Death on Daytime: A Tess Darling Mystery (The Tess Darling Mysteries) (21 page)

1
0.05 Monday morning. After a long, hard night in the edit, Tess was expecting developments. Others were less sure. “You can’t puke
now
,” said the make-up lady. “It’ll upset your face.”

“I’ll upset
your
face, if you don’t get that brush out of my nose,” said Tess. She’d been slapped with three coats of foundation that looked and smelt like liver-sausage pâté—”because the cameras need more”–and now her make-up lady was about to get it in the lap.

The two of them were taking up most of the available space in a brightly-lit box that passed for Make-Up Room 2. Make-Up Room 1 was much bigger, but then Make-Up Room 2 was reserved for hosts, Sandy Plimpton and Fergal Flatts. Make-Up Room 1 was where guests, competition winners and Colin Pound got touched-up for the cameras. The most media-savvy celebrities arrived ready-painted, of course. (The likes of Jackie, Joan and Michelle Collins wouldn’t
dream
of trusting their make-up to a Daytime TV employee with a Body Shop brush).

Over time, the amenities of Make-Up Room 2 had started to reflect its dwindling cachet. Lipsticks were down to stumps, cotton buds got re-used, and mascara wands were as likely to spread conjunctivitis as Super-Star Lash Effect. The room was now little more than a cupboard with a chair in it; plus a mirror and assorted cosmetic bric-a-brac. Ventilation came from the door being opened, whenever a pale-faced guest got shoved in, (and an orange one pushed out). What oxygen
was
available was polluted by a mix of Old Spice and sweat, (the dual hallmarks of Colin Pound). Still, this beat the signature notes of Tess Darling – acid reflux and chunks.

“Five minutes till you’re on,” an assistant floor manager shouted through the door. “Twitter’s already flapping. You’re trending higher than TOWIE. Now all
you’ve
got to do now is get to the sofa.” She groaned. The Assistant Floor Manager heard it.

“You
can
make it to the sofa, can’t you? Shit, Tess, you can’t – seriously, you can’t bail – Sandy will kill you. She’ll kill us all. I’m going for the sound guy. Don’t you move, OK? Stand tall. Break a leg.” He ducked off before she could make it his.

Fat chance. She could barely move. Fear had rendered her rigid. Millions were watching – or sticking on the kettle in the ad break. Viewers were gawping at their flat screens – or glued to their iPhones in the bus queue, at the canteen, with their mates. Knackered Mums, slumped on the couch while the baby slept. Receptionists, watching on their computer – and clicking back to Excel whenever the boss walked past. Sixth-form students crowding round an iPad in the common room. Freelancers ‘working from home’, their earphones in. All of them waiting for Tess, new media darling, to deliver her explosive report on The Truth Behind Jeenie Dempster’s Murder, culminating with a World-Exclusive Interview with Suspected Stalker, Alan Pattison.

Only there was no interview.

And Tess’ stomach knew it.

“You alright, down there? said the make-up lady. “Keep your chin up, that’s right. You know Sandy’s bumped the running order? She wants you on for
eight minutes.
”

The make-up lady sounded awed. She was right to be. The usual format for
Live With
was a slew of 3-minute items and frothy links. “Director’s swearing his head off. He says it’s not Daytime. All this death and news? He’s had to cut Lulu altogether.” Which was when Tess went down, and the first chunk of chicken started coming back up.

Last night had finished her. Eight hours without break in a darkened Avid suite – the worst kind of Soho wormhole. Equipped with barely forty minutes of footage, poor sound quality and no narrative arc, Tess had visited the last resort of a fucked TV producer, and tried to Fix Things In The Edit
.

It should have worked. For the purposes of getting Tess’ footage cut and packaged into slick TV, Sandy Plimpton had booked a session at Soho’s finest facilities house:
Mummy
was a plush, womb-like space, where directors came to birth their genius. Nervously, they entered their state-of-the-art edit suite to see their precious footage loaded into the Avid computers. Tentatively, director sketched out their ‘auteur’ vision to the editor tasked with cutting it together. Nerves ran high. Then a runner came to take their first food and drink order. The director drank their first bottle of Peroni. Nerves disappeared.

Hours of creative gestation followed – hot director working with shit-hot editor to get the best cuts of film spliced together, and put on to a soundbed by Arctic Monkeys. More Peroni was drunk, pizza was ordered in – then allowed to go cold, because there was synch missing, a pick-up shot dropped. The session over-ran, costs spiralled, the Avid computer developed a glitch, the glitch was fixed. Director and editor fell out dramatically–or became best friends for life – and at the end of it, the director emerged, blinking into the cold light of day with a final cut of the next big BAFTA winner, or the latest ad in a multimillion pound campaign. Failing that, a fresh episode of
World’s Funniest Home Videos.

