Written in Dead Wax

by Andrew Cartmel

  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.

  8. THE BOOT FAIR

  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.”

  I hated to think of that. The poor records would be ruined. I said, “We would like to speak to her. The ex-wife.”

  “She isn’t around.”

  “Do you know when she will be around?” said Nevada. Even an expert might have said she sounded polite.

  I said, “The thing is, we’re interested in acquiring his record collection.”

  The woman laughed. “Well, you’re out of luck. She’s already got rid of half of it.” Half of it, I thought. My heart began to hammer.

  “She’s sold it off?” I said.

  The woman laughed again. “Oh, hell no. She’s been giving it away. For free. That’s her way of getting back at him. I get the impression it wasn’t a dream marriage.”

  “Apparently not,” said Nevada.

  The woman nodded. “So she’s taking his priceless collection th
at he scoured the world for and is dumping it at charity shops. Nifty piece of revenge, huh?”

  “But she’s still got some of the collection to dispose of? The records, I mean. The ex-wife.”

  “I guess so.” The woman shrugged. She lifted the drill and squeezed the trigger. It buzzed to life. She was ready to get back to work.

  “Well, listen,” I said. “Could you please ask her to get in touch with me?” I took a business card out of my pocket and handed it to her. “I’ll be happy to save her any more trips to the charity shop.”

  “I think she kind of likes them,” said the woman. “The trips.” She turned to the ladder, sandals slapping as she stepped onto the lowest rungs.

  “Aren’t those things slippery when you get up there?” said Nevada.

  “When I get up there I take them off.”

  She disappeared up the ladder and we turned and walked back up the steps to the shadowed driveway.

  As we walked out the front gate and into the road, we moved apart to let a jogger pass us on the pavement. A woman, serious-looking and sweaty. “What now?” said Nevada. She took my arm and we walked down the hill towards the river.

  I said, “Have you ever heard of a boot fair?”

  * * *

  At four o’clock the next morning the alarm went off. The cats flinched at the unaccustomed noise, never before heard in their furry little lifetimes, and reluctantly stirred and jumped off the bed as I got up.

  Sitting stunned and blank in a hot bath for the next half hour brought me to something resembling full consciousness and a cup of real coffee finished the job. The cats fled at the sound of the grinder, of course, but I felt I owed myself at least this. I made enough to fill a thermos. It gurgled happily and grew warm to the touch as I poured the fragrant coffee into it.

  Out the window I imagined I could see the first hint of pink tendrils spreading across the sky. I was beginning to warm to the whole dawn patrol aspect of today’s mission.

  I was just tightening the lid on the thermos when the doorbell rang.

  Nevada was standing there. She gave me a malevolent look and said, “I’m out of my mind.”

  “Well, you’re in the right place for expensive psychiatric care.” I nodded at the elegant white outline of the Abbey, just beginning to make itself seen against the dark sky. She sprawled in a chair, setting her bag down between her feet. She rolled her head and looked at me. Her face was pale and there were lilac shadows under her eyes. She looked like an undead beauty in some erotic Euro horror flick.

  “Where are the kittens?”

  I hadn’t seen them since they’d fled the grinder. “Through there, I think. They’ve probably gone back to bed.”

  “Sensible girls.” She closed her eyes and for a moment I thought she’d gone to sleep herself. Then she sighed and began to rise, laboriously and bonelessly from the chair. “Well, I suppose we’d better get going.” She slung her bag over her shoulder and headed for the door. I followed her, picking up the thermos. She glanced at it.

  “Coffee?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “The proper stuff?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.”

  The boot fair, or car boot sale, or—if you were American, car trunk sale—was being held at a green field just off the A205 where the Mortlake Road becomes the Kew Road. It was evidently a sports field that someone didn’t mind hundreds of cars being parked on. Maybe the meandering muddy ruts in the turf made athletic confrontations all the more piquant. Clean Head dropped us at the main road and we walked up to the entrance gate. There were already a dozen people there.

  “You see?” I said. “Early birds.”

  “Early vultures,” said Nevada. She was still more than a little pissed off.

  “If we’d left it any later we would have been swamped with competition.”

  “It looks like we’re going to be swamped anyway.” She was looking unhappily at her boots, which were squelching on the wet grass, mud oozing up around them.

  “I told you to dress sensibly.”

  “For me, this is sensibly. And anyway you didn’t quite convey the backwoods nightmare which lay in store.”

  “This isn’t the backwoods. It’s Kew.” We were at the gate now. “There it is,” I said. The stall holders were busy setting out their wares, taking stuff out of the boots of their cars and loading it onto a rickety variety of folding tables. There was one table covered with boxes of records. It was situated at the far end of the field. “As soon as the gate opens, we have to get way over there,” I said.

