Diana Tong’s entire body seemed to sag.
‘I wondered when you’d get around to that,’ she said quietly.
Joanna tilted her head at Korpanski. He took the hint. She wanted to be alone with Diana Tong.
‘Shall we go into the sitting room?’
Diana nodded.
When they had settled down Joanna asked her curiously, ‘Whatever’s wrong with someone knowing your origins?’
Diana heaved a great sigh. ‘Maybe it doesn’t seem to matter so much these days,’ she said, ‘but in the early sixties there was a lot of snobbery about. Particularly amongst the BBC lot.’ A faint smile crossed her face. ‘Have you ever listened to the BBC announcers from that era? I mean, really listened?’
‘Are you trying to tell that Timony’s background was lower class?’
Diana shook her head. Her skin looked lined and old, parchment white, thin and white as silk. Worse,’ she said. ‘Her father was …’ She began again. ‘Her father … What I’m trying to say is that her …’ Her voice trailed off.
Joanna waited, wondering what on earth was so hard to reveal that Mrs Tong could hardly say it.
‘Timony’s real name was Dorothy Hook,’ she said at last. ‘She was from Balsall Heath, Birmingham. If you know Birmingham,’ she continued, ‘you’ll know that Balsall Heath is not one of the wealthier areas. And in the fifties and sixties it was considered a slum.’ She looked up sadly. ‘The old back-to-backs, you know?’
Joanna nodded. The practice of building houses bordered on three sides, sharing backyards, was one which had largely been cleared from the UK, although she couldn’t see what Diana was getting at. Still … Does this have something to do with Timony’s death? She tried to listen patiently, without interrupting.
‘Poor old Mary Hook.’ Diana looked up. ‘Dorothy’s mother. She had a hard time of it. There isn’t a nice way to say this,’ she said, looking up, ‘but Hugo Hook spent some time in prison. He was a burglar who used force. Timony was in a school play and a scout from the TV company saw her. The rest,’ she said with a smile, ‘is history. Naturally, when Timony was given the part Mary was thrilled at the thought that her daughter would be away from all that. It’s quite possible that money was involved but Mary did make Freeman promise that Dorothy – or Timony, if you prefer – was properly taken care of. The trouble was that as far as the production company was concerned the last thing they wanted was for pretty, innocent little Lily Butterfield to be associated with slums and the daughter of a convicted burglar. A violent burglar, at that. It would have done the series harm so it was suppressed.’ She looked up. ‘Successfully.’
Joanna was fascinated. To be able to reinvent your past sounded like magic to her. Timony could shed her mother, her sister. And her violent father. ‘So,’ she said, ‘new name, new identity.’
Diana nodded. ‘But she lost her family. She was vulnerable.’
‘I see.’ And she did. There had been no one to represent the interests of an eight-year-old girl. She suddenly cottoned on. ‘And the sister who repeatedly wrote to her? Was she real?’
‘There was a sister. Dead now. Her name was Kathleen.’
‘And Timony’s mother is, I assume, also dead.’
Diana nodded carefully.
Something struck Joanna. ‘Was all this going to come out in her autobiography?’
Diana Tong blinked then nodded. ‘Yes.’
Joanna stood up. ‘We’ll talk again,’ she said. ‘But for now I have work to do.’
Diana Tong bowed her head and nodded.
As she and Korpanski, along with another twenty or so other officers, started setting up a major incident room in one of the barns, she was painfully aware of all that had gone wrong. It was almost as though Chief Superintendent Gabriel Rush was already conducting an enquiry, telling her she should have probed more when the call-outs escalated, taken more notice after the cat incident, delved further into Timony Weeks’ real history and, in particular, the assault, even though it had been years ago, which had scarred her and almost cost her her sight. She could practically hear him speaking quietly and without drama into her ear with his clipped, public school accent. She knew he would take great delight in her mistakes. Hah, she wanted to say. Easy in retrospect. If I’d known she was going to get bloody well shot I’d have taken a bit more notice. What about all the other ‘more important’ crimes on my desk? She knew that at the beginning Timony Weeks had appeared a rather histrionic sixty-year-old woman. All the same she could still imagine Rush focusing on all the questions she should have asked and hadn’t. More detail on the husbands who were still alive. And in all probability Rolf Van Eelen would prove to be her legal heir. So there was a motive. A few million constituted a very real motive for murder.
But what about the fan who had tried to kill her, the only person who appeared to have wished the child star real harm? Joanna considered this possibility but was tempted to reject it. That had been the frenzied attack of a madman. Not intelligent, structured intimidation, almost a warning of what was to come, followed by a cold-blooded execution. There was no sign of emotion in the death of Timony Weeks. It hadn’t been a jab with a pair of scissors but two accurate shots which had ensured her death. No, for her money she should have pursued Rolf Van Eelen, husband number five; at least found out where he was, asked a few questions about his financial situation. Did he need money? How badly? Of course, he could be purely avaricious but murder was a hell of a risk to take. And what about the woman who had claimed she was Timony’s long-lost sister? Who was she really? Had the pursuit continued?
