Stagestruck (30 page)

The criticism hurt. ‘Be fair, guv. Don’t you think if I’d found even a hint of anything like that, I’d have told you right away?’

As so often, his plain speaking had caused more offence than he intended. ‘I’m saying this has come out of the blue, that’s all.’

‘If you remember, I was looking at websites and fanzines. This isn’t the kind of stuff a pop star wants to be known for.’

He backed off a little. ‘You’d think the tabloids would have been onto this.’

From Ingeborg’s tone, she appreciated the shift of focus. ‘She must have kept it well hidden. Thinking about it, all the pictures I’ve ever seen show her with her arms covered up.’

‘Well, you can’t hide much when you’re on the dissecting table. Sealy says he can use ultra-violet light to enhance old scars and give us an idea how long she was doing this.’

‘Can we be certain they were self-inflicted?’

‘They’re classic signs, he says.’

Ingeborg moved on quickly to the key question. ‘Are you thinking she may have damaged her own face with the caustic soda?’ She paused, shocked by her own statement. ‘It changes everything.’

He’d debated this with himself for much of the night. What if no crime had been committed at all and the whole of CID was flat out on a barren investigation? ‘Let’s find out if Sealy is right. That agent you and I met at the hospital – the dragon. What’s her name?’

‘Tilda Box.’

‘Yes. She must know what her client got up to. Where is she based? London, I suppose.’

‘We have her mobile number.’

‘You’ll get more out of her if you meet.’

‘We need someone to identify the body.’

‘Neat.’ Not for the first time, he valued Ingeborg’s quick brain. ‘What time is it? Wake her up and tell her we want her here before they start the PM.’

‘Now?’

‘Call me back as soon as you’ve fixed it. I’m at home.’ He put down the phone.

Raffles was pressing against his leg, reminding him of a duty that couldn’t be ducked. There was barely time to open a pouch of tuna before the phone rang.

‘She’s catching an early train,’ Ingeborg told him. ‘I’m meeting her at the station and driving her to the mortuary.’

‘She’d heard, of course?’

‘Oh, yes. She’s been up some time answering the phone.’

‘You can you handle this, can’t you, Inge?’

‘Getting her to open up? No problem, guv.’

‘She’s a hard nut.’

‘Brittle. I watched you deal with her.’

This sounded like a compliment, but it wasn’t. Cracking a difficult witness was a skill Ingeborg had learned in her days as a journalist. There were times when Diamond suspected she could crack him, too. Right now he wanted her opinion on the excesses of her age group. ‘You hear quite a lot about self-inflicted injuries among young women. Why do they do it?’

‘Guys do it as well.’

He smiled to himself. ‘Point taken.’

‘It’s often a teenage thing,’ she said, and then conceded a little. ‘I don’t know what the stats say, but you could be right that females are in the majority here. As to why, you’d better ask a shrink.’

Perish the thought. ‘I was hoping to get an opinion out of you.’

She took a moment to think. ‘It’s often triggered by stress. Situations they can’t cope with. I did see a theory that they’re suffering such pain from within that they take to cutting themselves to transfer the pain to the outside.’

‘There’s something wrong with the logic there.’

‘I don’t think so. The cutting brings temporary relief.’

‘By pain from within, you mean anxieties?’

‘Out of all proportion. You know how tough it can be when you’re growing up.’

‘Clarion was no teenager.’

‘Right, but what kind of adolescence did she have? She was into the world of pop from an early age. Her growing up must have been distorted.’

‘Arrested development?’

‘If you want to put a label on it. She would have been okay while things were going well but as she sank in the charts she would have been deeply troubled. Her great days as a singer were over. We don’t know when she started cutting herself. It may have been when she was younger, but all the recent disappointment must have been hell to endure.’

‘Are you saying she was immature?’

A sigh came down the phone. ‘Emotionally, maybe. Unable to cope. She had the acting as a back-up, but everyone says she was rubbish in rehearsals. First night nerves plus the knowledge that she couldn’t hack it as an actor must have really got to her.’

‘Damaging her own face would be a step on from cutting her arms,’ Diamond said.

‘I know, but self-harmers use anything that comes to hand, a hot iron sometimes, a lighter, boiling water, acid.’

His flesh prickled.

