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

M
onday morning. 0830. Tess Darling was heading to work with characteristic dedication – by trying to hitch a lift. At the start of a hangover. In the middle of the worst storm since that one with George Clooney on a sardine boat.

To be fair, this hadn’t been her original plan. Required by work to be in Croydon by 8am but hopeless at early starts, Tess had done the responsible thing and spent the night in a nearby bar. On exit, however, she’d found the local taxi firm shut and no buses in sight. Faced with a brutal (two mile) walk, Tess had opted to hitch. Forty minutes after sticking out her thumb, she’d attracted nothing but wind-blown burger wrappers and spray from passing cars, so she decided to fling open her coat and stick something else out instead.

The results were instant. And crap. Instead of an offer of a lift, Tess got honked by a succession of truck-drivers, all craning through their windscreen wipers to admire how her legs only seemed to end as her breasts began. Having never paid much attention to her looks – relying on others to point out the lipstick on her teeth or Nutella on her tights – Tess had always been swift to discount those who told her she could stop traffic. She’d been right to: The rain was turning torrential and the skies getting darker with every passing shit-head.

Tess raked her hands through her sodden blonde hair. She’d ballsed up again, hadn’t she? Pushed it too far, and now she was seeing in another dawn, feeling alone and all wrong. An old, familiar knot was tightening in her stomach when headlights started to slow towards her in the gloom. A car had stopped. Visibility was down to just a couple of yards, so Tess sloshed towards her rescuer, praying for a Range Rover with heated seats and a comfortable cruising speed.

She got a milk float.

“I’m going as far as Croydon,” yelled the Dairy Express driver.

“Perfect,” she climbed in. There was always a chance he might slip her a yoghurt. She needed something to settle the intestinal grumbling that always followed too many Mojitos and prefaced another working day.

Tess Darling worked as a producer on the daily magazine show,
STOP THE WORLD, I WANNA GET OFF!
While the studio hosts tackled issues from the Olympics overspend to When To Wear Peach, Tess zigzagged the UK, filming live makeover strand,
Pardon My Garden
. Armed with a couple of ancient cameras and a van full of
Homebase
plants, Tess and her Outside Broadcast team battled gazebos, gladioli and trench foot, so presenter Jeenie Dempster could save semi-detached Britain from perennial disappointments and ill-considered borders.

It was the kind of job that drove TV producers straight into radio. Tess was the first to survive
Pardon My Garden
for more than a month – and not because she loved it. Tess hated the job
just
enough to get mad. As the heat rushed to her head, she forgot she was a twenty-five-year-old woman who lived with her mother and smelled a bit like Pernod. She forgot to feel useless and lost, and turned into a raging fury of efficiency. With nothing more than sharp thinking and the
threat
of violence, Tess could get the most disenfranchised of cameramen to focus – and the grumpiest presenter to smile. She could kick generators back into life; convince runners to stop snivelling about little things like hunger, and generally cut through the crap like Genghis Khan with a checklist.

Until that galvanising moment, however, Tess would ride a milk float to work. Today’s location was only a couple of miles away, she reasoned, how long could it take?

Ninety minutes later, they arrived. “Squarey Street,” announced her driver. He pointed up a road running off the main drag. “Not on my round, thank God. Bloody thing goes on forever.” Thanking him, Tess stepped down on to the pavement – and back into the storm.

Squarey Street was a steep road of mean-looking terraced houses, stretching ahead with nothing to enliven the view but the occasional lamp-post or plane tree (the latter gusted by furious winds). As the float whined off on its round, Tess felt a strange sense of foreboding. Perhaps it was the clap of thunder sounding overhead – as if the door to Heaven had just been slammed shut on her. Perhaps it was the churning black clouds that were speeding towards her, swallowing up roofs and TV aerials. Perhaps it was because she’d only slept for two hours, cuddling a quiz machine, but as Tess set off up the hill, she shivered.