Sol Brannigan. Had they been wrong to discount him so readily?
There were the two farmers who were, geographically, in the running as suspects but she judged them both incapable of the more subtle psychological bullying.
And then there was the wild card. Who was Stuart Renshaw? A bona-fide accountant? Son of a friend? Or was there something or someone else that she was missing?
Joanna had to admit: she’d done a very half-hearted job of investigating either Timony Weeks’ past life or the more recent complaints. Now she wished she’d spent more time in Butterfield Farm, walked around, looked more carefully and with more insight at the pictures of Timony in her various stages of life, with her multiples of husbands, and listened more carefully to her stories; delved further into her histronics, the supposed blurring of fact and fiction, to seek out the truth. She had heard the tales of a child growing up under the glare of celebrity, and in her day Timony Weeks had been as famous as Cheryl Cole or Kristen Stewart were today. Now it was too late.
Followed by Diana Tong, who was now silent, Joanna wandered around Butterfield, from room to room, realizing that the rooms were set out like a stage set. But even observing the house she couldn’t connect the Timony Weeks she had known with someone whose father had been in prison and had spent her early years in abject poverty, living in what had, even then, been classed as a slum. Usually Joanna could detect accents. Most people give their roots away in a tone or a phrase, their pronunciation of one or two giveaway words. But stage school and elocution lessons had eradicated any sign or sound of a regional twang. Her mother appeared to have signed her daughter away, believing that to escape from poverty was an answer to her prayers without considering what really lay ahead for the child. What sort of mother had she been to give her up so completely to a TV set? Back came the answer. A mother who was naive.
So did Timony have any living relatives? Now that it was too late Joanna wished very much that she had done more, had at least glimpsed the real child who lay behind the manufactured fantasy figure.
Diana Tong observed her activities without comment. But her lips seemed to press together tighter and Joanna had the impression that the companion was not only grieving but uneasy. As she walked past her Diana opened her mouth as though to say something but her eyes slid away and she didn’t speak, merely frowned and gave a slight shake of her head.
Eventually Joanna and Mike holed up in the barn, ineffectively heated now by electric radiators; much of the heat seemed to soar into the rafters. They might be cold but the barns were, like the rest of Butterfield, immaculately clean, with no hay and not even the faintest scent of an animal. Joanna had never been in such a sanitized barn. The team gathered around her on makeshift benches and she wrote names on a whiteboard, trying to focus the enquiry, fully aware that she could be accused of ‘shutting the stable door’.
What else was she to do?
She addressed the entire room but in reality she had already decided which teams to allocate and where. ‘Find out all you can about the dead woman, both as Dorothy Hook and Timony Weeks.’ She walked across the barn floor and deliberately shut the door. It was possible that when the story broke there would be a prurient interest out of proportion to the secluded life Timony Weeks had adopted in the past few years. The first name she wrote was: Diana Tong.
She turned around and addressed DC Hesketh-Brown. ‘Danny, you and Hannah just keep an eye on her, will you? I can’t think of any obvious motive she might have for setting up recent events and I certainly can’t imagine her killing the cat in such a cruel way, but it has to be said, she’s the one on the spot.’ She turned back to the board. ‘Bridget, you and Phil Scott look into the ex-husbands, will you?’ Again she wrote three names on the board, bracketing them together:
Adrian MacWilliam, Sol Brannigan and Rolf Van Eelen. ‘I’ve picked Sol out because Timony herself said he was a nasty piece of work, and we know he’s been in prison for grievous bodily harm and armed robbery. Adrian MacWilliam – well, no reason really, except that he was her husband.’ She turned back to the board. ‘Rolf Van Eelen is probably the only one with a real motive. He is almost certainly Timony’s legal beneficiary if she died intestate and they were never divorced. See if you can track these down then speak to her solicitor and find out more exactly how much money Timony Weeks had and who gets it. And while you’re at it you might search out Carmen Weeks, last heard of in Dubai, and see if it still rankles that Timony stole her husband.’ Bridget Anderton and Phil Scott nodded and smiled.
‘Korpanski, Mike,’ she appealed, as she wrote another name on the board: long-lost sister. ‘According to Diana, Timony or Dorothy Hook had a sister, Kathleen, who has died. Just look into her, will you, please?’ She knew he was far more interested in the luxury cars which were vanishing from around the area than the death of the actress. But he raised his eyebrows and smiled. He would not let her down. ‘Take Jason with you and look into this. Alan, you take WPC Critchlow and find out about the fan who assaulted Ms Weeks, Paul Dariel. See if you can try to make contact with him.’ She gave them all a smile of encouragement then spoke to PC Paul Ruthin, a relative newcomer to the Moorlands. ‘I’d like you to look into the wild card, Stuart Renshaw. I just wonder about him.’
