The Run-Out Groove Read online

Nevada reddened. “Paranoid?” she said in a threatening tone that suggested at the very least a long, loud, sarcastic and very eloquent refutation of poor Tinkler. She’d been on a short fuse ever since the goose.

  “But there was an opposition,” I said. “And they were dangerous.”

  “They may well have bounced you down the stairs on your noggin, Tinkler,” added Nevada.

  Tinkler rubbed his head and did his rueful look, which he was rather good at. “But those people are gone, aren’t they?”

  “Sure, but this is a new situation and there’s no reason to assume that there won’t be some new form of opposition, that they won’t be at least as dangerous, and that they won’t be on to us just as quickly.”

  “What do you mean, on to us?” said Tinkler.

  Nevada sighed. “Isn’t it obvious?”

  I said, “Whoever robbed Freddie’s place was obviously looking for the record.”

  “Our record,” said Nevada.

  “And they got hold of it before we did.”

  “You think the robbery was all about the record?” said Tinkler.

  “Of course.”

  “But they took Freddie’s computer, and Magda’s iPod, and…”

  “That was all just camouflage,” said Nevada.

  I nodded. “They tore the place apart to hide the fact that they were after the record.”

  “Okay…” said Tinkler, stretching out the first syllable, obviously unconvinced.

  I took a deep breath. “Look,” I said, “we have to assume there is an opposition—”

  “Not paranoid at all,” murmured Tinkler.

  “And we have to assume that they’re on to us.”

  “They,” said Tinkler.

  “And we have to try and work out who they are.”

  “That’s right,” said Nevada. “So we’re drawing up a list.”

  “Ah, a list. Are you checking it twice? It’s getting on for that time of year.”

  I ignored him. “And on it we’re putting the names of everyone who might have known that we were going to Freddie’s to buy the record from him.”

  “And we want your contribution,” said Nevada.

  “And Clean Head’s?” said Tinkler. “You don’t trust her more than me, do you? I mean, you don’t think I’m any more likely to be the leak than Clean Head?” I couldn’t help noticing that the man who had been so breezily proposing paranoia only moments earlier was now thinking in terms of avoiding the blame for being the leak.

  “Yes, we are going to talk to Clean Head too, and find out if she might have mentioned it to anyone, or if anyone might have found it out without her knowing about it.”

  “If they found it out without her knowing about it, she wouldn’t know about it,” said Tinkler. “It’s like at the airport where they ask you if anyone could have tampered with your bag without you knowing about it.”

  “Anyway,” said Nevada in exasperation, “right now she’s not here but you’re here, so we’re asking you.”

  “To tell you anyone I might have mentioned the record to? Anyone who might turn out to be the ‘opposition’ and have stolen it?”

  “Yes.” Nevada took out a pen and a sheet of paper and was looking at him in a businesslike way when the doorbell rang. I went and opened the front door.

  It was Freddie and Magda. He was wearing a plaid cap and tweed jacket. No corduroy, I realised with a mild shock. He was looking sporty and well turned out. At his elbow Magda was in some kind of brocaded black jacket with a yellow silk scarf at her throat. She was holding a large, beaded red bag. That was corduroy, I noticed. Her expression was solemn, but Freddie looked like a man who had to keep reminding himself that he shouldn’t be jaunty. “Can we come in?” he said.

  “Of course. Good to see you. This is unexpected.” I escorted them through the narrow hallway into the living room where Tinkler and Nevada were sitting. Apparently in my brief absence hunger had got the better of Tinkler, because he had the jar of pâté open and was spreading a liberal quantity of pinkish goose liver onto a piece of bread. As we walked in, he set the jar back down on the table. At the centre of the table actually.

  It couldn’t have been more featured if we’d shone a spotlight on it.

  Magda took one look and did a slow 180-degree turn and walked back out again. I heard the front door close behind her. Freddie and I looked at each other. “Should I go after her?” I said.

