Murder Most Fab Read online

  This book is dedicated to the memory of

  Russell Churney, 1964-2007

  The only known heterosexual in the

  World of showbusiness

  In secret we met:

  In silence I grieve

  That thy heart could forget,

  Thy spirit deceive.

  If I should meet thee

  After long years,

  How should I greet thee?

  With silence and tears.

  ‘When We Two Parted’ — Lord Byron

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  With special thanks to Kirsty Fowkes, my editor, who encouraged and restrained me with great skill and diplomacy.

  Thanks also to Andrew Goodfellow at Ebury for giving me the chance to write my first novel, Ian Mackley for telling me to get on with it, David McGillivray and Brenda Clary for helping me select poems, Frankie Clary for the Spanish translations, and Valerie for kind looks late at night.

  Dear Timothy,

  I am sorry about this book, in so far as it implicates you. My story is so interwoven with my love for you that it is impossible to separate the two.

  It is time for me to explain my life, to demystify my feelings for you and spell out exactly how fame and murder took over what might otherwise have been a harmless, insignificant existence.

  Guilt grows like a tumour inside me. The idea of telling my true story, thus squeezing the spot, expelling the poison and cleansing my soul, is not only a solution but a compulsion — writing down the truth in all its grisly detail will be chemotherapy for my moral anguish.

  You know the real me, the me that existed beneath the famous television persona, Mr Friday Night. Fame is such a strange thing, Timothy. It transforms you and everyone who knows you. Only you, my beloved, remembered the innocent boy from Kent whose heart you stole and broke and mended — and broke again. Even while I was the darling of the tabloids, the king of television, doyen of the party scene, I was just Johnny to you … But even you didn’t know the full story.

  If we were being picky we might describe me as a serial killer. But I don’t think of myself like that. There was no bloodlust to quench, no orgasmic satisfaction in dispatching any of my unfortunate victims. I was forced into a situation by circumstances beyond my control, obliged to make a choice between my survival and other people’s deaths. It sounds trite to say ‘one thing led to another’ but it’s true. I wasn’t acting under any uncontrollable urge. Please don’t think of me as a psychopath, sociopath or schizophrenic. None of those is applicable. I’m a normal, balanced, contributing member of society. And I love you. It couldn’t be worse, really, could it?

  As for the rest of my dreary life, I’m done for. But, strangely, I don’t mind. I’m a different man now, after everything that’s happened. I had it all, lost it all, and now I’m surprised to find that I don’t want it back. Been there, done that, got the bloodstained T-shirt. My juices don’t flow at the thought of publicity like they used to. The thrill of being in the papers has long since been replaced with dread, but the final feeding frenzy of tabloid adjectives and lurid headlines has been a fine exit. And if one is, however unwillingly, to enter that arena, it’s best to be cast in the role of bad boy. The language of journalists flourishes much more imaginatively when they take the moral high ground.

  I’m sorry. I love you. I hope you understand and that you forgive me,

  JD x

  I was no ordinary prostitute, I liked to think. I was high class. I had a number of tricks up my sleeve, as it were, to ensure my client’s satisfaction. I was twenty-two and my enormous, proud and ever-ready member had the ability to throb and twitch on command, and — most exciting of all — could ejaculate by the beakerful at a moment’s notice and not before. If required to play the passive role, my sphincter could squeeze and tug, vibrate and undulate in a frankly unnatural manner. I was more of a circus turn than a common trick. I claimed I could peel a satsuma with my arse, but that wasn’t strictly true — although I did once crack a Cadbury’s Creme Egg.

  Believe it or not, back then in the early nineties, I was a straight-looking boy-next-door type who specialized in rough sex and humiliation. The image was part dominant master and part horny straight boy, up for it when paid, yet — wouldn’t you know? —bad and dirty with it.

  Although I was British, my grandmothers had clearly had exotic tastes: people speculated that I’d had one Indian grandfather and one, maybe, Hawaiian. While Grandmother Rita assured me that Grandfather Norman was good, solid British stock through and through, she had to admit that there was no knowing what might have come through on the other side. I was dark-haired and olive-skinned with inscrutable Buddha-like brown eyes. You couldn’t tell what I was thinking when I kissed your forehead any more than when I tightened my hands round your throat.