She kept shivering. By the time she’d reached the top, the wind had turned icy and the rain was slicing through her Puffa jacket. Water was seeping through her knee-boots – and had started to rise up the legs of her jeans – when she saw a familiar truck parked ahead, a dented satellite dish on its roof. Picking up her pace, Tess went up and banged on the driver’s window.

“Kev, are you in there? Which one is it?” An unshaven face appeared at the glass.

“Number 13,” said Kev. “Behind you.” Tess turned to face a pebbled-dashed house with a rickety porch. It was identical to all those she’d just slogged past, except it had its porch door banging in the gale and its front door propped open with a brick. The poky entrance hall was already running with rain. Leaves were piled up as far as the stairs and an umbrella stand had crashed to the floor. A passer-by would assume a burglary had just taken place. Tess guessed her TV crew had arrived.

She allowed herself a small sigh. Then she threw back her shoulders and strode inside – to find a hunched figure in earphones, fiddling with what looked like a car battery: her soundman. “Why aren’t you out back with the rest of the crew?” she said, marching him through a tiny kitchen and out the back door. “We’re going out live in five minutes and… TITS.”

Coming to a halt, Tess greeted the Lawn of the Dead.

Due to considerations of budget and time – she had neither – Tess selected locations for
Pardon my Garden
without benefit of a prior recce. Using photos supplied by hopeful applicants, she’d pinpoint those gardens crying out for an extensive, four minute makeover. Today’s garden
had
come under the category of “needs a quick rake.” Now it was a muddy hell-pit filled with faceless Gore-tex zombies.

Her
Pardon my Garden
crew.

From her position on the back step, Tess couldn’t distinguish lawn from flower-beds. Thick, camera cables snaked through churned-up earth. Spades and shovels lay in discarded heaps. A snapped light stand dangled from the branches of a rose bush. Stumbling among broken flower-pots was her team, zipped so tight into their waterproofs she could see only their terrified eyes. Suddenly, Tess wished she was back on a milk float, talking dirty over a Yop. “You guys were supposed to set up hours ago,” she howled.

“We
ded
!” sang a furious Welsh voice. “Storm just takes it all down again, dunnit?” Looking down, Tess saw Di – her production manager. She was wearing a carrier bag over her head and pulling a large camera tripod out of a small pond. “The more diggen we do, the more the bluddy garden’s going to
shit!
“

“
Nature’s
shit,” said Tess. “That’s why God put it outside.” Stepping off the back step, she sank slowly into mud. A couple of her crew gave a forlorn salute. (Their boss was foul-mouthed and stole their biscuits, but she got the job done – and didn’t
try
to make them cry).

“Fuckit,” she decided. “Today’s
Pardon my Garden
is going to air without one shot of garden.” She signalled to her lead cameraman, a stoical Kiwi who was currently trying to warm his hands on a Lucozade bottle. “Today’s item will consist of a fourminute close-up of our presenter and – what’s today’s punter called?”

“Mrs Meakes,” said Di.

“I want you right up her nose,” Tess ordered him. As he readied himself, however, Tess realised someone was missing.

“Miller,” she murmured. “Where is he?” Miller was Tess’s best friend and worst cameraman. She felt responsible for him – always had done – ever since she’d drugged him into marriage. (They’d both been aged seven at the time. Tess had put Miller in her father’s best suit, and then plied him with a cocktail of Paracetemol, Dr Pepper and glue. When Mr Darling found pink vomit all over his dress-shirt, he’d been furious. He didn’t understand why Miller was still hanging round the house when Miller’s mother–the Darlings’ erstwhile cleaner–had been sacked six months ago for trying to wipe down the Hockney with a J-cloth. So he’d banished the boy. Head bowed, Miller had shuffled out the front door. Then he’d returned through the back door like he always did, and the newly-weds had got on with married life.

Twenty years on, they were still getting on with it. And just like many marriages, their relationship had developed into something strong, stubborn and entirely unpredicated on sex. Last night, Tess had sworn to set Miller up with the finest females in Mitcham, only for him to be lured from the bar by a boss-eyed girl promising chips. “Anyone seen Miller?” she shouted more anxiously.

