Death Of A Diva

by Derek Farrell

  Like I say; I was glad she’d called me, but sorry I had to be the one to work this mess out.

  “That’ll be a hundred and thirty quid, please,” I said

  Christie smirked. “Danny. Dannydannydanny. You know: you lot are so funny. Shut that door and all that. Love it. I! Fucking! Love it!” He roared, attracting disapproving glances from the small group at the left side of the bar.

  I smiled. “How many glasses?” I asked.

  “Tha’s better,” he smirked, counting the mob with a fat, nicotined finger, “Seven, eight, nine. Nine. Make it ten; have a drop yerself, mate.”

  “I won’t,” I smiled back at him, with just as much hatred as his smile to me had contained, “If you don’t mind; but I will have the cash: one-thirty. Please.”

  “Yeah. ‘Bout that,” Christie slipped off his barstool, tilted his head almost imperceptibly to the right end of the bar and slid a little towards where the newcomer was stood flipping idly through a free newspaper. I followed him a little out of the hearing range of the tribe.

  “Listen, you stupid little queer,” he had the look of a rabid terrier now, his beady little eyes shining wetly, his teeth – tiny, sharp and almost unnaturally white – exposed behind drawn back lips, “open the fucking ‘poo or this little lot will tear this fucking place to pieces.”

  “Go fuck yourself, Christie.”

  He paused, his mouth opened, his face set in a shocked look and then snorted; his approximation, I supposed, of a laugh.

  “That booze costs over a hundred quid and the only way you’re getting it is cash upfront.” I heard my voice and it sounded infinitely braver than my pounding heart or my trembling knees felt. “I’ve got to pay Chopper his cut out of everything that crosses the bar; so unless you want to explain why you and this fucking rabble are pouring a tonne’s worth of his profits down your greedy fucking throats, you pay up, or fuck off.”

  Christie put his hand down on the bar and his opened palm contained a gun. He turned his hand over and the gun was only partially covered by his fleshy mitt. He smiled coldly.

  “Do you really think Chopper gives a flying fuck about you, your mob of shit stabbers or this crappy boozer?” He demanded. “You’re already nothing more than a lesson he’s gonna have to dole out, faggott. You need friends round his gaff and I’m offering you the chance to make some mates here. Now, open the fucking booze, smile, then fuck off backstage and try not to piss me off any more than you already have.”

  “You got half a bitter?” A voice asked. I glanced up and it was the newcomer and I remembered where I’d seen him before.

  “Oi!” Christie slipped a copy of QX over his fist full of Heckler & Koch and turned his hate filled glare on the young dark haired stranger who was standing a little too close to him for his comfort. “D’you wanna back off, mate. And get your hard-on out of my back; I ain’t interested, bum boy!”

  “That’s not my hard-on,” the newcomer said, reaching over Christie’s shoulder to slap an open warrant card with a bright shiny police badge onto the bar. “It’s my baton. Hope you’ve got a licence for that little toy, Jimmy,” DC Nick Fisher asked, his lips almost intimately close to the thug’s ear. “Otherwise I might have to take you out back and conduct a cavity search. And I’m sure you wouldn’t want that.”

  Christie jerked as if a jug of boiling water had been shoved down his back. His hand left the gun where it sat and he backed fully into the young policeman, who stayed, arms surrounding the short sack of nastiness, just where he’d been.

  “I’ve no idea where that came from,” Christie croaked. “Just sitting on the bar it was. Was just telling my friend here that this place has gone right downhill. Punters with shooters? Whatever next?”

  “Punters who want to drink for free?” Fisher offered.

  Christie swivelled and realised that, since the Detective Constable hadn’t actually moved, his back was now pressed against the bar, as the copper leered over him. From the corner of my eye, I saw one of the mob nudge the other and heard a snigger exchanged.

  “Listen, mate,” Christie said, keeping his voice low, “I’m as gay friendly as the next man; but you’re a bit too close for comfort. Know what I mean?”

  Ali sidled up beside me. “Everything OK?” She asked.

  “Really? You’re gay friendly?” Fisher leaned in. Christie leaned back, his head clunking off the draught beer taps. “Only, so far I’ve heard you use the words Little Queer, Shit Stabbers and Faggott and none of them in an ironic, empowering way.”

