by Val McDermid
I tiptoed back to the loo and put my shoes back on. Then, very noisily, I stood up, flushed the loo and clattered loudly over to the sink, where I committed an arrestable offence with the dolphin till I got a loud gush of water out of it. Then I made great play of fiddling with the door lock before I emerged.
I managed to stop short in the doorway with every appearance of surprise. ‘Inspector Jackson!’ I exclaimed as his head swivelled round to face me. Those tinted glasses of his were really sinister when the light was behind him.
‘And what exactly are you doing here, Miss Brannigan?’ he demanded, a note of weary irritation in his voice.
‘Pretty much the same as you, by the looks of it. Waiting for Kevin. I heard he’d be back soon.’ Well, it was true, sort of.
‘And how, exactly, did you get through a locked door?’ His voice was oilier than I’d have imagined possible. It’s the voice they use, cops, when they think they’ve got you bang to rights. Doesn’t matter if it’s speeding or murder. I think they learn it in training.
‘Locked? You must be mistaken, Inspector. I just turned the handle and walked through. After all, if I’d effected an illegal entry, I’d hardly be powdering my nose and touching up my mascara, now would I?’
Me and my big mouth. Jackson’s hands moved up to the knot of his immaculate paisley tie and tightened the precise knot a fraction. I had the irresistible feeling he wanted to tighten his hands round my neck. ‘And is Mr Kleinman expecting you?’ he said through stiff lips.
‘Only in the most general way. He knows I’ll be wanting to talk to him sometime. Nothing urgent. I’ll pop back another time, when I’m not in your way.’ I headed for the door, doing the confident routine.
‘While you’re here, let’s you and me have a little chat while we’re waiting,’ he commanded.
‘Fine by me,’ I said. ‘It’ll save me having to get up early tomorrow for our little chat.’ I can’t help myself, I swear. Every time I run up against a copper who thinks he’s in the last days of his apprenticeship to God, I get one on me. I walked over to the desk and leaned against it. Jackson squirmed forward on the sofa to try and get in a commanding position. I could have told him it was a waste of effort. ‘Ask away, Inspector,’ I invited him.
‘In your statement, you said you’d been here, quote, about an hour, unquote, before you and Mr Franklin went in search of Miss Pollock.’
‘That’s right,’ I confirmed.
‘You can’t be more precise than that? I’m sorry, but I find that very hard to believe, Miss Brannigan. I thought you private eyes prided yourselves on being accurate.’ Had to get his little dig in, didn’t he?
I shrugged. ‘Don’t you find that’s so often the way it is, Inspector? People’s memories are incredibly inconvenient. I’m constantly surprised when I’m interviewing people by the things they manage to be vague about.’
‘Perhaps we can be more precise if we work backwards. Where did you come from? And what time did you leave there?’
‘I had been working near Warrington. I finished there about half an hour after midnight, and decided that since I was only ten minutes or so away from Colcutt, I’d pop in for a nightcap.’ Time to go on the offensive, I decided. I really couldn’t afford to get into a detailed analysis of time and place. ‘What’s the big deal, anyway, Inspector? Still trying to get Jett in the frame? I’d have thought there wasn’t a lot of point in that now you’ve got someone in custody.’
He pushed his glasses up and rubbed the bridge of his nose in an exasperated gesture. ‘Why don’t you just leave us to do the job we’re paid to do, Miss Brannigan?’
‘Are you denying you’ve arrested Maggie Rossiter?’
‘If you’re so keen to find out what we’re up to, you should send that boyfriend of yours along to our press conferences,’ he said sarcastically. Pity the police aren’t as good at catching villains as they are at gossiping. ‘At least that way you’d get hold of the right end of the stick. You still haven’t answered me. What time was it when you got here?’
‘I told you, I can’t be sure. We chatted for about an hour, I’d guess, then Jett went to fetch Moira.’
‘Why did he wait that long? Why didn’t he go and get her before then?’
I took a deep breath. ‘He went to get her then because they’d arranged to meet for a working session in the rehearsal room and he didn’t want her hanging around waiting for him. I guess he didn’t go and get her before because he didn’t know where she was.’
