by Jo Bannister
Chandos gave an irritable shrug. ‘This is all a fiction. You do know that, don’t you? A fairy story. Detective Superintendent Deacon has been asking me the same question for the last two hours: he went away because even he finally realised he was barking up the wrong tree. Doesn’t that tell you something, Jared? Someone who really wanted to pin something really bad on me has just gone home. I know your mental powers aren’t what they once were, but that should tell even you something.’
Brodie considered for a moment. ‘If you want to believe you’ve convinced him of your innocence, don’t let me spoil your day. But if the three of us are satisfied of your guilt you shouldn’t count on Jack missing the point. Jack Deacon is many things, not all of them admirable, but one thing he isn’t is gullible.
‘You’re not walking away from this, Eric. Not because of what we know: because of what Jack knows. You went to some trouble to distract him, but time was never going to be on your side. You made him angry. I dare say he’s still angry, but now he’s thinking as well and he’ll be on your case until either you tell him what happened or he works it out for himself. Telling him might be easier.’
The way Chandos looked at her, for a moment she felt the quiver in her belly as her body responded to the proximity of his. As if he hadn’t used her as a shield to hide behind and cast her off when her function was performed. As if he hadn’t traded her happiness for his own safety, and not even carelessly but in full knowledge of what he was doing. She had every reason to hate this man. But the danger was, if he went on looking at her like that, she’d forgive him.
At least she recognised the danger. Daniel once said, when someone accused him of doing something courageous, that it wasn’t necessary to be brave, only to play the part. Try as she might, she couldn’ t feel nothing for this man. But she could pretend to. She curled her lip and looked away.
Behind her back she heard Chandos sigh. ‘Look. I didn’t kill that girl. You can believe it or not, but it happens to be true. Yes, I met her. I found myself in possession of her songbook, and I used it to kick-start Jared when he lost his way. But I didn’t kill her.’
Daniel’s voice was low. ‘Should I get Superintendent Deacon back here?’
Chandos shook his head. ‘If anyone deserves to hear it first it’s Jared, and it might be difficult for us to talk properly later. I’ll tell you what happened – everything that happened. Then, if you want, you can call Deacon back and I’ll tell him. But you’d better understand what the result of that will be. I’ll be in trouble certainly, though perhaps not as much as you’d like. But I’ll get through it. Jared won’t. If you make this public, you won’t just be destroying his future, you’ll erase his past. You might as well slit his throat here and now.’
Fry was standing at the foot of the stairs, his hands stuffed in his pockets. Blood was smeared on his face and his shirt was torn. His eyes were angry and afraid and his body was tensed in a bitter resentful hunch. ‘Keep talking.’
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The King’s Hall in Belfast was used to staging big events: everything was ready, everyone knew what they were doing. Chandos spent a couple of hours there – no more, there was no need. He took the SeaCat to Stranraer and drove half the day and into the night, getting home red-eyed and exhausted in the early hours of Monday morning, June 16th.
There was no one else in the London house. Fry and Tommy were in Ireland with the band and Miriam the housekeeper had taken a fortnight’s holiday while they were away. Chandos didn’t have a PA at that time but he’d given the girl who did his secretarial work some time off as well. He got in at two in the morning, a time when even London is mostly asleep, and surprised a burglar.
At least, that was what he thought when he hauled himself upstairs, discarding clothes as he went, only to hear a soft sound from behind Fry’s bedroom door. He stopped dead and looked for something heavy with which to arm himself.
As a household they didn’t go in for bronze statuary, walking-sticks or golfclubs. The best he could do was a pseudo-Gothic mace Fry had used in the act until one day it rolled off the stage and broke someone’s foot. Now they used it as a doorstop.
‘You hit a nineteen-year-old girl with a mace?’ breathed Brodie, horrified
‘Of course I didn’t,’ snapped Chandos.
Thus armed, he crept to Fry’s door, threw it open, threw the light-switch and had his weapon at the ready in less time than it takes to say it.
