

  LOOKING GOOD DEAD

  FOREWORD

  Welcome to my first published novel, which crept, unseen and unnoticed, onto the bottom shelves at the rear of a handful of bookshops kind enough to stock it back in 1981 – and remained there, mostly unsold. I remember WH Smith, out of the goodness of their hearts, taking a grand total of thirty copies – a far cry from the 30,000 they would take of books that were destined for the bestseller lists! But I am still hugely grateful to them for giving a total unknown the kudos of being able to say, ‘Ah, yes, WH Smith stock it, actually!’

  It was rejected by the first publisher who read it, New English Library, headed by Nick Webb. Seven years later, in 1988, he was to surprise me by outbidding all other UK publishers for my supernatural thriller Possession. The second publisher, to my joy and delight, bought it. WH Allen paid a princely £2,000 – not a lot of money even in those days.

  It was not the first novel that I had written – I wrote three between 1967 and 1970 which, luckily, were never published at all, much to my dismay back then. The first was titled Ride Down a Roller Coaster and it was inspired by my hero at the time, a young writer called Adam Diment who wrote three massively successful, racy, spy thrillers – The Dolly Dolly Spy, The Great Spy Race and The Bang Bang Birds – which enabled him to live a Champagne lifestyle in his mid-twenties and drive an Aston Martin, a car I coveted above all others. Roller Coaster wasn’t a spy thriller; it was a kind of rake’s progress to disaster through the pop and drug world of my own teen era, the 1960s.

  Unlike Adam Diment’s first book, mine was turned down by an endless succession of UK agents and publishers. A friend who read it told me it might appeal more to American tastes than British. I bought a copy of The Writers’and Artists’ Year Book and singled out a New York agent, Kurt Hellmer, who had one of the largest entries. Ever hopeful, I dutifully photocopied the manuscript and airmailed it to him. Imagine my surprise when six weeks later I received an airmail letter (this was in the days before that wonderful technology called fax) containing eight pages of effusive praise telling me I was a wonderful writer, but the book needed some editorial work, after which he was confident it would be published – and listing his thoughts with copious notes. But by then, now at film school, I was nearly at the end of my second novel Atom Bomb Angel (a title I was to use again over a decade later for my second published novel).

  I sent him the new manuscript, but he replied that he didn’t like it as much as Roller Coaster and please would I consider his notes. However, I had then started work on my third novel, a zany comedy titled Bethlehem Where Are You? Kurt hated this book with a vengeance and told me to go back to Roller Coaster. By now I had graduated from film school and emigrated to Canada, where I got a job, through a stroke of luck, at a Toronto television station, writing a daily programme for pre-school children called Polka Dot Door. I wrote proudly to Hellmer telling him the news. Within days I had a very snarky letter back from him, telling me to quit this job if I was serious about a career as a novelist, as I would never write a novel if I was writing for a day job. He advised me to get a job in a library or a factory.

  I ignored his advice, Roller Coaster remained an unfinished project and instead I turned my energies to making films – starting with writing and producing a series of low-budget horrors, and then a comedy called Spanish Fly, starring Terry-Thomas and Leslie Phillips, which came out in 1976 to disastrous reviews. Barry Norman, then the doyen of all film critics, called it ‘The worst British film since the Second World War and the least funny British funny film ever made.’ I have the framed review hanging proudly in my office today!

  Spanish Fly, in which I had invested myself heavily, wiped me out financially, and I was unsure what to do to recover. At this time my father and mother were running our successful family business, Cornelia James, Glovemakers to the Queen, with a factory in Brighton. My father became ill with heart trouble and they were thinking of selling the business. I realized that, having not made it as a writer, and being in a parlous financial state, it would be sensible to go into the business, which would at least give me a decent living. So I went to work in the factory, dimly remembering the advice of my agent, the lovely, patient Kurt Hellmer.

