“There’s nothing to get away with!” I almost shrieked. “I didn’t kill her!”
“Of course you didn’t,” she said, the look on her face expressing horror that I could even have suggested such a thing. “You’re the most honest man I know. You’ve never been in trouble. Apart from that day you tried to strangle poor old Brenda.”
“I did not try to strangle Brenda. I was merely very upset at being fired from the mag.”
“As was I, dear; but I didn’t try squeezing the life out of the directress of HR. Yes, I’m afraid only one of us was forcibly dragged from the building that day. Was it true you were foaming at the mouth? Only I heard you were and, of course, I denied it. He’d never foam, I said. Froth, possibly, but that’s a far more luxe type of insanity.”
“Caz, really, what am I gonna do? I’m fucked.”
“No you’re not. As I said, this doesn’t look good. But you’re not fucked. You have me and where there’s Caz, there’s hope.” She pulled her mobile from the bag, along with two miniatures of Jack Daniels, passed one to me, unscrewed the other with her teeth whilst dialling and, having swigged the bottle dry in one go, lifted the phone to her ear, her tone becoming perceptibly more cut glass. “Hello? Police, please. I’d like to report a murder...”
And that’s when we heard the sirens.
Chapter Four
I’d begun to realise – long before the train pulled into Waterloo – that, in simply turning my back and walking out on Robert, I might, just possibly, have acted a little rashly. I didn’t, quite frankly, have a pot to piss in.
Or – apart from my upcoming redundancy cheque – any potential source of income.
Caz – my best friend in the whole wide world – had been fired ten minutes after me and had told me – via a rather expletive-laden mobile phone conversation as my train wound it’s fateful way to the scene in the bedroom at 83 Battenberg Avenue – that, en passant, she had swiped a carton of Vuitton and Gucci samples, was ebaying them on her laptop as we spoke and was heading home to pack and piss off to Miami for a few weeks.
So I was alone, penniless and without a friend in the world. What was I to do?
Well, obviously, what any other self-respecting Anglo-Irish homosexual worth his salt does: I went back to the warm and familiar surroundings of my childhood home, moved back in to the bottom bunk in the room I’d last shared with my brother Paddy and fell asleep wondering if the vintage Kylie posters were worth slapping on ebay.
I dreamt of ways to murder Robert and carried on doing so for several weeks.
The day after I’d dreamed of nailing him to a tree, I had my Saint Paul moment.
It was almost a month since I’d walked out and a little over a week since he’d stopped calling me. The mobile had given way to his calling my parents’ number, until my dad informed him that not only was I never going to be taking his calls again, but that he’d find it very hard to make any calls with broken fingers or express any regret through broken teeth and both disabilities were likely to befall him if he called any of my family again.
I decided to go back to the house and collect the few things I wanted to take. I still had the house key and the train journey was covered by the season ticket. And so I went, knowing that he’d be at work and I wouldn’t have to see him.
And the fucker had changed the locks. In a little over a month. But when I lived with him, it took him six months to get the faulty extractor fan in the downstairs loo looked at.
I wanted to punch in one of the windows and to crash in through the bloody conservatory, except one of the neighbours had seen me arriving and I had a feeling that – if she knew what had happened the last time I’d been here (and who wouldn’t, what with a naked corporate lawyer hanging out the window as his bit of working class flounced off up the street) – she’d already be on the line to, at the very least, the neighbourhood watch.
So I took the train back to Waterloo and, on a warm and hazy summers evening when the whole world seemed to be full of lovers, walked east along the river, my mood becoming bleaker each moment, until finally I’d had enough and moved away from the river, headed inland into a maze of streets as old as the city itself and found myself outside a grimy, half-dead mausoleum to The Good Times.
I pushed open a creaking old door and, stepping inside, discovered that, for the jukebox, the Good Times had ended some time about 1998 and that the place appeared to have been painted last some time before the Queen’s silver jubilee; the Queen in question being Victoria. Two sclerotic regulars were being propped up by opposite ends of the immense, dark-stained wooden bar, so consumed by their autistic consideration of the Racing Post that they might have been hunkered down trackside at Newmarket.
