That sounded fascinating. And it was a good way to get off Neil and on to the other members of Jett’s entourage. “How do you mean?” I asked sweetly, helping myself to more vermicelli before it all disappeared into the human dustbin.

“Always seems to me that Jett has to work a lot harder than other people at his level in the business. I’d love to pin Kevin down as to why that is.”

“Maybe he just likes it,” I suggested.

Richard shook his head. “Not the amount of stuff he does,” he

I put some of the lyrics down to sour grapes, but I filed the general melody away for future reference. As Richard tore into the spicy pork, I tried another strategy. “Couldn’t you go ahead anyway and write the unauthorized biography, warts and all?” I asked. “You must know a lot about the things that Jett wouldn’t necessarily want to make public. Like the split with … Moira, wasn’t it?”

“Sure, I could spill any amount of beans,” Richard agreed. “But I don’t know if I want to do that. I mean, Jett’s a mate.”

“He’s got a funny way of showing it,” I mumbled through a mouthful of beef koon po.

“It would be the last exclusive I got from him.”

“There are plenty more people in the rock business who trust you,” I replied.

“But an awful lot of them wouldn’t be happy about talking to me if I’d dropped Jett in it,” Richard reasoned.

“Surely they’d understand why you’d done it?” We were going down a side alley that wasn’t taking me any further, but I couldn’t help myself. Offering support to Richard was a lot more important to me than helping Jett.

Richard shrugged. “I don’t know. But anyway, there wouldn’t be enough of a market for two books. Jett’s not quite in the international megastar league.”

I got up and helped myself to a bottle of Perrier from the executive drinks fridge Richard keeps in the living room. It had

Wonders will never cease. Richard stopped eating. “You know, Brannigan, you just might have something there … If I flogged it on the quiet, they could put a staff reporter’s byline on it and that would protect my other contacts.”

That was enough to open the floodgates. I knew that when he was sober in the cold light of morning, Richard would have changed his mind about plastering Jett across the front pages of the gutter press. But by the time we made our amorous way to bed a couple of hours later, as far as Jett and his entourage were concerned, I had picked Richard’s brains as clean as he’d picked the salt and pepper ribs.

Chapter   7