The Mystery of Mercy Close (24 page)

The bloke on the end – some techie who’d obviously been commandeered to stand in for missing Wayne – was the only one who was any good. And he was brilliant, so fluid and rhythmic that he made the rest of them look pitiful. I couldn’t take my eyes off him.

Then, to my surprise (category:
very
unpleasant), I saw that it was Jay Parker. He’d removed his jacket and tie and rolled up his shirtsleeves, and was giving it loads with his snake-hips.

It took a moment for me to relocate my equilibrium. Of course Jay Parker was a good dancer – he’d always been
slippery
.

He saw me and abruptly ceased and desisted with his shimmying. He came right over, pulled me into a little corner and said quietly, ‘You found him?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘Where is he?’

Suddenly John Joseph’s face appeared beside Jay’s. Then Zeezah was there. Where had she come from?

I shut my mouth. Client confidentiality was client confidentiality.

‘Keep talking,’ Jay said. ‘No secrets here.’

‘Okay,’ I said, ‘I have eye-witness reports that Wayne was abducted yesterday morning.’

‘
What?
’ Even Jay seemed shocked.

‘He was taken away by at least two men in a black SUV.’

‘But who would kidnap Wayne Diffney?’ Jay asked. ‘Why?’

‘I don’t know but the police are on it. I’m out.’

‘What? Now wait a minute! You told the police! I told you not to!’ Jay’s face darkened.

‘A person has been abducted,’ I said. ‘It’s more important than the singing and dancing show you’re trying to put on here.’

Jay glared at me, then his face cleared as it dawned on him that, if he handled this right, he could generate more publicity and tickets sales for Laddz than in his wildest imaginings. You could see the cogs turning in his brain as he tried to decide how he could twist and shape this latest development into something that would ultimately make money. Heartbreaking appeals on the six o’clock news from Wayne’s parents as they begged, ‘Please let our baby go’? Or making an enormous deal of having an empty white stool on the stage during the ballads, ‘waiting’ for Wayne to come back?

Suddenly my attention was caught by John Joseph and Zeezah. They’d stepped away from Jay and me and were speaking to each other in low, tight voices. They looked anxious, very, very anxious, and out of nowhere my imagination was going like the clappers. What if John Joseph and Zeezah had ‘disappeared’ Wayne? What if they’d
murdered
him? What if his body was in a shallow grave in their garden, and tomorrow a concrete ornamental fountain was going to be built over him, sealing him in for ever? Or maybe Wayne was stretched out on the kitchen worktop right now, and obedient Alfonso and Infanta were disjointing him with a chainsaw, preparing to feed him to the dogs?

‘What’s going on?’ I said to them.

‘We are really concerned for Wayne,’ Zeezah said.

‘Is that right?’ I didn’t know why but I wasn’t quite buying it. And it was good to get a look at her in proper lighting. She was still very beautiful but quite hairy. Along her jawline she had sideburns that could have given Elvis in his Vegas period a run for his money. You’d have thought she’d have got it lasered. I mean, I’d got both my legs done and admittedly the pain was horrific – at least it was before I illegally bought the anaesthetic cream off the internet – but the jawline wouldn’t take five minutes. I could even give her a tube of the cream if I could find a diplomatic way of making the offer, since I had a couple left.

‘Why would someone kidnap Wayne?’ Zeezah asked.

‘Sacred divine!’ Frankie Delapp had crept up on the conversation. ‘Wayne’s been kidnapped! But why? What if someone wants to kidnap me? I’m more important than Wayne. I’m on the telly. I’d be worth more to a kidnapper. And I’m a family man; I’ve children to fend for.’

He turned on Jay Parker. ‘You need to organize protection for us. Round-the-clock people!’

‘Quieten the fuck down,’ Jay muttered. ‘Get a grip here. I’ll talk to the law, see what really happened. No one’s going to kidnap you.’

Roger St Leger ambled over. ‘You know me, open-minded kind of guy. I’ll try anything once, including incest and alcohol-free beer. But even I’m not crazy about the idea of being kidnapped.’

‘I’m on it.’ Jay was starting to look panicky. ‘No one’s going to be kidnapped. Keep dancing, you lot. I’ll go and talk to the law. I’ll sort it all out.’

My phone rang. It was Artie. ‘Where are you?’ he asked. ‘How soon would you be able to get over to Cain and Daisy’s house?’

‘Why? What’s going on? They’re dangerous, that pair. They scared me.’

