Death Of A Diva

by Derek Farrell

  “She didn’t,” I protested. “And if she had, why would I have kept something like that secret?”

  “Oh, let me think: because it was you?”

  Dorothy Frost shook her head. “Here we are again: source of this accusation?”

  “Your client. He was heard announcing in the kitchen to Lyra Day’s stepdaughter that her aunt knew who’d murdered Ms Day. Statement was confirmed by a Mr Dominic Mouret, the young lady’s fiancée.”

  “I said she knew where Barry Haynes was,” I protested.

  “And this Mr Haynes is?” Reid tilted his head and glared at me.

  “Lyra’s first manager. He tried to strangle her, threatened to kill her and had been in touch with her last year,” I answered.

  “And,” Dorothy Frost jumped in, addressing Reid, “you’ve subsequently interviewed this Haynes and removed him from your list of suspects?”

  Reid flipped through his notes, reached for a pack of Marlboro that lay before him, hesitated, raised his eyes to Mrs Frost, who pointed a finger at the conspicuous No Smoking sign on the wall and went back to flipping through his notes.

  “So, Danny,” Dorothy addressed me as though Reid and Nick weren’t even present, “where did you hear about this Barry – Haynes, was it? – Barry Haynes,” she leaned in and spoke directly at the microphone on the desk, “and his threat to murder Ms Day?”

  “Hear? Um…” I was a bit stumped there: did I want Nick and DI Reid to know that I’d been snooping around? “Well it’s not exactly a state secret,” I finally admitted. “I found out by talking to some of the Lyra obsessives at the pub.”

  “Fans?” Dorothy telegraphed her disbelief, as Reid shot a filthy look at Nick.

  I nodded and, at Dot Frost’s request, said “Yes, I found out about his existence by asking her fans if there were any well-known threats against Ms Day’s life.”

  “I’m waiting,” Dorothy Frost smirked at Reid. “Have you or have you not interviewed this person?”

  Reid glared at her. “We will, of course, continue to build our list of parties we would like to interview. But right now, we are talking with your client.”

  “Yes,” she responded, “because you prefer to take the word of some tittle-tattler than look into documented events of threats against Lyra.”

  Reid waved a sheet of paper in front of me. “This one was poisoned,” he declared, “after your client was heard having an argument with her.”

  “Good, now we’re getting somewhere,” Dorothy nodded curtly. “Danny, did you have an argument with Mrs – oh let’s just call her Doris. I had two sherries at lunch and the chances of me getting that Polish name out unmangled are slim. So: argument? Doris?”

  “No,” I answered.

  “Raise your voice? Manhandle? Appear threatening?”

  “No!” I protested, then, “Wait…”

  A glint appeared in Reid’s eyes as he leaned in closer. “Go on.”

  “She was wasted. I mean, she was drunk when I first met her and I gave her my gin.”

  “You gave her your gin,” Reid intoned, as though I had just disclosed the secret of the universe to him.

  “But I lost her; she went to the loo and we lost her and by the time I found her again, she was rambling – incoherent – and I had to take her elbow to stop her falling over. She was really out of it and I may have shouted at her. I was trying to get her to focus, to tell me where Barry Haynes was.”

  “But you did not argue with her?” Dorothy Frost was most insistent and I confirmed this understanding. “And you did not, at any point, threaten or assault her?”

  “Absolutely not!”

  “But you did give her your gin,” Reid intoned, in a way that had me seriously worried.

  “Yes,” I snapped back, “I gave her my gin. Is that illegal now?”

  “Giving her the gin isn’t,” he shot back, with a look on his face that said Gotcha, “but lacing it with Morgan Foster’s blood pressure medication is. Filling the old girl with so much medication, that the deceased appeared, even as her blood pressure continued to plummet to be drunk, disorientated, incoherent, rambling. Till finally, with virtually no pressure, the heart tries pumping one last time and she goes into cardiac arrest and dies in your arms. Wasted, I think you said.”

  “Oh.” I looked at Dorothy, who looked back at me and we both looked at Reid who leered triumphantly at us both.

  “Thought that’d shut you up,” he sneered.

