But Hughie liked them like that, because he could remove them at will, cutting off access to the greenhouses. Nevada was peering at one of them now.
She said, “Why the moats? Are you expecting to be besieged by knights with medieval battering rams?”
“No rams,” said Hughie, his Glasgow accent now going full throttle for some reason, perhaps brought out by his appreciation of Nevada. “Just rats.” He smiled at her, nodding in my direction. “I take it our friend here has told you about my little agricultural endeavours?”
“Oh yes. What’s more, I’ve had a chance to sample your produce and may I be the first to assert my belief that the farmer is the backbone of the nation.”
Hughie chuckled raspily, his breath fogging on the cold air. Nevada said, “Anyway, you were saying about rats.” Hughie’s smile faded.
“Oh yes. The little bastards. They were getting into the greenhouses. Didn’t matter what we did—we used heavy-duty PVC, we tried putting sheet iron underneath, it didn’t matter. They always managed to dig or chew their way in.”
“And then they’d attack the, ahem, cash crop?”
“They’d eat the tomatoes and then they’d attack the cash crop.”
“Really?” said Nevada.
“Oh yes. They’d gnaw through the green stems of young plants, killing them with a couple of bites. It would break your heart. Leaving these nasty little tooth marks.”
“Do you suppose they get high, the rats?”
“Not anymore,” said Hughie, smiling grimly. “Not on my weed they don’t.”
“Thanks to the moats?”
Hughie nodded. “That’s right. In the spring we fill them with water and the little bastards can’t get across.”
“They won’t swim?” said Nevada.
“It seems to discourage most of them.”
“I must say that shows the sort of lack of endeavour and initiative which blights this fine nation of ours.”
Hughie grinned at her delightedly, showing his full assortment of mismatched teeth. “You must take some tomatoes home with you,” he said.
“Bugger the tomatoes,” said Nevada. “We’ll take a bale of weed.” Hughie gave a hard shout of laughter and did a jaunty little strut back towards the factory. All this talk of illicit hemp farming had fired him up. He was a lot more excited than I’d ever seen him when dealing with a hi-fi. He clapped me on the shoulder.
“Is that it?” He indicated the rucksack with the record in it.
“Yes,” I said. “Shall we give it a clean?”
But he insisted on taking us home for Albina to cook us lunch first—an alarming prospect to those in the know.
16. BLACK CIRCLE IN THE SNOW
The meal was as mediocre as expected, and Hughie’s son was just as much of a brat. His little daughter, Boo, was charming, though, and Nevada took to both her and her mother, Albina. The feeling was mutual. They actually seemed sorry to wave goodbye to us when we left.
The light was failing as we drove back towards the factory. The sky was clear now, but a lot of snow had fallen while we’d been wasting time at the house. It had come down in silent quantities, clothing the sides of the road in soft rounded white contours. We drove by a different route this time, passing the local railway station. It was only half a mile away. I said, “We could have caught the train down and then walked.”
“Wouldn’t that have made it easier to follow us?”
“I guess that’s why we didn’t catch the train.”
She looked at me. “Do you think someone could have followed us, after all the precautions we took?”
“If they have, I’ll be really pissed off.”
I peered at the winding road ahead. Hughie’s tail lights started blinking to indicate a left turn, the red and amber glow reflecting off the snow on the road.
He was waiting for us by the open back door of the factory. The dog was beside him, dancing impatiently and wondering why we didn’t all go into the nice warm building and close the door tightly behind us. The yard was illuminated by the pearly glow from the greenhouses, all of them lit from within by the growing lights. It was a soft, eerie, suffused luminescence that shone on the snow. I could hear the faint chugging of the generator.
I said, “You switched the generator on?”
Hughie shook his head. “Comes on automatically after dark.” The dog was straining at his side, willing us all to go in. We did. Hughie took us through the shadowy, echoing machine shop which occupied the ground floor of the building, to a staircase that led up to the offices, some store rooms and a listening room. The record cleaner was set up in one of the offices, along with some disembowelled turntables and a surprisingly elaborate closed circuit television system.
Two large computer screens set up side by side gave assorted views of the front and back yards of the factory from several angles. Beside them was a heavy-duty metal cabinet fitted to the wall. Hughie unlocked this and took out a double-barrelled shotgun. He took a handful of shells from his pocket and set them on the desk.