There was a little shriek of terror and Chandos found himself eyeballing a girl – his first thought was she was about twelve years old – wearing a t-shirt and underwear and nothing else, kneeling on Fry’s bed where she had obviously been sleeping not long before.
‘Who the hell are you?’ he yelled, the backwash of fear coming out as fury. ‘What the hell are you doing here? How the hell did you get in?’
She was white, shrinking from him. Her voice was tiny. ‘I climbed in.’
‘Climbed in? What do you mean you climbed in?’
She gestured at the bedroom window, then drew her hand back hard against her body before he got a chance to snap it off.
Chandos looked at the window, looked at the girl, looked at the window again. ‘We’re two storeys up!’
‘Drainpipe …’ she mumbled.
This was Sasha Wade, scion of an unknown house, so full of the music that nothing seemed too difficult, no risk too great, in the cause of liberating it. She reminded him of Fry. Of Fry when first Chandos saw him, three years before, a ragged eighteen-year-old with fallen angel eyes and the voice of a storm. The anger leached from him. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked again. ‘What do you want?’
‘I wanted to see you.’
‘Me?’ Managers aren’t used to that. ‘Jared’s away on tour.’
She knew. ‘Ireland.’
Chandos nodded. ‘So what do you want with me? And how long have you been here?’
‘Since Saturday night,’ she whispered, her eyes downcast. ‘I was going to leave in the morning if you hadn’t got back. I haven’t taken anything,’ she assured him anxiously. ‘Except I made some coffee, but I’ll pay for that. And soup. And there was some …’
‘Never mind the food,’ he snapped. ‘You’ve been here two days? You climbed up a drainpipe and in through a window carelessly left open by a certain demon rocker who will be hearing all about it, then you set up camp in Jared’s room. And you say you wanted to see me but I still don’t know why. Do your parents know you’re here? Maybe I should call the police.’
‘No!’ Her eyes flashed dramatically wide. ‘My parents don’t know I came. Nobody knows. I haven’t done any harm. Five minutes of your time, that’s all I want. I can tell you everything you need to hear in five minutes. Then you can throw me out if you want to. You can call the police if you want to.’
‘Damn right I can call the police.’ But the urgency had gone. It was impossible to feel threatened by a teenage waif in her underwear. ‘Five minutes. And for heaven’s sakes, put some clothes on.’
Unsure if dressing time was included in the five minutes, she talked as she scrambled into her jeans – fast, because five minutes isn’t long to make a pitch the rest of your life is going to depend on.
‘I write songs,’ she gabbled. ‘And sing. You think Jared’s good? – I’m better. When you hear me sing you’ll want to hear more. So will everyone. I’ll sing with Souls or on my own, whatever you want. You want Jared to sing some of my songs, you can have that too. You don’t know it now but you need me as much as I need you. I can give you songs to stop the world.’
It wasn’t the first time Chandos had been ambushed by wannabes. At the start of his career he was afraid to send them away in case one of them really did have the Midas touch. Later he realised how very rare it was, how vanishingly small the risk of missing a genuine talent. Now he got rid of them as quickly as he could without resorting to actual bodily harm.
This girl was different. It was the way she used words
. They danced for her. If she talked like that when she was trembling with fear and trying to find the left leg in her jeans in the middle of the night with no one here but him, what could she do with an audience? What might her songs be made of?
Warily, conscious that it might be a mistake, he said, ‘Shall I find you a guitar?’
‘Brought my own.’ She produced it from beside the bed, a cheap acoustic guitar with a gaudy woven strap. She’d climbed a drainpipe with it on her back.
She sang the song the world would come to know as Crucifiction.
When she’d finished, her eyes shining with the effect she’d obviously had on him, Chandos just kept sitting on the edge of the bed, trying to breathe steadily. ‘You wrote that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Words and music?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are there any more?’
