Love Him to Death

  For Viv, who got the ball rolling…

  The puppy raised its head and sniffed the air. Manure? Manure! Wowee! That meant cows! Ancestral memories stirred. Chase them! Bite them! Round them up! It growled, peeling its lips back to reveal an impressive set of teeth.

  “Don’t be daft, Dinkum.” Mick, the dog’s owner, spoke sternly. The pup looked up guiltily then grinned in apology, tongue lolling out sideways.

  “You’re not in the Outback now, mate. Don’t you start getting ideas. Heel.”

  The pup wagged its tail, waiting obediently by its master’s side as he opened the gate into the meadow. A path led up over the hill then down to a wooded copse, where the bluebells would be just starting to bloom. Mick’s heart lifted at the prospect of seeing them: he loved this time of year.

  The herd had been grazing quietly by the far hedge, but when they saw the man and dog they ambled closer, propelled by bovine curiosity. By the time Mick neared the top of the hill, fifty or more cattle had surrounded him, snorting, blinking, huffing clouds of steamy breath into the morning air. He stopped to admire them.

  Maybe someday he’d have a herd like this. If things worked out, he’d get a nice place in the country. Once everything had blown over. Once Bill had seen sense… The situation was driving Angelica mad. She was already right on the edge. Suppose she totally flipped? What then? He didn’t want to think about it…

  Mick flapped his arms and the cattle skittered aside. He and Dinkum continued their walk. The sun crested the hill, blinding them for a moment. Neither saw the figure coming towards them, an ivory-topped walking stick raised like a club.

  One well-aimed blow was all it took. Mick didn’t have time to dodge or scream; he didn’t have time to make any kind of noise. One minute he was standing upright, the next he was lying still, blood pouring from his head. The pup wagged its tail uncertainly. Was this a game?

  The sudden violence had unsettled the herd. So when Mick’s assailant began shouting and waving the stick through the air in sweeping circles, they didn’t just skitter, they stampeded. And with no master’s command restraining him, Dinkum did what comes naturally to an Australian cattle dog: he gave chase, snapping at their heels, driving them across the field, then back and forth, once, twice, three times, until their hooves had obliterated all evidence of the blow that had felled his master.

  Mick’s killer watched from the safety of the stile. A good morning’s work. The police would be sure to conclude that this was the scene of a tragic accident. Natural causes. It was death by misadventure, no doubt about it.

  Table of Contents

  Dropping Everything

  Mr Nice Guy

  The Uninvited Guest

  Angelica’s Landing

  Which Witch?

  Venus and Adonis

  Bouffant Hair

  The Blushing Bride

  Natural Causes

  A Sting in the Tail

  Beach Party

  Killer Heels

  Mick

  No More Mr Nice Guy

  dropping everything

  My name is Poppy Fields. When we got pulled out of school for a few days and whisked off to a tiny Greek island, my friend Graham was none too pleased about what he described as “the potential long-term damage to our education”. I, on the other hand, was absolutely delighted – and not just because we were missing a whole bunch of End of Term Tests and Assessments, although I have to admit that helped. No, it was because we were going to meet Bill Strummer, real-life rock star … and witness his wedding! Right up close and personal. The world’s press had worked themselves into a frenzy about it and I knew it was going to be a mind-blowingly sensational event. But little did I know quite how sensational…

  It was July and the end of the school year was approaching fast – although nothing like fast enough as far as I was concerned. My mum, Lili, who’s a landscape gardener, was away doing demonstrations at a flower show and I was staying at Graham’s. His dad was at some IT conference in France so his mum, Sally, was in sole charge of us. We were sitting in their kitchen on a Sunday afternoon, and this being a typical English summer, the weather was dismal. The rain was lashing against the windows and the wind was howling around the house. We’d been doing the “Hubble, bubble, toil and trouble” scene from Macbeth at school and for homework were meant to devise a witch’s spell. Graham was writing a list of ingredients but I couldn’t concentrate. I was watching his mum prepare the tea with a sense of impending doom.

