Dead Beat Part 6

Maggie crossed the room, all two paces of it, and put a protective arm round Moira. 'You don't need him any more,' she declared. 'Where was he when you really needed help? If he'd been so b.l.o.o.d.y keen to find you, why didn't he do it when you left? He's just being selfish. His career's a disaster area, and he wants you to get him out of the s.h.i.+t. You don't owe him anything, Moira.'

'Oh, I see,' I remarked. 'There's a statute of limitations on feeling guilty now, is there? Just because Jett didn't act right away, then he can only be out for himself? Is that it?'

Maggie glowered at me, but Moira actually smiled as she reached up to squeeze her lover's hand. 'He's really not like that, Maggie. He's one of the good guys. I didn't expect him to come after me. I'd been doing his head in for so long he must have been glad of the peace.'

'So what's it to be?' I asked. 'Will you at least listen to what he's got to say?'

Moira took a deep drag on her cigarette. Maggie looked as if she was holding her breath and praying. Moira blew two streams of smoke down her nose and nodded at me. 'I'll listen. When can you set it up?'

'The sooner the better. He's at home working on his new alb.u.m. Believe me, he needs your help yesterday.'

Moira smiled, a wide grin that lit up her whole face and took ten years off her. 'I'll bet,' she said. 'What about tonight? Might as well get it over with.'

'But it's past ten o'clock!' Maggie protested. 'You can't go off there now.'

'Maggie, unless Jett has had a personality transplant, he'll be up watching videos and listening to music till three or four o'clock. He doesn't get up to listen to the Archers omnibus on Sunday mornings,' Moira replied, a gentle tease in her voice.

Maggie flushed. 'I still think you should leave it till tomorrow,' she said stubbornly. 'You're tired. You need a night's rest after the show.'

She still had a lot to learn, I thought sadly. Every performer I've ever met is so high after a show that they need half the night to come down to a point where sleep's possible. That's why so many of them get hooked on a mixture of uppers and downers.

As if reading my thoughts, Moira said, 'No, Maggie. Right now, I'm on a high. All that applause! Tonight, I feel like I could meet Jett as an equal. And if I sleep on it, I'll probably bottle out. Or else I'll let you talk me out of it.'

Moira got to her feet and put an arm round Maggie's waist. 'Kate, if you'll give me ten minutes, we'll meet you in the car park. Ours is the red 2CV. I'll have to go home and change into something more suitable,' she added, waving at her blue lurex dress and a jogging suit. 'If you follow us back there, then you can take me over to see Jett. If that's OK with you.'

'Fine by me,' I confirmed, feeling exultant. There's no better feeling in the world than the moment when you know you've cracked a difficult job. Moira wasn't the only one who was on a high.

An hour later, Moira and I were heading back down the motorway towards Manchester. 'I feel like I've spent more time on this motorway in the last couple of weeks than I've spent in my own bed,' I muttered to break the silence that had fallen on us since Maggie had waved a mournful farewell on the doorstep.

Moira chuckled. 'I'm sorry I've given you so much trouble,' she remarked.

'Oh, it's not just you. It's another case I've been working on. A team that's flooding the country with fake watches. You know, Rolex copies, all that sort of thing.'

Moira nodded. 'I know exactly what you mean. A lot of the guys in Bradford are into that kind of thing. It's a nice little earner. They do a lot of fake jogging suits and t-s.h.i.+rts. You know, any big thing like the Batman movie, or the Teenage Mutant Turtles. They just copy the legit stuff and flog it round the pubs and the markets. The guy I worked for in Bradford even had us selling fake perfume to johns for their wives, can you believe it?'

I laughed. 'Wonderful. I love the psychology.' I put Everything But The Girl's Language Of Life in the ca.s.sette and we both settled in a companionable silence to listen to Tracy Thorn's sensuous tones.

'So how did you track me down?' Moira asked finally as I turned on to the M6, heading south towards Jett's mansion. The home she'd never seen, I reminded myself.

When I got to the bit about Stick asking for his four hundred pounds, she laughed out loud. 'You know,' she said, 'if this does work out, I might just pay him back. Mind you, he'd die of embarra.s.sment if word got out that he took me to Seagull. Stick the hard man! He'd never live it down.'

