23. Only the Good Die Young #2
“Gary Runcorn! What time do you call this?!” Jeanie jumps out of the chair beside the window.
“I don’t know, there aren’t any clocks in the sea,” I reply.
“What I mean is, why are you testing your boundaries in the middle of the fucking night?” She’s yelling now. Whoopsie.
I can’t be arsed with the preamble. I’ve got questions I need answered. “Tell me how you’re involved in Peter’s death?”
Jeanie flinches, but she waits too long to deny it with any believability. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Lol!” I say, crossing over to one of the cabriolet sofas and trying very, very hard to sit with at least a fraction of class.
“In my time, people write that in text messages to mean ‘laugh out loud,’ except nobody’s ever laughing when they type it.
” I fear she will miss the nuance in that sentence.
“Are you alright, Gary?” she says, sitting at the other end of the settee and putting me to shame with her ass?balancing skills.
“Yes, I’m quite fine.” I don’t bother to mention how my heart is aching for someone destined to pass into a different life. What’s the point? “But I need you to tell me how you were involved in Peter’s death.”
Again, she pauses, but now it’s a resigned pause. She looks at her hands, her fingernails, and sighs. “If there’s one thing I regret not doing before I died, it’s getting my nails done. They look bloody awful.”
I could agree with her, explain how I wish I’d fucking shaved and trimmed my moustache the night before I got squished, but I leave the silence floating between us, like a bunch of question marks she can’t ignore.
Eventually, I win.
“Fine,” she whines. “I guess Angel gave the game away, didn’t he?”
“Even if he didn’t, I’d have figured it out sooner or later. You want me to investigate everyone’s death but Peter’s.”
“That’s not true,” she says, but the curvature of her eyebrows and the deer?in?headlights stare tell on her. “It’s simply that we already know what happened with Peter. It was an accident. The sword went in the wrong hole. An accident. Even Petey’s forgiven Helga.”
“Not a single sentence in that word salad you just spewed is accurate,” I say.
Jeanie folds over on herself. Her face finds the gap between her knees, her arms come up over her head, knocking her eye mask askew. “Fine. Fine. But please, none of this can go on Unalive on Air. It would ruin Helga, ruin the hotel, and the entire village.”
I don’t want to make that guarantee, but I also desperately need to know what happened. “Okay. Cross my heart, hope to die.”
“Oh, ha ha,” she says, but accepts my promise.
“It was eighty-four. I’d just finished filming The Last Bus to Hornblotten Green and came back to Helzephron for the summer as I always did.
Well, not always. The year before, I was actually in Morocco making this film about desert zombies.
Anyway . . .” She repositions herself after I raise an eyebrow.
“I was staying at The Paragon. It wasn’t as nice in those days, but you know, it was the eighties.
It all felt incredible at the time. I was young and making movies, living the dream.
I remember one day I’d left a script in the dressing room behind the auditorium, and when I went back to collect it, I bumped into Helga.
Oh, she had such long, beautiful hair back then. It was all the way down to her bot—”
“Is the hair relevant to the story?” I say, raising my hand.
“Well, not really.”
“So, let’s only cover what’s important, shall we?”
Jeanie puts on a mocking voice. “Let’s just cover what’s important, shall we?”
She’s taking the piss out of me, but for some reason, I like her more for it. I suppress a smile.
“Helga, this beautiful, blonde Amazonian stranger was in floods of tears. I asked her what was wrong because I’m not a monster, and she told me she had a feeling her husband was going to kill her that night.”
“She had a feeling?”
“Darling, I know how much you enjoy talking about cold hard evidence and keeping feelings out of investigations and whatever, but you are truly underestimating a woman’s intuition.”
I stay silent.
Jeanie rolls her eyes. “Helga’s father had recently died and had left her a bit of money. About two million krone, which was perhaps about two hundred and fifty thousand pounds, I can’t quite remember. That was a lot back then. You’re good with numbers, what would that be with today’s inflation?”
I puff out a breath, do some quick mental calculations. “About a million, probably, maybe a little more.”
“Wow,” Jeanie says, as though she has, or has ever had, any concept of money.
“Anyway, she’d inherited this fortune, and it was just sitting in a bank account in her name.
Not their shared account. The second piece of ‘evidence’ .
. .” Jeanie does air quotes, making the word seem like a joke.
“Is that she’d found some newspaper clippings in a book that Peter owned.
Some man in Portugal or somewhere had accidentally killed his glamourous assistant during a sword?box illusion.
The ‘accident’ being that he used the wrong sword. ”
She raises her eyebrows in a “Well, what do you think?” manner.
But before I can get a word in edgeways, she’s chatting again. “I know these things aren’t ‘real evidence’—to you anyway—but back then it was enough to set off a chain of worry with Helga.”
“Actually,” I add, slightly affronted by Jeanie’s lack of faith in me. “I wouldn’t have dismissed this.”
“Oh, well, thank you. She said the carry case that contained the swords felt heavier than usual, and Peter wouldn’t let her set them up at the side of the stage.
I told her to run for it, but she said she couldn’t.
That he’d know she knew and would find her.
Gary, she was nineteen. Nineteen! And he was forty.
I know they say love is blind, but come on! Have you seen him?”
“You’re getting sidetracked again,” I say. Though it feels an awful lot like grooming to me.
“Right, yes. Anyway, Helga couldn’t run away, so we made a plan.
The show would go ahead, but during the climactic finish, I was going to yell out from the crowd for them to switch roles and have Peter get in the sword box.
Apparently, it was always Helga who went inside.
Everything went fine with the performance.
Helga fumbled a few times, but I think it was nerves, and then at the end of the show, The Remarkable Roskelly did a little speech about loyalty or something.
It felt . . . out of place, and then they were preparing for the grand finale.
The time was approaching for me to shout for the pair to switch, but I chickened out.
I figured since I’m only five foot two, how would they hear me?
But my friend Dalton was there on holiday, and I managed to convince him to do it.
We attended drama school together. Amongst his many talents, he was also a professional baritone.
“Peter had two choices. Reveal to the world he’d plan to kill his wife.
Or climb into the box. If he was innocent, he had nothing to worry about.
If not . . .” She shrugs. “I was so certain Peter wouldn’t go through with it, that he’d find a way to get out of everything or force Helga into that box, but I think he knew then .
. . risk death or prison. He made his choice.
“At first, it didn’t seem like anything had gone wrong with the trick.
Somebody pointed to blood dripping from the bottom of the box, but most people thought it was part of the performance.
Until it started gushing towards the crowd.
By coincidence—well, not that much of a coincidence, it is a very small town with not many other activities—Dave Davies and the then sergeant, I’ve forgotten his name, sorry, were in the audience.
He ran onto the stage, opened the box, and Peter’s body just . . . thumped out.
“After that, it all got a bit chaotic. I don’t recall what happened next.
I only remember waking up in Angel’s bed with cuts and bruises on my hands and knees.
My therapist said I’d had a nervous episode and reverted to a childlike state.
That I’d gone to the beach because it was my comfort place. The place I first met Angel.
“I was told they arrested Helga under suspicion of murder, but she was later released on bail and was ordered not to leave the country. She’d explained that Peter was trying to set her up and had switched out the trick sword for a real one.
We, or rather she, decided to keep my name out of it because she didn’t want to harm my career, and the police never found the actual sword used. Nothing ever came of the incident.”
It takes a few moments for all of Jeanie’s information to sink in. “But after all this, why would Helga stay at The Paragon? The order was obviously to remain in the UK. She could have gone anywhere.”