He tweeted a few careful observations about the dilapidation around him, keen not to bring any accusations of snobbery or condescension down on his head, his phone discreetly nestled in his left hand. Almost instantly he had a tweet back from Jaqui.
You in the North. Unbeleevb. What’s next @Dominicator in Wales? #radicalnorth
He had forgotten that Jaqui was from up North. Liverpool, wasn’t it? He should have asked her for some tips, though he could well imagine her response: “I am not some expert on all things Northern, Alex”, the waspy expression, the heavily plucked eyebrows arching. Karen said she thought Jaqui wore too much make up, and that was quite a Northern trait. And that she flirted with him, which she did.
The window displayed a number of New Age tomes behind a sheet of dusty, transparent yellow plastic that had failed to stop what little sun the street enjoyed discolouring the covers:
The Shaman’s Path, The God Within, Healing Through Past Lives
. Fractal spirals, cheap renderings of the cosmos, gaudy woodlands, levitating yogi, and iridescent crystal pendants. Had Crane been into all this shit? Hard to imagine, but then, in the early Nineties, new age and hippy-dippy Rave mysticism must have been everywhere.
Inside it was piled high with unsorted paperbacks, and smelt damp and musty.
Hi, Hello, Alex Hargreaves called out, and received an equally questioning hello in response that he traced to the back of the shop through one of the number of small rooms that made up the ground floor. There the shop owner sat in a shaft of sunlight, bearded, middle aged, a faded black Hawkwind t-shirt on, smoking a roll up and resting a cup of tea on his belly. This couldn’t surely be Robert Gillespie; he looked to be a decade older for one thing, dumped there in his chair like a great damp haystack. This must be Howard.
How may I help you?
Ah. Interesting, voice rich and plummy, Southern, aristocratic almost.
Oh just a book lover like yourself who happened to be passing through, Alex Hargreaves told him, offering his most winning smile.
I see. Anything in particular?
Oh, I Iike to stumble across things, generally, he said, but then he couldn’t resist testing the water. So, say, well I’d love a first edition of
Lucerne’s House
by Oleg Trentmoller.
A slurp of tea. Wouldn’t we all! You’re down from …
London, Alex said with an apologetic grin.
Ahh, it’s been a while since I was up there.
Are you a Londoner originally?
Well, yes. But I haven’t lived there for the best part of thirty years now. And I have been here for what, almost twenty. He smiled, missing teeth, the others the colour of creosote.
Alex had come in through the doorway now and pulled up a chair.
Actually, he said, I am a specialist in rare, really rare books and unpublished manuscripts. I mean, there is such a dearth of really original writing around these days and it occurred to us, you know, that our time might be just as well invested in going back and digging up, digging out all those unpublished and self-published novels and seeing which of them really had been lost to time as much as wading through the slush pile.
He extended his hand. Alex, he said.
Howard.
Well, Howard, someone suggested that the owner of this place may have lots of small-scale, kind of indie published stuff in his collection.
Well I am the co-owner. Who mentioned me?
A friend, Dominic Bowes. He’s a literary agent, knows everything.
Well, Howard said, I don’t have much of a collection myself.
Maybe the other person you own it with. Are they around?
Oh, them. Howard said, his face darkened, he took another slurp of tea. Indeed, no they are not around and haven’t been for some time. I say co-owner of course but in reality my partner has had no involvement in the place for a decade. And he owes me money.
Well, I am sorry to have raised the subject, he said. The sunlight was making his right eye water and so he closed it for a moment and shifted his position in the chair. I see, he affected a crestfallen expression, then I’ve come all the way down here for nothing.
Yes, I believe the person you’re looking for is Robert Gillespie, who almost certainly took anything and everything of even the remotest value when he decided to return to Bonnie Scotland for good.
Scotland? Do you have any contact details for him, postal address?
Howard slipped on a pair of comically dusty glasses hanging on a cord around his neck and began to thumb through a large red rolodex on the coffee table.
