Star Fall

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘What about John Lavender? Did you like him?’

  She frowned slightly. ‘He wasn’t the sort of person you liked. He was just there. He never made any effort to be friendly. He looked after Rowland’s interests, and that was that. To tell you the truth, I thought at the beginning that they were in a relationship. That they were gay. I soon learnt that wasn’t the case, when Rowland started coming on to me.’

  ‘How did that happen?’

  ‘The usual way. First he was attentive, then he started flirting with me. I was used to that – it’s a hazard that goes with the territory,’ she said, with the mental shrug that a beauty soon learns. ‘And of course, gay men will flirt with you too. That’s just fun. But I realized Rowland meant it, and he was very persistent. Kept asking me out. I’d just broken up with my partner of five years at that time – you know, Mike Shaw, the BBC political editor?’

  Slider nodded.

  ‘So I was a bit raw and wasn’t interested in a relationship anyway. But when Rowland wouldn’t take no for an answer, I had to tell him I wasn’t interested in him. He obviously didn’t like that.’

  ‘He didn’t take it well?’ Slider suggested.

  ‘Oh, he pretended to. Smiled, shrugged, said no hard feelings, made all the right noises. But I got the impression he was pretty miffed about it. He had a lot of women chasing after him – most of the females on the show and all the female punters – and I think it hurt his pride to have me reject him.’

  ‘What did he do that made you think that?’

  ‘Well, for a time he avoided me. He was polite but cold – very different from the way he’d been at first. He sort of – brooded. I’d catch him staring at me across the room. Then one day he came to see me.’

  ‘Came to see you where?’

  ‘At home. I had a flat in St John’s Wood at the time. He turned up on my doorstep one day. I was startled to see him – a bit nervous, in fact, though he was smiling and behaving the way he had at first, as if we were the best of friends. He’d brought a bottle of wine. I told him I didn’t think it was appropriate for him to come to my home. He said he had something to talk to me about, and he thought I’d want to be sure we weren’t overheard.’

  She stopped, and her face was bleak now. Slider waited. At last she went on, ‘He’d found out something about me. Something I’ve gone to great trouble to keep secret. God knows how he found out. But it’s something that the media and the gossip magazines would go mad for.’

  ‘What is it?’

  She looked at him for a long moment, but she shook her head. ‘I won’t tell you. If you know, then – I don’t know who else will get to know. I’m sorry. It would make my life a misery if it got out. And – someone else’s. Someone who doesn’t deserve to be hounded by the press. It’s nothing illegal, or anything like that. Just something very personal that I don’t want known. I’ve a right to my own privacy, haven’t I?’

  Up to a point, was Slider’s internal answer to that, but he let it go for now. ‘So he came to blackmail you, did he?’

  ‘That’s what it amounted to.’

  ‘He asked for money?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘That was my first question. He gave me a sort of pained look, as if I’d impugned his honour. He said, what do you take me for? So I asked him, what do you want? And he said, nothing, nothing at all.’

  A very odd sort of blackmail. But Slider had no temptation to mock. He was seeing a pattern emerging.

  She bit her beautiful lips and stared in appeal. ‘How do you cope with someone who says that? He must have deliberately searched out the information. Then he made a point of telling me he knew. He wanted something. But he kept just smiling and saying, how could I think such a thing? He said, how about a glass of wine, and when I said no, he went away and left the bottle. It was a very expensive claret. In a restaurant it would cost you a couple of hundred pounds. I was so confused.’ She shook her head slowly, like a goaded bull.

  ‘What happened after that?’ Slider prompted her.

  She gave him a look of great bitterness. ‘That was the start of the new era. We were “friends” again, like at the beginning. He’d greet me with a kiss, sit beside me at breaks, take the chair next to mine when we all went out after the show. He’d lay a hand on my shoulder and smile every time we passed. He’d come over and gossip with me in a low voice when the cameras were off us, so that it looked to everybody as if we were great pals and had lots to say to each other. And I had to put up with it.’

  ‘Did he mention your secret again?’

  ‘Never. Not once. But it was there all the time, in the back of my mind, every time I saw him. It was like waiting for the guillotine to drop. Gradually, over the years, I came to think he wasn’t going to blow the whistle on me as long as I was nice to him. But I could never be sure.’

