Deep Waters (6 page)

He looked at his watch. No one was expecting him at the police station for the rest of the day, so he would have time to find a record shop and get Chiara’s Karma CD. He might even have a chance to see Callie. It was her day off; perhaps they could meet up and have lunch together before he went on to work. He’d give her a ring straightaway and see if she was available.

Mark stopped in a doorway and switched his phone on. There was an immediate indication that he’d missed a call and there was a message waiting.

He recognised the number. Work, not Callie. Mark sighed and punched a button to listen to the message.

He was to ring DCS Evans immediately, the message said. That didn’t sound very promising.

Mark’s pessimism was well placed. Evans’ secretary put him through straightaway, and Evans tersely explained what was required of him.

‘It’s going to be a high-profile case,’ he said. ‘The press are already on to it. Jodee and Chazz are huge, you know.’

‘Jodee and Chazz?’

Evans sighed. ‘I don’t get it, myself. But the wife…Mrs Evans… she loves them. She can’t get enough of “twentyfour/seven”.’

Mark was aware of ‘twentyfour/seven’; he’d heard of Jodee and Chazz and knew something of their notoriety. But he couldn’t help asking. ‘Don’t any of these people have last names?’

That raised a weary chuckle from Evans. ‘As a matter of fact they do. In this case it’s Betts. Fairly unglamorous, I suppose. And it seems to be a mark of celebrity status not to
need
a last name.’

Elvis. Madonna. Somehow, reflected Mark, Jodee and Chazz didn’t have quite the same iconic ring.

‘Anyway, no time to waste. You need to go to their place ASAP. It may take a while for DI Stewart to get there.’

Neville! ‘But he’s on his honeymoon!’ Mark protested.

Evans snorted. ‘Not any more, he’s not.’

They really weren’t taking any chances with this one, then. What the American cop shows which Mark watched sometimes, with guilty pleasure, called a ‘red ball’. Mark made a half-hearted attempt to get out of it. ‘Wouldn’t Yolanda Fish be better than me, Sir?’

‘DC Fish? We’re talking about a dead baby here, Sergeant Lombardi. Think about it.’

Mark thought about it. Yolanda Fish, ex-midwife.
Tenderhearted
in the extreme. She took her cases very much to heart, got involved with the families as if they were her own. Usually that was a great strength; Mark could see that in this instance it would be asking too much of her. She wouldn’t be able to maintain any objectivity around young parents who had just lost their baby.

And maintaining objectivity, while remaining sympathetic and helpful, was what the job of a Family Liaison Officer was all about.

Mark didn’t need to ask why the police were involved in this very private, yet potentially highly public, tragedy. A baby was dead. It could have been an unpreventable cot death, just one of those inexplicable things that happened all too frequently to families round the world.

Or it might have been something else.

If it
was
something else, Neville and his colleagues, including the pathologist and the coroner, would get to the bottom of it. But not without pain for a great number of people.

Mark sighed. He wasn’t going to get out of this one, it was clear. Jodee and Chazz: at least that might raise his street cred with Chiara. Though, as a fond uncle, he hoped that her mother hadn’t allowed her to watch their much-publicised frolics in the hot tub…

The other good thing was that the celebrity couple’s home was a mere stone’s-throw from Callie, just round the corner from All Saints’ Church and vicarage. If this case extended for a few days, he might have one or two opportunities to see her.

On the way to the Central Line Tube station, he gave her a quick call, mobile to mobile.

Callie sounded glum. ‘My mother,’ she said. ‘I’m going to have lunch with her. Peter’s coming too, so maybe it won’t be so bad.’

Mark had met Callie’s mother—though just once, at a stilted dinner party—so he was in a position to sympathise. And he’d heard a great deal about Laura Anson’s unrelenting negativity, her
self-absorption
, from Callie. ‘Poor you,’ he said. ‘But if you’re going past a record store at some point, maybe you could do me a favour.’

‘What do you need?’

‘Chiara’s birthday tomorrow. Apparently she wants the latest album by Karma.’

‘Karma who?’ Callie queried.

Mark chuckled. ‘Well might you ask. Just Karma, apparently. Doesn’t it make you feel old,
Cara mia
?’

By the time Neville Stewart arrived at the Betts’ Bayswater
mansion
, he was not in the best of moods.

His idyllic honeymoon had been cut short, and that wasn’t the worst of it. Triona hadn’t spoken to him on the flight back to Luton, so things were only going to go downhill after this. What a way to start married life.

There had been a police car waiting for him at the airport. He’d had to put Triona in a taxi, along with their luggage, and go straight to Bayswater. Bloody Bayswater—just about the last place on earth he wanted to be at that moment.

Neville’s mood wasn’t improved by the knot of tabloid
journalists
and photographers clogging the pavement in front of the house. At the sight of the police car, and him emerging from it, they all surged towards him with eager faces, and he knew that they viewed him as little more than a momentary diversion from the boredom of the stake-out. ‘No comment,’ he said tersely, shouldering his way to the door.

He was, at least, relieved and grateful to find Mark Lombardi on site. ‘Doing your usual hand-holding/tea-making job, I see,’ he said when Mark opened the door to him.

Mark looked hurt, and as he stepped inside Neville instantly repented his sharp tongue.

‘I think my job involves a bit more than that,’ Mark said stiffly.

‘Sorry, mate. I’m just so royally pissed off to be here.’

‘I’m not surprised. Your honeymoon…’

Neville didn’t want to talk about his honeymoon. Not now. ‘Fill me in, then,’ he said. ‘Before I meet them. What are they like?’

