Now's the Time

by John Harvey

  Strolling back through Soho, jogged by memories of great musicians he’d travelled down to see in the past – Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, Roland Kirk – Resnick stopped off for an espresso at the Bar Italia, wandered across the street to Ronnie Scott’s and chatted with the woman at the desk. She didn’t think the man was a regular, though she couldn’t be sure.

  Later that evening and the evening after, Jackie Ferris and whoever’s arm she could twist would hit the rest of the clubs: the 100, the Jazz Café, Pizza on the Park; the Vortex, the Bulls Head and the 606.

  Nothing clicked.

  Back in Nottingham, Resnick trawled round a similar, smaller circuit and got only a series of similar, blank responses. After a few days, he called Jackie Ferris, confessing he had drawn a blank. Maybe, she told him, he’s moved on, our mystery man, some other section of the line. Given up, Resnick suggested, while he’s still ahead. Neither of them thought it true.

  “It’s Bill,” Laughlin said with a grin. “Just plain old Bill Cooke. William, according to the birth certificate. William John. Not that anyone’s ever called me that – William – except for my mother. And a few of the teachers at school.” He laughed. “The other kids, most of them, they called me Willie.” He laughed again, not afraid to show his teeth. “You know what kids are like.”

  She did. Deputy head of a Catholic primary school close to the Holloway Road, she knew only too well.

  “And you?” he asked, smiling now with his eyes, dark eyes.

  “Mary,” she said, “Mary Parker.”

  “Well, cheers, Mary.” Reaching for his glass, he brushed her arm, accidentally of course, with his.

  When she had spotted him looking at her on the train, staring really, she had raised the pages of her Guardian higher and dismissed him from her mind. By Finsbury Park he was forgotten. But then on the bus that carried her down to Crouch End he had been there again, rising from his seat in front of her as she moved towards the exit; apologising as, for a moment, the pair of them stepping down on to the pavement, his arm and her bag became entangled. She had stood too long, a deep flush rising, unbidden, along her neck.

  The bar he had taken her to was new, pale furniture and green plants, bottled beer from Belgium and Japan. She had never been there before. She rarely went anywhere, not like that. Not on her own or with someone she scarcely knew.

  She watched him talking, chattering on, a gesture here, a smile there, not really hearing what he was saying, not needing to, looking instead at the red of his mouth, the brightness of his eyes, the way their lashes fanned out in an almost perfect curve.

  When his arm touched hers again, no possible accident this time, she smiled back.

  “Call while you were out,” Resnick’s sergeant said. “Ferris? Get back to her when you can.”

  It was almost two months since they had met in London and Resnick had been swept up into the everyday travail of inner city police work, one case of arson especially, a child dead, the mother and two others injured, preying on his mind. Jackie Ferris’s con man more or less forgotten.

  Her voice was slightly fuzzy on the line, resigned. “He finally did it, Charlie. Our underground jazzman.”

  “Did what?”

  “Lost his cool. A woman named Mary Parker, a teacher; she’d been seeing him, off and on, a couple of weeks. Woke up in the middle of the night, needing to pee. There’s our friend, stark naked in the middle of the living room, helping himself to her credit cards.”

  “What happened?”

  “She screamed, threw something at him, threatened to phone the police. He punched her once in the face, broke her nose. Then he punched her again.”

  “She’s okay?”

  A pause. “Considering, she’s fine.”

  “What name did he use this time?” Resnick asked.

  “Cooke, Bill Cooke.”

  Willie Cooke, Resnick thought, christened John. Born Louisiana, 1923. Joined Ellington in fifty-one and was in and out of the band until Duke died. He allowed himself a wry smile. Jackie had been right. All that useless knowledge, a sure sign of obsession: too many nights counting jazzmen before he could get to sleep.

  It was only three days later, leafing through the pages of Jazz Journal, that the advertisement caught his eye. One night only at the Pizza Express Jazz Club in Soho, Joe Temperley.

