The Run-Out Groove Page 3

  “All right,” I said. “Tell me about it.” Nevada smiled a delighted smile and perched on the arm of the sofa, legs crossed, elbow braced, chin attentively on her hand.

  I sighed and looked at Lucy Tegmark. “So, tell me all about it,” I repeated.

  She seemed suddenly uncertain. “Where should I start?”

  “Well, why don’t you start by explaining how you come into it? You and the Colonel.”

  “Don’t call me that,” said the man.

  “What?”

  “The Colonel. I’m not a colonel. I’m not in the army and I never was.”

  Lucy smiled at me. “It’s true. But he’s always talking about his father. How the old Colonel would do this, or do that—everything from the proper way to butter a slice of toast to the correct method of making sure you’re not short-changed by a taxi driver. Anyway, he talks about the Colonel so much I started calling him that. I suppose it’s a nickname. And it stuck.”

  “No it didn’t,” said the man stubbornly.

  I said, “So what do we call you, then?”

  “John,” said Lucy merrily. “Johnny. Jack.”

  “Mr Drummond,” said the man, tightly.

  Drummond.

  The faint alarm bell in my head got suddenly louder. Now I knew why it was ringing. I would have put it together a whole lot sooner if my brain hadn’t been addled by the magic mushroom tart my beloved had poisoned me with. I must have been staring at him because suddenly his cold little eyes were beaming directly into mine. I searched his face for a family resemblance. I could detect none, but I was certain all the same. “You’re a relative,” I said.

  “She was my sister.”

  Nevada leaned forward. She said, “Valerian was your sister?”

  “Valerie Anne. Yes.”

  4. VALERIAN’S BROTHER

  “That’s why we’ve come to see you,” said Lucy Tegmark.

  “That’s why I’ve come to see you,” said the Colonel. “She’s just along for the ride.”

  She glared at him. “I am as much involved in this project as you are. I am just as committed to it. Just as emotionally invested.”

  “I don’t think so,” he said dryly, and I had the sudden surprising impression that he might be right; that this apparently emotionless man sitting at my table, petting my fawning quisling of a cat, might be a hell of a lot more ‘invested’ in this than she was.

  Maybe it was just the residual psilocybin in my system, but it seemed for an instant that he’d spoken a profound truth, and everybody sitting here listening to its echo in the quiet morning sunlight knew it. He had somehow put us all to shame.

  But especially Lucy.

  She turned to us, apparently eager to make up lost ground. “Of course I’m not family, but I am passionately interested in this story. In discovering the truth of it and putting it in the public domain.”

  I said, “You’re a journalist?”

  The Colonel snorted. She shot him a look of unadulterated hostility; for the first time he’d managed to get under her skin. “I’m a writer,” she said. “I don’t know that I’m qualified yet to be called a journalist. My father was a journalist. Monty Tegmark.” She sounded proud.

  The Colonel grinned mirthlessly. “Journalist is stretching it a bit,” he said. “He was a stringer for a sleazy Fleet Street tabloid.” Suddenly, under the American accent, I could detect English tones and intonations. He must have grown up here if he was Valerian’s brother. A local boy, after all.

  Lucy Tegmark shook her head. She had regained her composure and didn’t seem stung by the remarks. It was as if she was on firmer ground here. “My father was a very respected professional. He was held in high esteem by all the national dailies.”

  “The point is,” said the Colonel, growing impatient at this encomium, or perhaps just nettled that he hadn’t been able to rile her sufficiently, “he left behind a cache of useful information. Documentation.”

  “About what?” I asked.

  “Valerian,” said Lucy. “My father knew a great deal about her. He went on tour with the band, wrote a whole series of articles.”

  “During the period when…” I was going to allude at this point to Valerian’s grisly demise—but then I realised that her brother was sitting right here at my table, looking at me. Near enough to reach out and touch, in the unlikely event that anybody would want to touch him.

  So instead I said, “When her boy went missing.”

  “During and before,” said Lucy. “Dad was one of the first newspapermen to discover Valerian, to discover the band. So he had access to them from the start. He was writing about them when they were still on the pub circuit. He followed their rise to fame, charting it, writing profiles of all the band members, interviewing them…”

  “He was working on a book,” said the Colonel.