There were many more. She sang eight or nine of them; which was the first he saw of her songbook. Or rather, as it turned out, her new songbook. ‘I left the old one at home. Some of the stuff in it isn’t that good. I copied the best ones into this.’
‘How long have you been writing songs?’
‘Since I was a kid. But mostly the last couple of years. Since I heard Jared. I knew what I wanted to say but till then I didn’t know how to say it. But I do now. Don’t I?’
He had to admit that she did. ‘Listen, Sasha, I think you’re right – you have a talent and it ought to be nurtured. Maybe I’m the one to do it, maybe not, but somebody should. We have to talk about this again, seriously, with your parents and maybe with a lawyer. But not in an empty house in the middle of the night. I at least have a reputation to lose.’
She laughed at that, a high bell-like chime that reminded him what her voice was capable of. Her pale skin glowed with excitement. She knew she was on the shore of the new world she’d been seeking. She knew he wasn’t lying to her: she knew she’d got her break. She let him show her down through the house to the front door.
At which point a thought struck him. ‘Have you anywhere you can go tonight?’
She gave an elfin shrug, genuinely uncaring. ‘I’ll wait on the station. There’ll be a train in a couple of hours.’
She was nineteen and looked younger, a fey child alone in an unfamiliar city, a girl so set on her destiny she would break into the house of someone she thought could help her. He couldn’t turn her out on the street at four in the morning. ‘Go back to bed, I’ll take you to the station after breakfast.’
‘But you didn’t,’ hazarded Brodie softly.
‘By breakfast she was dead.’
He’d gone to his own room then, and though he was exhausted by the long day his head was too full of possibilities to sleep. An hour ago he was a successful man, respected in the music industry, the man who’d produced the remarkable talent that was Jared Fry. Now he was going to do it again, with an unknown who sang like a harp and wrote like Dante. Once could be luck, but twice was a reputation that would sustain him for the rest of his career.
Eventually exhaustion won and he slept, dreaming of platinum records and white limousines.
He woke to a shock like melt-water pouring down his spine and the awareness of small, cool hands on his body.
He shot out the other side of the bed as if fired from a gun. He scrabbled for the bedside lamp, but he’d been away from home too long for it to come naturally to hand, he succeeded only in knocking it to the floor where it smashed. He kept going, groping for the light-switch beside the door.
When the light came on it found both of them naked, her kneeling on the bed, him spread-eagled against the wall, the bedclothes spilled in a line between them. He yelled, ‘What are you doing?’ in a voice that soared till it cracked.
There’s a difference between elfin and elvish. She gave him an imp’s smile. ‘Casting couch.’
‘You’re nineteen years old!’
‘Old enough. Even the law says so.’
Whatever the law said, whatever she said, she wasn’t a woman. She hadn’t a woman’s body. It was small and spare, long thin bones under downy skin, small high breasts that would have gone unnoticed altogether if there’d been any flesh anywhere on her. With her cap of fair hair and her huge eyes she looked like a poster-child for a famine in Stockholm. Sleeping with her would be like sleeping with his niece.
‘Will you for God’s sake go and put some clothes on!’
‘You haven’t got any on.’
‘This is my room!’
‘It’s big enough for two.’
Some of the shock was passing. One thing was certain: she wasn’t big enough to rape him. ‘Sasha, I don’t know what you think you know about the music business but this isn’t how it’s done. Leastways, it isn’t how I do it. You have talent and I want to promote it. If I’m right you’ll make me a lot of money. I don’t need any other kind of reward, and I’m not looking for a girlfriend young enough to be my daughter.’
‘That’s all right,’ she said reassuringly, ‘no one has to know. I won’t make sheep’s eyes at you at showbiz parties.’
‘Damn right you won’t, you’ll be tucked up in bed saving your voice. Sasha, I’m not kidding – this is no part of the deal. It isn’t necessary and I don’t want it.’
‘Why not?’ She looked down at herself in surprise. ‘What’s wrong with it?’