  “Wait!” I snapped myself out of my shocked silence, “Where did you say this medication came from?”

  “Morgan Foster’s bathroom cabinet,” Reid sneered back.

  “And how the hell would I have had access to his bathroom cabinet?” I demanded.

  He could, by now, barely keep the smirk from his face. “How? Oh, perhaps when you went walkabouts through the whole bloody upstairs, let yourself in and out of bedrooms and went hunting for the relevant medication. Which, before you ask, you already knew about, because you were present when Ms Day admonished Mr Foster about his heart condition.”

  “Well, all I can say,” Frost observed, “is thank the Lord we don’t have hanging any more, cos otherwise, Daniel, you’d be a goner. He’s got you, as they say, banged to rights. If, that is, we’re now accepting hearsay, supposition, fantasy and downright delusion as legally admissible evidence.”

  “He was seen, Dot, opening the door of Morgan Foster’s bedroom.”

  “By whom?”

  “By Liz Britton, Ms Day’s PA.”

  “Hang on a minute,” I jumped in. “I may have been seen opening the door to Foster’s bedroom, but I didn’t go in. I couldn’t, because Liz Britton was on her way out of the room and blocked me from entering.”

  Reid frowned, wiggled both eyebrows and blushed in a truly alarming manner.

  “You knew this already, right?” Frost asked. “Wait: you didn’t? Oh Frankie, you’re getting sloppier every day. It didn’t dawn on you to ask Britton where she was when she saw something that might be putting my client in the hot seat? Didn’t enter your mind to wonder whether she herself might have a reason for directing suspicion away from herself? Jesus, Frankie!”

  She shook her head, for all the world, like a very disappointed school ma’am.

  “He’s hiding something,” Reid insisted, pointing menacingly at me, as his head changed shades from puce to post-box.

  “Hiding? Really? What, you mean the way that you hid the fact that you haven’t even considered the possibility of a suspect that’s already closely linked to Ms Day – say, this Mr Haynes? Or the fact that you were so desperate to collar Mr Bird for these crimes that you hid the fact that you hadn’t properly interviewed your supposed informants? I don’t think Mr Bird has anything to hide.”

  I shot a filthy look at Nick, who met my eyes momentarily, shook his head sadly and returned his gaze to the paperwork before him.

  “She spoke to him!” Reid insisted, jabbing his finger at me. “As she was dying!”

  “Mr Bird?” Frost turned to me and I nodded. “And would you care to disclose what it was that she said?”

  I nodded.

  And disclosed.

  Chapter Forty-One

  “So she was murdered by a midget?” Caz marvelled.

  It was that afternoon and we were, once again, ensconced in the kitchen at the Marq, with me making a vat of beef and onion pie filling and Caz trying to work out how she was going to thaw a block of puff pastry bigger than a three-month-old baby.

  “Odd, because I didn’t see any midgets there. Mind you,” she frowned, extracted a hacksaw from a drawer and began attempting to saw the block into smaller portions, “one wouldn’t, if one didn’t look down. They’re crafty that way, midgets.”

  “I don’t think that’s what she meant,” I said, tossing a bowl of thinly sliced onions into the bath-sized cooking pot. “It must mean something else.”

  Caz lifted the partially sawn block in both hands and slammed it down with such force aga
inst the edge of the work surface that a large chunk shot off, flew through the air and landed on the floor. “Oops.” She smiled, swooped in, snatched it up and plonked it in the microwave.

  “So, if not midgets, what? Dwarves? They exist, right? One gets so confused: I know elves are fictitious, as are fairies, but dwarves are real. Aren’t they?”

  “Ah, the wonders of a classical education,” I muttered, tossing in a bowlful of finely diced carrot. “Yes, midgets and dwarves do exist but, sadly, munchkins do not.”

  Caz paused in the act of using a small chisel to hack away at the slab of pastry and frowned. “I don’t get it,” she mused. “Why would her last word be munchkin if she wasn’t referring to her killer? Oh my God!” She gasped. “The munchkins are in The Wizard of Oz, right? And in The Wizard of Oz, the wicked witch – Lyra – is killed when a house drops on her. And the inhabitant of that house – the woman who killed the witch – is,” she paused, chiselled off another chunk of rapidly defrosting (and more than likely no longer usable) pastry, brandished it as though it were an Oscar and intoned the name: “Dorothy!”