  Sally is a freelance chef. She does all kinds of stuff: private parties, big business events, weddings, christenings, funerals. Sometimes she’s really busy and sometimes she’s not. This was one of the slack times and she’d taken a local butcher up on his offer of work. She was putting together a recipe leaflet for him, entitled Offally Fine, which highlighted the million and one lovely things you could do with innards and entrails – liver, kidney, heart, tongue, that kind of thing. She’d been experimenting on me and Graham since I’d arrived, and while the olive-and-kidney tartlets had proved surprisingly tasty, the tripe-and-onion trifle had been a real stomach turner. At that precise moment she was pouring raw minced liver from the food processor onto a baking tray. It looked like she’d just committed a particularly nasty murder and the tea situation was not looking good.

  Then the phone rang and the world turned upside down.

  Sally rubbed her hands on her apron and plucked the receiver off the wall. She hadn’t even opened her mouth to say hello when a voice blasted down the line, so urgent and demanding that we could hear it right the way across the room.

  “Sally? Sally, is that you?”

  Sally held the phone at arm’s length to avoid damaging her eardrum. “Erm… Yes, it’s me. Who is this?”

  “Tessa! Tessa Whittam. You remember. From college?”

  “Oh, Tessa,” Sally looked puzzled. “Yes, of course. I haven’t spoken to you in… Gosh, how long is it?”

  “Never mind that. I didn’t ring for a chat,” snapped the invisible Tessa. “I’m desperate. You’ve got to help me.”

  “Well … yes…” said Sally, sounding apprehensive. “I suppose so. If I can. What’s the problem?”

  “I’m Bill Strummer’s personal assistant.” Tessa paused, clearly expecting a reaction. Sally’s mouth had dropped open but she didn’t make a sound. Graham and I looked at each other, eyebrows raised. All thoughts of Shakespeare and spells were instantly wiped from our minds.

  “You have heard of him?” asked Tessa suspiciously.

  “Hasn’t everybody?” squeaked Sally.

  You’d need to have been living in the darkest depths of the Amazon for the last fifty years not to have heard of Bill Strummer. In fact, even that might not work: he was always doing stuff like campaigning to save the rainforests.

  “Ohmigod!” Sally sighed girlishly. “I had the biggest crush on him when I was at school!”

  “Well, you’ll know about his wedding, then.”

  “Yes, of course. It’s been in all the papers. Tomorrow, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Twelve noon. Now look, my head chef’s gone down with some hideous bug. I need someone competent over here right now, and I seem to remember you being fairly sensible. I’ve got all the staff and all the ingredients: I just need you to take charge. I’ll email the details – you have got a laptop, I take it? I’ve booked you on the 19.14 to Athens. Bill’s helicopter will meet you when you arrive. I’ll send a car to collect you now.”

  “But I’ve got Graham…” protested Sally limply.

  “Who?”

  “My son. And his friend Poppy is staying with us… I can’t just—”

  “Bring them,” snapped Tessa.

  “It’s term time. They’re at school.”
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  “Where?”

  Sally told her.

  “Leave it to me, I’ll sort it out.”

  “But…” Sally insisted. “I can’t just drop everything.”

  “There’s a fee involved.” Tessa’s voice dropped and a note of low cunning crept in. She muttered something. It was too soft for me and Graham to catch, but whatever she said, it was enough to make Sally clutch the work surface for support. First the colour drained from her face and then she flushed scarlet. “Yes, well,” she said briskly, “that sounds more than generous. We’ll be ready and waiting. See you in Greece.”

  Twenty-three minutes later a stretch limousine pulled up outside and we all piled in. Sally hadn’t even had time to clean up the kitchen – we’d only just managed to dash over to my place to grab my passport and swimsuit. The last thing we saw as we left were her bloody fingerprints on the phone.

  If I’d been the superstitious type, I might have taken that as a bad omen.

  mr nice guy

  Sun. Sea. Scandal. What more could anyone want? I was in seventh heaven by the time we reached the airport, and that was before I found out we’d be flying first class. The limousine dropped us off in departures and we stopped at the newsagent’s, where I bought all the celebrity magazines I could find. I also grabbed a few tabloid newspapers, all of which had photos of Bill Strummer plastered across them.

