“Except Aimee Gillen, of course.”
Lana Aubrey winced. “Ah… yes. I didn’t mean to dismiss Aimee Gillen’s suffering like that. Of course, not all people can be one hundred per cent happy all of the time. But Aimee was one of our longest serving actors here. She was part of the team way back in 2000. I joined only two years before she did.”
“And look at you now,” said Hogarth.
The woman’s face turned icy. “You’ve got the kind of face where I can’t tell if you’re being facetious or not, Inspector.”
“No, I wasn’t being facetious, Miss Aubrey. You’ve done well for yourself. As you say, Miss Gillen was only a couple of years behind you. But it seems you’ve ended up with very different prospects.”
“Unfortunately, some people don’t learn that life is a product of the choices we make. Life’s not about potential, or even talent. It’s about drive, determination, work and making the right choices over time.
“Sounds like you should be writing self-help books, not working for Harry King.”
“I don’t think there’s a reason why I can’t do both, do you, Inspector?” said Aubrey, with a hint of challenge in her eyes.
“You can go now, Marvin,” said Aubrey. She glanced back at the young man standing at her shoulder. “I’m sure you’ve got plenty to do. I can help the police from here on in.”
“Of course,” said Marvin. They watched the young man walk away
“It’s terrible, you know, it really is” said Miss Aubrey. “We’re like a family in this studio We have to be. We live in close quarters, we sometimes work very long hours to meet our deadlines, and let’s face it, these people have to appear naked on camera together. That’s a lot of taboos they are breaking together. So, they’re a pretty tight knit bunch. Aimee Gillen will be missed. She had a lot of fans out there, too.”
Simmons coughed, and Hogarth looked at him. Simmons looked pink-cheeked. He met Hogarth’s eyes and looked away. If there was a time to be restrained, it was now. He hoped Simmons wasn’t about to have a fit of teenage giggles. Hogarth really didn’t need another complaint against them so soon.
“I’ve been told that Aimee was deeply unhappy.”
“It’s about choices, like I said. Even so, I had a lot of time for her. She was almost my age. If I wasn’t so busy maybe we could have been friends… as much as a boss and her employee can be, at any rate.”
“I’ve had a chance to meet some of your other employees,” said Hogarth. “It doesn’t strike me that Aimee had many friends here. At least not of late. Your rules couldn’t have helped her too much.”
“Our rules?” said Aubrey.
“About not interacting too much.”
“Oh, those are guidelines, not rules. That was to help them not get into messy relationships here.”
“To protect the progress of a new movie too, I suppose?”
“That too, yes,” said Aubrey. “But Aimee didn’t have friends because she was becoming something of a recluse. I guess we should have seen the warning signs.”
“Signs of what, Miss Aubrey?”
“Self-isolation, those endless late nights, refusing to come out of her room… she was depressed. Very, very depressed. I guess I didn’t realise how low she had become.”
“So, you believe Miss Gillen committed suicide then?”
Lana Aubrey looked at each of them with a sad, grim face and offered a small shrug. Her phone chirped again. She pulled the phone free, scanned the screen then put it away again.
“Sorry for the interruption. But I’m the MD. I have to know what’s going on here, if nothing else.”
“Of course,” said Hogarth. “What leads you to believe Miss Gillen killed herself, Miss Aubrey?”
The woman sighed and looked away for a moment before looking back.
“Well what else could it be? She was thirty-six years old. It wasn’t old age or natural causes, was it? It has to be suicide,” said the woman. Hogarth felt her trying to read him. He nodded.
“That’s our working assumption, yes. But I always like to make doubly sure before I commit. Could we have access to Miss Gillen’s living quarters, please?”
“Yes, of course. Follow me and I’ll get the keys for you.” She started up the stairs, and they followed. “When will you take the body away?” asked Aubrey. The question came out in a blurt, like she’d been wanting to ask it for a while. She was all heart.
“Our crime scene people and the pathologist will need to see the body to officially determine death before it can be removed. Once that’s been done, and any associated evidence has been gathered, the body will be taken away.”
