Written in Dead Wax Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Andrew Cartmel

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Side One

  1. The Death of the Dragon

  2. Firebird

  3. Snowfall

  4. The Unknown Jazz Fan

  5. Jerry’s Letter

  6. Jumble

  7. A Night at Jerry’s

  8. The Boot Fair

  9. Interlude

  10. Glasgow Coma Scale

  11. Spook Store

  12. People Carrier

  13. Vinyl Crypt

  14. Awakenings

  15. Sunday

  16. Black Circle in the Snow

  17. Kill Fee

  18. Japan

  19. Zen Garden

  Side Two

  20. Call Me Ree

  21. The Bull’s Head

  22. A Red Wig

  23. Feed the Cats

  24. Twelve Boxes

  25. A Little Dead

  26. Hollywod

  27. Buddha on a Bad Day

  28. Hammer Man

  29. Tears

  30. Solution

  31. Encounter

  32. Rendezvous

  33. Business Card

  34. London

  35. The Rule of Three

  36. Out of the Rain

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Coming Soon from Titan Books

  Also by Andrew Cartmel and Available from Titan Books

  The Run-Out Groove (May 2017)

  Victory Disc (May 2018)

  The Vinyl Detective: Written in Dead Wax

  Print edition ISBN: 9781783297672

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781783297689

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: May 2016

  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.

  © 2016 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.

  For my brother, James Cartmel,

  the coolest cat of all.

  SIDE ONE

  1. THE DEATH OF THE DRAGON

  The heating on our estate had originally been provided by a huge central boiler, which resided under the car park in a vast sealed concrete chamber. I used to imagine it curled there like a sleeping dragon, and when I eventually got a look at it, I found I wasn’t far wrong. It was like being in the engine room of a submarine: long gleaming steel cylinders receding into the shadows with a subdued hum of power.

  I just walked in one day down the steps and through the door marked BOILER ROOM, which had been left ajar, and wandered around in the shadows until I found the guy who looked after it, an affable fat Geordie in blue overalls. His official title was Estate Environmental Domestic Heating Manager, but I didn’t hold that against him.

  He let me look around because my cat had managed to get himself lost and I thought he might have wandered in here. But no feline fugitive. The boiler guy seemed to genuinely share my disappointment. I guess he could see how worried I was. As I left he wished me luck finding the cat.

  I walked back up the steps from the boiler room into the daylight, blinking. As it turned out, luck was the one thing I didn’t have, eventually locating a small black and white corpse on the grass verge at the entrance to Abbey Avenue.

  * * *

  I took what was left of him home and buried him in the garden. It’s surprising how much comfort you can derive from knowing some bones are close by. Shortly afterwards, as if in a token of respect, the boiler on the estate also died. I blamed that on the succession of lowest-bid knuckleheads employed by the council who had failed to maintain it over the decades.

  My dead cat I blamed on the clientele of the Abbey. Dizzy had evidently fallen foul of one of the luxury cars driven by the assorted Premier League football fatuities or ferally sculpted supermodels who sped along the road en route to London’s leading detox centre.

  Once a genuine working abbey with its own bake house, stables and mill, the Abbey was an elegant old white structure, which I could see looming beyond my garden whenever I looked out the sitting room of what I called my bungalow—I actually lived in the lower half of a former two-storey house. It was now converted into separate dwellings and I had the ground floor rooms and the garden. The wall of my garden backed right onto the Abbey’s grounds.

  Which is why I had occasion to meet one of the inmates.

  It was a bright morning in an unseasonably warm September. The man had somehow managed to get into my garden and he was standing there, in a royal blue dressing gown with a gold monogram ‘A’ on the pocket and blue flip-flops.

  He was staring at me as I drew back the curtain. I had been listening to music in the darkness, which is what I tend to do in the mornings while drinking coffee until my consciousness surfaces sufficiently to face the day. The man yelled something and I opened the back door and went to see what he was raving about.

  “Max Roach,” he said. It took me a moment to register this. And by that time he’d also said, “Red Mitchell on bass. George Wallington on piano.”

  “It’s the Gil Mellé Sextet,” I told him. I stepped out the back door and joined him in the garden. It was a little chilly. “Recorded in 1952.”

  “On Blue Note, right?” The man frowned at me. He was deeply suntanned, completely bald, but heavily bearded. Which gave a mild impression that his head was upside down. He started searching the pocket of his blue dressing gown for something.

  “That’s right,” I said. It was clear that the trespasser at least had a working knowledge of some rather esoteric jazz.

  “It’s vinyl, of course,” he said, rummaging in his pocket.

  “Of course.”

  “Original Lexington Blue Note?”

  “No, sadly. It’s a Japanese reissue.”

  The man took his hand out of his pocket for a moment and made a curt, dismissive gesture. He shook his head with satisfaction. “I didn’t think it sounded like the original.”