  “You forgot Bum Boy,” Ali offered.

  Fisher nodded gratefully at her. “Thank you, madam, you’re quite right: I did forget Bum Boy. Though I bet you, Jimmy, have never forgotten a bum boy in your life, have you?” He smiled nastily, paused a half second and continued. “In fact, mate, with all those nasty negative euphemisms, I’d have put you down as a pretty gay unfriendly type. Which sort of makes me wonder what you’re doing in South London’s leading new gay bar.”

  Christie did the whole constipated pigeon thing with his bobbing head and straightened himself up. “Jus’ doin’ some business,” he muttered. “Wanna let me loose?”

  Fisher stepped back, one eye remaining on the gun. “I’d suggest your business here is done,” he stated coldly.

  Christie bob-gulped again, the last of his bravado restating itself. “I got a pint to finish.”

  “For which you will, of course, have paid in full,” said Fisher, his eyes locked firmly onto the nasty little face before him.

  I watched the back of Christie’s head and knew that I’d probably pay for this humiliation; but right now, I didn’t care, as he scuffled, in a panic, through his pockets, pulled out a fistful of cash; slapped it, without inspection, on to the bar next to the gun; hesitated a moment as though trying to decide whether to make a snatch for the piece; decided against it, barked “Boys, we’re off,” and slid over to the mob, muttering loudly about the place being full of buggers and busies.

  The gang downed their pints, the little blonde moued and said something about his promising her champagne. Christie muttered something to her and shot me a filthy look. Ali slid the cash off the bar, counted it, rang up the till and informed me in a whisper that “We’ve just taken that tubby tit for ninety-three seventy-two. For six Stellas, a Pernod, and a rum and coke.”

  “He can come again,” I muttered to her as the tribe lumbered – as though choreographed – to the door. Christie and the bimbette – now also shooting daggers in my direction – exited first, followed by the entire Wormwood Scrubs corps de ballet.

  A moment later, the door opened again and a gaggle of new – and quite clearly not gangster – customers entered the bar. Ali, having clapped me on the shoulder, went off to serve them.

  “Have you got a bar towel?” Fisher asked, his eyes changing from olive to emerald green.

  “For you, I have anything,” I responded, wondering, as I slid a Teutonberg towel to him, whether flirting with one of the coppers who had you down for divacide was advisable.

  Fisher lifted the towel and using it, reached across to pick the gun up from the bar. “Unlikely to have any useful dabs,” he smiled, “but worth taking care of. You know: you really need to watch the sort of people you allow in here. That one’s not only a worthless piece of shit, but also very, very straight.”

  “We’re very straight friendly,” I flirted back. “Bitter?”

  “I try not to be,” he smiled, rolling the towel up and slipping the parcel into his coat pocket.

  “You wanted bitter,” I clarified.

  “I did indeed,” he replied, smiling at me. “But I wanted you more. That is,” he blushed, “I wanted to ask you something.”

  I reached for a glass and began to pour a half pint of Pride into it. “Anything, my hero,” I flirted, placing the glass on the bar.

  He sipped from the glass. “What are your plans tonight?”

  Which made a nice change, I supposed, from, where were you last
night; when did you last see your father; or who put the boom in the boom-biddy-boom de boom?

  “Um,” I extemporised, in a manner that would, I felt confident, have done Noel Coward proud, “why?”

  “Come to dinner with me.”

  “No, seriously: what do you want?”

  “Seriously: come to dinner with me.”

  “Wait: you’re actually... I mean are you?” My jaw hung open and I wondered whether someone with such totally worthless gaydar should even consider opening a gay bar.

  His grin widened, “I can recite the entire libretto of Miss Saigon and bench press one hundred and eighty kilos. I’ve got a season ticket to Arsenal and go every week with my brothers who have known my whole life and weren’t surprised or bothered when I told them at twenty-two what I’d known since I was fifteen. My dad was a copper, as was his dad, as are two of my five brothers and I’ve wanted to be a copper my whole life. Now you know as much about me as I know about you. Come to dinner with me.”

