Death is the New Black

by Dominic Piper

  I spot a traffic warden watching me. I get Isolda into the passenger seat, walk around and get in the driver’s side. I take off my jacket and shove it in the back, noticing for the first time that the seat and the floor beneath it are covered in blood. I think of taking the gun out of the jacket and sticking it somewhere else, but I don’t want Isolda to see it, so I leave it where it is. Producing a gun right now would freak her out completely.

  ‘Right. Let’s have it. You’re not leaving here until you’ve told me everything.’

  I rest my hands on the steering wheel and look straight ahead. Sometimes not making eye contact helps people spill their guts more readily.

  I keep an eye on her with my peripheral vision. She’s looking at a couple of colourful hanging baskets attached to a lamppost. Mainly pink and purple. Mainly petunias. She watches a couple of elderly tourists walk towards us, then watches them as they walk past.

  She starts to bite one of her fingernails, then thinks better of it and wipes the saliva off onto her skirt. She clenches and unclenches her fists. She looks at me; I don’t react. She looks out of the window again. Then she starts talking.

  ‘It’s my father.’

  ‘What? What is? What’s your father?’

  ‘I don’t know where to start. My father’s Tommy Jennison.’

  She turns to look at me as if this name may mean something to me. It doesn’t.

  ‘I don’t know who that is.’

  ‘I was afraid when Sara hired you that you might be ex-police. Lots of private investigators are, apparently. I was so relieved when Sara happened to mention that you weren’t.’

  ‘What difference would that have made to you?’

  ‘This is a difficult thing for me to talk about and I’ve never really spoken about it to anyone before. It really, really isn’t the sort of thing you tell people.’

  I’ve started her off. I won’t respond now. I’ll just let it flow. She’s crying, but this time the tears seem genuine.

  ‘When I was two, my dad went to prison. It was in all the papers, but I don’t really remember it, you know? It was a twenty-three-year sentence, but he got out after about sixteen years.’

  She runs a hand through her hair and shakes her head. This releases a cloud of her perfume into the air. I have to concentrate.

  ‘He’d been like, I suppose, a career criminal; mainly protection and extortion at first, but he’d also taken part in some big robberies. You have to understand that even now I don’t know the whole extent of what he did. It wasn’t something he was going to tell me about. I think the robberies were mainly to do with security vans, things like that. Some of them were quite violent.

  ‘It was all very well organised. He had like a ‘family’ of people who worked for him. He was opportunistic; he’d sometimes rob things like fur warehouses; anything where a lot of big money could be made. My grandmother told me she remembered the house being full of mink and silver fox furs and the awful smell they made. She was afraid of catching anthrax. Whatever, he was a big name in the criminal underworld and was very successful.’

  The atmosphere is a little calmer, and even though there are tears streaming down her face, she’s stopped sobbing. I’m going to push her along now. This is going too slowly for my liking and I can’t see any relevancy yet. I’ll start gently.

  ‘OK. What happened that caused him to go to prison?’

  ‘I still don’t know the precise details, but it was to do with someone from a rival operation. Something to do with rival criminal operations after the same thing, you know? It was always happening, apparently. Anyway, he…’

  She suddenly brings a hand up to her mouth and the sobs wrack her body once more. Whatever this is, it’s a painful memory. I decide to shut up and let it come out naturally. If the flow stops, it may be to Sara’s disadvantage. I have to keep thinking of Sara.

  ‘There was a man called Jason Marshall. He’d been running an operation much like Dad’s. As I said, I don’t know precisely what led to all of this. Dad and one of his friends lifted him and tortured him pretty horribly. Dad’s friend was a man called Jack Heath. Dad and him had been in school together. They’d know each other for years.

  ‘Jack Heath was a pretty inventive enforcer and torturer. He liked doing it and was full of ideas. People were afraid of him. He and Dad hammered six-inch nails into Jason Marshall. I think this went on for a long time. He almost died. He was certainly finished physically and mentally.’