  Resnick had been too young to hear the Lyttelton band of the late fifties, the eight-piece with Tony Coe on alto, the late Jimmy Skidmore on tenor, Temperley on baritone – one of the best reworkings of the Ellington small band sound ever. But he had heard the recordings, knew them well. Knew that Temperley had gone to America to try his luck and stayed; played in a big band led by Ellington’s son, Mercer, after the Duke had died. On the soundtrack for the film, The Cotton Club, it had been Joe Temperley who recreated the solos of Harry Carney, Ellington’s star baritone. And now he was back in England, a flying visit. Resnick wondered who else might have seen the boxed advertisement near the foot of page five.

  Resnick had been to the old Pizza Express Jazz Club, not the new; had suffered near heat exhaustion listening to Buddy Tate on a summer night when sweat stuck fast to the walls and finally he’d been forced upstairs and out on to the street where the sound was blurred but at least he wouldn’t faint.

  This place was larger, still low-ceilinged but air-conditioned; black walls hung with posters, a thick red carpet on the stage. Resnick sat at a small round table smack up against the centre mike, a clear view along the piano keys to his left.

  He’d been seated no more than ten minutes when Temperley moved into the spotlight, a wide-shouldered, heavy man wearing a loose, double-breasted suit, a dark shirt, a tie shot through with aquamarine. There was something of Resnick’s own father in the broad, almost Slavic face, glasses, dark hair and moustache.

  “All the way from America . . .” said the announcer. “Aye,” Temperley scowled, clipping his saxophone on to its sling. “By way of Cowdenbeath.” Leaning towards the piano, he called a blues in B flat. After two choruses, bell of the baritone close to the mike, the first notes spilled out, rhythmic, rich; large hands, square thumbed, working the keys with ease.

  Tune followed tune, song followed song; the club slowly filled. ‘Broadway’, ‘The Very Thought of You’, ‘Straight, No Chaser’, ‘Once in a While’. Waiters and waitresses brought food and beer, bottles of wine. Tempos changed. Between solos, perspiring, Temperley took out a handkerchief and rubbed it back and forth across the back of his head.

  “We’d like to finish the first set,” he said, “with Duke Ellington’s ‘In a Sentimental Mood’.”

  Two tables behind Resnick, and a little to his right, a fortyish man in a gently faded denim shirt, also sitting alone, leaned forward in anticipation and smiled.

  As the musicians left the stage, Resnick eased back his chair and drank a little more Peroni; the man in the denim shirt was standing now, talking animatedly to Temperley, jabbing the air with one hand to make a point. After a few minutes, their conversation over, the saxophonist joined the other musicians at their table and denim shirt headed off towards the gents. Resnick wondered which name he was using this evening; whether he ever used his own.

  Laughlin was standing at the urinal, whistling, when Resnick entered and took his place alongside him.

  “Great stuff!” Laughlin said, fastening his fly. “Great player.”

  Resnick agreed. When he turned, Laughlin was washing his hands at the sink, still whistling softly between his teeth.

  “I thought brass players were more your thing – I mean, rather than saxophones.”

  The whistle died mid-phrase. In the mirror, eyes stared.

  “More obscure the better. Leon Cox, Allen Smith . . .”

  Laughlin spun fast and, ready for him, Resnick stepped to block his path, reaching for his upper arm but failing to evade the knee that jabbed hard into his groin. With a gasp, he stumbled back as Laughlin pushed between two men entering and ran.

  There were t
wo exits from the club, one by the iron stairs leading up into the street, the other through the restaurant. Jackie Ferris had positioned officers at both and was sitting near the restaurant door, polishing off the last of an American Hot pizza with extra spinach, when the man she recognised from the artist’s sketch, neatly side-stepped a waitress with a heavily laden tray and hurried towards the corner exit.

  Waiting until he was almost level, she brought one of her legs up smartly between his, allowing his momentum to send him head first into the glass of the door. All those Saturday afternoons at Highbury, watching the Arsenal defence, had not gone for nothing.

  Before Resnick had arrived, slightly breathless, at her side, Jackie had Laughlin’s arms cuffed behind his back and was reading him his rights.

  It was Saturday morning when the package arrived and Resnick was at home: a square shape, covered in brown paper and bubble-wrapped. The note was on plain card, signed Jackie. I slipped in a couple of extra questions during the interrogation and the suspect suggested these. There were ten CDs in all – Duke Ellington: The Private Collection. Resnick thought it would look good on the shelf, close by his box set of Billie Holiday on Verve. He thought it would sound pretty good, too.