  I listlessly stirred the veg around, the microwave pinged and the clock on the wall noisily counted out another sixty seconds I was never going to get back.

  She heaved a sigh. “Don’t you get it? Dorothy? What’s your lawyer’s name?”

  I got it – had gotten it sometime previously – but had been hoping that Caz would surprise me. “So you’re suggesting that Dorothy Frost – a woman who didn’t enter my life until after Lyra was long dead – sold her a load of coke and strangled her because – why? – cos Lyra was a witch? Crept into Lyra’s funeral and bumped off her sister for a laugh? And Doris, in her last breath decides to tell me this in fucking code?”

  Her frown deepened. “But otherwise, it doesn’t make any sense. Why would she say that word?”

  “Bingo.” I scooped the veg to one side and added the first of several packets of mince. “Which is exactly what Reid said. I think he still thinks I’m hiding something, but I swear, the last thing she did was look over my shoulder and say Munchkin.”

  “Danny.” I turned. Ali was standing in the doorway, a worried frown on her face. “We have a problem.”

  “What’s up?” I hefted a lid on to the pan and turned to her.

  “They might be family,” she started, “but I won’t ‘ave it. You either sort it, or I’m off.” She folded her arms across her chest, heaved a couple of breaths that could have been suppressed sobs and stared confrontationally at, first Caz, then me.

  “What are you on about?” I ushered her in and pointed her at the table.

  Ali moved so as to keep both of us in her sightline and sat down at the table, her leg bouncing nervously. “Them twins,” she said, at last.

  “Their work not up to scratch?”

  Ali shook her head. “Nah. They was in here last night and they worked like Trojans. This place ain’t been so busy in a long time.”

  “Told you,” Caz trilled: “nothing beats a nice strangling to get the ghouls in.”

  Ali shot her the sort of filthy look I guessed she normally reserved for paedos and council health inspectors, and turned back to me. “They was goin’ out later. Some club up the West End. They got everyone out and cleared the place top to bottom. Even emptied the glass washer and put them back out on the shelves. Helped me stock up for today and then asked if they could freshen up in the gents.”

  “And?” I asked, shocked at the discovery that the ASBO twins appeared to be model employees.

  “Well, they were taking ages and I got afraid I was gonna miss me bus, so I knocks on the door and walks in.”

  “They was freshening up, alright; but they was having more than a flannel wash.” Ali reached into the pocket of her hoodie, removed something and slapped her palm on the table. When she removed her hand, we were looking at a small bag containing some sparkly white powder.

  And printed on the bag, dead centre, as though it were a trade mark, was a single stylised white snowflake.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  “Explain.” I slapped the baggie down on the bar.

  Dash and Ray looked at it, at each other and blushed.

  “Sorry, Dan,” Dash said. “Didn’t think you were so anti.”

  I shook my head. “I am up to my ears in shit cos some dappy tart decided she wanted a little sniff and got throttled for her troubles. I don’t really give a flying fuck what people do in their own time, or their own places, but this pub has been crawling with plod, I’m still under suspicion for supplying and you’re consuming on the fucking premises?”

  “We were going out,” Dash explained. “Just wanted a livener.”

  “And Ali? The fact that you’ve upset her?”

  “We’re sorry about that,” Dash responded.

  “Really sorry,” Ray added, seeming to perk up at her name.

  “Oh. It speaks. What the fuck were you thinking?”

  “We weren’t,” Dash responded, “and it won’t never happen again.”

  “We apologised to Ali,” Ray said, “but it was a bit rushed.”

  “I’ll bet.” I had gathered from Ali that she’d basically ejected both twins, in differing states of undress, from the premises.

  “No, really.” Ray shrugged, “She’s nice and she was a good boss and we’re sorry we fucked up. It’ll never happen again and we wanted to apologise properly to her.” He held up the bunch of roses that had been held by his side till now.

  I sighed. “And what about me?” I asked.