She went on, ‘And she had the extra incentive that scarring her face would save her from being savaged by the critics and all the bad publicity, which she must have been dreading.’

‘I thought self-harming was done in secret and covered up.’

‘She did cover it up by blaming the theatre.’

‘But the pain was very public.’

‘No one knew it was her own doing. She would have secretly brushed caustic soda on her face just before going on, so the cause of it wasn’t obvious. She had the credit of making an entrance and the agony that followed actually saved her from having to remain on stage.’

‘This is getting too deep for me. We didn’t find any trace of the stuff in her dressing room.’

‘She would have flushed it away, wouldn’t she?’

‘You really believe this, Inge, don’t you?’

‘It makes sense to me, guv.’

‘Why did she threaten to sue? Wouldn’t a self-harmer stay silent?’

‘To make her story stand up. She wasn’t going to admit that the scarring was self-inflicted or she’d have been crucified by the press. So she had to point the finger at someone else. She waited a few days and then let it be known she was withdrawing the action, but without saying why.’

He was being persuaded, and now he added his own twist. ‘I wonder if she ever did instruct her lawyers. That’s something else you should ask the agent.’

‘Do we agree that the threat to sue was all a bluff?’

‘Could well have been, if this theory is correct. Her stay in hospital may have given her pause for thought. The doctors who treated her at Frenchay would have seen the state of her arms and worked out that she had a history of this.’

‘Wouldn’t they have informed us?’

‘Patient confidentiality.’

‘I’m all for that,’

‘So am I, until it gets in the way of a police enquiry.’ He drummed his fingers on the edge of the worktop. ‘And so we come to the even bigger question: does self-harming lead to suicide?’

‘You mean did she kill herself?’ The question hung unanswered for a long interval before Ingeborg said, ‘I don’t think it follows. Most of them are content to damage their bodies without wanting to destroy them.’

‘It’s not a slippery slope, then?’

‘You’d have to ask an expert, but I don’t believe it’s inevitable or even likely.’

He’d done enough theorising. ‘We have no clue as to what caused her death last night.’

‘But we should find out from the post-mortem. Will Keith be sitting in?’

‘He’s got lucky again, yes. But of course we’ll have the usual wait for test results.’

‘Is poison a possibility?’ Ingeborg said, her voice rising in anticipation.

‘She wasn’t shot, stabbed or strangled. There were no obvious injury marks, apart from those we’ve talked about.’

‘So it is.’

‘The trouble is we won’t know if she took poison herself or was given it.’

‘Was there an empty cup or glass in the box?’

‘I didn’t see one.’

‘Most poisons are slow-acting, aren’t they? I don’t think I’m with you on this.’

He let it pass. In fact he hadn’t declared for poisoning or any other form of death. He’d simply complained about waiting for results. But he wanted Ingeborg on side. ‘Hope it didn’t ruin your evening, turning out last night.’

‘It wasn’t a problem. I was ironing.’

‘
Ironing
?’

‘And listening to the radio.’

A domestic scene he hadn’t remotely imagined. He’d pictured her clubbing at Moles. It seemed even the funky Ingeborg wasn’t whooping it up every night of the week.

It was still early. After shaving, he got on the phone again and put in several calls to police authorities in the home counties. He’d given a promise to Paloma that he would follow up on that call he’d made to the Yard seeking information on Flakey White. She was right. For peace of mind, the damage of long ago had to be repaired if at all possible. Everyone he phoned said they would ‘look into it’. He suspected that their priority was at a lower level than his.

His first move of the day wasn’t to the theatre or Manvers Street nick, but south, into Somerset, with Paul Gilbert as back-up and chauffeur. An early call on Francis Melmot was essential.

The sun came out and Melmot Hall appeared dramatically out of an early morning mist, much of the west wing still obscured. A little over a week ago, Clarion had been driven here to be the guest of her unlikely fan and his sharp-asnails mother. What had the pop star expected of her stay in a stately home, and what had she experienced? She hadn’t remained here long.

‘Do you like lemon drizzle cake?’ Diamond asked young Gilbert as they approached the pedimented entrance.

‘I don’t even know what it is, guv.’

‘You’ve led a sheltered life. You could find out today. They’re famous for it here.’

Their knock was answered after a long delay by Melmot himself, wearing an ancient brown dressing gown over bare legs and with flecks of shaving foam around his nose and ears. ‘Do you know what time this is?’

