Victory Disc Read online

  Contents

  Also by Andrew Cartmel and available from Titan Books

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue: Screen Shot

  1. Hidden Treasure

  2. Sigmund Freud

  3. Locust Pie

  4. Sheds

  5. Group Portrait

  6. Dover

  7. Gillian Gadon

  8. Silk Stockings

  9. The Embankment

  10. Satan’s Ladder

  11. TP37

  12. Chelsea

  13. Local History

  14. Tour

  15. Beer Barrel

  16. Mud on the Plates

  17. Family

  18. Camberwell Green

  19. View from the Bridge

  20. The House in Eltham

  21. Opal

  22. Dissertation

  23. The Houseguest

  24. The Barmaid

  25. Backfire

  26. Bovine TB

  27. Sack

  28. Upwards

  29. Nazi Farm

  30. National News

  31. Signal Flare

  32. Royal Festival Hall

  33. Champagne

  34. Note

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  THE VINYL DETECTIVE

  VICTORY DISC

  Also by Andrew Cartmel and available from Titan Books

  Written in Dead Wax

  The Run-Out Groove

  Flip Back (May 2019)

  THE VINYL DETECTIVE

  VICTORY DISC

  ANDREW CARTMEL

  TITAN BOOKS

  The Vinyl Detective: Victory Disc

  Print edition ISBN: 9781783297719

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781783297726

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: May 2018

  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 © 2018 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 Lucy Kissick, lover of music and language.

  PROLOGUE: SCREEN SHOT

  Welcome to my new website, ‘Historic Homicide’!

  My name is Jasper McClew and I am a local historian here deep in the English countryside on the beautiful coast of southeast Kent.

  But, despite its alluring beauty, this is a coastline as jagged as the knife of a brutal killer… a coastline shrouded with murder, mystery and mayhem, which is as menacing and treacherous as the deadly sea fogs that roll in from the ancient, haunted waters of the English Channel…

  Here you can read the story of a notorious and vicious sex crime that took place during the bloodshed and savagery of the Second World War and resulted in the death of a beautiful young woman.

  But you can also read how that crime stretched its icy, skeletal, bloodstained fingers into a new century and plunged them deep into the living flesh of our own era…

  …and recently claimed helpless new victims.

  Because murder solves nothing, and the dead do not rest in peace, and the evil that man does lives on…

  Just click on the link below and, for a modest fee, you can read the entire story!

  (Payment information: PayPal, Credit Card, Bank Transfer accepted.)

  1. HIDDEN TREASURE

  We were in the kitchen. I was making coffee and Nevada was feeding the cats, when suddenly she looked out the window and said, “There he is now. At last.”

  “Who?” I said, measuring the freshly ground beans as I poured them into the filter.

  “Your friend Tinkler.”

  “I see,” I said. “So he’s my friend now.”

  “Finish feeding these two, would you? I’m going to deal with him.” She wiped her hands and hurried out of the kitchen just as the front gate clanged, signalling Tinkler’s arrival. Nevada had been waiting for days for just this moment—her chance to pounce—but now it had arrived, she played it very cool. Opening the door before he had a chance to ring the bell, she was as nice as pie. “Tinkler! Hello.” There was the sound of her smooching him on the cheek and then she led him into the kitchen, her arm twined around his. “Darling, look who’s here.”

  She was laying it on a bit thick, I thought. “Hello, Tinkler,” I said. I’d finished giving the cats their breakfast—Aberdeen Angus ox cheek, served raw and laboriously chopped up with the kitchen scissors while Turk tried to snag pieces from me, with her razor-sharp claws and great dexterity, and Fanny merely contented herself by getting underfoot and making lots of imploring noises—and returned to making the coffee. “You want some coffee? It’s the good stuff.”

  “I’d expect nothing less,” said Tinkler. His face had an unaccustomed touch of suntan and he was grinning happily. He had no idea what was in store for him.

  “How was France?” said Nevada.

  “Great. It was just Mum and Dad and Maggie and me in this huge gîte. That’s a kind of farmhouse—”

  “Of course it is,” said Nevada, who was fluent in more languages than Tinkler had had hot baths. “But why don’t you come in and sit down and tell us all about it?” Tinkler made a move towards a kitchen chair, but Nevada steered him away from it. “No, come into the sitting room,” she said.

  Here it comes, I thought. She took him by the arm again and guided him out of the kitchen. He was beaming, enjoying all the attention, the poor sap. “And while you’re at it,” said Nevada from the next room, still at this point appearing to be the sweet voice of reason, “perhaps you can tell us what the fuck this is.”

  I left the coffee and hurried through. I wasn’t going to miss this for the world.

  Nevada and Tinkler were standing there looking at a tall black object that dominated the room.