“Oh. And I suppose that can that take time?”
“Several hours in some instances… why? Is there a problem?”
“Nothing that can’t be handled,” said Aubrey. But she didn’t sound happy about it. “It’s just we had a shoot planned for the sauna this afternoon.”
“That’s a shame,” said Hogarth. He raised an eyebrow and cast an eye to Palmer.
“Sorry if that sounds a little cynical to you – but even with Aimee’s death, we still have a tight schedule to run.”
“Yes, of course you do,” said Hogarth, keeping his tone neutral. Lana Aubrey picked up a set of keys from the smiling blonde woman at reception. She led them halfway towards another corridor of hotel-room style doors, when her phone rang again. Aubrey stopped in her tracks and sighed with irritation.
“Miss Aubrey,” said Hogarth. “It’s okay. We can handle this. You get on with your phone calls.”
Hogarth opened his hand for the keys. Aubrey looked at Hogarth’s weather-beaten hand and then gave him the keys.
“Fine. It’s number seventeen. The door at the end. And thank you…”
“Don’t mention it,” said Hogarth. But she didn’t hear him. Lana Aubrey already had the phone against her ear as she marched away from them. “Yes, this is Lana Aubrey…” she said.
“Oh yes. It’s just like one big happy family here,” said Hogarth. “With sex, drugs, and suicide thrown in.”
“And I thought my family were bad,” said Simmons.
“Come on. Let’s go and see what a soft-porn star’s bedroom looks like. And Simmons, no touching anything. I’ll be watching.”
“Guv, what do you take me for?” said Simmons.
“No comment,” said Hogarth. He smiled thinly as he led the way to door number seventeen.
Seven
“Where’s the mirrored ceiling, then?” said Simmons.
“This is low budget stuff, Simmons,” said Hogarth. “I don’t think Harry King likes to waste his money on anyone but himself, from what I hear.”
The three of them stood just inside the threshold of the room and looked around the dead woman’s room.
“But I thought they were apartments,” said Simmons. “You know. A place with a few rooms, with some swish and fancy touches at the very least. This isn’t much better than the caravan at St Osyth where my old man shipped us every summer.”
“Not tempted by the glamour of the porn industry then, Simmons? The world will never know what it’s missed.”
Simmons shook his head at Hogarth’s cheap joke.
Hogarth’s eyes roamed the cream walls, the half unmade double bed, the pale white curtains as he spoke. He took in the details. The indentation of the woman’s form left in the duvet, where it was half peeled back to expose the mattress. He noted there was no sign of anybody else being with her. No other indentation. The room smelt only of tobacco and perfume. Beneath those strong notes was the stale smell of a room which didn’t get much air. It was a smell Hogarth had endured many times. A smell of poverty and depression. A smell which often accompanied lives of addiction. Aimee Gillen wasn’t impoverished, though. At least not financially. But if Marvin the runner and Lana Aubrey were to be believed, poverty was something she must have feared.
Hogarth watched Palmer advance into the room, her sharp eyes roaming over the room the
same way his had done a moment before.
“What are you picking up, Palmer?”
“A single woman, clearly. If she had a boyfriend, he wasn’t here much. She was someone who was well used to being lonely…” Palmer looked at the small white stereo on the built-in dressing table. She opened the drawer of the desk and looked inside. There were dance music CDs with images of Ibiza on the front. There was a large box of condoms, but it looked almost entirely unused.
“Not much so far, If I’m honest,” said Palmer.
“Aimee Gillen was an outcast from Harry King’s business – Lana Aubrey didn’t bother to deny it,” said Hogarth. “And those catty porn queens down by the sauna didn’t show any sympathy for her. It’s likely her life had been difficult here for some time.”
Hogarth opened the wardrobe. A third of it was devoted to shimmering lingerie, all hung up like proper work outfits. The rest held casual sweaters, jeans, joggers, and leggings.
