Dead Alone

by Gay Longworth

  ‘“o.m.p.” What does that mean?’

  ‘Wait.’

  They continued their walk along the periphery of the site. Jessie kept one eye on Sally Grimes. The pathologist had put a mask over her mouth. She was kneeling over the body, taking temperatures.

  ‘Look at that –’ said the photographer. Three more letters, same height, this time in capitals: O.S.I. Jessie closed her eyes.

  ‘Follow me,’ said the photographer.

  ‘It’s okay,’ said Jessie. ‘I’ve got the point.’

  ‘No, you have to look.’

  ‘Tio – t.i.o.’

  The photographer stopped. ‘How did you know?’ Jessie didn’t say anything. ‘It’s brilliant, isn’t it? I mean, she was always over the top, but this really is something else. I mean, fuck, to be here – good thing I brought so much film.’

  ‘How can you be so sure it’s Eve Wirrel?’

  ‘We were at art school together.’

  ‘You recognised her?’ That.

  ‘The jewellery and the hair gave it away.’

  ‘And you don’t mind?’

  ‘Mind! Eve’s last piece. Titled even.’ He was smiling. ‘It’s a gift.’

  ‘Look, I don’t think you should –’

  ‘Don’t put a bag on her head!’ The photographer screamed into Jessie’s eardrum.

  Ed and Sally looked up. Everyone else stopped what they were doing.

  ‘He has to,’ said Jessie, waiting for the ringing in her ear to stop.

  ‘Jesus,’ said the photographer, marching back to the entrance of the cordoned area. ‘This is art, that’s the whole point. Once they’ve cleared the leaves, we need to photograph her, as she intended.’

  ‘You need to, you mean,’ said Jessie.

  ‘I am a photographer.’

  Jessie nodded slowly. ‘I think you had better leave.’

  ‘What! I’ve been taking photos all morning.’

  ‘Yes, and I’d like all the film now.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I always develop all police work myself.’

  ‘Not this time. I’m sorry. This is not a career opportunity. You are employed by the police to take photos of crime scenes. Those films are our property.’

  ‘I don’t fucking believe this.’

  ‘Well, you’d better. Fry, make sure he hands over all the film. And the Polaroid camera in his left pocket. I’d like the Polaroids of the trees, please.’ She held out her hand. ‘The ones in your breast pocket.’

  ‘Bitch.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, whatever.’

  He handed them to Jessie.

  ‘Unbelievable,’ said Jessie as she watched Fry lead the man away. ‘Get those bags on.’ She turned to Niaz. ‘Find Mr and Mrs Wirrel – use Interpol if you have to, but find them. Get hold of her agent or gallery or whatever and find out where she lived, where she worked. I want a media blackout on this until we find them. No one speaks to the press.’

  ‘Jessie,’ called Sally, taking a step back from the body. ‘I think you should come and have a look at this.’

  Jessie approached. The smell got stronger as she drew nearer. Sally was holding a pair of medical tweezers, hanging from which was a pair of knickers. Soiled knickers.

  ‘Where did you find those?’

  ‘Her mouth,’ said Sally. What the foxes had left of it. ‘And the femoral artery has been cut. One long incision.’

  ‘And nature isn’t that neat,’ said Jessie.

  Sally shook her head. ‘Not in my experience.’ She waited for Ed to finish bagging the feet then rolled the corpse to one side. Excrement poured out from the body’s defunct bowel. Jessie tried not to gag. There was an area of ground stained with blood. Eve Wirrel had bled to death in the middle of the Isabella Plantation. Where the deer were. Jessie looked up. She couldn’t see the house clearly, but with good binoculars …

  The rising sun was spreading warmth through the earth but the cloud cover was not burning off. The upward drift of air was minimal. The high-pressure cell seemed to intensify the closer you were to the body, the sky above did not want this methane-laden, ammonia-reeking air to join it. It was holding it here, low on the ground, to cling to the back of the throat, seep by osmosis into the skin, the subconscious. ‘I don’t think this is a suicide, Jessie,’ said Sally. ‘Died Blonde. Dead Art. The knickers are a cosmetic touch, just like the bleach.’

