Death Of A Diva

by Derek Farrell

  He went to slam the door, but I put a hand out and held it open.

  “Leon – Mr Baker – I didn’t kill anyone. The police brought me in because–”

  I was floundering and Caz came to my rescue: “Because, as manager of the pub, Danny had to give a statement on the evening’s events.”

  “Exactly!” I shot her a look filled with admiration. I wish I was as convincing a liar as you, it said.

  “Poor Lyra,” he sniffed.

  “Yes.” I left a beat for consideration of how much poorer humanity was without her and then pressed on. “The thing is, Leon, we’re trying to help the police find out who did this. And we were wondering if you could assist us.”

  A wary look came into his eyes. “Assist? Isn’t this a job for the law?”

  Caz tried again. “Leon, we know you loved Lyra.”

  She got no further. Leon’s face crumpled in on itself like a deflated balloon. “Lyraaaaaa!” he wailed, wrapping his arms around himself and rocking slightly on the stoop. “Oh my Lyraaaaa.” He suddenly seemed to remember where he was and, focussing on me, a look of rage swept across his features. “Leave me alone!” he shouted, slamming the door in our faces.

  We listened as the sound of his crying receded back down the hall.

  “Well, that wasn’t a total success,” Caz conceded.

  “Leon!” I banged on the door with my open palm. “Leon, please let us in.”

  “What on earth are you doing?” Caz asked, horrified that I was raising my voice in the street.

  “He’s distraught,” I replied. “He might – well, he might do something stupid.”

  “Oh sweetheart, he already did that; the man has spent his life idolising Lyra bloody Day.”

  “And now she’s gone,” I reminded her.

  “Yeah. He’ll be on to Liza by Friday.”

  “Leon!” I bent down and shouted through the letterbox. “Leon, let us in. We just want to talk!”

  From the depths of the house I heard his voice, plaintive but firm: “Go away. I want Lyra!” And a new bout of sobbing commenced.

  “What did he say?” Caz demanded as I straightened up.

  “He says he wants Lyra.”

  “Well he’ll have to get a bloody shovel. Oh come on; this is hopeless. The man’s a loon.”

  “Wait,” Again, I pushed open the letter box. “Leon, we need you. You’re the only one with the sort of knowledge who can help.”

  This time, it was Caz’s turn to gaze upon me with admiration.

  “And Leon: we can trade. You tell us what you know about Lyra and we’ll tell you all about her last hours: what she ate, drank, what she said.”

  “Cheese and onion crisps, PG Tips and ‘Get the fuck out of my room,’” muttered Caz. “It’s hardly the stuff of legend.”

  “Maybe not,” I said, standing up, “but it worked.”

  Baker’s front door swung open again. His red-rimmed eyes glittered fiercely behind his horn-rimmed glasses and he had changed into a Lyra Live t-shirt that was too small for his pot-belly. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand and, ushering us inside, asked “Did she mention me, at all?”

  “Mention you?” Caz asked in disbelief.

  “Leon,” I jumped in, “she talked of little else; how pleased she was to have such wonderful fans.”

  “By name.” He pointed down the hall and we traipsed down the dim space and into what can only be described as a shrine to Lyra. “Did she mention me by name?”

  We stepped into the living room and, almost simultaneously, gasped. Every spare inch of wall and ceiling was covered in images of the late diva: framed pictures, signed album covers, mounted and framed t-shirts, lithographs, posters; the book cases were filled with magazines, books and DVDs featuring or about the woman whom Leon Baker idolised. On the TV, a live concert was playing.

  On the top shelf of the bookcases were four pairs of shoes – a pair of red patent stilettos, a pair of black suede court shoes, a grubby and smelly-looking pair of Nike Airs, and a pair of neon blue platform shoes with huge lime green daisies painted on to them.

  Behind these, on three stands onto which prints of Lyra’s face had been pasted, were three wigs – a punky blonde one, a black Louise Brooks-style bob and a bright red asymmetrical item that could only have come from the mid-eighties.

  “Wow!” It was Caz who spoke first; I was too busy trying not to vocalise the words that were running around my head: Buffalo Bill! Buffalo Bill! Run away or die!