‘Time for some questions about last night,’ Diamond said. ‘You know what happened in the theatre?’

‘Of course. I was there.’

‘Not when I needed to question you. May we come in?’

Melmot held onto the large oak door. ‘Can’t you come back later?’

‘That’s something you don’t say to the police, Mr Melmot.’

‘If you must, then. I wasn’t expecting visitors.’

‘You coped with hundreds the other day.’

‘Only in the grounds. That’s different.’

When they entered, it was apparent what the problem was. The grounds had been trimmed, clipped and weeded for the open day. The interior of the house, a spacious entrance hall with a curved, cantilevered staircase, was like a tip, cluttered with bulging carrier bags, piles of books and junk mail, all covered in dust.

‘As you see, I don’t employ staff in the house,’ Melmot said, opening a door. ‘You’d better come in here.’

They entered a large, high-ceilinged room almost empty of furniture and with patches on the wallpaper showing where pictures had hung.

‘Find yourselves a pew.’

The only possibilities were dining chairs heaped with cardboard boxes containing crockery.

‘These things are waiting for a valuation,’ Melmot said.

‘Selling up?’ Diamond asked, gesturing to DC Gilbert to clear some space for them all. The prospect of coffee and lemon drizzle cake had all but vanished.

‘Not the house. Just some of the contents. You wouldn’t believe the upkeep of a place this size. It’s death by a thousand cuts. Most of my ancestors’ portraits have gone, including, I may say, two Knellers and a Gainsborough. Each time I sell something I have to justify it to my mother, who thinks I’m a wastrel. By the way, she won’t interrupt us if you’re brief. She remains in her room until eleven. After that, she’ll be on the warpath.’

‘Let’s go for it, then. I was told you were phoned some time yesterday by Clarion wanting to see the evening performance.’

‘That’s correct.’

‘You knew already that she’d dropped the lawsuit. You heard from her lawyers, you told me.’

Melmot nodded, wary of what he might be asked.

‘So you were well disposed to the lady?’

‘We’ve been over this before. I told you I was a fan.’

‘But your admiration must have been tested by the lawsuit hanging over you.’

‘A temporary difficulty. Others took it more seriously than I.’

‘Denise, for one.’

‘That’s a matter of conjecture, isn’t it?’

‘Not since we found the suicide note.’ Diamond watched the reaction before adding, ‘Didn’t you hear?’

Melmot blinked several times and turned a shade more pink. Plainly, the Theatre Royal’s bush telegraph had malfunctioned. But then Diamond remembered that the discovery had been known only to Ingeborg, Fred Dawkins and himself. If three members of CID can’t keep quiet, who can?

No point now in keeping back the news.

‘How desperately sad,’ Melmot said after he’d been told, but it was lip service. Anyone could tell he wasn’t either desperate or sad.

‘Yes, if Clarion had withdrawn her threat earlier, Denise might not have taken the action she did.’ Diamond gave a shrug that would not have disgraced a Frenchman. ‘But then a lot of unpleasantness would never happen if we had the gift of hindsight. Getting back to Clarion, can you recall her exact words when she phoned you yesterday?’

‘That’s asking too much.’

‘Near enough to exact, then.’

‘I’ll try. She had my mobile number from a couple of weeks ago when I made arrangements for her to stay here. She phoned me about three in the afternoon. I was surprised and rather relieved to hear her voice.’

‘But you already knew she wasn’t going to sue.’

‘Yes, but not from Clarion herself. There was no hint of reproach. She used my first name and asked if I’d heard she was out of hospital. She said she was staying at the Cedar of Lebanon in Bristol and was wondering if there was some way she could get to see the play she’d had so much to do with. I took it as an olive branch.’

‘Was anything said about the lawsuit?’

‘No, we avoided that. I said we’d be delighted to welcome her and she said immediately that she didn’t want to make an occasion of it. She wanted to come unannounced and in secret. She wasn’t ready yet to meet the cast or any of her fans.’

‘Because of the scarring?’

‘I suppose. We didn’t go into that. I had what I thought was the rather good idea of letting her see the show from a private box. It’s not the best sight-line in the house, but it has the great advantage of being discreet. If you sit well back you’re invisible to the audience.’