  Ten minutes later, coffee made, he slipped the disc into place. Volume one, track one. Chicago, 1956. The band kicking off with a limber, loose-limbed blues. As he listened, his eyes ran down the personnel: Harry Carney on baritone, John Sanders in amongst the trombones, Willie Cooke on trumpet.

  Smiling, Resnick sat back and closed his eyes.

  Slow Burn

  Some nights, Resnick thought, you knew sleep wasn’t destined to come; or that if it did, it would be haunted by dreams pitched just this side of nightmare, broken by the startled cry of the telephone heralding some new disaster, awful and mundane. So there he was, at close to two a.m., ferreting through the sparsely filled refrigerator for the makings of a snack, pouring cold milk – yes, milk – into a glass, opening the back door so that Pepper could join Dizzy in a little night-time prowling, hunting down whatever was slower or slower-witted than themselves. Miles and Bud were upstairs on his bed, missing, perhaps, his bulk and warmth while relishing the extra space.

  Carrying his sandwich through into the front room, he pulled an album from the shelf and slipped the record from its tattered sleeve. The Thelonious Monk Trio on Prestige. Through the smeared glass of the front bay, he could see the outlines of houses left and right along the curve of street, roofs bulked against a city sky that was never truly dark. Faint, the hum of occasional cars, one block away on the Woodborough Road. Monk’s fingers, flat, percussive, treading their way through ‘Bemesha Swing’ like an overgrown child lurching along the pavement, crack by crack.

  It was no surprise when the phone finally rang, nor that the voice at the other end was his sergeant’s, weary and resigned.

  That deep into the early hours it was no more than a five minute drive to the old Lace Market, the corner of Stoney Street and King’s Place and the Victorian conversion that for years had housed Jimmy Nolan’s jazz club and bar. Acrid and pungent, the scent of burning struck Resnick as he climbed out of the car. Smoke eddied on the air. Fire officers, purposeful yet unhurried, damped down smouldering wreckage; making safe. Resnick knew they would already have isolated, as far as possible, the area where the fire began. The building itself was little more than a blackened shell.

  Resnick stepped across lengths of fire hose to where, bareheaded, hands in the pockets of a loose, navy blue anorak, Millington waited.

  “Graham.”

  “Sir.” When there were other professionals within earshot, it was ‘Sir’ rather than ‘Charlie’.

  “Fill me in.”

  There had been an anonymous call to Emergency Services, logged at three twenty-seven. The first appliances had arrived nine minutes later; by then the fire had taken hold and the immediate concern had been to stop it spreading to the old warehouse buildings on either side.

  “And Nolan?” Resnick asked.

  Millington shrugged. “Locked up this side of two, according to his story; home and tucked up by two-thirty. We called him out of course, key-holder. Been here and gone.” The sergeant lifted a pack of cigarettes from his pocket then thought better of it. “Know him, don’t you? Jimmy Nolan?”

  “Over the years, yes. A little.”

  Millington nodded towards the smouldering ruin. “This place, too, I’ll bet.”

  Resnick nodded. Not so often recently, not as often as he’d have liked, but yes, he had been here, evenings, nights to remember: Nat Adderley, Teddy Edwards, Mose Allison.

  “Screeching and wailing till all hours,” Millington said, his face taking on a pained expression. “Gives me a headache.”

  “I daresay, Graham.”

  “Any road,” the sergeant continued, warming to his theme. “Took a sight more’n two of them be-boppers rubbing their trumpets together to get this started.”

  “We don’t know yet what did?”

  Millington shook his head.

  “And that’s not why you called me out,” Resnick said. “Me knowing Jimmy Nolan. That could’ve waited till morning.”

  Millington blinked. “They found a body. Charred beyond recognition, apparently. Must’ve been inside when the place went up. Caved in on him.”

  For a brief moment Resnick closed his eyes, as smuts of soot fell soft against his face, caught in his hair.

