Death Of A Diva

by Derek Farrell

  Caz pulled a pack of cigarettes from her bag. “Mind if I?” she waved them vaguely and he shook his head, nodding at the fag graveyard on the table. She offered him one and he took it, leaning forward as she lit it for him. “So what about the drugs?” Caz asked, pretending not to notice that his gaze, as she lit the cigarette, had settled longer than the average week-old widower’s would on her impressive cleavage. “I mean, if Lyra was back on the wagon and healthy enough to work, why was she demanding vodka and drugs within minutes of arriving?”

  He straightened up, inhaled a lung full of smoke, held it and blew it in a thin grey stream into the air. “’Cos Lyra wasn’t quite ready to come back. We were still dealing with Eliza; and Eliza was a frightened little girl, who hid that fear behind a mask of nasty spitefulness and, when that failed, tried to drown herself in drugs and booze.”

  “Any idea where she got them from?” I asked, sipping my tea.

  “Well not from any of us,” he bristled. “I assume it came from one of your lot. On that subject,” he blew another stream of smoke out, “the – the crime scene – was sealed by the police. All her stuff is still there. Is it safe?”

  “Safe?” Suddenly, I felt like Dustin Hoffman.

  “That Baker freak and his ilk’ll be in in seconds and some of those dresses cost a fortune.”

  “Oh.” I nodded. “It’s safe. I’ll ask the police when the tape’s due to come off the door and let you know.”

  Morgan nodded his thanks.

  “Actually,” I broached the topic tentatively, “you’ve already got a lot on your plate. Perhaps I should just check in with Ms Britton. Let her know when it’s OK to collect. Have you got her address? I’d like to, you know, offer my condolences.”

  “Leave Liz out of this,” Foster stubbed the cigarette out and squinted angrily at me. “She really doesn’t need to be dragged any further into this mess than she already is.”

  “Surely she’ll want her makeup box. I mean, what good’s a makeup artiste without their kit?”

  “Liz – Ms Britton’s pretty shaken up by this whole thing,” Foster muttered, draining his mug. “I don’t want her upset any more than she needs to be.”

  “OK,” I finished my tea, shot a look at Caz, who drained hers and we placed the two empty mugs on the draining board. “But, if you are speaking to her at any point, would you tell her to feel free to call me any time she wants to; to arrange return of her stuff, once the cops have given the all clear.”

  “If there’s nothing else,” he suddenly said, “I think it’s time you both left.” Foster straightened up and ushered us out of the kitchen.

  We were heading back to the front door, so I figured it was now or never: “Mister Foster; do you have any idea who could have murdered Lyra?”

  “What?” He stopped dead and glared at me. “Do I have any idea? Do you think, if I had a single clue, that I’d be stood here talking to you? I’d be down at the police station. Christ! Who might have killed Lyra? You met her: almost anyone who ever met her might have killed Lyra. But nobody – nobody with a soul – could have wanted any harm to come to Eliza.”

  “What about Barry Haynes?” I prompted.

  He frowned. “Who?”

  “Haynes. Lyra’s first manager. Apparently, he once tried to strangle her. Maybe he came back to finish the job.” It was stretching belief, but I wanted to see how Foster would respond.

  He snorted humourlessly, “There you go then: even at the start, Lyra was capable of making anyone who had to work with her feel murderous. But I hardly think this Jerry Haynes…”

  “Barry.”

  “Barry. Whatever. I really don’t think that anyone would have waited this long before coming back around. I’ve never even heard of this guy, so I’ve no idea how you have. No,” he shook his head, opening the front door and ushering us out, “Lyra was killed by the one thing she could never have enough of: fans. One of those fucking loony Lyra Lovers probably got into her room and strangled her before she could have him ejected. I hope the cops are looking for that Baker maniac.”

  “Leon didn’t strike me as homicidal,” I commented and Foster drew himself up to his full height, stared down his nose at me and curled his lip into a sneer of disdain.