Beneath that she wrote, John Reeves and Tom Brassington, then addressed PCs Timmis and McBrine. ‘You two may as well stay in the moorlands and look into the two farmers whose land borders Butterfield. I’ll be honest,’ she continued, ‘I can’t really see either of them having much to do with this but check it out anyway. And while you’re at it you might have another word with the Faulkeners. Just dig around and see if there was any reason why a pair of hikers ended up trespassing on this particular property.’ She scanned the room, smiled and finished the briefing. ‘And in case you’re wondering what I’m going to get up to, I’m going to do a spot of reading.’ She risked a joke. ‘No, I don’t mean the latest bestseller from Peter Lovesey, though I have to say I’m tempted.’ There was a titter around the room. They all knew her predilection for crime fiction. ‘I’m going to take a look through Timony Weeks’ autobiography and see if there’s anything there that gives us a hint. Let’s meet back here, shall we say tomorrow morning, eight o’clock. Any questions?’
There was a general shaking of heads so she thanked them and dismissed them.
Korpanski had stayed behind but she didn’t know why. She assumed it would be to grumble because he had been pulled off the case of the high-profile cars. ‘Mike?’ she queried, knowing he was disgruntled, if not fully understanding why. Later, when she analysed it, she realized his dissatisfaction was, in a way, predictable. Korpanski was a realist, a pragmatist who dealt only in concrete facts, disliked ideas and fantasy. Particularly hunches. He wanted reality. This was the very worst case he could have been asked to work on.
‘We didn’t even know her name,’ he grumbled. ‘Only her stage name.’ His neck was red with anger. ‘Bloody woman, I wish she’d never moved to the moorlands. Or at least,’ he conceded, ‘if she did have to move here that when the threats started she’d moved herself out again.’
Her head jerked around. Unwittingly Detective Sergeant Mike Korpanski had put his finger on something. ‘You have a point,’ she said. ‘Why did she come here in the first place and then stubbornly stay if she was so unnerved by the attention?’
‘Didn’t she say something about feeling more comfortable in a remote location than in a city?’
‘It seemed a pretty weak excuse to me,’ Joanna said. ‘But if it was true there are plenty of other remote locations. She didn’t have to stay here but she was determined to.’
‘She didn’t,’ Mike agreed, his anger cooling as they discussed the case, ‘but she’d recreated her Shangri-La here, in the moorlands. She’d have had to start all over again, get planning permission in the green belt, which can be difficult to obtain. And it seems that she didn’t want just any old house. She wanted to recreate Butterfield Farm. She was lucky to get planning permission for it here. She would probably have had no end of trouble in another rural location.’
Joanna nodded slowly, starting to see things from another angle. She hadn’t been able to leave, to abandon this recreation of a happier life. She had been prisoner to the illusion she had created.
Korpanski looked straight into her eyes. ‘There’s something else that’s struck me, Jo,’ he said. ‘These practical jokes obviously unsettled her. So why didn’t Diana Tong move in with her permanently?’
‘She needed something, somewhere of her own. Timony would have swallowed her up whole,’ Joanna responded, but knowing she had had similar thoughts. ‘Though she did seem to spend most of her time there anyway.’
‘Hmm,’ Mike said, turned around and spotted Jason hovering near the door. ‘Well, I’d better be off. Come on, Sparks.’
Joanna felt restless watching the officers depart to their allocated tasks and, on leaving the barn, seeing the forensic teams scour the property in their slow, methodical way. She wandered up to the house with an overwhelming feeling that it was Timony’s past which had resulted in her murder. The pranks had been a warning and, when not heeded, she had died. Someone had been trying to tell her something, to warn her of what might happen if she didn’t comply. What were those dark memories threatening to surface? If Timony had read the messages she had not heeded them. And Joanna did not understand them. Comply with what?
Where better to look for the answer to that than in her own story of her life? She met Diana Tong, stony-faced, in the hallway. ‘Timony’s memoirs,’ Joanna said, stepping towards the study. ‘I’m going to take a look.’
‘Whatever for?’ Diana Tong looked genuinely puzzled.
Joanna decided she was sick of giving reasons, of being dictated to, of having her strings pulled by others. ‘I don’t need to give you a reason, Mrs Tong,’ she said flatly. ‘Butterfield is now a major crime scene and her book may hold some clues.’
