Death on Daytime: A Tess Darling Mystery (The Tess Darling Mysteries) (8 page)

“Fuck,” she said. “Your lot have really cleaned the place out.”

It provoked a trace of a smile. “Believe it or not,” said Selleck, “This is how we found it.”

Whistling, Tess stepped over the only other item of furniture in the room: a cluttered, glass coffee table smeared with faint, white lines and what looked like either blood or soy sauce. Hardly a love-nest.

She recalled the story Jeenie had sold to the papers in the aftermath of her affair with Mark Plimpton: fantastic sex all night, then lazy mornings in front of the telly, watching his deserted wife throw to the weather.

“It’s no palace, is it?” said Selleck. The police officer sounded disappointed. “All that stuff you read about these celebrities, you expect them to live somewhere more…”

“Hygienic?”

“Luxurious”.

It was Tess’ turn to smile. “You know what? I’m surprised Jeenie could even afford this. Appearing on TV doesn’t bring you wealth, officer, so much as spare time. Presenting a four-minute gardening slot – just once a week – Jeenie probably pocketed what my researcher got for sixty hours’ hard graft.”

“Well something bought this little lot.” DS Selleck nodded at the coffee table: a trail of cocaine smears stretched, like a bad zebra crossing, between a bottle of Jim Beam and a cigarette lighter.

“She seemed like such a nice girl on TV.”

“That wasn’t moral fibre,” said Tess. “It was hair and make-up.”

Leaning over the coffee table, Tess studied the rest of Jeenie’s clutter. A scuffed case of MAC blusher lay open. The powder inside was cracked dry, and studded with the remains of a Kettle Chip. Beside it, a badly-rinsed jar of Hellman’s mayonnaise held a bouquet of Interflora lilies. Rotting into their cellophane, they smelled of death and sweets.

“From Mark Plimpton?” she straightened up.

“Not according to the card we found in Jeenie’s waste bin.” The officer met her gaze. He knew she was fishing, Tess thought. But he seemed to be doing some calculating of his own.

“The message might mean something to you.” he said. “
Remember, I am your beginning and your end.
Signed
A.
”

Alan hung in the air between them – until Tess swung her leg over the coffee table. “Sorry, officer,” she hopped off. “O
ur
Alan starts with an ‘F’.”

Crossing the room, she heard a noise like a muffled bark come from the DS. “What exactly
was
your relationship with the murdered woman?” he said. “Sandy Plimpton claims you enjoyed an intimate professional bond. Yet in your statement to us—”

“I knew what
every
producer should know about their presenter,” said Tess. “Can they read off cards? Will they nick the clothes? Fuckit, I didn’t think murder was something real people
did
any more. Why kill someone when you can just leave the room?”

To prove her point, she stomped off into the dingy, galley kitchen. Here, a forensic slamming of cupboard doors revealed an ancient box of Ritz crackers, a hotel jam sachet, and near-concrete proof the dead woman couldn’t scrape egg off a fish-slice. Opening a pedal bin jammed with pork balls and empty wine bottles, Tess recoiled: It could have been her bin on a good day.

She was scanning the sink counter, wondering whether a ring of formica fag burns constituted the personal detail Sandy Plimpton sought, when something moved behind her. It was Selleck, crossing the flat to Jeenie’s bedroom door. He stopped still, and held his hand up to her in warning.

Suddenly, the flat seemed very small. The officer was straining to listen for something. Over the thud of her heart, Tess heard it: heavy breaths coming from the other side of the closed bedroom door. For the first time in her adult life, Tess was glad she was with a policeman.

‘This is DS Selleck, Croydon,” he said loudly. “Whoever is behind this door, I’d like you to come out now.”

Silence. The handle started to turn. As the hinge creaked open, Tess realised she was experiencing something more than fear. Fuckit, the fear was there alright, like a dull gripe in her stomach. For all her fat talk to the detective sergeant, she’d never been near death before – certainly not the kind that made her look over her shoulder in case she was next. Huddled together over Jeenie’s sodden body yesterday, the
Pardon My Garden
crew had shared a sense of violation. The normal order of things had been upturned. The natural response was dread.
Now, however, Tess knew her response had evolved and sprouted guilty wings. Fear had mutated into a shameful excitement – the kind Tess once got from pulling on tight jeans and doing the Running Man.

Blood racing, she stared at the handle as it continued to turn. The door yawned open. From the darkness emerged a shiny, corkscrew perm. “Ey oop Tess,” it said. “Pulled again, ‘ave yer?”