  Freddie shook his head. “No, she’ll be fine. She’ll wait in the car and—oh shit, the bag.” He hurried after her, out the door. I looked at Nevada who was glaring at Tinkler, who was still frozen halfway through the motion of lifting the incriminating morsel of bread and goose liver to his mouth.

  “Tinkler!”

  “What?” he said, reluctantly setting it back down on his plate. “How could I know they were coming? You didn’t tell me.”

  “We didn’t know,” I said. “We had no idea they were coming.”

  “Although now that they’re here,” said Nevada, “they can help with the list.” She tapped her pen on the piece of paper. The door opened behind me and a sudden gust of cold air signalled the return of Freddie. He shut the door behind him and came in, taking his cap off. He had a large square cardboard envelope under one arm.

  “I’m sorry about that,” he said. He looked at the open jar of pâté, then at Tinkler, and said, “No, you go ahead.”

  “Oh, really? Are you sure?” said Tinkler. He picked up the bread with the thick coating of pâté on, and bit it in half, happily groping for a cornichon as he did so. He ate the rest of the bread, crunched the cornichon, and began to spread more pâté on another piece of bread.

  “Well, we certainly weren’t expecting you, Freddie,” I said.

  “It was an impromptu visit. Magda has these people in London who buy the cushions she makes. And yesterday when Gwenevere…” He paused tactfully. “Well, we wanted to use her feathers for something, just as we used every other part of her if we could. So Magda made a little cushion and stuffed it with the goose feathers. But she didn’t want to keep it in the house. It reminded her of Gwen. So we came down to London to sell it today.”

  “Ah,” said Nevada.

  “Here,” said Freddie. He took out his phone and showed us a photo of the cushion in question. It was a lovely little piece of work, with the silhouette of a goose embroidered on it. She must have stayed up all night doing that, I thought.

  “It’s beautiful,” said Nevada.

  “It was a good idea, really, coming down to sell it. We made enough money to cover the cost of the trip to London and more.”

  Nevada looked at me. I knew what she was thinking. There’s money in these cushions. “And also,” said Freddie, “it gave me a chance to deliver this.” He handed me the cardboard envelope.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “Your record.”

  “My record?”

  “‘Butterfly Dreams’,” said Freddie patiently. Tinkler was beaming at me. I refused to meet his eye as I opened the envelope and took out the record. Sure enough, it was the single. Freddie was watching me. “So,” he said, “we hadn’t actually settled on a price…”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “How about five hundred?”

  “How about four hundred,” I said. I could see Nevada out of the corner of my eye, holding her breath.

  “It’s a very rare disc,” said Freddie.

  “It is,” I agreed. “And it’s in very nice shape. But it has had the centre punched out of it.”

  Freddie nodded. “Yeah, good point. Pity that. I think it might be a juke box copy.” He sighed. “Okay, we’ll call it four hundred and fifty.”

  “Four hundred and twenty-five.”

  “Okay,” said Freddie, and he shook hands with me in the manner of a man who was getting twenty-five pounds more than he expected. I could have pressed him harder, but it wasn’t my money and I felt obscurely guilty about the goose.

  “I’ll get our clien
t to transfer the money to you tomorrow,” I said.

  “Great. Make sure it goes into the Singles Barn account, the business account.” Freddie paused. “Well, if you don’t mind, I’d better make a move. Magda’s waiting in the car…”

  We said our goodbyes and watched him leave. Then we all looked at the record he’d left on the coffee table. Tinkler was chuckling. “‘It was all just camouflage’,” he quoted. “‘They tore the place apart to hide the fact that they were after the record.’”

  “All right, all right, all right.”

  Nevada was staring at me. “So they didn’t steal the record?”

  “I guess not.”

  “And it was all just a coincidence?”

  “I suppose so,” I said. And then it occurred to me. “Unless…”

  “Unless?”

  I looked at the record. “Unless they’ve replaced it with a fake,” I said.

  “Oh boy,” said Tinkler. “The dizzying heights of paranoia.”

