Читать книгу Dead Alone - Gay Longworth - Страница 16

For the second time that morning Jessie burst into Jones’ office without knocking. ‘You are not going to believe this.’ Again, she didn’t notice Jones straighten himself up. ‘The implants belong to Verity Shore.’

‘Who?’

‘Verity Shore.’

‘I said who, not what.’

‘Sorry. She’s an actress. Well, actually, not really – you know, she’s married to that pop star, um … Oh God, I’m crap with names. He’s had three huge hits, used to play with that band Spunk, went solo and is now enormous … P. J. Dean. You know?’

‘No.’

‘She stripped for a tyre ad and got into trouble doing pregnant nude poses for Playboy.’

‘Hardly narrows the field.’

‘She wore a see-through piece of gauze to a film premiere. You couldn’t have missed that!’

He shrugged.

‘You’re hopeless. Where’s Trudi?’

‘On an errand.’

Jessie raided Jones’ long-suffering assistant’s desk drawer and retrieved a dog-eared copy of Hello! ‘She’s in here all the time. I don’t think she can help herself.’ She quickly flicked through it. ‘Here we go, “At Home with Verity”, following her stay in a health farm.’ She looked up at Jones. ‘She’d been suffering from exhaustion,’ she said, handing Jones the article.

‘A lot of that going about,’ he noted drily.

‘You’ve got to feel sorry for the woman: all those parties, all those photo ops, it’s bound to exhaust the girl.’

Jones studied the photo. A leggy blonde languished on a white sofa. A bedraggled man stood in the background, blurred. ‘Not any more.’

‘The thing is, sir, she hasn’t been reported missing. I don’t really want to turn up and scare everyone, only to find out she’s asleep upstairs and LA haven’t quite got their filing system in order. She’s got kids. Two, I think. Not by him – two other guys.’

‘Nice.’

‘She has a habit of leaving one when a more famous other comes along.’

‘And the kids?’

Jessie shrugged. ‘She got custody in both cases, though I don’t know if the respective fathers fought that hard, if you know what I mean.’

‘You think he’d kill his wife?’

‘P. J. Dean?’ Jessie shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. He’s very well respected, though of course you never know what’s true and what isn’t these days.’ Jessie held up a photograph. ‘But if this is Verity Shore, she was decapitated and dipped in acid. That is not the same as picking up a bread knife in the middle of a drunken domestic.’

‘So what do you want to do?’ asked Jones.

‘Pay P. J. Dean a visit. See if his wife is missing and whether they are trying to keep it quiet. They live in a modern house in Richmond.’ Jessie held out the magazine. ‘According to this, anyway.’ The conversation was taking on surreal proportions.

‘Okay.’ He stood up. ‘Let’s go.’

She appreciated that. It meant he would come with her. Lending her the weight of his far superior badge. After all, bones were one thing, P. J. Dean was another.