The Run-Out Groove Read online

  She kept nodding, all the more emphatically. “We’re getting the papers copied for you.”

  “We’re having them scanned,” said the Colonel. “Onto a USB memory stick for you. And for us. It will be a damned sight easier than carrying around a huge wad of photocopied pages.” He gave Lucy a look. “What would have made sense would have been to scan all the documents onto a USB memory stick in the first place.” He really loved using that technical designation; I guess it made him feel young and with it. “Instead of photocopying all the damned things.”

  I could see that he’d managed to get under Lucy’s skin. “How did you expect me to get them scanned in Morocco? They don’t have the facilities there.”

  He snorted with contempt. “Of course they do.”

  “They’re not as readily available.”

  “Of course they are.”

  “It was difficult enough getting the papers photocopied.”

  “Difficult for you,” said the Colonel. “For you everything is difficult.”

  “You were in Morocco?” said Nevada hastily, the dove of peace flying bravely into the crossfire, olive branch firmly clutched in beak. She smiled dazzlingly at Lucy. “I bet it was beautiful.”

  “I live there,” said Lucy Tegmark, staring coldly at the Colonel. “I’ve lived there virtually all my life. So I ought to know how problematical it is to get a large cache of documents digitally scanned.”

  “Nonetheless,” said Nevada, still bravely trying, “it must be beautiful.”

  It went on like that for a while, with the Colonel and Lucy at each other’s throats and Nevada doing her best to keep things civilised and calm. It was a relief when the two of them finally left. As soon as they were gone, Turk came trotting in.

  She was a little shy of visitors and often lurked outside until the coast was clear. She entered warily and then, as soon as she was certain it was just us here, she hopped up and lay down on the coffee table.

  It was Nevada who spotted that she had a note under her collar.

  She gently teased it out and showed it to me. It was the same note we’d sent back to Stinky, but with a new annotation. Just under where I’d written My cats hate you. How did you get close enough to one of them to put a collar on her?

  It read:

  Fresh salmon.

  And, pathetically:

  Please help.

  Nevada read it with me then said, “Hang on just a minute.” She went and rummaged in a drawer in the kitchen and came back clutching a thick-tipped red marker pen. She took the note and wrote across it in large letters, FUCK OFF STINKY. “Should I sign it Nirvana? Oh dear, I don’t seem to have left enough room.”

  She folded the note and slipped it back under Turk’s collar. Turk seemed to be getting used to the routine. “Good girl,” said Nevada. “What a good girl. Our little postal pussycat.”

  * * *

  I immediately got busy. I made some phone calls about the record, Valerian’s great lost 45. Despite its enormous rarity I had a pretty good idea of someone who might have a copy—Freddie Fentyman, known universally in the record-collecting community as Freddie Forty-Five.

  Having arranged the earliest possible visit to Freddie and his frankly huge collection of singles, I got on with the list of names Lucy and the Colonel had prepared for me. They included Valerian’s publicist, her business manager (a woman—unusual back in those days), her lead guitarist, and a famed 1960s photographer who’d done a lot of work with the group.

  This list had been compiled from sources long before the days of the Internet. Indeed, the London area codes on some of the telephone numbers were obsolete by decades. This didn’t fill me with confidence about the up-to-date accuracy of the document as a whole, and sure enough it turned out that three of the people on it were long since dead and four had vanished. Of the remaining four I managed to track down some kind of contact number for three of them.

  The first one I tried was Nic Vardy, the photographer who had shot the original cover for All the Cats Love Valerian. He had been one of the great photographers of the 1960s and I’d always admired his work. I was looking forward to meeting him, regardless of whether he had any useful information about the disappearance of Valerian’s son.

  Vardy was based in London—good man—and both his studio phone number and residential number were available from directory enquiries. I left him what I thought were friendly yet businesslike messages on both, but I got absolutely nowhere. I also tried email and leaving a message on the comment section of his website.

