Dying for Millions

by Judith Cutler

  He came back, wearing remarkably cheery striped socks, and thrust a similar pair at me: I put them on, and wrapped myself in the duvet he’d brought down. Then he produced an envelope from the dressing-gown pocket and spread in front of me a set of colour photos. I rubbed the last of the bleariness from my eyes and looked. Andy’s BMW, with a scar on the bonnet as if a child had scribbled on a blackboard; Ruth’s new Mercedes, open-top and in the sky-blue of a Corgi model, with a spray of white lilies on its bonnet. Not at all cheery.

  ‘That’s what worries me,’ he said, pointing at the funeral flowers.

  ‘The whole thing worries me,’ I said. ‘Have you read any newspapers recently?’

  He counted them off on his fingers, as if humouring me: the Guardian, Irish Times, Independent.

  ‘Not the Evening Mail?’

  He looked at me sharply. ‘OK – tell me.’

  I told him.

  We sat in silence, our hands clasped. At last he pushed away, and sought the comfort of jam and butter, spreading them thickly on the toast. ‘Fuck the diet,’ he said, as if I’d protested.

  ‘What have you done about this so far?’ I asked. ‘Apart from the police?’

  ‘Not the police.’

  ‘Not the – you’re joking!’

  ‘Private investigator. I want it all kept confidential.’

  ‘You must be off your head!’

  He looked away, irritated. Then he turned back. ‘I want to do this job for UNICEF more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life. It’s important. I want to do it now, while the punters remember me, and I don’t want anything to stop me. Anything.’ He pushed himself to his feet and stalked to the far end of the kitchen, forgetting that it’s hard to look dignified in an undersized towelling bath-robe. Especially when you’re wearing stripey socks.

  My desire to laugh was extinguished by what I had to say. ‘There’s one thing’ll stop you. And that’s what this lot is threatening you with.’

  ‘There’s a bodyguard with me all the time.’

  I searched ostentatiously under the table.

  ‘In an Espace, parked outside. Tailed my taxi from the airport. And I’ll be safe enough at the Music Centre – the roadies have all toured with me for years.’

  ‘What about the local team?’

  ‘They’ll only be using people I’ve worked with before.’

  I raised an eyebrow. ‘With all the activity erecting the set, Attila the Hun could get in and no one’d notice.’

  ‘Passes.’

  ‘Passes, schmasses. You can’t tell me all those odds and sods who float around have passes.’

  ‘They do this time. Special liggers’ passes. Actually says “ligger” on it. And,’ he added triumphantly, ‘it’s not just a pass they need, but the right colour cord round their neck.’

  ‘Ligatures,’ I said, grimacing at my own pun.

  ‘Different colour neck-cords for each type of pass, the colour combination known only on the day and decided at random.’

  I wrinkled my nose. A statistic about the number of murder victims who knew and trusted their murderers was niggling somewhere in the recesses of my mind.

  ‘Still think you ought to tell the police. Chris, for instance – he’d know what to do.’

  ‘It’s not unknown,’ he said, ‘for people under police protection to be attacked. Is it?’

  ‘Point taken. All the same—’

  ‘Tell you what, we’ll argue about it in the morning. Night, love.’ He kissed me absently on the cheek and went back to bed.

  I met him again an hour later, trying to sneak downstairs without waking me. At the time I was trying to sneak downstairs without waking him. We plodded in silence back to the kitchen.

  ‘What do you do when you can’t sleep?’ he asked.

  ‘Clean out a drawer,’ I said.

  ‘What?’ His face was so appalled it was comical.

  ‘Clean out a drawer. There was this man at college had the most appalling insomnia – tried everything the National Health could suggest and then some. Anyway, he fetched up with a hypnotherapist, expecting a swinging watch before the eyes. But he didn’t get it. He got forty quids’ worth of advice, though. The therapist asked what he hated most. Cleaning the kitchen floor, he said. Right, said the therapist, that’s what you’ll do tonight when you can’t sleep. And tomorrow. And the night after. Carl couldn’t believe his ears. I usually have a milky drink and read, he said. Quite, said the therapist. And you don’t sleep. You’re rewarding yourself for not sleeping. This way you’ll sleep. It may take a week, if you’re a slow learner.’

  Andy was grinning at last. ‘How long did it take?’

