Death Of A Diva (16 page)

Chapter Thirty-Six

              “
They
came for you,” Ali waved at an enormous bunch of blood red roses that occupied the corner of the bar. “Oh and Christie’s been on the phone half a dozen times. A couple of heavies in here earlier too, asking where you were.”

              “Ooh, flowers!” Caz clapped her hands gleefully. “Who are they from?”

              “Well they ain’t from Chopper,” I muttered, still shaking the rain from my coat, whilst casting an eye over the fixtures and fittings and wondering whether I could sell them to get the money to pay Chopper back. I reckoned lock stock and barrel-shaped tables; the whole place was furnished with about fifty quid’s worth of tat. It was probably worth more as firewood.

              I leaned down to look for a card and the rich sensuous perfume of the roses – mingled with tiny spots of jewel-bright blue wildflowers and backgrounded by the darkest green ferns ever – drifted into my nose.

              “Well?” Caz demanded? “PC Pretty obviously had a great time.”

              Nick? I wondered, as my fingers found the tiny white envelope nestled amongst the flowers and tore it open.

The card was unsigned and it read simply
Here for you always
.

              “Well,” Caz glanced over my shoulder, “that’s, um, romantic.”

              “Cryptic,” I corrected her, “is what it is.”

              “Yeah, well,” Ali sniffed, “talking of crypts, Christie says If Chopper hasn’t got his money in his hands by tomorrow evening you’ll need a bloody good undertaker. That’s funny...” she frowned.

              “Yes, Ali,” Caz squeezed my shoulder, “it’s fucking
hilarious
.”

              “No,” Ali glanced at the card on the bar, “I mean that it’s printed.”

              Caz shot me the look that said
Proles
and gave Ali the smile she keeps for simpletons and fashion models. “They do that when it’s an internet order,” she explained.

              “But the other one was handwritten, cos I had to dump them in the bin and I found the card.”

              “Other one?” Now we both perked up.

              “The roses that Lyra got.”

              “And the card said...” I prompted.

              “You remember:
Die Bitch
,” Ali answered.

              “Which she promptly did,” Caz muttered.

              “Have you still got the card?” I asked, my heart racing a little faster.

              “Why would I keep something like that?” Ali protested. “Sick, that is. I flung it in the bin.”

              “Has the bin been collected?” I asked, hoping against hope that it hadn’t.

              Ali shook her head and, within minutes, Caz and I had the contents of the huge metal trash can dumped on the ground in the alley at the back of the pub.

              “Jesus,” Caz groaned, “you know my ancestor Francoise De La Croix was a lady-in-waiting to Mary Queen of Scots, don’t you?”

              “Keep digging, highness,” I muttered, wondering just why a pair of cycling shorts with the crotch torn out had ended up in my rubbish bins.

              “What do you think she’d say if she could only see her descendant now? Rooting through shit in a back alley of some dingy little boozer in sodding Peckham.”

              I was about to correct everything from her geography (“It’s Southwark, not Peckham”) through to her description of my pub (“It’s not dingy, it’s characterful”) and on to her history (“De La Croix died of advanced syphilis. She was barking mad and still trying to shag her gaoler when she carked it, so I don’t think she was a stranger to rooting around in filth,”) when my phone rang.

              I checked the display and saw that it was a
Number withheld
. Did Chopper have this number, I wondered? Would Ali have given it to him? With dread, I flipped the phone open.

              “Hello?”

              Silence.

              “Hello?”

              I could hear someone breathing.

              “OK,” I stood up, “This was fun, but I have work to do.”

              “Stay out of what’s not your business,” said a voice I didn’t recognise. “Or else.”

              The line went dead. “Gotcha!” Caz exclaimed, stood up suddenly, waving the small square of white card, lost her balance and with a squawk, fell into a pile of potato peelings.

              I waited for the outrage and, when it didn’t come, I turned around, slipping the phone into my back pocket.

              Caz was sat amongst the vegetable matter staring at the card in her hand with a frown.

              “What’s wrong?” I asked.

              “She was right,” she answered, “it
is
handwritten. But, Danny: I know this handwriting.”

              And at that moment, Caz’s phone rang. Automatically, she answered it, said “Hello,” and then sat with a slightly stunned look on her face.