  No response of any kind.

  In the end I gave up and tried the other numbers, which belonged to the publicist, one Jack Welland, and the lead guitarist. The guitarist proved as much of a frustrating dead end as Nic Vardy.

  But I eventually got lucky with Welland. The residential number I had been calling always went straight to voicemail after half a dozen rings, and I duly left messages but they went unanswered.

  I kept trying, though, and finally got a different recording on the voicemail. Instead of inviting me to leave a futile message it offered an alternative number to ring. A mobile this time. I jotted it down, hung up, and immediately dialled the new number.

  Welland answered on the first ring. I was so eager, having finally pinned him down, that I could hardly speak. But I managed to tell him I wanted to talk to him because I was researching Valerian for an article I was writing for my music blog. This was the story I’d decided on.

  I wouldn’t have thought it was such a big deal, but I was gratified to hear that he was virtually breathless with excitement at the prospect of being interviewed, and he instantly agreed to see me. Having set a date and time, I was willing to wrap up the conversation, but he wouldn’t let me off the line. “You know how we met? Me and Valerian? We both bought our boots from Stan the Man in Battersea! I met her over a pair of pointy-toed boots!” He was now breathless with nostalgia. “I knew her really well, Valerian. I know things about her, things nobody else knows.”

  I felt a little hollow thrill of anticipation.

  I said, “Like what?”

  “Like the father of her little boy. I could give you a fair idea of who that was.” I could hardly believe what I was hearing. But then his voice changed. “Poor little boy,” he murmured. “Poor little kid. What happened was so terrible…”

  I could sense him beginning to have second thoughts, so I said a hasty goodbye and told him we’d be there to interview him as arranged. I briefed Nevada, who began to have fantasies about how much we could invoice the Colonel for.

  But when I rang Welland’s mobile the night before to confirm our appointment I got a new recorded message, in a new voice—an elderly woman. She said she regretted to inform the caller that Jack Welland was now deceased.

  She gave the date and time of his demise in a dry, detached voice, and then the message stopped. The shock must have showed on my face as I hung up. “What is it?” said Nevada.

  I told her. “He was going to tell us something. Something of vital importance. And now he’s dead.”

  “I know what you’re getting at,” said Nevada calmly. “But don’t you think you’re jumping the gun a little?”

  “No.”

  Just to prove her point Nevada insisted on calling Welland’s mobile to get more details. I told her it was just a recorded message, but she persisted. And the next day she actually managed to get through to someone: the woman who had left the recorded obituary notice.

  “It’s Welland’s mother,” she told me. “He was no spring chicken himself, so she must be, let me see, at the very least in her eighties. But she’s sharp as a needle. And do you know what she told me?” Nevada gave me an ironic look. I asked her to go on.

  “Welland was in a hospice. Terminally ill. Some kind of respiratory condition. He was due to go any time.”

  So he hadn’t been breathless with excitement.

  And there was nothing suspicious about the circumstances of his death.


  That seemed like that. Then, two days later, I was on a train between Putney and Barnes and I noticed a newspaper lying abandoned on the seat opposite me. The headline that caught my eye was MERCY KILLING AT HOSPICE?

  The story went on to detail how the apparently natural death of a terminally ill patient at a hospice in east London had been discovered to have in fact been an unlawful killing. The patient—Jack Welland, of course—had been suffocated with a pillow.

  This was only discovered because a medical student was working in the hospice to earn some extra money. He had seen the body and recognised what were described in the story as the ‘telltale bloodshot eyes’ and also noticed that the deceased’s dental bridge had been dislodged, as if someone had forced something over his face. Tiny rips in the pillow of the victim (he had been promoted to a victim by this point in the article) matched the metal work on the bridge. He’d had his mouth open wide and had been struggling as the pillow was held over his face.

  Terminally ill as he was, Jack Welland had been in no hurry to die.

