The Run-Out Groove Read online

  “They stole the computer,” he said.

  “That’s terrible,” said Nevada.

  “Was there anything embarrassing on the computer?” said Tinkler. “You know, any, ahem, adult websites bookmarked or anything?”

  Freddie looked at him bleakly. “It doesn’t matter about the computer. The computer can be replaced.”

  Tinkler cleared his throat. “You’re insured then?”

  Nevada was looking at Freddie strangely. “What’s wrong?” she said. “What else happened?”

  “When we woke up this morning and saw what had happened we couldn’t understand how they’d got in without us being alerted. Gwenevere is better than any alarm system. And then of course we found that they’d…”

  “What?” said Nevada. “Oh Christ. No.”

  Freddie shook his head, tried to speak for a moment and couldn’t. I realised his eyes were red because he’d been crying. “Yeah,” he said hoarsely. “They killed Gwenevere. The bastards killed her.”

  “They did, did they?” said Nevada and I saw real rage flare in her eyes, and then reduce to a dangerous smoulder, suggesting her rather large and resourceful intellect was busy at work.

  I realised glumly that all this didn’t bode well for whoever might have killed the goose, if we ever happened to bump into them. It was wise on such occasions to recall that my honey pie knew how to use a gun, and where to get hold of one.

  The question was, would she be mad enough to use it?

  I looked at Freddie and said, “Look, Freddie, I really hate to ask you at a time like this, but I need to know. Did they take the record?”

  “What?” Freddie gave me a disgusted look and turned away from me as though in sudden physical pain. He waved his hand in the air. “I don’t know. Everything’s a mess. They totally turned over my office. They stole the computer.”

  “I know. You said.”

  “And a phone. Magda’s iPod. The telly from the kitchen. You know, the usual stuff.” Freddie looked at me. I think he was a little contrite about his previous reaction. “I really don’t think they were after your 45. I think it’s just buried under all the other crap. They really turned the place over.”

  “You must sleep pretty heavily,” said Tinkler.

  “All the real upheaval took place in my office, which is in a separate building and at the other end of the farmhouse from our bedroom. We didn’t hear a thing. But that doesn’t mean ninjas crept in under cover of darkness and stole your copy of ‘Butterfly Dreams’.” He was starting to sound angry again. “I really think it’s still in there somewhere, just buried under all the other crap.”

  I had my doubts about this theory, but I sensed I couldn’t press him any further. He shook his head and said, “I just don’t feel like digging it out for you right now, if you don’t mind. Under the circumstances.”

  “No, of course,” said Nevada. She took my arm and stood looking at Freddie. “How did they do it? To Gwenevere?”

  “They garrotted her,” said Freddie. “Put a wire around her neck and pulled it tight, sliced right through her throat.”

  We all looked at each other. “They garrotted the goose,” said Tinkler. Nevada’s face had gone a perilously pale shade but she just nodded, apparently calmly.

  Then the door of the farmhouse banged open and Magda stepped out.

  Nevada and Magda took one look at each other and then flung themselves together, sobbing in each other’s arms. I looked at Tinkler in astonishment and we backed slowly away, as men tend to do when suddenly confronted by a powerful display of female emotion. As if backing away from something that might explode or throw off dangerous radiation.

  I said, “They only met yesterday.”

  Tinkler shrugged. “They bonded over the goose.”

  Even Freddie had backed away to a safe distance from the two sobbing women. He looked at us. “You’re going to stay to lunch,” he said.

  “Jesus, Freddie,” I said. “I don’t see how we can under the circumstances.” But he was shaking his head stubbornly. I said, “I mean, Nevada won’t want to eat anything after what she’s just heard.” Nevada broke her clinch with Magda and looked over at me. She wiped her eyes. They were both wiping their eyes.

  “You must,” said Freddie.

  “Well, I suppose…” said Tinkler, who was always thinking about his stomach. I shot him a furious look, but he just shrugged. “I need to drive back to London. I’ve got low blood sugar. I need a meal. You wouldn’t want me to drive back to London with low blood sugar, would you?”

