The Death of Me

by Michelle Davies

Genres: Crime Fiction; Legal Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

When Isaac Naylor committed suicide after a teenage fan was found dead in his hotel room, the world thought it had lost one of the greatest rock stars of a generation. Naylor, lead singer of The Ospreys, had been arrested for causing the girl's death and was on police bail when he drowned himself in the sea off the Devon coast, leaving two notes addressed to his bandmates and his younger brother, Toby, discarded on the beach.

Now, eight years on, music journalist Natalie Glass stumbles across a blind item on a US gossip website that suggests Naylor's death wasn't quite what it seemed - and he might in fact still be alive. The item claims he is the mystery songwriter who has for the past year been submitting lyrics to producers in London via his lawyer for other artists to record. He insists on anonymity and the only person who knows his identity is the lawyer.

But as she delves deeper into what happened, the plot to stop her intensifies and Natalie finds she has a stark choice: give up trying to find out what happened to Naylor or risk her own obituary ending up in print.

Release date: November 11, 2021

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 352

Sample

I’ve never liked swimming in the sea. Even the slightest tang of salt water on my lips makes me gag. Such was my loathing of it as a child that on holiday I would never venture further than the shallows, primed to run back up the beach the moment I feared the sea was getting too rough and might splash me. As an adult I never willingly go near it.

This I am reminded of when I am shoved forward into the next breaking wave and it hits me full in the face. I retch as my mouth is doused and water reaches my throat. Coughing furiously to expel it, I battle between wanting to keep my lips tightly sealed and knowing I have to keep sucking down deep breaths for as long as I can, for as long as I remain above the surface.

The waves are at my waist now and the further we’ve waded from the shoreline the more urgent they’ve become. The rising current pulls at the folds of my dress while the trainers he forbade me to discard on the beach now encase my feet like cement. Every step forward is a physical strain but he doesn’t care – he is impatient and testy, pushing and shoving me onwards until dry land is far beyond my reach.

We shuffle onwards until the water laps my shoulders. It’s here he finally unties my wrists. I beg him to let me go back, to think about what he’s doing, but he’s much taller than me so he’s not out of his depth yet, and because of that he wants to keep going. I’m shivering with terror as much as from cold and I’m trying desperately not to cry, knowing I need to preserve every ounce of energy I have left if I’m going to survive this. And I need to survive for Daniel. I want to howl when I think about how I’ve let my son down. I could’ve stopped all this after what happened at the awards. I should’ve heeded the warning. But I didn’t, I kept going in my pursuit of the story and this is where it has brought me, up to my neck in freezing cold sea off the Devon coast, about to be drowned.

I take another step forward but this time my foot doesn’t connect with the bottom. It’s a shelf break and the sudden drop knocks the wind out of me as I plunge below the surface. I want to scream that I’m not ready, that I haven’t taken a big enough breath, but the water has already closed over my head and then I feel his hand upon my crown, pushing me deeper still. I claw at his skin, raking it with my nails so sharply I must be drawing blood, but he has a fistful of my hair now and I’m writhing back and forth but it’s not getting me anywhere, so I grab his wrist with both hands and pull as hard as I can so he loses his footing and plunges beneath the waves with me and it works, he’s loosened his grip.

But I can’t fathom which way is up now. The current is pulling me back and forth like I’m a rag doll and I’m trying to kick, I’m trying to get back to the surface, to fresh air …

Come on, Natalie, kick.

I break the surface, gasping, but the next wave pummels into me and I’m under again. I keep trying to swim upwards but I’m so tired already and my eyes are stinging and I know I can’t scream or call for help because I mustn’t let any water in.

Kick, Natalie, kick.

Then he’s next to me. I can’t see him in the murky darkness but I know he’s there. He’s grabbing at me and I’m trying to swim away but he’s too strong …

OhmygodallIwanttodoisbreathein.

My lungs are burning now and I feel dizzy and sick and my arms are heavy and everything hurts, everything really hurts …

Kick Natalie, kick.

I’msinking …

lungsburning …

thepain …

Kick, Natalie, kick.

needair …

haveto …

breathein …

So I do.

