Deep Waters (30 page)

He wasn’t actually a fan of pop music; Neville’s passion was for traditional Irish music, with occasional forays into jazz. He didn’t recognise the song Samantha was singing, but could tell she was singing it well. Her voice, he reckoned, was a good one, if not truly great: she had a broad range, swooping effortlessly from high notes to low ones, and a pure tone, without vibrato. She sold the song well, too, strutting across the stage with a sassy bounce and then staring soulfully out across the dark, empty chairs.

And as for her appearance…

That was something Neville did feel competent to pass judgement on, as a long-time connoisseur of female beauty. And in that arena, Samantha was truly astonishing. She was, in his expert opinion, breathtakingly lovely. Creamy skin, huge eyes, a tumble of blond hair, and a figure to match, clad in low-slung tight jeans and a midriff-baring top. God, she was gorgeous. Neville didn’t care whether she could sing or not: he could have sat there and watched her for hours.

But after she’d been through the song a few more times, and stood centre stage for comments from her vocal coach, Samantha disappeared from view. A moment later Tarquin was back at Neville’s elbow. ‘Come with me,’ he beckoned.

Neville followed him through a maze of endless corridors. ‘You haven’t told her, have you? Why I’m here?’

‘No worries. I’ve watched enough cop shows.’

They reached a door with Samantha’s name on it and Tarquin gave a tap.

‘Yes?’ called a voice from within.

‘Sam, it’s Tarquin. I’ve brought someone to talk to you.’

‘Come in, then.’

Tarquin nodded at him to open the door before slipping away.

She was rather artfully arranged on a chaise longue, a glass of water in one hand while the other hand played with her hair. Looking up at Neville, she gave him a beguiling smile and
gestured
to a chair. ‘I’m Samantha,’ she said. ‘What’s your name? And what paper are you with?’

Neville took his time replying, partly for effect and partly so he could just look at her.

Up close, he could see that a measure of her beauty was attributable to artifice—the expertise of her makeup people. But she was still a stunning example of female pulchritude, and he wondered about the question Sid Cowley had posed: what had she seen in the middle-aged Joe di Stefano?

‘I’m Detective Inspector Neville Stewart,’ he said at last. ‘With the Metropolitan Police.’

She frowned. ‘Not a journalist?’

‘No.’ Neville sat down. ‘I’d like to ask you a few questions, Miss Winter.’

‘Sam. Everyone calls me Sam.’ She’d seemingly recovered from her surprise and smiled at him prettily.

‘Sam. Are you aware that your…professor, Mr Joe di Stefano, is dead?’

She bit her lip. ‘I’d heard that. It’s a shame. Very sad.’

Not exactly the reaction he would have expected from a bereaved lover, Neville observed. Maybe she was a good actress as well as a talented singer. He plunged ahead. ‘I need to ask you about your relationship with Mr di Stefano. Or was he Dr di Stefano?’

For a moment she just stared at him. ‘You’re sure you’re not from the press? You’re not going to sell them my story?’

He took out his warrant card and showed it to her.

Samantha was silent for another few seconds, then gave a small shrug. ‘I suppose enough people knew about it,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t a very well-kept secret. We were a bit careless. Even his wife knew.’

‘So you confirm that you and Joe di Stefano were…lovers.’

‘There’s no point denying it. But,’ she added, ‘it was over. Weeks ago.’

That made sense: with the press avidly watching the “Junior Idol” contestants, they’d probably had to cool it when the show began. ‘Which one of you broke it off?’ he asked.

‘I did. It had run its course. And I’d met someone else.’ Samantha smiled to herself.

‘And who is that, Miss…Sam?’

Her smile disappeared. ‘That’s none of your business.’ She
narrowed
her eyes and stared at him. ‘What is this all about, Inspector? Why are you asking me these questions? I didn’t do anything illegal. Stupid, maybe, but not illegal. I slept with Joe di Stefano for a while, then broke it off, and now he’s dead. End of story.’

‘Not quite the end of the story,’ Neville said evenly. ‘Joe di Stefano was murdered.’