  “I can drive to London,” I said. “My blood sugar is fine.” Nevada came over to join us. I looked at her. “You don’t want to eat anything, do you, honey?”

  “You must,” said Freddie.

  “Oh yes, you must,” said Magda, joining us. Her eyes too were painfully red.

  “Well, if you insist,” said Nevada. It was becoming clear to me that for some reason it was emotionally important to Freddie and Magda that we joined them. Maybe they didn’t want to eat alone.

  “I guess it’s fine,” I said.

  “Great,” said Tinkler. “What’s for lunch?”

  “Roast goose,” said Magda. We were all silent for a moment. I couldn’t decide which was weirder, whether she was serious or she was making a hideous joke. Then I looked at Freddie and realised they meant it.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” said Nevada.

  Magda and Freddie were both shaking their heads, in utter accord. “No, we are not kidding,” said Magda. “How else can we make her death less senseless, less meaningless?”

  Freddie was nodding in fervent agreement. “Someone wasted Gwenevere, but we can’t let her go to waste. It would be a crime.”

  “You’re serious,” said Nevada.

  “This is the only way for her death to have some meaning,” said Freddie.

  “We loved her,” said Magda. “And this is the last way we can make that love mean something. The last way we can express it.”

  “It seems quite a sensible notion to me,” said Tinkler.

  “Shut up, Tinkler.”

  “I’m just saying.”

  * * *

  Lunch was, as you might imagine, a rather odd affair. The first thing that has to be said is that Gwenevere smelled delicious and my mouth watered in a treacherous fashion. We all sat around the big table in the kitchen. Tinkler had grabbed the seat nearest the Aga, where it was warmest. I was beside Nevada who was beside Magda. Freddie sat opposite me and he began the meal by pouring a glass of red wine and holding it high in front of us.

  “Thank you and farewell, dear friend,” he said, and then Magda commenced to carve the roast bird, which was golden, done to a turn. The skin crunched juicily under the pressure of the knife. There were tears in their eyes as we began eating.

  Nevada refused to eat any. She looked at me. “But you go ahead,” she said.

  She seemed to mean it.

  I took one small slice, as a token to appease our host, then passed the platter along to Tinkler.

  I carefully ate one symbolic mouthful of goose. It was delicious and I was a little regretful to leave it at that, but I wanted to respect Nevada’s feelings—feelings that I shared—for the poor fucking goose.

  Meanwhile Tinkler tucked in happily, helping himself to seconds.

  * * *

  After all that malarkey about blood sugar I ended up driving us back to London with Tinkler lounging in the back seat. I think one of the principal attractions of having his own car was for him to be able to loll about as a passenger while others chauffeured him around.

  I looked at Magda and Freddie waving in the rear-view mirror, standing outside the farmhouse, shivering in the cold, then I turned onto the main road and they were out of sight.

  “Can you believe we just did that?” said Nevada.

  “Well, it made them feel better about losing her,” I said.

  “By eating her?”

  “Well, you know what they said a
bout her always being part of them now.” And part of me, I suppose. And definitely part of Tinkler, who had eaten an enormous amount of goose meat and was now torpid as a result.

  “Yes, very poetic and moving,” said Nevada. “But poor Gwenevere. It still involved roasting her and cutting her up and eating her.”

  Tinkler leaned forward. “Not just that. She also had her liver made into pâté.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, Freddie spent all morning doing it. You fry onions in butter…”

  Nevada shuddered and cut him off with a wave of her hand. “That’s so disgusting. The whole episode is disgusting. It’s enough to make one want to go vegetarian. Forsake meat for good.”

  “The cats wouldn’t stand for that,” I said.

  “No,” said Nevada, her tone softening. “That’s true. The disreputable little carnivores would not approve. I wonder how they’re doing?”

  “He made it with brandy,” said Tinkler.

  “Made what with brandy?” said Nevada.

  “The liver pâté.”

  Nevada paused, then looked back at him and said, “Tinkler, you didn’t.”