  ‘Look at this.’ Jessie fanned out the Polaroid photos in the correct order: D.E.C. o.m.p. O.S.I. t.i.o. ‘Decomposition.’

  ‘Where’s the N?’

  Jessie pointed to the corpse. ‘Eve is the N. Nude. Nubile. Narcissistic. Nasty. Needless. Take your pick. It depends on whose point of view you are looking from.’

  ‘You agree with the photographer? You think this is a composition? Even following on the heels of Verity Shore’s murder?’

  ‘There are no immediate signs of a struggle, she wasn’t bound …’

  ‘No sign of a camera either. If dying was a process undergone for art, wouldn’t Eve Wirrel have filmed it?’

  ‘Not necessarily. She wouldn’t have known she’d end up looking like this. Perhaps she was relying on people like that photographer. Maybe that was the point.’

  ‘Let me get her to the lab. I’ll do the full blood-works – we should get the results in time for the postmortem. We’ll soon know if she came here under duress. If she did, this may be victim number two.’

  CHAPTER 24

  Jessie stood in the nondescript doorway with Niaz Ahmet by her side, carrying some items that P.J. had requested. A female constable stood behind her. Everyone was instructed not to mention Eve Wirrel. When P.J. opened the door, he was wearing old 501s and a black V-neck T-shirt; the stubble he’d had when she met him on the bridge was fast becoming a beard. Jessie saw the WPC’s eyes widen as they hurried inside. The boys snaked around P.J.’s legs, looking wary and getting trodden on as everyone sorted themselves out, until P.J. stroked the elder boy’s hair and said, ‘Take your brother to the kitchen and ask Bernie to make these nice people some tea. Paul likes baking. Just wait till you see what he’s made for tea.’ Paul smiled, took his younger half-brother by the hand and left.

  ‘Paul cooks when he’s upset. Bernie can’t get him out of the kitchen at the moment,’ said P.J. quietly as he showed them through to a small sitting room. A significant step down.

  ‘Why do you call him Paul?’ asked Jessie. She’d been reading up on Verity’s very public life, sifting through countless magazines, photo shoots, shopping sprees, drying-out sprees, endless gossip about Verity’s lovers, rumours about lovers, photos of alleged lovers, more shopping sprees and finally the biggest headline grabber of all, her death. An explosion of tabloid activity. Verity Shore had never been so famous.

  ‘Yeah, well, Apollo is a nonce’s name. Poor lad was getting grief at school. He chose it. I was flattered. It’s my first name. Not very rock’n’roll, mind.’

  ‘What about Paul Young …?’

  ‘Ouch. I’m going to try and forget you said that.’

  Jessie smiled. She tried not to. ‘How are they?’

  ‘Fine. Considering. I got the lawyers on to Danny Knight. Bastard. He must have called the Daily Mail before you’d even left the house.’

  ‘I thought he looked a bit shifty.’

  ‘Yeah, well, that’s me to a T, always the last one to know. Anyway, the boys are being amazing, but that’s probably because it hasn’t sunk in. All this running about is exciting for them. Couldn’t do without Bernie. Listen, thanks for meeting me last night, I’m sure it was beyond the call of duty. And thanks for, you know, telling me what had happened to her.’

  ‘I usually spare families that sort of detail.’

  ‘We’re not a normal family though, are we?’

  There was no denying that. On average, a piece about them appeared in the press every other day. Usually centred around Verity. Though, it had to be said, in his heyday, P.J. had given the tabloid press a run for their money. T
he hotel rooms. The endless models. The coke. The no-speaks with his father. The death of his mother and his non-attendance at the funeral. The typical rock’n’roll stuff. Then Verity and the boys arrive on the scene and he becomes the model parent of someone else’s children. The question Jessie wanted to ask was, could it all be too good to be true?

  Niaz sat unobtrusively in the corner, a pencil poised over his pad. Jessie hoped P.J. would forget he was there. The WPC was standing outside the door.

  ‘I’ve written everything out, like you asked. All the machinery in the studio is clocked and timed – makes billing the record companies easier. The names and phone numbers of the people who came and went are there, and you can cross-check that with the house security system,’ said P.J., proffering a list.

