Death on Daytime: A Tess Darling Mystery (The Tess Darling Mysteries) (13 page)

“To Jeenie.” Mark raised a toast. “A consummate TV star, who produced the ultimate
, live
finale.” He winced as he swallowed down a bitter gulp. “She’d have loved that.”

“You think?”

“Of course. Doesn’t every great artiste want to finish at the pinnacle of their career? For Jeenie, that was
Pardon My Garden.
Pissed on by the heavens and surrounded by clods.”

He gave a pissed giggle. Tess took a pull on her wine. She couldn’t judge Mark for his unique approach to the mourning process. (Hell, she was wearing a leather mini-skirt and purple ruffles). He
could
get his facts right, though. “Jeenie would have been furious,” she said. “Her big break was just about to come.”

“It was?”

“Come off it Mark. You know as well as I do: Jeenie had bumped your wife off the sofa. Rod Peacock masterminded the whole thing – your new girlfriend was about to become the new face of
Live With.
”

Mark stared at her. “You’re kidding.”

He looked genuinely stunned. “Jeenie
didn’t
tell you?” she said. “I could’ve sworn she’d be singing it from the rooftops.”

“Yeh, well,” he frowned. “I’d not been anywhere near Jeenie’s…
rooftops
in a while.” He grinned suddenly. “Sandy must have been chewing the carpet.”

Topping up their glasses, Mark spilled wine on to the table, and across Tess’ skirt. Wiping splashes of the finest Sancerre from her thighs, she noticed Mark looking at them. What was it the drycleaner below Jeenie’s flat had said? No friends used to drop by – even Jeenie’s boyfriend had stopped visiting. “Mark,” said Tess. “Had you and Jeenie split up?”

“Between you and me,” Mark set down the bottle. “You’re smarter than you look. And to think, I had you down as another blonde wannabe.” He looked hopefully at her chest. She let him. Those guns were her biggest weapon. If she
was
trigger-happy, could anyone blame her?

Growing up with a delicate mother who was half her size and had viewed her daughter’s passage through puberty as akin to the arrival of Godzilla, it had taken Tess years to realise her slightly cartoonish combo of long legs, soft tummy and full bosom drew men like bees to honey. Oddly, it didn’t seem to alienate women too much either. (“I
should
hate you,” confided Di, a few days after Tess joined the
Pardon My Garden
team. “But your hair always looks like you put it on backwards, and you dress like you’re confused: Are you off to turn tricks or change a tyre?” she sighed. “I just wanna wash your face, drop your hem, and introduce you to that nice boy who works in accounts.”)

Faking a confidence she didn’t feel – but hoped two large G&Ts and several glasses of Sancerre might fake – Tess uncrossed her legs. Then she crossed them again, and slid the toe of her leather knee-boot up the side of Mr Plimpton’s trouser leg. “You’ve been through a lot, these past weeks,” she said. “Would it help to talk about it?”

“Off the record?”

“Of course.” Tess held his gaze, having realised she’d just smeared what looked like dog poo up his sock. “You can trust me.”

“I can, can’t I? Nice girl like you, so soft and…” he leaned forward. “Sympathetic. Truth is, I’d never met anyone as hungry as Jeenie before. Oh Sandy, she’s ambitious as hell, of course. Sulks and bleats and bosses
on and on,
but Jeenie was something else. Jeenie just stretched out those vicious, red nails of hers, and
grabbed.
”

It was Mark’s hand Tess was concerned about, however. It was sliding up her inner thigh. “So Jeenie grabbed
you
?” she murmured, bending back his fingers.

“She did, thank God.” Retrieving his hand, Mark ran it through his mane of hair. “I don’t care what story Sandy sold the papers – we only stuck together for the show. Our marriage had been hell for years.”

“But you’ve just had kids! Twins, wasn’t it, last year?”

“Sandy’s idea,” he nodded. “Last-ditch marriage-mender, I thought, but we’d not been trying for a week when she ‘revealed’ our IVF plans to the world. Our ‘crusade to conceive’ brought in 100,000 new viewers – and a pay-hike from the channel. Of course, when the two poor sods
did
arrive, I’d be up in the middle of the night changing their nappies, terrified that any minute Sandy might—” He stopped himself. Forced a wry smile.

“My precious wife wouldn’t even let us get a nanny at first, for fear of “Knackered in Nightie” headlines. I’d drag myself into studio to present a live show on three hours’ sleep, then get pilloried for asking Ed Balls if he had any plans to leave
Coronation Street.
”

“But…” Tess struggled to compute. “Sandy was killing you, you had to get out – so why turn to
Jeenie
? Of all the women you could have… what was the attraction?”

