Dead Beat

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 hell 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. Nobody 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 hell 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 shirt.

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

'She's dead, isn't she,' he whispered hoarsely.

'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 realised.

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 passing 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 entry-phone when I butted in and said curtly, 'Let them in. Jett knows all about it.'

She pressed the gate release button 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 flashing blue light on top of their car washing 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 fuck is going down?' I glanced up to see Kevin leaning over the gilt banister, looking as

Dead Beat • 93

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 hell are you doing here, Brannigan?' he ranted as he turned the corner of the stairs. Then he saw the cops and stopped dead. 'Oh shit, 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 hell 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 assistant 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?'

Gloria ran through her mental checklist, then her hand flew to her mouth. I really didn't think anyone did that any more. 'I forgot Micky,' she wailed. 'I'm sorry. Micky Hampton is Jett's record producer. He'll probably be in the studio – that's in the cellar.'

'Don't worry, it's hard to remember everything at a time like this. You've obviously had a bit of a shock. I'm sorry to ask this, but we're going to have to interview everyone as soon as possible. I'd appreciate it if one of you ladies could get everyone together,' he said.

'I'll go,' I piped up. 'I think Gloria should be with Jett right now.'

The look she shot at me was pure poison, but there was really nothing she could do about it. After all, she was the one who'd set herself up as Jett's little helper. The policeman nodded and I swiftly got directions from Gloria. Jett clearly wasn't going to let me walk away from this murder. And if I was going to have to investigate these choice specimens, I at least wanted to see how they reacted to the news.