‘No, they’re okay. And I’m here. And so are Officers Masterson and Quigg. But I think you’d better get over here fast.’

‘Really?’ Artie wasn’t a drama queen. He wouldn’t have said it if he didn’t mean it. ‘All right, I’m on my way.’

I hung up – and recoiled from a sea of beseeching faces: Jay, John Joseph, Zeezah, Roger and Frankie. Especially Frankie. He looked like Jesus on the cross in his final few minutes.

‘Stop!’ I said.

‘What’s going on?’ Jay asked.

‘The people who saw Wayne being kidnapped? The police are with them now and they want to talk to me.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ Jay said.

‘We’ll all come with you,’ Frankie said.

‘You can’t. There’re too many of you.’

‘We could be in danger too,’ Frankie said wildly. ‘Anyone who’d kidnap Wayne would definitely kidnap me. I mean, I’m on the telly; I’m in the public
eye
. I’m a
celebrity
.’

‘Wayne is our brother,’ Roger St Leger said. How did he make everything sound like a sneer? Even the sweetest of sentiments? ‘You can’t blame us for being concerned.’

‘Oh, all right, then!’ I said. ‘But we go in my car, all six of us.’ I needed to retain some control of the situation; I didn’t want us arriving in batches. ‘And if the coppers won’t let you sit in on the interview, you don’t take it out on me.’

‘Okay.’

‘And if they do let you sit in, then I do all the talking.
All
the talking, understand?’

John Joseph, Zeezah, Frankie and Roger squashed themselves into the back seat of my Fiat 500. Jay Parker took the plum position in the passenger seat and we headed for Sandymount. A great deal of jostling for space and bickering was going on behind me.

I drove fast. As we approached an amber light on Waterloo Road, I put my foot on the accelerator and we sailed through as the light changed to red. Roger St Leger yelled, ‘Wahay!’

‘Jesus,’ Jay Parker remarked, ‘it’s just like old times.’

Exactly what I’d been thinking: a movie entitled
When Jay Parker was My Boyfriend
had begun running in my head. I found myself watching a scene of me and Jay in this self-same car, driving at high speed to some appointment that Jay hadn’t warned me about and hadn’t given me enough time to get to. ‘You can’t keep pulling these last-minute stunts!’ My memory was that I’d never stopped complaining, but in the movie I seemed to be elated and high-spirited.

We’d spent night after night whizzing from pubs to clubs to house parties, accumulating and losing new friends as we went. ‘I’m a businessman,’ Jay used to say, to excuse his unpredictability. ‘I don’t keep regular hours.’

‘What sort of businessman?’ I always asked, and got a different answer every time.

‘I’m a restaurateur,’ he’d claimed one evening.

‘That’s today! Yesterday you were trying to broker the sale of seventy-five combine harvesters.’

‘Yeah, well,’ and he was laughing, ‘you’ve to spread your net wide …’

It used to amaze me, the diversity of people he’d known – farmers, beauticians, bankers, civil servants, low-level crims – and he was eternally up to mysterious stuff. He had fingers in countless pies, endless ideas on the fizz and a complex network of exploratory contacts. I didn’t know the half of it and I hated being kept in the dark; I liked to be the secretive one in a relationship and Jay Parker was miles better at it than me.

He kept pulling new locations and new people out of a hat and was for ever springing unexpected stuff on me – ‘I just said I’d meet this bloke for a drink. In Copenhagen. Are you coming?’

Yes, well. As a movie
When Jay Parker was My Boyfriend
had turned out to be a dud. Promising opening scenes, admittedly, and an interesting middle section, but a bitterly disappointing ending.

I rang Cain and Daisy’s doorbell and it was Artie who opened the door. He took a look at the lot of us, sighed, but said nothing. I felt ridiculously proud of how big and handsome he was, as if I was personally responsible for his good looks, but decided not to introduce him as my boyfriend in case I compromised his professional standing in some way.

We followed him down the short hallway into the sitting room, where Officers Masterson and Quigg – a man and a woman – were sitting with Cain and Daisy, who both seemed super-shamefaced.

They looked up in wild surprise as the Laddz and Jay and Zeezah and I piled into their already crowded sitting room. Their jaws literally hung loose as they gazed at faces that they’d heretofore seen only in the pages of glossy magazines. Indeed, Officers Masterson and Quigg looked almost as overwhelmed as Cain and Daisy.

‘I’d introduce everyone,’ I said, ‘only we’d be here all night.’

‘Are you … 
Zeezah
?’ Daisy was so bamboozled she looked like she might faint.