  Jack Heath? This must be Uncle Jackie aka Footballer Dad. It always does the heart good to know you’ve offed a major lowlife, even if accidentally.

  ‘Dad didn’t know that the police were observing him for something else altogether; one of his jobs, I mean. There was one particular police officer, a detective, who’d been on Dad’s case for three years or more. The police were always after him, but they could never get a conviction. He was too smart for them.

  ‘This detective was hoping to catch Dad with a load of stolen goods from a warehouse robbery at some electrical goods place in Lewisham or somewhere. Maybe it was Ladywell, not Lewisham. Instead, he and his men came upon this torture scene.

  ‘It was a big thing. Finally, after all those years, someone had got something on Tommy Jennison. He seemed to be invulnerable and it really pissed the police off. The upshot was that both he and Jack Heath were arrested, charged and put away. Can you…’

  She opens the door. I reach out to stop her, but she’s only going to be sick in the road. She spits a few times and gets back in, shutting the door again.

  ‘I don’t understand, Isolda. I don’t understand what this has got to do with all that’s been going on with Sara.’

  ‘I have to tell you all of this, so you’ll see how it’s happened. When my father went to prison, my mum coped for a while, but she committed suicide when I was six. She took an overdose of paracetamol. I don’t really know why. She just…I don’t know.’ She stops to wipe the tears out of her eyes. ‘After that, I was brought up by my grandmother; my dad’s mum.

  ‘It wasn’t too bad, except she was ill a lot of the time and couldn’t do parent stuff with me; take me to places. It was a bit grim. I never had birthday parties and could never have friends around. I had friends in school, but my grandmother wouldn’t have them in the house and their parents didn’t want them hanging around with me anyway. I never visited Dad in prison. It was just never on the cards.

  ‘We lived in this huge house because of Dad’s money from his jobs. The police or the courts took a lot, but they couldn’t take everything. They couldn’t take the house, and a lot of the money was invested in various things that no one knew about, so it was out of their reach.

  ‘When Dad got out, I was eighteen. I was like this person he didn’t know. He felt really upset, guilty and angry that he’d missed me growing up. He was really, really guilty about Mum killing herself. He felt that was his fault, too, and I suppose it was. Before she killed herself, she had lots of affairs and he found out about some of them and had the perpetrators taken care of whenever he thought he could get away with it.

  ‘As a result of all of that, there was nothing he wouldn’t do for me. When I wanted to be a fashion designer, he backed me all the way. When I was in St Martin’s, he set me up in a fabulous flat in Notting Hill so I wouldn’t have to live like a student. He hated that. He hated students. I had a ball. Everything I wanted I could have, whether it was books, clothes, holidays – you name it.

  ‘Dad soon got back into his old ways again once he was out, but on a more subtle level. I don’t really know what he gets up to now and I don’t want to. He’s often said that he won’t tell me for my own protection. He owns a couple of nightclubs, but I haven’t been to any of them. I think they’re just fronts for the taxman and the law.

  ‘Whatever he does, I always feel he’s a little ashamed because of what happened when I was small, but it’s like it’s all he can do, you know? I’m surprised he’s still at it, to be honest. I th
ought he might have retired by now. Maybe he can’t.’

  She turns to me and puts a hand on my thigh. ‘You liked it with me, didn’t you? I’m good at it, aren’t I? I thought some of it might freak you out, but it didn’t, did it. Some men I’ve been with, they won’t go along with…’

  ‘Can we get on with it, Isolda? We really can’t waste any time now.’

  She looks away sharply. Despite herself, she’s still trying it on. She smiles at me, then opens the car door and throws up again. At least the vomit looks genuine.

  24

  THE CAMPAIGN

  We both stare out of the windows of the SUV, watching tourists, watching people embarking from taxis, watching the wind blow the leaves on the trees. I start wondering about how they managed to take Sara from my flat without a struggle. Was it one monumental punch in the face again, like in Baker Street? I get a chill in my stomach when I remember she was only wearing my sweatshirt.