  ‘Three nights. Now, I don’t mind kitchen floors, but I hate drawers.’

  ‘Better fetch my rubber gloves,’ he said, emptying the cutlery drawer into the sink.

  ‘I can’t think,’ I said, greeting him at eleven with a light kiss, ‘of a nicer way to be woken than by the smell of bacon.’

  He raised a disbelieving eyebrow.

  ‘OK. Not many nicer ways.’ Chris believed in alarm clocks, and early-morning exercises. He considered sex something you did before you went to sleep, and when I’d once tried to alleviate some dawn boredom he’d had a tantrum but no erection. I sighed at the memory.

  Not too surprisingly, Andy made the connection. ‘Is Chris coming to the gig? You’d rather he didn’t? Think he’d disapprove?’

  Chris and Andy had never met face to face. They’d spoken on the phone a couple of times, when Chris had happened to answer it for me, but neither had seemed particularly keen to take things further. Andy had heard a lot about Chris, however, seeming to have an uncanny knack of phoning whenever the offs of our relationship outweighed the ons.

  ‘I don’t know is the answer. To all of your questions. He’s safely at Bramshill at the moment, busily male-bonding. Poor chap,’ I added, ‘he must hate it. He’s distinctly unclubbable.’

  ‘Drop him. Come on, you’re how old?’

  ‘Nine months older than you, pillock!’

  ‘Thirty-six. I’d have thought your biological clock was ticking quite loudly by now. Aren’t you leaving it a bit late?’

  ‘For children, you mean? Lots of women leave it later than this.’

  ‘You’re not lots of women.’

  I waited while he turned the bacon – apparently he was out of vegetarian mode already – and broke an egg into the frying pan. ‘I know. And I don’t seem to have the instincts of lots of women. OK, there was a bad year when I was about thirty, when I’d have loved a baby. But these days it just doesn’t seem to worry me. All those students I teach – perhaps it’s sublimation,’ I added, not altogether joking.

  ‘It’s not just kids, though,’ he said, ‘Ruth and I – we can’t. Nor the sex. It’s the cuddle in the middle of the night, the person next to you that you can reach out and touch.’

  It was having someone to hold when you had a nightmare.

  Ruth.

  I dug in the fridge for the bread.

  ‘The trouble is,’ he said, flipping the egg on to a plate and breaking another one into the pan, ‘that being in a second-best relationship can stop you getting into the right one.’

  ‘There isn’t a right one on the horizon at the moment,’ I said, angry that I was letting the bleakness show. ‘And I have a penchant as great as yours for falling for the wrong person. At least Chris keeps me on the straight and narrow.’

  ‘In that case you definitely ought to drop him. Tell you what – come down to Devon at Easter. I’ll parade all the eligible young men I know before you.’

  ‘Knowing your friends,’ I said, ‘that’ll take all of two minutes.’

  Chapter Five

  ‘I can see why you need an ego-mobile,’ I said, pulling into the artists’ car park at the Music Centre and slipping the Renault in a space from which it could gaze in admiration at the row of six forty-ton articulated trucks. It must be a big set: though I knew other halls, l
ike the National Exhibition Centre, could take up to thirty trucks’ worth of gear. ‘Something this size would get an inferiority complex if it had to do this very often.’

  ‘Even the BMW looks pretty small by comparison. I hate to admit this, but I have been known to turn up in a Roller, on grounds of size alone. A full-size one.’

  A man who could only be a minder had materialised from the Espace and was looking macho by Andy’s door. He snatched it open, holding it while Andy got out, and gazing menacingly into the middle distance. I got out my side; I knew he wasn’t paid to extend the same courtesy to me.

  ‘What d’you mean, a full-size one?’ I repeated. ‘Aren’t all Rolls Royces the same size?’

  The minder cracked his face for a second as he slammed the car door.

  ‘Tell the lady, Griff.’

  I fished my bag from behind my seat, shut my door and zapped the central locking. Then, as all three of us fell into step, I prompted him: ‘Yes, tell the lady.’

  ‘There is this individual, miss—’

  ‘Sophie, please!’