And so Diana Tong pressed back against the wall and Joanna passed her, feeling the companion’s resentment hot and angry. She didn’t care.
She reached the study and switched on the computer. No password, she noted. Open to anyone. She copied My Memoirs on to a USB stick and took it back to the barn, like a lion hoarding its kill. She moved the heater closer, inserted the memory stick into her own computer. And read.
At two thirty Matthew rang to see if she intended being present at the post-mortem. She looked through the windows as he spoke. Butterfield was a hive of activity and the teams were working equally hard, some on the telephone, others on their computers, and still others had left the area to pursue their suspects. They would all be following up their initial leads but they could do without her for a while. And the post-mortem of a murder victim necessitated a police presence – if only to validate the samples. She asked Matthew to wait for her to arrive, told Mike he would be in charge for the next few hours and drove the thirteen miles towards the mortuary in Stoke. Mark Fask would meet her there.
The mortuary in Newcastle-under-Lyme was an unprepossessing building, small and square with little to announce its function apart from an unobtrusive board. It was as though it wanted no one to notice it. Which was reasonable, Joanna decided, given its purpose. She slid her Honda into the parking space next to Matthew’s BMW.
He was already gowned up in his scrubs and looked anxious to begin. In the mortuary he always wore an air of slight impatience, as though he wanted to get on with things quickly. He was frowning as he stood back and waited for her to fasten a gown on over her own clothes. Though Joanna had attended scores of post-mortems she still had the usual feeling of apprehension. The truth was she hated them. Although she was acutely aware that they were necessary they seemed to her to be the final insult to the victim – even their inner organs and most private secrets would be exposed, under the arc light. All the way through, from the jud-dud of the Stryker saw and the clumsy stitching of the attendants whose job it was to stuff the organs back into their cavities, they still made her feel slightly sick, though she had never repeated her first performance in this very mortuary. They all watched in silence as the attendant did the initial weigh-ins of measurements and observations. Matthew stood back, eagle-eyed, his hands clasped. He moved once and that was to check the video camera was set up properly. He made a brief introduction, name, persons present and then slowly ran the camera over the body. Timony Weeks, or Dorothy Hook, was finally fully exposed.
She looked even thinner naked. As tiny as a child and bony too. Joanna was struck by her physical vulnerability. Even she was unprepared for the feeling of pity she felt for this woman in death, who had appeared so irritatingly strange in life.
Matthew’s attention was now on the X-rays he had taken to help him locate the final positions of the bullets. When he moved back over to the body he began, with a probe, to follow the trajectory of the two bullet holes, taking careful measurements to ascertain the calibre of the firearm. Then he began excising the tissue around them, moving in with the probe until he found the bullets. These were removed with a pair of long, angled forceps ready for the ballistics department. Hopefully, at some point, they would have a weapon to compare them with. The rest of the post-mortem was routine. Apart from the attentions of a cosmetic surgeon Timony, it appeared, had been in good health.
Half an hour later Matthew was giving her his findings. ‘The head wound was inflicted first,’ he said. ‘There is slightly more contusion and bleeding there. Immediately after that, I would guess, she was shot in the heart. The head wound entered the frontal lobe of the brain, ricocheted against the cranium and lodged in the top of the spine. The heart assault was similarly deadly. It entered the left ventricle and lodged in the thoracic spine. Death would have been virtually instantaneous.’ He was looking down at Timony as he related his findings. ‘Nothing else of note really. She was in very good shape, some of it thanks to surgery.’ He looked across at her. ‘Some clumsy, most very skilled, particularly the very enthusiastic face lift. Oh,’ he added as an afterthought, ‘and she had had a child at some point.’
‘What?’ News indeed, when Timony had categorically denied it.
‘Yes,’ he said defensively. ‘You can’t mistake it, Jo. The cervix changes shape.’
‘You’re sure?’
Matthew looked affronted. ‘Yes, I am sure.’
He could not know how many things this altered.
‘When?’
‘I don’t know that,’ he said, still a bit peeved. ‘Probably in her teens.’
‘But there’s been no mention of a child.’ She thought for a minute. ‘There is no child.’
He grinned at her and gave the smallest twitch of his shoulders. ‘Can’t help that,’ he said, ‘but she had had a pregnancy and a vaginal delivery. I’ve seen the episiotomy scar. That means,’ he said, eyeing her, ‘that she went into labour. I can’t know if the child lived or died but she did definitely give birth.’
Joanna digested this little snicket of information, then, ‘Anything else?’
‘We-ell, looking at the X-rays …’ He crossed the room to the computer screen to study the image, which even she could see was displaying an easily recognizable forearm. Radius and ulnar. There is this …’ He traced a faint mark on one of the bones. Joanna peered but could not interpret the point he was making. It looked like a thickening. ‘What is it?’