  It concerns me that she’s so attractive and what thugs like these guys might decide to do to her. Perhaps they just aimed a gun at her head and simply told her to come quietly or else. What were the chances of someone being escorted out of my flat at gunpoint and nobody noticing? Moderate, I would say. Apart from the evenings, Exeter Street is pretty deserted, three or four people walking around at the most, many of them lost or going somewhere else.

  ‘I was good at St Martin’s,’ continues Isolda after a few minutes, ‘but I wasn’t good enough and I knew it. Some people have a natural talent for design. Ideas just pop into their heads. They can’t get them down on paper fast enough. One girl I knew said she could actually close her eyes and see models walking by wearing all these clothes she’d been thinking about. All she had to do was to sketch them as quickly as she could before they vanished from her thoughts. I was so jealous of that. That was the exact opposite of what it was like for me.

  ‘For me it was a slog. I used to read book after book about top designers from the past. My flat was like Sara’s office. I just hoped that if I read enough and practised enough and looked at enough pictures and went to enough fashion shows that some of it would rub off on me and one day I’d just be magically able to do it like the big names.

  ‘I’d always been good at drawing and had a good sense of what colours to use. I knew what was good and bad and understood the history of the whole thing. But when it came to coming up with the goods I knew deep down that I couldn’t cut it.

  ‘When I graduated, I could probably have got a job with some Z-grade manufacturer, designing clothes for some bloody supermarket chain’s own brand or something, but I wanted to be up there at the top, I wanted to be involved with haute couture, I wanted to be somebody.’

  ‘So the closest you could get to the top echelons was being an MTA to someone who already was somebody,’ I say, the whole mess starting to coalesce in my mind, at long bloody last.

  ‘Exactly that. Top designers will always want assistants who know the score as far as design goes. They want someone smart, someone who knows all the history, someone who they can bounce ideas off, someone who can tell them when they’re repeating themselves or are being unconsciously derivative. If you’ve got a BA in fashion from St Martin’s they’ll know you’ve got the stuff to be a good MTA.

  ‘As long as you present yourself well at the interview; as long as you look the part and sound enthusiastic. And I was good at that – sounding enthusiastic, I mean. And thanks to Dad I had all the latest clothes. I knew I looked spectacular.

  ‘Fashion designers are confident, bright, fun, outgoing people. They like having people like me around them. I was a real fashionista. Maccanti was big, Sara was becoming big – it was exactly where I wanted to be, even if I wasn’t actually doing the designing.’

  ‘So you started working for Sara.’

  ‘Yes. I have to say that it irritated me straight away that she had so much going for her so soon. She had – well, I wouldn’t call it a stroke of luck – she had life circumstances that favoured her getting on in the fashion world. She had the gift, of course, just like I was telling you before. Ideas simply pour out of her. But her family background, even though it was unfortunate, certainly gave her an advantage.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Her father died when she was fairly young. He had a heart condition. Her mother remarried. Her stepfather was American and they relocated to New York when Sara was in her teens.’

  ‘So did her stepfather have some influence in the fashion industry? Did he give her a leg up?’

  ‘Oh no. Nothing like that. But he was pretty well off and easily able to foot the bill for a suitable university education for her. Sara was very good at art while she was in school. One of her teachers suggested that she think about going to Brown’s. I mean, that is the way to do it if you’re going into fashion design. A liberal arts degree from Brown’s, then an MA from St Martin’s. So she left Brown’s with her BA and then came to London. She was certainly a high flyer when she was at St Martin’s. We weren’t contemporaries, we just missed each other, but everyone was still talking about her and you were shown her work as an example of what to do.

  ‘I’d heard that she had some sort of breakdown and took some time off while she was at St Martin’s, but she picked herself up again and just finished the course with honours.