  “You really are a collector,” I said, unnecessarily.

  “Uh-uh,” Leon answered, coming into the room and standing between us and the TV so that he could see the muted performance on screen. “I’m not a collector. I’m the collector. My brain,” he tapped the side of his head with a forefinger, “is an Encyclopaedia Lyrannica. I have the biggest collection of Lyrabilia in the world. This,” he gestured at the room, “is just what I had out this week. The rest of the house has so much more. I rotate the displays weekly.”

  “Amazing,” I sighed, trying to turn the subject round to the point of our visit. “Leon, we don’t want to intrude on your grief too much. We can understand that this is a terrible time for you; but anything you could tell us about Lyra would be greatly appreciated.”

  “Tell you?” He tore his eyes away from the TV and turned a puzzled look on my face. “Oh, I can tell you everything.”

  That was when I spotted the empty bottle of scotch on the floor by the grimy sofa. Great: crazy and drunk.

  “I knew everything there was to know about Lyra Day,” he continued. “You see, I had to: I was her biographer. My life’s work. But I never thought I’d be publishing it after her death.” A single tear ran down his cheek and dripped onto his t-shirt.

  “I thought Dominic was writing her biography.”

  Baker turned on me. “Mouret is a hack,” he announced, anger overcoming his grief. “Lyra deserved a book written by someone who’s lived alongside her; lived their life for her.”

  Right. We were still standing in the middle of the bizarre room, the concert still playing on the TV. I glanced at it. “God, she looks so different.”

  He smiled sadly. “That was before the second nose job.”

  “Second?”

  “All in all,” he straightened up proudly, “Lyra had three nose jobs, an ear tuck, an eye job, several derma peels, two facelifts and she had her teeth capped. But she always denied having any work beyond the chin job.”

  “Chin job?” I had visions of some arcane sexual practice that had faded with the arrival of the internet.

  Leon lifted a small framed picture from the wall. “She had a cleft chin. Hated it; thought it made her look mannish.” He peered down into the frame. “One of my treasures,” he commented, stroking the glass almost reverentially. He turned it to me.

  It was a black and white publicity shot of a very young Lyra, smiling a wistful closed mouthed smile. I knew this because her name was given, along with the contact details for her manager, Barry Haynes. But beyond that, despite the fact that so much of the face – the slightly beaky nose, the square, almost mannish cleft chin and the hairline – was so manifestly different to the Lyra I’d met, there was something about the almond shaped eyes that had never changed.

  “She was pretty,” I commented.

  “Beautiful,” Leon corrected me. “She was beautiful. And she was two years older than her official age; did you know that?” He was showing off now, like a precocious kid who can’t keep his secrets to himself. “Born in Epping in 1955 to William and Elsie Chapel – Lyra’s real name was Eliza Chapel – she had one older sister called Doris. William left when Lyra – Eliza as was – was only two and both her mother and sister blamed her. Doris made her life hell. She constantly mocked Lyra’s looks. But Lyra had something special: that voice.”

  I knew this story. Everyone did: how, by the time she was fourteen, Lyra was singing at working men’s clubs, how she was discovered by her first manager, Barry
Haynes and how – it was rumoured – she became his underage girlfriend.

  “Haynes worked her like a dog,” Leon droned on. “But all he could ever book her on was low rent, cheap stuff. Lyra, however, was building a reputation. She could sound like anyone from Dusty to the Ronettes. Lots of people tried to lure her away from Haynes. Promised to make her a star. But she seemed to be genuinely under his spell.”

  This was new to me. “Then, suddenly, out of nowhere, she dumped him, vanished, went away for a year – nobody knows where why or who with. But when she came back, she had a new manager, she never spoke of – or to – Haynes again and a year later she had a number one single.”

  “Leon, do you have any idea who could have killed her?”

  “All of them,” he muttered bitterly, putting the framed picture back on the shelf and gazing fondly on it. “But ask yourself one question: why did she suddenly go from being under Barry Haynes’ spell to dropping him like a stone?”

  “She wised up and saw he was a loser?” Caz suggested.

