Off Script Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Previous Titles by Graham Hurley

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Previous titles by Graham Hurley

  The Faraday and Winter series

  TURNSTONE

  THE TAKE

  ANGELS PASSING

  DEADLIGHT

  CUT TO BLACK

  BLOOD AND HONEY

  ONE UNDER

  THE PRICE OF DARKNESS

  NO LOVELIER DEATH

  BEYOND REACH

  BORROWED LIGHT

  HAPPY DAYS

  BACKSTORY

  The Jimmy Suttle series

  WESTERN APPROACHES

  TOUCHING DISTANCE

  SINS OF THE FATHER

  THE ORDER OF THINGS

  The Wars Within series

  FINISTERRE

  AURORE

  ESTOCADA

  RAID 42

  The Enora Andressen series

  CURTAIN CALL *

  SIGHT UNSEEN *

  OFF SCRIPT *

  * available from Severn House

  OFF SCRIPT

  Graham Hurley

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  This first world edition published 2020

  in Great Britain and the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  Eardley House, 4 Uxbridge Street, London W8 7SY.

  Trade paperback edition first published

  in Great Britain and the USA 2020 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.

  eBook edition first published in 2020 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2020 by Graham Hurley.

  The right of Graham Hurley to be identified

  as the author of this work has been asserted

  in accordance with the Copyright,

  Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8979-9 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-688-3 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0413-4 (e-book)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents

  are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described

  for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are

  fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,

  business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk,

  Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  To Anneke and Phil

  With love

  Who scorns his own life is Lord of yours

  —Seneca

  ONE

  This morning happens to be the moment when a bunch of scientists give us pictures of a black hole in space. I’m still in bed, gazing at my iPad, trying to make sense of the statistics. Fifty million light years away from Earth? A huge galactic plug hole, blacker than black, denser than dense, a cosmic beast ever hungry for yet more matter? Can any of this be true? Has the Event Horizon Telescope found the feral beast that will eat us all? Will the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea be sending round an advice pamphlet?

  Pavel, I think. He has a brain, a mindset, an imagination tailor-made for this new hooligan on the cosmic block. He’ll know precisely why the image on my iPad is a tribute to Albert Einstein, how it sheds yet more light on the scary warping of something called space-time. The latter is the subject of one of the longer paragraphs in this morning’s Guardian report and, even after the third reading, I’m none the wiser.

  My eye keeps returning to the image of that black disc with its orange penumbra. Pavel is blind. How do I do this sinister presence full justice? How do I describe the latest reason for worrying ourselves to death? A curl of yellow brightens the orange. Half-close your eyes, I’ll tell Pavel, and you might be looking at a brand-new emoticon. Think dense. Think black. Be very alarmed.

  My phone rings moments later. This has to be Pavel checking in to tell me he’s still alive. We still talk every morning and often during the day, rich conversations spiced with a variety of surprises. As I tried to explain to H recently, I truly love this man, partly because of the way he handles his situation but mostly because time at his bedside opens so many doors in my head. The word ‘love’ made H uneasy. I told him it was inadequate. If there was another word – stronger, fiercer – I’d use that instead. Try going blind in your early forties, I said. And then imagine being paralysed from the neck down. Yep. That surreal. Just like the black hole.

  I’m wrong about the phone call. It’s not Pavel at all but one of his two carers down in Exmouth where he lives. Felip Requena is a Catalan from Barcelona. He has one of the penthouse apartment’s three bedrooms and is on hand throughout the night to attend to Pavel, should the need arise. His English is good but breaks down under pressure. Just now, I’m having trouble making any sense of his end of the conversation.

  ‘Again, Felip. Is Pavel OK?’

  ‘He’s fine.’

  ‘Then why the drama? And why are you whispering?’

  ‘I don’t want him to hear. I’m out on the balcony.’

  This explains the mewing of gulls and the slap-slap of halyards on metal masts from the nearby dinghy park. I ask Felip what’s happened.

  ‘It’s Carrie,’ he says. ‘She’s not here. She won’t come.’

  ‘Is she ill?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Have you phoned her? Talked to her?’

  ‘Si.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘S
omething’s happened.’

  ‘Like what?’ I’m frowning now, the phone to my ear, the iPad abandoned, half out of the bed.

