Authors: Peter Robinson
Paula came through from the lounge and said, ‘Sal! So you’ve finally decided to grace us with your presence, after all?’
‘I thought I’d drop by for a quick one, yes,’ said Sarah, taking off her mittens and rubbing her hands. ‘It’s cold out there.’
‘Not half as cold as it will be in a day or two, lass,’ said one of the drinkers behind her. Then they all laughed.
‘This is my sister, Sally,’ Paula said to all and sundry. ‘You know, the famous actress. Calls herself Sarah Broughton now.’ She tilted her head, put a finger to the tip of her nose and turned it up.
They all nodded shyly and said how d’you do, then went back to their dominoes and muffled conversations. Sarah doubted if any of them watched her show on television. Besides, she was getting sick of this
star
business Paula kept going on about. She wasn’t a star; she was a supporting actress on a network drama.
Still, she supposed that in a village like Robin Hood’s Bay, she would have to accept that she was a star.
She unzipped her jacket and sat on a stool at the bar. It was a long time since she had been in a real English pub, and she took in the rows of unfamiliar bottles, the mirrors and brass rails. There were plenty of imitations in Los Angeles, but nothing quite like the real thing, with its bags of pork scratchings and roast salted peanuts, its upside-down bottles in the racks with optics attached, stone-flagged floor and roaring fire in the hearth.
‘What’ll you have?’ Paula asked. ‘Whatever it is, the first one’s on the house.’
‘Thank you. I’ll have a whisky, please.’
‘Good idea,’ said Paula ‘Summat to warm the cockles of your heart.’
Paula handed her the glass and Sarah sipped. It burned all the way down her throat and spread a warm glow in her stomach.
She hadn’t been paying attention to the radio, but at that moment, Gary Knox came on singing ‘Blue Eyes, Black Heart,’ his biggest commercial success and his least favourite song.
Sarah turned pale and almost dropped her glass.
When Paula realized what had happened, she went into the back. A few seconds later the song stopped and another station came on: an innocuous Whitney Houston number, this time.
‘You didn’t have to do that,’ Sarah said quietly to Paula when she came back. ‘But thank you.’
‘Think nowt of it. Maybe one day you’ll tell me about him?’
Sarah managed a weak smile. ‘Maybe one day, yes.’ She had heard only a snatch of the song, of Gary’s distinctive voice – like honeyed gravel, a poetic reviewer had once written – but it was enough to bring his image back to her mind’s eye.
Tall, thin, stooped, dark-haired and hollow-cheeked, with a lock of hair constantly falling over his right eye and a distant, crooked smile, he had always looked the way she imagined one of the Romantic poets might look after he had been up all night grappling with a particularly recalcitrant sonnet and a bottle of laudanum. Young Coleridge, perhaps, with feverish opium eyes and mussed-up hair, and that distracted look, as if he were hearing and seeing things no one else could. And, like many a Romantic poet, Gary had died young.
She had tried to imagine Gary’s death many times, how he had faced it. Many of his songs were about death; it was a subject he had thought intensely about since adolescence. She had recognized a kind of death-wish in much of his drug use and recklessness, a sort of cocking one’s hat against the grim reaper and saying, come on, catch me if you can.
As far as Sarah had heard, Gary had simply dropped dead on La Brea after leaving a nightclub with a group of friends. The autopsy had revealed a lethal mixture of cocaine, ecstasy, heroin, LSD, alcohol and barbiturates. His heart had, quite literally, just stopped beating. Had he had time in the moment of his death to savour the experience that had fascinated him so much in his life? Sarah didn’t know, and never would.
Their life together was still something of a blur. Of course, she remembered the early days: the party where they met in Camden Town, and how they walked the quiet London streets all night talking; the sunny idyll on the Greek island of Santorini, all vivid blues and whites, when Gary was writing the songs for what was to be his last album; the frustrations of studio work; the tour.