  “Not quite,” Leon smiled sadly at the TV screen where Lyra continued to perform. “Haynes tried to kill her.”

  “What?”

  “There’s a story that they argued one night after a concert and he tried to strangle her. She fought him off, but it wasn’t long after that that she got away from him.”

  “Wait a minute: he tried to strangle her? Leon, she was strangled to death!”

  “Not by Barry Haynes she wasn’t. He’s dead.”

  Bugger. “When did he die?”

  “Well, he was last seen as a junkie on the streets of Camden. He lost everything. I tried tracking him down. That’s as far as the trail went.”

  “But you haven’t actually seen a death certificate?”

  “Trust me; he’s dead. And even if he wasn’t, why would he suddenly surface and murder Lyra? It makes no sense.”

  “So why bring it up?” Caz asked testily.

  Because he wanted us to know how much more than us he knows, I thought. “Well where should we be looking?” I asked.

  “You want to look at the leeches surrounding her. Her own family. That bastard husband and her bitchy stepdaughter. You saw them,” he answered, picking up the discarded housecoat and folding it into quarters. “This was hers,” he said absent-mindedly. “She wore it when she was in the hospital, after she got ill. I paid one of the orderlies. Cost me a grand, but worth every penny. It still smells of her.” He lifted the soiled gown and inhaled it.

  I glanced at Caz, who rolled her eyes and mouthed the word Cuckoo.

  “Bloodsuckers, every last one of them. You saw them that day; I’d watched them for years. They didn’t care about her. Not like I did. You want to know who killed Lyra, you start there. With the family.”

  We left him, his eyes fixed firmly on the picture of a fourteen-year-old Lyra, a strange frown on his face.

  Chapter Thirty

  “I’m warning you,” I said, “if he gets grabby I’ll punch his lights out.”

  “Oh sweetie,” Caz swept a pointed look up and down my personage, “how many years ago was this Christmas party?”

  We’d just exited Farringdon station and were making our way through a series of empty and rain-swept streets to Aubrey St John’s flat.

  “Here we are,” Caz announced, stopping in front of a red brick building. She pressed a bell and the lovechild of Bela Lugosi and Kenneth Williams answered.

  “Who calls?” It asked, managing to make a two-word, one sentence sound completely sibilant.

  “Lady Caroline Holloway and Mister Daniel Bird,” Caz announced in her purest RP.

  A buzzer sounded and the door opened. We stepped into a halogen lit space and crossed to a waiting lift, which whooshed us upwards.

  The doors opened directly into a giant loft space – all Eames chairs, glass walls and exposed brickwork. Standing before us was a tall, broad chested young man, tanned so deeply that he could – like a lizard – have blended in with the brickwork.

  And it was an all over tan; I could tell this because, even in early December, with a constant slate grey rain falling beyond the tinted ceiling-to-floor windows, he was wearing – apart from a small tattoo on his left pectoral of a Chinese symbol that meant either bravery or spring roll – nothing more than a very small pair of white speedos.

  I handed him the bottle of wine we’d brought as a peace offering to the motherfucker who’d fired me and started this whole mess, and he glanced at it, raised an eyebrow – actually raised an eyebrow – and said, in perfect Bella Williams tones, “Ah, Waitrose. Always a wonderful vintage,” before flouncing away stage right.

  Leaving us facing the vastness of Aubrey St John’s pad.

  “Oh for Christ’s sake,” a voice – clearly not talking to us – announced, “she might have been a spice girl, but nowadays the only thing going for her is the child. And, frankly, it’s a pig. Tell her: we Photoshop five pounds off the brat, or she loses the cover and it ends up in Cellulite Corner. Daaarling,”

  Aubrey St John spotted Caroline, stood, announced “This conversation is over” to whichever unfortunate subordinate was on the other end and flipped shut the phone.

  “Aubrey!” Caz stepped forward, arms open and allowed herself to be enfolded by the vile tub of lard.

  After the air kiss fest had ended, she gestured towards me. “Daniel,” she announced.

  “Ahh,” St John smiled, a transaction that made his whole face balloon to twice its already inflated size, “the accused.”

