by Liz Evans
‘Nope.’
‘God, how can you be so bleedin’ ignorant.’ Closing her copy of Wannabee (the magazine for those who want to be famous), Jan strolled back to her desk and leant over the computer. Her outfit was black as usual; polo-neck sweater, sheer tights and stilettos, broken only by a black and white chequered belt that might have been a skirt. ‘There, see.’ She swung the screen so I could see it. ‘That’s Clemency Courtney.’
A cleavage was facing the camera. Behind it lurked a girl with long blonde hair, deep-lashed blue eyes and cheekbones you could cut cheese on.
‘You’ve got to recognise her now,’ Jan said. ‘She’s in Shoreline Secrets.’
Vague memories of some soap set in a seaside town niggled at the back of my mind.
Jan continued to plug the gaps in my ignorance. ‘She won Best Actress in the TV Awards, two years running. And Best Newcomer the year before that. She plays the barmaid, who’s a reformed lesbian, who has an affair with her long-lost brother and ends up getting pregnant by her mother’s new husband, who’s really the defrocked vicar who kidnapped her when she was a baby because he’s the leader of a devil worshipping cult.’
‘Totally rooted in reality then. What about Jonathon Black? Who’s he play?’
‘No one, far as I know.’ She typed his name in a search box and got a ‘No match’ message. ‘Yeah, see.’
She did something else and another picture appeared. It was a party scene. Clemency was in a long black evening dress, her left arm around a big female in a red satin frock. ‘That’s her best mate, Bianca. She takes her to all the showbusiness parties. When I’m famous, I might take you.’
‘Looking forward to it already.’
Jan was convinced she was going to be famous one day. Quite how, when she had no talent for anything — particularly not reception work — was something we hadn’t figured out yet. Reading over her shoulder, I discovered Clemency was a local girl.
‘Why’d you want to know about Clemency?’ Jan enquired, switching off the computer and picking up the magazine again.
‘I’m about to become her gardener.’
I lugged the rest of the requests for my services up the two flights of stairs to my office on the top floor of Vetch’s, intending to get files made up for them and fit the jobs in around the pruning and snooping. Opening the door, I took a quick inventory of the room. Desk. Filing cabinets. Hat stand. My chair. Visitors’ chair. Six-foot-plus of male hottie.
He grinned at me. ‘Morning, duchess.’
Chapter Three
‘Did you tell anyone you’re here? Or did you just break in as usual?’
Previous encounters with Dane O’Hara had taught me that he regarded closed and locked doors as minor irritations, rather than large hints that the occupiers might prefer him to stay on the other side of them.
I’d first run into him a couple of months ago when it had turned out we were both working on the same case; me because I’d been paid to do so, and him for personal reasons. I’d agreed to hook up with him for that one enquiry because he had all those skills that a female PI needs in her life — particularly an ability to use some serious force when the bad guys turned nasty.
‘Your receptionist sent me up. Didn’t she say?’
No. But that was standard procedure for Jan. I decided to go for the laid-back approach. ‘So, how have you been? Must be what … four weeks?’ I swung my own chair out and threw the mail casually on the desk.
‘Six,’ he said, watching the lot skid over the polished top and waterfall on to the floor on the other side.
‘Really?’ I sat down and stretched my legs out, tilting the chair back. A loud warning creak made me crash it back quickly. ‘So what brings you back to Seatoun? Or did you never leave?’ One of the many things I didn’t know about O’Hara was where he lived.
‘I left. And now I’m back. Have a drink with me tonight and I’ll tell you why.’
‘What makes you think I care why?’
‘Come on duchy, you know you’re dying to find out.’
I was, damn it.
‘Nine o’clock, the wine bar next to Lloyds Bank?’ he suggested.
‘Okay. Now I’ve got work to do.’ We both looked at the pile of post strewn over the floor. I waited until he’d left before collecting it up.
