The Run-Out Groove Page 17

  “What happened to the perfect companion and perfect shopper?” said Clean Head sardonically.

  “He’s been carried away by the thrill of the chase,” said Nevada.

  “So I see.”

  I must admit the thrill of the chase had got to me a bit, too. My heart was thumping a little, just a ragged edge of excitement. Who knew what we might be about to discover? Maybe the dear deceased had been a jazz fan.

  Perhaps a set of Tubby Hayes originals on Fontana beckoned.

  It was a large detached house in its own grounds near the Dover Road on the outskirts of Canterbury. We’d driven down residential streets and past a church and a small private hospital on our winding way as the daylight faded, bickering incessantly about the GPS, but eventually we’d found the place. We parked in the street outside and approached on foot. There were apple trees reaching over the low stone wall, and a gleaming new tarmac drive led in through the open gateway. Inside, the drive forked and split in two around a patch of well-tended rose beds. One branch led to a garage with its green-painted wooden doors firmly closed. We followed the other branch to the front door, past a trickling water feature of a Grecian lady with an urn constantly replenishing a pond where goldfish darted. Turk would have enjoyed keeping an eye on that.

  A notice on the door read CLEARANCE SALE in large letters written on a sheet of the same green paper that had been used for the handbills. It was taped to the door and fluttering in the wind. “It looks like it’s the right place,” said Tinkler, rubbing his hands together happily. He trotted forward, ahead of us, and jammed his thumb on the doorbell.

  “His childlike excitement lightens the heart,” said Nevada as the doorbell sizzled.

  “No one’s coming,” said Tinkler.

  “Don’t just lean on the bell continuously,” said Clean Head.

  “Yes, it’s rude,” said Nevada. Tinkler let go of the bell as if it had given him a shock. No one came to the door and we couldn’t discern any activity within. Tinkler looked disconsolate. I knew how he felt. That flyer had really got my hopes up, too. He looked at me.

  “No one’s home.”

  “Hello!” We all turned to see an elderly lady coming around the side of the house. She was spry and well turned out, dressed in jeans and green wellies and a brown and white roll-neck sweater. She wore big, clumsy gardening gloves and was holding a bunch of sad-looking roses in one hand and a pair of muddy garden clippers in the other. “I almost didn’t hear you. I was around the back.” She peered at us happily. “Have you come for the sale?”

  “We certainly have,” said Nevada.

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t waiting inside to greet you,” said the lady. She wiped her forehead, which was damp with sweat. She’d obviously been hard at it in the garden. She radiated vigour and good-natured health. “I was cutting back the roses.”

  “The roses are lovely,” said Nevada.

  “Yes, they’re beautiful,” said Clean Head.

  Tinkler caught my eye and silently mouthed the words, Fuck the roses.

  * * *

  The woman introduced herself as Mrs Beatty and insisted on making us a pot of tea, which she served with a homemade lemon and poppy seed cake, which was really very good. Tinkler and I were champing at the bit to go and rifle through her records—and presumably Nevada felt the same way about the vintage clothing. But the formalities had to be observed.

  “So do you have a lot of stuff to get rid of?” said Tinkler. “I mean, to sell.”

  “Oh yes. Far too much,” said Mrs Beatty. “I have to seriously declutter my life.” She smiled bravely. “This is all because of Robert,” she said. As she mentioned the name a shadow passed over her face and she paused.

  “What happened?” said Nevada, in that shockingly direct way that women sometimes have, and often get away with.

  Which is what happened here. Mrs Beatty immediately opened up to her and gave a moving account of the death of her husband of fifty-seven years from cardiac occlusion. She presented the facts with precision and detachment, keen with dry-eyed regret. She’d obviously lost the partner of a lifetime, and I felt a bit bad about finding myself automatically doing the arithmetic—working out what age old Robert must have been when he popped his clogs and therefore what kind of records we might find in his collection.