  6. LAST RESORT

  That night in bed Nevada said, “There’s something fishy. And before you worry, that’s not a remark about anyone’s personal hygiene.”

  “Not even the cats?”

  “Not even the cats.” She rolled over and we curled together, the long, lithe, nude length of her warm against me. “It’s about this record,” she said.

  “Valerian’s single?”

  “Yes. You made such a song and dance about how rare it is…”

  “It is. It’s almost impossible to find a copy. It’s difficult enough locating a rare album, but a single is much more problematical.”

  “Why?”

  “Singles are smaller. They often don’t come in a picture sleeve, but just a generic wrapper, or if you’re really unlucky just a blank paper sleeve. And they don’t have a spine.”

  “Spineless, eh?” said Nevada.

  “Yes, literally. So they’re constantly being misfiled or misplaced. Even people who think they know what they have don’t know what they have. The land of the 45rpm record is the land of chaos.”

  “So I begin to see.”

  “For all these reasons, singles are ten times as hard to find as LPs. And when the record is rare to start with, as in the case of Valerian…”

  “It’s almost impossible to find.”

  “Yes.”

  Nevada rolled over, leaning on her elbow and looking at me. “And yet,” she said. “And yet I don’t sense any hopelessness in your voice.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Not even any fashionable cynicism.”

  “Oh dear.”

  “In fact what I sense, when you expound at such great length on just how fucking impossible it is to find this record of Valerian’s, is quiet confidence.”

  I smiled in the darkness. She could see right through me. “That’s because I think I know someone who’s got a copy,” I said.

  “Well, why haven’t we gone to this person and obtained the record?”

  “Because he’s currently out of the country. But he’s due back soon.”

  “Excellent,” said Nevada. She was silent and I began to drift off to sleep. Then she said, “Do you really think he was murdered?”

  For a second I didn’t know who she was talking about. Then it came back to me. Jack Welland, with the pillow pressed down over his face as he struggled in his hospice bed. Someone had stolen what few days he had left.

  I had told Nevada all about it.

  Now I shook my head, lying beside her in the dark. “I don’t know. I mean, I’m damned sure he was killed by someone. I just can’t be sure…”

  “Whether it’s got anything to do with our case?”

  I said, “We’re calling it a case now, are we?”

  “Yes.”

  * * *

  I went back to the list of names that Lucy and the Colonel had given us. The only real leads I had left were the elusive photographer and the guitarist. Theoretically at least, I had phone numbers for both of them. But there was no luck with either. The bastards just wouldn’t get back to me. It was like running into a brick wall.

  And, unlike searching for records, when you need to speak to a particular person, you can’t respond to failure by going out in search of another copy.

  I was soon frustrated and seething with subdued rage. No one likes to be ignored.

  My mood didn’t go unremarked by Nevada. “Don’t worry,” she said soothingly, taking the sheet of paper, by now covered with my scribbled emendations and the occasional angry obscenity. “Let me have a go.” She studied the list. “Both blokes,” she said, and smiled at me. “Let me work my charms.”

  This seemed like a good idea, not least since I’d run out of alternative strategies. The next day she began working the phones. By mid morning she was as pissed off as I’d been. “What is it with these people?” she said. “Do they think they’re too good to talk to us?”

  We went to bed that night in matching moods of gloom. The following morning I woke up to hear delicate slurping sounds from the direction of the bathroom.

  “Turk’s drinking from her bowl,” said Nevada, lying beside me. “Isn’t that sweet?” Fanny would only drink from a running tap but Turk liked to go to her bowl first thing in the morning, when she had returned from a busy night of rodent hunting. She often followed up her drink by triumphantly bringing a dead mouse into the bedroom and presenting it to us—or rather, showing it to us and snarling if we made any move to take it from her before she had disembowelled it and, if we were lucky, devoured it from the end of its perky nose to the tip of its cute little tail.