  My then wife, and several friends who knew of my novel-writing ambitions, kept asking me if I was still going to try to achieve my dream of getting a book published. I was twenty-eight and it was a wake-up call. But what to write? Then, by chance, I read an article in The Times saying that with Adam Diment having stopped writing, and with Ian Fleming long dead, there was now an acute shortage of racy spy thrillers. It was a light-bulb moment for me!

  I knew one person who had worked in the security services, Vanessa Gebbie, now a successful novelist in her own right, who had once been a secretary in MI5. Although restricted in what she could tell me, I gleaned enough from her, and from reading a raft of fiction and non-fiction about MI5 and MI6, to have some idea of the world of spooks. I also had, buzzing in my head, an idea for an opening scene for a novel – but no idea where to take it from there.

  So I wrote the scene – a man and a girl wake in his New York apartment, after a raunchy night, to find someone breaking into the room, who then, immediately and inexplicably, commits suicide. Unlike my Roy Grace novels, which I plot meticulously and always know the ending I want to arrive at, I had no idea what would happen next. So I just kept writing and writing and writing. Finally, in 1979, I finished the book. I titled it A Pink Envelope with a Bright Blue Bow.

  I photocopied it and airmailed it to my agent, Kurt Hellmer, who I had not spoken to since 1971. Two months went by without hearing a word from him. I finally phoned his number and got a dead line tone. After several more phone calls, I learned that he had died six years earlier. I guess dead agents aren’t a lot of use . . .!

  I was recommended, through a brilliant entertainments industry lawyer, Bob Storer of Harbottle and Lewes, two agents. One was Debbie Owen, totally delightful, but clearly not that hungry as she was Jeffrey Archer’s agent. The other, Jon Thurley, was just starting out on his own, and I was told he was hungry. Four days after I mailed him the book he phoned me to say he wanted to represent me, but I needed to change the title. Two months later I had the publishing deal I had always dreamed of, but never dared to believe would actually happen.

  One of the strangest – and nicest – things about my writing career is that I have so often found myself writing about subjects that subsequently – entirely coincidentally – become major news, as with my fifth Roy Grace novel, Dead Tomorrow, which is about the murky world of the international trafficking of human organs. Dead Letter Drop is about the discovery of a mole deep within MI5. Within days of signing my publishing deal, the scandal of Anthony Blunt broke. A senior member of MI5, he had been exposed as a spy for Russia.

  I hope you have as much fun reading Dead Letter Drop as I did writing it. Take it with a pinch of salt and please don’t ju
dge me too harshly!

  Peter James

  Sussex

  1

  There is a strange sensation you get when you know someone has entered your room but you haven’t yet seen or heard him. You just feel him there. I got that feeling in my bedroom late one night. It was very late and very dark.

  I had had the same chill before on a thousand different occasions, in a thousand different circumstances; a car breaking its grip on a wet road, an aeroplane dropping 5,000 feet in an air pocket, a shadow coming from a dark alley.

  There was definitely someone in the room. He wasn’t a friend. Friends don’t drop by into my bedroom at 2.30 in the morning – not on the thirty-second floor of a building where the elevator has been switched off, and the key is in my jacket pocket, hanging on a chair near the bed, where there are 3 Ingersoll ten-lever deadlocks, 2 Chubb two-bolt upright mortices, a Yale No. 1, and a double safety chain, not to mention a 24-hour armed door surveillance, making entry to this building harder than the exit from most jails. He was no friend. I didn’t move. He didn’t move. I had an advantage over him: he thought I was asleep. He had a better advantage over me: he’d probably been in the dark for a long time and his eyes would be well accustomed to it. He had one bigger advantage still: he wasn’t sprawled, stark naked, dripping in baby oil, with one foot manacled to the bedstead, and he didn’t have a quietly sleeping naked bird occupying the 5 feet 11½ inches that separated an extremely greasy hand from an uncocked Beretta.

