Death on Daytime: A Tess Darling Mystery (The Tess Darling Mysteries) (16 page)

As if sensing the same perverse resistance, his mother let go. Dropping Tess’ arm, Mrs Pattison pushed roughly past her visitors to the kitchen. “Do what you can.” She turned back to her washing-up. “Nothing from
me
can put him right.”

Abandoned in the hall, Alan seemed to shrink. His smile disappeared, back into whatever secret place it had come from. He looked lost again. Less sinister than squashed, thought Tess, feeling her response swing back from recoil to pity. “You’re in trouble, Alan,” she said. “The police are saying you had
Pardon My Garden’s
call sheet – the one for Monday’s shoot.”

He rocked his head. “They stole it from me.”

“They’re convinced you were stalking her—”

“They stole it!” He took off. Down the hall, past his mother’s turned back, Alan scurried into the next doorway along. “They’ll take it all away, Mum schays, all of it!”

Pursuing him, Tess found herself in a cramped, overheated lounge. Two armchairs took up the only space left by the huge TV, which was an ancient analogue Philips set. Housed in a vast, faux-mahogany sideboard, the hulking machine was an adapted antique, built long before remote controls, when Sky+ was just a twinkle in a techno’s eye. Even with the volume turned low, however, it dominated the room. Fat Alan already stood mesmerized. Today’s
Live With
was coming to a finish, its hosts wrapping up. Still in mourning black for his fallen colleague, Fergie Flatts was announcing the winner of a holiday competition, while Sandy had a quick pick of her teeth.

It was too much for Tess. Feeling her temperature rise, she spun Alan round – and regretted it. The dry skin of his arm flaked like plaster under her fingers. His face was a mess. The lurid glow of the TV showed up details hidden by the dinginess of the hall – the bits of food caked in the corners of his mouth, the patches of eczema scabbing across his cheeks. His soft, blond moustache was clotted with chocolate milk, and his swollen stomach strained against his ‘CHOOSE LIFE’ T-shirt. Fat Alan was a pulsating ball of BO and fear.

Fuckit, she thought, he was also their friend. “The shoot schedule for the day Jeenie died,” she said. “How did you get hold of it, Alan?”

“From
you
– from your offisch!”

“Our–?”

“Office,” translated Miller. “Our production office.” Loping across the room, he slung a big arm round Alan. “You helped us, Alan, like always. The week Jeenie died, you carried up Gideon’s bags for him, didn’t you?”

Crap, thought Tess, so he had. She remembered now. It must have been on the Tuesday or Wednesday. Tess and Gideon had gone on a recce to Plymouth, producer and researcher sizing up a potential location for a future
Pardon My Garden
shoot. Returning to Backchat after an unhappy day spent in the company of a menacing merchant seaman and his TV-hungry wife, Gideon refused to unload the production van, declaring himself exhausted from his doomed efforts to ‘turn’ a sailor in three feet of patio with his wife watching. Parking up on the Backchat forecourt, Gid saw Jeenie’s one-and-only fan keeping his perpetual vigil, and pounced. Alan subsequently lugged several bags up to the
Pardon My Garden
office.

“The callsheets for Monday were just schitting there – on the printer,” said Alan. “Scho, I took one. I collect them, you schee, momentos of Jeenie. I’ve got thirteen call sheets already – from different shoots – for my scrapbook. But the poleesch took them. Took them all.” His head started rocking again.

“The poleesch got mean, Tesch, really mean. Kept aschking me about a car. Did I follow Jeenie on the day that schee died? Did I know where schee was going? I schaid yesch, yesch,
schee wasch going to be with me
.” He turned back to the TV. “Like alwaysch.”

Today’s
Live With
was done. Keeping to a format established the day after her death, closing credits were scrolling over a still of Jeenie Dempster (‘in memoriam’). Reaching out to the screen, Fat Alan stroked the smiling, soft focus face of the murdered presenter. “I watched Jeenie every day. But my bedroom was our schpecial place. That’s where I could
really
feel her.” He looked sidelong at Tess, his coy, complicit smile returning. “You want to feel her, too?”

He didn’t wait for an answer. With unexpected speed, the overweight man moved from the lounge into the hallway. Reaching the door to his bedroom, he bent over the padlock. The chain came free with a rattle. He turned, and gestured for Tess to follow.

Stepping through the musty doorway, Tess felt her innards loosen. She was moving into a place of darkness; crossing a terrible threshold from the world of sanity into –

“The 1980s!” Miller bounded past her. “I knew they’d come back!”