  This morning she didn’t have a mouse. But she did have a slip of paper under her collar. Nevada sighed and extracted it. “It’s Stinky again, of course,” she said, reading the note.

  “What does he have to say?”

  “Just the same as before. Begging us to act as what he calls his pipeline for what he calls his scoops. He’s offering you what he describes as handsome sums of money and he’s still calling me Nirvana.”

  “I could never take his money.”

  “I’m so glad you said that.” Nevada rolled over and kissed me. Then she wadded the note and threw it into the corner. Turk went streaking after it, found it and started batting it around the floor with her paws. “Anyway,” said Nevada, “you’ve already got a paying job. Finding a missing person.”

  “At this rate we’ll be lucky to get paid,” I said. “Judging by the lack of responses and my complete failure to get an appointment with any of those fuckers, I’m never going to—” I fell silent, suddenly thinking.

  Nevada was looking at me. “What is it?”

  “Stinky,” I said.

  “What about him?”

  “He can help.”

  “You have to be joking,” said Nevada, sitting up so she could look down at me and make sure I was not, in fact, joking.

  “No,” I said. I began to grin. The notion was growing on me. “God help us, but we can use his help.”

  “What help? How?”

  “I hate to admit it,” I said, “but he has an entrée into a world that is closed to us.”

  Now Nevada was smiling as she stared down at me. “The world of music.”

  “Rock and roll,” I said. I sat up beside her. “It might just work.” We got up and found some paper and a pen and between us composed the note over breakfast. “Tell him we don’t want money,” I said.

  “We want access to his contacts,” said Nevada.

  “Right. And we want this personal assistant of his to be at our beck and call.”

  “Brilliant. I’ve always wanted someone at my beck and call. The only thing is, I don’t feel entirely happy about the other side of the deal. Being his conduit for god-knows-what salacious gossip and celebrity tattle. Who knows what malicious blether he intends to spew into the world?”

  “Well,” I said, “the only way he can get any writing out is past us
. If we don’t like what he writes we’ll just change it or discard it.”

  “You mean we exert editorial control?” said Nevada, and grinned. “Well, that’s a different kettle of cat biscuits. Of fish. Of fish-flavoured cat biscuits.”

  When we were finished with the note we folded it up and tucked it under Turk’s collar. We got Stinky’s reply—and his eager, not to say obsequious, consent—in a note that came back that afternoon.

  “By return of post,” said Nevada. “Or rather, return of puss.” She caressed Turk and poured her a bowl of biscuits while I rang Stinky’s PA.

  The following day we had our first appointment.

  7. DOCKLAND DUCKS

  Nevada spent two and a half hours choosing what we were going to wear to our meeting. Half an hour was devoted to me, two hours to her.

  I said, “Am I to interpret this as a measure of our relative importance?”

  “You’re to interpret it as a measure of how much more fucking clothing I have than you,” said Nevada, frowning furiously at three different tops spread out on the bed. She discarded one and added two more. I was scrupulously saying nothing but I might have glanced at the clock. She turned to me and said, “Don’t you think it’s important that we look the part? I mean, we’re supposed to be media achievers at the cutting edge of contemporary culture.”

  “Since we’re also supposed to be working for Stinky Stanmer you might have slightly overstated the case.”

  Finally she chose a top and her ensemble was complete. Now all we had to do was feed the cats, brief them, and then get out the door.

  Briefing the cats had begun as a joke by me. Sometimes when I was going out I’d tell the cats where I was going and what time they could expect me back. However, Nevada had latched on to this and now it had become a matter of official policy, with the force of law. You don’t go out without telling the cats.

  Nevada poured biscuits into their bowls. “Now, girls,” she said, “we’re going out to Canary Wharf and we may not be back until late—if I can convince this cheapskate to take me to a movie.” Fanny and Turk sat looking up at her. Fanny was stationed on the floor by the refrigerator, Turk sprawling on the counter by the sink. They might even have been patiently listening.