Written in Dead Wax

by Andrew Cartmel

  He watched me unhappily from his doorstep as I climbed on board and Clean Head started the engine.

  Sitting beside me in the back, I could feel Nevada literally quivering with excitement. “Did you get the keys?” she said.

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “Tally ho!”

  The taxi roared through the dark streets towards Primrose Hill. All the way Nevada drummed her fingers impatiently on the window, staring out. As if in a continuation of the day’s funeral theme she was dressed in a black roll-neck sweater, black ski pants and all-black Converse sneakers.

  The drumming of fingertips was winding me up. “By the way,” I said, “what’s with the ninja assassin get-up?”

  She stopped drumming and turned to look at me. “You said it was a dirty business grubbing through these records. I’ve dressed for dirty business.”

  “You look like a cat burglar.” She turned away again, sulking. “A very high class cat burglar,” I added. This seemed to mollify her.

  We were making good time, as per Clean Head’s usual driving, and only hit traffic once, on Belsize Road in St John’s Wood. I was worried about getting to Jerry’s before the police had a chance to clear out, but even though we were there at fifteen minutes to midnight, they were already evidently long gone. The only sign of them was a piece of blue and white police tape hanging limply from the doorframe.

  “Maybe they knocked off early,” I said

  “Not too early I hope,” said Nevada. “I’d hate to think anyone had a chance to ransack the place before we did.”

  She paid and the taxi hummed off into the night, leaving us standing on the pavement. We looked at the house. It was a thin, handsome semi-detached Georgian. The front garden was covered with cracked concrete, a slender but flourishing plum tree rising triumphantly from a dark patch of earth in the middle. The wrought-iron front gate creaked as we opened it. Apart from the distant buzz of traffic, it was eerily silent. I paused as we stepped through the gateway. There was the sudden sound of footsteps.

  I looked around, but it was just a his-and-hers pair of sports freaks out jogging.

  Jogging in the middle of the night.

  They ran along the pavement outside the gate, not even glancing our way, their panting breath just audible.

  I watched them go as we walked up the narrow stone steps to a narrow green front door. On either side of it the police tape hung down. It looked like it had been cut through the middle. By the police themselves, I hoped. I sorted through the keys, jingling them on the ring, until I found the right one to open the door. It seemed strange not to have a rush of cats accompanying us as we entered.

  It was dark and cool and damp inside. “I can’t see anything,” said Nevada.

  I switched on the light, to reveal a scene of chaos. The small front entry hall, staircase leading up from it, and room to the right were all completely covered with LPs. Or at least they had been before the police had begun their crime scene investigation. A narrow pathway had been cleared through the hall, and up the stairs, with the records shoved to one side. I picked up one album. There was a size 12 boot print on it.

  “Our British police,” I said. “Aren’t they wonderful?” In fairness, though, it was almost impossible to move in the place without stepping on a record. They were piled everywhere in toppled heaps like frozen waves. “It’s like sand dunes,” I said.

  “Vinyl dunes,” said Nevada. We looked around at the apparently endless mess. It appeared an impossible task. “Well, let’s get cracking,” she said. Under her jauntiness I already sensed an edge of despair. She looked at me. “Where should we start?”

  “Right here, I guess.” I crouched down and commenced looking through the records starting with those nearest the door and working my way in. “Luckily I remembered to wear my crate-diving shoes. I mean crate-digging. You’ve got me doing it now.”

  “It’s more like diving,” said Nevada, “the way you launch yourself at them.”

  She went off to explore the house and I set to work, pacing myself. Even with the right footwear, grovelling around on the floor like this for half the night would prove pretty taxing on the muscles in my legs and my lower back.

  And half the night looked like an optimistic estimate.

  I moved quickly through the records, checking the covers then stacking them in neat ranks against the wall, out of the way. A few had been badly mangled by people, presumably cops, treading on them. But most had escaped unscathed.

  The records, at least those near the door, were all proving to be classical. Mostly on smaller European labels like Hungaroton and Supraphon. The light in the hallway wasn’t great, coming from one dim bulb in a floral glass bowl suspended from the ceiling, moths battering it as I worked. Nevada came back down from the upper levels of the house and perched on the steps, watching me. She was showing uncharacteristic levels of patience.

  I reached the staircase and started working my way up them, step by step, going through the records and stacking them neatly. Nevada retreated to the landing above and sat there, watching me again, feet dangling, her shoulder bag squeezed between her legs. There was a fluorescent tube affixed above the stairs and the light was better here. I sorted through the records quickly and efficiently. She stayed put as I moved up towards her. By the time I was working beside her legs, my chin on a level with her knees, I had reached the last of the records on the stairs.

  We looked at each other.