  Nevada praised Mrs Beatty on the quality of her flyers and Mrs Beatty nodded and smiled, happy to be appreciated for her ability to use a computer and printer. They spoke briefly in French, and the little old woman listened with approval as Nevada expounded to us on how bric-à-brac came from the phrase ‘à bric et à brac’, which means ‘at random’.

  Luckily this led us back to the topic at hand: the sale. “I need to get the keys,” said Mrs Beatty, “for the various rooms upstairs. Everything is stored in the rooms upstairs, all the clobber I need to get rid of. I’ve kept it stored there and locked up since Robert passed away. I suppose that seems silly to you.”

  “Not at all,” I said and she smiled at me and shoved another piece of cake my way and then went over to a cupboard and took down a key. “This is for the room with the clothing,” she said and I watched Nevada do a very good imitation of someone who didn’t actually want to snatch a key from the hand of a frail elderly lady.

  Instead she said, “What sort of clothes, exactly…”

  “Oh I kept everything, dear,” said Mrs Beatty. “I don’t really know why. Did I think I was going to be young again? Anyway I kept it all. All the lovely dresses I got from Carnaby Street and the King’s Road. Biba and Hung on You and Granny Takes a Trip.” I could see Nevada almost begin to salivate as the woman enumerated these legendary boutiques. “Let me show you,” said Mrs Beatty. “Come upstairs with me.”

  “There’s no need for you to come along,” said Nevada.

  “Oh, it’s all right, dear. I need to get the other keys from upstairs. Then I’ll leave you in peace.”

  “I don’t suppose you have any books?” said Clean Head suddenly.

  “Books?” said Mrs Beatty.

  “Paperbacks. I don’t suppose you have any Penguins?” said Clean Head.

  Mrs Beatty stared at us and blinked. “Why, you know,” she said with a note of surprise in her voice, “that’s the most extraordinary thing. We actually have masses of books. I just didn’t think of putting them in the flyer. There are paperbacks of all kinds. Robert had loads of Penguins. And he kept them all in immaculate condition.” Clean Head’s face lit up and I found myself hoping Robert had given the same care to his record collection. “They’re right next door. Would you like a look?”

  Clean Head immediately got to her feet and Tinkler rose with her. “I’ll help you look,” he said. She gave him a sceptical glance.

  “Aren’t you itching to delve through the vinyl?”

  “Oh, that,” said Tinkler in his best offhand manner. “That can wait.” He shot me a look. “But if you find any classic British rock, it’s mine.”

  “Maybe,” I said as Mrs Beatty led him and Clean Head out. A moment later Tinkler’s head popped back around the edge of the door. “Or classic British R&B,” he said. Then he disappeared. I looked at Nevada.

  “What’s with him?” I said. Nevada grinned.

  “He could see he was losing brownie points for being such a record-hunting fanatic.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” I said. “I’m a record-hunting fanatic.”

  “Yes, but you didn’t spend the morning going around Canterbury Cathedral and the tea shops trying to prove to Clean Head that you’re actually a well-rounded human being. Now he’s trying to make up for lost ground, by taking an interest in what she’s interested in.”

  “So he intends to seduce her over a pile of Penguin paperbacks?”

  “Yes,” said Nevada. “And if they find some Modern Classics it might work. Because she’ll get hot.”

  Mrs Beatty and the others were gone a long time and we sat there at the table in the warm little kitchen sipping tea. Nevada fl
ipped idly through the pile of flyers that Tinkler had left on his chair. “The accent grave over the ‘a’ in bric-à-brac is a nice touch,” she said. “I like a woman who knows her diacritical marks.”

  Mrs Beatty looked in and said, “Did you want to see the clothes, dear?”

  Nevada got up. “Yes, please.”

  Mrs Beatty smiled at me and looked back. “I just have to find the key for the record room and I’ll be right back.” They went out. She didn’t come right back. I heard footsteps upstairs. Then silence.

  Time passed and I sat at the table, feeling left out and a little odd. It was very warm in the kitchen. Sweat prickled on the back of my neck. I yawned and stretched. My blood pounded in my ears. I felt a little light-headed, as if I might be coming down with a cold.