  I am a modest five feet nine inches, smooth and naturally toned from my youthful participation in athletics. My aura, I’m told, is the same dark green as an empty Louis Coudenne claret bottle held up to the sunlight: menacing and mesmerizing all at once.

  My working name at that time was simply JD (Johnny Debonair being my real name) but I also answered to ‘sir’.

  JD —floating your boat, whatever the weather! read my business card, and it was true. If being verbally or physically abused was your desire, I could deliver. I could transport. I could bring joy. As my ad at the back of Gay Times stated (beneath a torso shot with a digitally blurred face): ‘Totally active type. Versatile if need be. Horse hung.’

  I wasn’t boasting. The look of gratitude on my punters’ faces said it all — they were misty-eyed as they said goodbye. It wasn’t love, of course, but I knew I could induce infatuation in a single visit. I was the font of happiness. Besides offering them my magnificent body, with its awe-inspiring genitals, I could give them emotional satisfaction too. I told them that I hoped to see them again. I did extended eye-contact and dealt with the financial transactions quickly and dismissively, never counting or questioning. I remembered their quirks and preferences, knew how and when to trigger their orgasm(s) and held them tight in my arms afterwards, evaporating their loneliness for a few blissful moments. I was worth it.

  I was also discreet, punctual, clean and enthusiastic. I did what it said on the packet.

  In retrospect, my path to the unusual career choice of high-class hooker seems straightforward, but I had no idea I was heading in that direction even as I took each step along the road. Generally speaking, enrolling at the Lewisham School of Musical Theatre isn’t always a sure-fire fast-track entry to a life of vice. It might not be as prestigious as some drama schools but it has still launched one or two limp little careers of vague interest, if only to those closely related to the people concerned. Nevertheless, that was where it began for me.

  I hadn’t craved a life in musical theatre but I applied for a place because my grandmother had decided it was the best possible career for someone like me. I was an extrovert youth, with a mother who wore gypsy skirts, so it was agreed I would be a natural. As I wasn’t sure one way or the other, I went along with it. Apart from anything else, I had to think of something to do with myself and most other possibilities seemed too much like hard work. There was no way I was going to spend my life in an office, if I could help it; singing and dancing for a living were better than that.

  I charmed my way through the audition, giving it my all with a hearty, thigh-slapping rendition of ‘Michael Row the Boat Ashore’, thrusting my funky groin at the panel during the alleluias.

  I couldn’t sing, but I had charm that made people smile and that translated, somehow, into stage presence.

  I was offered a place on the year-long course and assumed that, in exactly twelve months’ time, my name would be in lights above the do
or of some West End theatre. My mother would have to come to terms with the fact that the fruit of her loins was very probably the next Michael Crawford. Not an easy realization for any woman.

  I had a rather rude awakening when I arrived in the big city and promptly found myself a long way from the glitz and glamour of the West End. My bedsit was in a dreary lodging-house on Brownhill Road, one of sunny Lewisham’s less salubrious addresses. I began to wonder then if leaving the cosy little cottage I shared with my mother in a beautiful corner of Kent had been the right decision. But then I remembered all the reasons why I’d had to get away and determined to make the best of it.

  I pretended that everything in my new life was perfect. ‘The bedsit is beautiful,’ I told my mother on the phone. ‘It’s a nest of luxury.’

  ‘Oh, good. Clever Grandma to find it for you.’

  Grandma had told me it wasn’t exactly the Dorchester but I hadn’t been expecting quite so much in the way of peeling wood-chip wallpaper, damp, and electrical sockets that buzzed.

  ‘Are you looking forward to college?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I can’t wait to learn how to do jazz hands properly.’

  ‘You’ll have a fabulous time, my sweet.’

  She firmly believed it was now only eleven months and twenty-eight days before I burst into the world of showbiz in a blaze of glory.