‘How long was he away?’
‘A couple of minutes. Not long enough to kill her, if that’s what you’re trying to get at. Besides, I felt her skin temperature when I tried for a pulse. She was a lot cooler than she could have got in three or four minutes.’
‘Don’t tell me,’ Jackson said sarcastically. ‘Let me guess. And she wasn’t as cold as she would have been if she’d been dead an hour, am I right?’
‘That would be my judgement, yes,’ I replied.
‘I’m sure our pathologist will be fascinated by your expert opinion,’ Jackson sighed. ‘When you saw the girlfriend—was she going towards the house or away from it?’
‘I can’t be certain, but I think she was heading back towards the village.’
Jackson nodded. ‘And she looked what? Startled? Afraid? Upset?’
‘She looked pretty startled. But who wouldn’t, nearly being run over in the small hours?’
‘And when you went rushing off to interview her, did she happen to mention how Moira Pollock met her end?’
‘No.’ That I was sure about.
‘And did you?’ He was probing more firmly now. I began to wonder why he wasn’t back at the station giving Maggie the third degree.
‘No. You told me not to, remember?’
‘And you always do what you’re told? Spare me, Miss Brannigan.’
I pushed myself away from the desk. ‘I don’t know where this is getting us, Inspector, but I’ve got more important things to do with my time than sit here being insulted. If you’ve got some genuine questions to put to me, fine, we’ll talk. But if you’re just going over old ground, and trying to get me to change my testimony to incriminate my client, then you’re wasting your time as well as mine.’ I was halfway to the door as I finished. But Jackson was faster than me.
He blocked the doors, standing with his back to them. ‘Not so fast,’ he began. Then he stumbled forward, nearly cannoning into me as someone pushed the door behind him.
Kevin looked furious as he stomped into his office. ‘What the hell is going on here?’ he started. ‘What is this? Why’s everybody playing cops and robbers in my office?’
‘I was just leaving,’ I said haughtily, skirting the pair of them. ‘I’ll catch up with you another time, Kevin,’ I threw over my shoulder as I pulled the door shut firmly behind me. Time to do some work on my timetables.
24
I found Jett in his private sitting room, on the opposite side of the house to Kevin’s suite. I walked in through the open door, then paused till he noticed me. He was sitting on a tall stool by the window, picking out fragments of old melodies on a twelve string Yamaha. After a few minutes, he turned his head towards me and nodded. He reached the end of a phrase of ‘Crying In The Sun’, one of their collaborations from the second album, then stood up abruptly. ‘Kate,’ he said softly. It was impossible to see the expression on his face, silhouetted against the light as he was.
I sat down on a chaise longue and said, ‘How’re you doing?’
Jett carefully leaned the guitar against the wall then folded himself into the lotus position on the floor a few feet away from me. ‘It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever known,’ he replied, his voice curiously lacking in its usual resonance. ‘It’s like losing half of myself. The better half. I’ve tried everything I know—meditation, self-hypnosis, booze. Even sex. But nothing makes it go away. I keep getting flashbacks of her lying there like that.’
I didn’t have anything useful
to say. Bereavement isn’t something I’ve had a lot to do with. We sat in silence for a few moments, then Jett said, ‘Do you know who killed her yet?’
I shook my head. ‘I’m afraid not. I’ve asked a lot of questions, but I’m not a whole lot further forward. Anyone could have done it, and nearly everyone seems to have some kind of motive. But I’ve got a few interesting leads that I need to follow up. Then I might have a clearer idea.’
‘You’ve got to find who did it, Kate. There’s a really bad atmosphere round here. Everybody suspects everybody else. They might not admit it, but they do. It’s poisoning everything.’
‘I know. I’m doing my best, Jett. It would help if I could ask you a few questions.’ I was treading gently. I didn’t know how close to the edge he was and I didn’t want to be the one to push him over. Besides, he was the client, therefore not up for any kind of badgering.