  Nolan had lived in the same spot in the inner city for close on thirty years; the centre of a Victorian terrace, appropriately facing Victoria Park. While most of his neighbours had sold out to upwardly mobile first-homers with their wooden blinds and self-assembly shelving from IKEA, shrill little loud-mouthed kids named Ben and Sacha, Jimmy Nolan’s house had remained stubbornly the same. Plaster flaked off the outer walls and slates skimmed from the roof in strong wind. The upper floors he rented out, the remainder were his own. Small rooms sparsely furnished, bits and pieces bought at auction, curtains that were faded and mismatched, wallpaper beginning to peel away. At the front, an upright piano had been wedged between window and door, an uneasy pyramid of manuscript paper and sheet music balancing on top. Rickety shelves opposite held a reel-to-reel tape player, record deck and amplifier; speaker cabinets, solid and cigarette-burned, stood knee-high at either end of the room. White tape boxes, annotated in untidy hand, were scattered in haphazard piles across the floor. Instrument cases and a saxophone stand shared the empty fireplace with an overflowing ashtray and a dying plant.

  By the time Resnick rang the bell, morning was already starting to leak into the sky.

  Nolan’s face was pale save for the shadows pocketed around his eyes; there was a tumbler of scotch in his hand and it wasn’t the first. “Fuck, Charlie,” he said. “Why you?”

  “You’d rather someone else?”

  For an answer, Nolan stood aside and ushered Resnick through. He was no more than medium-height, with hunched shoulders and a stooped back; greying hair fuzzed around his ears, the bristle on his cheeks was white. He was wearing a collarless striped shirt under a sleeveless pullover, baggy trousers that needed a belt. Far from the man Resnick remembered, sharp-witted and smartly dressed, up on stage at the club.

  “You’ll not be wanting one of these, duty and all that.” Nolan swayed a little as he raised his glass.

  “A small one, Jimmy. Thanks.”

  “I’ve no ice.”

  “Water’s fine.”

  They sat facing one another across the small room, the silence broken by the short scratch of a match as Nolan lit a cigarette.

  “Remember the first night at the club?” Nolan asked.

  Resnick nodded, not raising his head.

  “You were just an ordinary copper, wet behind the ears.”

  Resnick looked at him then. “You were still playing saxophone.”

  “Al Cohn and Zoot Sims. Up from the smoke in a black Daimler, half a mile long, looked like a fucking hearse.”

  �
��You sat in with them.”

  Nolan laughed, a dry crackle. “My club, Charlie. They weren’t exactly going to throw me off the stand.”

  “‘Four Brothers’, I remember.”

  “Just the three of us.”

  Resnick sipped at his scotch. “You were good.”

  “I was bollocks!”

  “Jimmy . . .”

  Nolan got up and walked to the window: it was light enough to see across the slope of grass to the old Victoria Baths. “It doesn’t matter now, Charlie, none of it. Not a flying fuck.” He laughed again, brittle and short. “I could’ve sold it, Charlie, that place. Down the years. A dozen times over. But no, stupid bastard that I am, I wouldn’t listen, turned ’em down. And now . . .”

  “The insurance . . .”

  “Not half what I could’ve got before; not a quarter.”

  “But you’ll be all right? Financially, I mean.”

  Nolan shook his head and swallowed down more scotch. “What are you, Charlie? My fuckin’ social worker?”

  Resnick shook his head and leaned back in his chair.

  Nolan stubbed out his cigarette. “Let’s say, when I’ve paid off all the debts, any luck I’ll be okay. Least, not be knocking at the poor-house door.”

  Resnick let the silence settle round them once more. “When you locked up tonight,” he asked, “there wasn’t anybody in the building?”

  Nolan’s glass was empty. “Of course not. Who would there be?”

  “You checked?”

  “There was no need. I knew.”

  Resnick was staring at him, waiting.

  “What? What the hell you saying?”

  “Someone was in there when it went up. They found a body. Somebody died.”

  “Oh, fuck!” Nolan said, lowering his face into his hands. “Oh, fuck! Oh, sweet, sweet fuck!”

  Resnick got to his feet and lifted the almost empty bottle of Bells from the floor; the majority he poured into Nolan’s glass, the remainder into his own. Nolan’s eyes were bright with tears. “Why, Charlie, why?”