  There was silence in the back of the car. Then, “Well, it was twenty-year-old Armagnac.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “I couldn’t let it go to waste! It sounded delicious. They didn’t want it.” He reached in his pocket and produced a small jar with a hand-lettered paper label on it.

  “And it comes in an attractive ramekin.”

  12. CUSHION

  They say you can’t train a cat, but as soon as I slipped the note under Turk’s collar she turned and trotted for the cat flap and thrust herself out into the back garden. I went to the window and watched her hop nimbly onto the rear wall and then over it, heading for the Abbey.

  She knew the presence of the note meant she could seek out Stinky and receive a reward of fresh salmon or king prawns—Stinky had made some kind of arrangement with the Abbey’s kitchen. Perhaps they thought he was a recovering seafood addict.

  Whatever he gave Turk, she must have eaten it quickly because she was back five minutes later with his reply. Unusually for Stinky there was no absurd attempt at trendy salutation followed by a combination of name dropping, sexual boasting and social condescension, with Nevada’s name incorrectly rendered at least once as Nirvana.

  Instead, just a phone number.

  Half an hour later Nevada came in the front door, keys jingling, and said, “I got the French bread you like but they didn’t have the cheese you asked for. I had to wing it. If you don’t like it, blame the chap at the cheese counter.” She set the shopping bags down on the table and I came over to inspect the substitute cheese; it was fine. She kissed me. Her hair was cold from the outdoors. “As for wine,” she said, “don’t get me started. The way these people carry on you’d almost think there were other wine-producing countries than France, and other regions of France than the Rhône valley. I mean they’ve got racks and racks of stuff from Australia and New Zealand and Chile and the United States and Italy and Spain. But try looking for a decent Rhône red. They didn’t stock a single thing by Paul Jaboulet, can you imagine? Luckily I got a Chapoutier.” She proudly unwrapped the bottle and handed it to me. Like her hair, it was cold from her walk home.

  “Shall I pour us some now?” I said.

  “Why don’t you do that?”

  As I opened the wine I said, “Do you know what we’ve lost in the era of the mobile phone?”

  “The ability to communicate meaningfully?”

  I poured the wine. “Well, that too of course. But I was thinking of dialling codes.”

  “Dialling codes?” Nevada took a glass and we sat down on the sofa.

  “For the local exchanges. Time was, you could look at someone’s number and know in what part of London they lived. That’s the beauty of a landline.” I handed her the piece of paper Stinky had sent me. She turned it over in her hands.

  “What’s this?”

  “You know all that trouble we were having getting through to Valerian’s guitarist?”

  “Erik Make Loud. Erik with a ‘k’. That just kills me—‘kills’ spelt with a ‘c’, by the way.”

  “Well, I’d tried all the numbers that Stinky’s PA managed to dig up, and none of them were any good. They were all mobile phones and I couldn’t get anything but voicemail. So it occurred to me that an arch ligger like Stinky might have the number for Erik’s personal direct line.”

  “And he did? Excellent!” Nevada kissed me. “As loath as I am to admit it, Stinky does seem to have his uses. And have you noticed how glossy Turk’s coat is? That’s all the fish oil she’s getting.”

  “But look at the dialling code,” I said, “on Erik’s number.”

  Nevada frowned at the piece of paper. “It’s the same as ours.”

  I chuckled. “That’s right. We’ve been chasing all over London looking for the bastard, and here he turns out to live just up the road.”

  “So we can go and see him? I mean, just pop over and visit?”

  “Yes. I phoned him, or rather his housekeeper, and made an appointment for us to go over tomorrow.”

  “Excellent,” said Nevada. “Remind me not to take the piss out of him about his name.”

  The doorbell rang and I went and admitted Tinkler. Rather promisingly, he was carrying a bag with the logo of an expensive delicatessen emblazoned on it. “A wine and cheese party,” he said. “How fashionably retro! Can we have fondue next?”

  “Hello, Tinkler,” said Nevada, and kissed him.

