The Run-Out Groove Read online

  Even now, somewhere in Docklands, a devotee of modern furniture might be looking into a skip and shrieking with pleasure.

  The crucial things, though, were the pictures.

  All the pictures on the walls were changed. Gone were the charming colour images of wildlife, birds spreading their bright plumage against sky or water. They had been replaced by black and white photos from the 1960s. Mostly of rock stars, some of fashion models. Iconic faces of the day. And some surprisingly gritty reportage, all achingly redolent of the era.

  The bastard could take a photograph, I’ll give him that.

  There were quite a few pictures of Valerian and her band.

  Even more shots of them, unframed prints, were spread out on two long, black padded benches that hadn’t been there before. They were situated in front of the sofa so that you could sit there and inspect a wide spread of photographs, completely filling your span of vision.

  Erik sat down on the sofa, Vardy making room for him, as he picked up a glass from the floor. Vardy picked up his own glass. They both sipped and looked at me. I saw the bottle, standing on an elegant little cherry wood table. I couldn’t actually see what they were drinking, though, because the bottle was encased in a solid block of ice. The ice was beginning to melt and in a little while the water was going to start ruining that nice polished wood.

  But worrying about such a thing wouldn’t have been very rock and roll.

  Erik picked up one of the photos, a dramatic black and white shot of himself, shirtless and muscular and predatory, in a rock god posture. I wondered if it had been posed. On the whole I suspected not. Nic Vardy had a gift for capturing the moment. I wondered if it was his only gift.

  “God, I was beautiful,” said Erik.

  Vardy laughed and swigged his drink. “You great ponce,” he said. They were both in full laddish swing. He turned and grinned at me. “Hello there, by the way.”

  “Hello.”

  “What’s all this bollocks I hear about someone trying to burn down a house with you in it?”

  I was annoyed that Erik had told him about this, but I suppose I shouldn’t have expected anything else. “Me, Nevada and couple friends of ours.”

  “Luckily old Tinkler got them out,” said Erik.

  Vardy blinked and said, “Where did this happen?”

  “Canterbury.”

  “What were you doing there?”

  “Seeing Cecilia.”

  Erik and Vardy both went quiet at the mention of her name. “How is she?” said Vardy.

  “We had a chat with her.”

  “I didn’t think she spoke to anyone.”

  “I think she speaks to Ambrose,” said Erik. “I’ve always had that impression. Or at least he speaks to her.”

  “As long as that’s all he’s doing to her,” said Vardy, elbowing Erik in the ribs. They both chuckled. “Can you imagine climbing around on that flesh mountain, looking for a way in?”

  “How would you know it when you found it?” said Erik.

  “And what if she rolled over in a moment of passion?” said Vardy. “You’d be squashed flat.”

  “All that meat and no potatoes!” They laughed, slapped their thighs, and laughed some more. It was a boys’ night out, no mistake. Nic Vardy caught my eye and, apparently, something of my disapproval.

  “You think we’re being cruel?” he said.

  I shrugged. “I’m not the one who knew her. I’m not the one who thinks she might have been a greater singer than Valerian, if she hadn’t been stuck in her sister’s shadow.” I was looking at Erik as I said this and his grin slowly faded.

  “I never said she was a greater singer, sport.” He picked up his glass and stared into it. There was still a perilous amount of clear liquid there. He drained it. I was wondering how drunk the two of them were, and how drunk they intended to get. “I said she was a greater talent. Potentially a greater talent. She had a good voice. But she never had the balls, the guts. Her sister seized the spotlight. Cessie always hung about in the shadows.” He searched for the words to sum it up. “She lacked bottle.”

  “But we don’t,” said Vardy. “We’ve got a bottle that still needs to be drunk. Let me refill your glass.” He stood up, taking his own glass, which was still half-full and Erik’s, which was predictably empty. He seemed to be pacing himself. Maybe he wasn’t as taken by drink as he seemed. I didn’t think he was going to have the courtesy to offer me anything, but as he walked towards the table with the bottle on it he turned and said to me, “How about you?”