He sighed, and forced out a half smile that looked grotesque on his haggard features. ‘I laid you on, so I guess I have to pay the price. Look, I have to go see Moira’s mother. Why don’t you drive me into town and we can talk on the way.’
‘How will you get home?’ I asked. Trust me to find the completely irrelevant question.
He shrugged. ‘Gloria’ll come and pick me up. Or Tamar. It’s not a problem.’
I followed him out the door and down the stairs. On the front steps, he paused and said, ‘You can ask me anything you want, you know. Don’t worry about sparing my feelings.’
‘Thanks.’ I unlocked the car and kept an anxious eye on him as he squeezed into the passenger seat. The briefest of smiles flickered on his face as he strapped himself in.
‘I’ve got too used to flash motors,’ he remarked.
I revved the engine and headed off down the long drive. The tyres hissed on the wet road, the wipers struggled to keep the screen clear. ‘Weather looks like I feel,’ Jett said. ‘OK, Kate, what d’you want to know?’
‘Can you run through your own movements from about eight? I particularly want to know where and when you saw anyone else.’
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jett massage the back of his neck with one hand, then rotate his head a few times. ‘Tamar came back from one of her shopping sprees, and said she’d cook us some dinner.’
‘Was that usual?’ I butted in.
He shrugged. ‘We don’t stick to formal routines round meals here. Everybody kind of fends for themselves, except for Sunday. Gloria always cooks a proper Sunday dinner and we all get together then. But Tamar often cooks for the two of us. Moira did dinner a few times the first couple of weeks she was here, but once we’d really got stuck into the work, she didn’t bother.’
‘Right. So what did you do then?’ I opened the window and pressed the gate release button. A flurry of rain stung my face before the electric window could wind up again.
Ignoring the invasion of the weather, Jett said, ‘Moira and I went down to the studio to see Micky about a couple of tracks we weren’t happy with. He wanted to do some fancy stuff with drum machines and stuff, but we weren’t thrilled with the idea. So we discussed it, and then I went up to have dinner with Tamar.’
‘Did you and Moira come back upstairs together?’
Jett thought for a moment. ‘No,’ he eventually said. ‘She was still there when I left, but she was upstairs a few minutes later, because I saw her going towards the front door as I came through from the kitchen. I thought she was going off to meet Maggie.’
‘So you knew Maggie was staying in the village?’ I asked, with a vague gesture in the general direction of the pub.
‘Sure I knew,’ he replied in surprise. ‘Moira didn’t broadcast it, but she had to tell me. I’d have been worried, you see, if I’d been looking for her and I hadn’t been able to find her. I told her to bring Maggie up to the house to stay, but she wasn’t having any of that. Said she didn’t see why Maggie should have to put up with the shit she was getting from all sides.’
‘OK, so after Moira left, what then?’
‘We ate our steaks, and watched Regarding Henry on the video. Tamar went off to have a bath just before ten, and I came up here to make a couple of phone calls. There were a couple of session musicians I wanted for next week, and I needed to check they were available. Usually, Micky does that, but he’s got such strong ideas about this album that I didn’t trust him not to come back to me pretending they couldn’t make the sessions. After that, I went along to Tamar’s room and we went to bed together.’ His voice dropped and he came to a halt.
‘What exactly is the score between you and Tamar?’ I prompted.
‘That’s a question I don’t have the answer to. I’m fond of her, but sometimes she drives me crazy. She’s so materialistic, so empty compared to Moira. I keep thinking I’ll end it, then we go to bed together one last time and I remember all the good times and I can’t let go. Maybe if Moira and me had been able to get it together in bed again, I’d have been able to free myself.’
You mean Tamar’s a great lay, and you won’t say goodbye till something better comes along, I thought cynically. ‘I see,’ was all I said. ‘So where did you go after you left Tamar’s room?’
‘I went back to my room and had a shower. Then I went down to the rehearsal room. That must have been some time between half-eleven and midnight. Moira and I had planned to do a couple of hours’ work on a couple of new songs, but we weren’t meeting till half-past one.’