              “What? Oh, hello sweetie. Yes. Yes..., so sad. What?
What
? I’m not sure I understand. Well, wouldn’t that be... Yes. Yes, of course, but... OK. Bye then. Bye.”

              She hung up and looked at me.

              “You do realise you’re sitting amongst pigswill,” I offered.

              “This just gets weirder.”

              “Let me guess: the clap clinic called and you don’t have gonorrhoea.”

              “Better: Jenny Foster called. She’s spoken with Morgan and the family want us to be present at Lyra’s memorial.”

              “
What
? Are they out of their minds?”

              “There’s more: the handwriting on this card? I recognise it mainly cos I used to copy her French homework every Thursday. It’s none other than Jenny Alice Foster.”

Chapter Thirty-Seven

              “Nobody invites the police’s chief suspect to their dead wife’s funeral.” My dad checked the rear view mirror and manoeuvred the cab out into the sluggish traffic. “It just doesn’t happen. I mean, what did they say?
We’re short on pallbearers and we’re not sure if she was liked enough to fill a few pews; who else can we invite? The man accused of selling her dope then strangling her? Perfect
!”

              I gritted my teeth. “
Accused
, Dad, right? I mean, you do know I didn’t do either of those things, don’t you?”

              Dad grinned at me in the rear view mirror. “’Course I do. But I still can’t fathom why the hell they’d invite you two. More to the point, why the hell would you
go
?”

              Beside me, Caz, resplendent in a midnight black silk blouse tucked into a navy blue pencil skirt, a matching bolero jacket, a pair of seven inch heels and a hat with a brim wide enough to warrant its own post code, applied a slick of startlingly wanton scarlet lipstick, checked her reflection in a small compact, slipped both lippie and mirror into her usual voluminous bag and smiled at the back of my dad’s head. “We’re going because we were invited, because we’ll get a chance to check out Jenny and find out why she sent her stepmum a card saying
Die Bitch
, and because there’s bound to be free booze at the reception afterwards.”

              “And why were we invited?” I echoed my dad’s question.

              “Because Morgan has realised that you’re far too nice to have been the killer and wants to publicly acknowledge this fact by inviting you to the memorial service.”

              “Or because him and his floozy have realised that you’re on to them and are trying to keep you sweet so you don’t tip the law off to their little romance,” my Dad speculated.

              “Ooh,” Caz moued at me, “that cynicism of yours is
genetic
.”

There was really no answer to that and, luckily for me, the cab arrived at that moment outside the church.

“Take care, son,” my dad said, giving me a sad little smile, “don’t make this mess any worse than it has to be.”

A sizeable crowd of bystanders had gathered on the pavement outside the church – those who hadn’t been invited, I guessed, but who wanted to be present. I saw Leon Baker and a dozen faces who’d been in the Marq that fateful night and, realising that I was looking at the hardcore of the Lyra Day fanbase, turned away and headed to the church door.

The question of why Morgan had invited us was answered as soon as the cab pulled away: he hadn’t.

“What the hell are you two doing here?” He demanded, grabbing my elbow as I tried to enter the chapel.

“I invited them,” Jenny piped up, sidling up behind him with a slightly triumphalist look on her face. “Caroline’s one of my oldest friends and I want Danny here to show that we know he’s guilty of nothing more than trying to give Lyra a chance to redeem herself.”

“Are you out of your mind?” Foster goggled at his daughter. “This bastard’s the only one who’s been questioned by the police. What type of circus are you trying to turn this into? He’s not stepping inside this church.”

“Dad. If Caroline and Danny go, then Dominic and I go.”

“Tell Dom I want to see him as soon as we get back to the house. That bloody book of his is going to have to be sorted out.”

“Are Caroline and Danny good to go in?”

Foster looked back at us, as though just remembering that we were there. “This is a disgrace,” he grumbled, as he stood to one side.

“Jenny,” Caroline stepped forward and embraced her friend, “we need to talk to you, about,” she was fishing in her handbag for the card when Dominic came up behind Jenny and put a hand on her shoulder.

“Dad wants to talk to you,” Jenny smiled sweetly at the tall, dark and exceedingly handsome writer.