  “Background research,” I told Graham in response to his sideways look. “We need to know all we can about these people.”

  “We’re hardly likely to discover anything edifying from that kind of reading material,” Graham sniffed disapprovingly as he paid for his copy of Computing Weekly.

  We checked in without any problems and were ushered through to the first class lounge, where pleasant music poured gently from concealed speakers in an attempt to soothe nervous passengers. It completely failed to work on Sally. She sat hunched over her laptop, frantically scanning the sixteen-page email Tessa had sent, muttering under her breath, “Nuptial Nibbles? Blissful Beach Barbecue? What’s that supposed to mean? For how many people? Oh lord, how am I going to manage that? I’ve only got one pair of hands.”

  “We can help,” Graham offered.

  Sally patted Graham’s hand absently and continued to scan the email. “That’s very kind, love…” She didn’t finish her sentence.

  Graham’s cooking skills aren’t exactly legendary. He can microwave a ready meal as well as the next person, but that’s about it. When we made scones once in food technology his batch emerged from the oven as hard and black as lumps of coal. (Admittedly mine weren’t any better, but I’m not the child of a chef.)

  “Maybe we could chop stuff up for you,” I said. “Peel cucumbers, shred lettuce, that kind of thing?” Surely even we couldn’t ruin salad vegetables?

  “Thanks,” smiled Sally. “But Tessa did say she had the right staff. I’m sure I’ll manage. Somehow.” She turned back to the laptop with an anxious frown.

  Graham and I sprawled on the comfy sofas and were served Coke and crisps by flight attendants with insanely wide grins. We’d just finished our second drink when the call came to board, and five minutes later we were installed in the first-class section of the plane. Sally carried on reading Tessa’s email, turning whiter and whiter by the second. Graham buried himself in his magazine and I settled down with the newspapers to find out all I could about our host.

  I knew that Bill Strummer was getting pretty old but that his music was as popular as ever. My mum played his stuff almost every time we went anywhere in the car. When Sally had called her from the limo to explain about our unexpected trip, she’d let out a squeal of envious rage. The she’d said with a sigh of longing, “He doesn’t want his garden doing, does he? Put in a good word for me, would you, Sal?”

  Even though he was a bit wrinkly about the edges, Bill was still spectacularly handsome. But it wasn’t just the hit songs and the movie-star profile that made him famous: he was the music industry’s Mr Nice Guy. Despite being an absolute megastar, he’d never forgotten his poor-lad-from-the-backstreets-of-London roots. He gave loads of money to charity, was famously friendly to journalists, polite to photographers, kind to his staff and, until very recently, blissfully happily married. He’d never had kids: his wife Angelica was rumoured to be a bit of a control freak who didn’t want anyone coming between her and her husband. She’d toured the world with him, cooking up deliciously exotic meals for the band and crew at his concerts and producing several cookbooks to prove it. They had been a devoted, golden couple with a relationship as rock solid as Mount Everest.

  Then disaster had struck – at least for Angelica. At the beginning of June this year her well-past-fifty-massively-rich-and-famous husband had met a totally-obscure-but-young-and-pretty cocktail waitress – and dumped his wife-and-childhood-sweetheart as fast as a fresh cowpat. After a whirlwind courtship of precisely three and a half weeks, Bill Strummer had divorced Angelica and proposed to Josie Diamond. Hence the hastily-arranged-but-highly-romantic wedding on a tiny Greek island that we’d be heading for the second the plane took off.

  Josie Diamond had now been written about in every gossip column going, and they all went something like this: That girl’s barely twenty if she’s a day – young enough to be his daughter! An absolute nobody who’d do anything to get famous! She may look sweet and innocent, but she’s got her pretty little paws on one of the biggest fortunes in showbiz! She’s a heartless homebreaker. A shameless gold-digger! Bill Strummer must be having a mid-life crisis, trading his wife in for a younger model. What on earth does he think he’s doing?!