  “Um, I have a pub to run, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “What time d’you close?”

  “What? Tonight? Impossible.”

  “Tomorrow, then.” He smiled. “I am your hero. You offered me anything I wanted.” There was a pause, during which he half blushed; then he smiled. “And all I want is dinner and the chance to talk to the only barman I ever met who stood up to Jimmy Christie and a sizeable handgun.”

  “I’m the landlord,” I clarified, “a sucker for flattery and we don’t close till eleven-thirty. Cleared by midnight. There’ll be nothing open by then.”

  “But nothing to stop you coming to eat with me. You do eat, don’t you?”

  “Look, Fisher,” my nerve was fading, “this probably isn’t such a great idea.”

  “Call me Nick. And I think it might be one of my better ideas.”

  “Well, last time I checked, you were still one of the coppers investigating a murder in which I was – according to your boss – a prime suspect.”

  “Did you do it?”

  “No!”

  “I didn’t think so. Know who did?”

  “I wish.”

  “Good. Dinner,” he downed the rest of his drink, smiled at me and saluted. “I’ll pick you up about midnight tomorrow. Dress warm.”

  And with that he was gone into the gathering darkness.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  “Daniel,” Caz announced as I walked back into a still filthy yet strangely cleaner-feeling kitchen, “my family rent out cottages smaller than these freezers. You’ve got some really good beef in here.”

  “Probably some dodgy deal the last bloke did,” I offered, “though at least we won’t starve.”

  “Well we need to eat, so I’ve thawed some in the microwave.” She frowned, “What’s wrong with you? You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”

  I checked out the beef. It was a dark ruby, almost black in places and marbled with almost saffron yellow fat. My mouth watered and I lifted it, a couple of heads of garlic, a sack of carrots, a sack of sweet potato and a bag of onions out of the fridge and began to slice and dice, as Caz stood, arms folded, foot tapping, and waited.

  Finally, I told her: “I’ve just been asked out on a date.”

  “You?”

  I bristled. “Well there’s no need to say it quite like that,” I sliced the onions into translucent slivers chucked them into a bowl, put a heavy iron pot on the range, poured oil into it, added a knob of butter and turned the gas on; “I mean, it’s not the most unlikely event you can imagine.”

  “No,” she righted herself, “not at all. It’s just, well...”

  Two carrots were diced and added to the onions. “Well what?” I slid the veg into the pan. They hissed, the onion fragrance filling the room. Caz remained silent as I shook some flour into a big bowl, added salt and pepper, a pinch of herbs de Provence and a little powdered mustard, and tossed the chunks of beef.

  “Well, you haven’t exactly been giving off the I’m available for love vibe.”

  “It’s not love,” I said, adding diced carrots sweet potato to the pan. “It’s dinner. With one of the coppers who interviewed me this morning.”

  “Not the fat sweaty one,” she frowned, her face a mask of horror.

  “Yeah, fuck you too, Caz. No; not the fat sweaty one. The other one. The cute one.” I pushed the softening veg to one side, turned up the heat and added a fistful of the seasoned beef. The room filled with sizzling and the deep savoury smell of cooking meat.

  “With the green eyes?”

  “Were they green? I hadn’t noticed.”

  “Much,” she teased me.

  I added some more beef, slid the contents of the pot around, frowned and ducked out of the room.

  “So? Where are you going?”

  “To get some more pots. You’ve thawed half a cow, love and I’ll be buggered if I let it go to waste. So I’m going to just cook up as much of this stuff as I can. It’ll refreeze once its beef stew.”

  “No; I meant for dinner. Where are you going?”

  I frowned, “Not sure if we’re going anywhere,” I said, lifting two more pots onto the range and slicing up some more onions.

  “What? Why ever not?”

  I paused; the twelve inch kitchen knife paused mid-air, I frowned. “Let me see: because he’s a bloody copper who’s investigating me. For murder.”

  “If all he wanted to do was investigate you for murder, Danny, he’d have ordered you down to the station, not asked you out to dinner. I think this is a great idea: you can pump him for information. And other things.”

  “Other things?”