‘Ossification,’ he said, ‘of an old – a very old – fracture of the right radius. Probably done when she was around ten. Possibly a greenstick. Not set very well, I’m afraid.’
‘Why would that be?’
‘It wasn’t set properly. I would assume that she didn’t receive medical attention.’
‘Why might that be?’
Matthew shrugged. ‘Who knows? Perhaps she didn’t think it was that bad. A greenstick isn’t a complete break but a partial snap. Or …’
‘Yes?’
‘It was probably done years ago. She might have been just a kid.’
But at the age of ten Timony had been a ‘studio kid’. Pampered and observed all the time.
‘What would it mean?’
Matthew was busy scrubbing his hands. ‘You mean as far as a deformity is concerned?’
She nodded.
‘Very slight. She might have had trouble writing – unless she was left handed.’
Joanna tried to remember and failed. People use both hands on a computer keyboard. ‘Is this likely to have any bearing on her …?’
Matthew’s eyes gleamed mischievously as he slipped out of his rubber apron. ‘I’m just the simple pathologist, Jo,’ he said. ‘You’re the clever police woman. I just report the facts. It’s you who must draw the conclusions.’
She could have thrown a pillow at him – if one had been to hand. As it was she made do with scolding him. ‘Matthew Levin,’ she said severely, tempted to wag a finger at him. ‘You can be the most irritating.’ His smile was far too warm for her to continue. She substituted the scolding with a giggle, then asked, ‘Anything else?’
‘No. As I said: she was in great shape for someone starting her sixties. No atheroma. No nasty holes in the brain. She had the body of a healthy fifty-year-old.’ His expression changed. ‘She would probably have lived for years.’
‘Instead …’ There was no need to finish the sentence. She smiled at him. ‘Thank you, Matt.’
‘My pleasure, my lady,’ he said, sweeping a mock bow. She watched him, feeling his good humour leak into her psyche. His boyish enthusiasm for his work endeared him to her. He could never know how much.
‘You’ve taken some toxicology samples?’
He grinned again. ‘You don’t have to remind me of my job, Joanna,’ he said gently.
‘No. What about the cosmetic surgery? Before I go just run me through it.’
‘Hmm,’ was his response. ‘We-ell, as you probably guessed, a whole heap of stuff, some done years ago. They don’t use these breast implants any more. Far too synthetic-looking and they’ve capsulated anyway, and the work on her abdomen is quite crude. It’s almost butchery. Cheap stuff. Not done in the States or Harley Street, at a guess, but one of the provincial centres. Teeth.’ He inserted a gloved finger into the mouth. ‘All veneered. Done more recently. An expensive job this time. At a guess none of this has any bearing on her murder.’
‘OK.’ She took a last glance at the still figure. ‘I’ll get back to Butterfield then. See you later, Matt.’ He merely grinned at her and raised his hand.
As she drove out through the city of Stoke on the A53, passing through Endon and Stockton Brook, she reflected. In the old days she would have called in the station and informed Chief Superintendent Arthur Colclough of events, filled him in on the lines of enquiry they were pursuing and anything else that might have a bearing on this major investigation. But these were not the old days. Rumour had it that Chief Superintendent Gabriel Rush was to start on April 1. Not only a Sunday but April Fools’ Day, she thought, as she took the congested road through the town passing the roundabout, which was currently the subject of furious debate to the citizens of Leek who were resisting change. They wanted their dear and unique town to stay exactly the same. There had been a few noisy demonstrations and one or two of the more impassioned demonstrators had camped on the roundabout, but so far the police had not been involved and certainly not DI Joanna Piercy. She drove past the station, continuing through the town and out the other side to take the Ashbourne road towards the Peak District and eventually Butterfield Farm.
The minute she passed the millstone and entered the Moorlands she was aware of her environment. It was as though the purity of the atmosphere seeped into her car. It was a crisp, clear day, as clean and fresh as any winter’s day can be, cleansed by a sharp overnight frost and the blessing of a cool winter’s sun all day. Sheep wandered around baaing aimlessly, the winter wool heavy on their backs. They looked perfect against the snowy hills, like a painting by Hunt or Morland. But when she reached the ridge which overlooked the farm and looked down she decided that no one could be deceived into thinking that this was a tranquil place. As the light of the dying winter sky, slate grey with a tinge of pewter, began to fade, lamps were being switched on all over the house. And outside stood a car park full of vehicles: forensic vans, police cars, private cars. Arc lights illuminated the front of the house like an urban factory besieged by burglars. It was unmistakably the centre of great drama. A rogue thought entered her mind. Timony would so have loved this.
