01.Dead Beat

by Val McDermid

She frowned. ‘I’m sorry, have we met?’ Without waiting for a reply, she went on. ‘Look, she’s too tired. If it’s an autograph you want, I can get her to sign one for you.’

  I shook my head. ‘Thanks, but I need to see her. It’s a personal matter,’ I stated calmly.

  ‘Who is it?’ a voice from inside the room called out.

  ‘No one we know,’ Maggie remarked over her shoulder. She turned back to me and said, ‘Look, this is not a good time. She’s just done a show, and she needs to rest.’

  ‘What I have to say won’t take long. I don’t like to be difficult, but I’m not going till I’ve spoken to Moira.’ I spoke firmly, with more confidence than I actually felt. I was in no doubt that Maggie could have me thrown out of there so fast my feet wouldn’t touch the sticky carpets. However, to do that, she’d have to leave Moira. I couldn’t see Darsett Trades and Labour Club being the kind of place that had a house phone in the star dressing room.

  ‘What the hell’s going on?’ Moira demanded, pulling the door open and staring belligerently at me. It should have been a moment of triumph for me, to come face to face with my quarry like this, but any satisfaction was destroyed by the irritation in her voice. ‘Are you deaf or what? She told you, I’m too tired to talk to anybody.’

  ‘I’m sorry it’s a bad time, but I need to talk to you,’ I apologized. ‘It’s taken me a long time to find you, and it’s important for you that you listen to what I have to say.’ I tried a conciliatory smile which produced a scowl from Maggie, standing like a bulldog in front of Moira.

  Moira sighed and pulled her white bathrobe more tightly round her. ‘You’re damn right, it’s a bad time. I suppose you’d better come in. Let me tell you, sister, this better not be bad news.’

  I waited for Maggie to move reluctantly away from the door before I entered the tiny dressing room. There were two small formica topped tables in front of mirrors, a corner sink unit, three chairs and several hooks on the wall. Moira sat down in one chair facing a mirror and carried on removing her make-up. Maggie leaned against the wall, arms folded.

  I pulled a chair over beside Moira and sat down. ‘I don’t think it’s bad news, but that’s for you to decide. My name’s Kate Brannigan and I’m a private investigator.’ Moira flashed a quick look at me, fear in her eyes, then forced herself to look back in the mirror.

  ‘So what’s your interest in me?’ she challenged.

  ‘Jett asked me to find you,’ I told her, watching for her reaction. The hand with the make-up removal pad shook and she quickly lowered it to the table.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said in a low voice.

  ‘He wants to work with you again. He bitterly regrets what happened all those years ago,’ I tried. My instincts told me that with Maggie in the room, I should steer well clear of the emotional arguments.

  Moira shrugged. ‘I haven’t a clue what you’re on about.’

  ‘I think you should go now,’ Maggie piped up.

  I ignored her. ‘Look, Moira, Jett is desperate to reach you. He says his work has gone down the tube since the two of you stopped writing songs together. As a fan, I have to agree with him. And I bet you do too. He just wants to meet you, to talk about the possibilities of making music together again. That’s all. No strings.’

  Moira laughed, a harsh bark. ‘Oh yeah? And what’s Kevin going to say about that? If you’ve been looking for me, you know what my life’s been like the last few years. I’d be too much of a skeleton in the cupboard for Mr Clean. Never mind what Jett will think.’

  ‘Jett knows all about it. And he didn’t tell me to stop looking just because you’d been on the game, or on smack. He wants to talk to you. He doesn’t care what’s happened in between,’ I argued as fiercely as I could.

  Moira ran a hand through her short curls. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said softly. ‘Too much water under the bridge.’

  ‘You heard her,’ Maggie interjected. ‘I really think you’d better go now before you upset her any more.’

  I shrugged. ‘If that’s what Moira wants, I’ll go. I told Jett he might be wasting his money, asking me to find you. I told him you might not want to be found. But he’s not going to be satisfied with that. And the next private eye he hires might not do things my way.’

  ‘Don’t you threaten us!’ Maggie exploded.