I turned into the gateway of Colcutt Manor and wound down the window and leaned out to press the intercom b.u.t.ton. When it crackled back at me, I said clearly, 'It's Kate Brannigan to see Jett. Don't f.u.c.k with me, Gloria, let me in.'

As the gates opened, I caught Moira's expression out of the corner of my eye. She looked stunned. I headed up the long drive, and the house appeared in my headlights. 's.h.i.+t,' she breathed. 'You might have warned me, Kate.'

I pulled up at the foot of the steps that led up to the front door and said, 'You ready?'

Moira took a deep breath and said, 'Ready as I'll ever be.'

We got out of the car and I led the way up towards the door. Three steps from the top, it opened and a pool of light flooded out. Jett himself stood silhouetted in the doorway. It took only a moment for him to realize I wasn't alone. Then he saw who my companion was. 'Moira?' he said in tones of wonder, as if he couldn't believe his eyes.

I paused, and she walked past me. 'Hi, babe,' she said, stopping a few feet short of him.

Jett's hesitation was only momentary. Then he stepped forward and folded her into his arms. Moira buried her head in his shoulder.

Me, I headed back into the night, trying to start the car as quietly as possible. Some things don't need witnesses. Besides, I had a huge invoice to dictate before I could sleep.

Part Two

13.

The sound of the phone jerked me awake. 'Kate? It's Jett. It's an emergency. Get over here right away.' Then the phone slammed down. The clock said 01:32. Happy Monday. I leapt out of bed and dressed on automatic pilot. I was halfway to the car before I remembered it had been six weeks since I'd stopped working for Jett. What the h.e.l.l was he playing at? By then, I was awake anyway, so I figured I might as well drive out and see.

The gates stood open, and Jett was waiting for me on the doorstep. He looked stoned out of his box. I asked what was going on and he simply handed me the key and said, 'The rehearsal room.'

It was my first dead body. The private eyes in books fall over corpses every other day, but Manchester's a long way from Chicago in more ways than one. My first reaction was to get out of the room as fast as my legs would carry me and keep on running till I was safe inside my car.

Instead, I tried to fight my nausea by breathing in deeply. That was my second mistake. n.o.body ever told me that freshly spilled blood has such a strong smell. My only experience with the stuff was when half a pound of liver leaked all over my cheque book. That hadn't been too pleasant either.

I tried to behave like a professional and forget that I knew the person who was lying dead on the polished wooden floor. If I was going to get through this experience, I'd have to convince myself it was no more real than the Kensington Gore in a Hammer Horror film.

Moira's body lay a few yards inside the door of the rehearsal room. Her limbs were splayed at angles too awkward for comfort. That alone would have been enough to show something was badly wrong. But there was more. The back of her head was matted with blood, which had trickled into a congealed pool behind her. A few yards away lay a tenor sax, its gleaming golden horn smeared with blood. I left it alone. My only direct experience with murder weapons was Cluedo, but even I knew enough not to mess with it.

I walked cautiously towards the body, and noticed that her face looked mildly surprised. I crouched down, forcing myself not to think of this as Moira, and noticed that her hands were empty, palms upwards. No clues there. Feeling foolish because I couldn't think of anything else to do, I picked up her wrist and felt vainly for a pulse. Nothing. Her skin felt warmish-not quite normal temperature, but not cold either. I got to my feet and glanced at my watch. It was forty minutes since Jett had woken me. What the h.e.l.l was keeping the police?

With a deep sigh, I left the room and locked it behind me. I found Jett in the blue drawing room, huddled in a corner of the sofa. I sat down beside him and put a hand on his shoulder. His skin felt cold and clammy through the thin silk s.h.i.+rt.

His eyes were frightened. I realized now he was in shock rather than stoned.

'She's dead, isn't she?' he whispered hoa.r.s.ely.

'I'm afraid so.'

He nodded, and kept on nodding as if he had a tic. 'I should never have brought her here,' he muttered.

'What happened, Jett?' I asked as gently as I could. It looked pretty obvious even to me, but I wanted to hear it from his own lips.

'I don't know,' he replied, his voice breaking like a teenager. 'We were supposed to be working on a new song tonight, and when I went in, she was lying there.' He cleared his throat and sniffed. 'So I came out and locked the door and called you.'

Gee, thanks. 'Did you try her pulse?' I asked.