Fat Alan’s bedroom was like a scene from
Back to the Future,
before Marty McFly went anywhere. The 1980s ruled. On one bedside table, a bright red SodaStream machine fought for space with a pile of
Blue Peter
annuals. On the other, a ‘Charles & Di’ Royal Wedding mug sat on top of a radio alarm clock. The single bed in between was covered in an Ultravox duvet, with Midge Ure face-up on the pillow. On the floor beneath, Tess could see a pair of roller skates – the kind you strapped on over your shoes. They jostled for space with a battered Casio keyboard and a magnetic pencil case, adorned with ‘Hello Kitty’. So far so retro. “Alan,” said Tess. “You’re
cool
.”

“No he’s not,” said Miller. He wasn’t smiling anymore. He was rubbing his spectacles, and staring at the far corner of the bedroom. Tess saw a plastic desk cluttered with dated, teenage toys. an Etch-a-Sketch protruded from the coils of a broken Slinky. A Rubik’s snake was nesting on a Spirograph. Towering over them was the head of a
Girl’s World
doll. Her face was battered, her make-up grotesque – eyes like bruises, lips like blood.

That was nothing to what was splattered across the wall, though. Every inch of it was covered with teen-magazine spreads – from a long-distant past. Yellowing posters were overlaid by ripped pages from
Smash Hits, Just Seventeen, Look In,
every article trumpeting the same name, every picture showing the same, terrifying face: Jeenie Dempster. Barely out of teens herself, guessed Tess, her eyes bright, hair bouncy. Each careful magazine cutting, each lovingly-dismembered article paid homage to the ‘zany’ Saturday morning kids’ show she’d presented at the pinnacle of her fame – over twenty years before.

“Welcome to
Wacky House
,” Tess murmured. She’d been at primary school when the show hit the nation’s screens, the brash spirit of the ’80s spilling into the next decade.
Wacky House
had been the noisy, new kid on the Saturday morning block – anarchically funny, dangerously grown-up. Tess had sensed that much as a five year-old, but her only vivid memories of the show were those implanted subsequently – by the never-ending stream of nostalgia media that charted the era. The ’80s and ’90s had been a Golden Age for Saturday morning TV. Only two terrestrial channels vied for eyeballs. Parents had to share a TV with their kids – and wanted in on the joke.

“Wacky House ran from 1989-1991.” Miller turned to Tess. “I went through Jeenie’s biog, last week, in case there was something, you know, we’d missed…” She didn’t hide her surprise. He turned away again. “Jeenie presented two series. Then the show got pulled.”

A fresher, funkier format had come along, surmised Tess. Until then, however,
Wacky House
had been
the
place to catch Morten Harket losing a flan fight, or Margaret Thatcher playing Hangman with T’Pau. Jeenie’s face must have been everywhere. Twenty years on, it still was. thirteen floors up, in the dim light of Fat Alan’s tower-block shrine.

Moving up beside Miller, Tess inspected picture after picture of their murdered presenter. Ignorant of the grim fate ahead, Jeenie smiled, laughed, preened. She was young and confident. She sported huge, plastic hoops in her ears, and coloured bangles up her arms. In the rare shots where limelight was split, it was with her two
Wacky House
co-hosts. Though Tess had long forgotten their names, their faces were, even now, familiar. Peering harder at the pictures, she studied first the girl – rosy cheeks, cheeky grin and spirals of red hair bouncing from a scrunchied top-knot – and then the boy. He was beautiful. As cute and clean-shaven as a choirboy, he sported spiky, blond hair and a shocking, pink shirt. Late ’80s/ early ’90s style, he wore it with the sleeves rolled up, and the buttons opened to give a glimpse of the slogan T-shirt he wore underneath. Thick, black letters on a white background… Tess peered closer… what did they say?
CHOOSE LIFE..
?

“No,” she said. “It can’t be…”

“Alan Antony!” said Miller. He turned from the wall to the man who’d made it. “You’re Alan Antony. From
Wacky House.”
His relief was palpable. “Only fatter!”

“And weird-looking,” said Tess. There was no hiding it. She and Miller regarded their friend – ageing, eczematous, alone – and saw him for what he truly was: a TV legend. A former celebrity.

A ghost.

“
A
lan Antony was my stage name,” he explained. “I hated my real name – Pattison. The kids at school called me
Pat-a-Cake Fatty Cake,
but I showed them, didn’t I?
Didn’t I
?” His face twisting into a grimace, Alan started to expel frantic, rasping breaths. He was giggling, realized Tess.