The bar itself resembled some leftover prop from a production of the Lord of the Rings and the atmosphere of the place was redolent of brandy-quality nicotine, oozing from the carpets, walls and punters, with an eye-watering top note of Pine “Fresh” issuing from the not-quite-closed door to the gents. A smoky base of rum, desperation and resignation seeped from the whole edifice.
The sign above the door had given the licensees name and had read Free House. This was a good thing, because, frankly, I didn’t think you could have sold it. In fact, they’d probably have had trouble giving it away.
I knew, of course, that the licensee was a front. I grew up in this manor, remember, and I knew that the real owner of what was titled The Marquess of Queensberry was Chopper Falzone. Chopper Falzone owns, or has an interest in, every pub, wine bar, club, disco, after hours den and kebab shop between the river and the outskirts of Peckham. He is emperor of all he surveys, even if what he surveys is the shittest chunk of South London imaginable.
The carpet was dark and threadbare. I crossed it to the bar and ordered a Fosters. While the barmaid poured the amber nectar, I glanced at the back of the bar, at the “Begorrah! Saint Patrick” posters still plastering the yellow mirror, at the Saint George pennants hanging from the shelves housing a collection of streaky smeared glasses, mixed with the Happy Carnival red, gold and green collars around the Malibu bottles, at the yellow-brown fug that seemed to permeate the air in the place, making it feel like a living advertisement entitled Your Lung! After 190 years of chain-smoking!
And there it was, Blu-Tacked to the Dewar’s bottle; the beginning of my Saint Paul moment. A plain index card with the words Manager Wanted. Please apply to– followed by a mobile number that I knew would connect to Chopper or one of his agents.
And suddenly, I decided that it was time to take control of my life, to stop moping around waiting for something good to happen.
The barmaid put the pint in front of me. I paid and, before she could strike up a conversation, I took it to one of the tables, sat myself on a wobbly stool and took out my mobile.
Chapter Five
“Evenin’ Danny. Alright if I call you Danny? This is DC Nick Fisher and I’m Detective Inspector Frank Reid. Evenin’ Dorothy.” All of this said without pause for breath or for me to interrupt and finished with a nod to the duty solicitor who sat next to me – a polite and professional-seeming middle-aged woman who, I was sure, was perfectly adequate for the function she was there to fill, but who seemed to me rather, well, beige.
Reid collapsed his bulk into a chair on the opposite side of the Formica table, at the same time reaching forward and pressing record on the strategically placed machine and indicating, with a flick of a finger, that Fisher should sit beside him.
Fisher sat and placed a manila folder on the table. My gaze fixed for a moment on the manila folder and then, glancing upwards, met a pair of the greenest eyes I’d ever seen.
Fisher blinked, the spell was broken and Reid slammed a hand the size of a Christmas ham onto the desk, stated the date, time and inhabitants of the grim, dimly lit room and fixed me with a piggy stare.
“Danny, Danny, Danny. Right little mess you’ve gotten yourself into, innit?”
I opened my mouth and Dorothy Frost raise
d a hand to silence me. “Is Mr Bird charged with anything, Frank?”
I didn’t like the Frank in that sentence. It spoke, to me, of a little too much chumminess. It felt, to be honest, like having one’s oncologist give a pet name to a particularly virulent tumour, but I shut my trap and waited for Reid to respond.
“Oh, I dunno, Dorothy. Let’s see: I’ve got one dead singer, about four hundred quid’s worth of what I’m fairly sure will turn out to be a rather high quality Peruvian go-fast powder, a dozen or more witnesses who’ve reported hearing your client threatening to,” he snapped his fingers and Fisher opened the manila folder and handed him a sheet of paper. It was all theatre because Reid didn’t take his beady little gimlet from my own to even glance at it before continuing, “and I quote, ‘Strangle the bitch with my own hands,’ and a number of other interesting factors which, I’m rather afraid, place your client up to his ears in shit.” Here he turned his stare on Frost, smiled a sarcastic twist of a leer and then shrugged. “So you tell me. What should I be doing?”