'No need. The spirit had left. I knew that right away.'

Thank you, Dr Kildare. 'Why aren't the police here yet?' I asked, refraining from pointing out that she just might have been still alive when he made his New Age diagnosis.

'I didn't call the police. I only called you. I thought you'd know what to do.'

I couldn't credit what I was hearing. He'd found his ex-lover's murdered body in his house and he hadn't called the police? If Jett wanted to throw suspicion on himself, the only way he could have made a better job of it would have been to call his lawyer as well. 'You'll have to call them now, Jett. You should have done that first, before you called me.'

He shook his head obstinately. 'No. I want you to handle it. I can trust you.'

'Jett, you can't hush up a murder. You have to call the police. Look, I'll make the call if you don't feel up to it,' I offered desperately. The last thing I needed was for the police to get it into their heads that I was involved in concealing a crime.

He shrugged. 'Please yourself. But I want you to handle it.'

'We'll talk about it in a minute.' I stood up. There was a phone in the room, but I wanted some privacy to gather my thoughts so I headed for Gloria's office down the hall. Neil was coming down the stairs as I reached the door. He looked as surprised to see me as I was to see him. 'Kate!' he exclaimed. 'I didn't know you were here.'

'Jett needed a meeting,' I offered lamely, not feeling up to breaking the news.

'Maybe see you later,' he said, sketching a wave as he walked down the corridor into the far wing. Clearly he saw nothing odd about business meetings in the small hours.

I closed Gloria's door behind me, picked up the phone and dialled 999. I was quickly connected to the police emergency line. 'I'm calling to report a murder,' I said. To my amazement, I could feel a giggle welling up inside me. I must have been more shocked than I'd realized.

The copper on the other end of the phone wasn't amused. 'Is this some kind of hoax?' he demanded.

I pulled myself together and said, 'I'm sorry. Unfortunately not. A woman has been killed at Colcutt Manor, just outside Colcutt village.'

'When did this happen, madam?' His voice was hard and cool.

'We're not sure. The body's only just been discovered.' I gave him the details. It seemed to take forever. When I returned, Jett was sitting exactly as I'd left him, hugging himself and rocking gently to and fro. What he needed was a cup of strong, sweet tea, but I didn't rate my chances of finding my way to the kitchen and back again without a ball of string or a map. Instead, I sat down and put an arm round him. 'Jett,' I said softly. 'We're going to have to get our story straight or the cops are going to get very heavy with you. Listen. I was pa.s.sing on my way home from a job and I dropped in for a drink. We were talking for the best part of an hour, then you went down to the rehearsal room to get Moira to join us, and that's when you found the body. I was already here. Understand?' I could only pray that the pathologist wouldn't come up with a time of death that made a nonsense of the alibi I was handing him.

'I got nothing to say to the cops,' he informed me.

'Jett, unless you want to spend tonight in a cell you're going to have to stick to our story. In their eyes, you're the number one suspect, especially if we tell them the truth. Promise me you'll keep to my version.' I repeated the tale to him and made him recite it back to me.

We were interrupted by the distant sound of the gate intercom. Jett showed no signs of moving, so I headed back towards the hall. Gloria had beaten me to it. She was wearing a heavy red silk kimono with, appropriately enough, black and gold dragons embroidered all over it. Either she had ears like a bat or she'd been on her way downstairs anyway when the intercom sounded. She was carrying out her usual friendly interrogation over the entryphone when I b.u.t.ted in and said curtly, 'Let them in. Jett knows all about it.'

She pressed the gate release b.u.t.ton then turned furiously towards me. 'I don't know what you think you're playing at, police in the middle of the night. I suppose Moira's doing drugs or something. I wish he'd never hired you in the first place. Then we would all have been happy.'

I already felt put upon, which is the only excuse I can offer for snapping back at her, 'Moira won't be doing drugs or anything else ever again. Somebody made very sure of that tonight. Moira's dead.'

Before I could properly judge her reaction, there was a tattoo of knocks on the front door. I pushed past Gloria and opened the door. Two uniformed officers stood on the doorstep, the flas.h.i.+ng blue light on top of their car was.h.i.+ng them in an eerie glow. 'Miss Brannigan, is it?' the older of the two asked politely.

'That's me. You'd better come in. Are the CID on their way?'