  “Well, if you’ll pardon my saying so, you’re hardly a pre-eminent judge of character, are you?” He demanded, before slamming the door in our faces.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  “Well,” Caz re-buttoned her blouse, “that’s one seriously fucked-up puppy.”

  “Rattled,” I corrected. “And guilty.”

  “You think he did it?” She pulled the coat she’d never even been asked to remove back around her shoulders and buttoned it up as an icy wind howled down the street.

  “Killed her?” I shook my head. “No. But I think he knows it was his own desire that put her in danger. She was vile that day and it was because she was shaken to the core at being asked to perform in the Marq.”

  “And he was the one pushed her there. To help her regain her confidence.”

  “Something like that,” I murmured.

  We walked down the driveway and onto the road.

  “What now?” Caz asked, looking around her.

  “Big houses,” I said.

  “What? Danny, I’ve just realised we’re in the middle of nowhere and you didn’t arrange for your dear old dad to come and pick us up at any point. How the hell are we getting home?”

  “They’ve all got drives,” I added.

  “What are you? An estate agent? Yes, Danny, they all have big long sweeping drives, up which limo’s and cabs – like the one your father drives and in which we could get home – often whoosh.”

  “So why’s that parked there,” I asked, pointing at a car parked a little up the road behind an overhanging thicket, “and why is he hanging around,” I added, tilting my head towards at a figure hunkered down under a tree opposite the gate.

  “Christ,” Caz’s jaw dropped. “Leon?”

  “Leave him,” I muttered, turning up my collar and heading off in the direction of the white mini parked about two hundred yards away.

  Caz tottered after me. “But what’s he doing there?” She demanded. “It’s – well, it’s creepy.”

  “He’s holding a vigil,” I said, stopping in front of the car and nodding to myself. “Did Morgan look like the sort of man who might wear mother of pearl pink lipstick?”

  “Sweetheart, Morgan didn’t look like the sort of man who’d used deodorant today. What the hell are you on about?”

  “The kitchen. An ashtray full of cigarette ends. Two sorts – Marlboros and some skinny designer menthol types. A single cup on the table, but another one on the draining board – with the dregs still sitting in the sink. And the cup on the draining board, like the menthol fags in the ashtray, still had a trace of pink lipstick on the rim, which means that Morgan Foster was not alone in the house when we buzzed up. And since we know that Jenny stayed over at Dominic Mouret’s last night, he wasn’t sitting smoking and drinking coffee with his daughter.”

  “He got quite protective of Liz Britton,” Caz commented.

  “Mmm mmm. And Liz strikes me as the sort of girl who’d smoke menthols by Cartier and use pale pink lipstick.” I placed my palm on the bonnet of the car. “And since we already know that this is her car – she arrived in it yesterday – and since this is stone cold, I think we’d be fair in deducting that Liz Britton and Morgan Foster spent the night together and may have been doing more than consoling each other. For quite some time.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Liz Britton lived in a fourth floor walk-up flat in Covent Garden. She’d telephoned at eight pm the night before to invite us to come visit her.

  My guess was it had gone something like this: after Caz and I left – after I’d made it as clear as daylight to Morgan that I knew he had a guest and knew who she was – they’d agonised about what to do. He’d have wanted to do nothing, brazen it out.

/>   Liz, on the other hand, struck me as the sort of person who would not feel comfortable with deception.

  Caz and I, when Liz called, had been slaving in the kitchen at the Marq. Ali had bundled in not long after we’d returned to announce that: “That vat of stew what you made last night went down a treat. I’ve thawed out some chicken and a few boxes of ribs if you fancy makin’ something for Sunday lunch and we’re packed solid out front, so any time you fancy popping out to give us a hand with the punters, well, feel free,” before sniffing, raking a vicious glare up and down Caz and her too tight blouse and announcing that it smelled “Like a fucking bordello in ‘ere.”

  “Chanel!” Caz called after her. “And not from the bloody market! You need to fire that woman, dear; she possesses neither style, decorum nor, by the looks of her split ends, a bottle of conditioner.”

  “I quite like her,” I smiled, lifting the lid on the chest freezer and withdrawing a Tupperware box filled with frozen peas.