  ‘– Sophie – for whom I once had the honour of working, who was what our politically-correct brethren might call vertically challenged. Being a professional, miss, you’ll forgive me if I decline to reveal his identity: suffice to say he does not hail from this side of the Atlantic. This – individual – wanted to enhance his height, and after due consultation with his image-builders and agent hit on the obvious solution – he would be surrounded by things and people smaller than himself. None of his backing musicians or singers is more than five foot four tall. Nothing on the set is more than seventy-five per cent of its usual size.’

  ‘You mean, drums and guitars and everything?’

  ‘Everything. And when the gentlemen travels in his Rolls or limo, it is a scaled-down version of the market model. Three-quarter size. Built by hand.’

  A look at his face told me he wasn’t joking.

  ‘And there was that fat guy you worked for, Griff – surrounded himself with overweight singers and dancers,’ Andy said.

  ‘And you – what tricks does Andy use, Griff?’

  He shook his head.

  I stopped dead. ‘There is something, isn’t there?’

  ‘OK, OK,’ Andy said. ‘Doesn’t matter if you know, after all. We have to be careful what colour spot they use, or my hair appears to go green. Not so bad now Ruth’s found me something else to use.’

  I looked at him sideways. ‘I’ll bet you wouldn’t want that lot to find out, all the same.’

  A knot of young women of all ages had gathered the far side of the artists-only gate. One was screaming, but most were simply calling Andy by name, and waving in friendly rather than frantic fashion. A couple of middle-aged security guards were adamant but not unpleasant about keeping the gate locked.

  ‘Duty calls,’ said Andy. ‘You stay here with Sophie, Griff.’ He dug in the inside pocket of his jacket and fished out a plastic ballpoint pen. Then he sauntered over, grinning as if they were long-lost cousins. But not quite how he grinned at me.

  ‘Wish he wouldn’t bloody do this,’ said Griff.

  ‘You’ve tried stopping him?’

  ‘Have you ever tried to stop him doing anything he wanted to do?’

  ‘Trying to make him do something he doesn’t want to do isn’t easy, either. Which force were you with?’

  ‘The Met. At least he’s not insisting on having the gate opened,’ he added. ‘Got more sense now he’s married to Miss Jean Groupie.’

  I didn’t think Ruth deserved that, and said so.

  ‘No offence meant. We all got our names. And if you’ve ever worked in a set-up like this, you’ll know we call spades fucking shovels.’

  I nodded: the average roadie wasn’t into self-restraint when it came to verbal exchanges.

  Andy was walking back at last, unhurried despite the wind. He turned and waved; the women waved back with enthusiasm.

  Despite the passes and the neck-cord, which was blue and white and bore the unlikely legend ‘Baggies Bounce Back’ – Andy being a determined West Bromwich Albion supporter – we were stopped at the door. Andy hesitated a microsecond until he was recognised; Griff followed as if glued to his shoulder. I tried to, but was intercepted.

  ‘Come on, young lady, you know you can’t come in here.’

  I brandished my pass.

  ‘They all try that. Not hard to get hold of one from somewhere.’

  ‘This one got hold of hers from Rivers himself,’ said Griff.

  ‘The fucking Money?’

  ‘The same,’ he said darkly, ‘and I don’t doubt he’d welcome a bit of respect.’ He grabbed my arm and propelled me along faster than my legs were designed to go until we caught up with Andy outside his dressing room. Clearly someone with a sense of humour had been giving thought to protecting him: he was installed in the room set aside for the Midshires Symphony Orchestra’s Chief Conductor, Peter Rollinson. It was heavily personalised by its rightful tenant: framed cartoons on the walls; family photos on the desk; shelves filled with books. Being there at all felt like trespassing. No, Andy wouldn’t mind giving this up.

  Griff, square-shouldered and officious, elbowed into the bathroom; you could almost see him reaching for a handgun, ready to react. But this time he returned with a palpable smile. ‘Thought these classical types were supposed to be into austerity and things of the mind and that!’

  Andy shrugged. He liked to blur distinctions, if possible – apart from his ethnic explorations he had worked with the Brodsky and the Duke Quartets. But he decided to indulge Griff and I followed him in. Apart from the usual shower, loo, etc, there was a big cornerways bath, complete with a family of yellow plastic ducks. But Andy’s smile was pallid.