  ‘After London, it just took her five years to get to where she is today, which is absolutely amazing. And she’s amazingly popular. Everyone loves her. It helps that she’s so cute and pretty, I guess, but so, so bloody talented. God knows where she’ll be in five years.’

  ‘OK, Isolda. So what happened? What started to go wrong for you?’

  She looks down at her lap, brushing imaginary lint off her skirt. ‘You keep a lid on it, you know? I knew that I could never be like Sara. I’d always known that. And I really admired her. I loved her work. But her progression and acclaim was so fast, so meteoric that it started to grate.

  ‘It was as if she had a charmed life. I’d sit in at meetings with her and she’d be coming out with all these great ideas and I’d wish she’d shut up, you know? It was like being bludgeoned with greatness. It really started to get annoying.

  ‘I didn’t have anything to complain about, not really, and it’s been a great ride working for her for the last two years, but it must have been the gap between us that began to irk me. It was so big. Her success as a designer and my lack of it; it was like a worm, burrowing away day and night. She never said anything, but I knew that she must have regarded me as an inferior in some way. That might not be true, of course, but it was the way I looked at it. I couldn’t help myself.

  ‘She knew, obviously, that I’d done my BA at St Martin’s and all that, so it was clear that I’d originally wanted to do what she did. We never talked about it, of course, not even at my interview. She was so nice. It might have been preferable if she’d had been a bitch, do you know what I mean? But generally it was all OK. I managed to suppress it all. I wasn’t unhappy or anything like that, you know?

  ‘I’ve always had a great time at Maccanti and I’ve always had a great time working for Sara. In fact, I sometimes resented how I was feeling. I resented myself, if you like. I actually thought of going to see a psychiatrist or psychologist about it. Someone who could talk me through it and help me eradicate it all. But in the end I didn’t bother. I just let it happen. I just let it eat away at me.’

  I’m getting bored with this now and I start to wonder whether she’s just buying time, for herself or for someone else. It’s all very interesting, though, if you’re intrigued by self-pitying psychobabble.

  Anyway, we’re a little further on than we were five minutes ago and I still get a strong feeling that she’ll just shut down if I push her too hard and I can’t have that happening, not when I’m so close.

  While I’m waiting, I try to remember how long I’ve been on this case and it’s difficult. Then I realise that this only Day Two. This wouldn’t be bad progress at all, were it not for th
e fact that my client has been abducted from right under my nose.

  ‘So what happened next, Isolda? Can we move forward a little?’

  ‘It was about a month and a half ago. Sara had a meeting with me, Melody, Gaige and Maria Auclair, the business head. She said she intended to try something that was either going to make us all groan with all the work it would involve or it would be the most exciting thing we’d ever heard of.

  ‘She was going to attempt to do the autumn Milan and New York Fashion Weeks simultaneously. Well, almost simultaneously, maybe three days break in between the two. No one had done it. Everyone went WOW and we all leapt around, but – and I couldn’t understand it and tried to suppress it – I felt really tearful.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘The meteoric rise, the talent, the energy, the industry and public reception to her work and to her as a person – and now this.’

  She half laughs and wipes away a tear that’s slowly falling down her cheek. ‘So a couple of nights later I was round my dad’s place for dinner. My grandmother was there, too. We were just talking about this and that and Dad started asking me about work and what the famous Sara was doing and I told him about the shows. My dad must have seen there was something wrong and pressed and pressed and pressed until I came out with it.

  ‘I started crying. I couldn’t help myself. All of it came out in one tearful torrent; the fact that I was only a few years younger than her, the fact that we’d both been to fashion school but she was doing it and I was only a helper, the fact that nothing could stop her and she’d been going from one success to another since she’d started and now this amazing thing she was going to do with New York and Milan. It was as if I’d chosen the worst possible person to be associated with. I was hand in glove with someone who was everything that I wasn’t.