  ‘I’m not threatening you,’ I flashed back. ‘I’m simply trying to be straight with you. Jett wants to find you. Whatever that takes. You might do a runner after tonight, but you’ve got to leave traces. Someone else will track you down, just like I did. And next time, it could be Jett knocking on your door. Don’t you think it would be better to meet him on your terms, when you’re prepared for it, rather than have him catching you by surprise?’

  Moira’s head dropped into her hands. ‘You say he knows already?’ she mumbled.

  ‘He knows about everything except the singing.’ And I don’t think that’s going to give him the screaming habdabs, I thought wryly.

  Moira’s head came up and she stared at her face in the mirror. ‘I don’t know,’ she said doubtfully, lighting up a pungent Gauloise.

  Maggie crossed the room, all two paces of it, and put a protective arm round Moira. ‘You don’t need him any more,’ she declared. ‘Where was he when you really needed help? If he’d been so bloody keen to find you, why didn’t he do it when you left? He’s just being selfish. His career’s a disaster area, and he wants you to get him out of the shit. You don’t owe him anything, Moira.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ I remarked. ‘There’s a statute of limitations on feeling guilty now, is there? Just because Jett didn’t act right away, then he can only be out for himself? Is that it?’

  Maggie glowered at me, but Moira actually smiled as she reached up to squeeze her lover’s hand. ‘He’s really not like that, Maggie. He’s one of the good guys. I didn’t expect him to come after me. I’d been doing his head in for so long he must have been glad of the peace.’

  ‘So what’s it to be?’ I asked. ‘Will you at least listen to what he’s got to say?’

  Moira took a deep drag on her cigarette. Maggie looked as if she was holding her breath and praying. Moira blew two streams of smoke down her nose and nodded at me. ‘I’ll listen. When can you set it up?’

  ‘The sooner the better. He’s at home working on his new album. Believe me, he needs your help yesterday.’

  Moira smiled, a wide grin that lit up her whole face and took ten years off her. ‘I’ll bet,’ she said. ‘What about tonight? Might as well get it over with.’

  ‘But it’s past ten o’clock!’ Maggie protested. ‘You can’t go off there now.’

  ‘Maggie, unless Jett has had a personality transplant, he’ll be up watching videos and listening to music till three or four o’clock. He doesn’t get up to listen to the Archers omnibus on Sunday mornings,’ Moira replied, a gentle tease in her voice.

  Maggie flushed. ‘I still think you should leave it till tomorrow,’ she said stubbornly. ‘You’re tired. You need a night’s rest after the show.’

  She still had a lot to learn, I thought sadly. Every performer I’ve ever met is so high after a show that they need half the night to come down to a point where sleep’s possible. That’s why so many of them get hooked on a mixture of uppers and downers.

  As if reading my thoughts, Moira said, ‘No, Maggie. Right now, I’m on a high. All that applause! Tonight, I feel like I could meet Jett as an equal. And if I sleep on it, I’ll probably bottle out. Or else I’ll let you talk me out of it.’

  Moira got to her feet and put an arm round Maggie’s waist. ‘Kate, if you’ll give me ten minutes, we’ll meet you in the car park. Ours is the red 2CV. I’ll have to go home and change into something more suitable,’ she added, waving at her blue lurex dress and a jogging suit. ‘If you follow us back there, then you can take me over to see Jett. If that’s OK with you.’

  ‘Fine by me,’ I confirmed, feeling exultant. There’s no
better feeling in the world than the moment when you know you’ve cracked a difficult job. Moira wasn’t the only one who was on a high.

  An hour later, Moira and I were heading back down the motorway towards Manchester. ‘I feel like I’ve spent more time on this motorway in the last couple of weeks than I’ve spent in my own bed,’ I muttered to break the silence that had fallen on us since Maggie had waved a mournful farewell on the doorstep.

  Moira chuckled. ‘I’m sorry I’ve given you so much trouble,’ she remarked.

  ‘Oh, it’s not just you. It’s another case I’ve been working on. A team that’s flooding the country with fake watches. You know, Rolex copies, all that sort of thing.’

  Moira nodded. ‘I know exactly what you mean. A lot of the guys in Bradford are into that kind of thing. It’s a nice little earner. They do a lot of fake jogging suits and t-shirts. You know, any big thing like the Batman movie, or the Teenage Mutant Turtles. They just copy the legit stuff and flog it round the pubs and the markets. The guy I worked for in Bradford even had us selling fake perfume to johns for their wives, can you believe it?’

