The Vinyl Detective--Flip Back Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Andrew Cartmel and available from Titan Books

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1. White Mule, Black Dog

  2. Love or Money

  3. The House with The Moat

  4. Money to Burn

  5. Loopy Groupie

  6. Bonfire Night

  7. Red and Green

  8. At This Time of The Morning

  9. The Killer with Two Masks Thing

  10. The Green Ceremony

  11. Pink Cottage

  12. Fairy Tale Kingdom

  13. No Brakes

  14. The Burnt Spot

  15. Like Quicksilver

  16. Reliant Robin

  17. The Drowning Man

  18. Viking Funeral

  19. Team Meeting

  20. Alexander Von Humboldt

  21. The Sea View

  22. Deckchairs in The Dark

  23. Honey Trap

  24. Porky and Perky

  25. Farmhouse

  26. Establishing Shots

  27. The Statue Garden

  28. Garderobe

  29. Two Recordings

  30. Kind of Red

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also Available from Titan Books

  THE VINYL DETECTIVE

  FLIP BACK

  Also by Andrew Cartmel and available from Titan Books

  Written in Dead Wax

  The Run-Out Groove

  Victory Disc

  THE VINYL DETECTIVE

  FLIP BACK

  ANDREW CARTMEL

  TITAN BOOKS

  The Vinyl Detective: Flip Back

  Print edition ISBN: 9781785658983

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781785658990

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: May 2019

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Andrew Cartmel. All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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  For Scott Cochrane, with thanks for a lifetime of friendship.

  1. WHITE MULE, BLACK DOG

  I’ve been shot at before.

  I had hoped it would never happen again.

  The way it came about this time was, like so many misadventures in my life, largely thanks to the intervention of one Jordon Tinkler.

  “How long have we been friends?” said Tinkler.

  “Here it comes,” said Nevada, from the kitchen. My sweetheart tends towards the cynical.

  “Am I not your best friend?” continued Tinkler, ignoring her and giving me his finest beseeching look. It made him look like a cute little puppy who just at that very instant has contracted rabies. You can sort of see the mad force of the virus swimming up in those big, moist eyes.

  I sighed. “What do you want?”

  “Yes, what are you after this time, Tinkler?” said Nevada. She came in from the kitchen carrying a bottle of wine by the neck in one hand and in the other three glasses, held by their stems in an untidy but somehow elegant cluster. She set the glasses deftly down on the table without so much as a clink and then proceeded to pour the wine in a precise steady stream from a considerable height, standing over the first glass with the bottle neatly aimed. The wine poured in a graceful golden flow and she didn’t spill a drop.

  “What is this?” said Tinkler. “White wine?”

  “Don’t try and change the subject,” said Nevada. She finished filling the glass and started on the next.

  “But you only ever drink red wine!” exclaimed Tinkler, all innocence.

  Nevada corrected him, frowning with concentration as she poured. “I only ever drink Rhône wine. Or Rhône style. And this is from one of my favourite Rhône producers.”

  “But it’s white.”

  “Yes it is. In fact, it’s called the White Mule.” She finished filling the second glass and moved the bottle over to the third. The pale golden wine glugged softly into the Riedel crystal. “But stop milking it, Tinkler. What kind of favour are you sniffing around for?” As she said the word ‘sniffing’ she picked up a glass and held it happily to her nose.

  “A favour?” said Tinkler. “You wrong me. I just want to hire your boyfriend here to do what he does best.”

  “Find a record?” All of a sudden I was interested.

  “Yes. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I want to hire the Vinyl Detective. You do realise it was me who first thought up that name?”

  “No it wasn’t,” I said. I remembered getting the idea, standing in front of the machine that printed the business cards. Late at night, in an airport, during the grinding, endless red-eye wait between planes.

  In many ways it had been a bad idea and had led me to bad places.

  On the other hand, it had led me to Nevada…

  Now she stopped sniffing the bouquet of the wine and smiled at me. She knew I was thinking of her, the little minx. She handed me a glass.

  It was cool in my hand. I gave the honey-coloured liquid a tentative sniff. It smelled good. That was about the extent of my expertise. “What about me?” demanded Tinkler, and she handed him a glass. I took a sip from mine.

  It was creamy and complex and some other adjectives I had learned from Nevada.

  “So,” she said, turning to Tinkler. “How much are you going to pay him, to find this record that you want so badly?”

  “Jesus, you’re so mercenary.”

  “I’m his business manager,” said Nevada. “It’s my job.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll pay you. You’ll get paid.”

  “You’d better. We’d better. How much?”

  “A fair amount.”

  Nevada sighed. “That doesn’t sound very promising, Tinkler. Suddenly I’m not sure we can even fit you in. As a matter of fact, we were thinking of taking a holiday. A nice, long holiday.”