“Guv,” said Simmons. Hogarth turned to see Simmons standing beside an open drawer at the bedside cabinet. Hogarth walked over and saw a small rectangular grey slate sitting on top of a small tin, inside the open drawer. On top of the slate was a neat white line of powder with a small chrome tube beside it. There were a few white grains elsewhere on the slate, as if a few had already been snorted.
“Cocaine. And it looks like the good stuff,” said Hogarth.
“How can you tell?” said Palmer.
“Look. Can you see the yellowish tint to it?” said Hogarth. He picked up the slate and looked at the old green and gold tobacco tin beneath. The logo of the tobacco was very familiar, but the branding still looked well out of date.
“That’s an old tin, that one,” said Hogarth. “Open it will you, but be careful.”
Palmer nodded and moved in. He teased open the tin’s thin metal lip and it popped up to reveal a thick bed of yellowish-white powder. It puffed up like chalk powder and settled back as Simmons jogged the tin.
“Bloody hell. That’s a lot of charlie for one little lady,” said Palmer.
“Then maybe she was dealing to the others in here,” said Simmons.
“Fair point,” said Hogarth. “If she was snorting that much – and that’s the best part of five grand in there – the woman could have easily had heart or respiratory problems. That’s the biggest problem with charlie. It gets the old ticker in the end. But we’ll have to let Ed Quentin be the judge of that.”
Hogarth tapped his fingernail on the corner of the slate tile. Tink-tink. “Odd though,” said Hogarth.
“Odd? What’s odd?” said Simmons.
Hogarth gave him a look, but Palmer got there first.
“She set up a line of charlie but she left it there like that,” said Palmer. “A cokehead usually only lines one up to take there and then.”
“Exactly,” said Hogarth. “And looking at those crumbs there, she might have tried to snort it then stopped.”
“Maybe she got distracted then. Someone interrupted her,” said Simmons.
“Okay. Then what? She walks off leaving the line untouched? Surely, she would have finished it at some point. Especially if she decided to go off and have a crazy late-night sauna.”
“She could have gone off with a fella, guv. Broken those guidelines you were talking about,” said Palmer. “She could have met a man in the sauna. That might have distracted her enough to leave a line of coke like that.”
“Wouldn’t she have snorted it and then gone? No, I don’t think so. And going off for a spot of nookie in the sauna? Well, that only happens in skin flicks, doesn’t it?”
“We wouldn’t know,” said Simmons, smiling.
“Sheltered lives and all that, eh?” said Hogarth. “Either way, people don’t meet up with secret boyfriends in saunas and then top themselves.”
“So, it can’t have been a boyfriend then,” said Palmer. “So something else.”
“Yeah…” said Hogarth. “Something else. Take a good look around. We need more of an insight into her thinking, her state of mind. The charlie tells us plenty, but there’s got to be more.”
Palmer nodded and walked away into the en suite. Simmons walked around the bed and tried the other bedside drawer. It was empty. After a short search, Palmer returned from the bathroom.
“Guv, I got something,” said Palmer.
“What is it?” asked Hogarth.
“In here, guv,” said Palmer.
Hogarth walked into the small bathroom and saw a tall stem goblet, with a small swish of clear liquid at the bottom. He bent down towards the glass and looked around it for obvious prints. Bar a smear at the top, which was probably from drinking, he saw nothing. He sniffed the contents.
“Doesn’t smell of anything,” said Hogarth.
“Yeah. I think it’s probably water,” said Simmons.
“In a wine glass? Someone as clean living as our Aimee. That’s odd, don’t you think?”
“Maybe she washed it out after some wine.”
“So she did the washing-up and left a line of coke before she runs off for a deadly sauna,” said Hogarth.
“What are you thinking?” said Palmer.
“I’m not, yet. I think Dickens and Marris might need to look at this.”
“It’s a glass of water,” said Palmer.
“In this place, the things I’m seeing are causing me to ask questions. For me, that white line on the tile is one of the big ones. That wine glass could be nothing, but it’s wise to make sure.”
“Still. It’s probably nothing,” said Palmer, already looking for the next item of interest.
“Probably,” said Hogarth. But Palmer saw he wasn’t convinced.