‘Jesus.’ Her eyes widened; she pursed her lips into an O and exhaled in a long breath. ‘But…I thought it was a heart attack. That’s what I was told.’

‘Poison.’ Neville decided not to elaborate; it was best if the exact details weren’t made public just yet. ‘So you can see why I have to talk to everyone who knew him…as well as you did.’

Samantha took a sip of her water, put the glass down on a nearby table, then leaned back in the chaise, twirling her hair
round her finger. ‘No one knew him as well as I did. Not for those few months, anyway.’

Neville didn’t understand it. ‘But…why? I mean, why would
you
…?’

‘He listened,’ she said simply. ‘Joe di Stefano may not have been much to look at, but he was a good listener. He had this way of…’ She stopped, then gave him a wry smile. ‘That, and he was great in bed.’

Unexpectedly embarrassed by her candour, Neville looked down at his hands and twisted his wedding ring. It was
not
like him to react like this. But then he didn’t usually interview women as stunning as Samantha Winter. There was something intimidating about that combination of beauty and frankness.

‘So in case you think I killed him,’ she said calmly, ‘you can see that I didn’t have any reason to. We were finished, I was with someone else. If anyone was upset about it, it was Joe, not me.’ Samantha reached for her water glass and took another sip. ‘I think you should be talking to his wife. If anyone had a good reason to kill him, it was his wife.’

Neville was inclined to agree with her, but he wasn’t going to let her off so easily. Her new boyfriend, whoever he was, might have been jealous of her previous lover, and…‘I’m going to ask you again,’ he said. ‘I’d like the name of the person you’re currently…with.’

‘You won’t tell the press?’ She gave him a coy smile.

He was getting tired of this. ‘Not bloody likely.’

‘It’s one of the production assistants. Tarquin. Tarquin James.’

Now it was his turn to gasp in astonishment. ‘Not…
that
Tarquin?’

She laughed. ‘You should see your face, Inspector.’

‘But he’s…’

‘What? A poofter? A screaming queen? I can assure you he’s not.’ She tossed her head and ran her hands through her hair. ‘Tarquin loves to camp it up. So no one will suspect a thing. But believe me, it’s all an act.’ Samantha smiled knowingly, not an innocent young girl but a woman of the world. ‘I can quote
you chapter and verse, if you like. I can tell you what he did to me last night at the hotel. Or what he did in this dressing room, earlier this morning.’

‘No,’ said Neville, getting up. ‘That won’t be necessary.’

‘It wouldn’t surprise me if she done it, our Jodee. Shook that baby, I mean. She’s always had a nasty temper, that girl.’

Lilith sighed as she sat at her desk, reading the competition—one of the other tabloids. Predictable, that’s what it was: going to Jodee’s poisonous mother for a quote. She wondered how much they’d had to pay the grasping bitch to accuse her own daughter of lethal child abuse.

Probably not all that much, if experience was anything to go by. The one time Lilith had talked to Debs Fuller she’d offered her a few hundred pounds, and it had been snatched with
alacrity
. Maybe, though, Debs had got greedier since then.

That had been back last summer, when Jodee was still in the ‘twentyfour/seven’ house. Lilith had taken the train all the way to Newcastle—the ends of the known universe, as far as she was concerned—for the interviews with Jodee’s boyfriend and mother. She’d felt like asking Rob for hazard pay, considering what she’d had to put up with. Not just the interminable train journey, but what followed. The tiny council house reeked of tobacco, and everything in it, from the beat-up furniture to the woodchip-papered walls to the cheap curtains, was yellow with nicotine. If that wasn’t a clear cautionary message about the evils of smoking, Lilith didn’t know what was.

And in the midst of the fug of smoke, puffing away, sat Debs Fuller. Mutton dressed as lamb: jeans that had been cut off just below the crotch, a disastrously drooping tube top, sequinned spike-heeled shoes. Not yet forty, though her smoke-aged skin, tanned as old leather, made her look closer to sixty. At her side was the latest in a string of live-in toy-boy ‘partners’. Probably out of his teens, but certainly not out of his twenties. Tattooed, pierced, pasty. Inarticulate to the point of total silence, which
was undoubtedly a blessing. Craig, maybe, or was it Carl? Lilith didn’t remember, and it didn’t matter. He was probably history already, replaced by another of his interchangeable tribe.