Yes, here we are. Do you need a pen? He glanced around. That’s fine, Alex said. I’ll take a photo. Phone out, quick tap. Gotcha. Alex’s face remained neutral but a long plangent thrill went through him, seemed to snag at the back of his right eye and suddenly make it water.
All the way up to Aberdeen? Howard asked him. He must have something really worthwhile.
We hope so, yes. He had some connections back in the early Nineties.
Howard was looking at him intently now, his mouth half open, his hand up and stroking at his beard, his breath more rapid, a slight catch in his chest turning it into a wheeze.
Anyone specific?
The temperature in the room had shifted now, the shaft of sunlight as bright as ever, the books around him seeming to stand as witnesses, some odd entreaty pushing at him.
Vernon Crane. I understand you were friends. You were one of the last people to see him. That’s what Paula Adonor tells me.
Howard’s eyes remained fixed on Alex Hargreaves. When he spoke again his voice had grown deeper, almost as though it belonged to someone else entirely.
Now listen to me, listen to me. This name, Vernon Crane that you’ve been given, you should think back to who has given it to you, though I’m sure they have tried to hide themselves one way or another because oh, it’s a coward’s tactic this, a coward’s revenge. The name, Vernon Crane, is a cursed name. Pursuing this can come to no good, no good at all.
Alex smiled. Here we go. He had anticipated that there would be flakiness. He could tell the second he set eyes on Howard that there would be mumbo-jumbo to navigate. Scratch the New Age surface and there’s a paranoid loon beneath.
What has happened to you since you heard that name? I can tell you, you have become obsessed; you have abandoned your work, your home, your loved ones, to pursue a phantom.
Well, not exactly, Alex said.
Howard was looking down at the floor now and shaking his head. Who told you this name? He asked again. You have an enemy. You have someone who wishes you ill. The past will not stay dead, he said.
Look, he said, lots of people know that name. I am just one of the better informed ones.
Go home. Go home, forget this. What does it matter to you? He was scrutinising Alex closely now, trying to intimidate him, but Alex Hargreaves wasn’t the type to be intimidated.
Well, Alex said. He swept his arms open expansively. It matters. Matters to me.
Howard had raised his eyebrows. Do you know what they used to get up to, him and Robert Gillespie? What they dabbled in?
Mystical stuff by any chance?
Magical practices. Howard said, he fixed Alex with a severe gaze, one eyebrow arched. Alex almost wanted to laugh.
Have you got any of Crane’s work?
You have come here under false pretences, Howard said. You are one of the tricksters, one of the damned ones who will not be steered from the course and with whom it is either kill or be killed.
The dead, Howard said, must die again and again. The past must be killed repeatedly.
Is that right? Well, thank you for the information on Robert Gillespie, Alex said as he waved his phone at him, a flash in the sunlight among the dusty books, the dead pages, indistinguishable from magic.
Well, that short meeting with Howard had proven to be intense but useful. He laughed in the car as he pulled out of town, surges of adrenalin magnified by the Deveretol surging through him and making his fingers tingle. He sent Paula Adonor a message:
Just met Howard. Wow. Robert Gillespie next. Hope he’s not as intense.
Message back:
Howard always scared me tbh. Good luck with Rob!
The car told him it would be five hours to Aberdeen, and he decided to do it in two stages: the first half of it up to Glasgow on the Expressway, and then tomorrow some dawdling and driving on minor roads the rest of the way. On the journey there, instead of reading he found he was constantly messaging, and even going so far as to send out the first section of the novel he had scanned and had decided in a flash of inspiration to call
Eminent Domain
to a number of agents. Then he added the first page to his personal website and linked it through some of his other social networks. Momentum is key, he thought as the countryside blurred past and the day darkened and the seat cradled him, reclining and lifting underneath him as he shifted position. Visibility is everything, presence, velocity of presence, that was the essential element, quantity rather than quality of production, a constantly refreshed and reiterated profile, these were what mattered, and if the work was interesting too, all the better. He mustn’t allow himself to get out of the loop again, the next time he was sure would be fatal.