  Jessie took it. ‘Do you alarm the house at night?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We’ll need those records.’

  ‘I’ll get Bernie on it.’

  ‘It should be you.’

  His expression changed abruptly. ‘What do you mean by that? Bernie is a named keyholder.’

  ‘You trust Bernie then?’

  ‘Implicitly.’

  ‘Why? When you don’t trust anybody else?’

  ‘I’ve told you. Because she is trustworthy.’ He said it in a voice that implied he wished to change the subject.

  ‘What makes you so sure?’

  He folded his arms in front of his chest. ‘Is this about Verity or Bernie? Because when I last checked, Bernie was in the kitchen and Verity was in the morgue.’

  Jessie knew when to pull back, but she wondered what Verity Shore had felt about the trust her husband so clearly put in his young, attractive housekeeper.

  ‘Let’s talk about Verity then.’

  He sat down without complaint. ‘Good.’

  ‘Why did you keep her under lock and key?’

  ‘What?’ He reacted calmly, given the question. Too calmly. More calmly than he had when she’d asked him about Bernie.

  ‘You locked Verity in her own room at night. Why?’

  ‘I … She locked her door, quite a lot.’

  ‘You sure about that? The key is on the outside.’

  ‘The doctors told us to do it.’ At least he wasn’t going to persist in denying it. That would have undone all the progress they’d been making. Police work was all about trust. It was often the most personal details, the ones people were loath to tell, that led to the conviction of the right person.

  ‘Us?’

  ‘Sorry, me.’

  ‘Why?’

  P.J. pushed his palms against his thighs, stretched, then, seemingly exhausted by his actions, collapsed back into the sofa. ‘It was to protect her. She was erratic after her binges.’

  ‘But she always came home?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Or did you have to go and find her and bring her back?’

  ‘Sometimes. Jesus, I didn’t know what else to do.’

  ‘P.J., you told me she put herself through a mini cold-turkey every time she came home, implying some sort of control over her drug-taking. Is that really what happened?’ Jessie looked at him. This time she didn’t shy away from those big, famous green eyes. They didn’t seem so big and famous any more. He was just another man with a bad marriage and unusual domestic arrangements.

  ‘We thought we were helping her.’

  ‘We, P.J.? Always “we”. One husband, two wardens.’

  ‘It wasn’t like that.’

  ‘Then tell me what it was like.’

  ‘Okay, shit, so Bernie helped me with her, so what? I couldn’t do it on my own.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Stop her from killing herself.’

  ‘But you said she wasn’t the suicidal type. And, according to you, she had her drugs under control.’

  ‘She wouldn’t have done it on purpose.’

  ‘I’m sorry to tell you this, P.J., but you locked her in with her drugs. We found a quantity of heroin and cocaine in a shoe box, she kept vodka in her shampoo bottles, and instead of taking the Antibuse and Zyban you gave her to wean her off her addictions, she hid the partially sucked pills behind a loose tile in the bathroom. She was on something all the time. The problems with your wife only started when she ran out. That was when the shopping sprees happened. You said hundred of bags came home, thousands of pounds’ worth of clothes. Well, I don’t suppose you searched the contents of those bags: the clothes, the pockets, the toiletry bottles, the shoe boxes?’

  ‘You worked all this out from one visit to my house?’

  ‘Two. That’s my job. Now, you have taken enough drugs in your life to recognise when someone is in an altered state. I have, and I’m not a rock star. So, explain to me, how come you didn’t recognise it in your own wife?’

  P.J. remained quiet.

  Jessie could feel the heat. She was warm. Close. ‘You knew about the drugs, didn’t you?’

  ‘I suspected.’

  ‘Do you know where she got them from?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How she got them?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you still trust Bernie?’

  ‘You can’t possibly think Bernie was getting drugs for Verity.’

  ‘I’m asking you.’

  ‘Bernie didn’t know about it. I knew but kept quiet. It made life easier. Verity spent a bit of time with the boys, the boys liked it and I kept an eye out. Jesus, alcoholics do it all the time – hold down a job, families. I thought it was okay.’

