“Rothmans, Marlboro or Silk Cut?” Caz asked and, with a clunking scratching noise, the chain was removed and the door opened.
“Come on in,” Haynes said, flinging open the door on a hallway that made the stairwell smell like the Harrods perfume department.
I stepped in and stopped dead, causing Caz to collide with me. Any suspicions I had harboured around Barry Haynes having, for some unknown reason, tracked Lyra down and finished off the throttling he’d bottled several decades previously were immediately abandoned.
The wraith-like figure, still staring fixedly at the bottle in Caz’s hand was attached, via various tubes and a face mask currently held absently in his left hand, to a three feet tall oxygen canister. The thing was on a little wheely trolley, but even so, I thought it highly unlikely that this sliver of humanity could have carried it down six flights of stairs, cabbed it from Croydon to Southwark, noiselessly trundled the thing down the alley way at the back of the Marq, soundlessly hauled it up the stairs there, along the landing, into the dressing room and squeezed the life out of Ms Lyra Day before repeating the trek in reverse.
“So?” He asked.
“Shall we go inside?” Caz enquired brightly, passing by him. “This must be the living room. Gracious, how charming.”
I felt sure that even Ed Gein would have had trouble describing the squalor into which we stepped as charming.
“Cleaner’s day off,” Haynes whined, wheeling the oxygen tank across the room and collapsing into an armchair that looked as though it might have actually grown around his shrivelled form. Balanced precariously on the right arm was a tin ashtray with a cigarette smouldering in it, a thin stream of grey smoke streaming steadily upwards.
“What you want, then?” He demanded, before slapping the mask to his face, flicking a switch on the tank and inhaling like a man saved from drowning.
“Just to talk,” I answered, “about Lyra Day.”
Haynes was seized by a coughing fit, ripped the mask off his face, snatched the cigarette from the ashtray, dragged furiously on it and glared malignantly at me. “Fuck,” he finally spat. “I knew it! More fucking fans.”
The cigarette died and, as he spoke, he switched between dragging hungrily from the oxygen tank and agitatedly pulling another fag from a packet in the breast pocket of his thin red checked shirt. He popped the stick into his mouth and attempted to flick a cheap lighter into life.
I winced as the naked flame issued, Haynes leaned to the left to take another gulp from the oxygen mask, dropped it and turned his head to the right to light the cigarette.
“What?” He pulled deeply on the cigarette and tore his beady glare away from the scotch long enough to give me some more evils. “You scared I’m gonna blow the place up?”
“Well–”
“Mate, look at me. Go on: take a look! You think getting my arse blown to kingdom come could be any worse than this?”
“Glasses?” Caz enquired in the tone of voice she’d normally have used to enquire of Mr Armani whether hems were going up or down this season.
Haynes pointed wordlessly at a door behind him and Caz merrily tripped off in search of his cut crystal tumblers, leaving me alone with the shrunken little man – his beady eyes still glaring angrily at me.
“Not a fan,” I clarified, “well, that is to say, I was a fan, but I’m not here as a fan.”
He withdrew the cigarette from his mouth and a thin sliver of silvery smoke streamed from between his lips and drifted upwards to form a nicotine-infused halo around his shrunken head.
“What then?” He demanded and I realised that I was getting used to the electronic monotone.
“Well,” I stammered, wondering how I was going to tackle this.
“I couldn’t find the glasses,” Caroline trilled in her best Fanny Craddock, “or the ice. So I hope neat’s OK.” She smiled warmly at Haynes, handing him a cracked mug filled to the brim with single malt, before turning, dropping the smile, raising an eyebrow and handing me an equally abundant beaker before settling down with her own Silver Jubilee cup of cheer.
I’d noted that, as she handed him the mug, Lady Caroline had been sure to bend low so that the invalid had a clear view down her low cut Prada silk blouse. The simple act of charity had the desired effect: all the anger seemed to evaporate from the little man.
