Free Death on Daytime: A Tess Darling Mystery (The Tess Darling Mysteries) by Tash Bell Page B

he’d subsequently persuaded Sandy Plimpton to use her on
Live With
prompted much media muttering. Muttering it would remain however. Rod Peacock was the Godfather of Soho, and his knuckles bore Russell Brand’s teeth marks to prove it.
    “You don’t intimidate me, son,” he now told Selleck. “Where’s yer fookin’ uniform? And I’m not talking about the one you wear to school.”
    An angry flush spread across the officer’s jawline. His gaze fixed on Peacock. Tess seized the chance to slip out from under it. Sidling into Jeenie’s bedroom, she stifled a gasp: It was like a Primark changing room on a hot, sale Saturday. The bedroom windows couldn’t have been opened in days. The air smelled of BO, bad feet and Ellnet hairspray. A nest of plastic belts, laddered tights and bras snaked over the floor. The bed itself was buried under deodorant-encrusted vest tops and thongs you could cut cheese with.
    Trying not to inhale, Tess scanned the room for something, anything that might reveal more about Jeenie than her predilection for a viscose gusset. Even poor old Mrs Meakes had managed to cheer up her cell at the Happy Cypresses with a few family photos (admittedly of dead people). Jeenie didn’t have a single picture on show of family or friends: no heart-shaped frame around the image of her celebrity steal, Mark Plimpton. The only souvenirs on her bedroom mantelpiece were some bar-room matches and her agent’s business card.
    Outside, Rod was getting increasingly rancorous. Tess heard him sink on to the couch – and rise to Selleck. “Why
shouldn’t
I be ’ere, Officer? Jeenie were like a daughter to me, d’yer hear me? A
daughter.”
The couch protested. “But shaggeable.”
    “Mr Peackock, are you saying—”
    “Oh, I never touched ’er, lad! Never mook with the merchandise, do I? Especially as Jeenie’s price was about to go oop big time. That girl had just landed herself a
very
big break, I swear. Her killer ‘ad one
hell
of a sense of timing.”
    “Go on.”
    “I can’t. Contractual reasons.” Even from the bedroom, Tess could hear Peacock shift his position. “I’m here
purely
to honour my precious girl, Officer, the star in my sky.”
    Leatherette squeaked. Tess shuddered. It was one thing to find a man of Rod’s sinister clout skulking round Jeenie’s tights drawer, but to catch him turning sentimental? It was like hearing Vlad the Impaler ask for ‘an ickle kiss’. What
had
he been after?
    Casting a last look over the mess on his dead client’s bed, Tess recognised Rod’s coat. A flashy, sheepskin thing, she’d seen it on him a few times. (The diminutive agent wore it for stature, along with his high hair and built-up heels). Whatever he’d been up to in here, Tess mused, it had been hot work.
    And hot work, Tess knew, bore results.
    Checking the door, she rifled expertly through Rod’s coat. (It had long been part of Tess’ Nightclub Code to frisk any man who pressed a drink on a girl, and then expected a swift hand shandy). Expensive-looking and fat, Rod’s wallet bulged with £50 notes and business cards, pressed on the talent agent by everyone from DIRECTOR GENERAL OF THE BBC to Sally-Ann, Dancer and Nail Technician (Accredited).
    Nothing to do with Jeenie.
    Returning the wallet, Tess went back through Rod’s coat. She fished out a hefty ring of keys, a silk hankie studded with spat-out nuggets of gum and then, from the depths of Rod’s inside pocket, an envelope. Bearing an indecipherable smudge of postmark, it was addressed to Jeenie Dempster, here at 390A Bayswater Road. Tess thought back to DS Selleck, stooping downstairs to go through today’s post. No wonder he’d found nothing: Rod had got there first.
    He’d just not had time to open the envelope. Outraged at the agent’s brazen requisition of evidence, Tess ran a finger under the loosely-gummed flap, and pulled out the contents: a folded sheet of lined paper with a few blue biro words stabbed into it. ‘
Why