Dead Alone Read online

  ‘You are brilliant, Niaz.’

  ‘So it isn’t a jellyfish?’

  ‘No. It’s one of a pair of silicone implants. With the two, I think we now have the full barcode.’ She took a pen from her back pocket and wrote out the number from the first and then added the one from the second. The middle three numbers overlapped. She stood back. ‘We’ll soon know who she is.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘How behind is LA?’

  Jessie’s mobile rang. It was Sally Grimes, the pathologist. ‘Sulphuric acid. The bones were drenched in it.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘Will that wipe the smile off your DI’s face?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Congratulations, Detective Inspector.’

  ‘Thank you. One more thing, Sally – would sulphuric acid dissolve silicone?’

  ‘Depends how long it was exposed to the acid.’

  ‘Same length of time as the body.’

  ‘Partially probably. Maybe totally, depending on the make. No doubt you’ll be wanting a proper Home Office pathologist to do the tests at the postmortem.’

  ‘Will you assist?’

  ‘If you insist.’

  ‘I insist.’

  ‘Leave it to me then.’

  Jessie looked at Jones. ‘Acid.’

  ‘I gathered. But does that necessarily mean the bones and the implants belong to the same person?’

  ‘One of them fell out of the chest cavity.’

  He weighed it up in his mind. Jessie needed this one to cut her teeth on. And silence those doubting Toms. ‘Well, they belong to someone, let’s find out who.’ Jessie was watching him, her large hazel eyes full of concentration and excitement. Jones continued: ‘I’ve a friend in the LAPD, you can start there.’

  Jessie smiled. ‘Thanks, boss.’

  ‘You’d better start taking notes, Detective Inspector. Looks like you have a murder investigation on your hands.’

  ‘PC Ahmet, would you do it? I’ll get you a temporary transfer.’

  ‘It would be an honour.’ He smiled broadly.

  ‘Right then, follow me.’

  CHAPTER 10

  For the second time that morning Jessie burst into Jones’ office without knocking. ‘You are not going to believe this.’ Again, she didn’t notice Jones straighten himself up. ‘The implants belong to Verity Shore.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Verity Shore.’

  ‘I said who, not what.’

  ‘Sorry. She’s an actress. Well, actually, not really – you know, she’s married to that pop star, um … Oh God, I’m crap with names. He’s had three huge hits, used to play with that band Spunk, went solo and is now enormous … P. J. Dean. You know?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘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

  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 remi
nd 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.

  ‘Very Agatha Christie,’ whispered Jones as the manservant beckoned them to follow. ‘I’ll go first.’

  ‘Age before beauty.’

  ‘Charming.’

  ‘Just getting you back for the hairdresser comment.’

  ‘Actually, we may be dealing with a madman. Who’s to say he didn’t dip his wife in sulphuric acid?’

  ‘Too much to lose.’

  ‘Or a man who has taken his role of modern deity to such heights that he believes himself above the law.’

  The walls were covered with framed headlines and publicity photos of Verity.

  ‘Of course, we could be dealing with an extremely elaborate publicity stunt,’ said Jessie.

  Danny Knight reappeared. ‘Please, keep up.’

  ‘I don’t like dungeons, they make me nervous,’ said Jones as they followed the manservant’s shiny pate. The corridor was lined with fake flame lanterns. Looking at the pieces of material flicker in the heat of the bulb, Jessie didn’t think Jones had anything to worry about. Acid-dipping homicidal maniacs didn’t shop at Christopher Wray.

  The manservant knocked on a door, a voice answered, and in they went. To a bowling alley. Jessie let out a shocked laugh. P. J. Dean looked up.

  She had known she was coming to P. J. Dean’s house, and she had known what P. J. Dean looked like. She could recall his face in her mind easier than her own. He was billboard big. She had known exactly what to expect – except her own reaction.

  Dean’s dark hair was cropped to his head. Not too fiercely – Jessie guessed a number three. His eyes were sea green, each the size of a two-pound coin and outlined by thick black eyelashes. Jessie and Jones walked slowly towards him and the two small boys by his side. The taller one was fair, the younger had dark hair. Both of them wore pyjamas. Neither of them had their mother’s colouring. Bleach blonde. Peroxide blonde. Ammonia blonde. Jessie pushed the smell to the back of her memory. She was about to orphan these children.

  ‘You go on playing, kids,’ P.J. said, ruffling their hair. The older one looked at Jessie and tried to flatten his hair back down.

  Jesus, thought Jessie, that voice. P. J. Dean was also wearing pyjamas. Bottoms only. And an old fraying dressing gown that hung open over his shoulders, chest and stomach. Jessie couldn’t help it. She looked down. Then sideways. Then at her feet. She had spent hours in the gym Thai-boxing, running and doing yoga, and in all that time she had never seen a stomach like it. It was a Fight Club stomach, disappearing into a taut V that pointed indecently to his low-slung pyjamas. As he came forward to meet them he pulled the dressing gown together and tied the cord around his waist. Only when the knot was secure did Jessie look up.