  “Well, if we’re going to investigate Lyra’s murder, it wouldn’t hurt to have the inside scoop on whatever the Rozzers know, would it?”

  I put the knife down. “Rozzers? Christ, Caz; this is not the bloody Sweeney. Did they teach you that word in the Swiss Finishing School or the Sorbonne?”

  She grinned, came up behind me and put her arms around me. “Danny, I know it’s scary: murder, suspicion, the thought that anyone might fancy you enough to actually go to the trouble of asking you out. But it’ll be fine. You’ll see. So: what’s next?”

  “Dinner,” I nodded at the hissing stove, made a large quantity of roux and searched the scullery for a couple of bottles of red rotgut.

  “And tomorrow?”

  “Like you say, we need to know more. About Lyra.” I nodded at the laptop open on the table. “Leon Baker runs a website called Lyraworld.com. I figure that’s as good a place to start as any.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  “So I called Aubrey,” Caz announced, as casually as she might have explained that she’d been communing with my mum and not talking with Satan’s less agreeable brother.

  “Via, I hope, a fucking medium,” I retorted, wishing I’d brought an umbrella as we stepped out of South Wimbledon tube station into a slow steady grey drizzle.

  “Danny, be charitable. He’s really awfully sorry about having to fire you. He thought you were a great mailroom boy.”

  “I was an internal courier; this public school girl charity thing really doesn’t suit you; and that fat greasy fuck wouldn’t have known me if I’d sat on him. Which, if I was reading the signs correctly, was exactly what he wanted me to do the night of the 2005 Christmas Party.”

  A bus flew past, its wake making the rain lash vertically into my face.

  “Where the fuck is Masset Street?” I squinted at the map I’d printed off that morning, “And why on earth did you telephone him?”

  “Because, dear heart, he knows everything. Oh, not about politics and technology and stuff. About the things that really matter: celebrities. If there’s any dirt about Lyra, Aubers‘ll know it.”

  “Dirt?” I goggled. “What? Apart from the fact that she was the nastiest, bitchiest, vilest coke slag on the planet?” I cracked. “So, what did the old gasbag have to say?”

  “He said twelve-thirty and bring a decent Ch
ianti.”

  I stopped dead. “I am not visiting Aubrey St John,” I announced.

  “Yes you are,” she responded, “because – no matter how loathsome you find him, you want to get to the bottom of this thing and you’re willing to take any help you can get from anywhere you can get it; including from Looney Leon, the loopiest Lyra Lover on the planet.”

  Leon’s house was number thirty-three. I’d gotten his address and phone number from the contacts page on his Lyraworld website and had tried several times the previous evening and a few times this morning to get hold of him, but the phone had just rung unanswered.

  Opening the garden gate, we stalked up the short pathway, conscious of the flickering curtains on number thirty-two.

  The rain – a thin steady drizzle of the sort that doesn’t even seem to be there, then ends up soaking you to your skin – fell steadily. We stood outside Leon Baker’s door. From somewhere we could hear a high pitched keening. It took a moment before we realised that the sound was coming from inside the house.

  “Nice to know someone’s taken it badly,” I commented.

  “Should we come back?” Caz wondered. “When he’s a bit less... you know...”

  The big difference between me and Caz is that, while she continues to display all the fear of confronting emotions that won – and lost – the British upper classes an empire, I – being from a long line of peasants – have never had a problem with hysteria. Most of my relatives are often on the way into or out of some sort of hysterical fit.

  I reached out a finger and pressed the doorbell, which – of course – played the chorus of I hope you’re happy (but I wish that you were dead).

  A wet age passed. Drizzle plastered my hair to my scalp and ran down the back of my collar. Finally, the door was opened. Leon stood in the doorway, his face pale, his hair dishevelled, his naked torso peeking out from a gaping towelling dressing gown which seemed to be covered in a lifetime’s worth of spilled dinners.

  “Hello Mr Baker,” I started, in my best I am not a Jehovah’s Witness tone.

  He wasn’t wearing his glasses and he squinted through red-rimmed eyes at us. He recognised Caroline first. “You’re from the pub,” he said, frowning. Then, turning his squint on me: “wait, didn’t they arrest you. Oh my God! You killed Lyra!”