A sly grin crossed her face as she caught him gawping. ‘Armani.’
‘You look like you’re going to the Oscars.’
‘Hardly,’ she sighed. ‘I’m supposed to be an ordinary hostess. Imagine you’re a guest at my Christmas drinks party. .’
‘Thank you.’ Carlyle gave a small bow.
‘And I am introducing you to the delights of Prince Percy’s Perfect Peanuts.’ Shifting round in her chair, she grabbed a 500g tin from the table behind her and waved it in the air. ‘They’re be-yond tasty!’
‘Mm, I’m not really a nut man myself.’
‘I don’t blame you,’ said Zelle, tossing the tin back on to the table. ‘But this was the only thing that my agent could get for me, useless cow.’
Why did a woman who had made millions from her divorce have to do adverts at all? And why would anyone go out and buy a tin of nuts on the basis of her endorsement? Keeping his questions to himself, Carlyle gave her a sympathetic nod.
‘I mean, I should be doing Ferrero Rocher — craftsmanship, perfection, excellence. Or maybe Disaronno. In other words, products with class.’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s not like I’m even getting paid properly for this. We recorded the original ad months ago, but then the British Nutrition Foundation complained that we’d oversold the health benefits and the Advertising Standards Authority made us pull it.’
‘Health benefits?’
‘I don’t know the details,’ she said airily, as a hassled-looking man with a beard stuck his head round the dressing-room door.
‘We’re ready for you now, Margaretha.’
‘I’ll be there in a minute,’ she snapped, gesturing towards the inspector. ‘Can’t you see that I’m helping the police with their enquiries here?’
The bearded man glared at Carlyle, who gave an apologetic shrug. ‘As soon as possible then, please,’ he muttered.
‘Yes, yes.’ Zelle turned her attention back to the inspector. ‘I suppose I should thank you, really.’
Carlyle frowned. ‘Why?’
‘Now that the police have broken open this phone-hacking scandal, I’m in line for a nice payday.’ Reaching forward, she gave his arm a gentle squeeze. ‘Zenger Media is going to have to pay out compensation for all the victims. My agent reckons I should get something in the low hundreds of thousands — maybe even half a million.’
‘Wow.’ Carlyle let out a low whistle. ‘Not bad for letting someone listen to your voicemails.’
Sitting back in her chair, Zelle shot him a sharp look. ‘It’s for misuse of private information,’ she rebuked him, ‘for breach of confidence, publication of articles derived from voicemail hacking and a sustained campaign of harassment over a period of more than eighteen months.’
‘Of course,’ Carlyle said stiffly. ‘Anyway, that’s not what I came to talk about.’ From his jacket pocket, he pulled out the pages that he had carefully cut from the magazine he had found in Harris Highman’s office. Opening them out, he showed her one of the smaller photos they contained.
‘God, I remember that!’ Zelle squawked. ‘It was soooo totally boring. No one in Berlin seemed to know who I was.’ She pointed to one of the other women in the picture. ‘They were all fawning over that stupid bitch Yulissa Vasconzuelo. Just because she’s fucking the Prime Minister doesn’t mean she’s any good, you know.’
Trying to stick to the point, Carlyle put his finger against the third woman in the picture. ‘You knew Mrs Mosman?’
‘Zoe? Yes, I’ve known her forever.’ Zelle’s face darkened. ‘Terrible what happened.’
‘Indeed.’ Carlyle showed her another photo. ‘What about this guy?’
‘Dario, yes. We all go back a long way.’
‘So he knew Zoe, too?’
Zelle shot him an amused look. ‘Oh, yes, he knew her intimately.’
‘Before she was married?’
‘Before. . and after.’ Zelle waved her hand in the air. ‘It wouldn’t surprise me if he even fucked her on her wedding day. That kind of thing would have amused Dario,’ she arched a heavily pencilled eyebrow, ‘and aroused him considerably.’
‘Did her husband know about the affair?’
‘Ivor Mosman,’ Zelle sighed, ‘is not a man of any great passion. He’s a bit of a wimp, really. Altogether very English.’ She thought about that for a moment. ‘With a tiny dick — I can vouch for that.’
Carlyle didn’t want to know about that.
‘I think,’ Zelle continued, ‘that he decided at an early stage that he could just ignore what was going on. I’m sure it bothered him, but he could live with it. In my experience that’s quite common; a lot of people just decide to put up with things.’
That particular situation seemed rather a lot to put up with, but the inspector said nothing.
She noticed the scepticism in his face. ‘Maybe it was more than that. Maybe he found it convenient, especially as the kids grew older. The couple lived fairly separate lives. After all, Zoe was financially independent. Indeed, I know for a fact that she bankrolled his business for a while, when things were tough. But as a marriage it was fairly hollow.’ She shook her head. ‘They’d had separate bedrooms for years.’
‘Mm.’
‘Marriage is tough,’ Zelle said ruefully, and then she grinned. ‘A man in your life is like a car — you need to change them every couple of years.’
The inspector was wondering quite how to respond to this when the door reopened and a woman’s voice shouted, ‘Margaretha! We’re ready. They’re all waiting for you.’
‘All right, all right,’ Zelle grumbled. ‘I’m coming.’ Getting to her feet, she slipped off the Puffa jacket. ‘Prince Percy’s Perfect Peanuts,’ she mumbled under her breath ‘They’re be-yond tasty!’
‘What do you think about Dario?’ Carlyle asked her, as she reached the door.
Zelle didn’t miss a beat. ‘I think he’s easily the biggest bastard I ever met.’ She said it quietly but with feeling. ‘If you’re looking for someone who might have killed Zoe, I would start with him.’
‘For you.’
Simpson eyed the party-sized tin of peanuts, which the inspector had just placed on her desk, with a mixture of suspicion and disgust.
‘Apparently, Prince Percy’s are all the rage if you are hosting a drinks party,’ the inspector explained innocently.
Ignoring the nuts, she fixed him with a wary look. ‘Why are you here?’
‘Mosman,’ he said cheerily.
‘You mean the case that you were supposed to be prioritizing?’
‘The case that I am prioritizing.’
‘Oh?’ Simpson frowned. ‘Did I miss an arrest? Can we put another tick in the “case-solved” box?’
Ignoring his boss’s sarcasm, Carlyle told her, ‘The guy we think is responsible is called Dario Untersander, a Swiss national. He and Zoe Mosman go way back. The suggestion is that she did a bit of escorting to pay her way through university and-’
Simpson held up a hand. ‘Are you saying that she was a hooker?’
‘Grey area.’ Carlyle shrugged. ‘When she was younger, it seems that there were lots of parties and expensive holidays paid for by rich boyfriends of various ages and tastes. Was she on the game? It’s a matter of semantics. The point, however, is that it was at this time she met Untersander.’
‘And who told you all of this?’
‘A reliable source,’ Carlyle said. For the purposes of this conversation, he was prepared to stretch his definition of reliable to include someone as flaky as Margaretha Zelle. ‘Someone who has known both of them reasonably well.’
Simpson grunted, unconvinced.
‘Anyway,’ Carlyle ploughed on, ‘Mrs Mosman and Untersander had a sexual relationship which apparently was continuing, sporadically, despite both of them since being married to other people.’
Simpson gave him a Get on with it look.