  ‘Until she keeled over and died.’

  P.J. walked across to the fireplace. ‘I meant to get her back into rehab, but, Jesus, I couldn’t keep telling the same old exhaustion story. The woman didn’t bloody work, what the fuck was she exhausted from, shopping? Most of the rehab places wouldn’t have her back because of the disruption she caused. Sleeping with the suicidal, arranging drug drops and escape plans. She could be very persuasive, that one. You don’t become a something from nothing without one unique selling point.’

  ‘What was Verity’s?’

  ‘She wanted it so much she could get even the hardened cynics to believe she deserved it. People in the limelight don’t just find themselves in the right place at the right time. They put themselves there. Time and time again. At the expense of everything – family weddings, friends, funerals, Christmases. All with one goal in mind: fame. At any cost.’

  ‘Is that what you did?’

  ‘I was in a successful band. It went with the territory.’

  ‘What about the drugs?’

  ‘That too goes with the territory, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying.’ P.J. paced the room.

  ‘And the pig’s blood, the death threats – they too go with the territory?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘Can you remember what they said?’

  ‘They were long tortured letters written by some loon telling Verity to leave me alone or she would die.’

  ‘So they were sent to her. Not you.’

  P.J. pulled back the netted curtain for a second then let it fall. ‘God, this place is claustrophobic.’

  ‘What did Verity think of these letters?’

  ‘She didn’t know about them.’

  ‘But they were sent to her, weren’t they?’

  He picked up a china dog from the mantelpiece, looked underneath it, then replaced it. ‘Like I said, everything that came in the house was checked.’

  ‘Even her post?’

  ‘Especially her post.’

  ‘For drugs?’

  ‘What else, if not drugs?’

  Jessie let the question hang in the air. ‘Are you sure you weren’t checking up on your wife? I’ve seen the press-cuttings, P.J. All those alleged lovers, are you sure they were nothing more than rumours?’

  ‘Yes. All manufactured by Verity. She didn’t have lovers. Trust me, she wasn’t a sexual person. Sex was just another way of getting attention and causing havoc.’

  She�
��d have to take his word for it, for now.

  ‘Look, what if Verity simply took too much coke and had a heart attack? It happens more often than you think. The people she was with might have panicked and tried to disguise the body. That’s the only rational explanation I can think of,’ said P.J.

  Jessie had thought about that. Trouble was, they had done a test on the silicone. Sulphuric acid would have eaten through the implant as fast as it would have the liver, heart and lungs. Each silicone implant had been purposely removed, kept to one side, then replaced in the ribcage where they were supposed to be found. Somewhere, someone had created an awful lot of mess. Jessie thought about the smell of bleach in Verity’s bathroom, the locked door, the secret exit over the garage, the drained pool. That kind of mess would have taken a great deal of expert tidying.

  She stood up. ‘Perhaps now would be a good time to talk to Bernie.’

  P.J. walked over to her. He was only inches away now. Jessie could see the individual hairs of the long stubble on his face, the line of slightly chapped skin on his lip where he’d been chewing it, eyelashes the thickness of Diana Dors’, eyes the colour of sea-smoothed glass. Is he magnetic because of who he is, she thought, or is he who he is because he is magnetic?

  ‘You think I was a terrible husband, don’t you? I can see it in your face.’

  ‘This isn’t about what I think,’ said Jessie, staring back.

  ‘Get to know me, I’m not the person you think I am,’ he said softly.

  Jessie wondered if this was the technique he used to get women into bed: I’m not the star you think I am, I’m an ordinary man …Well, she wasn’t for bedding.

  ‘I have no opinion of you, Mr Dean. As I said to you last night, all I’m trying to do is establish what happened to your wife.’

  P.J. stepped away from her. He didn’t like that, Jessie could see it in his body language. ‘I did what I thought was best,’ he said.

  ‘If you knew she was on drugs and you knew she wasn’t bringing them in, who did you think was? Assuming that it wasn’t you.’

  His eyes narrowed. He opened his mouth to say something but changed his mind. He turned away from her. Seduction over.

  ‘One more thing, do you know Eve Wirrel?’