“Well,” Caz simpered prettily and looked from one of us to the other before lifting her cup and downing half the contents in one gulp, “this is nice, isn’t it? Danny, have you been bringing Mr Haynes–”
“Barry,” Haynes simpered back, before sipping his scotch slowly, allowing his glance to steal back to the Honourable Caroline’s cleavage and licking his thin cracked lips like a lost Bedouin spotting an oasis in the distance.
“Barry,” Caz acknowledged the familiarity with a soft smile, “up to speed?”
“Not really,” I admitted somewhat sheepishly.
Caroline tsked as though she were Nanny Brown and I were the silly schoolboy who could never quite express himself properly. She sipped again from the mug and turned her gentle gaze back to Barry Haynes.
“You see, it’s like this, Barry,” she began, “Danny here was the unfortunate young man who hired Lyra to perform the night of her death.”
The flames of malevolence flared back up in Haynes’ beadies, but Caz quelled them by raising an immaculately manicured hand, “Oh I assure you, Barry – and I’m a very good judge of character – that Danny is completely innocent of Lyra Day’s murder.”
“I heard he’d been grabbed by the Rozzers,” Haynes responded, his suspicions still not entirely laid to rest.
Caz resisted the double entendre, sipped once more on the scotch, smiled gently at him and said “Suspicions abound at times like these. The police asked some questions. And Danny was set free.”
“Suspicions?” Haynes lifted the oxygen mask to his face and sucked as greedily at the air as he had at the cigarette.
“The finger of blame is a terrible thing. For example – would you like a top up, Barry? I’m having one,” she unscrewed the cap on the bottle, leaned forward and poured several measures into his mug before adding a sizeable glug to her own, adding a couple of shots to mine and silently toasting us. “Now, where were we?”
“Blame,” Haynes intoned, dropping the mask and slurping from the mug.
“Ah yes. Blame.” Caz chuckled and it sounded like the tinkle of tiny silver bells. “You see, that’s why we’re here. It’s silly, really, but someone – I can’t for the life of me remember who – actually suggested you might have been to blame for Lyra’s death.”
Haynes suddenly burst into the sort of coughing jag that should, by rights, have constituted the libretto of Act Three of La Traviata.
“I know,” Caz held that manicure up once again, sipped gently from the mug and waited for the coughing to subside. “I know: seeing you, well, obviously that was nothing but a vicious bit of slander. Why, a man in your condition would barely have been able to leave this room let alone kill Lyra.”
Haynes, a malicious look on his face, smirked. “Too right, sweetheart. You can go and tell that to whichever fucker’s been stirring it for me.” His dark little eyes glinted triumphantly.
“Of course,” Caz smiled and sipped her scotch. “Your whiskey’s getting cold,” she murmured to Haynes, who automatically lifted and glugged from his mug. “Mind you,” Caz frowned, “whilst you couldn’t have killed her yourself...”
“You could have hired someone to do it for you,” I finished.
“Get this – and get it straight,” Haynes swivelled his glare on me, “I adored Lyra Day. Adored.”
“Well we can clearly see that, Barry,” Caz crooned. “You’d never touch a hair on her head.”
“Except for that time you tried to strangle her,” I added.
Haynes opened and closed his mouth, like a fish gasping for air and his face changed from silver to the flat purple of a good steak. Finally, in his rage, he remembered
the contraption that could give sound to his fury and lifted it to his throat.
“Bollocks,” it spat. “What cunt told you that?”
“Dear me,” it was my turn to behave like a disappointed nanny, “such language. Do you get angry often, Barry? ‘Cos that’s a temper and a half you have there...”
He snatched the mask violently and pressed it, with trembling hand, to his face, gasping from it, before flinging it to one side and glowering at me. “Once,” he said. “One fucking time. And she was asking for it.”
“Asking?” Caz raised an eyebrow at that one and put her mug down on the carpet.
“She was asking for it the day someone offed her in my bar,” I murmured, “but you’d know nothing about that...”
“Listen,” he gulped hungrily from the mug, leaned forward in the chair and jabbed a finger at me, “we were good. She was going to be a star. I was going to marry her. Then, out of nowhere, she starts picking fights, finding faults. Nothing I did – nothing – was good enough.”