It was crazy from the start. Pushed by the record company to promote the new album when he was still exhausted from its creation and production, Gary set out for a mammoth US and Canadian tour with the band. Sarah went along for the ride.
And what a ride it was.
She could only remember patches of the chaos: backstage arguments, smelly tour buses, short, gut-churning air hops. New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Montreal, Toronto, Chicago. The names sped by and meant nothing; she saw nothing but hotel rooms and concert halls. Half the time she didn’t even know whether she was in the USA or Canada.
Gary was too sick from drugs to perform in Omaha, and he collapsed on stage in Dallas. The fans loved it. After only a couple of days’ rest, the band hit the West Coast and life became a non-stop party tinged with mayhem and madness. Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, picking up groupies and hangers-on all the way like a snowball picked up snow going down a hill. The further south they got, the more Sarah’s memory started to fail her.
Somewhere along the line, Gary had changed. He was pushing himself at an insane pace, drunk and stoned or coked-out all the time, almost as if he were running headlong to embrace death. There were no rules; nothing was sacred; everything was permitted. Total derangement of the senses. Well, Sarah had read Rimbaud, too, and look what happened to him.
At first she wanted to know why, what was wrong, but he wouldn’t talk to her about anything. They didn’t even make love. When he was capable, he suggested threesomes with poxy groupies or all-out gang-bangs with the whole band. When she refused, he ridiculed her. Maybe she didn’t always refuse; she couldn’t remember. But something had driven her over the edge; something had given her the courage or fear to walk out and salvage what little self-respect she could.
But until then, hurt and humiliated day after day, she had snorted coke to get up, though it no longer made her feel good, and she took booze and ’ludes to get her to sleep. Ecstasy in between. She liked the downers best. ’Ludes or nembies, it didn’t really matter.
After a couple of bad LSD trips, one of them a terrifying nightmare in Tijuana, where she was almost raped by a half-crazed local pimp, whom Gary’s entourage had adopted for the night, she stopped taking hallucinogens altogether. Life had become hallucinatory enough without them. Everything was crumbling, falling apart, until that one day when she just walked out. She felt that she had run so far and so fast with Gary she had left herself behind.
The weeks after she left marked the lowest point in her life: her ‘illness,’ the Great Depression. She couldn’t remember details or events, the number of times she had just wanted to die, except that Ellie had taken her to the clinic and saved her life. But she could still feel the shadow of the emotion, the sense of utter worthlessness; she could still hear the echo of the voices that berated her, told her she was an evil slut, a trollop, a tart. And, from time to time, she still felt the impulse towards suicide. The darkness was still there inside her, and sometimes it beckoned.
‘Penny for them.’
‘What? Oh, sorry, Paula, I was miles away. I think I’ll have another whisky, please. A double.’
‘You want to be careful, you know.’
‘Don’t worry, I’m not turning to the bottle. As a matter of fact, I hardly drink at all back in Los Angeles. I just can’t get used to this English cold.’
‘You grew up with it, same as me.’
Sarah laughed. ‘Yes, but it’s amazing how quickly you get soft.’
Paula snorted and poured her a drink.
Sarah paid, then Paula wandered off to serve someone else. The place had started to fill up, Sarah noticed, and one or two people looked at her as if they knew who she was. It wasn’t as if, with her red nose, woolly hat and raw cheeks, she resembled Anita O’Rourke, but probably because she was a stranger in the village and Paula had told them all her famous sister was coming. The actress.
When she met Gary, she remembered, she had been at a loose end because she felt her acting career in England was going nowhere. She was either underdressed in Channel Four art-house erotica or overdressed in BBC costume dramas. There seemed no place for her in a British series. If the Americans put too much of a premium on bland good looks, then the English went too far the other way – crooked teeth and bad skin.
Just before she met Gary, her father had seen one of the Channel Four films. He stopped talking to her for a month and after that, things had never been the same.