  We trailed back to the sitting room. Despite the personal items it was curiously depressing; the calming shades of grey and green had badly misfired. And the atmosphere seemed to be rubbing off on its temporary occupant. What it needed was perking up. Andy’s dressing rooms were usually lush with flowers, weren’t they?

  ‘No roses?’ I asked.

  ‘At this time of year, where do roses come from? Roses come from Africa. Are roses indigenous to Africa? No, roses are not indigenous to Africa. So if you want to grow roses in Africa you erect acres of greenhouses and divert millions of gallons of precious water from people who need it for their subsistence crops, then use more of the earth’s precious resources flying the roses to European markets.’

  ‘OK. No roses. Not so much as a British daffodil?’

  ‘Wouldn’t mind some of those,’ he said. ‘But they’re not a priority. Ah, Jonty!’

  Jonty, the tour manager he’d worked with for years, gave me a smacking kiss and his watch an anxious glance. ‘There’ve been a couple of glitches,’ he said. ‘Tobe’s left the sodding sound system boot-up disks at the Mondiale – didn’t find out till five minutes ago, stupid bastard. I’ve sent a local gofer to pick them up.’ He made it sound as if the guy would have to travel miles rather than a couple of hundred yards up the road; Griff caught my eye. ‘And there’s been a couple of the Brummie roadies sacked. Don’t know the meaning of “no drugs tour”. So what I thought we’d do is …’

  Raising a hand to Griff, I drifted off. It’d be nice to organise some daffodils for Andy, to try and lift the gloom that had descended on him, though I was reluctant to go out myself only to have to confront the Cerberus who’d questioned my ID on the way back. No doubt Ollie would know a gofer who’d got a couple of minutes to spare. If there was any work still to be done it was probably in the capable hands of the touring roadies; the Brummies would have done their whack.

  The place was alive with Wind of Change T-shirts and sweat-shirts. There was no Ollie to be seen backstage; I’d go round the front. Perhaps, though, I’d better look in on Karen first, to see how she was getting on.

  There was a cheerful babble coming from the group of women washing up. It looked as if they were just coming to the
tail-end of the lunch-time crockery: there were far more clean plates than dirty stacked on caterers’ trolleys. Despite my late breakfast I helped myself to a couple of prawny pastries, which proved to be more-ish but unfilling, and sang out a greeting to Jill, Ollie’s wife and supposedly Karen’s mentor. Of Karen herself there was no sign. If the wretched girl had let Jill down …

  Jill stripped off her rubber gloves and hugged me. ‘Your little friend’s made a great hit,’ she said, surveying the work that was left.

  ‘Does that mean she’s not pulling her weight?’

  ‘Well, it’s her first time. Stars in her eyes.’

  ‘Stars my arse. She’s paid fifty quid to help!’

  ‘She did quite well on the breakfast stint. Then Ollie decided to show her around – you know what an old softie he is. Funny, the thing that impressed her the most was the catering team. Or, at least, one of the guys in it. I must admit he’s gorgeous – legs that go on forever and the neatest little bum.’

  ‘Show me!’

  ‘Into cradle-snatching, are you?’

  ‘It’s called having a toy boy. And I could use one.’ I thought briefly of Chris – even more briefly of Carl, who still carried a torch for me – and sighed. ‘Yes, I could certainly use one,’ I repeated.

  ‘There’s always Phiz!’ Jill crammed a couple of vol-au-vents into her mouth, resumed her gloves, and picked up a pile of plates. ‘You know he’s panting for you.’

  ‘He’s panting for anything in a skirt. I meant to warn Karen—’

  ‘I think young Peachy Bum has put paid to any chances Phiz might have had. Go on, go and have a look.’

  ‘See you later then!’

  Armed with a chicken leg, neatly boned and stuffed with something interesting, I toddled off to the kitchen. Sure enough, there was Karen, poring over tarot cards and swigging a bilious-looking brew from a pint glass. She turned another card, and absently poured another slurp of liquid from the juicer goblet.

  ‘What the hell d’you think you’re doing? And where the hell is Sam?’

  Sam was Andy’s chef, ready to indulge whatever diet Andy happened to be following at the time. When he was in junk carnivore mode, Sam’s burgers were magic – but should his employer enter a more self-denying phase, Sam was ready with lentils. He’d probably have worked wonders with stewed hair-shirt, if called upon.