A knock at the door disturbed them. The door opened, and Lana Aubrey walked in and surveyed the room with a pinched but polite smile. Hogarth, Palmer, and Simmons looked at her from their respective positions around the room. Hogarth noticed Simmons paying particular attention to her physique and gave a subtle shake of his head. Aubrey looked at him and Hogarth coughed to clear his throat.
“Did you find anything?” she said.
“You could say that,” said Hogarth.
“Oh?” said the woman, her tone of voice changing at Hogarth’s suggestion.
“It seems you’ve got something of a drug problem here at the studio, Miss Aubrey. Did you know?”
“A drug problem?” said the woman, shaking her head. “Excuse me. I don’t follow.”
“See that tin there – and that slate tile. That’s evidence that Aimee Gillen was a seriously heavy cocaine user. From the amount she had here we could have done her for possession and intent to supply. That is a serious amount of coke.”
“It’s exactly like I told you before. Aimee Gillen wasn’t exactly making the best life choices, Inspector. That’s one of the things I was alluding to.”
“Then you did know.”
“I suspected, is all.”
“There are rumours about the level of her drug use. Surely, people knew…”
Lana Aubrey tensed for a moment before her winning smile returned. “I’m sorry… are you somehow suggesting that we are responsible for Aimee’s drug use?”
“That’s not exactly what I’m suggesting. But the runner, Marvin, certainly knew she was on drugs. He said he felt sorry for her.”
“We all felt sorry for her, Inspector, but Aimee was her own worst enemy. Look. I suspected she was taking drugs, but she won’t be the only one breaking the code of conduct like that.”
“So you think there might be a culture of drug taking here?” said Hogarth.
“I don’t think there’s a culture of anything,” the woman added quickly. “But we have over twenty-five staff on the payroll here and a good few live on site because it’s easier that way. You put a bunch of young actors of any stamp in a dormitory environment like this, and lots of things could happen, no matter what rules you institute. Drug taking could be one of them. But let’s not generalise because of a few bad apples. That’s
the risk with our business. A lot of people want us to be closed down just because of what we do, but what we do is legal – so they look for other accusations they can hurl at us instead.”
“But I’m not hurling any accusations, Miss Aubrey,” said Hogarth. “I’m just saying what I see.”
“Aimee Gillen used coke? That doesn’t mean we all do. Maybe we should have done more to help her. When she was last on set, Harry noticed she had some, how shall we say, problems…”
“Yes, I heard a little about that already. But no one did anything about it, it seems.”
“We’re very busy – and we’re not infallible, Inspector. No one is. And all of us have vices, too. Even you, I bet.”
“Quite true,” said Hogarth. His mind flickered with an image of a bottle of malt, before Ali’s seductive smile appeared in view. He pushed the images out of mind. “But I must ask one thing – do you turn a blind eye when the actors hit the drugs?”
“A blind eye? I’m not sure I like the sound of that, Inspector.”
“It’s just a turn of phrase, Miss Aubrey.”
The woman’s phone buzzed. She glanced at it, then looked Hogarth in the eye. “You need to understand that these people are adults. We don’t handhold them. We can’t. We’re their employer and yes, they live here, but some of their pay goes to their accommodation. We’re not a boarding school, and we’re not their parents. But having said that, we don’t turn a blind eye to anything.”
“Very good, Miss Aubrey. Which means poor Aimee must have been the exception to the rule.”
“I’m sorry? What rule?” said Aubrey. Her phone rang and her peach-coloured fingernails plucked it from her pocket.
“The no-blind-eye rule. Aimee Gillen slipped right through the net.”
Aubrey looked at the screen of her phone but didn’t answer the call.
“You think she took an overdose?”
“An overdose… suicide… yes, it’s all possible,” he said with a shrug. “It certainly looks that way at present. But we’ll know a lot more when the pathologist has done his work.”
“Of course. That pathologist will be along soon, won’t he?”
The Darkest Deed: A Gripping Detective Crime Mystery (The DI Hogarth Darkest series Book 3) Page 5