  It was taller than an upright piano, and deeper. A vast, grim-looking box of unvarnished wood painted a matte, obdurate black, its top third consisted of a broad rectangular opening. It completely dominated the lounge, taking up most of the space between the dining table and the sofa and blotting out a great swathe of light from our high, sunny, south-facing windows.

  The object was almost as tall as I was. It was big, and it was ugly.

  “What is this thing?” said Nevada. “And what is it doing in my living room?”

  But if she’d expected contrition or remorse from Tinkler, she was out of luck. He stared at the black monolith and sank down on his knees before it, like one of the hairy humanoids in 2001: A Space Odyssey, a look of beatific satisfaction on his face. “It came,” he murmured, almost prayerfully. “It’s here.”

  “Of course it bloody came,” said Nevada. “Of course it’
s frigging here. The question is, why did it come? Why is it here? As opposed to being around at your place. Taking up all the room there.”

  “It had to be delivered while I was away,” said Tinkler. He had risen from his knees now and was standing beside the huge black box, caressing the side of it as if it were the flank of some monstrous black horse. “And somebody had to be at home to accept it and sign for it. Which was you guys. I told you to expect it.”

  “Actually,” said Nevada, “you told Agatha to tell us to expect it.” It was an index of her anger that she was using Agatha’s real name here. “And she duly told us.”

  Tinkler looked at us, all innocence. “So what’s the problem?”

  “So the problem is that she told us to expect a small package which was being sent here for you. Which we were more than happy to do. A small package.” Nevada’s extravagant hand gesture in the direction of the black behemoth was entirely redundant.

  “I didn’t say that to her.”

  “No,” said Nevada, shaking her head. “You didn’t. You told her that we should expect a speaker for your hi-fi. A speaker!”

  Tinkler patted the crudely painted black wood with the pride of new ownership. “That’s right. A speaker. And here it is.”

  “But she thought that you meant what any normal person would have meant by a speaker. And she translated that into a small package, and that’s what she told us to expect.”

  Tinkler shrugged. “Well, that girl just doesn’t know her exponential horn-loaded loudspeakers, then, does she?” His nonchalance fooled no one. We all knew he was talking about the girl he loved, or at least lusted after, with a longstanding and no doubt hopeless passion.

  Turk came wandering into the room, having devoured her breakfast, and jumped up with an effortless leap onto the top of the black box, where she crouched peering up at Tinkler. “Hello, Turk,” he said, rubbing her under the chin. “Do you like my new speaker? I know you prefer the horn-loaded designs. All the girls do.” Then he smiled brightly at us. “At least it gives the cats a new place to play.”

  Nevada nodded in my direction. “I thought his speakers were ridiculously gigantic. But compared to yours they are just dainty adornments.” I gazed fondly at the Quads in question. Just looking at them made me want to listen to music.

  “That’s because the sorry fool prefers electrostatic technology to the noble horn,” said Tinkler.

  Nevada headed for the kitchen to serve the coffee, which was beginning to smell good. As she went, she said, “Come away from there before I give you the noble horn.”

  “Sounds attractive,” said Tinkler. But he moved briskly away from the speaker and followed her out. I found my Luiz Bonfá album—on Verve, with arrangements by Lalo Schifrin—and put it on loud enough to be heard in the kitchen. It was one that Nevada loved and it always chilled her out. Sure enough, by the time they returned with the coffee, she had begun to mellow. Luiz’s guitar was working its magic. She and Tinkler set the coffee things down on the table and I went to join them, sitting in the sunshine. This took a certain amount of careful manoeuvring of the chairs—to avoid the baleful shadow of the monster speaker.

  Tinkler finished stirring sugar into his coffee and said, casually, “So where are the cables?”

  “What cables?”

  He frowned at me. “Don’t tease me. You know I can’t stand it where serious matters like hi-fi are concerned.”

  “I’m not teasing you,” I said. “What cables?”

  “They were part of the deal.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The deal. On eBay. When I bought the speaker for what I let this guy think was an extortionate price but actually, although of course I didn’t let on to him, was a snip.”

  “A snip,” said Nevada, staring at the giant ugly black box.

  “That’s right. This beauty here is worth a couple of grand more than I paid for her.” Tinkler sipped his coffee, discovered it was still too hot, and set it aside.

  “‘This beauty’,” repeated Nevada, shaking her head. “There’s something creepy about you referring to it as ‘her’, too.”

  Tinkler ignored her and kept on with his story. “I even convinced this guy to throw in a set of cables, too. It was a really sweet deal. And I want my cables!”

  Nevada shrugged, “So, what’s a set of cables more or less?”

  Tinkler sighed the long-suffering sigh of an audiophile having to explain things to a civilian. “They were silver cables. Solid silver. They were worth almost as much as the speaker. And he threw them in for nothing.”

  “Or perhaps didn’t,” I said, and Tinkler winced.