She knew her father had always preferred Paula, anyway. Paula did all the right things. Paula got married (even if it didn’t work out). Paula had children. Paula didn’t make dirty films. Paula was the sensible one, the practical one, the down-to-earth, salt-of-the-earth lass who didn’t have ideas above her station.
Paula hadn’t traded the accent God gave her for fame and fortune in a heathen land. Paula hadn’t tossed aside all the moral values she had been brought up to believe in. Paula hadn’t changed the name her parents had christened her with.
Too late to do anything about that now. Sarah finished her whisky. It was time to go back to the cottage.
‘Catch you later,’ she said to Paula, who was busy serving a man in a fisherman’s jersey, then she zipped up her jacket, put on her mittens and left. As she walked out, she was struck by the thought that the tour was by far the most logical place to start looking for her tormentor, if only she could remember more about it. After all, just about everyone had been crazy back then.
17
Arvo spent most of Sunday at home sprawled on the floral-pattern sofa in the living-room watching
Tunes of Glory
for the thousandth time and putting his notes on the Sarah Broughton case in order.
He lived in a tiny, detached Spanish Colonial Revival bungalow hidden away on a residential street in the southern part of Santa Monica, near the college. Apart from one or two new low-rise apartment buildings in the modern, cubist style, most of the houses on the street were older, like his. They were similar in design, all white or beige stucco with low-pitched red tile roofs, but each was just a little different from its neighbour. Some had shutters, for example, while others had metal grille-work around the windows. Arvo’s had both.
A short path wound through a postage-stamp garden crammed with small palms, ferns, jacaranda and bougainvillaea, so overgrown that you had to push the fronds aside with your hands as you walked to the portico. Sometimes it felt like walking a jungle path, but the shrubbery provided excellent shade and kept the place cool in summer.
Inside, the living room was immediately to the left, the kitchen and dining area to the right. A short hallway, with closet space for coats and shoes, led to the hexagonal hub, off which doors led to the three small bedrooms and the bathroom. The floors were of unglazed tiles, the colour of terracotta, and there were little art deco touches over the tops of the doorways and windows: a zigzag here and a chevron there.
The living room was where Arvo spent most of his time. Nyreen had had very particular ideas about art, and after she left with all her contemporary prints, he put up two large, framed movie posters on the walls, one for
Casablanca
and one for
The Big Sleep
.
There were two large built-in bookcases in the room, flanking the shuttered windows: one was filled with an eclectic mix of books, from movie history to theatre, urban planning and hard-boiled detective fiction; and the other housed his video collection, from
Citizen Kane
to
Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers
.
He had found the down payment for the house from the money he inherited on the death of his parents, and bought it as soon as he knew he had the job on the TMU. The mortgage stretched his resources almost to the limit, but he hoped to hang on to the place if he could, even if he never got to eat out again.
A good house in a pleasant neighbourhood was hard to get in LA, real-estate prices being what they were, and apartment living didn’t appeal to him. He had done it in the past and found he quickly tired of smelling someone else’s cooking, or listening to someone else’s music, domestic arguments and sexual gymnastics.
When he had finished note-taking, the movie was over, the pot of coffee was empty, and he had sheets of paper spread out all over the floor and armchairs. But he was still no better off than when he started. The list of names Stuart Kleigman had faxed him gave him thirteen people with the initial
M
in either their first, middle or last names.
In addition, Stuart had found out very quickly through the movie-industry grapevine that Justin Mercer, Sarah Broughton’s ex-lover, had been working on a movie in a London studio for the past two months. Which let
him
off the hook.
Arvo stuck some leftover chili in the microwave for dinner, tossed a quick salad and opened a bottle of Sam Adams lager.
While the chili reheated, he dialled Ellie Huysman’s Toronto number again. There was a three-hour time difference, so it would be about nine-thirty in the evening there. He had tried three or four times during the day but got neither an answer nor a machine he could leave a message on. This time, as he was about to hang up after the tenth ring, he heard a breathless voice in his ear.