I’ve been staring at the sums on the spreadsheet for the past hour and they don’t add up whichever way I look at them. Even including potential income for articles I’ve pitched to editors but haven’t actually been commissioned to write yet makes no difference: the outgoing column of my finances still exceeds the incoming by an eye-watering amount. I fiddle with the figures a bit more, trying to trick my brain into believing I am better off than I am, but the spreadsheet refuses to bend the truth: I am broke, in debt and it’s getting worse.

With a tremulous sigh I snap my laptop lid shut, wishing that out of sight really did mean out of mind. Instead, my cash flow imbalance is a constant, hovering presence, like a fly that can’t be swatted, a direct consequence of being a self-employed writer in an industry that apparently values creativity over actually paying people on time or half decently. But covering the music scene for national newspapers and magazines on an ad hoc basis has positives that far outweigh the negatives, the most important being I set my own hours and can work flexibly around my son’s schooling on the days I have him.

I leave my laptop on the table in the reception room and retrieve my mobile from its charger in the kitchen. There’s a pressing call I need to make, but it’s indicative of how much I’m dreading it that I call my landlord first to tell her my rent is going to be late again. On answering she listens politely to my grovel-soaked explanation, then sighs when I finish by saying, ‘Please don’t tell Mum and Dad’, which admittedly is a strange thing to say to your landlord when you’re a thirty-seven-year-old woman who has lived independently of her parents for almost two decades, but in this instance my landlord is also my godmother, Gayle.

It was to her and not my parents that I turned when my marriage fell apart eighteen months ago. They viewed the divorce as my fault and sided with my ex, Spencer, whereas Gayle, a friend of Mum’s from school, simply consoled and counselled me and kept me supplied with gin. She also, on hearing I was having to leave the marital home, invited me to stay at the Maida Vale mansion flat she bought in the sixties with her late husband, Charlie, when property in this exclusive part of London cost less than a week’s holiday in Spain would set you back today. The apartment sat empty apart from the odd weekend when Gayle would leave her main residence in our home county of Suffolk to shop on Bond Street and she said I’d be doing her a favour by keeping an eye on it.

‘Of course I won’t tell them, Natalie,’ she says, ‘but if they knew you were struggling I’m sure they’d help.’

‘I don’t want to worry them.’

‘In that case, don’t think about paying me anything this month. It doesn’t matter,’ says Gayle.

‘It matters to me,’ I reply hotly. Gayle was disinclined to charge me any rent at all when I first moved in, but I didn’t want to fall into the trap of not paying anything and then thinking I was better off than I am. So we agreed on an amount that is nominal when compared to what it would really cost to rent in Maida Vale, one of the wealthiest areas in London. ‘I’m due a payment from The Times on Friday. I’ll transfer what I owe as soon as it’s in my account,’ I add.

‘You know I don’t care about the money, Natalie. My concern is that you’re struggling and that will impact on you getting Daniel back.’

Mention of my ongoing custody battle prompts my stomach to flip-flop. On my spreadsheet there is a column entitled ‘legal costs’ and it’s the most depressing of all. I am spending thousands I don’t have on fighting my intractable ex for equal custody, funded at first by a loan, but now creeping onto credit cards. The battle has become protracted and costly because I’m trying to persuade the family court that my letting Daniel stay with Spencer when I moved out wasn’t the abandonment he claims it to be.

‘It won’t. My solicitor is doing a great job,’ I say. It is a whopper of a lie, but I cannot bring myself to admit to Gayle that my solicitor has paused working on my case until I can settle what I already owe him. She would be rightly horrified if she knew. But I’ll find a way to pay, I always do.

‘I’m glad to hear that,’ she replies. ‘You must keep me updated while Andrew and I are away.’

Andrew is what Gayle calls her companion and next week they are flying to Kenya for a month’s vacation. He’s nearly twenty years younger than my godmother and wants to marry her but at seventy-one she says she feels too long in the tooth for a third shimmy up the aisle. She reckons Charlie and his brief successor, Leon, who she married in regretful haste in the early days of widowhood when grief stopped her seeing straight, have between them provided as much matrimony as any woman needs in her lifetime. She’s a great role model.

‘In the meantime, why don’t I lend you some money to tide you over while we’re away?’

My cheeks burn with shame that she’s felt compelled to offer. ‘Thanks, but I already owe you enough.’

‘Natalie––’

‘Sorry, I’ve got to dash. Someone’s sent me an email with a commission and I’d better reply to it. Have a great trip and I’ll see you when you’re back.’