  I spent the next several tenths of a second debating what to do. My visitor obviously wasn’t going to hang about for the rest of the evening – he’d have to have been a very dedicated voyeur to go to such lengths. He certainly wasn’t any kind of cat burglar out to steal anything – the place didn’t have any valuables, neither the Fort Knox nor the National Gallery variety; there was nothing in it that a colourblind midget with an IQ of 24 couldn’t have bought from a Bloomingdale’s sale in half an hour flat for a couple of thousand dollars – and in fact probably had. What there was could best be described as embryonic Jewish Renaissance, and constituted the equivalent amount of personal effects you are likely to encounter walking into a room of a half-built Holiday Inn.

  My visitor didn’t seem like he wanted to chat. If he did, he’d probably have opened the dialogue by now. No, the most likely reason for his visit, I concluded in the two-tenths of a second it took me to weigh up the alternatives, was to do some killing.

  On account of lack of choice the most likely victims seemed to be either Sumpy or me. Sumpy is a variation of ‘sump’ – a nickname I gave her for her fascination with Johnson’s Baby Oil – at the procreation end, which is what she seemed to think it was for, rather than at the end product of same for which it was originally intended. If the visitor was for her it could only have been some jilted lover; since Houdini had died before she was born I ruled out the possibility of the caller being for her.

  All of a sudden I felt lonely. Our house guest must have just about figured out who was who by now; a 9-millimetre silenced parabellum slug for me and a razor for her so she wouldn’t be waking the neighbours with any hollering.

  There was no way I could make it to my gun in time. There was no way I could swing my right foot high into the air and bring that bedstead crashing down on his head prior to having to retrieve my brains and most of my skull from my neighbour’s apartment. It was equally unlikely that if I remained still he might go away.

  The bang came. Not a quiet, silenced plug sound but a great, hefty, high-velocity, 200-grain magnum .44 explosion, and death descended on me. It was a hot, dark thump; a huge, great weight that crushed my bone and shot the wind out of me, shot all the wind out of me. It was damp and bloody and hurt like hell. It was the son-of-a-bitch visitor himself.

  He lay there, sprawled over the top of me, revolver sticking in his mouth and most of the back of his skull deposited out onto Park Avenue.

  I sat up, managed to get the lights on. There were shouts. There were yells and footsteps and bells and sirens and pounding sounds, and Sumpy woke up without even opening her eyes and asked if I had gone mad and went back to sleep again.

  I disentangled my foot and staggered to the kitchen to put the kettle on – it didn’t look as if I was going to get much more sleep that night. I cracked my head on a cupboard door because I was confused. Reckon I had a right to be. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to commit suicide.

  2

  What a hell of a night it had been. I wanted to spend the morning forgetting it for a few hours. It was a glorious, cold, November Sunday morning and Manhattan looked just great. Only a few factories and few exhaust pipes were chucking their excrement into the sky. The World Trade Centre and the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building and all the rest of Manhattan’s fantastic skyline stood crisp and clear against and into the sky, just as all its creators had ever envisioned it should.

  Sumpy and I stood wrapped in our coats on the open deck of the Staten Island ferry with the water of the Hudson river churning past us. I took a large bite from the still-warm potato knish I had been carrying in a paper bag in my pocket, and hoped it would mop up some of the pints and pints of coffee that swilled in my insides and take the taste of the Marlboros and Winstons and Salems and Tareyton Lights and Camel Lights and Cools and Mores and Chesterfields and all the other cigarettes I had been able to scrounge during the night, out of my mouth and throat and lungs and everywhere else.