  Felip says he doesn’t know. I’m Breton by birth and grew up in France. Felip speaks a little French and when he’s really challenged and thinks it might help, he summons the odd word or two.

  ‘Elle est choquée.’

  Choquée. Shocked. Something has happened.

  ‘Why, Felip? Why is Carrie shocked?’

  ‘She won’t tell me. She won’t say. Only you, she says.’

  ‘Only me what?’

  ‘She only tells you.’

  ‘And Pavel?’

  ‘I tell him she’s got a cold.’

  ‘And he believes you?’

  ‘Si. No. No se.’

  He doesn’t know. This is awkward. It’s been obvious for a while that Pavel has come to depend on Carrie. She’s a local woman, gifted in all kinds of ways, and she spends an important part of every day at Pavel’s bedside. I was lucky to find her and luckier still that all three of us – me, her, Pavel – so quickly became friends.

  ‘You want me to come down? Talk to her?’

  ‘Si.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Now. Today.’

  ‘So where is Carrie?’

  ‘At home.’ His voice is growing ever fainter, unlike the gulls. ‘I said you could be here in a couple of hours.’

  I cancel a lunch with a casting director and I’m on the road by half past nine. Holland Park to East Devon, on a good day, is a three-hour drive and I know every inch of the road, chiefly because my son, Malo, lives on his father’s 300-acre estate in West Dorset. His father, by the way, is H. H stands for Hayden.

  The way England becomes so green and empty beyond Stonehenge has always lifted my spirits and today – mid-April, sunny, cloudless – is no exception. As the road rises for the next hill, and then the hill after, it’s easy to kid yourself that the folk who hoisted those immense blocks of stone knew a thing or two about eternity. Drive into one of those long sunsets on a summer’s evening, and you’d never spare a thought for black holes.

  Exmouth, as H recently told me, does what it says on the tin. I suspect it was meant as a throwaway comment but, as is so often the case, H was right. It’s a low-rise traditional English seaside resort parked beside a sensational stretch of water where the wideness of the River Exe, itself a thing of exceptional beauty, flows into Lyme Bay. During the summer it has donkeys on the beach and armies of kids with buckets and spades. Whenever the wind blows, the view out to sea blossoms with kitesurfers. The town itself has an exceptionally slow heartbeat and appears to have turned its back on the rest of the UK. Nearly a lifetime ago, as a child, Pavel spent holidays here, which is why he’s chosen to come back. He tells me he still has the happiest memories and, based on what I’ve seen of the place, I believe him.

  Pavel is a scriptwriter by trade. By the time I met him in the flesh he’d already acquired a golden reputation for narrative reach and pitch-perfect dialogue. Both these phrases have become far too common among far too many critics to retain any real meaning, but the radio play he’d scripted with yours truly in mind spoke to me from the first page. Everything Pavel touches has a rightness, a distinctive authenticity, that give thesps like me the confidence to open the throttle and take a risk or two. That’s not as common as you might think but Going Solo – the story of a woman who effectively becomes a fighter pilot – scored a decent audience and some glowing reviews. It also prompted an invitation from Pavel for lunch à deux. Which is where the trouble began.

  Pavel Sieger, in keeping with someone who spends all his waking time making up stories, isn’t Pavel Sieger at all. His real name is Paul Stukeley. Pavel, which happens to be the Slav cognate of Paul, is a doff of the scriptwriter’s hat to the city he loves most in all the world. Prague is undoubtedly Pavel’s real passion. It’s also the place where he chose to go blind. Chose is his word, not mine. Blindness, he told me on our first date, runs in the family. Certain symptoms warn of its imminence. So, when the world began to slip out of focus he took a Ryanair flight to Prague, checked out his favourite view from the Charles Bridge, made himself comfortable in a darkened hotel room, and never laid eyes on the world again. It happened to be New Year’s Day. When the summoned Czech doctor appeared at his bedside, Pavel asked whether it was still snowing. Snow, he told me later, is the enemy of darkness, along with sunshine, anything played by Paul Lewis, and the blessings of a listening ear. Since we met the latter has been my responsibility, and that, he told me only yesterday, makes him very happy.