*
The house Jonathon Black and his wife had bought in Seatoun was, inevitably, an ex-boarding house. Practically every house in Seatoun had let rooms at one time. It had been a seaside resort since Victorian times, although it had really come into its own in the nineteen-twenties and thirties, when two weeks of sand and hypothermia had been most Britons’ idea of a fun way to spend hard-earned cash. From the nineteen-fifties onwards, trade had declined as the cheap package holiday to the Costa del whatever had taken off. The place had been down-market, tacky, and desperately clinging to its dwindling holiday-trade for as long as I’d known it, but lately I’d started to notice a worrying trend to tart it up. Perhaps Jonathon and Clemency saw this place as an investment.
Standing on the opposite side of the street, I gave the house a quick look-over. Built in the early nineteen hundreds in solid brick, it was currently painted an odd shade of pinkish red, with off-white picking out the windows. It was three storeys high, but narrow. The small front garden, covered over in tiles the colour of ox-blood, was enclosed by a low stone wall. The decorative iron gate squeaked loudly as I opened it.
I buzzed the intercom by the front door. A disembodied voice called out, ‘Yes?’
‘Grace Smith. Mrs Black asked me to come round. About the garden,’ I added when this information brought no response.
I’d been expecting the blonde ex-lesbian, incestuous, devil-bait with the killer cheekbones. Instead a workman was flattened against the wall to let me step inside.
‘Hello, gosh, sorry. Jonathon did say you were coming, but I forgot. Sorry.’
I’d been deceived by the denim dungarees, the baseball cap and the sheer size. Clemency’s best mate looked even larger in the flesh than she had on Jan’s computer. She was over six feet tall and her shoulders reminded me of an American footballer, only she carried her own padding.
‘Sorry,’ she said for the third time. ‘What did you say your name was?’
‘Grace Smith.’ I rarely bothered to change it when working under cover. Having a bog-common name has its advantages. ‘And you are …?’ I prompted.
‘Oh yes, sorry. Bianca Mendez. Come through. Sorry about all this stuff …’ She gestured vaguely at the clutter of tools, paint, dust-sheets and step-ladders. To our left, the staircase clung to the walls, its side an open banister-less drop. To the right a door was propped against the wall, beyond it the floorboards in the room had been removed.
‘You’re really having a major make-over here,’ I said to Bianca’s broad butt.
‘Clemency wanted a more modern look. Lots of light and air.’ She stopped in a half-finished kitchen. ‘You do know whose house this is?’
‘Jonathon Black and Clemency Courtney.’
Bianca nodded vigorously. ‘And you have to understand that Clemency doesn’t like anyone talking about her private life. You mustn’t talk about anything you see in this house. Promise.’
I solemnly licked my finger and crossed myself. ‘Nothing will ever drag out of me the colour of Clemency Courtney’s sweet peas.’
Bianca’s giggle sounded incongruous in her thick throat. ‘The garden’s out here.’
She flung open the back door. She was right. The garden was out there. Plainly not much got past her. We both stepped outside. Like many older properties, the back garden was far larger than the front of the house suggested. This one seemed to stretch for miles into the distance, and it was hard to work out where the end was, because the bottom section was obscured by a small jungle. ‘Nobody’s done much with it for a while,’ Bianca said. ‘I can lay patios and walls and things, but I’m not much good with plants. Better than weedkiller, Gran used to say.�
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‘Right, well I should really talk to Mr or Mrs Black. See what they had in mind for the garden. Are they here?’
‘No. They’re both out at the location at the moment. But it’s not Mrs Black. You mustn’t ever call Clemency that. She uses her own name. Always.’
I wouldn’t get a chance to call her anything if she wasn’t here. The whole point of getting into the property was to talk to Jonathon and his wife. I was going to have to hang out the gardening thing for as long as that took but, for the moment, I guessed I’d better look like I knew what I was doing. ‘I’ll just take a stroll around, get the feel of the place, jot down a few ideas, okay?’
‘Oh yes, do. I’ll make us some coffee, if you like?’
‘Great.’
A frown creased Bianca’s thick features. ‘Are you all right? Only you’re walking a bit funny?’
I was walking like that because, after a week of wearing bunny feet, my leg muscles screamed in protest if I tried to walk any other way. ‘Over-exercising. It will soon wear off.’