  To be perfectly honest, you didn’t have to look very hard to see where Josie’s appeal lay. Angelica had once been pretty, but the years hadn’t been kind to her. In contrast, Josie was as fresh and unspoilt as a ripe peach. She had long, dead-straight, naturally blonde hair, brilliant baby-blue eyes and a complexion my gran would have described as “English rose”. There were dozens of photos in all the magazines of Josie and Bill looking adoringly at each other, and I could see that whatever nasty things people had written, they were both totally besotted. Some magazines also carried photos of Bill and Angelica before the split, and they made interesting viewing. I’m fascinated by people’s behaviour and how much they can say without speaking a word. It seemed to me that Bill had lost interest in his wife long before he’d met Josie. There were several shots of Angelica smiling lovingly up at Bill, but he wasn’t looking back at her – he was staring sullenly straight at the camera, his bodyguard looming just behind his right shoulder like a dark shadow.

  The Bill and Josie affair (or Billosie, as the tabloids wittily renamed the couple) had caused a media explosion. Shockwaves had vibrated through the showbiz world like a scale-nine earthquake. According to one newspaper, all the A-list-celebrity guests Bill had invited to the wedding had point blank refused to go. The only ones willing to make the journey to Greece were Z-list wannabes who hoped that some of Bill’s fame would rub off on them.

  I turned to Hi! magazine, which had an exclusive deal to cover the wedding and had devoted its entire issue to Bill and Josie’s love story. As far as I could see, the Big Day was going to be a sort of cross between Barbie’s Dream Wedding and Mamma Mia! Bill had hired a luxury cliff-top villa to accommodate their guests and the ceremony would take place in a little chapel at the top of the mountain. Then there was going to be a barbecue followed by a party on the beach with Bill singing live.

  As I read through the article I discovered that Josie wasn’t exactly the shy and retiring type. She’d told her friends in eye-poppingly-intimate detail the whole history of her love affair with Bill, and they, thoughtfully, had related every last morsel to the Hi! journalist. “Josie’s loved him since she was seven years old. She used to have his poster on her wall in the children’s home. She kissed it every night and dreamt about the day she’d finally get to meet him.” She’d got her wish when she’d been waitressing at the awards ceremony where Bill wo
n a gong for Lifetime Achievement. “She knew right away that he was her one and only. Her wedding will be the happiest day of her life.” Their first steamy kiss had happened backstage that same night (“It was so hot, they nearly set off the smoke alarms!”) and he’d written a song for her right then and there on the back of the menu. “Ain’t No Escaping My Love” had gone straight to number one. And now, apparently, they were already trying for a baby. (“Bill’s always wanted kids. He’s dying to have his own little Strummette. Josie is desperate to be preggy!”)

  “Euw!” I exclaimed. “Way too much information!”

  “Where?” asked Graham, closing Computing Weekly. Curiosity had finally got the better of him.

  “Take a look at that.” I handed him the magazine and picked up a newspaper, which carried the other side of the story. There weren’t any interviews with Angelica herself, but plenty of her friends had talked indignantly to the reporter. The divorce settlement had been more than generous – Bill had handed over the whole of his mansion and half his fortune the day he moved out – but money wasn’t everything. His ex-wife was miserable and everyone knew it. A showbiz “insider” said, “I’m frightened that she might end up hurting herself. She’s desperately unhappy.” “Sources close to her”, “concerned friends” and “anxious relatives” all agreed that she was devastated. “Bill was hers and she was his,” said one. “He was her now-and-for-ever love,” explained another. “She never wanted anyone else,” declared a third.

  There were snatched paparazzi shots showing Angelica in varying states of distress. Tearfully leaving her house. At the wheel of her car – streams of mascara making broad black lines down her face. The worst was of her staggering through a bluebell wood. The flowers were just starting to bloom but she was clearly oblivious to the beauty of the scene. Her hair was in disarray, her shirt was coming undone so you could see her bra and her mouth was frozen open in what was obviously a cry of distress. Everything about her screamed pure misery. There was something very badly wrong about that photo. It didn’t feel right to see anyone in that state – it was like walking in on them sitting on the toilet. I closed the paper.