  I thought this was pretty rich considering he was standing in the garden. “I’ve got an original Blue Note pressing of this,” he announced. “With the Lexington Avenue address on the label.”

  “Deep groove?” I said.

  “Oh yes.” He reached into his pocket and triumphantly drew out an expensive-looking cigar. The cigar had the effect of making him look less like an escaped madman in a bathrobe and more like the denizen of an exclusive resort hotel who happened to have wandered away from poolside.

  Which effectively he was.

  “It’s a flat-edge pressing, my copy. You know what that is?” I had been trying to identify his accent, which was very faint but discernible. Something about the decisively didactic sound of the last sentence made me think Scandinavian.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Those are electrostatic speakers you’re using?” he asked. I nodded. He took out a box of matches, struck one, let it burn for a moment, presumably to allow the sulphur to disperse, then ignited his cigar.

  “You can always tell.” He ex
haled a mouthful of smoke, shook the match out and threw it into my flowerbeds, which didn’t exactly endear him to me. Then he reached into his pocket again and took out the mangled butt of a previous cigar. Why was he carrying that around? Probably because he wasn’t allowed to smoke them in the Abbey and the discarded butt would have been a clue.

  But he felt free to discard it here, in my garden. He chucked it into the pond.

  That really was the last straw.

  I said, “You have a flat-edge copy of this record?”

  “That’s right.” He grinned. “All of my Lexington Avenue first pressings are flat edge.”

  I had him right where I wanted him. I looked at the cigar butt floating in my pond and said, “You do adjust the vertical tracking angle, of course.”

  “What?”

  “When you play one of your flat-edge LPs. You adjust the tracking angle of the cartridge?”

  He stared at me. “What do you mean?”

  I tried not to overdo my look of wide-eyed innocence. “Well, your tone arm and cartridge will be set up to play standard records. And the geometry required for tracking properly on a flat record is completely different. But you know that, of course.”

  He stared at me in silence. I said, feigning surprise, “You mean you don’t adjust the system every time? That means you’re getting distortion and groove wear. Your vertical tracking angle is way off. And that’s before we even start talking about the azimuth.”

  That shut the fucker up.

  He took his leave presently, loping back to the Abbey in his dressing gown.

  I never expected to see him again. But I did. When his face turned up on the front page of the free local newspaper.

  It had been jammed through my letterbox along with an assortment of pizza leaflets and taxi cards. I opened the newspaper and saw a headline that read ARCHITECT DIES IN FALL. Underneath was a photograph of the man, Tomas Helmer. He wasn’t wearing a bathrobe now, but a rather snazzy suit. Apparently he lived—or had lived—in Richmond, in a large house where he’d been having trouble with his guttering.

  Fed up with the situation, he’d climbed onto the roof to do something about it—and had slipped to his doom.

  The poor bastard. I switched on the valve amps and put the Gil Mellé Sextet on the turntable in his honour.

  It sounded great. I picked up the newspaper again. The main thrust of the brief story was how ironic it was that, being a multi-millionaire and all, Helmer had proved too cheap to employ properly trained professionals to repair his guttering and had consequently paid the ultimate price.

  Nevertheless, I was sorry for the poor guy. It was a shame he was gone.

  But I must admit my very first reaction was to wonder what had happened to his record collection.

  * * *

  Soon I had other things to worry about, though.

  When the boiler died, the tenants on the estate were offered the choice of a new heating system provided by the council or installing their own. Both options cost money and, given the current state of my finances, I couldn’t afford either.

  So I decided to just brace myself and tough it out that winter.

  It was worse than I could possibly have imagined. For a start, I hadn’t realised that a large hot water pipe from the boiler had run under my house, heating in passing the slab of concrete on which the house rested. When the boiler was decommissioned this pipe abruptly ceased its regular cycles of cheery warmth and the concrete slab around it rapidly grew cold as a crypt. And my bungalow stood on it.

  It now acted like a giant refrigerating unit, chilling the whole place. The floors were soon stingingly freezing and my little house as cold and damp as a cave. Sinister black mould took hold above the windows in the spare room.

  My cats looked at me with matching appalled expressions, wanting to know what the hell I’d done.

  After Dizzy had been run over, I’d ended up with two kittens, sisters, called Fanny and Turk. Now a year old, they had manifested very different personalities. But they looked at me with identical expressions of betrayal as the floor gradually transformed into a freezing slab of stone.

  Turk took to spending all night outdoors, perhaps on the theory that it wasn’t any colder out than in. Meantime, Fanny took to climbing inside my duvet at night, a refugee from the cold. I mean right inside. She crept in through the slit in the duvet cover and curled up, a warm bundle at my feet as I slept.

  Every morning as soon as I finished breakfast I went out for the day—there was no point staying in the freezing house. The cats followed me out through the door and took up their stations among the frost-struck stalks in my front garden.

  I then spent the entire day outside, and so did they.

