Death Of A Diva (12 page)

Which made a nice change, I supposed, from,
where were you last night
;
when did you last see your father;
or
who put the boom in the boom-biddy-boom de boom?

“Um,” I extemporised, in a manner that would, I felt confident, have done Noel Coward proud, “why?”

“Come to dinner with me.”

“No, seriously: what do you want?”

“Seriously: come to dinner with me.”

“Wait: you’re actually... I mean are you?” My jaw hung open and I wondered whether someone with such totally worthless gaydar should even
consider
opening a gay bar.

His grin widened, “I can recite the entire libretto of
Miss Saigon
and bench press one hundred and eighty kilos. I’ve got a season ticket to Arsenal and go every week with my brothers who have known  my whole life and weren’t surprised or bothered when I told them at twenty-two what I’d known since I was fifteen. My dad was a copper, as was his dad, as are two of my five brothers and I’ve wanted to be a copper my whole life. Now you know as much about me as I know about you. Come to dinner with me.”

“Um, I have a pub to run, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“What time d’you close?”

“What? Tonight? Impossible.”

“Tomorrow, then.” He smiled. “I
am
your hero. You offered me anything I wanted.” There was a pause, during which he half blushed; then he smiled. “And all I want is dinner and the chance to talk to the only barman I ever met who stood up to Jimmy Christie and a sizeable handgun.”

“I’m the landlord,” I clarified, “a sucker for flattery and we don’t close till eleven-thirty. Cleared by midnight. There’ll be nothing open by then.”

“But nothing to stop you coming to eat with me. You do eat, don’t you?”

“Look, Fisher,” my nerve was fading, “this probably isn’t such a great idea.”

“Call me Nick. And I think it might be one of my better ideas.”

“Well, last time I checked, you were still one of the coppers investigating a murder in which I was – according to your boss – a prime suspect.”

“Did you do it?”

“No!”

“I didn’t think so. Know who did?”

“I wish.”

“Good. Dinner,” he downed the rest of his drink, smiled at me and saluted. “I’ll pick you up about midnight tomorrow. Dress warm.”

And with that he was gone into the gathering darkness.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

              “Daniel,” Caz announced as I walked back into a still filthy yet strangely cleaner-feeling kitchen, “my family rent out cottages smaller than these freezers. You’ve got some really good beef in here.”

              “Probably some dodgy deal the last bloke did,” I offered, “though at least we won’t starve.”

              “Well we need to eat, so I’ve thawed some in the microwave.” She frowned, “What’s wrong with you? You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”

              I checked out the beef. It was a dark ruby, almost black in places and marbled with almost saffron yellow fat. My mouth watered and I lifted it, a couple of heads of garlic, a sack of carrots, a sack of sweet potato and a bag of onions out of the fridge and began to slice and dice, as Caz stood, arms folded, foot tapping, and waited.

              Finally, I told her: “I’ve just been asked out on a date.”

              “
You
?”

              I bristled. “Well there’s no need to say it quite like that,” I sliced the onions into translucent slivers chucked them into a bowl, put a heavy iron pot on the range, poured oil into it, added a knob of butter and turned the gas on; “I mean, it’s not the most unlikely event you can imagine.”

              “No,” she righted herself, “not at all. It’s just, well...”

              Two carrots were diced and added to the onions. “Well what?” I slid the veg into the pan. They hissed, the onion fragrance filling the room. Caz remained silent as I shook some flour into a big bowl, added salt and pepper, a pinch of
herbs de Provence
and a little powdered mustard, and tossed the chunks of beef.

              “Well, you haven’t exactly been giving off the
I’m available for love
vibe.”

              “It’s not love,” I said, adding diced carrots sweet potato to the pan. “It’s dinner. With one of the coppers who interviewed me this morning.”

              “Not the fat sweaty one,” she frowned, her face a mask of horror.

              “Yeah, fuck you too, Caz. No; not the fat sweaty one. The other one. The cute one.” I pushed the softening veg to one side, turned up the heat and added a fistful of the seasoned beef. The room filled with sizzling and the deep savoury smell of cooking meat.

              “With the green eyes?”

              “Were they green? I hadn’t noticed.”

              “Much,” she teased me.

              I added some more beef, slid the contents of the pot around, frowned and ducked out of the room.

              “So? Where are you going?”