  ‘Nice to him? Did he ask you for sexual favours?’

  ‘No! He didn’t even ask me to go out with him. It was just that whenever we met, I had to pretend we were friends.’ Her eyes blazed with sudden anger. ‘He was torturing me! Like a cat playing with a mouse. It may look like fun, but it damn well hurts.’

  ‘So what he wanted,’ Slider said, ‘was to have power over you.’

  ‘Yes!’ she said eagerly. ‘That’s exactly it. He had power over me, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.’

  ‘I believe you are in another relationship now?’

  She frowned – the old imperious frown – but then seemed to realize she wasn’t in a position to object to his impertinence any more. ‘Benedict Cowper. My co-presenter on Nazi Art Thieves.’

  ‘What was Mr Egerton’s reaction to that?’

  ‘I thought he might make a fuss, but he never mentioned it. I didn’t know if he just didn’t know about it, or he didn’t care – or if it was just another part of the torture, leaving me wondering all the time if he was going to find out and lower the boom on me. I’ve tried to be as discreet as possible with Ben, but I can’t go on like that. I love him, we want to get married, and with Rowland’s threat hanging over me—’

  She stopped, her eyes widening a little, as perhaps she remembered that now the threat was hanging no longer.

  ‘Does Mr Cowper know about it?’

  ‘About the blackmail, or my secret? Neither. I’ve never told him either.’ Her lips tightened. ‘I hope now I won’t have to.’ Slider was silent, and after a moment she met his eyes with a mixture of fear and defiance. ‘I realize you now know I had a motive for wanting Rowland dead. But there must have been lots of people who felt the same way. And I don’t believe, if he behaved that way towards me, I was the only one. Everyone has secrets.’

  Slider maintained the silence as she looked at him with the question hanging in the air: are you going to take this any further? Are you going to crack open my secret and destroy my life? She had a powerful motive for getting rid of Egerton – a stronger one than Melling by far. But she didn’t flinch in the face of his not answering, seeming to grow more steady as the seconds passed. He didn’t think she had killed Egerton, or had him killed; but what about Benedict Cowper? She said he didn’t know, but she might have let something out in the course of pillow-talk, or he might have observed for himself. And she was a woman to kill for.

  He saw in an instant what a hellish life she must have been leading under Egerton’s thumb; and in general, what a hellish life any celebrity must lead, especially a female celebrity, walking that tightrope between adulation and exposure. No wonder she looked tired under her perfect make-up. No wonder she was thin enough to slice bresaola.

  He remembered a photo he had once seen of Princess Di, on a yacht in the middle of the ocean, sitting on a diving board. She was supporting her weight with her hands, so that her thighs wouldn’t look fat. She knew that the odds were that a telephoto lens somewhere was trained on her. And of course she was right. Why on earth did anyone crave that sort of public eye?

  He felt very sorry for Felicity Marsh and hope
d that it would not be necessary to probe any further into her life. He thought, a little wearily, that they would have to check on Cowper, as they’d had to check Melling’s weak point. As for Egerton – he wanted to feel sympathy for the victim, as in every case, but it was becoming harder not to think that getting rid of him was a form of pest control.

  The excited clamour about Miss Marsh’s visit was only just dying down when Slider was summoned to Mr Porson’s office. The old man was pacing back and forth behind his desk, talking – or rather listening – on the phone. Porson’s contribution seemed limited to, ‘Yes, sir. No, sir. Yes, sir.’

  When he slammed the phone down, he whirled round on Slider in what was practically a fouetté. ‘Bloody Nora, that’s all we needed! That was Mr Wetherspoon on the blower.’ All bosses were a pain, but Mr Wetherspoon was a particular thorn in the ointment.

  ‘Has something happened, sir?’

  Porson’s eyebrows collided in the middle like two hairy caterpillars mating. ‘Happened? The spit’s hit the spam, that’s what’s happened! One Rupert Melling, TV celebrity, one of your suspects, has ended up in hospital. Also a certain freelance TV cameraman. And one of the dancers in the Royal Bally has been taken into custody for assault and actual bodily harm.’

