Flash, USA is sputtering out explanations about Charley’s lying to them about the location of the photos. Charley told them he had gotten a tip from one of Stella’s rich friends about her habit and she’d allowed him to take zoom photos of her stealing jewelry from the hostess’s bedroom. When I had read the statement in Flash, USA about Stella stealing from a friend, I thought it was a reference to me.
Brenda apologized to me for thinking I had anything to do with the photos. The following week, we had a glass of wine together after Stella fell asleep. The lateness of the hour and the warmth of the wine called for confidences.
“I’m going to tell you something that nobody else knows,” Brenda said. “Stella is my stepmother. I was part of the package when she married my father, her second. I was ten years old and so homely and awkward that my real mother, also a movie star, didn’t want me. Stella told me I was beautiful and would always be with her. After the divorce, I went with Stella and she gave me a good life. Lots of warmth, excitement, glamour. I love her and I will always try to protect her.”
We both cried, me for the poignancy of the story and Brenda for failing to shelter Stella from Charley and Derrick. When we heard Stella moving about upstairs, we quickly dried our tears. I shooed Brenda to bed. It was my turn to comfort Stella as best as I could.
Holding on to the stair rail and refusing help, she slowly descended, graceful and stoic in her prison stripes. Since her appearance in Flash, USA, Stella refused to wear anything but her costume from Innocence Denied. When she reached the next to last step, she recited her lines from the ending of the film. “As God is my witness, I am innocent,” she cried. Then, as she has done so many times since she saw those awful photos, she plunged into my arms.
“You won’t let them put me in the electric chair, will you?” she sobbed.
I stroked her hair. “No, Stella. Brenda and I won’t let them do it.”
That assurance soothes her for almost ten minutes until she repeats it as if performing a retake on the old studio lot. I’m going to stay here until Stella recovers. Brenda needs me to spell her during the long nightly replays of Innocence Denied. However long it takes, one of us will be here at the foot of the stairs to catch a falling star.
Sunset City
by Martin Edwards
Martin Edwards’s very first book in the lawyer Harry Devlin series, long in print in England, has finally been published in the U.S. by Five Star Press. The book is entitled All the Lonely People. Mr. Edwards has recently edited the British CWA’s Golden Jubilee anthology Mysterious Pleasures, and his own nonfiction book about crime investigation, Urge to Kill, has just come out in the U.S., from Writer’s Digest Books.
She must have known.
“I’m not accusing you of anything,” Alix said. She opened her eyes very wide. It was a favourite trick. Simple, sure, but she never ceased to be surprised how often it worked.
In the distance, sea gulls were keening. The sun was still high, but there was a sharp edge to the breeze and Alix was glad she’d kept on her suede jacket. It wasn’t exactly beachwear, but she never trusted the British weather, least of all at the British seaside. If you could call this Britain? She didn’t know the island’s technical status; that sort of trivia held no appeal for her.
Jayne Ive folded her arms. She was standing on the step outside her bungalow, a compact middle-aged woman, neatly dressed in a lime-green trouser suit. Alix, a relentless optimist, thought it a good sign that Jayne hadn’t slammed the door in her face. Behind her, Alix could see a hallway with framed prints of moody sunsets on the wall. This could be Mrs. Anyone of Anywhere. But it wasn’t.
“You say that as though you’re doing me a favour.” Jayne’s voice was pleasingly husky, Alix decided. Firmness tinged with irony. This was no downtrodden woman, scarcely a natural victim. She would sound good on the box. “Taking my part when everyone else is against me.”
Alix smiled and said, “Well, it’s not so far off the truth, is it?”
“I have all the help I need, thanks. And, you might like to bear in mind, I have a good lawyer, too.”
The bungalow stood on the cliffs, looking out over the bay and beyond to the Irish Sea. Alix glanced at the sandstone buildings spreading out below, towards the ruined castle on St. Patrick’s Isle. The little island was linked to the larger by a short causeway. A pretty enough place, this, but hardly a centre of metropolitan sophistication.
“Really? The sole Manx specialist in the law on defamation of character?”
As soon as the words left her lips, she regretted them. She hadn’t liked the hint of legal action. Court proceedings, injunctions, they could snarl up any programming schedule; sometimes they killed a project stone-dead. But she knew better than to allow herself to be provoked and she’d intended no more than a flip aside. Yet it sounded as though she were mocking both Jayne Ive and her island home. A bad mistake. It would be crazy to antagonise the woman she’d travelled so far to see.
“He’s a partner in a big firm in Merseyside, actually,” Jayne said drily. “Don’t worry, I’m not entirely parochial. I did live in Liverpool for ten years, remember.”
Alix had been raised in Sydney and resident for the past eighteen months in Battersea. To her, Liverpool was parochial enough, but she didn’t push it. Jayne Ive came from a different world, a world Alix, too, would need to inhabit if this programme were ever to be made.
“After the trial, though, you came back to your roots. Back to the Isle of Man.”
“There’s a saying round these parts. A Manx girl who marries a man from the mainland will bring him back to the island one day. William and I spent all our wedded life in Liverpool.” Jayne unfolded her arms and brushed a lock of fading fair hair out of her eyes. “But I tell you this: One day, he’ll come back to join us, Rosie and me.”
There was a catch in her voice, making Alix wonder if at last she might be ready to crack. Time to be gentle. Tea and sympathy?
“Do you think — we could sit down, have a quiet chat?”
Jayne frowned. She was about to say no, Alix was sure of it, when her expression changed. She was looking over Alix’s shoulder and an anxious look came into her eyes.
Alix turned her head and saw a young woman approaching, her flat heels crunching the gravel of the unmade road. Tall, overweight, with a blotchy complexion. The loose grey top was fair enough, but the flowery leggings definitely a mistake. Her dark hair was inexpertly cropped, tufts of it sticking out at odd angles, as if she’d let an old mariner down by the harbour do his worst with a blunt knife.
“This is Rosie?”
She was guessing. The studio possessed no file pictures of William and Jayne Ive’s only child. But the age was about right. Nineteen, twenty? She bore no obvious resemblance to her mother, but her father, now, that was a different matter. The lumbering gait and the widely spaced blue eyes were spookily familiar from photographs and TV clips of William Ive attending court.
“Yes, it is,” Jayne said.
As she drew near, Rosie Ive focused her gaze on Alix. She glanced quizzically at her mother, as if to say, Why are you, you of all people, talking to a stranger?
“We can talk, if you like,” Jayne said hurriedly. “Just for a little while.”