‘Distraught, obviously.’ Mark lowered his voice, though they were not likely to be overheard. ‘Not coping very well.’

‘But what are they
like
? I don’t think I’ve ever met a real celebrity before.’

Mark scratched his cheek. ‘Well, Jodee seems very…I
suppose
brittle is the word. A bit manic. And at the moment she’s not looking as glam as her photos,’ he added. ‘I suppose that’s to be expected.’

‘What about Chazz?’

‘Quiet,’ Mark said carefully. ‘Not much to say. Polite, but… like he’s not really
there
somehow.’

From what Neville had heard and read about Chazz, the winner of ‘twentyfour/seven’ wasn’t reputed to be the sharpest knife in the drawer. The public had loved him for his sweet nature—and his looks, of course—rather than his brains.

Mark hesitated for a second. ‘And he’s beautiful.’

‘Beautiful?’ That seemed an odd word to use. Handsome, maybe. Attractive. Good looking. ‘Well fit’, or some other such current slang.

‘You’ll see,’ said Mark.

Neville did see, though he considered himself far more of an expert in female pulchritude than masculine beauty. Beautiful was the only word for it. The shape of his face, the perfectly
symmetrical
alignment of his features, the extraordinary eyes…When Chazz was on ‘twentyfour/seven’ his head had been shaved; now his hair had grown out in soft curls. It was a face that Neville now
realised he’d seen on hundreds of billboards and adverts—most recently at airports. Selling perfume, selling clothing.

‘This is Detective Inspector Stewart,’ Mark announced by way of introduction.

‘I’ll need to ask you a few questions,’ Neville said to the space between pacing Jodee and seated Chazz. His voice was as apologetic as he could manage, given his resentment towards the disruption to his life. It wasn’t their fault, he reminded himself.

‘But why?’ Jodee turned a ravaged face to him, only half seeming to take him in. ‘It’s like you think we killed her. I mean, can’t you just like leave us alone? All of you?’

Mark intervened with a conciliatory gesture in her direction. ‘I did explain. We have to find out—’

‘Our Muffin!’ Jodee keened. ‘Why would we kill her?’

‘No one thinks you killed your baby,’ Neville stated, perhaps more loudly and forcefully than he’d intended. What he needed now was a bit of co-operation from the bereaved parents, not a load of resistance to being questioned. Maybe he would have to explain it to them in words of one syllable. ‘We need to find out what happened to her,’ he said. ‘For you, as well as for us.’

Chazz spoke for the first time, so quietly that Neville strained to hear. ‘They took her away,’ he said. He crossed his arms across his chest, almost as though he were cradling a baby. ‘And her things.’

‘Her bedding!’ Jodee added shrilly. ‘The police took it all! And it didn’t half cost a pretty penny, like, that bedding. It came from Paris, not bloody Mothercare!’ Her words ended on a wail; she covered her face with her hands and sobbed.

This wasn’t going well. Neville looked towards Mark and caught his eye; Mark shrugged helplessly.

But it was as though Jodee’s last outburst had released
something
in her. After a moment of noisy tears she lowered her hands and looked properly at Neville for the first time. ‘I understand,’ she said. ‘You’re trying to help.’

Thank God for that. ‘Yes,’ he confirmed. ‘We’re trying to help.’ Maybe now they could start getting somewhere.

While Neville led Jodee and Chazz though all of the requisite questions, Mark escaped to the kitchen to make a fresh pot of tea. With any luck, he thought, they’d have this all sorted quickly. The pathologist would perform the post-mortem, as a matter of some urgency, and it would almost certainly show that the baby’s death was unfortunate but not suspicious. Cot death. Sudden infant death: SIDS, that’s what the death certificate would say. That great catch-all which meant that the pathologist and the coroner didn’t really know why Muffin Angel Betts had died at the age of less than two months.

The press would have a field day, of course. No matter what the pathologist found and the coroner decided, the media would make their own judgements and freely pass them on to the avid public. If they decided to spin it against Jodee and Chazz and make them the scapegoats, there was so much they could accomplish with innuendo, falling well short of libel but equally damaging. They could suggest—subtly, of course—that Muffin had been neglected, underfed or overfed, allowed to sleep on her stomach, swaddled in too many blankets. Or, perhaps more likely, they could go all out with sympathy for the celebrity parents, so cruelly deprived of their beloved baby.

There was one consolation, Mark reflected. Life for Jodee and Chazz would never be the same again, but the media would soon move on to the next sensation. Maybe Karma would meet a new—preferably unsuitable—man, or some fresh face would win ‘Junior Idol’. In any case, the public’s appetite for celebrity gossip would shortly find something else to feast on.

Neville’s involvement with the case could be fairly
short-lived
—perhaps not much more than twenty-four hours or so. Once the post-mortem had been performed, and the
paperwork
completed, he could sign off on it and even resume his honeymoon.

But would he, Mark, be able to walk away quite so quickly? He wasn’t sure.

Chazz’s mother was at the kitchen table, Mark discovered, nursing a cup of coffee. She looked up as Mark came in.

‘Coffee’s there, if you want.’ She gestured towards a jar of instant granules.

‘I’m going to make some tea,’ he said, brandishing the empty pot.

‘Whatever.’

Mark hadn’t quite decided what to make of Brenda Betts. On the whole, he was inclined to view her as a good thing. Although she was clearly grieving herself, she was easier to deal with than the taciturn Chazz or the hysterical Jodee.

The phone rang. Brenda didn’t even raise her head from her coffee.