Joanna parked in the yard and walked into the barn, brightly lit, the warmth from the heaters at last making the temperature bearable. In fact, she felt as cosy as a cow. She sniffed. The barns had obviously not held animals for a long time and the place was swept as clean as a kitchen. But now she did catch an underlying scent of long-ago cattle, of a dairy, of milk and cow feed and cow dung too that made it both authentic and comfortable. Probably the scent lingered from the cottage long ago, soaked into the stones and the fabric of the site. She couldn’t imagine Timony doing any milking herself. She sat down at a makeshift desk, slid the USB stick into the computer and opened the file, My Story. She began to read and was absorbed. An hour later she was nibbling her thumbnail and staring into nothing.
She heard the door opening – and closing, looked up to see Korpanski watching her. ‘Jo?’ he asked uncertainly.
She looked up and gave a half smile. ‘This is the oddest autobiography I’ve ever read,’ she said. ‘Timony Weeks must have been a schizophrenic. It’s almost as though it was written by two people.’
‘How so?’ He hunkered down beside her, focused too on the computer screen.
‘Well, look at this. “I was born in a Midlands town of working-class parents. This is what they told me, that my mother and father were ambitious for their pretty daughter and enrolled me in a stage school.”’
‘So?’ Korpanski looked puzzled.
‘For a start, it’s not strictly the truth. She was spotted in an ordinary school play. And then it tells you nothing. No specific place, no names, no details. Not even her date of birth.’
Mike still looked puzzled so she explained. ‘I mean, as an autobiography it’s terrible. It doesn’t tell you anything.’
‘Had she already been paid for it? A what do you call it, had an “advance”?’
‘I don’t think so. I’ll check with Diana Tong. But more worryingly, Mike …’
Korpanski’s spine stiffened as he regarded her,
‘… it’s the bits later on in the book. Look at this. Nineteen sixty-five. She would have been about thirteen years old. “Filming all day. It was tiring as I was supposed to be looking after a baby lamb, covering it with my coat. But it kept running away. I was running after it but I couldn’t catch it up. I ended up falling over in the muddy field and dirtying my pinafore. The wardrobe mistress …”’ Joanna met Mike’s eyes. Underneath, in italics, was written,
‘“Right in front of everybody Sandra pulled my knickers down and smacked me really hard, told me I was nothing but a spoilt brat and a nuisance. That she hated me. I ran to Gerald and he told me not to worry, that he’d look after me. I LOVE GERALD.”’
Korpanski frowned. ‘Thirteen years old?’
Joanna nodded. ‘This, presumably, is Sandra McMullen, with whom she lived and who had the daily care of her.’
Korpanski was silent so Joanna continued. ‘There’s worse,’ she said.
Korpanski’s shoulders twitched. ‘Not sure I want to hear it, Jo. Does it have any bearing on her murder?’
‘Don’t know,’ she answered simply. ‘I only know that some of these actions taken against a child would be considered abusive nowadays.’
‘Her parents?’
‘Father in prison. There’s no mention of her mother; apparently access visits were discouraged or indeed any contact at all. It appears that both Sandra McMullen and James Freeman acted in loco parentis.’
‘And then Gerald marries her when she’s seventeen? Seems a bit incestuous to me.’
‘And to me.’
‘Does she mention any threats or coercion?’
‘It’s odd, Mike, but it’s almost as though she operates on two levels – the sweet, public image of Butterfield and this darker, unsavoury undercurrent.’
‘Is that possible?’
‘I’ve read something,’ Joanna screwed up her face. ‘Some article I read some time ago. I think they called it Replacement Memory Syndrome.’
Korpanski waited.
‘It describes a certain psyche which replaces unpleasant memories with a sort of fairy-tale story. As an actress Timony Weeks would have been an ideal subject for that. Writing her memoirs was a potentially dangerous experience for her. It was unleashing a beast. It’s possible that even she doubted these events could possibly be true. She must have tried desperately to bury the bad bits but each time she went back to the book they bubbled up again. No wonder she was confused about the difference between fantasy and reality.’
Korpanski suddenly twigged. ‘So might that be a reason for someone wanting to suppress the memoirs?’
She nodded.
Korpanski ventured further. ‘Stop their publication?’ He paused, watching the expression on her face. ‘Try and frighten her into submission?’
‘I think you’re getting there, Mike.’
‘I think we’re getting there.’
They looked at each other. So naturally attuned, voicing the next logical question was unnecessary.
Who?
‘I’ve left someone off the list,’ Joanna said. ‘Freeman, the producer of Butterfield Farm. He may be elderly now but he would still want to guard his reputation, wouldn’t he?’
‘Suppose so,’ Korpanski agreed.
She looked at her watch. It was five o’clock. ‘I’ll be talking to Diana Tong again in a minute,’ she said. ‘Want to join me?’
‘Wild horses wouldn’t keep me away, Joanna.’
