Written in Dead Wax (12 page)

Nevada came back in. This time she was holding some neatly folded sheets of paper, pale blue and white. She was reading them as she entered. “I’ve found some love letters,” she said, “and they’re
torrid
.”

“Have you no shame?”

“I’m sure Jerry wouldn’t mind me reading them. He seems like one hell of a guy. And
busy
. Obviously very popular, too. Inspired quite the hot epistle.”

“Don’t feel obliged to commence any excerpts.”

She sat down in one of the armchairs that I had cleared and studied the letters with fascination. “You’ve been turning off the lights as you go?” I said. She nodded absently, enrapt with whatever she was reading. I was far from convinced she’d actually heard me. “You remembered what we said?” I said. “To only have lights on in a room when we’re actually in it?”

“Mmmm.”

“Because we agreed we didn’t want the house lit up like a beacon in the middle of the night. What with the police having only departed and it being a murder scene and all.”

She looked up from the letter and stared at me distractedly. “What was that?”

“I was saying, you did remember to turn off the lights? You didn’t leave upstairs ablaze with illumination?”

“No,” she said, setting the letters aside. “Quiet.” She was looking away from me now. “What was
that
?”

Then I heard it, too. A rattling from the far end of the house.

We looked at each other. It was now about three in the morning and London was dead and quiet around us. The night beyond the windows was silent except for the distant murmur of a passing car. Nevada got up from her chair, took a step towards the door, then froze.

The sound again. A metallic rattling. She looked at me. The rattling was followed by a brisk scraping sound. By now I recognised what we were hearing. The rattling had been a doorknob being turned. The scraping was the sound of a key in a lock.

Someone was coming in at the back of the house, through the door from the garden.

I moved to the window and opened the curtain a crack. The street was quiet and dead. There was no sign of any police vehicles. It suddenly hit home to me that this was the place where someone had killed Jerry.

The scraping stopped then started again.

Nevada was looking frantically around the room. I knew what she was thinking. She’d left her shoulder bag upstairs.

She looked at me.

I reached down to the fireplace and grabbed a heavy pair of brass tongs. “I’m going to turn out the light,” I whispered. She nodded and turned and seized the long cylinder of ivory off the mantelpiece. It suddenly looked like a solid, lethal weight in her hands.

“When I give the word, turn it back on.”

The scraping stopped as the lock popped open.

I turned off the desk lamp and then the overhead bulb at the switch by the door. We were plunged in darkness just as, far down the hall, the door creaked open.

There was a pause and a long strange silence. I felt the shadowed weight of the house all around me. The door creaked slowly shut again and then there were footsteps, moving slowly from the back of the house towards us.

I stood tensely in the darkness. I couldn’t see a thing but I could sense Nevada standing at my side. My heart was thudding in my ears. My chest felt like someone had sewn it into a shirt that was too tight.

The footsteps were coming down the hallway. They were getting closer. I sensed the presence of the walker through the wall of the room, as if I glimpsed his shape on an X-ray. The footsteps got closer. They reached the open door of this room and stopped.

I tried not to breathe.

My heart was beating so loudly I thought it could be heard. Someone stood filling the space of the doorway. The cool darkness flowed all around us. Somewhere, miles away, a dog barked. A floorboard creaked. The figure moved towards us. I remembered the plan. I raised the fire tongs in my right hand, high in the darkness above my head and snarled, “Now!”

Nevada hit the switch and light blazed all around us.

Glenallen Brown was standing in the doorway, mouth open and eyes wide. He was holding a bunch of keys in his hand and gaping at us. He might well have gaped. I was now clutching the tongs like a baseball player preparing to swing. Nevada was holding the ivory dildo high, ready to strike.

“Right,” he said, looking from Nevada to me. “Right… Okay…”

* * *

Two hours later, with no sign yet of dawn in the dark sky, we waited outside the house for our taxi to come. “Did you see the way I handled him?” said Nevada. “I
owned
him.”

“Yes, the charm offensive did cheer him up, particularly in contrast to our earlier attempt to smash his brains out.”