“Oh, Frank,” Frost fiddled with a bangle for a moment, then turned her eyes up to lock on to his, “if I told you what I think you should be doing, I’d probably get done for verbal abuse.”
Score one for the beige lady. Maybe she wasn’t quite as chummy as she seemed.
Reid glowered at her. I glanced across at the still silent Fisher and saw that his lips were pursed in what seemed to be an attempt to suppress a smile. They were rather fine lips, too – full and plump and I had to remind myself that I was, as Fisher’s boss had just pointed out, up to my ears in shit and that fantasising about the blow job lips of policemen was probably not the best use of my time.
“So where’s Lilly,” Reid returned the hulking scowl to me and for a moment I had no idea what he was talking about. Then it came to me: the name above the door – the licensee on this supposedly Free House which I was running.
“Lilly’s on holiday,” I answered, wondering if Lilly Carver even existed.
“Funny, that,” Reid answered, demanding, with another snap of his fingers, yet another piece of paper from the folder, “cos I’ve got comments here from a number of sources that say that the mysterious Mrs Carver ain’t been seen near that shithole for at least three years. Which I’m sure you know, Daniel, as a seasoned member of the licensed victuallers trade, would be breaking the terms of the licence. So, let’s try again: any idea where Lilly Carver is?”
What the fuck does Lilly Carver have to do with Lyra Day being face down in my dressing room, I wondered and, in the absence of anything better to say, repeated the lie I’d been told to give if anyone ever enquired about the whereabouts of Mrs C: “Lilly’s visiting her parents in Magaluf. Her mum’s not been well, so she’s had to go away at short notice and I don’t know when she’ll be back.”
Now it was Reid’s turn to raise an eyebrow, though the effect was less sardonic and served only to intensify his resemblance to an adult Augustus Gloop at the moment he gets sucked up by Wonka’s machine. “That what Chopper told you to say?”
My solicitor didn’t need to raise a hand this time; I’d been struck speechless all by myself.
I flapped my mouth for a few seconds and then: “Chopper?” Said, I hoped, with the right level of I have no idea who you’re talking about. This singularly failed to impress.
“Anthony ‘Chopper’ Falzone,” Reid raised both hands, linked them behind his head exposing a couple of vast, darkly stained armpits and tipped the chair back on to two legs, making it squeak in a rather alarming fashion. “Businessman, entrepreneur, avoider of VAT and income tax, runner of protection schemes, loan shark syndicates, dodgy mini cab scams, seven brothels – including two for your sort – six unlicensed drinking dens, dozens of pubs ‘licensed’ to absent landlords – or, in your case, ladies – countless ice-cream vans all peddling botulism in a cone and purveyor – thanks to the two chop shops we know of – of stolen-to-order high-end motors to half the villains east of Warsaw. He the one who supplied the gear you sold Lyra?”
He tilted his bulk forward, returning the chair to its preferred position and slapping those huge open palms against the desk with a crack that echoed round the room like a gunshot. He had a limited range, I thought, as I momentarily left my seat, but it was effective.
Frost leapt in. “Frank: is Mr Bird charged with anything? Or is this simply a fishing expedition where you’ll name-check every villain from the Krays to Bin Laden on the off chance you can link my client to one of them?”
“Fishing expedition?” Reid wrinkled his nose in distaste. “You been watching too much Law and Order, Dorothy. I’ve got witnesses who have your client chatting merrily to Jimmy Christie – known to be Chopper’s right hand man – just minutes before he claims to have popped upstairs to call his performer and found her, not only dead, but liberally sprinkled with the same class A that your client already has form for possessing. So, Danny Boy, did Falzone provide the gear? Or were you doin’ a bit of freelance to make ends meet? What? She didn’t wanna pay up so you had to take matters into your own hands?”