              “To get some more pots. You’ve thawed half a cow, love and I’ll be buggered if I let it go to waste. So I’m going to just cook up as much of this stuff as I can. It’ll refreeze once its beef stew.”

              “No; I meant for dinner. Where are you going?”

              I frowned, “Not sure if we’re going anywhere,” I said, lifting two more pots onto the range and slicing up some more onions.

              “What? Why ever not?”

              I paused; the twelve inch kitchen knife paused mid-air, I frowned. “Let me see:
because he’s a bloody copper who’s investigating me
.
For murder
.”

              “If all he wanted to do was investigate you for murder, Danny, he’d have ordered you down to the station, not asked you out to dinner. I think this is a great idea: you can pump him for information. And other things.”

              “Other things?”

              “Well, if we’re going to investigate Lyra’s murder, it wouldn’t hurt to have the inside scoop on whatever the Rozzers know, would it?”

              I put the knife down. “
Rozzers
? Christ, Caz; this is not the bloody
Sweeney
. Did they teach you that word in the Swiss Finishing School or the Sorbonne?”

              She grinned, came up behind me and put her arms around me. “Danny, I know it’s scary: murder, suspicion, the thought that anyone might fancy you enough to actually go to the trouble of asking you out. But it’ll be fine. You’ll see. So: what’s next?”

              “Dinner,” I nodded at the hissing stove, made a large quantity of roux and searched the scullery for a couple of bottles of red rotgut.

              “And tomorrow?”

              “Like you say, we need to know more. About Lyra.” I nodded at the laptop open on the table. “Leon Baker runs a website called
Lyraworld.com
. I figure that’s as good a place to start as any.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

              “So I called Aubrey,” Caz announced, as casually as she might have explained that she’d been communing with my mum and not talking with Satan’s less agreeable brother.

              “Via, I hope, a fucking medium,” I retorted, wishing I’d brought an umbrella as we stepped out of South Wimbledon tube station into a slow steady grey drizzle.

              “Danny, be charitable. He’s really
awfully
sorry about having to fire you. He thought you were a great mailroom boy.”

              “I was an internal courier; this public school girl
charity
thing really doesn’t suit you; and that fat greasy fuck wouldn’t have known me if I’d sat on him. Which, if I was reading the signs correctly, was exactly what he wanted me to do the night of the 2005 Christmas Party.”

              A bus flew past, its wake making the rain lash vertically into my face.

              “Where the fuck is Masset Street?” I squinted at the map I’d printed off that morning, “And why on earth did you telephone him?”

              “Because, dear heart, he knows everything. Oh, not about politics and technology and stuff. About the things that really matter: celebrities. If there’s any dirt about Lyra, Aubers‘ll know it.”

              “
Dirt
?” I goggled. “What? Apart from the fact that she was the nastiest, bitchiest,
vilest
coke slag on the planet?” I cracked. “So, what did the old gasbag have to say?”

              “He said twelve-thirty and bring a decent Chianti.”

              I stopped dead. “I am not visiting Aubrey St John,” I announced.

              “Yes you are,” she responded, “because – no matter how loathsome you find him, you want to get to the bottom of this thing and you’re willing to take any help you can get from anywhere you can get it; including from Looney Leon, the loopiest
Lyra Lover
on the planet.”

              Leon’s house was number thirty-three. I’d gotten his address and phone number from the contacts page on his
Lyraworld
website and had tried several times the previous evening and a few times this morning to get hold of him, but the phone had just rung unanswered.

              Opening the garden gate, we stalked up the short pathway, conscious of the flickering curtains on number thirty-two.

The rain – a thin steady drizzle of the sort that doesn’t even seem to be
there
, then ends up soaking you to your skin – fell steadily. We stood outside Leon Baker’s door. From somewhere we could hear a high pitched keening. It took a moment before we realised that the sound was coming from inside the house.

“Nice to know someone’s taken it badly,” I commented.

“Should we come back?” Caz wondered. “When he’s a bit less... you know...”

The big difference between me and Caz is that, while she continues to display all the fear of confronting emotions that won – and lost – the British upper classes an empire, I – being from a long line of peasants – have never had a problem with hysteria. Most of my relatives are often on the way into or out of some sort of hysterical fit.

I reached out a finger and pressed the doorbell, which – of course – played the chorus of
I hope you’re happy (but I wish that you were dead).