“There was never any chance of us smashing his brains out. And what was he doing there anyway, turning up in the middle of the night without warning?”

“Kempton must have called him after we collected the keys. I could see he was getting cold feet about our whole nocturnal foray here.” I looked back at the house. “So he called Glenallen.”

“What an extraordinary name. It makes him sound like a Scottish golf course.”

“Anyway, he obviously couldn’t sleep for worrying about how many records I was stealing.”

She looked at me. Fast-moving shadows approached across the street. But it was just another pair—or perhaps the same pair—of fanatical late-night joggers.

Pre-dawn joggers now.

They ran past, on the opposite side of the road. Nevada said, “Do you really think that’s what he thought? That you’d do that? That
we’d
do that? Steal from him?”

I watched the joggers disappear into the distance. “He obviously couldn’t stand the possibility, and since he had a spare set of keys he decided he had to come and see what was going on.”

“He was ever so nice about it.”

I nodded. “I think he felt bad for not trusting me.”

“Well, anyway he was very decent. Saying you could take all those away and pay for them later.” She nodded at my bag full of LPs. Unfortunately
Easy Come, Easy Go
was not among them. She must have read my mind because she said, “You couldn’t have missed it, could you?”

“Shall we go back and look through them all again?”

“Seriously, though. Could you have missed it?”

“No.” I shook my head. I suddenly felt empty and profoundly exhausted. “It wasn’t there.” The sound of a diesel engine puttered loudly in the bare, quiet street, and headlights swept across us. It was a black cab with a familiar figure at the wheel. I wondered how much we were paying her. We climbed into the back, me carrying the records and Nevada with her shoulder bag.

It was cold in the taxi and we huddled together on the back seat. Outside it was misty and the streetlights passed us in blurs and streaks. “I was impressed with your reflexes,” she murmured, her voice low and sleepy.

“Likewise.”

“I always wanted to brandish a dildo,” she said. She chuckled softly and snuggled against me. The taxi purred through the quiet, misted streets. Sitting there on the big back seat with her at my side, I felt like a baby in a cradle. Nevada went to sleep with her head on my shoulder, snoring gently.

Clean Head dropped me at my house and then drove off, conveying Nevada to wherever she was when she wasn’t with me. The Connaught Hotel, or Castle Dracula perhaps. I rubbed my eyes and yawned as I opened the front door. No sign of the cats, but then I had never come home at this time before in their experience and they were nothing if not sticklers for tradition. This sort of unprecedented dawn arrival would probably meet with strong feline disapproval.

I shut the door and wandered into the living room, flicking on lights. Turk looked up at me sleepily from a chair and Fanny was lolling on the sofa. I set the records on the floor and sat down beside her. I leaned back and stared vacantly at the quiet room, too tired to go to bed. A pale pink light was spreading over the sky outside. It was quietly beautiful.

Then I noticed something on the coffee table. It was the cover of the jumble sale
Easy Come, Easy Go
reissue, propped up where Tinkler had left it. And I remembered the record itself was still on the turntable.

I went over and put it back in its sleeve, then returned to the sofa and studied the cover. I slid the record inside, and as I did so two pieces of paper fell out. One was the insert printed for the album, with sleeve notes in Japanese. The other was an invoice.

I remembered what Tinkler had said that night. “It’s a bit of a shame, isn’t it? He isn’t unknown anymore.”

Finally we knew who the Unknown Jazz Fan was.

The invoice was in German. It was from a record store in Frankfurt called Jumpin’ Jive. I had almost said to Tinkler that the customer’s name on it wouldn’t mean anything to us. But I was wrong.

I recognised his name.

He’d smoked a cigar in my garden, many months ago. My uninvited visitor who had gone walkabout from the Abbey. The architect Tomas Helmer.

The man who had fallen off his own roof, with fatal consequences.

I stared out the window, at the garden where I’d met him. I could hear in my memory the music that had been playing that day. I could smell his cigar. I looked at the invoice again.

Under his name was an address in Richmond.

The house where he had died.

How do you manage to fall off your own roof, anyway?
I wondered. Then I put out some biscuits for the cats and went to bed.

