Death on Daytime: A Tess Darling Mystery (The Tess Darling Mysteries) Read Online Free PDF Page A

secret.” Sandy leant in to Camera 1.
    “This secret, as her friend, I swore never to divulge. But now she is dead – dead in the most
suspicious
circumstances – I feel a duty to reveal what I know. Jeenie—” Sandy waited for the close-up. “Was being stalked.”
    As a cliffhanger, Sandy couldn’t have timed it better. With credits about to roll, a visibly-started Fergie thanked viewers for watching and closed the show. Back in studio, no-one moved. From the lowliest runner to the toughest grip, they waited for Sandy to finish what she’d started.
    They were to be out of luck. A curt nod from Sandy to the floor manager put her crew back to work. It was left to Tess to ask the questions. “Jeenie had a stalker?”
    “That’s what I said.”
    “She confided in
you?”
    “Of course,” flushed Sandy. “Why wouldn’t she?”
    The answer hung in the air. Three months ago, Jeenie Dempster had stolen Sandy Plimpton’s husband. Losing him had struck Sandy to the core; worse, it had threatened her career. For Mark Plimpton was not just the love of Sandy’s life, he was her co-star.
    The Plimptons had met while presenting a telethon for Anglia TV. Back then, Mark was the most dashing reporter on the local news. He subsequently proved to be the only man with enough foresight to seduce Sandy, the plain but passionate host of its weekly consumer bulletin. Vain enough to want it all but unsure how to get it, Mark had placed himself in Sandy’s strong, albeit slightly twitchy hands and, when Backchat Productions started casting round for a ‘cosy duo’ to front their new morning show, his new wife had pitched The Plimptons as the perfect pair.
    So they had proved. Online polls regularly voted them Happiest Couple in Showbiz, as viewers thrilled to their daily marital sagas – from last-night’s row over the remote control to Mark’s reversed vasectomy (a Bank Holiday special). Swept up in the Plimpton’s desperate battle to conceive, the nation had cooed over the eventual birth of their twins. While Sandy had been only too relieved to sink her splintered pelvic floor back on to the
Live With
sofa however, Mark was to prove more restless…
    Shortly after Jeenie Dempster bagged the
Pardon My Garden
slot, she’d bedded Mark. Three months ago, in a scandal that devastated Sandy and rocked the pages of ‘TV Quick’, he left his wife and twins for her. Worse still, he left the show.
    Sandy had promptly demanded Jeenie’s dismissal, claiming she couldn’t work on-screen with her husband’s mistress without
Stop the World
turning into some low-rent soap opera (precisely the reason Backchat refused). To mollify their humiliated star, they offered her the role she’d always coveted: Executive Producer. She took it. Day in, day out, the nation watched Sandy link to the woman who’d stolen her husband, while her hair got thinner, her waist fatter and her lip liner increasingly disconnected from her lips.
    Beneath this increasingly shaky exterior, however, lay breeze blocks of ambition. Hiring a second nanny and her first personal trainer, Sandy started to see less of her children and more of her feet. Her comeback was crowned with the wet kisses of Colin Pound but still Jeenie haunted her; taunted her over the satellite link-up. “Twins been keeping you up again Sand?” she’d simper over a seed-tray. “What you do! Makes me feel embarrassed to be young.”
    The women hated each other. Everyone knew it. Showbiz websites regularly reported their latest round of sniping. Gossip magazines that had once gushed over the Plimptons’ perfect marriage gloated over their
Divorce at Daytime.
Now Sandy expected the world to believe Jeenie had rushed to
her
when a stalker threatened?
    “Whatever our
personal
differences,” she continued. “Jeenie was no fool. When she started receiving disturbing mail, she knew she had a duty to report it.”
    “To the
police,
” said Tess.
    “To her Executive Producer,” corrected