She put a hand on his arm. ‘There were a couple of things,’ she said, ‘that came up in the post-mortem.’
‘Go on.’
‘At some point she’d had a child.’
‘What? Was Matthew sure?’
She nodded. ‘And it had gone full term. She’d given birth. It wasn’t a miscarriage.’
‘But she said …’
‘I know what she said, Mike, but the evidence was there. And,’ she continued, ‘she’d broken her right arm at some point. Matthew thought that it had probably happened when she was about ten but it looks as though she didn’t receive medical attention.’
‘It doesn’t make sense,’ Korpanski said.
She waited for him to draw his own conclusions. And he did, his face grim. ‘So she was both neglected and abused.’
‘It would appear so.’
‘Crikey,’ he said. ‘Her autobiography would have been a hot potato.’
‘Exactly. Shall we?’
They crossed the icy yard and entered the house, found Diana Tong sitting on the sofa, quite still. Logs were burning in the grate, giving out a sweet, smoky scent. As they opened the door a billow of smoke puffed into the room adding to the hazy look. After the chill of the outside and the half warmth of the barn the room was warm and the woodsmoke welcome. At a guess Diana had been sitting, without moving, for some time. She moved her head stiffly as they entered.
Joanna murmured more polite condolences before she and Mike settled themselves into the two adjacent armchairs and opened up the questions. ‘For now, Mrs Tong,’ she said, contrasting the careless appearance of the companion with her erstwhile employer’s carefully manicured public image. How must it feel always to be the ugly sister, second fiddle, the understudy instead of the star? ‘We’ll just stick to the facts. There’s a lot you haven’t told me, isn’t there?’
The companion’s lips tightened and she said nothing. Joanna gave Mike a quick glance. This was going to be a long haul. She leaned forward. ‘You don’t mind if we record this?’ Mrs Tong looked as though she would love to have refused the request. As it was she contented herself with a very negative-looking shrug. Joanna glanced across at Korpanski, who was sitting in the adjacent chair, his thighs apart, watching eagle-eyed. She was glad he was there and looked forward to his feedback later. She knew she could trust him not to interrupt unless it was called for and she also knew that he wouldn’t betray by look, words or gesture the information she had just fed him.
‘You were born in …?’
‘Nineteen forty-four.’ She seemed to feel that something extra was called for. ‘I was eight years older than Timony.’ Her mouth twisted but it didn’t look anything like a smile. ‘Twenty when I began working for and with her.’
‘And you joined the staff of Butterfield Farm in?’
‘Nineteen sixty-four.’ Again, she seemed to think that she should add something so said, uncomfortably, in her gruff voice and without apology, ‘I was a school-leaver. Not very academic. More practical.’
Joanna nodded. ‘What exactly did you join Butterfield as?’
‘Sorry?’
‘What was your title?’
‘I – I didn’t really have one. I was a sort of gofer.’
‘But as regards Timony? You were employed to look after Timony?’
‘Well, ye-es.’
‘And it worked?’ Joanna prompted.
‘Obviously,’ she retorted stiffly, ‘otherwise I wouldn’t still be here, would I?’
‘I suppose not.’
‘We became friends, I suppose. Naturally we became close.’
‘Was it you who was encouraging her to write about her experiences?’
‘Not really. But—’ Here she stopped herself abruptly.
‘But …’ Joanna prompted her gently.
‘Timony lived a lavish lifestyle,’ Diana said. ‘And her series ended a long time ago. They didn’t pay that much in the sixties.’
‘But Timony told me there was plenty of money left. She told me she was worth a few million.’
Diana’s response was a wry smile. ‘I’d have thought you would have realized that Timony was a fantasist.’
Joanna gave Korpanski a swift look.
‘Her divorces didn’t come cheap either. Bloody scumbags took her to the cleaners.’
‘Which particular scumbags do you mean?’
‘Brannigan, MacWilliam and Rolf. The damned lot of them,’ she said. ‘Timony was a soft touch. Even Rolf, that toad. What I’m saying is that there wasn’t that much money left.’ Diana spoke reluctantly, every word dragged out of her as though it pulled at her flesh. ‘So she approached some publishers to see if they were interested. Initially they weren’t and then they were.’ Something in Diana Tong looked proud. ‘She decided to reject the offers of a ghost writer and write it all herself. I could tell the publishers were a bit sceptical. Actresses, particularly child stars, aren’t known for their writing skills. Anyway, they said they’d take a look when she’d finished. They warned her it wouldn’t be quite as easy as she thought but she got on with it. They’d promised her a “generous” advance on delivery and acceptance of the manuscript. I assume the word acceptance meant if it was publishable and there was a market.’ She attempted an explanation. ‘The grey brigade, you know. There’s a lot of nostalgia for the sixties. The publishers thought there would be a demand providing it gave away enough secrets.’ She smiled and looked directly at DS Mike Korpanski, who did not return the smile but beetled his eyebrows together as though evaluating her ‘story’. His eyes were dark enough to be unfathomable and after a moment or two Diana Tong looked away. Joanna watched his face and wondered what he was making of all this. She’d know later. Korpanski wasn’t one for concealing his feelings.