  “She brings the tone down.”

  “Um, Caz? Corpses in the upstairs room bring the tone down. Ali keeps the place running.” I grunted as I lifted a pot large enough to bathe a small child in onto the range and clicked on the gas ring.

  “Sweetheart, what are you doing?”

  I paused, nodded at the closed door through which Ali had vanished and smiled, “Following orders.”

  “You’re cooking her lunch?”

  “Caz, I don’t think even Ali could have gotten through the hundredweight of stew we left last night.”

  “Oh!” The light dawned. “She sold it?”

  “Seems so. Perhaps we’ll get this place known for something more than corpses.”

  “Not if you feed them that chicken, Sherlock. It’s got a ‘best before’ 2004 stamp on it.”

  “It’s been frozen,” I offered half-heartedly.

  “For longer than my Uncle Gerald’s bank accounts. You sure it’s safe?”

  “Don’t you start,” I smiled. “Bloody Morgan with his is it safe about those dresses.”

  Caz shrugged off her coat, rolled up her Marc Jacob plum silk sleeves, slipped on a dubiously stained apron and began chopping carrots. I glanced across at her as I tore the wrapping off the first chicken and sniffed at the thawed meat. “What?” she asked, her cheeks dimpling. “Carrots go with chicken, don’t they? I do remember something from Saint Ethel’s academy, you know. Why do you think Morgan’s so obsessed with those frocks?”

  “Oh he’s not,” I replied, opening the other chickens and commencing to joint each into individual portions (thank you Uncle Pete the butcher). “He just wants to try to make everything OK now that it’s too late. Ensure that all Lyra’s stuff gets back where it belongs.”

  “Because?”

  “He’s got a guilty conscience.”

  “’Cos he was shagging Liz Britton behind Lyra’s back?”

  “And because he figured out the best scheme to ensure he got a chunk of Lyra’s money and the woman he really loved.”

  Caz frowned in confusion, then, as the light dawned, waved the huge chopping knife in my direction. “Ooh. Nasty. You mean he–”

  “–was going to get her to go back to work, build her confidence, park her in front of a row of chorus boys and wait for her to divorce him,” I answered.

  “At which point she’d have had to pay him off and he’d have got the makeup artist of his dreams.”

  “Bit convoluted,” I offered, “but yes, that’s what I think his plan was.”

  “So what do you reckon? He changed his mind, got tired of waiting, crept up the back stairs and went all Boston Strangler on her?”

  “It’s possible. But I’m not so sure.”

  “So, if not him, who then? Liz? She seemed like Mary, Mary, Meek and Mild.”

  I started peeling onions, the tears springing almost immediately to my eyes. “I know. But try this: people aren’t scared of Meek and Mild. They don’t sugar coat things. Why bother? No matter how rude or abrupt you are, Meek and Mild just accepts it. They’re used to just accepting their lot.”

  “Till they snap,” Caz finished, as I slammed the cleaver into the breast bone of the first chicken. “You think she snapped?”

  “Well, it did look like a ‘snap’ killing,” I answered, “in my admittedly limited experience.”

  “You know,” Caz said thoughtfully, the knife poised above the carrots, “now I think of it, I reckon she did it.”

  “Really?”

  “Mmm.” The knife swooped down and she commenced julienning the veg in a manner that would have made the chef de cuisine at Saint Ethel’s academy for young gentle ladies proud, “Just like Janis Chiles.”

  “Janis Chiles?” I lowered the jointed chicken pieces into the pot and they began to sizzle.

  “Girl at school. Couldn’t get her own way. Death threats, then stabbed the object of her objection.”

  “Christ. This Saint Ethel’s: was it twinned with Saint Trinian’s? Cookery and homicide?”

  “Stabbed her with a compass. In the thigh. Victim was a big gal. No real harm, but it was all repression, suppressed angst and die bitch which is rude, but, as far as the German language is concerned, at least grammatically correct.”

  And it was at that point that the phone rang and we were invited to pay a visit to Ms Britton the following day.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  We didn’t get much from Liz. Her eyes were red rimmed and her face pale. When she spoke, her West Country burr was shaky and low.