All Debs Fuller had wanted to do was slag off her daughter—in language far riper than the current article indicated—and take the money.

Lilith forced herself, now, to read on. ‘Jodee’s temper—that’s why I weren’t sorry when she left. I had my own baby to think of. Jodee’s little sister.’

She snorted. The only reason Debs had been glad to have Jodee—a free babysitter—out of the house was because of the boyfriend. Carl, Craig or whomever it had been at that time. Debs didn’t like the competition from her younger, prettier daughter.

Well, she’d come into her own now, had Debs, now that the tide of public opinion had turned so firmly against her daughter. She’d better make some money out of it while she could. In a few weeks Jodee and Chazz, currently public enemies numbers one and two, suspected child abusers if not baby killers, would be yesterday’s news. In a year’s time they’d be forgotten altogether. ‘Jodee—wasn’t she the one with the funny hair?’

That’s what bothered Lilith about the job offer from
HotStuff
. Yes, it would be tremendous fun to write about celebrities, to knock them down a peg or two whenever possible. But the world of celebrity was essentially meaningless. There was such an element of arbitrariness in it: Jodee hadn’t discovered a cure for cancer; Chazz hadn’t found the answer to global warming. Neither was a poet, a theologian, a philanthropist. Neither, quite frankly, possessed anything even close to an average allocation of brain cells. They’d both been in the right place at the right time, and that was all one could say for why they were famous and someone else wasn’t. If they’d been Mr and Mrs Joe Bloggs, and had shaken their baby until its toothless gums rattled, no one would have known and few would have cared.

As well as being arbitrary, celebrity was so transient, so ephemeral. Great romances came and went, winners became
losers and losers became nobodies. The public was so fickle, and so insatiable.

And at the end of the day it amounted to…nothing. Precisely that. Conjecture, gossip, rumour. Outright lies, if that was what was called for and you could get away with it. Hard facts had no place in the world of
HotStuff
.

Yes, Lilith liked to stir things a bit—she admitted it to herself. She loved the thrill of the chase. She enjoyed making an impact, having her name known and feared. She wasn’t even averse to pandering to the British public’s appetite for scandal.

But she was a journalist, first and foremost. Not a
gossip-monger
.

Admittedly, the
Daily Globe
wasn’t the
Telegraph
, august and above reproach. Yet Lilith believed—though she was aware some would disagree—that they were on the same side of the
invisible
line which divided both from
HotStuff
. It was a fine line, not easily defined—and it wasn’t just the difference between newspapers and magazines. There was more to it than that: a difference of intent.

If Lilith had to define her ambitions for her career, if she were to project herself five years into the future…

She realised, with a bit of a shock, that she would rather be working for the
Telegraph
than for
HotStuff
. She was firmly on that side of the line.

And yet…

What fun it would be to work for Aggie McLean. To throw caution to the winds, to get down and dirty. The money wouldn’t go amiss, either. She might be able to move out of Earl’s Court, to somewhere more upmarket. She’d meet interesting people. Interesting men, even.

The phone on her desk rang: the office phone, not her mobile. She picked it up. ‘Lilith Noone.’

‘Is this really Lilith Noone?’ said a breathless voice.

‘It is. Last time I looked.’

‘Thank God. I kept saying I wanted the organ grinder, not the monkey. I thought they’d never put me through.’

‘And this is…?’

‘I work at the “Junior Idol” studio. And I have some
information
I thought might interest you.’

More celebrity gossip, Lilith thought, suppressing a sigh. One of the finalists probably had an unsightly spot on the end of their nose, two days before the final—shock, horror. But she reached for her notepad nonetheless. ‘Yes?’

‘A policeman was here this morning. Detective Inspector Stewart.’