  Tinkler ostentatiously removed his jacket. It was the houndstooth silk one that Nevada had found for him in an Oxfam shop in Hammersmith. Underneath it he was wearing the black John Smedley roll neck she’d found in Twickenham. Dressed to the nines again, I noticed. He was handing me the jacket when he froze.

  He was staring at the coffee table where we had spread the photographs. “Where did you get those?”

  “They came in the post this morning,” said Nevada. “From Nic Vardy.”

  “My god,” breathed Tinkler. He settled heavily on the sofa, knees spread apart, and bent forward to study them.

  “Yes,” said Nevada, “he may be a hair-tint cheat but he’s quite good at snapping a photo.”

  Tinkler picked up a shot of Valerian standing holding a microphone, a spotlight behind her head. A halo of sweat and curly hair surrounded a face that was both angelic and demonic, frozen in the ecstasy of song. It was a black and white shot, like all the others.

  He rifled through them feverishly. “These are great! He gave them to you?”

  I said, “He included a note about how everything is going digital and, since that’s the case, maybe we’d like these duplicates of his prints that he’s managed to dig up.”

  “Maybe you’d like them?” said Tinkler.

  “They were addressed to me, actually,” added Nevada demurely.

  “Have you asked him about my autographed print yet?”

  “No, Tinkler, but we shall.” Nevada sat down beside him and looked at the photographs. “You know what is strange about these?”

  “No,” I said.

  “No, what?” added Tinkler.

  She picked up the photographs that Tinkler wasn’t monopolising. “There’s lots of shots of everybody in the band…”

  “Yeah. Aren’t they great?” said Tinkler.

  “Except Valerian’s sister. Everyone except Cecilia.”

  “Oh, that makes perfect sense.”

  “Really? Does it? Why?”

  Tinkler handed his sheaf of photos to Nevada. “Well, you see Cecilia played the piano. And a lot of these gigs they had, especially in the early days, were at venues that were too small even for the smallest upright piano.”

  Nevada shook her head. “So poor Cecilia was left out?”

  “She became sort of a back room presence,” said Tinkler. “Like Ian Stewart in the Rolling Stones.”

  “Who’s Ian Stewart
?”

  “Exactly,” said Tinkler.

  I sat down on the sofa with them, looking at the photos. I picked up a particularly striking shot of Erik Make Loud. “We’re seeing him tomorrow,” said Nevada.

  I nodded. “He lives just up the road,” I said. “In Barnes.”

  “Good gravy,” said Tinkler. “That close? One would have thought we’d be able to hear the howls of reverb and distortion from here.”

  “Time for me to go and assemble a green salad,” said Nevada. She looked back over her shoulder as she headed for the kitchen. “By the way, you needn’t have got all dolled up, Romeo. Clean Head can’t make it.”

  Tinkler’s face fell. “Why not?”

  “She’s working. We’ll have to have a separate summit with her later.”

  “Is that what this is, a summit?”

  I went and sat down at the dinner table and he joined me, carrying the delicatessen bag. He opened it and took out a jar of cornichons, little French pickled gherkins. “I thought I’d contribute these,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  “They’ll go very nicely with this.” He took out another jar. It was the pâté Freddie had made from Gwenevere’s liver.

  “Jesus,” I said, glancing towards the kitchen. “Did you have to bring that?”

  “Why?” said Tinkler. “It’s not still a sore spot, is it?”

  “Not still a sore spot? The poor fucking goose was only killed yesterday.”

  “I just thought, you invited me around, wine and cheese…”

  “We invited you around because it’s important that we talk. And anyway, we didn’t invite you. You invited yourself.”

  He paused in the act of opening the jar of cornichons and looked at me. “Important that we talk? Why? What about?”

  “Look,” I said, “we don’t want to make the same mistakes we made last time. The last time something like this happened.”

  “And what mistakes were those?” He popped the lid off the jar.

  Nevada came back with a salad bowl and set it on the table. She sat down and said, “It took us too long to realise that the opposition had us under surveillance.”

  Tinkler chortled. “The opposition? Don’t you think that sounds a little paranoid?”