  I thought about going upstairs to look for Mrs Beatty, but it seemed a bit weird to just wander around someone’s house uninvited. I wished I had a book to read. Perhaps I should go and find Tinkler and Clean Head and the Penguins.

  But I didn’t want Mrs Beatty to come back and find me gone.

  With nothing else to read, I found myself looking at one of the flyers again, one of the many Tinkler had stolen. It was exactly like the one we’d had on our windscreen, except for one thing.

  There was no handwritten addition on the bottom of it.

  No address. No way of finding the house. I looked through the others. None of them had the address on them. Just ours.

  That was odd.

  What was also odd was the way the green paper of the handbills had begun to glow. It was a faint but intense luminosity that actually floated above the paper. The colour and the paper had become separated. I spread out the handbills on the table and looked at the glowing placards of colour that floated in the air just above them. They seemed to move with my breath. My breathing was very loud.

  Then I looked up and saw Mrs Beatty standing in the door of the kitchen. She was smiling and holding a key. “Would you like to see the records now?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Oh, come now.” She smiled at me. “Why ever not?”

  “I feel a bit strange.”

  “There’s a great deal of jazz,” she said. “Robert had a splendid collection. And it’s all in superb condition.”

  “All right,” I said. She led me out of the kitchen. The shadowy house suddenly seemed huge and I was glad to have someone to guide me through it. I followed her up the stairs, my body making stiff rhythmic movements of arm and leg like a mechanical toy as we climbed each step. There seemed an awful lot of steps. The wooden staircase creaked under us, the noise of it flying around in the air to all the corners of the house, like a flight of startled birds. Then we were in a dim, carpeted upstairs hallway. I paused. Mrs Beatty turned and looked at me, smiling.

  “What is it, dear?”

  “I’d like to see Nevada. My girlfriend.”

  “Of course. Right this way.” She turned to a door on our right and opened it. “The records are in here.” It was a bedroom with a tall chest of drawers on the far wall, gleaming strangely in the last daylight coming through the window. “The records are in that cabinet,” she said. “Go and have a look and I shall get Nevada for you.” The chest of drawers seemed very tall and very far away. The room was full of shadows and I didn’t want to go into it.

  “No,” I said, turning around. “I’ll just wait out here.”

  “I’m afraid that won’t be possible, dear,” said Mrs Beatty. There was a man standing beside her. He was broad and stocky with short, dark hair and a pair of glasses with heavy, square, black frames. I was startled by his sudden appearance and was completely unprepared when he put his hand against my chest and shoved me through the doorway. I stumbled back into the room and they slammed the door. I heard the sound of it being locked. The key turned with an intricate metallic click.

  The sound went on for a long time, echoing in my head. I turned around and looked at the room. I went to the chest of drawers and opened it. It was full of sheets and smelled of lavender and damp. No records, but by now I hadn’t expected there to be any. I went to the door and tried it. I couldn’t open it. I hadn’t expected to be able to. The brass doorknob felt very strange in my hand. Endlessly slippery. And the coldness of it seemed to cling to my palm even when I took my hand away. There was an odd rectangular glow at the other end of the room and it took me a moment to work out that it was the window.

  I went and stood at it. For the first time I noticed there were bars fixed outside the glass, vertical steel bars. I stared through them. I could see the corrugated tin roof of a shed in the next garden, just over the wall. A charcoal-grey cat was sitting on it, enjoying the last rays of sunlight. I stared intently at the cat, trying to will my thoughts into its head. To send it a message to relay to Turk and Fanny. Tell them…

  Tell them what?

  We’re not coming back.

  I saw movement in the darkening garden below. It was Mrs Beatty and the man with the spectacles from the hallway. They were walking quickly, voices raised. They were arguing about something. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, and in a moment they were gone from sight. The light fled the sky and the window grew dark. All I could see in the glass was the ghostly reflection of my face and the dark lines of the bars. When the segments of my reflection began to separate, like strips of fabric someone was cutting away, I turned quickly from the window.