  ‘I’m saving up for the trip to New York,’ she said gaily. ‘I expect you’ll be wanted on Broadway, too, once they hear about you.’

  To be honest, I agreed with her.

  My illusion that a life in the public gaze awaited me after a year at drama school was rudely shattered on my first day at the college when I met the other students. Every single one believed that fame and fortune were the inevitable outcome of our course and, even with my … rural grasp of mathematics, I could see that this was a statistical impossibility. And so, almost at once, I started to lose faith. Which, of course, was fatal.

  In our first class we were made to sit in a large circle, then took it in turns to say a little about ourselves and why we were there. A large proportion of the other students — particularly the women, I noticed — were suspiciously thin.

  A very slender girl with long auburn hair, which she flicked and stroked and twirled round her fingers, said her name was Stephanie Dalton — ‘But my stage name is Darryl Streep. I’ve been acting since I was three and my mother says I could sing before I could talk and dance before I could walk.’

  That didn’t seem likely to me but I kept my thoughts to myself. By now she had taken to sucking a strand of hair into a wet rat’s tail and stroking her cheek with it playfully. ‘Just give me a songbook and a dance routine and I’m happy!’ she exclaimed.

  Everyone clapped, and I joined in dutifully, wondering why this merited applause.

  The only black person in the group was next. He had an American accent, was tall and leggy, dressed in jogging pants and a faded blue singlet with ‘POW!’ written across it in jagged yellow lettering.

  ‘I’m Larry, how you doin’?’ he said, then dissolved into self-conscious giggles. A moment later he pulled himself together with a mock slap of his face. ‘Okay, here goes …‘ He took a deep breath as if he were about to dive off the top board. ‘I’m Larry, I’m from Phoenix, Arizona, come to London cos it’s the best place on the planet for a hoofer like me to learn his trade, lovin’ it, lovin’ it, so excited.’ He spoke as if he was reading a list, intoning downwards at the end of each item. It was difficult to know when he’d finished peaking. ‘I’m seventeen, but ya gotta start young in this business, youngest of five, I’m gay but it’s not an issue, missin’ my folks like mad, been here a week and seen Cats six times, er, er, oh! And I’m black! Surprise!’ He flung out his arms, smiled a dazzling white smile and raised his eyebrows to signify he was done. He got a much bigger round of applause than Darryl, who tried to smile but looked more than a little put out.

  My heart sank. It was early days, but I knew I didn’t fit in with these people. I didn’t have their weird enthusiasm for singing and dancing. But worse was to come.

  The boy next to me identified himself. ‘My name is Sean,’ he said, in a posh Glasgow accent. ‘I’m a Pisces and I’m Scottish, as you can probably tell, and I just live to sing. I’d like to be playing a lead role in the West End in about five years’ time. Cabaret, Guys and Dolls, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg … I don’t really mind in which order.’

  I gave him a sideways glance. He was painfully thin and his cheekbones were accentuated by his constant pouting. He wore a tight red cap-sleeved T-shirt, baggy jeans and the inevitable leg-warmers.

  ‘I’m here in Lewisham to hone my craft and get my career on the road,’ he told us.

  Now it was my turn. ‘My name is Johnny Debonair and I come from a village near Ashford. I’m here to see if I like it. It was my grandmother’s idea …’ I trailed off to an embarrassed silence.

  ‘Well done, Johnny,’ said Larry, giving me a reassuring pat on the arm.

  A decidedly restrained spatter of applause began, then stopped almost immediately. I wasn’t bothered. I couldn’t bring myself to pretend I was one of the kids from Fame, as everyone else in the room seemed to want to do.

  There were fifteen of us in the class. When everybody had introduced themselves, our tutor, Francis Grey, told us it would be a tough year, we were going to work really hard, but it was a start of a new life, a life on the stage, the most demanding but also the most rewarding life there is, and so on. I perked up when he lowered his voice and added, ‘The sad news is that not all of you will make it. Some of you will fall by the wayside …‘

  There was hope, then.