He spent the night in a hotel that matched his preference and cost profile, and which the car selected for him, guided him to, a night in which it felt more as though he slipped into a trance than slept, a reverie in which, laying on his back on the bed he watched the darkness collected on the ceiling scintillate and sing. Come morning he found himself again in the car and moving forward, relentlessly, effortlessly conquering time and space. M80, A90. The Granite City.
Robert Gillespie’s house was in the middle of a terraced row in what was evidently the less affluent part of town. Alex knocked on the door, stepped back a few paces and glanced at the upstairs windows. He thought he detected a shape moving behind the net curtain.
He counted to thirty and then knocked again; the sound of feet on the stairs and a voice, rough, irascible, exactly the kind of voice he had anticipated, shouting out from behind the peeling green door. Coming, alright, hold on.
The door opened on its chain and a baggy bloodshot eye, a bald head, and a stubbly cheek angled into the space.
Mr Gillespie? Alex asked, and enjoyed watching the eye narrow in suspicion and mounting panic.
Who are you?
Robert Gillespie? He asked again.
I refer you to my previous question, Gillespie said.
My name’s Alex Hargreaves. I contacted you about Vernon Crane a few days ago.
Ah. Fuck’s sake! Get to fuck will you?
I’d like to ask you, he began, but the door had already banged shut.
Alex crouched and pushed open the letterbox, and shouted in at Gillespie’s retreating back. Look, do you think I’d have gone to all this trouble and come all this way if this wasn’t something major?
Gillespie disappeared into the living room. Alex had thought this might happen. Look, he shouted, I have dropped my card through your letterbox, ring me when you’re ready, I am going to be around all day.
He went back to the car. Robert Gillespie, for all his apparent hostility, would prove to be malleable, manageable. There was the inevitable resistance at first, but eventually he would succumb, as they all would. Alex Hargreaves wouldn’t take no for an answer. And sure enough, 19 minutes later he got a text:
You can buy me breakfast.
Breakfast turned out to be three pints of Guinness and a burned lasagne in a pub at the end of Gillespie’s road. First Alex had to wait almost forty minutes out on the street, fiddling with his phone and pacing up and down while Gillespie performed his morning ablutions. When he finally, wordlessly emerged and set off down the road Alex tagged along behind him, determined to control his temper. The pub was called the Dog and Trap and looked to Alex as though it hadn’t been decorated since the early Seventies. They took a seat near the toilets, next to a couple of pensioners that Gillespie nodded to and who responded with a slow, dazed shifting of the head.
Gillespie drank his first pint at the bar while the second was being poured; Alex had a bottle of water.
How did you get this address?
Your business partner. I went to your bookshop, he said, and was amused to see Gillespie’s eyes start flicking around the room, his head nodding
Howard? How did he strike you?
Alex Hargreaves laughed and raised his hands.
He said I was a trickster. He said the dead must be killed again and again or they will rise from their watery graves and confront us.
Listen. I don’t know you and I am sure, end of the day, you’re a bit of a cunt, but one of the reasons I am not down there in that bookshop is precisely because of Howard. He was unhinged ten years ago and I doubt he’s got any better over the years. I would avoid him.
Alex Hargreaves smiled indulgently. I think I can handle him, he said.
I don’t think you can and I’ll bet I’ve seen a lot of the shittier side of life than you have, pal. So don’t say no one offered you any friendly advice.
He said you and Vernon used to dabble in magical practices.
We did more than dabble, sonny. He took down the last half a pint of Guinness in a gulp and waggled the empty glass at Alex Hargreaves. I’ll have another of the same. I still don’t know what you want.
Alex went to the bar. He had his pitch well prepared; he explained that he wanted Vernon’s work, that he would be its custodian, that it had been neglected, that his friends had done nothing with it and it was time that someone who had the where-withal, the contacts, the drive, to make sure it got known.
You seemed very reluctant to talk about Vernon Crane when I contacted you. So what was that anyway?
Because I knew Vernon, right?
I am interested in Crane’s work, the whole backstory, especially all this stuff he distributed around the country.
Paula Adonor, right? She has been telling you all this stuff. I should have known. I don’t know why Vernon trusted her with anything.