  “I’ll take a beer.” I wasn’t going to get into competitive drinking with these two. And I was still feeling a little frail after the onslaught of psychic chemistry in Canterbury.

  Erik Make Loud laughed at me. “Pussy,” he said.

  Vardy disappeared and came back with a cold silver can of Sapporo and a bowl of green olives. He handed me the beer and took the olives over to set on the sofa between himself and Erik. He sat down and smiled at me insultingly. “You think we’re wrong to laugh about Cecilia? About what she’s become?”

  “You don’t know what she was, mate,” said Erik. “What she was like, back in the day.”

  “Exactly,” said Nic Vardy. He got up and picked up one of the prints and brought it over to me. A black and white shot of Cecilia, looking fresh and young and lovely, giggling at something just out of shot. “Look at that and then look at what she turned into.”

  “It’s a crime,” said Erik.

  “It’s a crime against nature,” said Vardy, rejoining him on the sofa. They both howled with laughter. I got up and put the photo back in the spot that he’d taken it from. I looked at some of the other prints. Erik wiped tears from his face and picked up his drink.

  “We’re laughing to keep from crying, mate,” he said.

  I was looking at a series of shots of Cecilia and Valerian. I said, “They look a lot alike, don’t they?”

  Nic Vardy got up. He came over and stood beside me, looking down at the photos, smiling. “If you use the right makeup,” he said. “And in those days they used big makeup. Eye shadow like you wouldn’t believe. It was that whole Cleopatra thing. Add the right clothes… a big floppy hat used to work quite well.” He winked at me. “Let me let you in on a little secret. We sometimes used Cecilia to stand in for Valerian at photo shoots when Valerian was late or she was busy, or…”

  “Too hung over or too drunk or too bloody stoned,” offered Erik.

  “All of those things, yes.”

  “Or too busy being shagged senseless by her latest toy boy.”

  “That too, yes.”

  “So there were pictures in circulation that were supposedly of Valerian, but they were actually of her sister?” I said.

  Erik leaned forward on the sofa. “Yeah. So what, sport?”

  “So, any attempt to identify either of them, Valerian or Cecilia, using a photograph is liable to be a somewhat dodgy business.”

  Erik stared at me silently. This never seemed to have occurred to him. And Vardy was watching me now with something resembling interest. “Where are you going with this?” he said. “What is it you think you know?”

  I shrugged. “Valerian was always in the limelight and—you said it yourself—Cecilia was always in the shadows. Maybe she resented it.” I looked at them. “Maybe she did something about it.”

  “Did something about it?” said Erik. “You’ve lost me, sport.”

  “Maybe she killed Valerian.”

  There was silence, then both of them howled with laughter. They made a big production of rolling around on the sofa in mirth. When they finally quieted down a bit, I said, “It would explain why she is the way she is.”

  “You mean she’s gone insane with grief?”

  “Something like that.”

  Erik shook his head decisively. “No, she went crazy because she was supposed to be looking after the little boy and he disappeared on her watch.”

  “That’s right,” said Vardy. The
y both seemed quite intent, for whatever individual reasons, to cling to this version of events. “Anyway, nobody killed Valerian,” he said.

  Erik nodded. “That’s right. Valerian killed herself, mate. She topped herself because her little boy was gone forever.”

  I said, “The same reason her sister went insane? This is your all-purpose explanation?”

  “You don’t think it was an important event?” said Nic Vardy coldly. “The disappearance?”

  “On the contrary, I think it’s the key event.”

  “But you don’t think it explains everything?”

  “Actually,” I said, shifting around so I could look at them, “maybe it does.” The three of us looked at each other like a trio of poker players. I hoped nobody would ask me what I meant, because I had no idea. They picked up their drinks in unison and took synchronised sips.

  I said, “Just out of purely idle interest, where were the rest of the band then?”

  “When?”

  “When Valerian died. When the little boy went missing.”