“Balls!” Mouret growled. “Your dear old dad wants to scrap what we’ve got to date, have me hand my notes over to him, and start shopping his own
Life with Lyra
around.

“But you’ve worked so hard on this book,” Jenny frowned.

“Hard? I’ve put my heart and soul into this thing, and the only way that your dad is getting his hands on my notes is over my dead body.”

A coughing and rustling told us that the service was about to begin. “Jenny,” Caz had the card in her hand now, “about this–”

“Oh Caroline, sweetie, sorry; can this wait? You two are coming back to the house afterwards, aren’t you?”

We hadn’t expected to, but if it meant a chance to do some more probing of the most dysfunctional family this side of the Borgias, I was all for it.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

              “Jesus,” I grimaced, as the drink hit the back of my throat, “did they put
any
tonic in this?”

              “Lightweight,” Caz goaded me. “I’ve never known you to have any troubles with next-to-neat gin.”

              “Well I’m trying to keep my head level,” I answered. “What do you think’s going on over there?”

              I nodded towards the corner, where Foster had finally trapped Dominic Mouret. The two were hunched together and their body language did not say
amicable
. Foster jabbed his finger into Dominic’s chest.

              “The book?” Caz necked her neat vodka.

              “Hmm,” I agreed. “Wonder just how much more money there is in the project now that the subject is no more.”

              The living room at
Chez Day
was filling up nicely with a mix of celebrities and showbiz insiders and a charabanc had arrived minutes earlier, depositing a contingent of what looked like central casting Cockneys.

              The crush at the end of the ceremony had put paid to Caz grabbing Jenny. Foster had grabbed Dominic as soon as they got back to the house and we hadn’t seen either Jenny or, come to think of it, Liz since we’d gotten back.

              “Right,” Caz decided, plonking the empty on a passing tray and snagging another vodka, “I’m gonna find Jenny. You coming?”

              “I want to watch this,” I murmured, drawn to the unfolding argument. There was something about it that bothered me – an air of desperation that I could almost
feel
across the room.

              “Well, I’ll find out what explanation she has for this thing,” Caz waved the card under my nose, “and let you know. If she doesn’t snap and throttle me for rumbling her.”

              “Don’t joke,” I shuddered, “if she is the killer, it’s probably best that you don’t let her get you alone.”

“Don’t get lumbered with any stiffs,” she sniggered, before tottering off across the room.

“Are you going to drink that, dear?” A short rotund woman with a mop of unruly hair dyed to a shade of black that could only really be called
Hallowe’en
peered up at me and nodded at the almost full glass of gin I was nursing. “Only, if you’re not, I’d hate to see it go to waste.”

“Here,” I held the glass out to her and she gratefully accepted it. “You’re a gent,” she twinkled and I half expected her to kick into a couple of choruses of
Chim-chim-enee
.

“Doris,” she announced, “Doris Chapel,” and I swear she fluttered her eyelashes at me.

I introduced myself.

“You’re Lyra’s sister, aren’t you?” I asked and the fluttering increased, as the copious bosom shifted another inch upwards.

“Yus,” she baritoned, in the manner of a particularly dour Lady Bracknell, before wobbling unsteadily on her feet. “Ooh, me plates are
killin’ me
,” she groaned, sipping at the gin.

“Hang on,” I said, “I’ll see if I can find you a chair.”

“Oh don’t worry, love; they’ll all ‘ave been commandeered by the nobs. That telly crowd only stand up if they’re gettin’ an award. Spent my life on me feet, I ‘ave, so a few more hours won’t kill me.”

As she spoke, her eyes scanned the edges of the room, paused at a point beyond my shoulder and then refocused on me.

“So,” she asked, “how’d you know Ellie – I mean Lyra?”

I sought for an answer that didn’t involve the words
I found her lifeless body slumped in the dressing room of the pub I run in Southwark
, but Doris beat me to it.

“’Ere!” She squawked, pointing a finger at me, “You’re the geezer what found her, aren’t you? Knew I’d seen you somewhere before. You were in the papers. Only I get confused nowadays, see; start talking to someone I think I know and then find out I’ve only seen them on the telly. I was just talking to that lovely boy off of the kid’s telly and do you know, I was convinced he was Freddy Deaver from the butcher’s shop. Mind you,” she paused for a sip of gin, but, before I could get another word in, had relaunched her flow, “least I’m not as loopy as that Maureen Carr. She spent three days convinced that my grandson Ryan was her old man Keith. You’d know how mental that was if you’d ever seen Keith – gawd bless him. Twenty-five stone, he was, when he got hit by that bus on the Commercial Road.”