  “And now I’m working on that book,” said Lucy Tegmark. “I want to write the masterpiece my father never completed. But I want it to go further than just being a mere biography of Valerian, a tale of her music and her band and how she lived and died.” I noticed a barely perceptible tremor go across the Colonel’s face at the word died. I knew what he was thinking and I didn’t blame him.

  It wasn’t just the fact of her death. It was the way it had happened.

  Lucy hadn’t noticed. She was still droning on about this hypothetical book she was planning to write about Valerian, concluding by saying, “But the most important single thing I want to do is to resolve the question of her son’s disappearance.”

  Yes, I thought, that’s going to be easy.

  I looked at the Colonel and said, “And she’s interviewing you for the book?”

  “No. I’m bankrolling the operation.”

  “So how do I come into it?” I said. “You’re bankrolling her and she’s researching it. What do you need me for?”

  Lucy shifted in her chair. “I’m not an investigative journalist. I see myself as pulling the book together from a rich diversity of sources and writing it in a single authorial voice, once we have all the facts we need in front of us.”

  “So you want me to do the investigating?”

  “They want you to be their legman,” said Nevada happily. “He’ll be a very good legman. He’s got nice legs.”

  * * *

  Lucy and the Colonel went out to have a bite of lunch while Nevada and I talked.

  “I’m not sure I want to do this,” I said.

  “Did you hear her say money is no object?”

  “Did you see the look he gave her when she said it?”

  “Well, look or no look, we need funds.”

  I said, “I find records. I don’t find people.”

  “You did a pretty good job of finding somebody last time.”

  “That was just a side effect of looking for a record. It was a happy accident.”

  “So why shouldn’t there be another happy accident?”

  I shook my head. “That little boy didn’t just vanish into thin air. Somebody took him.”

  “Who?”

  I shrugged. “Presumably the sort of people who take little boys. He was probably dead within twenty-four hours of being abducted. And that’s if he was lucky. Any accidents in this situation aren’t going to be happy ones.”

  “Poor kid,” said Nevada. She stood up. “Well, just think about it. They won’t be back from lunch for a while.”

  She smiled at me and then went out into the garden to use the phone, which was suspicious in itself. I went to the window. I could faintly hear her out there, just the buzz of her murmuring confidentially as she occasionally glanced my way. She was obviously up to something. She came in looking pleased with herself and walked through to the kitchen.

  A minute later Turk came clattering in through the cat flap. She hurried over to the sofa to say hello to me. I held my hand in the air and she put her front paws on my knee and stretched up and brushed her head against my palm. She studied me for a moment, her extraordinary turquois
e eyes gleaming on either side of her scarred nose. She was more of a roughneck than her sister, and that scarred muzzle gave her a piratical look. After a moment she turned away and hopped up onto the coffee table. She loved to lie stretched there for hours on end like a very large and furry ornament. Now she looked at me and flopped over on her back, legs akimbo and the white fur of her belly exposed for rubbing.

  Only I wasn’t looking at her fur. I was looking at the red plastic collar fastened around her neck. “Honey,” I called.

  “Yes?”

  “Honey, you know we agreed that we wouldn’t give the cats collars, because they’re probably uncomfortable, and there’s the remote hazard of them getting snagged on something?”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” said Nevada, coming in. “I remember all that. What on earth are you talking about?”

  I pointed at the table. “Well, then, why did you put a collar on Turk?” She stared at the cat, and I stared at her.

  I said, “You didn’t put the collar on Turk, did you?”

  “No.”

  Nevada bent down swiftly, examining the collar. “There’s something under it,” she said.

  “Something under it?”

  “A piece of paper,” she said. “A note.” She caressed Turk’s head and then slipped her hand down to the collar and carefully extracted a folded square of white paper. She opened it and examined the other side, which was covered with writing.

  “What is it?”

  Nevada handed it to me. It read:

  GREETINGS HIPSTER!

