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 won 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.
We still hadn’t taken off. The plane was delayed – some passenger or other hadn’t boarded when they were supposed to. The insanely cheerful grins had slipped off the flight attendants’ faces. They’d put a call out but no one had shown up and now we’d missed our slot and the other passengers were starting to complain.
Graham began tutting and checking his watch, and Sally was jiggling fretfully. “Tessa will be furious if we get to Athens late,” she grumbled. “I suppose the helicopter will wait, but I don’t know how I’ll manage to get everything done on time. I’ll have to start at the crack of dawn as it is. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea…”
“Why can’t we just take off?” I asked. “Surely it’s their own fault if they can’t get here on time? The rest of us managed it.”
“Presumably the missing person’s luggage is in the hold,” replied Graham. “With the threat of global terrorism, it’s not possible to embark unless every passenger who checked in a suitcase is on board. Otherwise it would be a foolproof method of planting a bomb.”
“Oh,” I said, wishing I hadn’t asked. I wasn’t a nervous traveller but the thought of being blasted out of the sky was enough to make anyone uneasy. To take my mind off it I picked up another magazine.
This article took the “Angelica’s perilously close to killing herself” angle one degree further, directing the threat of violence towards someone else. A “close personal friend” described how she’d been with Angelica when Josie Diamond had appeared on TV. Angelica had hurled her mug of tea at the screen. And then yelled, loud and clear, “I’m going to wring that little tart’s neck!”
Which I found extremely alarming. Because just then the missing passenger finally showed up, white-faced, stick-thin and shaking like a leaf in a storm-force wind.
There we were, about to fly off to Greece on the eve of Bill and Josie’s wedding.
And the person we’d all been waiting for was Angelica Strummer.