'That's right miss,' he said as they walked into the hall, looking around them curiously. They'd drink out on this for months, murder in the rock star's den. 'Can you show me where the uhh...'

'You'd better wait here, Gloria,' I said loftily. 'Someone will have to let the other officers in.'

As I turned away to lead them to the rehearsal room, a man's voice echoed down the stairwell. 'What the f.u.c.k is going down?' I glanced up to see Kevin leaning over the gilt banister, looking as spruce as if he was heading for a meeting with his bank manager. Didn't anybody ever sleep in this house?

'You'd better get yourself down here,' I called back.

'What the h.e.l.l are you doing here, Brannigan?' he ranted as he turned the corner of the stairs. Then he saw the cops and stopped dead. 'Oh s.h.i.+t, what are they doing here? What's going on?'

'Moira's been killed,' I blurted out before anyone else could speak.

Kevin missed a step and almost tumbled to the foot of the stairs, just catching himself in time on the banister. 'You what?' he gasped. 'There's got to be some mistake. Gloria, what's she playing at?'

'I don't know, Kevin. I just came downstairs and found her here.'

'No mistake, I'm afraid,' I interrupted. 'I've seen the body. You'd better go and sit with Jett. He's in the drawing room.'

Kevin shook his head like a man who thinks he's trapped in a bad dream and moved across the hall towards the door. Gloria took a couple of steps after him, then hesitated. The policemen conferred almost inaudibly, then the younger one stepped back towards the front door. 'I'll have to ask you not to leave the building, sir,' he said to Kevin.

'Listen, sonny, I'm not going anywhere. I've got an artiste to look after,' he said self-importantly. 'I've got a right to be here. Why don't you ask her what the h.e.l.l she's doing on the premises? She's the outsider here,' he complained sharply, pointing to me.

The older policeman looked exasperated. All he wanted to do was get to the murder scene before the CID arrived and started treating him like a turnip. At this rate, he'd end up looking like a complete wally who hadn't even managed to keep tabs on the occupants of the house. Ignoring Kevin's histrionic gesture, he said, 'Miss, if you could just show me the way?'

I led him to the door. Wild horses wouldn't have dragged me across the threshold again. I handed him the key and nodded at the door. 'In there. I checked for a pulse, but there wasn't one.'

'Touch anything else, miss?' he asked as he unlocked the door.

'No.' I leaned against the wall as he let himself in. All I wanted was to climb back into bed and pull the duvet over my head. It didn't seem to be an available option. Wearily, I pushed myself back into action. Apart from the young constable, whose radio was crackling like an egg in a hot frying pan, the front hall was empty. I didn't feel up to Kevin and Gloria, so I sat on the bottom step of the stairs and wondered gloomily why I'd already stuck my neck out to protect Jett. He wasn't a friend, simply a client who'd paid his bill promptly. I know that's rarer than a socialist at a Labour Party meeting, but it still wasn't reason enough for my quixotic behaviour.

The sound of the intercom brought Gloria scuttling back from the drawing room. This time, the door opened to reveal two plain clothes officers, a uniformed sergeant and an inspector. They hadn't wasted any time. They had a brief conference with the officer on the door, and the CID disappeared in the direction of the rehearsal room. The inspector went off to the drawing room. The sergeant turned to Gloria and me, pulled out his notebook and asked, 'Who else is in the house?'

I shrugged and Gloria pursed her mouth in a self-satisfied smirk. She didn't care if it took murder to keep me in my place. Then she rattled off efficiently, 'Jett is in the drawing room with his manager, Mr Kleinman. Mr Webster, Jett's official biographer, will either be in his office or in bed. Miss Spenser, Jett's companion, is in her room upstairs.'

'Thank you,' the officer interjected, desperately trying to keep up with her flow. He scribbled on for a moment then said, 'And you ladies are...?'

'I'm Gloria Seward, Jett's personal a.s.sistant and private secretary. And this is Kate Brannigan,' she added, her tone spelling out that I was an insignificant menial, there to make up the numbers. I held my tongue. The time to reveal my profession would come soon enough. Once they knew I was a private eye, it would be straight into quarantine for me, and I wasn't ready for that yet.

The sergeant, a hard-eyed man in his late thirties, finished writing and said, 'So that's everyone, is it?'