  ‘Good God!’ Slider said. ‘What happened?’

  ‘The bally dancer went on the rampage. According to Melling, he came home in a temper because the police had been asking questions about him. Apparently, he’s Russian, and they don’t have the same warm, friendly relationship with the police we do over here.’

  ‘He beat Melling up?’

  ‘Broken nose, broken cheekbone, black eye, three cracked ribs and a hairline skull fracture. Apparently, he threw him at the wall as part of the assault. Then he pranced off and ran down the other character in this cosy menarche ah troy. Name of Pelly. Got one good punch in before Pelly managed to slam the front door shut. Carried on pounding the door, trying to break it down, until the police arrived and nicked him. Pelly also went to hospital, but was released after treatment for a split lip and swollen nose when an X-ray revealed no underlying fractures.’

  Menarche was the mot juste, Slider thought, with all that blood around. ‘It’s hardly our fault, sir,’ he defended himself. ‘Atherton didn’t tell Anton anything about Pelly. Melling must have caved in and confessed.’

  ‘Caved in is about right,’ Porson said. ‘Bally boy just about caved his bloody face in. Now he wants to sue us for reckless endangerment.’

  ‘They all watch too much television,’ said Slider. There was no such crime in the UK.

  ‘What’s more to the point, Mr Wetherspoon wants our cockles in a seafood sauce for showing him up in posh company. You perhaps don’t know,’ Porson went on with elaborate sarcasm, ‘that Mrs Wetherspoon is best chums, gawd ’elp us, with Mrs Redbridge, as in Assistant Commissioner Gordon Redbridge of Scotland Yard.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ Slider said. He was one of the top bods in the Met hierarchy. Two steps further up and you got to God.

  ‘And further to the point, Mrs Assistant Commissioner is one of the leading lights of the Patrons of the Royal Bally, and the Redbridges and Wetherspoons have a box for the season. I expect they pay a lot for it, and they like to get their money’s worth.’

  ‘I’m getting the picture, sir,’ said Slider.

  ‘Now one of the soloists is banged up in the nick, the whole company’s upset, last night’s performance was forty minutes late starting – I can’t remember the whole lottery of sins because frankly I stopped listening after the first ten minutes. That’s what happens when you’re on the wet end of a shit shower. You get numbed to it. But Mr Wetherspoon is not happy; and, guess what, his not-happiness gets traced back to his favourite operative at the far end of the food chain – again. So, what have you got to say for yourself?’

  Slider tried to remain sturdy, though the images that were flooding through his brain as a result of Porson’s imagery were pushing him towards laughter. Actually, it was no laughing matter, upsetting Mr Wetherspoon, whose skills all lay in the general area of making people’s lives a misery. But it was a cheering thought that despite the Wetherspoons being bosom buddies with the Redbridges, he had never risen higher than Borough Commander, which surely proved he had a deficiency in some department or other. Slider suspected personality. Mr Wetherspoon, in his observation, had all the charisma of a vacuum flask.

  ‘As I said, sir,’ Slider replied to the charge, ‘I don’t see how I or my firm can be held to blame for the domestic upsets of anyone we question.’

  ‘You’re going with that, are you?’

  ‘What else can I say, sir? We have to do the job as it comes.’

  Porson nodded. ‘I said the same thing to Mr Wetherspoon, the first two times he rang. Shit happens. You can’t break eggs without straw. You understand, I’m only speaking to you like this on his bequest.’

  ‘Reprimand accepted, sir,’ Slider said.

  Porson sighed, and his brow furrowed like the result of a drunken ploughing contest. ‘All the same, I wish we could keep on good terms with the powers that be for more than two minutes at a time. I’ll try and keep everyone off your back, but you’ll have to pull off something spectacular to row back from this particular pile of merde. Like a quick result on this Egerton case. Do I need to tell you that Mrs Redbridge and Mrs Wetherspoon are also fans of Antiques Ahoy! or whatever it’s called?’

  ‘I could have guessed that, sir.’

  ‘So get someone for the murder, and get ’em quick. And preferably some low-life who’s never been nearer the bally than the one-and-nines at the Roxy for Billy Elliot.’