  I HOPE YOU DON’T MIND ME USING FANNY TO SEND YOU MY LITTLE MESSAGE. FANNY MAIL! HA HA. SOUNDS A LOT MORE FUN THAN FAN MAIL! ANYWAY, NOW THAT I AM STAYING NEXT DOOR TO YOU I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE RUDE NOT TO SAY ‘HI’. I CAN SEE YOUR HOUSE FROM HERE, AS THEY SAY. THAT’S RIGHT, I AM STAYING IN THE ABBEY. JUST A SHORT STAY FOR A BIT OF R R. I NEEDED A BREAK, SO HERE I AM. IT’S A GREAT PLACE. THE FOOD IS FANTASTIC. AND MY FELLOW GUESTS ARE AMAZING. SO MANY MUSIC GREATS. IT’S LIKE THE MERCURY AWARDS BUT WITHOUT THE CHARLIE, HA HA! WHICH IS WHY I’M WRITING TO YOU. YOU WOULDN’T BELIEVE THE STORIES I’M HEARING IN HERE. THE GOSSIP, THE TIPS. AND THE CONTACTS I’M MAKING ARE MIND-BLOWING. IT’S THE MOST VALUABLE NETWORKING EVENT I EVER ATTENDED. I’VE GOT SCOOPS, EXCLUSIVES, INTERVIEWS THAT ARE SOLID GOLD. ENOUGH FOR A DOZEN TELEVISION PROGRAMMES. BUT I CAN’T USE ANY OF THEM! THERE’S NO INTERNET ACCESS HERE, NO PHONES, NO LETTERS ALLOWED IN OR OUT. THAT’S THE RULES. AND THERE’S NO CHANCE OF SMUGGLING ANYTHING OUT WITH THE STAFF. THEY’RE REALLY STRICT ABOUT THAT. SO I’M WRITING TO YOU, OLD CHUM. HERE’S THE DEAL. YOU BECOME MY PIPELINE! I SEND THE STORIES OUT TO YOU ON FANNY HERE (DO YOU LIKE HER COLLAR? I CHOSE THE NICEST COLOUR, HAD MY PA SEND IT TO ME) AND THEN YOU PASS THE STORIES TO MY OFFICE. I WILL MAKE IT WORTH YOUR WHILE. YES, MONEY AT LAST. I’LL SEND MY PA’S DETAILS ON THE NEXT NOTE. THANKS FOR YOUR HELP.

  YOUR FRIEND, STINKY

  P.S. GIVE NIRVANA MY LOVE.

  We stared at each other. Nevada said, “Nirvana?”

  “Apparently he thinks that’s your name.”

  “The fucking halfwit. He can’t even tell Fanny from Turk.”

  “He just guessed about the cat’s name. He knew he had a fifty-fifty chance of being right. And he’d look smart if he got it right.”

  “He could never look smart.”

  I took out a pen.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Composing a reply.” I turned the note over and wrote: My cats hate you. How did you get close enough to one of them to put a collar on her?

  Nevada read over my shoulder and snorted with amusement. We folded the note up again and tucked it back under Turk’s collar. Just then the doorbell rang, causing Turk to jump up, leap off the table and flee out of the cat flap in the back door—perhaps to relay our message to Stinky in the Abbey. While the cat was hastily absconding Nevada went and let our visitors in. “How was your lunch?” she said, ushering them into the sitting room.

  “The burger wasn’t bad,” allowed the Colonel.

  “The burger was fantastic,” said Lucy Tegmark. “I saw how delicious it looked—I’d ordered the fish—”

  “She likes to think she doesn’t eat meat,” said the Colonel, “but she eats more meat than any apex predator.”

  “He refused to even let me try a little piece of his burger.”

  “I’m not letting her eat the food off my plate,” said the Colonel truculently, as though she was some kind of vile household pet.

  “Well, so you liked your meal,” said Nevada, pouring oil on the troubled waters.

  “Yes. It was good. Thanks for the recommendation,” said the Colonel. He looked at me. “I understand you’re concerned because we haven’t got a record for you to find?”

  I could feel Nevada’s gaze boring into the back of my head like a laser beam. “Well,” I said, “I suppose, you see, it’s normally my—”

  “We’ve got a record for you to find,” said the Colonel.

  “What?”

  “Don’t misunderstand us,” said Lucy Tegmark, interrupting the Colonel. “We still need you to discover what happened to little Tom Drummond. That’s our ultimate objective. To discover the fate of the missing child. But the first step in doing this involves you finding a record.”