Diana Tong absorbed the snub with a toss of her head. ‘It’s always hard,’ she insisted, ‘to know what to buy the over-sixties as presents for Christmas and birthdays. They have everything. What they want is nostalgia. They want their past back. And so you give it to them as a book or a DVD. You give them back their memories of when they were young.’
Joanna nodded. ‘I’ve been reading bits of it,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure her readers would be expecting some of those “secrets”’.
Diana Tong sat so still it was as though she was frozen into a solid block of ice. Joanna knew why. She was wondering what bits the detective had read. Joanna returned a bland smile. Diana Tong cleared her throat, licked her lips. ‘The trouble was,’ she said slowly, ‘the publishers made it clear that they wanted what they called “the dirt”.’ Her gaze drifted upwards to stare into Joanna’s face as though trying to convey a message without actually speaking the words. She licked her lips again and ploughed on. ‘They didn’t want some bland, jolly sixties thing, all hair ribbons and pretty frocks.’
‘Let me get this quite clear,’ Joanna said slowly so there could be no mistake about her question. ‘Are you saying that Timony might have …’
‘Embellished her story? I suspect so, though I haven’t read all of it.’
‘But you’ve read most of it?’
Oddly enough, Diana Tong didn’t appear to know how to answer this. She opened her mouth. Nothing came out.
Joanna took note and changed the course of the questions. ‘You are married, Mrs Tong?’
Diana did not like the question and tried to fend it off with one word. ‘Briefly.’
‘Your husband’s name was …?’
‘Colin. Colin Tong. We weren’t married for long. Less than a year.’
‘And when you joined the cast in nineteen sixty-four you say you were twenty and Timony nearly thirteen.’
Diana Tong nodded warily, obviously anticipating an awkward question.
‘So you were there when she was assaulted.’
‘I’ve already told you, I wasn’t with her that night.’
Joanna smiled. ‘So you have. I understand that after the assault she took some time off.’
‘Naturally.’ Even this silky answer was guarded.
‘Her parents didn’t keep in touch?’
‘I don’t think so. It was better they severed contact. It was discouraged.’
Funny, Joanna thought. It would be the exact opposite in today’s climate.
Father in prison + living in a slum + morphs into a successful actress = Great Story.
Diana seemed to think she needed to say something more. ‘I really have no idea whether her mother attempted to make contact and was discouraged by the studio or if she simply let her go,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you ask James Freeman? He’d know. All I know is I never met her parents.’
‘Why exactly were you taken on?’ Korpanski put in.
Diana Tong looked astonished by the question. She tilted her head on one side and regarded Mike Korpanski who returned her gaze steadily.
‘I don’t understand, Sergeant,’ Diana said.
‘Well. When she was younger, eight, when she first joined the set, Sandra McMullen looked after her, didn’t she?’
Joanna knew he was thinking about the broken arm.
And Diana Tong understood. ‘Sandra left,’ she said, ‘I took her place.’
‘As?’
‘You mean was I engaged as a chaperone?’
Joanna nodded.
Diana Tong seemed to have to think about her response to this one. She drew in her breath. ‘No. I was engaged more as a companion,’ she said, ‘and general dogsbody.’
And here you’ve stayed for nearly fifty years, Joanna thought. She wanted to ask so much more, more about the ‘long-lost sister’, about the fan, about the multiple marriages, about relationships between cast members, about the ‘secrets’ which Timony had supposedly embellished. But she decided to hold back. She didn’t want to antagonize the companion.
Keep something up your sleeve, Piercy, and better to have a card up it than just a handkerchief. She smiled. It had been one of her father’s favourite sayings.
So instead of pursuing the subject she veered off towards the practicalities. ‘Will you be dealing with her funeral arrangements?’
‘Yes.’
‘You realize we’ll have to wait for the coroner to release the body?’
‘Yes.’
‘Had she no family?’
‘Not that I know of. None that she was in touch with.’ But her words were said dismissively, without conviction, her eyes flickering along the floor. Diana Tong was considering her situation. Joanna waited, watched her face for clues and wondered whether she was about to volunteer some information but after a pause, Diana looked up and met her gaze with a steady stare. And Joanna knew she was going no further. Not today, at least.
Well, two could play at that game. In return she would suppress the fact that the post-mortem had revealed that Timony had had a child.
Tit for tat.