“Greed.” He raised his hands in surrender. “Sheer, naked greed. Jeenie wanted power, she wanted fame – and she wanted
me.
The sex was…” he juddered, “Amazing. That never changed. No matter what other shit went on – she made me feel like I was really something… someone…”

“But you’re Mark Plimpton. You’re famous… you’re—”

“A stupid piece of shit? Isn’t that what everyone’s thinking? I’m a daytime TV tart, Tess, a tired man in orange foundation who sells himself to a couple of million bored housewives every day. Wasn’t always, though.” He gave a half-laugh. “Would you believe I started out as a serious journalist? I wanted to
be
someone. Someone like your father.” As Tess choked on her drink, Mark took a slug of his own. “What was his slogan on
World Inaction..
?”

“
Hunting down the truth,
“ she coughed. “
Freeing viewers’ minds.
”

“I
just got them through the gap between breakfast and
Neighbours
.” Mark’s eyes flared with pain and passion, and Tess felt a responding ache somewhere between her heart and her kidneys. Damn, was there anything sexier than a damaged, six foot drunk?

“I was dying on
Live With
,” he said, “But what could I do? As my
dear
wife was forever reminding me, I was nothing without her… and
she
wasn’t going anywhere. She’ll die on that bloody show,” he laughed. “Just not soon enough.”

The laughter left him. Sinking back into his chair, Mark looked very tired, and very drunk. “Where was I?”

“Leaving your wife…”

“And
Live With…
”

“To set up your own production company,” said Tess. “You named it aptly enough: Exodus TV.”

He raised his glass. “You’ve done your research.”

In fact, it was Miller who’d been boning up on Mark. “Nine times out of ten, when a woman gets murdered,” he told Tess. “It’s her bloke who did it.”

“And your stats are based on–?”

“
Eastenders,”
confirmed Miller. “Plus Mark Plimpton is blond. And that’s just not right in a man. Not if they’re English and over forty. Something’s up.”

Miller had accordingly gone through the office back copies of
Broadcast
(the weekly journal for the TV industry), and discovered Mark Plimpton had been making a big noise about setting up his own TV production company. Mark claimed to have lots of
ground-breaking
ideas he’d long wanted to bring to the screen. His estranged wife Sandy was quoted as consulting her lawyers: “I’ve done all Mark’s thinking since 1993. Any intellectual property is mine.”

It seemed Mark had not read the quote, however. “Exodus was going to put
me
in charge,” he slurred. “I was going to make shit happen
behind
the cameras. At least, that was the plan. Turns out broadcasters weren’t so keen. They didn’t want my
brain
, did they? Just my face on their new, lunchtime quiz show.”

As Mark threw himself back in his chair, his greasy, white shirt parted briefly to reveal a long, deep scar across his collarbone. It made the household star oddly human, less naff. Tess didn’t share Miller’s fear of men with highlighted hair. She was much more democratic. And this dissolute, dangerous version of Mark Plimpton was disturbingly…sexy.

“BBC1, Channel Four, even bloody Sky.” he said. “No-one was ready to take a chance on my ability to produce and direct – my instincts for shaping new talent.”

“Don’t tell me,” said Tess. “New talent like Jeenie?”

“Why the hell not? She was hungry enough for both of us. Jeenie made me realise I had to act – for once in my life, act like a man. So, dammit I took a stand. I put my money where my mouth was, and ploughed the bulk of my capital into a pilot for a topical talk show. You should’ve seen it, Tess, it was real people, issues-led: Twenty-two explosive minutes on Jihad, teenage alopecia and the Green Belt.”

She stared at him. “Hosted by
Jeenie
?”

He stared back for a second, and then slumped, defeated, into his seat. “Perhaps not the wisest move. Jeenie did lack the human touch. The Mujhadin, mind you, they loved her.” Tess snorted into her wine. “It was a crazy time,” he appealed. “My head was all over the shop and Jeenie was very… persuasive.

“I bet she was.”

“Our pilot, however, failed to persuade
anyone
. When broadcasters stopped returning our calls, Jeenie bailed and then set about sinking me.”

He fumbled distractedly for the bottle, but Tess wasn’t letting him off that easy. Crossing her arms, she sent her breasts rising up through the top of her purple ruffle shirt, like two honey moons above a stormy sea. “What did Jeenie do to you, Mark?”

He stared, transfixed. “Can’t say.”

“Yes, you can.” She squeezed harder.

“Jeenie—”

“Yes?” Harder, harder.

“Blackmailed me!” A button pinged off her shirt into his glass. “£50k or she’d go to the papers and talk.”

“Fuckinell.” Tess dropped her boobs. “Talk about what?”