I wandered the length of the garden, making frequent detours to stare at bushes, examine things growing in beds and squint upwards at trees. I hadn’t the faintest idea what I was looking at; my only contact with gardening was limited to the pot plants at the office. When I finally reached the end wall, I found a brick-built shed buried under a thicket of prickly stems. Something rustled in the undergrowth. I just hoped rats hadn’t moved in although, given the growth down here, a herd of hippos could probably have moved in without anyone noticing. I started to fight my way out.
I was ripping myself free of a vicious set of thorns when Bianca burst out of the back door and yelled, ‘Cappuccino!’
‘Regular coffee will be fine,’ I called back.
‘Cappuccino!’ she bawled.
‘No thanks! Just regular,’ I yelled.
‘CAPPUCCINO!’
I could tell I was flogging a dead horse. ‘Okay, if you insist, let’s go with cappuccino,’ I shouted.
She lumbered down the lawn, a hammer and spirit level falling from the pockets of her dungarees as she ran. ‘Have you seen Cappuccino?’
‘Well not yet, you haven’t made —’ I choked off the rest of the sentence as the rats stirred and brushed past my ankle.
‘Cappuccino!’ Bianca pounced, scooped up a rabbit and cuddled it. ‘You naughty boy. Auntie Bianca thought she’d lost you. And Mumsie-Clemency would be cross, wouldn’t she? Yes, she would.’
The thing was enormous. It was mostly brown, with long cream-coloured fur on its undercarriage and a red dog collar around its neck. It seemed to be trembling. Considering Bianca was slobbering all over it, it probably figured it was lunch.
‘I thought it was a rat,’ I said.
‘Nooo! Cappuccino is a cross. A British Giant with a Giant Chinchilla they think. We’re not really sure, because he was a present to Clemency. Somebody left him in a box at the studio when he was just a little baby.’ She dropped a kiss on one of the bunny’s long ears. ‘Don’t you just love bunnies?’
A week ago I had been indifferent to bunnies. Now I hated the sight of long floppy ears and frothy white tails. Luckily, it was a rhetorical question. Turning towards the house, Bianca said, ‘I’ve made coffee if you’re ready for it?’
She removed her cap indoors. The thick wiry dark hair, which had been loose in that picture on Jan’s computer, had been tied back on her neck. Small strands stood out along her forehead like twisted paperclips. ‘Doughnut?’ She offered a plate piled high with an assortment. ‘Although I don’t suppose you eat them do you? You’re so slim.’
‘Genetics, not diet.’ I helped myself to a ring chocolate one.
Bianca sunk her teeth into a round sugary one. Jam oozed from her lips. ‘I can’t eat them when Clemency is around. It wouldn’t be fair. She has to watch her figure you see. It’s just perfect, don’t you think?’
‘I’ve not really seen it,’ I mumbled through a mouthful of choccy-goo.
‘You don’t watch Shoreline Secrets?’ Her tone implied I’d just admitted to eating babies. ‘But you must. Clemency’s just wonderful in it. I’ve got video tapes of all the episodes she’s been in. You can watch them here if you like.’
‘Maybe later. Work to do. Pruning, digging, hoeing. Have you known Jonathon and Clemency a long time?’
‘Oh, forever. Well, not forever, of course, but since I was twelve. We were in the drama group. I didn’t do any acting or singing or anything. I did scenery. And curtains. And lights. Clemency was in everything. She was just wonderful. She always got the leading part. And she deserved to. She was …’ She sought for the right word.
‘Wonderful?’ I supplied.
‘Oh yes.’ She nodded vigorously, her big round face alight with enthusiasm.
‘Was Jonathon any good?’ I asked, selecting a doughnut doused with hundreds and thousands this time.
‘He usually got the male lead.’ A sly smile crept over her features. ‘You are a fan, aren’t you? Some people don’t like admitting it. You’re one of those aren’t you?’
I gave a non-committal shrug. It was all the encouragement she needed to drag a sheaf of magazines from one of the drawers under the table. ‘There’s some articles on Clemency in these. You can read them, go on.’
I tried to feign enthusiasm for the pages of illustrations of Clemency Courtney in various skin-tight outfits.
‘I’ll get Clemency to sign one for you when she comes back,’ Bianca offered.
‘Great. Talking about coming back, I really do need to talk to her about the garden. And her husband of course. Have you any idea when that will be?’