  ‘I’ll do my best, sir.’

  ‘You’ll want to do better than that,’ Porson warned him.

  A miracle would be nice, Slider thought as he trudged back to his office. Or, failing that, a bit of evidence and a nice confession.

  ‘It’s a bit rich, criticizing us for that,’ Atherton said when Slider told him the reason for the carpeting.

  ‘You have to look at it from Mr Wetherspoon’s perspective: Mrs Wetherspoon and the AC’s wife both unhappy with him. Domestic bliss it ain’t.’

  ‘There’s an old saying which I think applies in this case,’ said Atherton. ‘Before you criticize anyone you should walk a mile in their shoes.’

  ‘How wise.’

  Atherton nodded. ‘That way, when you criticize them, you’re a mile away, and you have their shoes.’

  The phone rang, and Slider waved him out.

  ‘Mr Slider?’ An unfamiliar voice, slightly husky, medium-weight London accent, as of someone who had started off a bit Shepherd’s Bush and worked their way towards Notting Hill. ‘My name’s Harris. Jim Harris.’ Hearing Slider’s blank pause, he added, ‘Lenny Picket thought I might be able to help you.’

  ‘Crafty Harris?’ Slider enquired.

  The wince was almost audible. ‘I used to be called that, many years ago. It was just a bit of fun, but I don’t like it now. Doesn’t give the customers the right idea.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Harris. What can I do for you?’

  ‘More a matter of what I can do for you. Lenny said you were looking for a certain Fabergé box, green malachite, gilt and unpolished diamonds.’

  ‘Have you found it?’ Slider asked eagerly. Just when he’d been asking for a miracle …

  ‘Not found it, as such,’ said Crafty Harris, ‘but I’ve got a bit of information on it. I put out feelers, d’you see, and someone’s come back to me. A dealer that had it through his hands, would be about eighteen month, two year ago. Any use?’

  ‘Anything we can find out about the box could be useful,’ Slider said, his hopes sagging like chocolate on a radiator. All the same – eighteen months could put it close to the time it came into Egerton’s hands. It might be useful. ‘How can I get hold of him?’

  Harris gave him a name, address and phone number. ‘He’s got pitches in a lot of different shops and marts, so you’re not
likely to find him at home. Best to ring him first and find out where he is. He travels a lot.’

  ‘Thanks a lot,’ Slider said, scribbling.

  ‘No probs. You still want a lookout for the box?’

  ‘Yes, please. More than ever.’

  ‘Righty-oh. Just one thing – it’s not trouble for anyone I tell you about?’

  ‘If they’ve acted in good faith, they won’t be in trouble. And helping us is the best way to make that work.’

  ‘Gotcha. Right. I’ll be in touch.’

  I hope so, Slider thought, going to the door of the CID room to see who was free. His eye fell on Hollis, who was looking careworn and indefinably seedy, in the manner of a man living in a hostel who finds keeping spick and span a challenge. But perhaps it was just frowsting indoors all the time.

  ‘Hollis, d’you fancy an outing?’ he called.

  It didn’t turn out to be much of an outing, as Arthur Abrams was servicing one of his pitches, in a mart in Upper Street, Islington, when he answered the phone, and agreed to meet Hollis there if he could come straight away. ‘Only, it’s one of my busy days. I’ve got to get out to St Albans this afternoon,’ he said cheerfully, ‘so I can’t hang about too long.’

  Still, Hollis thought, as he drove out to the Angel, it was a change of scene, and he didn’t get too many of those these days. Abrams turned out to be a short, round man with a lot of tightly-crinkled hair gone gray – it looked as though he was protecting his head against CIA spy satellites with wire wool. He had thick glasses balancing on a thick nose and thick lips stretched out in a permanent smile, and he offered a handful of thick fingers like prime pork sausages to shake as Hollis introduced himself.

  ‘Can’t talk here,’ he said, jerking his head towards various other pitch-holders with their ears on stalks. ‘Come across the road for a cuppa tea and a sticky bun. There’s a nice caff there, and I’m starving. Didn’t get any breffus this morning, so my belly thinks my throat’s cut, as they say in the music halls. What did you say your name was, again?’