  I bought tickets from a sullen man in a day-glo yellow vest and then turned and walked back towards the road.

  “Where are we going?” said Nevada. As we walked away from the field, people were beginning to pour in from all directions. A flock of early vultures. She glanced nervously over her shoulder at them as we walked past. “Won’t we lose our place in line?”

  “We’re not going to wait in line,” I said. She glanced at me in surprise then grinned.

  “A bad boy. I like that.”

  Beside the sports field there was another field, consisting of allotments used by the local gardening enthusiasts. Access to this was through a narrow alleyway which was open to the public. I had also noticed several places on the far side of the cultivated area, adjacent to our objective, where it was possible to cross into the sports field. We made our way gingerly across square plots of vegetables and flowers. “Don’t step on any cabbages,” I said. We came to a row of low green sheds. Behind them was a wire fence. Beyond that was the field and the boot fair. The fence was a low, half-hearted effort and at several points it was quite possible to simply step over it.

  “Excellent,” said Nevada. She looked at me. The smudges under her eyes were fading now and colour had come into her cheeks. “Commendably devious.” She started towards the fence but I caught her by the elbow.

  She looked at me in puzzlement.

  “We have to wait,” I said.

  “Wait for what?”

  “Opening time.” I checked my watch. “Ten minutes to go.”

  She sighed. “What is the point of us sneaking in here if we aren’t going to get in there early?”

  I indicated the stewards patrolling the field in their day-glo vests. They were escorting a cute young blonde woman off the site. I could see she was trying to sweet-talk them and making absolutely no headway. If they would kick her out, what would they do to me?

  I said, “If we go in there early they’ll chuck us out. And they might not let us back in.” At the gate the blonde was propelled off the premises, the crowd watching her departure with unabashed hatred.

  “Plus we’d attract the opprobrium of the crowd,” said Nevada, watching with keen interest. “So what’s the point of being here? Where we’re standing. Where you dragged us.”

  “The point is that when it is time to go in, we can just hop the fence here and, oh, look what happens to be right there on the other side.”

  “Ah,” said Nevada. The table with the records was directly in front of us. It would take us about three seconds to get there. “There is method in your madness after all.” She seemed grudgingly impressed. “Let’s drink some coffee while we’re waiting.”

  “Sorry.”

  “What do you mean, sorry?”

  “I left it with Clean Head.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” said Nevada.

  “Poor girl looked like she needed it.”

  “That ‘poor girl’ has got me paying her approximately the gross fiscal output of a small nation for the privilege of chauffeuring us on this early-morning jaunt. And now she’s also got the fucking coffee.” These and other complaints filled the time and before I knew it, it was six o’clock and time to cross the fence.

  I climbed over it, holding a strand of wire down for Nevada, then both of us were running to beat the sudden influx of customers, who were like a stampede. Nevada disappeared into the throng, presumably in sear
ch of high-fashion bargains, and I made a beeline for the table with the records.

  Half of them were in cardboard boxes on the ground and I was glad I’d got to these early. Within a few hours the damp from the earth would have soaked up through the cardboard and begun to attack the records. It wouldn’t have much effect on the vinyl, but all the covers would soon be write-offs.

  I squatted in front of the boxes, comfortable in my dawn patrol crate-digging shoes, and started flipping. The first box had no jazz, just a lot of European-inflected easy listening, including a fairly astonishing number of LPs by Nana Mouskouri.

  I made a mental note to go back and look for the one on Philips produced by Quincy Jones, and hurried on to the next box.

  This was full of budget classical records. Nothing there for me. There were two more boxes. The next one was mostly twelve-inch singles and hip-hop. Onwards.

  As soon as I began flipping through the last box I knew this one had come from the Unknown Jazz Fan. Or rather Tomas. Or rather his wife. It was all jazz, all immaculate. But it was uniformly New Orleans and Dixieland. Laudable stuff, but not my cup of tea.

  Too early, pre-swing. There wasn’t even any Fats Waller. I flipped past the last record and reluctantly accepted the truth.

  It wasn’t here.

  I moved back to the first box to look for the Quincy Jones Nana Mouskouri opus—was it called The Girl From Athens?—when something hit me so hard it knocked me off my feet. I found myself lying on my back on the damp grass, winded and staring up at the thug who had done it.

  He had shoved me aside and now he was going through the box with intent mechanical speed. He had close-cropped blonde hair and wore a brown rough-woven sweater, khaki combat trousers and some expensive-looking running shoes. His big shoulders rose and fell as he flipped through the records. He was large and burly, built like an athlete. And he had an athlete’s physical arrogance.