Sandy wanted this, Tess knew. After twenty years on sub-primetime, she yearned for prestige, glamour, and the respect of her media peers. She wanted to make the kind of must-see TV viewed on the internet. Determined Tess’s mythical interview with Fat Alan would become a legend at Daytime, she’d hired Soho’s hottest editor to cut it. He was called Jez, Tess discovered. He was also wearing Converse trainers and a big-collared shirt under a V-neck sweater from the Gap. Waving her into the edit suite, Jez didn’t turn from his giant Avid screen. He couldn’t, could he? His craft needed him. So did DJ Pete Tong. “I’m just cutting the final frames of his Ibiza doc,” Jez nodded. “Sweet sounds. Good guy. You know him?”

“Nope,” said Tess. “Can I send out for a burger?”

He turned round then. Gave her a
Social Network
kind of smile, and gestured for her to take the co-pilot seat beside him. “Tess Darling, isn’t it? We loved your stuff on Youtube. Digging up that body? Then running at camera? Edgy.” He nodded. “Kinda
Blair Witch
…kinda
Baywatch.”

“Kind of real.”

He nodded again, like she’d named a subgenre. “You killed it, girl. Now,

Sandy’s been filling me in. You’ve mic’d up a stalker, and got him to talk? Sweet. You’ve logged your shots? Cleared any music? Good times.” He swivelled back round to face the giant computer screen where the editing happened. “Your footage is just loading up, so here’s the plan: I cut some great shit together. You cue up Spotify and read this month’s Momo. We’ll be out of here by midnight.”

By 9am this morning, Jez was a broken man. There was an unmentioned wet patch running down the inside of his skinny jeans. And he hadn’t talked about Pete Tong in a while. In fact, Jez had stopped talking altogether around 4am. When she’d left an hour ago, Gideon was putting a mug of espresso, laced with Red Bull, into his hands, and cupping urgently.

Thank heaven for the
Pardon My Garden
crew. Tess had scrambled them – red alert – following a call from Sandy Plimpton at 10pm: She’d finished up at the office, and was coming straight round to see a rough cut. Four hours into the edit, however, Jez had only pieced together 20 seconds of Tess’ report: “
The sound’s all over the place. The light’s all wrong. The picture’s shaking, who
shot
this?
” Tess had said something about a ‘challenged’ person, and been loudly outraged, before getting quietly on the phone to Gideon.

When Sandy Plimpton strode through the doors of
Mummy
Facilities House, Gid was stood at reception, waiting for her. “There’s been a glitch,” he said. “A big one. Technical. Like you wouldn’t believe.” He turned her round. “Glitchy, glitchy, glitchy. So I’m going to walk you round to the Soho Club, that’s right, easy squeezy through the doors. Hips are funny things, aren’t they?
Have
you ever considered a more pleated trouser?”

Before Sandy Plimpton knew what had hit her, she was squashed up in a booth at the Soho Club, having Gid ‘put a gay hand’ on her more pressing wardrobe issues – and several gins in her glass.

Working on a ratio of 3 Gs to 1 T, Gid had needed only one hour to get Sandy ranting about her ‘treacherousbastardofanexcuseforahusband’ Mark. She was bemoaning her ‘slobberingfoolofalover’ Colin after two, and nodding off beneath an Aspidistra after three. Back in the Avid suite, production manager Di had done her best to talk Jez down, and coach him into performing some – any – magic on Miller’s footage. After cutting together highlights that included a wheelchair-bound granny, a privet hedge and Diamond drycleaner, Tess had proved what she’d known all along: magic didn’t exist.

“Three minutes till we’re back from break.” The AFM shouted from the corridor outside Make-Up Room 2. “They want you in studio, Tess,
now
”.

Tess dropped her head again. Produced another piece of chicken. Cradling her waste paper bin, she tried to remember the last time she’d yakked without Miller patting her back, and dropping
Quavers
in her hair. Then she heard a familiar male voice above her head. “Would you like a glass of water? Or a tissue, maybe?”

Tess pulled her head out of the bin. She sat back in the make-up chair, and looked in the mirror. DS Selleck filled it. He was tall – she’d forgotten – and imposing. He wore a dark suit and tie. It was the same rig-up he’d worn to Jeenie’s wake. (Great, thought Tess, now he’s wearing it to mine). All the same, she took the tissue he offered her – a mansize Kleenex – and considered what bit of her to wipe first.

