Murder Most Fab (32 page)

Catherine
was huddled on the sofa in her dressing-gown, sobbing quietly, and a
policewoman was sitting next to her with a comforting arm around her shoulders.

‘What’s
going on? What’s the matter?’ I asked.

‘Sit yourself
down, Mr Debonair,’ said the policewoman. ‘I’m WPC Helen Jackson, a Bereavement
Support Officer.’

‘Pleased
to meet you, WPC Jackson.’ I took off my leather jacket and sat on the chair,
aware that I smelt of stale alcohol and cigarettes. ‘But why are you here?
What’s wrong with Catherine?’

WPC
Jackson gave me a concerned kook and tightened her grip on Catherine’s
shoulders. ‘I’m sorry to say that Catherine’s boyfriend took an overdose last
night. I’m afraid it’s not good news.’

‘Oh
dear,’ I said. ‘How awful.’

At this
point Catherine leapt from the sofa and flung herself at me, crying
hysterically. ‘Why?’ she wailed. ‘Why, why, why?’

‘It’s all
right, baby. It’s not your fault,’ I cooed, patting her back and stroking her
hair.

WPC
Jackson looked on, impressed by my sympathetic behaviour, I felt sure. ‘When
did this happen?’ I asked her.

‘Last
night, sir. Juan wrote a suicide note, then took an overdose.’

‘I’ve
been out all night,’ I explained.

‘No law
against that,’ said Helen.

‘I knew
I shouldn’t have left those pills in the bathroom cabinet!’ wailed Catherine.

‘It’s
not your fault, Miss Baxter, you weren’t to know. If someone’s determined to
do it, they’ll find a way.’ The policewoman turned back to me as I rocked the
bereaved, broken Catherine. ‘The body has been removed by the pathologist and
the police have examined the scene. I’ll leave you to look after Catherine, Mr
Debonair. We’ll be in touch as we’ll need statements from both of you. And may
I say again how sorry I am?’

‘Thank
you,’ I whispered. ‘You’re very kind.’ I stood up to shake her hand.

‘And,
by the way, may I say, too, that I’m a very big fan of yours?’

‘Oh,
how sweet! Would you like a signed photo to take away with you?’ From the sofa
I heard a suppressed snort.

After
the policewoman left, clutching her photograph, Catherine and I froze for a
couple of minutes, still clinging to each other. Slowly Catherine began to
vibrate with suppressed giggles. I joined her and we didn’t break apart until
we were helpless with laughter and gasping for air.

‘I
thought you were never coming home!’ she said at last. ‘I’ve been giving it the
full Gwyneth Paltrow for about ten hours!’

This
only produced a fresh wave of laughter in me. ‘Oh, poor you!’ I managed. ‘But
I’ve been on a labour of love, too. I’ve had to suck off some dwarf on your
account.’

‘It’s
like being in a Mike Leigh film,’ said Catherine. ‘God, isn’t it beautifully
peaceful? No more Carmen Miranda. No more “Johnny, I love you!” thirty times a
day. I know it might look callous to an outsider, but let’s celebrate.’

I
couldn’t stop laughing and crying at the same time and underneath it all I had
the creeping feeling that some kind of line had been crossed. We really would
stop at nothing, it seemed. I was exhilarated by our power and yet frightened
by it. I felt sorry for Juan yet highly tickled by what we’d done.

Eventually
we pulled ourselves together enough to snort a gram of cocaine and drink three
bottles of Laurent Perrier rosé.

The
battle between Latino lover and Essex girlfriend was over.

Fortuitously, just as my
star was at its zenith, my contract with the BBC came up for renewal. The
latest series of
Shout!
had been a riotous success, but Catherine
decided it was time to move on. ‘I want to see you interviewing Hollywood
royalty, not East 17.’

‘I like
them!’ I protested.

‘You’re
bigger than that now. This is your chance and we must go for it,’ she said. Now
that I had ‘suffered’ over Bernard’s terrible death in public, I was somehow
thought to have grown up and matured.

‘What
else do you have in mind?’ I asked. I wasn’t sure how I felt about abandoning
the goose that had laid such a spectacular egg.

‘I’m
thinking, Cowboy, I’m thinking. Maybe you could be the new Trisha — but without
the Norwich fashions. It’s time you were attracting an older audience. We
should do a photo shoot with you dressed in black and looking serious — in
fact, maybe you should say you’re into classical music and listen to Radio 4,’
she mused. ‘Perhaps you should buy a place in the country.’

It sounded
very exciting and, as usual, I was willing to go along with whatever she
suggested. The two of us were bound up together now. Only one person on earth
knew the deepest, darkest secrets in my life, and that was Catherine. She knew
about Georgie, about Bernard and the truth about Juan’s ‘suicide’. There was no
way that our fates could ever be separated.

The
police had accepted Juan’s death as suicide — after all, the medical evidence
supported Catherine’s story. And, in any case, why would they not? There was no
one to care much about whether or not some Nicaraguan boy had topped himself.
All the official channels accepted the outcome, and two weeks after his death
Juan’s body was sent discreetly home in a black ziplock body-bag. Even more
amazingly, we managed to keep the whole thing out of the press. When one or two
reporters sniffed round the story of another tragic death closely connected to
Johnny D, Catherine did some swift trading to stop it coming out. Instead, I
gave an exclusive interview to a Sunday newspaper about my battle with
depression since Bernard’s death.

‘I
sometimes wonder if you and I are part of a new super-breed of human beings,’
Catherine said, when we grasped that we’d got away with murder once again. ‘Can
it really be so simple, or are we the clever ones?’