I hang up before she can respond, feeling wretched that I fibbed so I could get off the phone. There’s no email waiting in my inbox I need to reply to, no commission I should hurriedly accept. My synced-up phone would’ve beeped with a notification if there were.

Ironically, music was never my passion growing up. I was a journalism studies post-grad desperate to get a foot in any door, so I applied for, and bluffed my way into, a junior writer’s role on a weekly music magazine called The Frequency. The magazine has since folded, along with half a dozen music titles like it, so now I freelance for publications here and abroad supplying interviews, reviews and features. It turns out I’m very good at it too, which is why my name is always high on the list for the best gigs and events and why I’m on first-name terms with a raft of music stars and record company executives. The kudos that comes with famous people knowing who you are is extremely potent and seductive and that’s why it’s easy to justify rejecting the stability a staff job would give me. Then I remind myself that yesterday I pitched a feature idea to one publication that a few years ago might have earned me £500, only for the commissioning editor to email back offering £75 for 1,200 words. ‘Budgets are tight,’ she wrote. You don’t say.

I plug my phone back into its charger and make a cup of tea. It’s mid-afternoon and I’ve got a few hours to kill before I head out to a showcase for a new female singer whose record company insists is this year’s/month’s/week’s Next Big Thing. I’ve heard a sample of her songs, and while she’ll never be my thing, I’m not going to turn down an interview I can sell on or an evening of free alcohol.

Tea made, I open the floor-to-ceiling French doors leading from the reception room onto a secluded private patio, a perk of being on the ground floor. I once looked up how much other apartments in the block have sold for and should Gayle ever sell this one she would walk away with around two million. Even when I get my share from the sale of the house in Clapham that Spencer and I bought together, where he and Daniel still live, I’ll never be able to afford anything as lovely.

It’s warm outside and I let the mellowness of the mid-June day wash over me as I set my mug down on the wrought-iron patio table. I love how tranquil it is out here. To the right of the patio there is a gate that opens onto a beautifully maintained communal garden, its dense hedgerows buffering noise from the surrounding streets. Sometimes it’s so quiet it’s easy to forget I’m in the capital, where nearly nine million people live cacophonously cheek to jowl, and not somewhere in the countryside.

I fetch my laptop from indoors and settle down to work. Ignoring my finances spreadsheet, I open another one entitled ‘commissions’ that helps me keep track of all the ideas I pitch. I’m fortunate compared to the vast majority of freelancers in that papers and magazines will approach me to write for them because of my specialism, but I still send ideas in on spec because I don’t take the work for granted. Right now, however, there is a depressing lack of ticks in the column marked ‘responded’, so I spend the next half an hour chasing up commissioning editors, only to receive ‘out of office’ replies from half of those I email, the causal effect of it being the onset of summer and the start of the great annual getaway.

I fire off a couple more emails then open my internet browser and click on the first tab on the right. An amateurishly designed page titled ‘Below the Line’ pops up and a smile spreads across my face. This is my guilty pleasure, an American gossip site that peddles the most ridiculously salacious and invented titbits about celebrities that would never make it past UK defamation or libel laws to publication. The way the site works, and what I like about it most, is that it posts a story dropping clues about an unnamed celebrity and subscribers have to guess who it is. I do far better at this than I ever would a round of Pointless.

The first couple of posts are too obvious to tax my brain but then a heading halfway down the page jumps out at me.

Is one of music’s greatest mysteries about to be solved?

We’re told that producers in London have been snapping up songs by a mystery songwriter and that some of the tracks have gone on to be solid top ten hits and one was even award-nominated last year. But no one knows the songwriter’s name and the only point of contact is via a lawyer. Why the cloak and dagger? It turns out the lyricist in question was a massive star until he did a headline-grabbing retreat from the spotlight – but his disappearing act was FAKED and he’s really been in hiding. It’s debatable whether the stars he’s turned hit-maker for are going to be happy when they find out about his resurrection though – when he left the scene his reputation was dead in the water.

My forehead creases as I ponder the possibilities. Who the hell could it be? Then I scroll down to see what guesses have been posted beneath it and my jaw drops.

AF123: My money’s on Isaac Naylor. ‘Dead in the water’ is a dead giveaway!

SoulSista: Isaac Naylor. Has to be. I’ve heard loads of people say he faked his suicide, so this proves it.

