Dead Alone

‘She stripped for a tyre ad and got into trouble doing pregnant nude poses for Playboy.’

‘Hardly narrows the field.’

‘She wore a see-through piece of gauze to a film premiere. You couldn’t have missed that!’

He shrugged.

‘You’re hopeless. Where’s Trudi?’

‘On an errand.’

Jessie raided Jones’ long-suffering assistant’s desk drawer and retrieved a dog-eared copy of Hello! ‘She’s in here all the time. I don’t think she can help herself.’ She quickly flicked through it. ‘Here we go, “At Home with Verity”, following her stay in a health farm.’ She looked up at Jones. ‘She’d been suffering from exhaustion,’ she said, handing Jones the article.

‘A lot of that going about,’ he noted drily.

‘You’ve got to feel sorry for the woman: all those parties, all those photo ops, it’s bound to exhaust the girl.’

Jones studied the photo. A leggy blonde languished on a white sofa. A bedraggled man stood in the background, blurred. ‘Not any more.’

‘The thing is, sir, she hasn’t been reported missing. I don’t really want to turn up and scare everyone, only to find out she’s asleep upstairs and LA haven’t quite got their filing system in order. She’s got kids. Two, I think. Not by him – two other guys.’

‘Nice.’

‘She has a habit of leaving one when a more famous other comes along.’

‘And the kids?’

Jessie shrugged. ‘She got custody in both cases, though I don’t know if the respective fathers fought that hard, if you know what I mean.’

‘You think he’d kill his wife?’

‘P. J. Dean?’ Jessie shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. He’s very well respected, though of course you never know what’s true and what isn’t these days.’ Jessie held up a photograph. ‘But if this is Verity Shore, she was decapitated and dipped in acid. That is not the same as picking up a bread knife in the middle of a drunken domestic.’

‘So what do you want to do?’ asked Jones.

‘Pay P. J. Dean a visit. See if his wife is missing and whether they are trying to keep it quiet. They live in a modern house in Richmond.’ Jessie held out the magazine. ‘According to this, anyway.’ The conversation was taking on surreal proportions.

‘Okay.’ He stood up. ‘Let’s go.’

She appreciated that. It meant he would come with her. Lending her the weight of his far superior badge. After all, bones were one thing, P. J. Dean was another.

CHAPTER 11 (#ulink_307df7f4-fbe8-54b9-b4d7-17f4c96ec0ec)

Jessie pulled up to a solid wood gate, twelve foot high. It was painted green. Quite a bright green. Not a very rock’n’roll green. Above and either side of her were security cameras. Jessie leant out of the window and pressed the buzzer.

‘The Dean Residence.’

‘Detective Inspector Driver and Detective Chief Inspector Jones from West End Central Police Station. We’d like to speak to Mr Dean.’

‘Have you got an appointment?’

‘No.’

‘Well then …’

‘We’re not asking.’

‘I see. Could you show me your badge?’

Jessie frowned.

‘Just hold it in front of the box. You can’t be too careful.’

‘Quite,’ said Jessie, holding it up. A few seconds later the gate buzzed and slowly began to slide open. The black granite driveway said it all. Jones and Jessie exchanged glances. The driveway was edged with a raised white wooden border brimming with white winter roses, beyond which lay perfectly mowed lawns. She spotted a couple of five-a-side football goals. A gardener was walking around replacing divots. The atmosphere was relaxed, thought Jessie, not the house of a missing person. Perhaps this was more of an elaborate hoax than she had given Mark Ward credit for.

Jessie eased the car slowly up the granite drive as it curved round to the left. The house was a modern building, three storeys, lowering to two then one. An architectural wedding cake. The walls were white, the woodwork was black. To her right, the single-storey block housed one enormous garage. Jessie had read about P.J. and his cars. A tall sandy-haired boy was polishing a Ferrari. He watched them drive by, hands on his hips, full of judgement and testosterone. Big-boy bravado; she’d seen it a hundred times in the faces of her brothers’ friends. The façade was a prerequisite of puberty, and this one looked like a loose covering. Jessie pressed her police badge to the window and watched the boy take an invisible punch to the solar plexus. When he’d recovered, he pushed himself from pillar to pillar of the garage, matching the speed of the car with wide paces and wide, worried eyes. He clutched the last pillar with both hands; it was doing more than holding up the flat roof, it was holding up the boy. Jessie could only assume that this boy knew something the gardener did not.

‘What an amazing collection of automobiles,’ said Jones.

‘P. J. Dean has a reputation for fast cars,’ said Jessie.

‘And loose women.’

‘I think a poor taste in women. Girlfriends were endlessly going to the press, some from years ago, with pictures of him at about eighteen and stories of him being bad in bed, that sort of thing.’

‘I doubt many teenagers would fare better.’

‘Don’t remind me. Can you imagine, getting famous then all those little mistakes you’ve brushed under the carpet come screaming back at you from the front page of the News of the World or some other gossip-fuelled mag?’

‘I didn’t have you down as the trashy-mag type.’

‘Even I go to the hairdressers, sir.’

‘Not that you’d notice.’

Jones saw the expression on Jessie’s face as she involuntarily ran her hand through her short hair. Three weeks before joining Jones’ team, she had cut ten inches off and had it styled into the spiky bob she thought more fitting for a DI. Although she wished she’d had the guts to do it years ago, she still missed the weight of it, like an amputee. Every morning she woke up surprised it was gone.

‘Stop fiddling,’ said Jones. ‘For a detective, that’s a compliment.’

Jessie parked outside the black double doors. ‘I’ll have to take your word for it, sir.’

A modern-day manservant opened the door. Tall and thin and bald, he looked at them with steely eyes, studying their badges again before admitting them into the house.

‘Danny Knight,’ he said. Jessie wondered if he fancied himself as a bit of a Richard O’Brien. The black tiles continued throughout the ground floor; the furniture in the main hallway was white, but that was the extent of the monochrome look. The walls were painted blood-red and the ceiling was gold leaf.

A young-looking woman peered out from a black side-door, but disappeared just as quickly when Jessie caught her eye. P. J. Dean had a lot of staff. And a lot of expensive ‘art’. Mounted on the red walls Jessie recognised an Eve Wirrel, the bad girl of contemporary art. It was part of a series called ‘The Wirrel Week’, the contents of which had almost become as famous as that shark. Jessie took a closer look at the two and a half condoms lying in a Perspex box. They’d been used. It was titled ‘An Average Week’. Next to it was a black-and-white nude study of Verity Shore. Exhibitionists unite, thought Jessie, then remembered the skeleton in the morgue. The actress-turned-model-turned-serial-celebrity-wife was not so photogenic now.

Danny Knight showed them through another high black door, this one flanked by gold pillars, and led them into a gigantic games room. A screen was pulled down over one wall, DVDs covered another, from the ceiling was suspended a digital projector. A curved seven-seater sofa had been placed behind squashy Ottomans for perfect viewing comfort. Jessie felt the first twinge of envy. A bar in the corner suddenly swivelled, revealing a descending staircase.