“First, I thought she was on the rag. Then I figured she was shagging someone else and looking for an out. But she wasn’t. I had her followed. She went to the doctor. I asked what was up and she turns on me: starts throwing half the fucking flat at me, bawling me out. Said I wasn’t good enough for her: she was gonna be a star and I was holding her back. Then she starts throwing punches. Nearly broke my fucking jaw.”
“So you throttled her?”
He rolled his eyes. “I laid hands on her – I’m not proud of that, boy. I pushed her away; she came back at me and the next thing I know I have my hands around her throat.”
He sipped his scotch and when his voice came again, it had, behind the electronic drone, a melancholic tone. “She packed that night and left.”
“And you never heard from her again?” Caz offered.
“Course I did,” he snorted and the sound, caught by the apparatus, came out as a nnnng sound. “Told you: I adored her; and Ellie – Lyra, I mean – for all her faults, was fond of me. I never knew where she went – probably back to that pig of a mother of hers. But, after a year or so, she gets in touch. She calls and tells me she’s sorry that it ended the way it did and now she wants to make it up to me.”
“So how’d she make it up to you?” Caz asked.
“And what was she making up to you for?” I wondered aloud.
“I never pushed on my contract; could have. She was still signed to me, but I figured if she wanted out, then fuck it... She sent me a cheque,” he answered Caz. “Every now and again, by post. Different amounts, depending on how she was doing.”
“Wait: twenty years ago she walks out on a contract that probably wouldn’t have been worth much and she’s been paying you ever since then?”
“I kept my eyes and ears open for Lyra; always did. Used to call her if I heard of anyone trying to stitch her up. Press were always sniffing around here trying to get the dirt on the early years, so if I got wind that someone was asking embarrassing questions – you know, about the family background, that sort of thing – I’d tip her the wink.”
Something – some tiny silver bell in the dim past – began to jingle. “When was the last time you spoke to her?”
He frowned. “Last year. Tried to call her a few months ago.”
“Why?”
“Well I heard about this bloke digging up stuff.”
“What did this bloke want?”
“I dunno. Scandal, probably. There was always some bugger trying to dig up dirt.”
“What did he look like,” I asked.
“Never met him, but I figured Lyra might want to know and, if he was going anywhere she didn’t want, she could get the lawyers on to it.”
“And she might slip you a few quid for the heads-up.”
He shrugged. “Was a waste of time, anyway; she was in one of her strops. Wouldn’t take my calls.”
“So you never told her?”
“Nah. And now, I never will. Still,” he shrugged, draining the mug of whiskey, “I don’t suppose it mattered.”
But it did. I didn’t know why, but I knew it had mattered.
Chapter Forty-Eight
I was confused: Leon Baker had told me the story of Haynes’ attack on Lyra and now I was wondering where he’d heard the story from. I was also still haunted by Doris’ last word. What did ‘munchkin’ mean? If there was anyone who’d know, it would be the self-professed keeper of Lyra’s story.
I needed answers, so next morning, whilst Ali and the ASBO twins bottled up, I slipped out of the pub and took the bus round to Leon’s.
The rain of the past few days had gone and instead we now had a piercing cold and a fog which gave the streets an almost Victorian gloom.
I pressed the doorbell and waited. A minute passed. I pressed again, keeping my finger on the buzzer this time.
Nothing – apart from the fact that my feet went numb as the damp cold fog seeped through my trainers – happened.
I grabbed the door knocker and pounded out a rat-tat-tat on the door.
Again, nothing.
Squatting down, I peered through the letter box. From somewhere in the house I could hear music. Lots of people leave a radio on when they leave the house. Especially if they have pets who they don’t want to leave alone.
Leon – so far as I’d seen – didn’t have a pet. There was precious little room in his life for anything more than Lyra Day.
“Leon!” I called through the slot. “Leon, it’s Danny. I know you’re in there. Come on Leon! Open up!”
I peered, once again through the letter box. Was that a shadow I’d just seen move?
“You gonna make that row all morning?” came a voice to my right.