The address on the invoice was a quiet street in Richmond overlooking a strip of parkland that led down to the river. It was a big white house set back from the road behind a dense green hedge. A fence of black iron railings rose from the waist-high white wall and ran along to join a tall wrought-iron gate big enough to let a bus through. Well, a minibus.

We didn’t have any kind of bus. We were on foot. The gate was open and we walked right in, crunching on the pale gravel that led up to the house. The garden was thick with conifer trees and they shadowed the driveway. As soon as we entered, it was like we’d left London behind. It was quiet and cool and green and a little otherworldly.

I looked at the house and estimated its worth at many millions. That wouldn’t make it unique in this neighbourhood. Mick Jagger lived around here, or so Tinkler never tired of telling me.

“Nice gaff,” said Nevada.

We pressed the doorbell and somewhere deep in the house it rang and rang and rang. We looked at each other.

“No one home,” said Nevada.

“We can’t just give up,” I said.

“Remind me why we’re here?”

We wandered back down onto the driveway. There was no car in sight but a ramp led down to a garage with twin doors, which looked like it could easily conceal a fleet of vehicles. I said, “For months I’ve seen signs of this guy’s record collection turning up, here and there, unmistakeable. And it’s been great stuff. The records were like traces of gold being washed downstream from the mother lode and I was like the wily prospector, squinting upstream and looking for the source of the riches.”

“Though perhaps over-clad with pelts,” said Nevada. “I could easily buy into this whole folksy woodsman fantasy of yours. Keep going.”

I stared up at the pale house in the cool shadows of the trees. “Well, this is it. The mother lode.” Somewhere in there was an amazing record collection, or what was left of it.

She started to say something, but it was drowned out by the ghastly screaming of a drill.

“Someone is at home,” I said.

We went down the steps and along the paved path, around the corner to the side and the back of the house. At the rear there was a wide paved area leading to an outdoor swimming pool, now covered with a sagging, leaf-strewn sheet of dark blue plastic. By the back door of the house was a pinewood table and chairs, obviously situated for al fresco dinners on a summer evening.

Right now, though, the table and chairs were covered with a variety of greasy-looking tools. Propped up against the wall of the house was a metal ladder, and halfway up the ladder was a young woman.

She was coming down, descending slowly with something in her hand. She looked to be in her twenties. She had pale skin and long red hair, tied back in a scarf. She wore blue denim dungarees, a white t-shirt, and sandals.

The woman noticed us as she was reaching the bottom rung, but she didn’t seem unduly surprised, and certainly not alarmed.

I saw she was holding an electric drill in her hand, the kind that’s powered by a battery pack in the base of the handle. She set the drill down on the table among the other tools and gave us a half smile.

“Hello,” I said. “We tried knocking at the front door.”

“I wouldn’t have heard,” said the woman. She lifted the drill again. “I was up there, cleaning the gutters.”

“With a drill?” said Nevada.

“Some masterminds did some work up there last year. Some repairs to the chimney.” She looked upwards. “They had to mix some cement. And when they finished mixing it they had some left over, in fact quite a lot left over, and they had to get rid of it somewhere. Guess where?”

“They poured it into the gutters.”

She nodded. “That’s right, they poured it into the gutters. It was just liquid enough to spread through the entire system. And just solid enough to set completely before it could drain out, with relatively little damage, at ground level.” She smiled at us. “It takes real talent to fuck something up so completely.”

I said, “I think I know those guys who worked on your roof. They once renovated the boiler on my estate.” She turned her smile on me.

“So, you don’t live here?” asked Nevada, getting to the point.

“Nope. Just getting the concrete out of the gutters.”

“And the owner isn’t in residence?”

“The owner is dead,” said the young woman.

“So I heard,” I said. “He fell off the roof.” I looked up the high white walls to the roof. It was covered with flat green tiles and it looked an awfully long way up.

“That’s right. I’m working for his wife. Ex-wife.” She looked up at the house. “I guess she’s the owner now. She hired me to try and sort things out. If those gutters aren’t fixed soon there’s going to be problems with water coming through the roof.”