  I picked up the record. The label looked kosher, pale blue with the logo of the Uffington white horse. Examining the vinyl told me nothing, except that it was in excellent condition. “We have to play it,” I said.

  “Can you?” said Tinkler.

  Nevada looked concerned. “Why wouldn’t he be able to?”

  Tinkler grinned. “Your boy doesn’t have a thick spindle,” he said.

  Nevada smiled back. “That’s an unwarranted canard.”

  It was true, though—because of the large hole punched in the middle of the single I couldn’t play it on my machine without some form of adapter. How annoying of Freddie not to have provided one. Not like him. Then a thought struck me. I picked up the cardboard envelope and shook it. There was a rattling sound. I reached inside and fished out a small black shape. A ‘spider’-style plastic adapter. Tinkler was watching with approval. “All that for only four hundred and fifty pounds.”

  “Four hundred and twenty-five.”

  “Who’s counting? Let’s play it.”

  “Okay.” I inserted the adapter into the big hole in the centre of the 45. Nevada came and studied the record as I did so. “Isn’t that horse the ancient chalk one?” she said. “From the Berkshire Downs? From the hillside?”

  “Yep.” I snapped the adapter into place.

  She studied the pale blue label. “So why didn’t they make the background green? Like a hillside.”

  Tinkler said, “They were taking so much acid they probably thought it was green.”

  I went to the turntable and put the 45 on the platter. It looked remarkably small and vulnerable there. I reached for the controls, then hesitated. “What’s the matter?” said Tinkler.

  “The Garrard,” I said, “I’ve never played it at 45. Only 33.”

  “So what? There’s the speed-changing control. So change the speed.”

  I peered down at my beautiful turntable. “But what if it makes it go wrong?” I said. “What if it damages the belt, or…”

  “It’s a Garrard 301,” said Tinkler impatiently. “It’s built like a Russian T-34 tank. It was designed to be played at three speeds and give untold decades of service to myriad stalwart audiophiles all over our great empire.”

  “All right,” I said. I flipped the switch and changed the speed to 45 with a reassuringly well engineered click. I started the turntable spinning and lowered the stylus into the run-in groove. Then I went back to the sofa and sat down with Tinkler and Nevada. We all listened to the song. It was ‘Butterfly Dreams’, all right.

  But what I really wanted to hear was the run-out groove.

  The song ended and the needle slid into it. And Valerian’s soft insinuating breathless voice began.

  Love is this.

  Love is this.

  Love is this.

  We listened to it until the meaning reversed itself, from a statement to a question and back again, and then we switched it off. We looked at each other.

  It was unquestionably the same record.

  “You are now leaving the city limits of Paranoia Heights,” said Tinkler. “We trust you have had a memorable visit.”

  13. FLOOD PLAIN

  The next morning we fed the cats then set out for Erik Make Loud’s house. We went on foot because it was a pleasant walk, splashing through the fallen leaves of Vine Road, strolling past the playing field on the common and pausing at the railway crossing. Both the railway crossings, in fact. “We managed to catch both bloody trains,” said Nevada. “I don’t mean actually catch them,” she added.

  “I know what you mean,” I said as the train finally thundered by. When it was gone there was an electronic ratcheting sound and the red and white striped barriers creaked up into the air. We walked across the tracks, then along the footpath that led us into a grid of residential roads. Emerging from a side street, we turned the corner where the old police station used to be.

  Across the road was the pond and a stretch of park that featured a boot fair once a year. I had many fond memories of records found there, including some immaculate Duke Ellington ten-inchers and a rather nice June Christy on Capitol.

  The pond itself was pleasant enough, too, with an assortment of lively waterfowl that it would have required a Nic Vardy to correctly identify. “Our photographer would be in his element here,” said Nevada. “Old false plumage Vardy.”

  “I was just thinking that,” I said. “And that reminds me, do you think that other guy dyes his hair?”

  Nevada took my hand as we waited to cross the street. “What other guy?”

  “The Evil Elf.”

  “What was his name, incidentally? We can’t go referring to him by that outlandish soubriquet indefinitely. Or can we?”