‘She is,’ I said. ‘But she won’t be doing any talking.’

‘And I’m Frankie Delapp,’ Frankie said. ‘You’ll know me from the telly.’

‘Shush,’ I said. ‘Get in there, all of you.’ I corralled my posse into a cluster behind me and took a position facing Cain and Daisy, who were sitting on the couch. I stood in order to retain control of the interview. Also because there were no seats left. Currently there were eleven of us in the room. The wallpaper, clearly overexcited by so many visitors, was buckling and lunging like no one’s business.

‘So what’s going on?’ I directed my question to Artie because I thought I had the best chance of getting sense out of him. ‘Where’s Wayne? Have you found him yet?’

‘It’s better coming from them,’ he said, nodding at Cain and Daisy. ‘Okay, Daisy, would you like to start?’

Daisy spoke, looking at her feet. ‘We thought you were a journalist.’

‘Me?’ I asked. ‘How do you mean?’

‘We saw you snooping around, asking questions like a journalist, and we decided it had to be something to do with Wayne because Wayne is the only thing that resembles a celebrity round here.’

Cain took up the story. ‘We
did
see Wayne getting into a car yesterday morning … voluntarily. Leaving with a packed bag. But we thought if we … you know … sexed it up a bit, if we told you he was being forced into the car and looking scared, you’d pay us more for our story.’

‘I don’t understand,’ I said.

‘Wayne
did
get into a car and leave yesterday morning. Just before twelve. We weren’t lying about the time. But no one strong-armed him; he went willingly.’

‘How many other men were there with him?’ I asked. ‘Were there
any
?’

‘There was, but just one. And he seemed … you know … matey with Wayne. He might have been a friend of his, although I didn’t recognize him. At the last minute it looked like Wayne had forgotten something because he hopped out of the car, and the man didn’t try to stop him. Just waited while Wayne went into the house, came back out again, got in the front beside him, and then they drove off.’

‘So Wayne wasn’t forced into the car?’ I asked.

‘No.’

‘So … Wayne wasn’t kidnapped?’

‘Sorry,’ Daisy whispered. ‘It’s just that we’re so strapped for cash. We thought if we exaggerated a bit, gave you what
you wanted, that you’d pay us. We didn’t think the police would end up involved.’

‘Did you recognize the other man?’ I asked.

They shook their heads.

‘And it wasn’t a big black SUV,’ Cain said. ‘We made up that bit too. It was just a blue Toyota. Five years old.’

‘A taxi?’

‘Not a taxi. Just an ordinary car.’

‘So why did you try to stop me leaving the house?’

‘We thought you were a journalist, that you were taking our story but not paying us. We’re sorry we scared you.’

‘You didn’t scare me.’ Well, they had, but no need to get into that.

‘It’d take more than the likes of you to scare Helen Walsh,’ Jay Parker said heatedly.

Artie narrowed his eyes with sudden interest. ‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘And you are?’

Jay took a moment to study Artie. Coolly he said, ‘I’m Jay Parker, Laddz’s manager. And who exactly are you?’

‘Shut up,’ I said to Jay. He was interrupting the flow.

Okay. What now? The fact was that Wayne was still missing, having disappeared with an unknown man, and I had a wild card and I might as well play it.

‘Cain and Daisy, I’m going to ask you both a question and I want you to think about your answer very, very carefully.’

‘Okay.’ They nodded solemnly.

‘The other man, the man who was driving the car,’ I said. ‘Is there any chance that he was … Docker?’

‘Docker!’

That one word infused the room with energy. Cain and Daisy sat up ramrod straight and stared at each other in amazement. Behind me, I could feel electricity burning off Jay, John Joseph, Zeezah, Frankie and Roger. Even Officers Masterson’s and Quigg’s stolid expressions livened up a bit.

I kept my gaze steady on Cain and Daisy. ‘Don’t tell me
what you think I want to hear, just tell me what you saw. Was he Docker?’

‘Do you mean
Docker
? Movie-star Docker?’

‘Yes, Hollywood Docker, Oscar-winning Docker. Could it have been him? Maybe hiding behind shades and a baseball cap?’

They gazed at me, looking almost in torment. They badly wanted this to work. They really, really wanted that man to be Docker.

‘But he wasn’t wearing shades,’ Daisy said.

‘Or a baseball cap. And he looked like he was about fifty –’

‘– and shorter than Docker, a lot shorter.’

‘More heavyset –’

‘– and baldy. We got a good look at him when he put Wayne’s bag in the boot.’