I was
certain that Catherine, at least, was one of the clever ones. Everything she
touched seemed to blossom. (Apart from Juan, of course.) The minute I was out
of contract, she skilfully created a bidding war for my services to the
television industry, with the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 slugging it out with their
cheque books. The amount of money being waved around was ridiculous. You’d have
thought I was a priceless painting by Picasso.

The
winning bid was a Friday-night chat-and-music show on Channel 4, which included
a satirical look at the week’s news. It was a three-year deal that would earn
me almost nine million altogether and leave me free to work on other projects
with anyone I pleased. The new vehicle was simply to be called
The Johnny D
Show.

‘You’ve
arrived, sweetheart,’ Catherine said.

‘All
thanks to you.’

‘It is,
rather. Lucky you to have clever me. I think I’m worth forty-five per cent,
easily.’

I might have arrived but
where was I? I still felt very much in transit. Maybe it was the drugs, but I
felt as if I was forever chasing some elusive goal, be it Tim, celebrity, peace
of mind or just the dealer. Wherever I was, it wasn’t the paradise I’d hoped
for.

It
wasn’t that I disliked fame — I didn’t. I still loved the attention I got, and
the way everything seemed to come to me so easily. But away from the
razzmatazz, the parties, awards shows and restaurants, I was, to my surprise,
still me. Catherine and I might have upgraded to a bigger and better flat, but
I couldn’t escape the memories. Sometimes I thought back to sitting on the
veranda with Sammy and Georgie, sipping G and T while they talked about their
glory days, and felt that that was when I had been happiest. The fact that Tim
was in my life again should have made me delirious with joy — and, certainly,
it was what I had thought I wanted. But, like so much else, the reality had
proved different and the bitterness I felt that we couldn’t be together
outweighed the sweetness of our stolen liaisons.

And
then there was the burden of darkness that I had pushed into the depths of my
soul and tried to forget. But at night, as I tossed and turned and tried to
sleep, the faces I wouldn’t let myself think of during the day reared up in my
imagination. Here was Georgie, breathless and desperate for me to kill him
again. Here was Bernard, rising once more from his pool of molten clay, eyes
wide with shock as mud dripped from his fingertips. And here was Juan, pleading
with me, saying, ‘But I love you, Johnny. Why you kill me, huh?’

Only
now did I understand the phrase ‘night terrors’. I longed to tell someone how I
felt. But Catherine, with her steely heart, didn’t understand and I couldn’t
risk losing Tim’s affection by confiding in him. He thought I was a glamorous,
successful star. How would he react if he knew that I was really a coke-addled
killer? I’d lose even the small part of him I had managed to claw back.

So, I
tried to lose myself in my constant companions — sex and drugs. The nightmares
weren’t so bad when I was in someone else’s bed, their arms wrapped round me
and the gentle rhythm of their breathing lulling me to sleep. And I could
forget my depression and hopelessness when I was riding high on cocaine and
speed, manic with alcohol. I took more and more to get the same fleeting
feelings of release and happiness, sinking great wads of cash into my habits.
In all senses, Catherine was my partner in crime, and as greedy for narcotic
highs as I was. Together we went on extraordinary binges that sometimes lasted
days, taking anyone with us who wanted to come along for the ride, dropping
them and picking up new party pals for the next keg of debauchery.

The Johnny D Show
went live to air for the first time at ten p.m. on a Friday night. I
hadn’t managed to stay in on the Thursday, but Anita the make-up artist was on
hand with her magic wands and powders. Anyway, the heavy eyes and unshaved chin
made me seem more grown-up. A new look for a new show. Tom Cruise was my first
guest, and he patted me on the back as if we were old friends. He laughed and
shook his head when I made jokey references to his height and to Scientology.
‘Only you could get away with that!’ he said, tears of laughter running down
his cheeks.

Although
some in the press predicted that I had bitten off more than I could chew in
moving from children’s to adult television, I handled the transition well. In
fact, the later time slot allowed me to reveal more of the sex appeal that I
had kept below the surface on
Shout!.
I flirted outrageously with the
actresses I chatted to on my sofa, and was laddish with the boys. The strand of
the show that was different, and which swiftly proved the public’s favourite,
was a part we called TLC. Here, I would chat gently to someone who was not
famous but who had recently been involved in something either tragic or heroic
or both: a policeman’s widow or a burns victim, that type of carry-on. I
coaxed the gruesome details from them by mining the still-raw emotions of my
own recent experiences. I had been there. I was one of them. The reviews were
unanimously complimentary.
The Times
said I had enough star quality to
light up Milton Keynes for a fortnight. Even Jonathan Ross didn’t get reviews
like that. I enjoyed the shows, knew I was being sexy and enigmatic — but I
wasn’t excited or particularly motivated. If appearing live on national
television in front of millions didn’t get me going, what would?

To my
surprise, I found my thoughts turning more and more often to Bernard. I missed
him. Juan seemed like a distant bad dream, but Bernard had left a gaping hole
in my professional life. I found myself looking for the fidgeting figure in the
flowery shirt at the back of the studio, wanting his helpful advice after every
show. He had always been first through my dressing-room door after a recording,
smiling and nodding reassuringly. He had been bound up in
Shout!’s
success,
of course, but it was me he had cared about. Now it was Catherine who came
tottering in, wearing a power suit and brushing away my questions on how she
thought it had gone.

‘Whatever.
We still get paid even if you kook like Benny from
Crossroads
so who
gives a monkey’s?’

Or she
was already there, racking us out a couple of celebratory lines of cocaine and
opening vintage Cristal, as we pursued our endless quest for forgetfulness.