  “You have to understand that Lyra started with nothing and dragged herself up to the top twice. She was selfish and spoiled and could be a nightmare. But she could also – once she got to know you – be sweet and funny and loyal.”

  Liz sipped her tea from a delicate china cup and, as she placed it back in the saucer, the porcelain rattled. “That was the one thing that stood for something with Lyra: loyalty.”

  “You’d been with her a while?” I asked, glancing at Caz, whose gaze was wandering around the room.

  “On and off, about ten years. I started as her makeup girl, then it moved on to general gofer to be honest.” Liz paused; her lips pressed close together and seemed to be fighting her emotions. “She wasn’t just my boss; she was my friend.”

  “Yet she still made you cry,” I prompted, reminding Liz of the scene in the Marq when she’d fled the pub in tears.

  “She was terrified,” Liz said quietly, “and she was trying to pretend that none of it was important to her. But it was, of course.”

  “And she was taking it all out on you?”

  Liz laughed mirthlessly and shook her head, “The opposite: she was taking it out on everyone else. She laid into poor Jenny, treated Morgan like shit that day and made your life a living hell.”

  “She’d been needling everyone all day and I finally had a go at her. I told her: I know you’re scared, but this is not the way to handle this.”

  “Course, she denied she was remotely bothered and the next thing I know we’re bitching at each other, till I said ‘Well if you carry on like this, you’ll chase away everyone who cares for you,’ and she just collapsed. And that just did for me. To see her so low.” A single tear bubbled over Ms Britton’s lower eye lid and rolled down her pale cheeks.

  I coughed, as much to clear my throat as to punctuate the moment. “You and Morgan,” I tiptoed round the subject.

  “Are friends,” she answered, wiping the tear away and fixing an angry gaze on me. “That’s all. Lyra was a great friend and all I ever was to Morgan was his friend.”

  “So he wasn’t shagging you?” Caz piped up for the first time since we’d sat in Liz’s living room.

  Liz turned her face to Lady Caroline and a look of unadulterated fury swept across it. “To the best of my knowledge,” she said through gritted teeth, “he’s not been shagging anyone.”

  “Would you know?” I asked and this time the angry look was directed at me, “I mean – are you a close friend? Would h
e tell you?”

  “I’d know,” she answered coldly.

  “So who do you think killed her?” I asked.

  She blinked, her eyes darting to the teacup and around the room before finally coming back to me. “Some loony,” she said, “who gained admittance to the pub and when she tried to scream, had to shut her up.”

  “She didn’t seem the sort who’d have trouble handling an overzealous fan.”

  “Well, if it wasn’t a loony,” she answered, “then who was it?”

  “That’s the sixty-four thousand dollar question,” Caz responded.

  “Ever heard of a Barry Haynes?” I asked.

  “Haynes?” She frowned. “Cockney type? Rough?”

  “Could be. You’ve met him?”

  “No,” she shook her head, “but he used to call every now and then and she always had me put him straight through. Few times she had me post him packages. Small envelopes.”

  “You see the address?”

  She closed her eyes, as though trying to recall the envelopes, then, after a beat, shook her head. “Somewhere in London.”

  “Any idea when the last one went off?”

  “None, but I know he called Lyra a few times last year. That time, she wouldn’t talk to him and he got quite shirty with me. When I asked Lyra who he was, she told me to mind my own business. Who was he?”

  “Did he ever leave a contact number?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t think so, but I can go back through the diaries and see if I made any notes.”

  And that was it. Liz took my mobile number and promised to call if she came up with anything and we left her flat and made our way down to the street where it had begun to rain.

  “Lord, Danny,” Caz turned the collar of her Prada macintosh up and, with a flick of the wrist, opened a Vuitton umbrella that we both huddled under, “have you ever heard such a pile of hogwash in your life?”

  “You don’t buy it?” I asked. “She seemed pretty cut up to me. She was paler than a vampire.”

  Caz rolled her eyes. “Think, Danny.”