“Dead?” I asked.

“Well, he walked away from the bus no problem; to be honest; I reckon the bus came off worse. But not five minutes up the road he fell through an open manhole and broke his neck. So tell me, how mad does an old woman have to be before she mixes up short fat dead Keith Carr with my Ryan, who’s twenty-two, dark haired and doesn’t have a broken neck?”

I was liking the sound of her grandson. “Is Ryan with you?” I asked.

“Nah,” she shook her head and sipped again at the glass. “He’d ‘ave loved to be ‘ere today; loves a good knees up, ‘e does; only he’s in the nick. Stupidity.”

“They locked him for being stupid?”

“Nah, love; they locked ‘im up for burglary. Stupid bastard din’t wear gloves. Left dabs all over the bloody ‘ouse. And he started off so well. Studied at Yale.”

“The States?”

“What? Oh no, love,” she clutched her chest and produced something between a chortle and the death rattle of a sixty a day all-in wrestler. “No; Catford ‘igh street. ‘E was a locksmith.”

She looked around the room. “Funny, innit,” she suddenly announced, “how fast time moves along. Seems like only yesterday I was twenty-two and now I’ve got a twenty-two-year-old grandson.” She chuckled, “The things we used to do, me and Ellie, wore our old mum to the ground; well, Ellie more than me. That bloody Vicar made ‘er sound like Joan of Bleedin’ Arc today.” She snorted into the gin, “’E’d ‘ave ‘ad conniptions if ‘ed seen ‘er when she was a kid. A right ugly cow she was, but she knew ‘ow to play the blokes. I used to give ‘er an awful life when we was kids,” she announced sadly, “Called ‘er all sorts of names. ‘Cos I was jealous of ‘er really.

“There was no hatred in it, mind; I mean we all had nasty nicknames then, you know? I was Dumpy Doris
and there’s Frieda Jacobs; we used to call her the Oxo Kid, on account of the ricketts. Couldn’t stop a pig in a passageway, poor cow. And Harold Perkins – Harelip Harry as was. Isn’t it amazing what they can do with surgery nowadays?” She shook her head, her eyes unfocussed, “Poor Barry – he’s in an iron lung, you know. Still, at least he’s sent his boy. Jesus, we had some cruel nicknames for each other those days. If you’d a funny eye or a pointy nose you’d be forever known as Eye-Eye Eileen, or Beaky Baxter. I mean, I’m not surprised Lyra had so much work done. I was so cruel to her. I’m just gonna go get a top up. Oh ‘ello love,” she said over my shoulder, “’Ow you doing? I ‘aven’t seen you for ages.”

I turned and Jenny, gripping Dominic Mouret’s elbow in a vice, stood behind me. “You must be Doris,” Jenny said. “I wanted to just say how sad I was, Lyra being your sister and...” she trailed off and, for want of something better to say, slid forward Dominic, whose face was still suffused by the fury that had obviously built up after I’d stopped watching the argument unfold. “This is my fiancé, Dominic Mouret.”

Mouret nodded, muttered something under his breath and offered his hand.

“Dominic,” Doris, frowning, sharp eyes looking from one to the other, took his hand and shook it. “Dominic,” she repeated, then straightened slightly and looked around her. “I need a refill,” she said absently and she excused herself and made her way across the living room in a parallel trajectory to the one that was bringing Caz towards me and Jenny.

“I need to get some air,” Dominic announced.

“Don’t let him wind you up,” Jenny counselled.

“
Wind me up
? He’s talking about taking my research –
my research
– and throwing it out so that he can write a hagiography of Lyra.
Make it respectful
,” he says. “As though mine – my true story of what and who Lyra Day was – would be disrespectful.”

“Well, sweetie, if you were going to tell the whole truth, it might be a bit, well,
harsh
for some. Ill of the dead and all that...”

Mouret shook his head. “The only disrespect you can show the dead is to write a biography that airbrushes out who they were.”