  I mouthed some nothings and allowed myself to be ushered away from the desk and towards three hideously uncomfortable chairs arranged around a HD screen playing a DVD loop of a roaring log fire.

  The mahogany manservant reappeared with a silver tray laden with drinks. These were placed on a small chest that might, just possibly, have served once as a coffin for a Moroccan child, and the servant withdrew.

  St John watched every second of the jiggling retreat. “The lovely Stephen,” he sighed at last. “Isn’t he a gem? Have we met?” He fixed a beady on me and frowned, sipping his bowlful of red.

  I lifted mine, sipped it, realised this was definitely not Chateau Waitrose and decided – for nothing, if not for the sake of the wine – to play coy. “Many years ago.”

  That seemed to satiate him. “So,” he turned to Caz. “You wanted to know about Lyra?”

  “Well,” Caz sipped the wine, paused and closed her eyes. “Margaux. Seventy-three?”

  “Four,” he responded and I realised what the British public school was for.

  “Yus,” Caz replied, placing the glass on the table. “Specifically: what’s her story? Who’d have it in for her?”

  “The woman – and I say this as someone who has done four covers with Naomi – was a beast! And not,” he winked at me, “in a good way. I’d say anyone who ever came in contact with her would be a possible suspect.”

  “But she was a bankrupt has-been,” Caz murmured, lifting the glass and sipping thoughtfully.

  “Oh she was a has-been, cara mia, but hardly bankrupt. No; Ms Day’s glory might well be far behind her but, whilst it’s true that over the years she spent vast sums of cash on wigs, drugs and a wardrobe that, quite frankly, even Theda Barra would have considered a bit O.T.T., Lyra, when she died, was still a very rich nasty old bitch.”

  “But I thought Lyra was skint,” I said.

  St John gestured at a manila envelope on the table. “I’ve been doing some digging; spoke to some people in finance – amazing there are any people left in that industry, really. Anyway – and none of this is exhaustive – Ms Day had a rather attractive portfolio. Speaking of which…”

  He trailed off as Stephen entered the room bearing a silver tray on which was a selection of antique china cups, each filled with various nibbles. His portfolio was fully displayed.

  Aubrey snapped himself back to reality. “Try the olives; they’re from my own farm in Tuscany. Where were we? Ah, yes, Ms Day: gover
nment securities, property – and not just a couple of flats in Fulham. Last I heard, Songbird Investments – the company set up to handle the money – owned large chunks of Mayfair and Marylebone. Recession-proof. No, Lyra wasn’t short of a few bob.”

  “But if she’s not skint,” I wondered, “why on earth was she performing...”

  “At a shitty boozer in Southwark?”

  “That’s not quite how I would have put it, but yes: why?”

  “Because Mrs Foster didn’t exist offstage. It didn’t matter which husband she was with, there was only one Lyra and Lyra needed an audience.”

  I didn’t like the way that Aubrey was making sense, but I had to agree that he had a point.

  “Do you have any idea who might have wanted to kill her?”

  He sipped his wine, his gaze fixed on the receding behind of the houseboy. “Magnificent,” he murmured, then snapped back to the present. “I’m sorry? What was that?”

  “Murder,” Caz prompted. “Any ideas?”

  “Oh, the husband, of course. If he didn’t do it, I’ll eat my hat.”

  I suspected there was something else in the vicinity that he’d be much happier chowing down on but chose instead to challenge his assertion. “But surely, if Morgan had done it, he’d have been killing the golden egg.”

  “Goose,” Aubrey responded and it was a moment before I realised it was a correction and not an instruction. “Goose that laid the golden egg. Of course, when the goose has a very public mental breakdown, in many businesses, they’d be sent straight to the foie gras factory. But, in showbiz, it just adds to the aura – of a tragic genius, whose artistic temperament was in conflict with the, shall we say, stresses of the modern world.” He frowned, peering at me. “Are you sure we haven’t met before?”

  I was your mail boy for sixteen years, till you fired me to pay for the himbo’s tanning sessions, I wanted to say. But I didn’t. Instead, I asked another question: “But I still don’t get it; she’s had the nervous breakdown.”