  That knish tasted good. It came from Yonah Schimmel’s. The Yonah Schimmel Knish Bakery is one of the great eating establishments of the world; if the Michelin gastronomic guide extended to the US it would surely mention it as ‘worthy of a detour’. Anybody who hasn’t been there has to go. It is spectacularly insignificant in appearance; it sits in one of the dirtiest, dreariest, grungiest places on God’s earth, deep in the heart of Manhattan, on the forlorn border between the East Village and Lower East Side, a bottle cap’s flick from the Bowery; a solitary five-storey brownstone with a yellow facia board that stands next to the yard of Blevitzky Bros Monuments, where two elderly vans sit, sagging on their suspension, behind collapsing wire-fencing. The street in front is a dismal dual carriageway with odd bits of barren shrubbery; there are morose and grubby people wandering around, and bits of garbage rolling along in the wind. It could pass with no difficulty as a suburb of any of a hundred American cities.

  The inside isn’t much of an improvement. A sign behind a high counter invites the clientele to ‘Try our new cherry cheesecake knish!’ and looks at least 10 years old. Behind the counter stands a short elderly man in a white apron with the burden of the world on his shoulders. The restaurant is empty except for two men in battered leather jackets deep in discussion but he still doesn’t have much time to spare to take orders. He marches over to a dumb waiter, a real one with a rope pull, and barks down the shaft, then stands on guard beside it with the hapless look of a sentry on a winter’s night.

  What comes up from that dumb waiter, however, is pure gold; busting with every conceivable filling – large, heavy, lovingly misshapen, immensely fattening and doubtlessly knee-deep in cholesterol.

  Early on that Sunday morning, paradise was a warm Yonah Schimmel potato knish, eaten with the salted breeze of the Hudson and the warm perfume of Sumpy.

  I’d kept the truth from her so far. What she thought was simply that we’d had an intruder and I had shot him. I decided that for the time being, and probably for ever, it was best to leave it that way. She thought I’d done something brave and heroic in saving both our lives. I’d no desire to take false credit, but on the other hand she was a bright girl and I didn’t want to set her thinking too much in case she came to the realisation that there might be more to my job in the plastic box manufacturing business than met the ordinary long, short or squint-sighted naked eye. And that wouldn’t be any good at all.

  So Mr Big Hero took another bite of his potato knish and stared out at the badlands and goodlands of sleepy-time Staten
Island, where 328,000 Americans were waking to a bright, sunny, all-American Sunday morning, to the New York Sunday Times crossword, and waffles, syrup and bacon, and a gentle screw, and toothpaste, and coffee, and no clatter of the garbage trucks today.

  ‘It’s cold,’ she said, and she was right; it was cold, damn cold and it felt good, for in the warm a soft slunky feeling would have crept straight up my body and put me in the land of nod, and there wasn’t going to be any nod for a long time yet, because when we got back to Manhattan I was going to have to go into the police station at West 54th and spend most of this beautiful day inside its dismal grey walls, answering questions and filling out forms and watching the dregs and misfits and victims of humanity be dragged interminably in and out, for speeding, murder, pickpocketing, mugging, knifing, raping, and reporting lost tabby cats and black widow spiders.

  There was no shortage of forms, and carbon copies to go under the forms, and columns to be filled in on the forms. I could have done it all myself in about ten minutes flat, with the aid of a couple of IBM computers and three dozen secretaries; unfortunately the only equipment that the city of New York could offer me was a battered, old, manual Olivetti, with a lower-case ‘t’ that had broken off, and a pair of index fingers attached to 18 stone of fatted flesh in a uniform grubby enough to give anorexia to a clothes moth. His dexterity at extricating his breakfast from his teeth with one finger, picking his nose with another, his ear with a third and typing at the same time was remarkable; but it was the typing that suffered the most.

  Relays of coffee arrived in receptacles that made British Rail’s plastic beakers seem like Crown Derby. There were no knishes and doughnuts weren’t available on this block on a Sunday; none others were worth eating, the resident doughnut expert informed me, but there was a Puerto Rican topless go-go dancer who did blow jobs in the men’s room of a coke den up in Harlem Sunday lunchtime, if I was interested in taking a ride. But it didn’t particularly appeal.