I looked up. Leaning over the dividing fence was a woman roughly the size of a wardrobe. The t-shirt she wore had the words ‘National Scaffolding’ stretched across it and I wondered whether this was an endorsement for the firm which had constructed the bra which was valiantly attempting to contain the most enormous frontage I had ever seen.
Her face, when I finally focussed on it, bore a startling similarity to the jowly visage of Henry Kissinger, if Kissinger had spent a lifetime plucking his eyebrows so thoroughly that all that remained were two light pink ridges and a couple of pencil lines three inches above them.
“Only,” she carried on, crossing her arms under her bosoms, which of course hoiked them further north so that from my vantage point all I could see were two eyes, a surprised-looking forehead and the most voluminous knockers on the planet, “I’m tryin’ to watch the telly. And you bangin’ an’ shoutin’ is doin’ my ‘ead in.”
I straightened up. “Sorry, Mrs...?” I said, sticking out my hand.
“Miss,” she pursed her lips and ran an appraising eye over me, “Wood. Janet to my friends.”
Janet Wood had a face that looked like it had been hacked out of a thousand-year-old redwood, which made her age difficult to guess at. She fluttered her lashes at me.
“...Janet.” I smiled and attempted to withdraw my hand. She held it a little longer, then, with a moue of disappointment, gave it up. “I was looking for Leon. Mr Baker. Do you know if he’s in?”
“Ooh. Haven’t seen him since yesterday, love. I think ‘e was goin’ away.”
“Away?”
“In a right state, ‘e was. I’d just come out to sign for something from Amazon, an’ ‘e was just leavin’. ‘Mornin’ Leon,’ I says, and ‘e almost din’t even see me. Hyper ’e was. I says ‘Ooh, you looks like the cat what got the cream,’ an’ ‘e goes ‘Better than the cream, Janet. Vindication,’ ‘e says.”
“’Bit cryptic,’ I says, an ‘e goes on about ‘ow ‘e was goin’ to the West Country, to make sure.”
“The West Country?”
“I know: tha’s what I thought? This time of year, there’s nothin’ down them parts but stones an’ cows. I don’t ‘old wiv the country. Full of cow shit, it is. And like my ol’ mum used to say: ‘Janet,’ she used t
o say, ‘Never trust nothing that can eat an’ shit at the same time.’”
“Any idea where in the West Country he was going?”
She paused, frowned, “Cornwall, I think. Or was it Somerset? No, it was Devon. Or was it Cornwall? No: Somerset.” She shrugged. “Somewhere where the cider comes from.”
So that was it: Leon had done a runner. To somewhere beyond Bath. I turned back, stupidly, to the door, wondering what my next step would be. Janet Wood was already shuffling back into her house.
“D’you want me to give ‘im a message, when ‘e gets back?” She asked.
“Why’s he left his radio on?” I asked, absentmindedly.
“That’s a funny message,” she frowned.
“No.” I tilted my head at the door. “Listen.”
She leant her incredible bulk over the fence, which groaned a little in protest and did as I’d instructed. From behind the door came the unmistakable sound of a commercial radio station – something cheesy and shiny.
She straightened up and her flirtatious manner became, at once, a little more careful. “What you gettin’ at?” She demanded.
“Well, if he was going away, why would he leave a radio on?”
“Lots o’ people leave ‘em on,” she answered, looking me up and down. “Stops it feelin’ so lonely when they get in of an evenin’. If they live alone.”
“Does Leon?” I asked. “I mean: you live next door. Does he usually leave the radio on; even when he’s going away with no return date arranged?”
She scoffed. “’E’s left ‘is radio on. I tole you ‘e was in a right state that day; prob’ly just forgot to switch it off.”
“Did he have any luggage when he went away?”
She frowned. “Now you come to mention it: no. I thought that was a bit odd at the time. I mean, ‘e might ‘ave been intendin’ to get there an’ back in a day.”
“And this was yesterday morning,” I prompted.
“So ‘e’d be back by now.” She finished for me. “’Oo’d you say you was again?”
“I’m a friend of Leon’s,” I lied. “Met through the Lyra Day fan site he runs. I was round here last week and I’d said I’d lend him some of my memorabilia.”
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