Below the Thunder by Robin Duval

Author:Robin Duval [DUVAL, ROBIN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd

Chapter 14

There was a mail box in the wall by the gates, immediately below the camera. Not the usual open-fronted design, but a stout, black steel canister with a letter slot set into a lockable flap. A number of bricks had been removed – not a difficult task since the wall was already flaking with age – and the box had been cemented into the space created.

He pressed back against the wall beyond the camera’s field of view, and tried to slip a hand through the slot. It was stuffed with envelopes; and he struggled to force his fingers far enough in to grasp one. The gap was too narrow and the thick gauge steel too brutally unyielding. He tried teasing an envelope out with a ballpoint pen but managed to lose the pen in the box’s maw. He found a twig by the roadside and wriggled it around. It shortly broke in two. The problem needed a little more thought.

He edged back up the street, crossed in the darkest part, and worked around again to the car. He took out the map book and ripped off its front cover, folded the cardboard down its length and flexed it to and fro until it became two pieces. He returned with one to the mail box.

It required time and patience but eventually he managed to force the cardboard into a shape with which he could lever up the topmost envelope inside the box. With some wriggling and shaking, it slid to the front of the open slot and into his grasp. A disappointment. In the slim beam of the torch it revealed itself merely as a circular letter from a local real-estate agent, addressed to ‘The Property Owner’.

He tried again. This time the process took even longer. The outcome, though, was everything he could have hoped for. This second envelope was from The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and was addressed to a Mr Ricky Gaunt. Serendipity… He tore it open. Inside was a leaflet listing the events and exhibitions available to Academy Members during the forthcoming year. No further information; but that was enough.

Bryn recognised the name. Ricky Gaunt might be well forgotten these days. There would be no tourist charabancs drifting past his celebrity residence, or fans hanging around for a brief glimpse of the one time star. Occasional bit parts in Japanese yakuza films, as an elderly Mafia don or the millionaire American father of a kidnapped heiress, were currently his main source of employment. Yet Ricky had once been the beefcake hero of a series of massively popular teenage Beach Party films – forty years ago and more.

Bryn had even attended a season at the British Film Institute in London two years since, when half a dozen of his derided money-spinners were brought together for a celebration presided over by the great Ricky himself. Bryn had thought him remarkably well preserved, if a little expanded at the waist. A testimonial to liposuction, Botox and permatan.

He studied the keys Agnete had given him.

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