  To me, he should add Carrie. It’s nearly lunchtime and I’m at journey’s end in Exmouth, making my way to the curl of waterside land that houses the town’s marina. Houses and apartment blocks in washed-out shades of yellows and blues line the basin, with its wooden pontoons and neatly moored lines of yachts, fishing smacks, and pricey runabouts. Anyone who still believes that England has emptied itself of serious money, squandered the lot on Brexit and one last foreign holiday, should come here. A year’s rent on a single berth costs thousands; a third-floor apartment with a glimpse of the sea is squillions more. After the accident, when Pavel needed round-the-clock care, we listened carefully to where he said he wanted to live and a penthouse apartment out beyond the marina, on the very edge of the estuary, turned out to be the answer.

  By this time, H was insisting on paying the bills. Typically, he handled the negotiations with the estate agents himself, keeping the details very close to his chest. To this day I don’t know what it cost, but – with its three bedrooms, high-spec everything, plus an endless list of bespoke modifications – it has to be seven figures. The last time I asked, H waved the question away. ‘Call it an investment,’ he grunted. ‘Call it whatever you fucking like. Just as long as the guy’s enjoying the view.’

  I’m looking at it now. There is, of course, no chance of Pavel ever enjoying any view, but H’s rough humour points to a larger truth because my all-time favourite screenwriter sees through his ears, painting the inside of his head with soundscape after soundscape. Hence one of the early bills H paid was for the floor-to-ceiling glass doors in the room where Pavel sleeps. Everything he needs is voice-activated through a piece of clever software housed in a green plastic cube no bigger than a tea caddy, yet another expense, and it only needs a whispered command from Pavel’s bed, or perhaps his wheelchair, for these fabulous doors to glide noiselessly open, parting the curtains on the world outside. Pavel calls this bedside device Sesame.

  On my first visit down here, once H’s team had settled him in, Pavel waited until dusk and then asked me to shut my eyes. It was low tide, he told me. The waders, oystercatchers and sundry other chancers would be feeding on the eel grass that carpets the mudflats in front of the apartment block. Just wait. And just listen.

  I take direction easily. I shut my eyes and pretended to be Pavel. The software he uses can respond to a range of orders, depending on the user’s mood. On this occasion he whispered Sesame at the bedside microphone and the moment the doors parted, the room – and my whole world – was full of the contented chuckles and mutterings of the starvelings on the roost tucking in. I might have been anywhere, any river, any stretch of seashore, and I’m guessing that was the point. God supplies the soundtrack and your memories fill in the rest. Then, minutes later, came a call I recognized, the liquid notes of a lone curlew, impossibly melancholic, and I was still trying to capture the feeling in a single word when Pavel spared me the effort.

  ‘Schubert,’ he whispered. ‘Impromptu number three.’

  ‘Paul Lewis?’

  ‘Of course.’

  He was right, as he usually is. And when I opened my eyes and saw the smile on his face, I realized that he’d probably spent most of his life rehearsing for moments like these. Paul Lewis, incidentally, is a concert pianist of genius with a presence and a face to match. Yet another debt I owe to Pavel.

  Access to the apartment is natu
rally by a private lift. The stand of fresh flowers in the IKEA vase was one of Carrie’s early ideas. Smell matters to Pavel, as well as sound, and she’d been nursing long enough to understand the way that the scent of a particular bloom can lift an entire day. As often as she can, Carrie takes Pavel out in his wheelchair and, judging by the latest offering, Pavel’s current favourites are freesias. Lucky boy.

  There’s a safety door on the third floor with a security touch pad. I know the code but respect for Felip’s feelings keep my hands by my side. Moments later, alerted to the lift’s arrival, he’s standing in front of me, framed by the view. He looks, to be frank, wrecked. Felip has never been friends with sunshine but just now, unshaven, balding and pale, he’s a ghost of a man.

  ‘Any word from Carrie?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And Pavel?’

  ‘He knows.’

  ‘He knows what, Felip?’

  ‘He knows something’s wrong.’

  This comes as no surprise. Pavel has an almost animal instinct for the imminence of any kind of disaster, big or small. He tells me you can hear it in the way people take an extra breath or two, in the hurry that danger imparts to what they’re trying to say. In this respect, Felip would be an open book.

  ‘So, have you told him? About Carrie?’

  ‘I’ve said she’s not well.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘You talk to him.’ He gestured vaguely in the direction of Pavel’s bedroom. ‘See for yourself.’