Moira Xaviera Pollock was thirty-two years old, a Pisces with Cancer rising and a Sagittarius moon, according to Jett. I felt sure that piece of knowledge would help enormously in my task. They had been kids together in Moss Side, Manchester’s black ghetto, where growing up without a drug habit or a criminal record is an achievement in itself. Moira’s mother had three children by different fathers, none of them in wedlock. Moira was the youngest, and her father had been a Spanish Catholic called Xavier Perez, hence the unusual middle name that was such a godsend to an investigator. In the photographs Jett had given me, she looked

Jett and Moira had started dating in their early teens and they’d soon discovered that they both enjoyed writing songs. Moira wrote the poignant and enigmatic lyrics, Jett put them to music. She had never wanted to perform, seeing no need to compete with Jett’s unique voice, but she’d done her best to organize gigs for him. He’d played a couple of local clubs, then she’d managed to get him a regular weekly spot in a new city center wine bar. That had been the break they needed. Kevin, who’d bought the wine bar as a diversion from the family wholesale fashion business, immediately saw Jett’s potential and informed the pair that he was going to manage them and to hell with the rag trade.

Seeing Jett now, it was hard to imagine what an enormous change it must have been for the two of them. Suddenly they were being wined and dined by Kevin Kleinman, a man who had a suit for every day of the week and then some left over.

Height, five foot, four inches, I typed in. She’d had a good figure too. The snapshots taken before Jett hit the top of the charts looked positively voluptuous. But later, she’d lost weight and her clothes had hung unbecomingly on her. Cutting through Jett’s selfreproach, it seemed that Moira had felt increasingly insignificant as Jett became the idol of millions.

So she had fallen for the scourge of the music industry. I could see how it had happened. Drugs are everywhere in rock, from the fans at the concerts to the recording studios. With Moira, it had all started when Kevin was piling on the pressure for more songs for the third album. She’d started taking speed to stay awake, working through the night with Jett on new songs. Soon she’d moved on to the more intense but shorter high of coke. Then she’d started freebasing coke and before too long she’d been chasing the dragon. Jett hadn’t had a clue how to cope, so he’d just ignored it and tried to lose himself in his music.