‘No. Not really. It’s difficult when they’re doing location filming. Some shots take ages to set up. People get in the way.’ She turned her head towards the front door as the buzzer sounded. ‘That might be them now.’
‘Don’t they have a key?’
‘Yes. But they forget sometimes.’ She lumbered down the corridor, followed by the rabbit, and returned with two padded envelopes swinging from each fist. ‘Just the fan mail.’ Gripping each side of one envelope, she heaved. The staples securing the flap flew off and tinkled to the floor. Bianca upended the package and tipped a pile of smaller envelopes and parcels on to the table.
I speed-read as much as I could, trying to locate any brown envelopes with triple spaced typing in block capitals. ‘Is this all for Clemency?’
‘Oh this is nothing. You should see what she got after she discovered she was having an incestuous affair.’
‘With her brother?’
‘See!’ Delight beamed over Bianca’s moon-face. ‘I knew you were a fan really. Didn’t you cry buckets when she found out? Didn’t she just act it brilliantly? Like it was real?’
‘Amazing performance. Does Jonathon get fan mail as well?’
Before she could reply the thump-thump-thump from the rabbit in the front room, turned to a squeal. ‘Oh no, he’s caught his collar on something again. It’s all right Cappuccino, Auntie Bianca’s coming.’
As soon as she’d gone to rescue the bunny, I shuffled the mail. Everything was addressed to Clemency or ‘Savanna Scroggins’, which I guessed was the name of her character in Shoreline.
So far, so nowhere. I was reviewing my options when the floorboards shook. Bianca screamed.
Chapter Four
‘It feels much better already.’ Bianca tried to rotate her wrist.
‘The painkillers are making it feel better. The doc said to give it a rest.’
She’d tried to walk across the floor struts in the front room without the floorboards and gone flying. The joint had ballooned up under the pack of frozen peas I’d wrapped round it before getting her into the Micra and round to the hospital.
‘It’s lucky it was my left one,’ Bianca said, continuing to experiment with comfortable positions for the bandaged wrist. ‘I can do some of the work one-handed.’
‘Can’t you take a break for a few days? They won�
��t expect you to work when you’re injured, will they?’
‘Oh I don’t mind. Clemency wants the house finished and I couldn’t let her down. I’d never let her down. And I could do the fan mail. I can type one-handed.’
‘Maybe I could give you a hand. If I’m working in the garden anyway, you could give me a shout if you needed help. Opening paint tins.’ Or envelopes.
‘Would you? That would be totally brill, thank you.’ She sat quietly for a few minutes, watching the beach whizzing past the car windows, each section bisected by the iron railings that lined the promenade. Then suddenly she burst out laughing. ‘Give me a hand. That’s a joke isn’t it? I didn’t get it. Sorry.’
It hadn’t been, but I didn’t mind if she took it that way.
We’d shut the rabbit in the kitchen. My query on the location of its cage had brought a sharp intake of breath. Apparently Cappuccino was house-trained and normally free to hop wherever the fancy took him. In view of the building work, however, Bianca decided to confine him to the kitchen while he was alone in the house. When we let ourselves in, he bounded down the corridor and launched himself at my ankle.
‘Cappy,’ Bianca scolded. ‘This is Grace. You mustn’t bite her. Who let you out? Hello? Clemency? Jonathon?’
‘Coming down.’
Photos and TV screens rarely give an accurate feel for size. Clemency Courtney was skinnier than I’d imagined, and taller. She was only about an inch shorter than me. The long blonde hair in the picture on Jan’s computer had been reduced to a chin length tousle that had probably cost a fortune at some styling salon. I got the same effect with a pair of nail-scissors. Clemency stepped barefoot down the wooden treads, casually dressed in a pale lemon T-shirt and a pair of cropped denims that showed off delicate ankles.
‘Who’s this?’ She stayed on the third step, looking down on me.
I tried not to mind the neck-crick. ‘Grace Smith. About the garden.’
‘What about it?’
Bianca explained. ‘Grace is going to sort out the plants. Jonathon fixed it. And she’s said she’ll help me. I sprained my wrist.’ She held out the bandaged limb. ‘But I can still work. I wouldn’t let you down. You know that, Clemency.’