  I laughed. ‘Wonderful. I love the psychology.’ I put Everything But The Girl’s Language Of Life in the cassette and we both settled in a companionable silence to listen to Tracy Thorn’s sensuous tones.

  ‘So how did you track me down?’ Moira asked finally as I turned on to the M6, heading south towards Jett’s mansion. The home she’d never seen, I reminded myself.

  When I got to the bit about Stick asking for his four hundred pounds, she laughed out loud. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘if this does work out, I might just pay him back. Mind you, he’d die of embarrassment if word got out that he took me to Seagull. Stick the hard man! He’d never live it down.’

  I turned into the gateway of Colcutt Manor and wound down the window and leaned out to press the intercom button. When it crackled back at me, I said clearly, ‘It’s Kate Brannigan to see Jett. Don’t fuck with me, Gloria, let me in.’

  As the gates opened, I caught Moira’s expression out of the corner of my eye. She looked stunned. I headed up the long drive, and the house appeared in my headlights. ‘Shit,’ she breathed. ‘You might have warned me, Kate.’

  I pulled up at the foot of the steps that led up to the front door and said, ‘You ready?’

  Moira took a deep breath and said, ‘Ready as I’ll ever be.’

  We got out of the car and I led the way up towards the door. Three steps from the top, it opened and a pool of light flooded out. Jett himself stood silhouetted in the doorway. It took only a moment for him to realize I wasn’t alone. Then he saw who my companion was. ‘Moira?’ he said in tones of wonder, as if he couldn’t believe his eyes.

  I paused, and she walked past me. ‘Hi, babe,’ she said, stopping a few feet short of him.

  Jett’s hesitation was only momentary. Then he stepped forward and folded her into his arms. Moira buried her head in his shoulder.

  Me, I headed back into the night, trying to start the car as quietly as possible. Some things don’t need witnesses. Besides, I had a huge invoice to dictate before I could sleep.

  Part Two

  13

  The sound of the phone jerked me awake. ‘Kate? It’s Jett. It’s an emergency. Get over here right away.’ Then the phone slammed down. The clock said 01:32. Happy Monday. I leapt out of bed and dressed on automatic pilot. I was halfway to the car before I remembered it had been six weeks since I’d stopped working for Jett. What the hell was he playing at? By then, I was awake anyway, so I figured I might as well drive out and see.

  The gates stood open, and Jett was waiting for me on the doorstep. He looked stoned out of his box. I asked what was going on and he simply handed me the key and said, ‘The rehearsal room.’

  It was my first dead body. The private eyes in books fall over corpses every other day, but Manchester’s a long way from Chicago in more ways than one. My first reaction was to get out of the room as fast as my legs would carry me and keep on running till I was safe inside my car.

  Instead, I tried to fight my nausea by breathing in deeply. That was my second mistake. Nobody ever told me that freshly spilled blood has such a strong smell. My only experience with the stuff was when half a pound of liver leaked all over my cheque book. That hadn’t been too pleasant either.

  I tried to behave like a professional and forget that I knew the person who was lying dead on the polished wooden floor. If I was going to get through this experience, I’d have to convince myself it was no more real than the Kensington Gore in a Hammer Horror film.

  Moira’s body lay a few yards inside the door of the rehearsal room. Her limbs were splayed at angles too awkward for comfort. That alone would have been enough to show something was badly wrong. But there was more. The back of her head was matted with blood, which had trickled into a congealed pool behind her. A few yards away lay a tenor sax, its gleaming golden horn smeared with blood. I left it alone. My only direct experience with murder weapons was Cluedo, but even I knew enough not to mess with it.

  I walked cautiously towards the body, and noticed that her face looked mildly surprised. I crouched down, forcing myself not to think of this as Moira, and noticed that her hands were empty, palms upwards. No clues there. Feeling foolish because I couldn’t think of anything else to do, I picked up her wrist and felt vainly for a pulse. Nothing. Her skin felt warmish—not quite normal temperature, but not cold either. I got to my feet and glanced at my watch. It was forty minutes since Jett had woken me. What the hell was keeping the police?