  The first class of the day was, as it would always be, a general warm-up for voice and body. We began with an exercise of sticking out our tongues as far as they would go. This we alternated with forcing air through our lips so we sounded a bit like horses snorting. We chanted ‘ma, ma, mas’ and ‘moo, moo, moos’ and then moved on to vowel sounds. Then we sang scales to the piano.

  ‘Who’s not giving me that C sharp?’ asked Francis. We sang the scale again as he walked up and down, cocking his ear at us. He stopped suddenly and looked accusingly at me. ‘Quiet, everyone.’ He stared at me as if I’d stolen from the poor. ‘Give me a C sharp, please, Johnny,’ he demanded.

  There was a hush of expectation. I made an intelligent guess and confidently sang the note.

  ‘Oh, my God!’ I heard Larry whisper. ‘That was a C!’

  ‘Hmm. Well done, Johnny. Good effort. We’ll work on that in your individual class,’ said Francis. ‘It was completely wrong, of course, but you’re not to worry about it now.’

  Larry looked at me as if I had herpes.

  ‘However,’ Francis continued gravely, ‘I have to tell you now that without C sharp you can’t ever do Oklahoma!.’

  Maybe I should top myself now, I thought — but I didn’t have the nerve to say it.

  By the end of the first week I knew for sure that I didn’t fit in. Everyone seemed neurotic, intense and a trifle self-obsessed. I was a country boy, excited to be in London and wanting to have fun. I didn’t yearn for a life on the stage as badly as the others did. Some of the girls amused me, but even they insisted on humming musical numbers mid-sentence as we scurried between classes and there was a whiff of vomit about the more slender ones.

  My initial impressions of Sean had been correct. At first he appeared to take quite a shine to me, and spent the first week fluttering his eyelashes and being heavily flirtatious. He even sang ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ to me one day while I was eating my lunch, and rather good it was too, although I would never have admitted so to him. Someone who worshipped so devoutly at the shrine of Rodgers and Hammerstein didn’t seem quite right to me, and it felt cruel to encourage him. And as for the flirtation —well, my heart was well and truly elsewhere and there was no way skeletal Scottish Sean could compete with the man of my dreams.

  Once he’d got the message, S
ean went on the turn. He began a laughable but vicious whispering campaign about me, which all stemmed from a chat we’d had in the college refectory one morning about his hopes and ambitions.

  ‘I just pray I’ll be good enough, that this gift I’ve been given by God, my voice, will fulfil its potential,’ he said, as if the alternative was global catastrophe.

  ‘I think anyone can sing and dance,’ I said provocatively. He needed shutting up.

  ‘How can you say that?’ Sean looked aghast. ‘How can you disrespect your colleagues in that way?’ He had raised his voice and begun to gesticulate. ‘You want to start appreciating the talent that surrounds you in this place, for God’s sake. The blood, sweat and tears of your fellow performers!’ He was wild-eyed and passionate. After that outburst (of which this was but a short excerpt), he did a lot of neck stretching whenever I came into the room. We never spoke again, but a conspiratorial atmosphere would descend upon any group of fellow students I attempted to engage in social interaction. Eyes would roll, lips would purse, and colleagues would suddenly remember they had left their jazz pumps in the studio and scurry away from me. Sean had got to them.

  ‘I hear you and Sean are, like, handbags at dawn,’ said Larry, with glee. ‘I just love all this bitchin’ — it’s so musical theatre!’

  After that it was a lonely life for me at drama school, as we went about the endless rounds of singing lessons, play rehearsals, fencing classes, elocution, and so on. I was beginning to regret the day I’d ever thought I might be able to spend my adult years as a chorus member in Les Mis even if it was as good as a job for life.

  By the end of the first term, I was disgruntled. For our first term ‘show case’ (which was themed round the songs of Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood), I sang ‘Elusive Dreams’ with an anaemic Welsh waif, the only person still speaking to me. I finished to a lukewarm response that, almost at once, petered out to nothing. Sean sang ‘Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me’. Everyone clapped and whooped. Sean shot me a look of terrible triumph as he took his fifth curtain call. As far as he was concerned he had won a great victory. It seemed I would never be among the people who truly believed that a well-honed musical could save the world.