  My heart was beating so hard I could feel the blood pulsing and stinging in the tips of my fingers. I was having trouble breathing. I sat down on the bed and the springs in the mattress creaked and rang endlessly. I sank into the softness of the mattress until it began to absorb me, then I stood up hastily.

  I tried to think. The window was barred. The door was locked. My thoughts travelled in great circles, as though they were coming to me around the circumference of the Earth. And they kept repeating themselves. The window was barred and the door was—

  The door opened.

  Tinkler was standing there. He had a halo around his head and his hair seemed to be moving in slow motion at the probings of a gentle breeze, but it was Tinkler. He said something and it took me a minute to put the words together.

  “Come on. Quick.”

  I was out of the door and moving with him down the carpeted hallway. The hallway seemed a lot longer than I remembered it. It seemed to go on forever. We kept walking and walking, but there was always still more carpeted hallway. “Where’s Nevada?” said someone. I realised it was me.

  “With Clean Head,” said Tinkler. “They’re in the car. Now we’ve all got to get out of here. Before they get back.”

  “They drugged me,” I said. “I was drugged.”

  “No shit. We all were. I think she slipped something in the tea. Or that fucking lemon and poppy seed cake.”

  As we came to the top of the stairs I caught the scent of something, intense and raw and rank. It burned my throat as I breathed it in. “What’s that smell?”

  “Petrol. They were splashing it everywhere, and then they ran out of it. Not enough to finish the job. So they rushed off to buy some more petrol.”

  “Splashing it everywhere?” I said. “Why? Were they going to set fire to the place?”

  “That’s right. With us locked up inside it.”

  “They were going to kill us.”

  “No shit, again.”

  Someone wanted me dead. It was not the first time, but the shock was undiminished. The house creaked around me as I put my foot on the staircase. I froze. It was as if a vast gulf had opened up. I didn’t want to take another step in case I fell in. Tinkler was staring at me. His face seemed to pulse, growing larger and smaller according to the beating of his heart. Or maybe it was the beating of my heart.

  “What’s the matter?” he said.

  “I’m scared.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake.” He took my hand and led me down the stairs. When we got to the bottom he looked down at my hand in his. “There i
s absolutely nothing gay about this,” he said. “Remember that.” What I was remembering was my father, walking with him hand in hand and feeling safe. We walked together through the maze of the dark house. I didn’t know my way, but I could see in the dark. The house was huge. Every room led into another house, or perhaps it was just the same house from a different angle.

  “Was everyone locked up?” I said.

  “Yes. But I got them out.”

  “How did you get out?”

  “I had to unscrew the hinges on the door.”

  “How did you unscrew them?”

  “With my Swiss Army knife.”

  I said, “You own a Swiss Army knife? What are you doing owning a Swiss Army knife?”

  “I got it free when I bought twelve giant Toblerones.”

  The front door opened and suddenly the cool, beautiful smell of night air was in my face. We stepped outside. I was suddenly hungry. “Can I have one?” I said.

  “One what?”

  “One of the giant Toblerones?”

  “I don’t still have them. This was years ago. That LSD has addled your brain.”

  We walked across the tarmac that gleamed like black ice and out of the gate and into the street. Tinkler’s car was there under the sodium glow of a street lamp, crouching like an animal. Clean Head was sitting in the front. Nevada was in the back. She stared at me and started waving at me through the window. We tried to open the door and get at each other, but neither of us could figure out how to operate it. Tinkler snarled with impatience and opened it for us. I climbed in with Nevada and she seized me and began kissing my face. “You’re here!” she said. Her lips were cool and I could smell the night in her hair.

  Tinkler had the front door of the car open and was leaning in towards Clean Head. “Move over,” he said.

  “I want to drive.”

  “Move over!”

  Clean Head sighed and folded and unfolded her long limbs elegantly as she slid over the transmission hump and gracefully exuded herself into the passenger seat. She must do yoga, I thought.