“You presented TV history.” Horror rose, as she compared the bright-eyed boy of the past with his bloated, broken incarnation today. “You were one of the
Wacky House
bunch. Now you’re – you’re…. shit, Alan, how long have you been keeping this secret?”

“Sinsch people schtopped recognising me. Schtopped believing me.” The rasping slowed. “That’sch when I schtarted to dischapear.”

“So I suggested he collect the odd souvenir.” Forcing them back to the present, Mrs Pattison shuffled in to the room, holding a tea-tray. “Just for his benefit, mind, to remind him what he was – what he could be again – only the damage had been done. The clock had stopped”.

“What do you mean?” said Tess.

“Stick him on a kid’s show, and my Alan’s a star. Throw him back into the real world, and he’s just a kid. A kid who’s seen too much, granted, but all the same. You know how kids get hooked on things.” Sinking down on to the bed with her tray, she turned a knackered look at her son. “Soon enough, the collecting got out of hand, didn’t it Alan? Turned into this… this obsession with Jeenie bloody Dempster. The only one of them to survive.”

“Survive?”

“On TV,” whispered Alan, his gaze moving to a patch of wall between the desk and the headboard of his bed. Walking round to it, Tess saw this small space had been given over to Jeenie’s progress
after
Wacky House…
swiftly downhill. A few, framed cuttings told the tale. A glossy, publicity still showed Jeenie, looking permed and pretty beneath the
Tops of the Pops
logo. Beside it, Fat Alan had framed a page torn from a 1995 QVC brochure. Jeenie was showing off a set off cut-price table mats. She looked thin-lipped and over-plucked. She’d segued to plain-tired and pissed-off by her next shot – a photo-feature on Stock Car TV (August 2001). All of which made the next picture more astounding. Jeenie, covered in manure and triumph, on a July cover of
The Radio Times
. ‘
Pardon My Garden
gets a new bloom!’ exclaimed the headline.

Jeenie Dempster was back.

“Schee was scho schpecial,” confided Alan. The hairs on Tess’ neck prickled. How had he snuck up on her? She turned to find Fat Alan almost pressed against her, Miller clamped to his side. “You have to underschtand,” he pleaded. “Jeenie was the lascht bit of schpecial I had.”

“I never thought for a minute he’d try to track her down,” said his mother, passing Miller a mug of tea, and a fleeting look of gratitude. “Come sit back here with me, Alan, that’s right, quiet by me.” Reluctantly, her son sat down beside her. She clasped him by the wrist. “Then Jeenie turned up on
Live With Sandy and Mark –
as it was called then, of course, Sandy and Mark still together – and Alan, well. I thought he was going to have a heart attack. I tried to turn it off, but he wouldn’t let me. He was getting distressed, a bit angry, like he does, you know.” Tess knew. “So I let him watch on. Which is when he saw it – on the end credits – the show was filmed at Backchat Studios. That’s when
my
heart good as stopped. You know that’s where they filmed the first series of
Wacky House
?” Tess shook her head. She’d had no idea. No idea about any of this, bloody idiot that she –

“Alan took it as a sign,” said Mrs Pattison. “Started making trips to see her. Didn’t want anything, mind, just the odd hello.” Her son nodded… smiled. Pulling away from his mother’s grip, he moved back to his shrine. Repressing a shudder, Tess tried to recall Jeenie’s fleeting interactions with the fan who’d worshipped her from the forecourt of Backchat TV. (Had she even looked him in the eye?)

“Didn’t Jeenie recognise him?” Tess asked.

“‘Course she bloody did!” said Mrs Pattison. “Stupid bitch just didn’t want anyone
else
to”.

“She was embarrassed?”

“She was terrified.
This
time, she might not get away with it.”

“With what?”

“With this.” She jerked her jaw at Alan. “What she done to him. Just look now.”

Mouth sagging with concentration, her son was smoothing the corner of a twenty-year-old. It was a magazine pull-out. The
Wacky House
trio were performing some complicated leap-frog to camera. Jeenie and the other girl – whatever her name was, curly hair and happy smile – were straddling the bent back of Alan. He had his hands on his knees, and his eye on the main chance, (winking at camera), and the contrast between then and now was pitiful. More than that, realised Tess, it was sinister – as if Alan had been shut away for twenty years to cultivate the perfect disguise: sunless blubber, unwashed hair and a prison-bitch moustache.