The solicitor opened her mouth and Reid looked daggers in her direction. “Look, Doll, give it a rest, OK: I’ve got enough stuff here to charge your boy with everything from breaches of the licensing laws, to possession of a class A restricted substance, possession with intent to supply, manslaughter – and possibly murder if I wanted – and stupidity: I mean, who in their right mind would open a bloody poofs palace in that neck of the woods?”
I looked over at Fisher, who was concentrating on something in the folder, his lips pressed, now in a concentrated and angry looking frown.
“Frank,” Frost started shuffling the papers before her on the desk and packing them into her briefcase, “you don’t have shit. If you did, I would not be asking you – for the third time – whether Mr Bird was being charged with a crime. So let’s cut to the chase: what have you got and what do you want?”
“July twenty-third, 2004.” Reid pinned me in his stare again. “Mr Bird was arrested in possession of six grams of what the report describes as,” another snap and another sheet of paper slid from Fisher to Reid. Fisher’s eyes – really the brightest green I’d ever seen – flashed angrily at the porcine policeman and the words very Victorian novel ran across my mind, even as I recalled the awful events of that distant summer night, “extremely high grade cocaine sulphate, cut with a,” he glanced down again at the page before him, “trace amount of crushed Vicodin. A little something to take the edge off, eh Danny Boy?”
I’ve never been a huge user of cocaine. Oh, don’t get me wrong: I’m not Saint Danny of the abstainers. Not by a long chalk. And I don’t think it’s an absolute guaranteed way to ruin your life: I’ve seen plenty of lives and families destroyed by addictions to gambling, booze and fags, but I don’t think Messrs William Hill, Johnny Walker and Lambert & Butler should all be rounded up and criminalised.
In fact, therein lies the problem: I actually like the odd line. A little too much perhaps and when I consume it, it does rather odd things to me – I get a little too verbose and a little too chummy with the wrong sort of people – which is why I tend to avoid the stuff. I have certainly never dealt it and rarely purchased it.
And I’ve absolutely never purchased six grams of the bloody stuff in one go, which makes the fact that the single entry on my criminal record is for possession of half a dozen grams of it rather infuriating.
Fact is, Robert’s birthday is July thirtieth and every year he throws a big birthday bash somewhere fabulous to which a handful of his closest, dearest (and vilest) friends are invited. And of course Robert, being Robert, has to provide the best of everything for his guests: Baccarat crystal, Wedgewood china, magnums of Krug and six grams of grade A chisel, which was sitting in the glove box of his Aston Martin, with me in the passenger seat, when the police pulled him over for doing sixty in a thirty zone.
Of course, the other fact about Robert is that he is a member of the
Bar, an officer of the court and, if he was ever done for possession of an illegal substance, virtually unemployable.
So I took the rap. For the wraps.
The things you do for love, figuring that, really, with your life and your career, how much harm can they possibly do you? I got – thanks to the hugely expensive solicitor that Robert hired – off with a first-offence fine and suspended sentence, Robert’s guilt-gratitude, a rather nice Cartier Tank watch (which I left when I walked out of the house in Windsor) and, now, a possible motive for murder.
“So,” again Reid reclined in the chair, a triumphant smirk twisting his lips, his hands linked behind his head and the two stinking pits staring straight at me, “let’s start again, shall we?”
Frost put her briefcase down on the floor and returned Reid’s stare. “Again, Inspector: what, exactly, is it you want?”
“How about the truth. Let’s get the story straight. From the beginning.”
“And after that?”
“We’ll see.”
Frost leaned in to me. “It’s your call, Danny. If you have been involved – even marginally – in anything, shall we say dubious, my advice is to zip it and keep it zipped for now. But if you want to make a statement, this is as good a time as any.”
I looked at her, an almost motherly look of concern on her face, glanced at Reid, who was still exuding an air of triumph and then shifted my focus to the DC, who was leaned forward, a concentrated frown on his face, his green eyes sparkling attentively. Confident that my audience was paying full attention, I began.
At, more or less, the beginning.
Chapter Six
Death Of A Diva Page 2