TaDa: How mad would you be if you were the rest of the band and he’d pretended to be dead all this time????

SteviesMicks: Forget the band, what about his family? I remember seeing pix of his baby brother sobbing at his funeral. Bloody heartbreaking.

BanalBob: Isaac Naylor was a GOD. Even if this were true, which I don’t believe for a second, he’d never write songs for shit pop stars. He was too cool for that.

I am incredulous. Isaac Naylor was the lead singer of The Ospreys, the most successful British alt-rock band to rival Coldplay. Record-breaking stadium tours, four consecutive number one albums and the kind of fame that meant even your granny had heard of them. Then it all came crashing down about eight years ago, on the opening night of the band’s latest tour. A teenage fan was found dead in Naylor’s hotel room in Glasgow with a heroin needle still lodged in the crook of her arm. Naylor, who’d not been long out of rehab after years of highly publicised drug addiction, was arrested on suspicion of causing her death, but two weeks later, while out on police bail, drowned himself off the coast in Devon.

I re-read the post and shake my head in wonderment. The suggestion that he faked his suicide is bizarre. How could he have done it? Where would he have been hiding all this time? Naylor was one of the most famous men on the planet – how could he just vanish and never be seen again? It’s impossible.

As my mind throws up more questions, I check the time-stamp on the blind item and see it was posted only half an hour ago. With a chuckle I screen-grab it and email it to my best friend Bronwyn, who loves industry gossip as much as I do because she’s the manager of a recording studio in south London and knows everyone who’s anyone. It’s how we bonded: I was invited to the studio to watch a band record and she and I got chatting between takes and she told me a brilliant bit of gossip about a girl band member and her manager and that was that, we were friends. In the ten years we’ve known each other Bronwyn has become the second most important person in my life after Daniel, the one friend in London who appreciates how insane my hours can be because hers are similar and who doesn’t judge me for them. My best friends from home and the school gate mums I hang out with, lovely as they are, don’t understand why I don’t apply for a position with regular hours, as though it were that simple. It’s only Bronwyn’s unequivocal support that has kept me sane during my wretched divorce.

Within five minutes of me pinging her the screenshot, Bronwyn’s on the phone, as I knew she would be, and I laugh as I answer the call.

‘I know, right? Can you imagine if it was true! It would be the comeback of all time,’ I say.

‘Natalie, where did you see this? I need to know, now.’

Bronwyn’s serious tone quells my laughter. This is not the response I was expecting.

‘Um, it’s on that American gossip site I’ve told you about.’

‘Right. What’s it called again?’

I regale her with the name then I hear her repeat it as though she’s talking to someone in the background, except her voice is muffled like she’s holding her hand over her phone. I can’t hear what the person says in reply; I can’t even tell if they’re male or female. Then Bronwyn’s voice rings clearly back on the line.

‘Is that the only place you’ve seen it?’ she asks.

‘Hang on,’ I say. I do a quick internet search using the key words ‘Isaac Naylor’, ‘mystery songwriter’ and ‘lawyer’ but only the blind item is returned. ‘It doesn’t look like it’s been picked up yet, but it was only posted half an hour ago,’ I say. ‘You know it’s bollocks, right? It’s made up.’

Again Bronwyn repeats what I say to whoever is in the room with her.

‘Who’s that you’re talking to?’ I ask her.

‘No one,’ she replies quickly. A pause follows. ‘Just don’t tell anyone else about this, OK,’ she says sternly. ‘And definitely don’t forward the screen-grab to anyone else, Nat.’

‘What?’ I laugh, bemused by how snippy she’s being. ‘Why ever not?’

‘Because I’m asking you not to,’ she says. ‘Look, I have to go, I’ll call you later.’

‘Bronwyn––’

‘I mean it, Nat. Don’t tell anyone else about this.’

Daily Mirror

16 July 2009

Take that, Robbie!

The Ospreys shatter Robbie Williams’ Knebworth record with half MILLION-crowd tally

By Showbiz Writer Nik Tweedle

The Ospreys have confirmed their status as the biggest band in the world after shattering the attendance record for gigs played at the historic UK music venue Knebworth House. The Brit heartthrobs, led by Isaac Naylor, performed to crowds of 125,000 on four consecutive nights, beating Robbie Williams’ previous record of 125,000 on three consecutive nights in 2003. The half million total has now earned them a place in the Guinness World Records, after almost four million fans worldwide applied for tickets to attend.