But Mark’s pliability had vanished with her cleavage. “Oh, stupid stuff about
Stop the World
,” he said fretfully. “How Sandy wrote all my cue cards… jabbed me with her pen when I went off-message… confiscated my microphone when we interviewed members of the Cabinet.”

Embarrassing, conceded Tess, but worth £50k? There had to be more. One drinker to another, she filled up his glass.

“It got worse,” he said. “A lot worse.” He ran a trembling hand across the open neck of his shirt, playing with the scar across his collarbone. “I’d told Jeenie things I hadn’t told anyone – bad shit, Tess… shameful. One word from her, and I’d be a universal laughing stock. So I scraped out the last of my company overdraft to pay the bitch. Then I shut up the office, bunked off to a mate’s pad in the Dordogne and communed with the bottle. Two days ago, I turned my phone back on, and got the good news.” He raised his glass. “And here I am!”

As Mark Plimpton started to sing, “Ding dong, the witch is dead,” Tess had to admire his nerve. He’d just conceded a rock solid motive for his girlfriend’s murder – and a resounding lack of any alibi – yet he was acting like a golden boy; one who’d just had the school tart, and escaped detention. “Aren’t you worried about the police?”

“Why?” he shrugged. “They’ve got this crazy Alan Pattison chap, haven’t they? All
I’ve
got is receivers at the front door – and broadcasters running out the back. What’s left?”

“Your twins?” she suggested. He stared at the wall. “How about the dregs of the Sancerre?” She stretched for the wine; he grasped her hand. She saw the distinctive mark of a cigarette burn on his wrist, and felt her breath catch: was Mark one of
her
kind, after all? Had he, too, walked over nightclub coals, and done the disco-dance of death? “Help me, Tess,” he said. “You can take away the pain.”

Tess didn’t know about that. Most of her men ended up bruised somewhere between their balls and their dignity, but fuckit, she was half cut and two-thirds horny. Leaning forward, she grabbed Mark by the shirt. Tilting back on her stool, she pulled him towards her, only for his handsome features to twist into a look of dread.

“Tess, watch out!”

She felt something sharp crack into the back of her head. The rest was black.

I
t felt like someone was smashing in her skull. Relentlessly. Mercilessly. Until her ears bled, and her eyes flew open. With no small relief, Tess saw she was sprawled on her bed in her flat, and the bangs weren’t coming from a prolonged and violent attack so much as a knocking at the front door.

“DOOR,” she said. It hurt. So did lifting her head. So she ground her eyeballs round in their sockets. The flat Tess rented with her mother couldn’t have been touched since the 1970s, and the walls were still covered in swirly, yellow paper. The furniture rubbing up against them was mostly laminated chipboard. Commencing a slow scan of the room, Tess hit a bad thought: She had less photos on show than Mrs Meakes in her old folk’s home. At least the widow
had
pictures of loved-ones, albeit dead. Tess’ shelves bore just one set of passport booth photos – her and Miller in their early teens, heads pressed together against a blue, concertina curtain. Tess’ flyaway blonde hair was stuck to the curtain by static, Miller’s mop of black curls was the size of a pram. But they looked cheery enough. The only other picture on the shelf was an out-of-date coupon from a Kellogs cornflake packet – for a day-trip to Alton Towers. Tess had promised to take Miller. But she’d failed to collect the remaining coupons. She failed at everything, didn’t she? Now she couldn’t even stop that banging at the door. Useless cow, drunken lush -

Her eyeballs got a hot, salt water bath. They moved more freely – rolling over Tess’ knackered CD collection – Complete Madness, Complete Abba, Complete Christmas Hits 2011. (So what if CDs were obsolete? Tess couldn’t throw away music she’d once danced to. They were the good times). On top of the CD stack sat Complete Madonna. On top of Madonna sat a fresh kebab, still in its wrapper. From last night? Tess couldn’t be sure. She needed more intel. Scanning the windowsill above, she spotted a large bottle of Coke and a badly-mauled Snickers. Good, thought, Tess, I’ve eaten.

And what else? Gritting her teeth, she raised her head off the pillow. “Thank the Lord,” she murmured – for there no unconscious man face-down on the floor. There was no conscious man grinning up from the foot of her bed. And if she
had
nicked anything last night, she couldn’t see it. This ruled out traffic bollards, road signs and small dogs, all of which had come home with her in the months since her return to London, and now lived out in the alley behind the overflowing dustbins. (Except for the dog, which Miller had subsequently confirmed was a stray, and professed to take to Battersea Dog’s Home, though Tess had noticed his duffle coat pocket now sometimes moved of its own volition. And got through quite a lot of ginger biscuits).