Tough call.

She looked like Bonnie Tyler the wrong side of a punch-up. (Too much face-paint and hairspray. Too much time upside down in a bin). Letting out an exhausted sigh, Tess set about wiping the smile from her face. “Don’t worry,” she mumbled. “I shall stick to lip-gloss for our wedding photos.”

He frowned. But he didn’t blush. She put down the tissue, and turned. “DS Selleck,” she said. “Are you wearing
face powder?”

“I’m not sure.” He did look very uncertain. “Sandy Plimpton stopped me on the way in. She took me to a place called Make Up 1. She said viewers wouldn’t trust a shiny copper.”

“No,” said Tess. “She’s not got you on the show too, has she?” Gid should have chosen a stronger poison. Sandy may have missed her visit to the edit, last night, but she appeared to have come round with renewed vigour today.

As Tess wiped off the worst of her make-up, DS Selleck squeezed past her indignant make-up lady, and lent against the dressing-table to chat. He’d been press-ganged on to today’s show, it turned out, and not just by Sandy. His own DCI wanted him visible alongside Tess. When she delivered her report, Selleck’s presence would reassure viewers of police commitment to the case He could offer further context to any new leads.

“You poor sod,” she said. “The next half an hour is going to be the most excruciating of your life, Detective Sergeant. Let me help you.”

“Please,” he said. “Call me Dan.”

“OK, Dan. Listen up.” She picked a piece of onion from her chin. “When appearing on live TV, it’s crucial you remember a few basic rules. You must not sweat. You must not wriggle – you’ll look shifty. You must show no natural expression – you’ll look depressed. Or simple. Just smile.”

“But we’re talking about murder—”

“I’m talking about murder. You’re there to be a sympathetic police presence. That means smiling
sadly. Live With
is your straightforward 2 camera set-up. Camera One is on the host, Camera Two is on the guest. The moment a question is addressed to you, Camera Two will wheel towards you like a Dalek. Ignore it. You are guest, remember, you have eyes only for your host. In return, your every word will be met with rapture or reverence. You can tell Sandy she’s a bug-eyed loon, without a friend in the world, and she will nod in frantic agreement. This is because she will not be listening to you.”

“No?”

“No. The
second
a TV presenter senses the camera has moved away from them, they switch off. They think about their crush on next door’s au pair, or how much more weight they have to lose before they can invite ITV’s new commissioner round for supper. They do not switch back on again until your mouth stops moving.”

DS Selleck had turned pale under his make-up. Liver pâté on white bread, thought Tess, with an unexpected pang of compassion. “What happens next?” he asked.

“They smile at you,” said Tess. “A special smile. Like you’re the Dalai Lama, and they’ve trekked 100 miles up the Himalayas to hang on your next word. As soon as you say it, though, they’re off back to next door’s au pair.” Selleck swallowed. Tess scraped a fleck of regurgitated mushroom from her neck.

“There is one – and only one – exception to this rule: at any time, you may notice the host go rigid and cock their head like they’re trying to shake a wasp out of their ear – or a bee from their bonnet. It’s neither,” said Tess. “It’s the director. He’s in their heads – and their earpiece – shouting instructions: “Keep them talking, the bloody computer’s crashed.” “DON’T ASK HER ABOUT THE DRINKING.” “Stop with the breathing, can you? We can’t hear the horoscopes.”

Tess was starting to enjoy herself. It felt wrong, though, seeing Selleck’s panic. Was she enjoying his fear? Or, more perversely, getting a kick out of TV? Making it, being part of it… even at Daytime. “I can’t speak for your future TV appearances,” she told Selleck. “But
Live With Sandy and Fergal
is a strict two-step. “When Fergal speaks, you laugh. When Sandy speaks, you agree with her.”

“But you’ll be there, too, won’t you?” His question held an uncharacteristic note of appeal. “You’ll be on the sofa with me. When
you
speak—”

“You get the hell out of shot. I’m going to be slaughtered out there. Don’t let the splatter mess up your suit.”

Just then, the door behind them opened. Darcus Darling strode through it. “And so it begins,” said Tess.

“
S
orry not to get here sooner,” said Darcus. “Sandy’s had me tucking into croissants in the Green Room.” He stopped; wrinkled his patrician nose, and then edged carefully round her bin. “I would’ve been in to see you sooner, but Sandy told me you were in Make-Up. I thought it kindest not to interrupt.”