  Erik rolled his eyes wearily. “I told you. We were in London, at Olympic Studios. Busy laying down tracks while her ladyship took her ease in the countryside.”

  “You were all there?”

  “Yeah.” He looked at Vardy. “You were there too, weren’t you, mate?”

  Vardy smiled at me. “That’s right.” He picked up the glasses and went to the bottle for refills. He didn’t bother asking me how my beer was doing. In fact, I hadn’t touched it. I found I was a little wary of any refreshments offered to me these days. I wondered if this might turn out to be a permanent attitude.

  Vardy returned to the sofa. He looked at me and said, “But if anything like that did happen—if somebody was behind it all, the little boy’s disappearance, or even what happened to Valerian—you should take a look at John Blacklock.”

  Sitting beside him, Erik Make Loud’s demeanour changed instantly. All the good cheer drained out of him and his face went hard and cold. “That’s right, that fucking snake.”

  “Yeah, take a good look at him,” said Nic Vardy.

  “Definitely,” said Erik. “I told you that myself, didn’t I? I’ve always had my suspicions about him.”

  “Get the dirt on Blacklock.”

  “I’d love to,” I said. “Where do I start?”

  They looked at each other. “Well, you know, that might not be so easy,” said Erik. No, of course not, I thought. “He was a bit of a mysterious character. Or at least he wanted us all to think he was a bit of a mysterious character. Covered his tracks. Never let on what his real name was, or where he was from.”

  “I thought you said he was Irish.”

  “Oh, he was definitely Irish,” said Erik. “No question about that. And he was a total fucking chancer.”

  “And he was fucking her,” said Vardy.

  “Who,” I said. “Valerian or Cecilia?”

  “Probably both of them.” He leered at Erik, and they laughed. “Anyway, he was a sleazebag.”

  “And a slippery character,” said Erik. “That journalist who was hanging about did a story on him. Researched him. Or at least he tried to.”

  I said, “What journalist?”

  Erik shook his head in irritation. “I can’t remember his name. Do you remember him, Nic?”

  “No.”

  I said, “Do you remember what newspaper the story ran in?”

  “I don’t know if it ever even came out. There was some talk of Blacklock calling in his libel lawyers. That always tickled me. John Blacklock, mysterious otherworldly master of the dark arts, just happened to have a libel lawyer on standby.”

  “He was a strange bastard, though,” said Vardy.

  “He certainly was. Refused to ever be photographed. He said it would steal his soul.”

  Vardy laughed. “Reveal his double chins, more like. You’re so full of crap, you silly bugger. That might have been a line he tried on you. But he loved to be photographed if he could guarantee he would look dark and majestic. I took a bunch of pictures of him myself.” He looked at me. “I can get you some prints if you like.”

  “Yes, please,” I said.

  “I took quite a few shots of him. Some approved, some not. I was always trying to catch him on the bog.”

  Erik chortled and sipped his drink. Then he paused. “You know what?” he said. “You should speak to the shrink. What’s his name? Osterleigh? Osterloh.”

  “Bill Osterloh,” said Vardy, nodding.

  I didn’t tell them that I’d met him. “Really? Who’s he?”

  “The shrink who was hanging around with the band. Valerian’s shrink. But Nic knows more about him than I do. I mean, it was Nic who put us onto him.” He looked at Vardy. “Wasn’t it?”

  “That’s right. I was photographing this model. You’d call her a supermodel these days.” He stared out the window, looking into a distant year. “She was a skinny little thing. You’d call that anorexic these days. She’d had a nervous breakdown, or she thought she had and that amounted to the same thing. So she started going to Dr Osterloh. And it did her a lot of good. We started noticing the difference, the people who worked with her. We saw how she changed and we clocked his name. It made a change to run across one of these witch doctors who actually knew what he was doing.”

  “By sheer law of averages there must be one or two of them out there,” said Erik. They looked at each other and nodded. I found myself wondering how much I believed of this encomium. I looked at Erik Make Loud and said, “Did he sleep with her? The shrink? You said everybody did.”