  “Timothy,” I said. “Timothy Treverton. Brother of Gordon with the arthritis and the jigsaw puzzles.”

  “The poor bastard.”

  The traffic stopped for the lights and we crossed the road. “No, his hair is totally natural as far as I can tell,” said Nevada, “the old Evil Elf.” We walked past the Bull’s Head, a famed music venue that had featured luminaries from Tubby Hayes to Michael Garrick. I’d once attended a memorable gig there by an American singer called Ree. Ree was the granddaughter of the great Rita Mae Pollini, and third-generation jazz royalty. Two streets away from the pub was the house where we’d found the dead body of Ree’s bass player and had to fade carefully away before the police arrived.

  I made a point of not reminiscing about any of these episodes with Nevada. Ree was still a sore point with her. Clean Head had once told me that she referred to Ree as ‘his whore in Hawaii’. His meaning mine. “She likes the alliteration,” Clean Head had said, needlessly. It was true Ree was now living on the Big Island and that we had once dated. And it was also true that I had a standing invitation to visit her there.

  Which I could accept only at considerable risk to life and limb.

  We walked along with the river on one side of us and a row of white houses on the other. “You know what surprises me about Barnes?” said Nevada. “What surprises me is that there is not more riverside frontage. You know, houses right on the river with river views. I mean, look how far all these houses are back from the river. Someone has failed to make use of prime real estate worth billions.”

  “That’s because the Thames has a nasty tendency to flood,” I said. “You see where the houses start? That’s pretty much the point the flood waters reached the last time the Thames breached its banks.”

  “Breached its banks?” said Nevada. “It’s amazing how serious that sounds.” We crossed the street, moving from the river side to the residential side, and approached Erik Make Loud’s house.

  It was set well back from the pavement. We actually walked across a black cast-iron walkway above what looked like a narrow concrete moat before we reached the front door. As far as I could see the ‘moat’ ran all the way around the house, as if in an attempt to separate it from the world.

  The door itself was tall and white and imposing
with a button below a vertical letter slit set high in it. I was reaching to push the button when Nevada stopped me.

  “Here, let me try,” she said.

  I stepped aside. “Sure, but why?”

  “Whenever you ring the bell, no one is in. Let me see if I have more luck.”

  She pushed the button and there was an efficient-sounding electric buzzing within the house, followed immediately by footsteps resonant on a tiled floor. Nevada turned to me.

  “You see?” she beamed, just as the door opened with an expensive-sounding click. The woman who looked out at us was squat and stocky, with a flat, suspicious face. I later learned she was, or had been, a Korean national. She was wearing black ski pants and a navy-blue blazer over a Fair Isle sweater and, incongruously, a string of pearls.

  “We have an appointment with Mr Make Loud,” said Nevada brightly.

  “For Stanmer Productions,” I added. We were just making up these company names as we went along.

  “I know,” said the woman. Her accent, if anything, suggested Birmingham. “I spoke to you yesterday.” She checked her watch, presumably to make sure we weren’t early—or late—and said, “Wait here please.” She showed us in, or at least a little further in, shutting the door and then disappearing deeper into the house. We cautiously edged forward as we waited. There was a long strip of rush matting just inside the door leading to a hallway lined with tiles so pale green that they were almost white. Those windows set on either side of the door and a skylight above us made the entrance hall uncommonly bright and welcoming.

  In front of us there was a mirror hanging above a low bookcase full of volumes on the history of World War Two. On either side of us the walls were decorated with striking rock posters by some of the finest artists. I recognised Rick Griffin, Alan Aldridge and Martin Sharp. Mounted behind non-reflecting glass in ebony frames, they featured acts like the Doors, Pink Floyd, Hendrix and Cream. On closer inspection I saw that the paper of some of the posters was ivory-coloured with age. They were originals. Beautiful and worth a fortune.

  I made a note not to tell Tinkler, otherwise he’d be around here with a crowbar.

  “I can’t believe I said ‘Mr Make Loud’,” said Nevada.