A wet age passed. Drizzle plastered my hair to my scalp and ran down the back of my collar. Finally, the door was opened. Leon stood in the doorway, his face pale, his hair dishevelled, his naked torso peeking out from a gaping towelling dressing gown which seemed to be covered in a lifetime’s worth of spilled dinners.

“Hello Mr Baker,” I started, in my best
I am not a Jehovah’s Witness
tone.

He wasn’t wearing his glasses and he squinted through red-rimmed eyes at us. He recognised Caroline first. “You’re from the pub,” he said, frowning. Then, turning his squint on me: “wait, didn’t they arrest you. Oh my God!
You killed Lyra
!”

He went to slam the door, but I put a hand out and held it open.

“Leon – Mr Baker – I didn’t kill anyone. The police brought me in because–”

I was floundering and Caz came to my rescue: “Because, as manager of the pub, Danny had to give a statement on the evening’s events.”

“Exactly!” I shot her a look filled with admiration.
I wish I was as convincing a liar as you
, it said.

“Poor Lyra,” he sniffed.

“Yes.” I left a beat for consideration of how much poorer humanity was without her and then pressed on. “The thing is, Leon, we’re trying to help the police find out who did this. And we were wondering if you could assist us.”

A wary look came into his eyes. “Assist? Isn’t this a job for the law?”

Caz tried again. “Leon, we know you loved Lyra.”

She got no further. Leon’s face crumpled in on itself like a deflated balloon. “Lyraaaaaa!” he wailed, wrapping his arms around himself and rocking slightly on the stoop. “Oh my Lyraaaaa.” He suddenly seemed to remember where he was and, focussing on me, a look of rage swept across his features. “Leave me alone!” he shouted, slamming the door in our faces.

We listened as the sound of his crying receded back down the hall.

“Well, that wasn’t a total success,” Caz conceded.

“Leon!” I banged on the door with my open palm. “Leon, please let us in.”

“What on earth are you doing?” Caz asked, horrified that I was raising my voice in the street.

“He’s distraught,” I replied. “He might – well, he might do something stupid.”

“Oh sweetheart, he already did that; the man has spent his life idolising Lyra bloody Day.”

“And now she’s gone,” I reminded her.

“Yeah. He’ll be on to Liza by Friday.”

“Leon!” I bent down and shouted through the letterbox. “Leon, let us in. We just want to talk!”

From the depths of the house I heard his voice, plaintive but firm: “Go away. I want Lyra!” And a new bout of sobbing commenced.

“What did he say?” Caz demanded as I straightened up.

“He says he wants Lyra.”

“Well he’ll have to get a bloody shovel. Oh come on; this is hopeless. The man’s a loon.”

“Wait,” Again, I pushed open the letter box. “Leon, we
need
you. You’re the only one with the sort of knowledge who can help.”

This time, it was Caz’s turn to gaze upon me with admiration.

“And Leon: we can trade. You tell us what you know about Lyra and we’ll tell you all about her last hours: what she ate, drank, what she said.”

“Cheese and onion crisps, PG Tips and ‘Get the fuck out of my room,’” muttered Caz. “It’s hardly the stuff of legend.”

“Maybe not,” I said, standing up, “but it worked.”

Baker’s front door swung open again. His red-rimmed eyes glittered fiercely behind his horn-rimmed glasses and he had changed into a
Lyra Live
t-shirt that was too small for his pot-belly. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand and, ushering us inside, asked “Did she mention me, at all?”

“
Mention
you?” Caz asked in disbelief.

“Leon,” I jumped in, “she talked of little else; how pleased she was to have such wonderful fans.”

“By name.” He pointed down the hall and we traipsed down the dim space and into what can only be described as a shrine to Lyra. “Did she mention me by name?”

We stepped into the living room and, almost simultaneously, gasped. Every spare inch of wall and ceiling was covered in images of the late diva: framed pictures, signed album covers, mounted and framed t-shirts, lithographs, posters; the book cases were filled with magazines, books and DVDs featuring or about the woman whom Leon Baker idolised. On the TV, a live concert was playing.

On the top shelf of the bookcases were four pairs of shoes – a pair of red patent stilettos, a pair of black suede court shoes, a grubby and smelly-looking pair of Nike Airs, and a pair of neon blue platform shoes with huge lime green daisies painted on to them.