The incredible four-night run ended last night with The Ospreys inviting some of the biggest legends in music to perform on stage with them, including Madonna, who stole the show with a rocked-up duet of her own song, ‘Get Into The Groove’, with Naylor, and The Who’s Roger Daltrey, who said afterwards that 125,000 Ospreys’ fans belting ‘My Generation’ back at him would go down as ‘one of the best moments of my career and that’s saying something considering how many I’ve already racked up’.

For The Ospreys, their Knebworth triumph is the latest in a long line of successes, including simultaneous number one albums both sides of the Atlantic. But if they were hoping Knebworth would detract from Naylor’s well-documented issues with drugs and alcohol they were disappointed – while the gigs went off without a technical hitch, his performance was patchy at times and on Wednesday night he almost stumbled off the edge of the stage, clearly drunk. He also announced on stage each night that the band’s lauded manager, Derrick Cordingly, had been begging him to go to rehab again, inspiring a crowd-wide sing-a-long of the Amy Winehouse hit of the same name.

Speaking backstage at the gig, where 500 VIP guests including Liam Gallagher, who famously played Knebworth in 1996 with Oasis, availed themselves of complimentary champagne and vodka, Cordingly brushed off Naylor’s on-stage comments. ‘Isaac’s his own man and a grown one at that, it’s not for me to order him what to do,’ he told the Mirror. ‘Let’s not take away from what’s been a phenomenal four nights for the band, breaking all Knebworth records. This is why The Ospreys are the biggest band in the world right now.’

It was Cordingly who had the idea for the band to beat Robbie Williams’ record and it took him almost eighteen months of negotiation and planning to pull it off. Unlike other gigs at Knebworth where the artists have profited, The Ospreys are giving 80 per cent of the proceeds to ten different charities and the other 20 per cent is being split between the 3,000 backstage staff needed to put the gigs on, netting each one of them an estimated bonus of up to £2,500. When announcing they wouldn’t make a penny from the gig, Naylor and his band mates Danny Albright, Archie Samuels and Robert ‘Renner’ Jones said in a statement, ‘We’ve got more money than we know what to do with now, it’s only right we share the wealth.’

The Hertfordshire venue has played host to many of the greats before The Ospreys made it theirs, with Led Zeppelin kicking things off in 1979. It was also where Freddie Mercury performed his last concert with Queen before his untimely death in 1991.

Among those who gave evidence at Isaac Naylor’s inquest was a tides expert who said the current on the particular stretch of Devon coast where he drowned could easily have taken his body far out to sea, rending it unrecoverable, and may have been precisely why he chose to die there. It was also the early hours of New Year’s Day, meaning far less chance of someone walking by and spotting him. I shudder as I read through the account of the expert’s testimony in an online article: how desperate must Isaac have been to deliberately walk himself into the water and force himself below the waves. I wonder if he was inebriated before he did so.

I close down the article and open the next one. Despite the blind item being a load of rot, I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole of reading up on Isaac’s suicide, where it happened and how, as I kill time before I go out. The facts of what led him to take his own life I am well versed in already: I covered the story of his drug-induced downfall for The Frequency and have written about The Ospreys a few times as they continue on without him. But I’ve never given much thought to the details of how Isaac killed himself, other than to consider it was a pretty cowardly thing to do, denying as it did the parents of the poor girl found dead in his hotel room any chance of justice.

He drowned himself off a stretch of Devon coastline he had never visited before. His brother, Toby, confirmed it at his inquest: there were no childhood holidays anywhere nearby that might have inspired a longing to return, no sojourns in adulthood either. But it is an area known for strong tides. Was that something he could’ve looked up online? Did the police check his internet history after he skipped bail? I’m wondering this idly to myself when I notice it’s nearly six p.m. and I should be getting ready for the showcase. But I can’t quite tear myself away from my laptop yet.

I do a bit more digging and, fantastical as it sounds, I discover there are actually plenty of people out there who would swallow the blind item’s ridiculous notion that he’s still alive and is staging a clandestine comeback. Ardent Ospreys’ fans who can’t bear to think of him dead and pop culture conspiracy theorists who like to perpetuate the scenario that he’s spent the last eight years living in a wooden hut on Bora Bora with Elvis and Marilyn Monroe as near neighbours. That . . .