  He shifted uncomfortably on the sofa. “Yeah, I might have said that. But I suspect he might have been one of the few and far between. One of the select company. We happy few. There weren’t many of us who didn’t fuck her.” He perked up and turned to Nic Vardy. “You fucked her, didn’t you, Nic?”

  “I might have gone there, once or twice.”

  “How was it?”

  By way of response, Nic held his hand out horizontally, flat in front of him and moved it minimally in a so-so gesture. They both roared with laughter.

  When I made my excuses and departed, they were busy comparing graphic notes about the groupies they’d known. As I left I noticed that there was now a folded towel under the bottle in its melting block of ice, to catch and neutralise the growing pool of moisture. He must have put it there when he came back with my beer.

  Nic Vardy wasn’t so rock and roll after all.

  20. MISSION: MOROCCO

  While I was rubbing shoulders with rock stars and famous photographers, Nevada was having a coffee with the Colonel in Mayfair. “Green Park, actually,” she said. “Near his hotel. It was quite nice coffee. I suspect even you would have approved. We must go there sometime, just you and me. Anyway, what he wants to do next is retrieve the documents.”

  “The ones that were stolen from the print shop?” I said. “How the hell does he propose to do that?”

  “Did I say retrieve? Maybe that isn’t exactly the right word. He wants to get the originals. You remember the ones that were stolen were just photocopies? He wants to get the originals from Morocco where Lucy left them. Actually, what he wants to do is go to Morocco, get the originals copied—digitally scanned, he’s obsessed with that—and then lock up the originals in a bank, in a safety deposit box, and return here with the digital scans on a dongle or whatever the hell they call it.”

  “Good idea.”

  “But he doesn’t want to go to Morocco himself. And he certainly doesn’t want to entrust the job to Lucy—for obvious reasons.”

  “For very obvious reasons.”

  “So he’s asked us to sort it out for him.”

  “Do you want to go to Morocco?” I said.

  Nevada smiled at me. “No. I thought we’d delegate.”

  “Well, we can’t use Tinkler.”

  “Why not?”

  I said, “Send Tinkler to Morocco? That would be like asking Jack the R
ipper to babysit.”

  “Why? I mean, in what way?”

  “The world’s finest, or at least most potent, hashish is found in Morocco.”

  “Ah, I take your point.”

  “If he went there we’d probably never see him again.”

  “We wouldn’t want that.” Nevada snapped her fingers and pointed at me happily. “I know what to do,” she said. “Clean Head, of course. She’s even met the Colonel. They’ve bonded over cat feeding. It’s perfect.”

  “Do you think she’s up for it? After recent events?”

  “She’s a boon companion and a great girl. She’s just a bit of a klepto where the rare Penguins are concerned.”

  “Clearly,” I said. “Do you remember how angry the poor woman in Canterbury was?”

  “Well, I suppose Clean Head felt those Penguins were owed to her after what they put us through. You know, almost burned at the stake, so to speak, while on acid.”

  “Except it’s not the lady they were stolen from who actually tried to kill us.”

  Nevada looked at me, eyebrows angled sceptically. “A bit of a nuanced philosophical distinction, don’t you think? Especially when poor Clean Head’s head was buzzing with a huge amount of LS fucking D?”

  “I suppose so,” I said. “Do you know what’s interesting about that whole situation? They didn’t expect Clean Head to be with us in Canterbury that day.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Well, the flyer they left on our car. It mentioned records, to hook me and, presumably, Tinkler. And it mentioned vintage clothes. To hook you.”

  “Yes, the bastards. I don’t suppose you have any fresh idea about who said bastards are? It would be nice to know. Since they’re trying to kill us and all.”

  I shook my head. “I keep going round in circles. I suppose Ambrose could conceivably have hired them. He had motive, and proximity. But what he didn’t have was…”

  “Knowledge of what bait to put on the handbill for us,” said Nevada. “Clothes and records.”

  “But there was no mention of paperbacks. ‘Mrs Beatty’ just improvised that when we arrived. And luckily for her, they actually had some in the house.”