  “Oh, does it?” I said, glancing at Nevada. “It suddenly involves me finding a record, does it?” Nevada didn’t meet my eye. She was too busy looking studiously innocent.

  “It’s a very rare and difficult to find record,” said Lucy earnestly.

  “I’m sure it is. What is it?” I was entirely certain this was something Nevada had cooked up on the phone with them, to make the deal more amenable to me.

  “The 45rpm single,” said the Colonel, “the one that was released to coincide with All the Cats Love Valerian. Do you know about that?”

  I stared at him. Of course I knew about it. But I was surprised that he did. “Sure,” I said, “it’s even rarer than the LP. There’s probably only a handful of copies still in existence.” Despite myself I felt a familiar excitement stirring.

  “Why is it so rare?” said Nevada.

  “Because it was withdrawn from sale,” I said. “Suppressed. They pulled it off the market before it even hit the shops.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a particularly clever marketing strategy.”

  “They’d abandoned marketing strategies at that point. Valerian was dead and her son had gone missing and the record company was in damage limitation mode.”

  “What damage were they trying to limit?” said Nevada.

  “Well, there was a rumour that Valerian had recorded a hidden message on the A-side of the single.”

  “What sort of a hidden message?”

  I opened my mouth to say something about black magic, child sacrifice and ritual cannibalism, but I suddenly shut up.

  The Colonel was staring at me hard.

  It struck me for the first time in a non-abstract way that this was actually Valerian’s brother, sharer of her flesh and blood, standing here in front of me. I felt a fleeting, enormous aftermath of the hallucinatory drug in my system. It burst on me like a giant flashbulb going off, lighting up everything in the room.

  This bitter, hard and hardened man staring at me… he had once been a child and had grown up with her.

  So I’d better steer clear of any off-colour remarks about how his sister was rumoured to have killed her only begotten son in a satanic ritual and then eaten him. Luckily, I was saved by Lucy Tegmark. She said, “At this point Valerian was being accused of witchcraft, of black magic, all kinds of occult nonsense. She’s supposed to have recorded some kind of incantation or black mass or something. If you play the record backwards you can hear it.”

  “That’s just one of the stories,” I said. “There’s a load of urban myths. No one knows the truth of it. The one persistent theme is that the hidden message alludes to the little boy’s… disappearance.”

  “So it could be a valuable clue,” said Nevada.
>
  “Yes.”

  Nevada shook her head impatiently. “So, why don’t we just listen to it and find out?”

  “The single was recalled and destroyed. The record company panicked and snatched them back from the shops and melted them all down.”

  “Not all of them. Surely.”

  “All right, not all of them,” I said. “Not every copy.”

  Nevada went over to the only shelf in the room that wasn’t covered with books, records or cushions for the cats. It was the shelf where I kept my laptop and the wireless router. “Then surely someone somewhere has put a recording of it online.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Lucy Tegmark. “There are plenty of them.”

  Nevada hesitated, turning away from the laptop. “Plenty?”

  Lucy nodded. “Dozens. All different.”

  Nevada came back and sat down beside me. “So they’re all fakes?”

  I said, “Well, there’s a maximum of one that might not be a fake.”

  “But no one knows which one that might be?”

  “Exactly.”

  Lucy smiled. “So you see, the only way we have of finding out the truth is by getting a copy of the record and playing it ourselves.”

  Nevada grinned happily and turned to me. “And that’s where you come in.”

  I looked at her. She had me. I looked at the Colonel and Lucy. They had me, too.

  This is what I did.

  And the truth was, I actually wanted to hear this record myself.

  I wanted to find it.

  5. MERCY KILLING

  Lucy Tegmark handed me a sheet of paper. “These are details of people from my father’s research. People who knew Valerian well or who were present at the time of the little boy’s disappearance. Names and addresses and phone numbers.”

  I glanced at the sheet. There were only eleven people listed on it. Something of my disappointment must have registered in my face because the Colonel said, “Don’t worry. There’s more where that came from.”

  Lucy nodded. “There’s a wealth of information in my father’s papers.”

  “Well, it would be useful for me to have it,” I said. “All of it. Anything you’ve got.”