Silence answered her. Even the wind seemed to drop for a moment. Then from out behind Mrs Meakes’ garden shed came a giant. Well, mused Tess, perhaps giant was a bit strong – but then so was Miller: 6ft 4, and as broad as he was tall, her mate could take the lid off any jar she put before him. (Get him to run up two flights of stairs, however, and he’d need a power-nap on the landing). Shy of his vast frame, Miller disguised it in an old, blue duffle coat and waterproof dungarees. He wore round, wire-rimmed specs and had a mop of curly black hair, which mostly smelled of Pringles. He was like Tarzan with a tummy, and Tess found it very comforting. Also useful for when she got into fights.

“Didn’t see you arrive!” shouted Miller, squelching through the flooded lawn towards her. “I was rescuing a worm. Have you heard the news?”

“What news?”

“No presenter,” he grinned.

“
No Jeenie?”

“‘Fraid so.” For the first time that morning, Tess’ heart beat faster.

“Cock.”

Pardon My Garden’s
presenter, Jeenie Dempster, was not a natural horticulturalist. However, she
did
have nice hair and a knack of nodding sympathetically while members of the public – whom she took care never to touch – talked about their aphids. The second the cameras stopped turning, she shook out her cute ponytail and lovable dimples, and morphed back into a tired, bitching forty-year-old whose feet were killing her, if the fags didn’t first.

“What’s her excuse this time?” yelled Tess.

“No-one knows,” said Miller. “When her car turned up to collect her, she wasn’t home. Her mobile’s off. So’s yours.”

“So no Jeenie.” Fury growing, Tess pulled her mobile phone from her jacket. As rain splattered down on to the handset, she hit buttons and – swearing loudly – tried to reach Jeenie’s agent, knowing full well she’d just get his voicemail. (No-one in the media world surfaced before 10am, unless they were physically trying to make a breakfast show. Rising before 9am was only for the miserably indentured, like runners and BBC staff).

In the event, Tess didn’t even bother to leave a message. Jeenie had stood them up before and the MO was always the same. Her agent’s assistant would ring shortly to explain Jeenie was bed-bound with flu. Back at the production office, Tess would google the inevitable photos of her presenter falling out of a limo/nightclub/padded bra the night before. Like so many of her younger showbiz peers, Jeenie Dempster was feckless about doing her job, but deadly focused on the career it served – and knew it was far more important to get her face in the papers than her tongue round ‘rhododendron’.

In the meantime, Tess couldn’t do much more than get mad – and call in the cavalry. “GIDEON!” she yelled. Seconds later, a beautiful youth appeared in the back doorway of 13 Squarey Street. He was wearing a tool-belt, gardening gloves and a skinny t-shirt, writ large with the diamante legend
Lick my Green Finger.

“Gid, you’re on!” ordered Tess, over a fresh rattle of hail.

“What?”

“You’re on,” she repeated. “Jeenie hasn’t turned up so you’ll have to stand in for her
again
”.

“But today’s a
Monday!
” he protested. “I’ve been clubbing for 48 hours and haven’t eaten so much as a Snickers. Have you
seen
my Trance Night cold sore?” Gideon was desperate to be the next Ant ‘n’ Dec, but too easily distracted. “What about my new, lucky top – you like?”

“No, I
don’t
like.” Pulling off her Puffa jacket, Tess rammed it between her knees and started tugging at her top. “You’ll have to swap with me. We’ve got five minutes to air, everyone, so set up now – MOVE!”

Dispatching her crew to their filming positions, Tess whipped off her skimpy vest and thrust it at her wayward protégé in exchange for his T-shirt. “Get your kit off man – that’s it -– off – OFF!”

As hail pinged off her balconette bra, Tess won admiring glances from the other male members of the crew. A gorgeous, grubby blonde, she was as hot-blooded and unstoppable as a drunken hug. While Gideon struggled to decide if he was
quite
gay enough to carry off a pink, sequined vest on national TV, Tess heaved
Lick My Green Finger
down over her chest where it strained like a bursting fan belt.