‘It’s ten years too young, that’s what!’
‘I’m good,’ she promised, as if that might be what was worrying him. ‘I lived with a premier division footballer for two months.’
He found his mouth open and shut it. That might have been a non sequitur; on the other hand, sexual technique could have been part of the coaching programme, sandwiched between dribbling and tax avoidance. He opened the door and pointed. ‘Bed.’
She patted the mattress. ‘Got one here.’
He hardly knew what to make of her. He couldn’t have made himself any clearer; she couldn’t still think this was the price of his help; still she wanted to jump his bones and wouldn’t take no for an answer. Leaving the door open he moved slowly back towards the bed. ‘I don’t want this,’ he said again.
Naked as he was, her eyes seemed to strip him, flay him, get under his very skin. There was a directness in her gaze that was both unflinching and uncompromising. ‘What do you think I am?’ she demanded. ‘A child? I’m not. I’m not sure I was a child when I was ten years old, I’m sure as hell not one now. I’m not jail-bait, if that’s what scares you. My body is mine to give. I’d like to share it with you, at least for tonight, and not as a bribe and not because I think I’ll get a hold over you but because it’s late and it’s cold, and I’m a long way from home, and we’re both alone, and I think it would make us feel good. But I’m not going to beg. If you really want to sleep alone you can.’
He dared to let his eyes trace her outline, to linger on the long muscles of her thigh, the dip of her belly. He’d been on the road for a fortnight, and he was tired and in need of comfort. He’d have settled for hot chocolate but …
If he told her once more to go he thought she would. He said, uncertainly, ‘What are your parents going to think?’
She shrugged, amused. ‘I can’t imagine telling them.’
She wasn’t lying: she was good. She wore him out. Of course, after the day he’d had that wasn’t difficult. When he had nothing left to give she pushed him onto his back and rolled off the edge of the bed, stretching as she rose, the early morning light gilding the contours of her body. Hovering on the cusp of sleep he watched with hooded eyes as she straightened and walked away, a slight pale figure at once frail and adamantine, strange and familiar. He heard the shower, then he slept.
Over a period of time, still sleeping, he became aware of something wrong. But not until he was awake did he realise what it was. The shower was still running.
His first fully conscious thought was that, having made all the running, now she regretted it and was trying to scrub every trace of him from her skin.
He chewed his lip, wondering what he should do. He called her name; there was no answer. He got up, wrapping a sheet around him, and opened the bathroom door. ‘Sasha, it’s all right. Don’t be upset. We’ll forget it happened …’
She was sprawled in the cast iron bath, limbs splayed awkwardly, the water – cold now, there hadn’t been time since his return to heat a full cylinder – beating down on her young body. She was the wrong way round, with her head on the taps, and he thought she’d fallen asleep with her chin on her shoulder. And then he saw she wasn’t asleep.
‘She’d slipped on the soap,’ he said. His voice was wondrous with the banality of it. ‘She was showering, she slipped on the soap and she banged her head on the taps. There was a graze on her temple, the sort of thing you get from walking into a cupboard door, the sort of thing that hurts for a couple of minutes but by the time you’ve found the Elastoplast you can’t see where it was. But she was dead.’
Chandos saw their expressions and marshalled a wan smile. ‘You don’t believe me. I don’t blame you – I didn’t believe it either. You see what people manage to survive, you don’t imagine people can die that easily.’
‘They can,’ murmured Daniel. ‘They don’t very often, but they can. The right injury to the right spot, and just occasionally someone dies for almost no reason at all.’
The look Chandos gave him bordered on grateful. ‘I kept having another look. I kept thinking, Don’t panic, she’ll wake up in a minute. But I knew she wouldn’t.
‘And I found myself thinking about all the other things I knew. That she wasn’t a local girl. That she’d come to London without telling anyone what she was doing. That she’d broken into the house – which meant no one had seen her because they’d have called the police if they had.