D
S Selleck looked ready to punch someone. He settled for talking loudly to the man beneath the perm.

“I need to some ID” said Selleck. “Now. This flat is out of bounds to all but next of kin.

“I’m Jeenie’s agent,” he snorted. “I
am
her fookin’ next of kin.”

Tess shuddered, as the words rang round the dismal flat. Jeenie had never sounded so alone.

Rod Peacock was known to Tess, of course. His huge, sandy perm was famous round Soho, (ditto the zoot suit and winkle-picker shoes that, as today, completed the set). Rod was proud to call himself a Teddy Boy, but keen not to mislead. “Don’t let the fancy threads throw yer,” he told new clients. “I’m a fookin’
bastard
.”

One of the biggest hitters in the industry, Rod’s story was a modern-day fable of rags to riches via Light Entertainment. Twenty years ago, the little man with a big perm had been struggling to flog female impersonators and barrel-chested comedians round Yorkshire working mens’ clubs, when his star act – a gout-ridden comic called ‘Jonesey’ – got ejected from a live TV talent show for rounding off a lewd joke about Princess Margaret and Liberace with, “Poofs, hey? Don’t you wanna poonch their fookin’ faces in?”

Fame promptly followed. While Jonesy proceeded to sink into an alcoholic decline, his manager soared. Rod found negotiating skills forged in hard working mens’ clubs transferred themselves neatly to the softly-furnished offices of Soho. Hefting talent on to the screen with a mixture of threats, bribes and bullying, the Rod Peacock Agency now owned the biggest names in TV, including the varied team of hosts and experts fronting
Live with Sandy and Fergal.
Rod had personally secured the contracts of everyone from Sandy Plimpton and Fergal Flatts to Colin Pound and, more recently – and most inexplicably – Jeenie Dempster.

Why Rod Peacock had plucked an ageing kids’ TV presenter from obscurity – how he’d subsequently persuaded Sandy Plimpton to use her on
Live With
prompted much media muttering. Muttering it would remain however. Rod Peacock was the Godfather of Soho, and his knuckles bore Russell Brand’s teeth marks to prove it.

“You don’t intimidate me, son,” he now told Selleck. “Where’s yer fookin’ uniform? And I’m not talking about the one you wear to school.”

An angry flush spread across the officer’s jawline. His gaze fixed on Peacock. Tess seized the chance to slip out from under it. Sidling into Jeenie’s bedroom, she stifled a gasp: It was like a Primark changing room on a hot, sale Saturday. The bedroom windows couldn’t have been opened in days. The air smelled of BO, bad feet and Ellnet hairspray. A nest of plastic belts, laddered tights and bras snaked over the floor. The bed itself was buried under deodorant-encrusted vest tops and thongs you could cut cheese with.

Trying not to inhale, Tess scanned the room for something, anything that might reveal more about Jeenie than her predilection for a viscose gusset. Even poor old Mrs Meakes had managed to cheer up her cell at the Happy Cypresses with a few family photos (admittedly of dead people). Jeenie didn’t have a single picture on show of family or friends: no heart-shaped frame around the image of her celebrity steal, Mark Plimpton. The only souvenirs on her bedroom mantelpiece were some bar-room matches and her agent’s business card.

Outside, Rod was getting increasingly rancorous. Tess heard him sink on to the couch – and rise to Selleck. “Why
shouldn’t
I be ’ere, Officer? Jeenie were like a daughter to me, d’yer hear me? A
daughter.”
The couch protested. “But shaggeable.”

“Mr Peackock, are you saying—”

“Oh, I never touched ’er, lad! Never mook with the merchandise, do I? Especially as Jeenie’s price was about to go oop big time. That girl had just landed herself a
very
big break, I swear. Her killer ‘ad one
hell
of a sense of timing.”

“Go on.”

“I can’t. Contractual reasons.” Even from the bedroom, Tess could hear Peacock shift his position. “I’m here
purely
to honour my precious girl, Officer, the star in my sky.”

Leatherette squeaked. Tess shuddered. It was one thing to find a man of Rod’s sinister clout skulking round Jeenie’s tights drawer, but to catch him turning sentimental? It was like hearing Vlad the Impaler ask for ‘an ickle kiss’. What
had
he been after?

Casting a last look over the mess on his dead client’s bed, Tess recognised Rod’s coat. A flashy, sheepskin thing, she’d seen it on him a few times. (The diminutive agent wore it for stature, along with his high hair and built-up heels). Whatever he’d been up to in here, Tess mused, it had been hot work.