  My one extravagance was a London Transport travel card, which allowed me—for an extortionate fee—unlimited use of buses and trains. I’d owned a car for a few years, but the novelty of sitting unmoving in traffic jams had rapidly worn off. So these days when it was too cold to stay at home, I took my trusty travel card and set out.

  To hunt for records. This is what I did.

  I went west then south, towards Twickenham. I spent the rest of the day working my way back home, seeking out every charity shop, junk shop or antique shop that might have a crate of old vinyl lurking somewhere.

  I was wearing my crate-digging shoes, which were cut low and were therefore comfortable when I was crouching on the floor, as I so often was, going through a musty box of records. It’s largely a discouraging business—in the crates I’d find the usual mix of unconvincing rock and pop, leavened by the occasional brass band or church choir. Now and then you’d discover a dozen identical albums by some singer or group you’d never heard of, and realise they’d been donated by the artists themselves. You’d stumbled on the heartbreaking marker of a failed career.

  Just as the low winter sun was sinking in the sky, in a little shop near the bridge in Richmond, I struck gold. An original Elvis RCA red label. It was in beautiful shape. My first impression was that someone had really looked after it. Or, better yet, never played it. I wondered what domestic upheaval—death, house move, existential crisis—had led to it being discarded here. When you thought about the series of coincidences that were required for this object to be right here and right now, in my hot little hands, it was dizzying.

  The cover was immaculate. But what was the record going to be like? My hands trembled as I took a look. The LP crackled as it came out of the sleeve, the static electricity causing the hairs on my arms to stir. The black vinyl gleamed. Pristine, virginal and perfect. I could see my reflection in it, grinning foolishly.

  I paid the pittance they wanted for it and headed out into the winter night with the carefully wrapped record tucked safely under my arm.

  The best part was I could sell it without a qualm.

  I recognise the virtues of Elvis. Like Sinatra, he has an enormously relaxed voice, which is consequently relaxing and pleasurable for the listener. Listening to these guys is like sitting in the most comfortable armchair in the world. But Elvis also had a glutinous and saccharine way with ballads, which, I felt, lumbered him with the same Achilles’ heel as Stevie Wonder. No more sappy slow numbers, guys.

  Anyway, I already had the complete Leiber-Stoller recordings and that was enough Elvis for me.

  I set off homewards, changing buses on the winter roads. Heading back to my icy house I felt like a trapper returning to his frozen cabin with a prime pelt.

  Except, in this case, no animals had been harmed.

  When I got home I would resume the usual winter routine, which consisted of making supper before retiring to my glacial bed, warmed only by a hot water bottle and, with any luck, an opportunistic cat. With the difference that, tonight, I’d first go online and flip the Elvis LP, scoring enough money for us to live on for a few more weeks.

  * * *

  When I got home I immediately knew something was wrong. Fanny was outside the front door, shivering, and she darted in after m
e. There was music coming from the living room. I hurried in there and froze in the doorway.

  Sitting on my sofa was Stuart “Stinky” Stanmer, listening to my hi-fi. Turk cautiously emerged from hiding behind a speaker as I came in with her sister.

  “I let myself in, sorry,” said Stinky. “I had to. The neighbours would have spotted me otherwise. You know, my fans.” I had known Stinky since university. Like me he had been an aspiring DJ, working his way up through college radio. But unlike me he had prospered, to such an extent that he had recently acquired his own radio show and even subjected the nation to an occasional appearance on television.

  “Actually, Stinky,” I said, “my neighbours are quite blasé about the presence of stars around here. Because of the Abbey and all that.”

  He looked out the window at the white shape of the Abbey against the dark winter sky. There were discreet floodlights that made it look moonlit, even on a night with no moon. “I suppose they would be,” he said wistfully. Painful as it was to accept, there were people more famous than he.

  “To what do I owe this pleasure?”

  “I was just in the neighbourhood and thought I’d drop by if you were at home.”

  “And even if I wasn’t,” I said. The record he’d been so presumptuously playing had reached the end of the side. The cartridge was now riding noisily in the run-out groove. I went and rescued it, taking the LP off the turntable. It was a Japanese Godzilla soundtrack. I returned it to its sleeve. While I did so, Stinky leaned back on the sofa. Fanny, walking across the room, gave him a wide berth.

  “So what are you up to?”

  “Oh, this and that,” I said, filing the album away on the shelf. I was sure he knew damned well anything I might be up to. I suspected that, under a variety of pseudonyms, Stinky was one of the most avid followers of my blog, Facebook page and Twitter stream. He poked at the piles of CDs on my coffee table.

  “Playing a lot of CDs, I notice.”

  “I have to listen to something while I’m changing records.”

  “Or while you’re turning them over—eh?” Stinky chortled. Now that he’d created a variation on the joke, he allowed himself to laugh at it. I noticed that he’d been looking through the stack of records I’d left on the armchair. They were in a different sequence to the way I’d left them. The armchair is where I’m in the habit of keeping the records I’m currently listening to. My top picks.