  “You can’t go on holiday. Your cats are too neurotic to be safely left on their own.”

  “We have friends who will look after them. Proper friends. Not like you.”

  Tinkler turned to me imploringly with his big, but slightly crazed, puppy eyes. “Oh, come on. Find my record. For me.”

  “How much are you going to pay us?” Nevada was remorseless.

  A look of glum resignation came over Tinkler’s face. He realised despite all his attempts at evasion he was going to have to talk turkey. “Depends on the condition. Obviously. But let’s say…” His forehead furrowed with simian calculation. “Fifty per cent of the median Record Collector guide price.”

  “Seventy-five per cent,” said Nevada instantly, despite not having any idea what the median Record Collector guide price might be.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” said Tinkler. “Don’t I get the friends and family rate? Don’t I rate it? Don’t I rate the rate?”

  “What is it?” I said. They could thrash out the gory financial details later. They both looked at me blankly. “What are you after?” I said, patiently. “What is the record?”

  * * *

  Of course, nothing can ever be straightforward.

  And it all began to get a lot more complicated on the very first day I started working for Tinkler. It was a bright winter morning with a cold bite in the air. I caught the bus across Hammersmith Bridge in the low, streaming sunlight and then took the Tube to Shepherd’s Bush. From here I worked the charity shops eastwards towards Holland Park.

  It is still possible to find astonishingly rare records at bargain prices in charity shops. Of course most of these shops have resident ‘experts’ to sift through their stock and pull out any choice items for premium pricing. In practice this means anything by the Beatles or Elvis being assigned astronomical price tags regardless of their scarcity or collectability. But the same chump who thinks a digitally remastered reissue of the King’s greatest hits on wafer-thin late 1980s vinyl is worth a small fortune might well let a British Vogue yellow label release of a Sonny Rollins Contemporary slip through for a pittance.

  And these treasures do turn up, going for a song, to be seized on by someone like yours truly, with trembling hands and a corresponding song of gratitude in their heart.

  Today, however, the god of charity shops didn’t smile and my search had yielded nothing—or rather, it had yielded a nice early Stan Getz on a French Verve reissue. Bu
t no trace of what Tinkler was after.

  I wasn’t worried. It was early days yet. And checking the charity shops was just part of my strategy. I was also going to be visiting the record dealers.

  I started with Lenny at the Vinyl Vault. I endured his questions about Nevada, questions that were transparently designed to run a health check on our relationship. Lenny was smitten with Nevada and was just waiting for the first sign of trouble between us, at which point he planned to swoop. In so far as someone like Lenny is capable of swooping.

  But while he was picking my brains about Nevada, I was picking his brains about a record label called Hex-a-Gone.

  “Hexagon?” said Lenny.

  “Hex-a-Gone. Like they once had a hex but now it’s gone.”

  “Oh, yeah, they had a picture of a hexagon on their label, didn’t they?”

  “Yes. It was a multi-layered piece of wordplay.”

  But Lenny wasn’t listening to me. I had pushed his buttons and now he was like a computer helplessly and automatically disgorging facts. “Late 1960s folk label, which was absorbed by one of the majors. Was it Atlantic? Anyway, their stuff is very rare. Very collectable. Expensive.”

  This last bit was just the boilerplate, so to speak, and Lenny would have added it in response to any enquiry, in an attempt to soften his customer up for whatever price outrage he was planning to perpetrate. Now he went on for a while about how costly and sought-after Hex-a-Gone records were. Which was useful to me, because I soon learned that he had no idea what constituted the most desirable artists or rarest albums.

  This was just what I’d been hoping. It confirmed that, in addition to finding gems in charity shops, it was still also possible to get terrific records from dealers at bargain prices, providing they didn’t know what they were doing.

  Which, as in most forms of human endeavour, was about ninety per cent of the time.

  I left Lenny’s, buoyant and optimistic about my prospects of finding Tinkler’s record. I was making my way along the winding back streets of Notting Hill when suddenly I had the oddest feeling.

  It was a quiet street and I’d been on my own for the last couple of minutes, walking through this peaceful backwater in the pearly light of a winter’s day. Everyone had gone into work and no one was coming out yet for lunch.

  But now, alone in the cobbled street, I had the sudden intense feeling that I was being watched.

  I stopped and, despite myself, looked behind me. There was no one there.

  I scanned the street. Blank white walls, black iron gates, windows with elegant curtains drawn tightly shut. Apart from some windowsill knickknacks—three beige pottery dogs and a benignly smiling brass Buddha—I was entirely alone.

  I started walking again. But I couldn’t throw off the sensation that I was being followed.

  I’ve begun to regard paranoia as an inevitable consequence of what I do for a living. Or at the very least an occupational hazard. And I’ve also begun to listen to my instincts. I’m not mystically inclined or a believer in the sixth sense or anything similar—I leave all that to Nevada—but better safe than sorry is my motto. And right now my instincts were telling me to walk more quickly, get the hell away from this lonely back street and out in the open, among other people.