And hot work, Tess knew, bore results.

Checking the door, she rifled expertly through Rod’s coat. (It had long been part of Tess’ Nightclub Code to frisk any man who pressed a drink on a girl, and then expected a swift hand shandy). Expensive-looking and fat, Rod’s wallet bulged with £50 notes and business cards, pressed on the talent agent by everyone from DIRECTOR GENERAL OF THE BBC to Sally-Ann, Dancer and Nail Technician (Accredited).

Nothing to do with Jeenie.

Returning the wallet, Tess went back through Rod’s coat. She fished out a hefty ring of keys, a silk hankie studded with spat-out nuggets of gum and then, from the depths of Rod’s inside pocket, an envelope. Bearing an indecipherable smudge of postmark, it was addressed to Jeenie Dempster, here at 390A Bayswater Road. Tess thought back to DS Selleck, stooping downstairs to go through today’s post. No wonder he’d found nothing: Rod had got there first.

He’d just not had time to open the envelope. Outraged at the agent’s brazen requisition of evidence, Tess ran a finger under the loosely-gummed flap, and pulled out the contents: a folded sheet of lined paper with a few blue biro words stabbed into it. ‘
Why do you deny me? I am your beginning and your end – and I
shall
come for you. A’.

Tess felt the hairs prickle up her neck. Alan was back in the room.

Still clutching the letter, Tess faced facts. Her loyalty to Jeenie’s beleaguered fan was based on nothing more than his loneliness and, on
Pardon My Garden
shoot days, his readiness to carry big bags of mulch. Why
couldn’t
this ‘A’ be the same Alan?

Even as the thought landed, Tess brushed it away. Those lilies on Jeenie’s coffee table were too expensive – this letter too full of sentences – to spell Fat Alan. Giving the paper a shake, she dislodged something – a photo tucked up in the last fold of the letter. When it floated down under the bed, she followed it.

“Tess? What you doin’ in there?” Rod shouted from the lounge. “I don’t like this, Officer. Is she going through my client’s intimate possessions?”

“It’s what Jeenie wanted,” she shouted back. “To be buried with her Fendi…loaf. I’m just grabbing the bag for you now.” Clambering out from under the bed, Tess found herself covered in dust and several strips of bikini wax (used). But she had the photo: a blurry snapshot of Jeenie in the embrace of a man. The two of them were sitting outside – on a bench – in front of what looked like an old, stone building. Jeenie was laughing – gloating – but the man looked tense, gripping her tightly round the shoulders, as if to stop her getting away. He looked young and slight, and was wearing a baseball cap. “A?” murmured Tess.

If it
was
the guy who’d written the letter, he wasn’t giving much away. Beneath the broad brim of the baseball, Tess could make out little more than a weak chin – and a weedy goatee. There’d been more hair on one of Jeenie’s bikini strips, she reflected.

“Get ’er outa there, Officer,” said Rod. “That girl wouldn’t know a designer handbag if yer whacked her round the chops with it.”

“Miss Darling,” said Selleck. “Come out where I can see you NOW.”

Tess sealed the letter back inside its envelope, and returned both to Rod’s coat. The photo she pocketed, hoping the agent wouldn’t miss what he was yet to find. Heading out, she grabbed a shiny-looking bag from a pile by the door. “Here we go. May Jeenie rest in peace. Found this too.”

Tossing Rod his sheepskin coat, Tess watched the agent fumble to keep it. Then she watched him pat it down. As Rod’s hairy fingers reached for the inside pocket – before they closed round the stolen letter – she could have sworn they shook.

When he looked up, however, his small eyes were hard – and trained on her.

“I need air,” she said, moving to the only window. Something about this flat stank, and it wasn’t just the pedal bin – or the lilies putrefying on the coffee table in an unwashed Hellman’s jar. There was no sense of Jeenie at all. The only proof the murdered woman had existed? Two sinister messages from a man in her life.

If he
was
in her life. Staring through the grubby glass, Tess wondered if she’d missed the full picture. What if ‘A’ wasn’t the man in the photo with Jeenie – but the man who’d
taken
the photo? Had he sent the picture to Jeenie to let her know he was watching her… warning her?

Suddenly Sandy’s claim of a stalker didn’t sound so far-fetched. Tess looked down at the street below. Was Jeenie’s stalker down there, watching them? All she could see was Miller, sat on the kerb of the Bayswater Road. His broad shoulders were bowed, his hands cupped over his face. From her distant vantage point, Tess couldn’t be sure – but he looked to be crying.