I said nothing for a moment, concentrating on the road junction ahead. The traffic comes down that main A56 like it was a German autobahn and speed limits hadn’t been invented. I spotted a gap in the cars and went for it. Thank God for the Nova’s acceleration. It took Jett by surprise, I noticed. He was thrust back into his tight-fitting sports seat with a look of serious discomfort on his face.
‘Isn’t that a bit late to start work?’ I asked.
Jett relaxed as my speed levelled out and the G-forces disappeared. His smile this time seemed genuine, though I couldn’t see into his eyes. I adjusted the rear-view mirror slightly so I could see his face. ‘We always did our best work in the early hours,’ he told me. ‘Sometimes we’d still be tossing lyrics and tunes around at dawn. In the early days, we used to drive off to a greasy spoon around five in the morning and have bacon butties and tea to celebrate our new songs.’
‘So why did you go off to the rehearsal room so much earlier than you’d arranged?’
‘I’d had a tune going round my head for a couple of hours, and I wanted to fiddle around with it a bit before Moira arrived. So I’d have something new to show to her, I guess. I tinkered with it for a while, then I decided to fix myself a sandwich, so I went off to the kitchen. That must have been just before one, because the news came on the radio while I was eating.’ His speech had become noticeably more jerky as he got closer to the discovery of the body, his shoulders tense and hunched.
I slowed for the roundabout but still managed to hit the motorway slip road at fifty-five. This time, Jett made it to the grab handle in plenty of time.
‘Did you see anyone at all?’
‘No. But then I probably wouldn’t have noticed anyone unless they’d actually spoken to me. My head was full of music, I wasn’t paying attention much to anything else. I don’t know how to explain it to someone who’s not a musician. I don’t even remember what was on the radio. They could’ve announced World War Three and I wouldn’t have taken it in.’
Which explained Gloria’s behaviour. Great. I had a client in the right place at almost the right time. I had a witness who wasn’t admitting it yet, but who could put him there. And it was my lies to the police which had given him his non-existent alibi. Never mind Inspector Jackson, Bill was going to love this.
‘Did you go straight from the kitchen to the rehearsal room, then?’
Jett bowed his head in assent. ‘That’s when I found her. I was only a room away, and I didn’t hear a damn thing.’
‘Because the rehearsal room’s so well sound
proofed?’
‘That’s right. That’s why the police had to believe you and me when we said we didn’t hear a thing.’
There was no point in questioning him about what he’d seen in the room. I’d seen it too and it hadn’t told me anything except that Moira was battered to death with a tenor sax. Besides, he seemed to be retreating inside himself, and I figured I’d have to move the conversation into different channels if I wasn’t to lose him altogether. ‘Who do you think it was, Jett?’
‘I can’t believe any of us did it,’ he said in a tone that lacked conviction. ‘Shit, we’re always rowing in this business. Nobody ever got killed before.’
‘She’d been arguing with Kevin, hadn’t she? Do you know what that was all about?’
‘She thought he was ripping her off over her royalties. But that was only a little bit of it. She made me stand up to him to get the deal she wanted—you know, a profit percentage on the album, an increased royalty rate, and now she was pushing for a production credit too. She kept telling me I wasn’t getting my share either, that Kevin was taking too much of a rake-off. And she kept going on about how I was being ripped off on the merchandising. She said there were loads of illicit copies of the tour merchandise all over the place, and Kevin should be doing something to put a stop to it, and why wasn’t he.’
My ears pricked up. Moira knew about the schneids? I was so busy with my own thoughts I almost missed Jett’s next comment. ‘She was even hinting we should get shot of Kevin and manage ourselves. She said it wouldn’t take her long to get the job sussed, then we could ditch him. I didn’t want to, but she made me promise that if she got evidence that he was ripping me off, I’d go along with her.’
I took a deep breath. Could anyone be as naive as Jett appeared to be? Here he was, handing me the strongest of motives on a plate, and he didn’t even seem to notice.
‘Did you know someone kept dropping heroin on Moira?’ I asked. The motorway petered out into dual carriageway. I barely noticed, only my automatic-pilot reflexes making me slow to within ten miles an hour of the speed limit.