  With a deep sigh, I left the room and locked it behind me. I found Jett in the blue drawing room, huddled in a corner of the sofa. I sat down beside him and put a hand on his shoulder. His skin felt cold and clammy through the thin silk shirt.

  His eyes were frightened. I realized now he was in shock rather than stoned.

  ‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’ he whispered hoarsely.

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  He nodded, and kept on nodding as if he had a tic. ‘I should never have brought her here,’ he muttered.

  ‘What happened, Jett?’ I asked as gently as I could. It looked pretty obvious even to me, but I wanted to hear it from his own lips.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he replied, his voice breaking like a teenager. ‘We were supposed to be working on a new song tonight, and when I went in, she was lying there.’ He cleared his throat and sniffed. ‘So I came out and locked the door and called you.’

  Gee, thanks. ‘Did you try her pulse?’ I asked.

  ‘No need. The spirit had left. I knew that right away.’

  Thank you, Dr Kildare. ‘Why aren’t the police here yet?’ I asked, refraining from pointing out that she just might have been still alive when he made his New Age diagnosis.

  ‘I didn’t call the police. I only called you. I thought you’d know what to do.’

  I couldn’t credit what I was hearing. He’d found his ex-lover’s murdered body in his house and he hadn’t called the police? If Jett wanted to throw suspicion on himself, the only way he could have made a better job of it would have been to call his lawyer as well. ‘You’ll have to call them now, Jett. You should have done that first, before you called me.’

  He shook his head obstinately. ‘No. I want you to handle it. I can trust you.’

  ‘Jett, you can’t hush up a murder. You have to call the police. Look, I’ll make the call if you don’t feel up to it,’ I offered desperately. The last thing I needed was for the police to get it into their heads that I was involved in concealing a crime.

  He shrugged. ‘Please yourself. But I want you to handle it.’

  ‘We’ll talk about it in a minute.’ I stood up. There was a phone in the room, but I wanted some privacy to gather my thoughts so I headed for Gloria’s office down the hall. Neil was coming down the stairs as I reached the door. He looked as surprised to see me as I was to see him. ‘Kate!’ he exclaimed. ‘I didn’t know you were here.’

&n
bsp; ‘Jett needed a meeting,’ I offered lamely, not feeling up to breaking the news.

  ‘Maybe see you later,’ he said, sketching a wave as he walked down the corridor into the far wing. Clearly he saw nothing odd about business meetings in the small hours.

  I closed Gloria’s door behind me, picked up the phone and dialled 999. I was quickly connected to the police emergency line. ‘I’m calling to report a murder,’ I said. To my amazement, I could feel a giggle welling up inside me. I must have been more shocked than I’d realized.

  The copper on the other end of the phone wasn’t amused. ‘Is this some kind of hoax?’ he demanded.

  I pulled myself together and said, ‘I’m sorry. Unfortunately not. A woman has been killed at Colcutt Manor, just outside Colcutt village.’

  ‘When did this happen, madam?’ His voice was hard and cool.

  ‘We’re not sure. The body’s only just been discovered.’ I gave him the details. It seemed to take forever. When I returned, Jett was sitting exactly as I’d left him, hugging himself and rocking gently to and fro. What he needed was a cup of strong, sweet tea, but I didn’t rate my chances of finding my way to the kitchen and back again without a ball of string or a map. Instead, I sat down and put an arm round him. ‘Jett,’ I said softly. ‘We’re going to have to get our story straight or the cops are going to get very heavy with you. Listen. I was passing on my way home from a job and I dropped in for a drink. We were talking for the best part of an hour, then you went down to the rehearsal room to get Moira to join us, and that’s when you found the body. I was already here. Understand?’ I could only pray that the pathologist wouldn’t come up with a time of death that made a nonsense of the alibi I was handing him.

  ‘I got nothing to say to the cops,’ he informed me.

  ‘Jett, unless you want to spend tonight in a cell you’re going to have to stick to our story. In their eyes, you’re the number one suspect, especially if we tell them the truth. Promise me you’ll keep to my version.’ I repeated the tale to him and made him recite it back to me.