“Who was she really?” I mused.

“A bitch,” Jenny provided for me.

“Talking of which,” I said as Caz swooped in, put an arm around Jenny’s shoulders, slapped on a broad and totally artificial smile and began propelling the confused girl towards the kitchen.

“Caroline,” Jenny cast a concerned glance at me as I fell in step beside them.

“We need to talk,” Caz announced and waved the card in front of Jenny, who turned green, opened her mouth in a wordless ‘O’ and promptly fell into a half-swoon.

Dominic reached for her and Caz put up a hand to fend him off, whilst continuing to propel Jenny towards the kitchen.

“Where–, where did you get that?” Jenny demanded.

“Oh you wouldn’t want to know,” Caz announced, depositing Jenny on a kitchen chair.

“More importantly,” I pressed, “why did you send it?”

“What is that?” Mouret demanded.

“Me? I didn’t...”

“Jenny, you were a lousy liar at school and you’ve not improved.” Caz lifted the card and read “
Lyra
,
I hope the show displays you as you truly are. And I hope”
she flipped the card over, “
that you die screaming you worthless fucking whore. Die Bitch!
”

Jenny slumped. “I’m so sorry,” she whimpered. “I didn’t mean it. I was so angry. She was doing everything she could to mess things up for me and Dom.” Her eyes sought and held Mouret’s. “Then, when she started on the bloody wedding dress, started trying to take over my bloody wedding day... Well, I just snapped.”

“And that’s even before you caught her snogging your fiancée,” I added.

Three pairs of eyes turned to me in surprise. “What? It’s my pub and if I happened to be accidentally passing when she put the moves on him
and if I happened to see you threaten to kill her
,
now I come to think about it
, then it’s not something I’m going to feel ashamed about.”

Jenny stopped and a hand went to her mouth. “Wait! You don’t think
I
...”

“Well,” Caz waved the card in front of her face. “If I were you, I’d start getting your alibi together.”

“Alibi?” Jenny looked from Caz to me to Dominic as her face changed colour from green to putty grey.

“Jenny’s already got her alibi,” Mouret piped up. “We were together constantly. She couldn’t have even spoken to Lyra without my being present, let alone throttled her.”

Jenny sniffed, her shoulders locking back into a straight upright position and wiped her cheeks dry with the back of her hands. “Yeah,” she said, “I’ve got nothing to hide. She was
vile
to me and I sent her a nasty card. But I didn’t kill her.”

“Well,” Caz announced, fixing a beady eye on Mouret, “that’s a handy little alibi. Amazing what love will do. But you see, Jenny, I’ve just remembered something else. I was telling Danny here about our school days and in particular about a little
stabbing
incident.”

Jenny blanched again, her shoulders slumping. “Caz... what that was...”

“I’d got it wrong. Mixed up names and things. The girl at school; the one who stabbed the other one,” Caz continued, “well it wasn’t Janis Chiles. Janis was the girl who got stabbed. The girl who did the stabbing – the one who couldn’t control her temper – was you Jenny. Janis was vile to you, always teasing you; and you finally snapped on a camping trip and went for her. No real harm done –
that time
– but you are quite capable of violence when you’re pushed too far.”

“All very interesting,
Miss Marple
,” Mouret responded, standing behind Jenny and putting his hands on her shoulders, “except, like we’ve just said, Jenny and I were together all night. There’s no way she went upstairs and strangled her stepmum.”

Something sparked in my head; something Caz had said about mixing up names.

And suddenly, there it was!

“Where’s Doris?” I demanded.

“What?” All three chorused, their puzzled faces turning to me.

“Doris Chapel, Lyra’s sister. She said ‘Barry! Doris said ‘Poor Barry’s in an iron lung!’ She knows where he is. Where’d she go?”

“Barry?” Jenny and Dominic looked at me like I’d lost my mind.

“Lyra’s first manager,” Caz chimed up. “Tried to strangle her once.”

“
What
? You know about a man who tried to strangle her once already and you’re hassling me about a fucking card?”

“And the stabbing!”

“I slashed her cagoule! It’s hardly Jack the Fucking Ripper!” Jenny, eyes blazing, turned on Caz, who shrugged helplessly.