  “Nothing?” she said.

  “Not yet.”

  She sighed. I said, “I’d better go back downstairs and work through the rest of the ground floor.”

  “All right.” She remained sitting disconsolately at the top of the stairs, drumming her heels, as I went back down and started again. I finished checking the hallway, the whole place becoming gratifyingly more orderly and accessible as I stacked the records neatly, and I worked my way through the hallway into the front room.

  This was a sitting room with an ornate fireplace, which had seen frequent use by Jerry if the set of fire tools, heaps of ash and large box of kindling were anything to go by.

  I pulled the curtains closed and switched on a desk lamp that had been set up on the mantelpiece, to supplement the feeble light from the ceiling fixture. It was cold in the house, the heating not surprisingly having been switched off, but I was sweating from my exertions.

  The records in here were, at least, getting more interesting. They were classical still, but some collectable labels—RCA and Mercury. I flicked through them more slowly. I found a copy of the Mercury Living Presence stereo pressing of Gunther Schuller’s Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee. It was in wonderful shape and I set it happily aside. If nothing else, the night’s mission had yielded this.

  Nevada came running through, as though she had a sixth sense. “Have you found something?” she said excitedly.

  “Yes. But not what we’re looking for.” I handed her the album.

  She set her shoulder bag down and accepted the record, studying it unhappily. “I didn’t think you listened to classical music.” She handed it back to me.

  “Occasionally they let me up to the big house,” I said. “Providing I remember to wipe my boots.”

  “Whatever that’s supposed to mean.”

  “How did you know I’d found something?”

  “I heard you stop flipping.” That made sense. She looked around. “How much longer do you think you’ll be?”

  It was a small room but the floor, a sofa and two armchairs were virtually covered with records. “Quite some time,” I said.

  “I think I’ll continue snooping.”

  “Good idea.” Her impatient presence in the room was already making the search more difficult. Also, she was standing in my light, and her dark angular shadow shrouded the pile of records I was inspecting. Nevada picked up her shoulder bag and went back out again. I resumed flipping through the records. I appeared to have exhausted the seam of classical and I was now finding vocalis
ts and jazz. A distant beat of excitement started up inside me.

  I found an excellent run of early Reprise Sinatra albums that would gladden the heart of some collector. I made a mental note to look out for anything with arrangements by Johnny Mandel or Robert Farnon. Then I was on to the jazz. It was all from roughly the right period and the excitement began to grow.

  Suddenly Nevada was in the doorway again. “Look at this,” she said excitedly. She was holding a long, thin white cylinder with a smooth, curved head, clutching it in a two-handed grip like a lightsaber. It took me a moment to realise what it was. “Oh Jesus,” I said.

  “En garde,” declared Nevada, holding the dildo like a duellist flourishing a rapier. She advanced on me and I took a step back. She cackled.

  “Nevada,” I said, shading my eyes from the sight of the object. It appeared to be made of ivory and now that I had identified its function I realised it was enormous. “For Christ’s sake…”

  “Look at the size of the thing,” she said, waving it around admiringly. “And it’s not at all flexible. Rigid is the word. I mean, can you imagine?”

  “I’d rather not. Please…”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Just put it back wherever you found it.”

  She went over and set it down on its base on the mantelpiece beside the lamp. It sat there, stable and balanced, pointing up at the ceiling. Maybe it’s purely decorative, I thought forlornly.

  Nevada stood admiring it. She said, “Isn’t it magnificent?”

  “It’s loathsome.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s made of ivory. It’s from an endangered species.”

  “Yes, because that’s what really bugs you about it.” She began to move it around on the mantelpiece. When she was satisfied with its position she began to move the lamp beside it. I saw what she was up to. At the new angle, with the lamp shining on it, it cast a monstrous diagonal shadow right across the room.

  “I can’t work with that thing looming over me.”

  She grinned at me. “Feel threatened? Inadequate?” But she laid it down on its side on the mantelpiece, with a resonant clunk, and headed for the door.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Further explorations beckon,” she said and scampered off again—this was more fun than a clothes rail full of second-hand Dolce and Gabbana. I resumed looking through the records. The room was becoming more orderly and inhabitable as I sorted them. I’d worked out where the piles of jazz were and I was going through those first.

  I found half a dozen Woody Herman albums on CBS, from the period in the 1960s when Duško Gojković was playing trumpet with the band. They were in beautiful condition and I put them aside with the Gunther Schuller. My spirits were lifting both with the growing order of the room and with my discoveries. What had seemed a Herculean task was swiftly diminishing to human proportions and as I rescued the small neat house from the chaos that had come over it, I felt I was doing something for Jerry.

  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 noctu
rnal 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.