  “Silver?” said Nevada. “You mean silver wire instead of copper?”

  “Yes.”

  She looked at me. “Does that make a difference? To the sound, I mean?”

  “Christ, yes,” I said. I’d gone from thinking Tinkler was making a fuss about nothing to suddenly and poignantly sharing his pain. I turned and looked at the speaker. “You’re sure the guy’s not sending them separately?”

  “No, he said they were definitely coming with the speaker.”

  “Maybe the blokes pinched them,” said Nevada. “The blokes who delivered the speaker. They looked like ruffians. Would they have known how valuable they were?”

  “I don’t see how,” I said. “They looked like ruffians.”

  “But couldn’t they have seen that they were silver?”

  “No.” Tinkler shook his head sadly. “On the outside they just looked like boring ordinary cables with a red and blue dielectric.”

  “Dialectic?” said Nevada.

  “Dielectric,” I said. “It’s the insulator.”

  A mournful silence ensued as we all contemplated the loss of Tinkler’s silver cables, their snazzy dielectric and all. “There was nothing else?” he said. “Nothing else with the speaker?”

  “Nope,” I said.

  “Not an envelope, or—”

  “Nothing at all.” Then I thought about it. I stood up and went over to the speaker and inspected the top of it where Fanny, ever the opportunist, had supplanted her sister and was lying in a patch of sunlight. I put my hand on the warm black wood. Nevada and Tinkler were staring at me.

  “What is it?” said Nevada.

  I ran my hand over the wood. Fanny feinted at me with her paw. She thought I was playing.

  Then I found it.

  Or felt it, rather. A small scrap of adhesive tape. It was black electrical tape and almost invisible against the black wood. The tape was at the front edge of the top of the speaker, and ran down over the lip of the large opening. My fingers traced it inside. “There was something taped here,” I said.

  Tinkler was already on his feet. He came over and inspected it. “If the cables were in there…”

  I said, “Hanging in the mouth of the speaker…”

  Nevada came over and joined us, peering into the shadowy maw of the giant box. “You think they’re in there?”

  Tinkler murmured, “They fell inside…”

  I nodded. “It’s possible. If the clowns who delivered it were careless.”

  “Of course they were careless,” said Tinkler. I could see he had seized onto this hope and was clinging to it for dear life. “They were ruffians. They were clowns. They were ruffian clowns.” We all stared into the mouth of the speaker. And saw nothing staring back at us but darkness.

  I went into the spare room to look for a torch and came back with two small, powerful LED flashlights that gave off an intense red beam. For reasons too complex to go into here, we’d once had to rob a grave in the middle of the night, and Nevada had purchased a large amount of ancillary equipment for the endeavour, including these.

  “I recognise these babies,” said Tinkler happily, taking one of the flashlights. He’d been there in the graveyard with us, in the cold dark Kent night. Though he’d done precious little of the digging. But he was a keen participant now, as we shone the red beams of light down i
nto the mouth of the speaker.

  We could still see nothing, except the smooth tapering flare of the horn. “They could be at the bottom of the enclosure.” Tinkler looked at me. The childlike eagerness in his face was touching.

  So, while Nevada sat blithely drinking coffee and watching us with a slightly superior smile, we got down on our hands and knees on the floor in a grovelling posture and inspected the base of the speaker. On three sides the wood was a solid, flawless piece of cabinetry without so much as an indentation.

  But on the fourth was a small access panel about the size of a magazine cover. Recessed in each corner of the panel were Phillips cross-head screws. I went back into the spare room and got my tools, including an electric screwdriver and a drill, in case we had to drill out one of the screws. Tinkler began to sweat at the very suggestion of this—drilling a hole in his beloved. But it looked to me like the screws hadn’t been turned for decades and might be hopelessly frozen in place.

  “How old is this speaker?” I said, lying on the floor with a manual screwdriver in my hand, trying to find an angle where I both had access to the screws and room to manipulate the tools.

  “Over fifty years,” said Tinkler. “Be careful there. You’ll spoil the paintwork.”

  “Spoil the paintwork? It looks like a blind man with a brush in his mouth did it in half an hour while drunk.”

  “But it’s still the original paint job.”

  I got the head of the screwdriver seated in the top left screw and moved around on the floor to free my elbow so I could begin twisting it. Nothing. No give at all. I moved on to the next one. I worked each of the screws in turn, and on the second attempt they started to rotate. With a warm feeling of triumph, and Tinkler crooning encouragement, I switched to the electric screwdriver. At the sound of it, the cats peered down apprehensively from the top of the speaker. Then, when they realised that the noise wasn’t actually coming from an electric cat-killing machine, they both hopped down to study it more closely. Tinkler was on his knees beside me and the cats were crouching between us.

  Nevada came over and regarded us ironically. “Need any help there, boys?” she said. Then she bent down and caressed the cats. “And girls.”