  Dash bit his lip. “You’re a good bloke, Danny and we know that. You believed in us; you’re the only person aside from our mum and Paddy who’s given a shit. And we really don’t want to fuck that up. We’re really sorry.”

  “All well and good,” I said, “but I’m the one who’s up for murder, dealing and probably sinking the fucking Titanic. And you do coke in my pub?”

  “It’ll never happen again,” Dash assured me. “And as for all that stuff the cops are accusing you of: it’s bullshit,” Ray nodded his agreement, “and we’ll do anything we can to help clear your name.”

  “You can start by telling me where you got this,” I pointed at the bag.

  They looked at each other and I swear I saw Ray’s lip wobble. “We’re sorry,” he said.

  “Enough sorry,” I said. “Spill: who sold you this stuff?”

  Chapter Forty-Three

  “Christie?” Caz would have raised a surprised eyebrow if she hadn’t treated herself to a little pre-Christmas Botox jab whilst I’d been interrogating the Asbettes. “Jimmy Christie?”

  “The one and only. Motherfucker.”

  She pursed her lips and slid an expertly prepared G&T across the kitchen table. The room filled with the scent of the pies baking in the oven, their savoury herb infused gravy the perfume of comfort food, but I was anything but comfortable.

  I slumped, dropping my head into my hands. “Which makes perfect sense, really: he was here that night. He’s been floating around since the beginning and he’s Chopper’s henchman. I mean, why would Chopper bother with a bunch of shithole boozers? ‘Cos he can use them as sales booths for the non-taxable part of his operation.”

  “But I thought you said Chopper had been as puzzled as you were by the whole thing.”

  I raised my head and my eyebrows. “Have you never seen a Scorsese?”

  “Well I’ve seen Rigoletto, if that counts. Oh!” An eyebrow involuntarily twitched, “That had a dwarf in it.”

  “Forget the fucking dwarves,” I said. “Chopper’s a gangster. What he says and what he knows are not always the same thing.”

  “So Christie sold Lyra the coke.”

  “But why would he kill her?”

  “Maybe she wouldn’t pay?”

  “Possible; she was a mean bitch,” I spoke ill of the dead. “But why throw the stuff all over her?”

  “Maybe as some sort of Don’t screw with me thing? Like in those Gangster movie
s?”

  “What? Like the ones Scorsese directs?”

  “Oh he’s a film maker? I thought he wrote operas.”

  “Clearly.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered truthfully. “I should go to the police.”

  “But...” she prompted.

  “Something doesn’t feel right.” I shrugged, “Right now, I really don’t think they’d pay any attention to me. Reid’s fixed his sights on me; I have no proof that Christie sold Lyra the coke and the only even tenuous link I could fix would drop Ray and Dash up to their ears in this mess.”

  “I repeat: what are you going to do?”

  “I need to find Barry Haynes.”

  “God Lord,” Caz murmured, “I’d almost forgotten him.”

  “We’ve got anecdotal evidence he once tried to strangle Lyra, so the MO is there.”

  “Did you just say MO? Sweetheart, try to remember this is Southwark, not Staten Island.”

  I ignored her. “Doris said something about Barry, just before she died. I’m convinced he was there that day too and he’d been trying to get in touch with Lyra recently – so we know he’s still alive. Everywhere I turn, I’m seeing Barry Haynes.”

  “So what does Jimmy Christie have to do with it all? Is he Barry Haynes?”

  I shook my head “About a decade too young, I reckon. He sold her the coke, but I don’t think he killed her.”

  “So he’s just a drug-dealing low-life with a taste for teenage blondes. Phew, that’s a relief.” Caz lifted her gin, unhinged her jaw and downed the entire drink in one barely audible gulp. “Right,” she stood up, swiped her collection of cosmetics, perfumes and prescription-only Botulism syrup into the voluminous bag, screwed the cap onto the two litre bottle of Gordons (causing me to wonder what sort of woman brings her own gin to her friend’s pub) and shrugged into a sheer black Prada rain mac. “I’m off.”

  I frowned. “Where to?”

  “I have,” she announced cryptically, “a date with a sexy older gent in a big black conveyance. We’re off in search of Mr Haynes. And we’re not coming back till we have him hogtied to the front of your dad’s cab.”