Behind these, on three stands onto which prints of Lyra’s face had been pasted, were three wigs – a punky blonde one, a black Louise Brooks-style bob and a bright red asymmetrical item that could only have come from the mid-eighties.

“Wow!” It was Caz who spoke first; I was too busy trying not to vocalise the words that were running around my head:
Buffalo Bill! Buffalo Bill! Run away or die!

“You really are a collector,” I said, unnecessarily.

“Uh-uh,” Leon answered, coming into the room and standing between us and the TV so that he could see the muted performance on screen. “I’m not a collector. I’m
the
collector. My brain,” he tapped the side of his head with a forefinger, “is an
Encyclopaedia Lyrannica.
I have the biggest collection of
Lyrabilia
in the world. This,” he gestured at the room, “is just what I had out this week. The rest of the house has so much more. I rotate the displays weekly.”

“Amazing,” I sighed, trying to turn the subject round to the point of our visit. “Leon, we don’t want to intrude on your grief too much. We can understand that this is a terrible time for you; but anything you could tell us about Lyra would be greatly appreciated.”

“Tell you?” He tore his eyes away from the TV and turned a puzzled look on my face. “Oh, I can tell you everything.”

That was when I spotted the empty bottle of scotch on the floor by the grimy sofa. Great: crazy
and
drunk.

“I knew everything there was to know about Lyra Day,” he continued. “You see, I had to: I was her biographer. My life’s work. But I never thought I’d be publishing it after her death.” A single tear ran down his cheek and dripped onto his t-shirt.

“I thought Dominic was writing her biography.”

Baker turned on me. “Mouret is a
hack
,” he announced, anger overcoming his grief. “Lyra deserved a book written by someone who’s lived alongside her; lived their life
for
her.”

Right
. We were still standing in the middle of the bizarre room, the concert still playing on the TV. I glanced at it. “God, she looks so
different
.”

He smiled sadly. “That was before the second nose job.”

“
Second
?”

“All in all,” he straightened up proudly, “Lyra had three nose jobs, an ear tuck, an eye job, several derma peels, two facelifts and she had her teeth capped. But she always denied having any work beyond the chin job.”

“Chin job?” I had visions of some arcane sexual practice that had faded with the arrival of the internet.

Leon lifted a small framed picture from the wall. “She had a cleft chin. Hated it; thought it made her look mannish.” He peered down into the frame. “One of my treasures,” he commented, stroking the glass almost reverentially. He turned it to me.

It was a black and white publicity shot of a very young Lyra, smiling a wistful closed mouthed smile. I knew this because her name was given, along with the contact details for her manager, Barry Haynes. But beyond that, despite the fact that so much of the face – the slightly beaky nose, the square, almost mannish cleft chin and the hairline – was so manifestly different to the Lyra I’d met, there was something about the almond shaped eyes that had never changed.

“She was pretty,” I commented.

“Beautiful,” Leon corrected me. “She was beautiful. And she was two years older than her official age; did you know that?” He was showing off now, like a precocious kid who can’t keep his secrets to himself. “Born in Epping in 1955 to William and Elsie Chapel – Lyra’s real name was Eliza Chapel – she had one older sister called Doris. William left when Lyra – Eliza as was – was only two and both her mother and sister blamed her. Doris made her life hell. She constantly mocked Lyra’s looks. But Lyra had something special:
that voice
.”

I knew this story. Everyone did: how, by the time she was fourteen, Lyra was singing at working men’s clubs, how she was discovered by her first manager, Barry Haynes and how – it was rumoured – she became his underage girlfriend.

“Haynes worked her like a dog,” Leon droned on. “But all he could ever book her on was low rent, cheap stuff. Lyra, however, was building a reputation. She could sound like anyone from Dusty to the Ronettes. Lots of people tried to lure her away from Haynes. Promised to make her a star. But she seemed to be genuinely under his spell.”

This was new to me. “Then, suddenly, out of nowhere, she dumped him, vanished, went away for a year – nobody knows where why or who with. But when she came back, she had a new manager, she never spoke of – or to – Haynes again and a year later she had a number one single.”

“Leon, do you have any idea who could have killed her?”

“All of them,” he muttered bitterly, putting the framed picture back on the shelf and gazing fondly on it. “But ask yourself one question: why did she suddenly go from being under Barry Haynes’ spell to dropping him like a stone?”