  ‘Sorry about my appearance.’ He held out a hand to each in turn. ‘P.J.,’ he said simply.

  ‘Detective Inspector Driver and Detective Chief Inspector Jones,’ said Danny Knight, pointing to each.

  ‘Chief Inspector, eh?’ P.J.’s eyes narrowed. ‘Danny, watch the kids a while. We’ll be in the studio.’

  Another corridor led to his recording studio. Among other things it was soundproof. One window looked back out to the bowling alley, another looked on to a padded recording room. Dean pulled over some chairs then pressed a button on a phone panel and spoke into it. ‘Bernie, can we have fresh coffee, orange juice and croissants.’

  The telephone replied: ‘On its way.’

  Panels of mixing decks stretched away from them, a million sliders, buttons, lights, dials, switches, plugs, meters, like a giant cockpit.

  ‘What has she done?’

  ‘Excuse me?’ said Jessie, who’d been studying her unusual surroundings.

  ‘Verity. I presume that’s why you’re here. It can’t be something I’ve done. I pay my taxes, I certainly haven’t been kerb-crawling recently, and hotels are too minimal these days to smash up. Which leaves Verity. My wife.’ He spat the last word out, but seemed exhausted by his own venom. He sighed heavily before looking out towards the bowling alley. He waved. The kids waved back.

  ‘Is she here?’ Jessie asked.

  He looked at her. ‘No. It’s a big house, but I don’t think so. You’d know if she were here – the bell never stops ringing.’

  ‘Has she many visitors?’

  ‘Not that bell. She has a staff bell, and she seems to be eternally in need of something.’

  These were definitely not the words of a loving husband. ‘When did you last see her?’ asked Jessie, sitting forward.

  ‘Just tell me what she’s done. I’ll sort it out, pay, whatever. You haven’t arrested her, have you? She doesn’t need that sort of publicity right now.’

  ‘No. The thing is, Mr Dean …’

  ‘Mr Dean?’ he looked from Jessie to Jones. ‘Oh shit. It’s serious, isn’t it?’

  Jessie didn’t know what to say.

  ‘Someone is dead,’ he said slowly. Then added angrily, ‘I fucking knew this was going to happen.’

  ‘Did your wife ever have cosmetic surgery?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Please answer the question.’

  ‘No one’s dead? Thank God.’

  ‘Please, answer the question.’

  ‘Absolutely not –’

  ‘The truth please, not the spin.’

  P. J. Dean’s shoulders dropped. He rubbed his forehead and wrestled with the truth. ‘Where do you want me to start? Lips, hips, eyes, tits. Course, she denied it all and plugged her diet books and exercise videos. What has all that got to do with anyth
ing?’

  ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but a body was found on the bank of the Thames. We traced the silicone implants to your wife.’

  He stared back at her. He didn’t move. He didn’t blink. He didn’t breathe.

  Jessie persevered. ‘I’m sorry, I know this is difficult, but when did you last see your wife?’

  Very slowly, P. J. Dean lowered his head. ‘You said no one was … Is she …? Oh my god, you think you’ve got Verity.’

  ‘Please answer the question,’ said Jessie.

  ‘Um, I was in Germany last Wednesday, got back late on Thursday, she wasn’t here, and now it’s um, Wednesday. So, just under a week.’

  Jessie looked over to Jones.

  ‘That’s bad, isn’t it?’ said P.J. ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying. You’ve found her silicone implants, what does that mean?’

  ‘We found a body, sir. We’re trying to identify who it is. Has anyone in the household spoken to her – the kids, for instance?’

  P.J. stood up and knocked on the window. Jessie noticed he was shaking. The bald man came to join them. ‘Danny, when was Verity last home – and don’t cover for her, this is serious.’

  Danny looked at the police officers. ‘She went out on Thursday night. We haven’t seen her since. She called during the day on Friday, wanting to talk to the boys, but she was incoherent. I’m afraid I wouldn’t put them on.’ He turned back to P.J. ‘Actually, she fired me, I’ve been meaning to mention it to you.’

  P.J. waved a hand, dismissing the idea of his wife firing the man. Jessie wondered whether Verity Shore had a point. Knight seemed a bit shifty to her, a bit in a hurry to go somewhere and yet a little too eager to stay. She gave him a long hard look. ‘So you haven’t seen or heard from her since Friday, when she called you, obviously distressed?’

  P.J. came to Danny Knight’s defence. ‘It’s not like that. Her disappearing for a few days isn’t particularly unusual. Verity likes to party, I like to spend the weekend at home with the boys. We had a rule: she couldn’t bring anyone back here. I don’t mean lovers, I mean … well, shit, you probably know already – the liggers, the party people, the coke-heads. I … well, you know, it was hard keeping track of her. I’ve sort of given up trying.’