  To find a crowd and lose myself in it.

  I began walking as fast as I could, across Pembridge Road. Then I turned into Pembridge Gardens and hurried towards Notting Hill Gate. I kept up the pace even though I couldn’t see anyone following me. At least there were other people around now. I began to relax, but as I was crossing the street towards the Tube station a big black cab came rumbling out of nowhere, loudly blaring its horn. The noise spooked me and I turned, angry, ready to curse the driver.

  But behind the steering wheel of the taxi, smiling at me, was Agatha DuBois-Kanes.

  * * *

  Better known to her friends as Clean Head, Agatha must be London’s most stylish black cab driver. “Careful how you parse that sentence,” was her standard comment at this observation. Because she is, if not black then at least mixed race, the sort of beautiful blend of esoteric genes which argues for the total enthusiastic mongrelisation of the human race, and the sooner the better.

  She also has a shaved head, which is why we call her Clean Head.

  It was warm and snug sitting behind her, on the big comfortable leather seat in the back of her taxi as we drove along the A402 towards Bayswater.

  And safe.

  The sense of being watched had abated as soon as I climbed into the cab.

  “Thanks for giving me a lift,” I said. Clean Head didn’t reply. The intercom was on, but she was concentrating on the traffic and wouldn’t speak until she deemed it safe to relinquish her full attention from the task at hand. It was a reassuring trait in a driver.

  Despite everything London’s world-class vehicular congestion was throwing at her, we were rapidly approaching the corner of Queensway. This would be a good place for me to catch the Tube.

  The thing was, I couldn’t at the moment afford a cab ride all the way into the West End, particularly in the slow-motion traffic currently on display. Any spare funds I had were earmarked for our supper, the cats’ supper, and—naturally—records.

  Of course, Clean Head wouldn’t necessarily charge me for the ride, but I didn’t feel I could deprive her of a paying customer, of which there were plenty, judging by the number of people leaning out to hail our taxi, then seeing the dimmed TAXI sign and subsiding in disappointment.

  “Anywhere up here would be good,” I said, reaching for the door. “I can hop out.”

  “Just sit back and chill,” Clean Head said, in a relaxed, droll voice that told me the traffic pattern no longer required her undivided attention. “You’re not hopping anywhere.”

  “But you could get a paying fare.”

  “You are a paying fare.” She glanced back in response to my startled silence. Her eyes were amused. “It wasn’t just a coincidence that I picked you up. I was looking for you.”

  “Looking for me?”

  “Your tootsie sent me. She said you’d be around here.”

  “My tootsie?”

  “Nevada,” said Clean Head in exasperation. Then, by way of explanation, “I’ve been reading Damon Runyon.” We were safely stopped at a light so she slid open the panel between us and handed me a paperback. I inspected it. The collected short stories of Damon Runyon.

  “It’s not a Penguin Modern Classic,” I said.

  “No, but you can’t have everything.” She took the book back from me, making sure that I hadn’t mauled it. Clean Head was a bit of a stickler about her paperbacks. She collected them, and god help you if you bent the cover of a book or, the ultimate crime, broke its spine. “So anyway,” she said, “sit back and relax. And don’t worry, it’s on the tab.”

  “Now we’re running a tab with you?”

  “Only if you’re working. And Nevada told me you’re working. You have a new assignment.”

  “Yes, hilariously enough I’ve been hired by Tinkler.”

  “Is he still porking that teen kleptomaniac?” asked Clean Head casually. I repressed the urge to ask if ‘porking’ was a term used by Damon Runyon.

  There was what you might call history between Tinkler and Clean Head. It was a history that mostly consisted of him hopelessly longing to get into her—no doubt stylish and skimpy—knickers. It had persisted thus until a pretty but predatory young woman called Opal had fallen into our orbit. And, to the astonishment of us all, including Tinkler, Tinkler had had a brief and passionate fling with her. Opal had parlayed this encounter into a well-received university dissertation and, potentially, a thriving career in the media. Tinkler, characteristically, had parlayed it into a broken heart and guilt.

  Guilt because he felt, in some obscure way, that he had betrayed Clean Head and ruined his chances with her. Which was weird. Especially since Clean Head did indeed behave exactly as if this is what had happened.

  “In fairness,” I said, “the teenage kleptomaniac never actually stole anything.”

  “We’re not interested in fairness around here,” said Clean Head.

  * * *

  After the Vinyl Vault, the next record dealer I was visiting was Styli, which is located north of Oxford Street in London’s West End. It had once been run by a nice guy called Jerry. Unfortunately Jerry had been murdered, brutally beaten to death. To the police this was still an unsolved case, and the perpetrators remained unknown.