Maxim Jakubowski - The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries 6

“It’s neat for me,” he said. “I wasn’t sure which of the two guys is the killer. Now I know there’s only one of them, I’ve got him, whatever he calls himself.”

“I wouldn’t count on it,” I said.

He shot me a foul look.

“The therapy requires me to find points of contact between the alter-personalities. When you came to me with this double murder, I could see how disturbing it would be for Jon. He carries most of the guilt. But this investigation of yours could be a helpful disturbance. It goes right back to the trauma that I think was the trigger for this condition, his ill-treatment at the hands of foster parents who happened to own a dog they pampered and preferred to the child.”

“My heart bleeds,” Morgan said, “but I have a job to do and two people are dead.”

“So you tell me. Jon thinks he may have murdered them, but he didn’t.”

“Come off it,” he said.

“Listen, please. Nathan’s story was true. He really did have that experience with the balloon and the little dog and falling in the pond. For him – as the more positive of the identities – it was one more entertaining experience to relate. But for Jon, who experienced it also, it was disturbing, raising memories of the couple who fostered him and abused him. He felt quite differently, murderous even.”

“Hold on,” Morgan said. “Are you trying to tell me the murders never happened?”

“They happened in the mind of Jon, and they are as real to him as if he cut those old people’s throats himself. But I promise you the old couple are alive and well. I went to Steven Street at lunchtime and spoke to them. They confirmed what Nathan told me.”

“I don’t get this. I’m thinking you’re nuts as well.”

“But it’s important that you do get it,” I told him. “There’s a third identity at work here. It acts as a kind of conscience, vengeful, controlling, and ready to condemn. It, too, is convinced the murders took place and have to be investigated. Recognizing this is the first step towards integration. Do me a favour and have another look at Jon’s face. It’s still on the screen.”

He gave an impatient sigh and glanced at the image.

“Now look at this, Inspector.”

I handed him a mirror.

The elaborate silvered gates stood wide apart, ready to accept guests. You couldn’t arrive on foot, of course; there was nowhere to walk, except in the drive or through the sprinkler-wet grass, and it would have looked foolish climbing towards the house in the headlights of arriving cars.

Inside, the first thing I saw was an avenue of rustling palms, their slender trunks wound with twinkling blue and white lights, like giant candy sticks. Two robotically handsome valets in gold and crimson jackets were parking the cars, mostly sparkling black Mercedes, Daimlers, Volvos. The staircase was flanked by six teenaged waitresses in tiny red Santa outfits tentatively dispensing delicate flutes of champagne. A floodlit house, oblong, low and very white, was arranged on two levels between banked bottle-green lawns. I could hear muted laughter, murmuring, a delicate presence of guests. I saw silhouettes passing before the rippled phosphorescence of a pool with translucent globes pacing its perimeter. There was no sign of our host, but on the patio a butler, chef, bartenders and waiters were arranged behind banks of lurid, fleshy lobster tails and carrot batons.

There was a muffled beat in the air, the music designed to create ambience without being recognizable, Beatles’ songs rescored for a jazz trio. It was the end of the sixties, the age of Aquarius. Smokey Robinson and Dionne Warwick were in the charts, but there were no black people there that night except me.

In Los Angeles, parties aren’t about letting your hair down and having fun. They’re for networking, appraising, bargaining, being seen and ticked from a list. There were two kinds of guest roaming the house that night, ones who would have been noticed by their absence, and others who had been invited merely to fill up dead space. It goes without saying that I was in the latter group. Only Sidney Poitier would have made it into the former.

It was the home of Cary Dell, a slow-witted middleweight studio executive at MGM, and I remember seeing plenty of almost-familiar faces; Jacqueline Bisset, Victoria Vetri, Ralph Meeker, a couple of casting directors, some black-suited agents lurking together in a corner, fish-eyeing everyone else. The important people were seated in a semi-circular sunken lounge, lost among oversized purple cushions. The area was so exclusive that it might as well have had velvet ropes around it. Everyone else worked hard at keeping the conversation balloon-light and airborne, but couldn’t resist glancing over to the pit to see what was going on at the real centre of the party.

There was another kind of guest there that night. Dell had invited some beautiful young girls. No one unsavoury, they weren’t call-girls, just absurdly perfect, with slender waists and basalt eyes. They stood together tapping frosted pink nails on the sides of their martini glasses, flicking their hair, looking about, waiting for someone to talk to them.

Parties like this took place all over the Hollywood hills; the old school still arrived in tuxedos and floor-length gowns, but studios had lately rediscovered the youth movie, and were shamelessly courting the same anti-establishment students they had ridiculed five years earlier. I had made a couple of very bad exploitation flicks, usually cast as the kind of comic sidekick whose only purpose was his amusing blackness. Back in those days I believed in visibility at any cost, and always took the work.

I had a feeling I’d been added to the guest list by Dell’s secretary in order to make up numbers and provide him with a sheen of coolness, because I wore fringed brown leather trousers and had my hair in an Afro, and hadn’t entirely lost my Harlem jive. He sure hadn’t invited me for my conversation; we’d barely spoken more than two words to each other. If we had, Dell would have realized I came from a middle-class family in New Jersey, and I might not have got the work.

I remember it was a cool night toward the end of November. The wind had dropped, and there were scents of patchouli and hashish in the air. The party was loosening up a little, the music rising in volume and tempo. Some of the beautiful girls were desultorily dancing together on a circular white rug in the lounge. I had been to a few of these parties and they always followed the same form, peaking at ten-thirty, with the guests calling for their cars soon after. People drank and drove more in those days, of course, but nobody of any importance stayed late because the studios began work at 4 a.m.

I was starting to think about leaving before undergoing the embarrassment of waiting for my battered Mustang to be brought around front, when there was a commotion of raised voices out on the patio, and I saw someone – a gaunt middle-aged man in a black suit – go into the pool fully dressed. It was difficult to find out what had happened, because everyone was crowding around the water’s edge. All I know is, when they pulled him out of the chlorine a minute later, he was dead. I read in the LA Times next day that he’d twisted his neck hitting the concrete lip as he went in, and had died within seconds. He was granted a brief obituary in Variety because he’d featured in a lame Disney film called Monkeys, Go Home. I remember thinking that the press reports were being uncharacteristically cautious about the death. I guess nobody wanted to risk implying that Dell had been keeping a disorderly house, and there was no suggestion of it being anything other than an unfortunate accident. Dell was a big player in a union town.