I said, “What the hell is that?”
“Is it for the rats?” said Nevada.
Hughie shook his head. “The rats don’t bother us in the winter.” He proceeded to load the shotgun. Nevada picked up one of the shells and looked at it curiously. It had a yellow case instead of the usual red.
She said, “I’ve never seen ones like this. What kind of shot is it?”
Hughie grinned his crooked grin again. “Sea salt. Finest Welsh sea salt. Hand loaded. I’ve had some trouble with kids breaking into the greenhouses. And if I see them, I’m going to give them a little discouragement.”
“You’re going to pepper them with salt,” said Nevada.
Hughie chuckled. He set the shotgun down on the desk in front of the screens. He nodded at them. “We can keep an eye on these while we work. In case those sneaky little bastards try to break in again.”
“How serious is the problem?” I said, peering at the camera feeds. The yards were desolate and empty and looked like no one had ever set foot there.
“At first it was just some clusters of buds,” said Hughie. “Then entire plants went missing.”
“Do you have any idea who it is?”
He shook his head. “No.”
“All large-scale crime is an inside job,” confided Nevada.
“Well, this is small-scale crime,” said Hughie, and he switched on the record cleaning machine. He had built it himself, but its design was the same as most of the top-end machines. Essentially it looked like a bulky turntable, but with a slender vacuum-cleaning head instead of a playing arm.
Hughie held out his hand. I felt a strange reluctance to unpack the record and give it to him, but I did. He put it on the turntable, fitting a small circular clamp to cover the label. Then he took out a plastic bottle of liquid and sprayed it all over the playing surface of the record. Nevada gave me an anxious, questioning look but I just nodded my head and gave her what I hoped was a reassuring smile. The liquid Hughie was using was his own secret formula, but it would be essentially the same as all other record cleaning fluids—distilled water, isopropyl alcohol, some kind of surfactant and perhaps a special something to counteract mould-release agent.
Hughie finished drenching the record and inspected the gleaming wet surface with satisfaction. “Now we let it soak for a moment.” He turned away and started rooting around in a cardboard box, eventually producing three pairs of heavy-duty ear defenders. These were like sets of headphones with large foam discs to enclose and cover the ears. He handed a pair to me and one to Nevada.
“Are these really necessary?” she said, inspecting them.
“Just you wait,” I said.
“Well, I hope they’ve been washed.” She slipped them on reluctantly.
Now that we were all safe, Hughie set the turntable in motion. The record began to spin. He set the cleaning head on the disc and turned on the vacuum cleaner. As I’d explained to Nevada, a normal domest
ic vacuum cleaner is insulated to reduce the amount of noise it kicks out. Hughie’s record cleaner, like most such machines, dispensed with these fripperies.
It emitted a bellow suggesting dinosaurs fighting in a primordial swamp. Big dinosaurs.
Nevada looked at me in amazement and fitted her headphones a little tighter. She was happy to be wearing them now, dirty or not. We watched the cleaning head travel across the record, slurping up the liquid from the vinyl. When it reached the run-out groove, Hughie guided it carefully back to its resting point and switched the turntable off.
He turned the record over and repeated the process on the other side.
When he was finished we removed our headphones and looked at each other. Hughie unscrewed the clamp from the label and took the record off the turntable. He handed it to me, grinning.
The vinyl was gleaming, a deep rich reflective black with rainbow highlights. The dense beautiful pattern of the microgrooves shimmered, precise and pristine. It looked brand new.
It was perfect.
“Normally I charge two quid for this service,” said Hughie.
“I think we can manage that,” said Nevada. She was jubilant. “We may even stretch to a bag of your no doubt overpriced cannabinoid greenery.”
“Yeah, you mentioned that,” said Hughie. “And you must take some tomatoes.” He was always eager to get rid of those tomatoes. He turned to me and pointed at the record. “Do you want to play it?”
Hughie’s listening room was next door to the office. It was a large, rectangular room with a turntable, amp and speakers located at one end and a sofa at the other. So that was where his sofa had gone. At home his lounge had nothing but armchairs in it. Now we knew why.
The speakers were set up against the far wall to fire down the long axis of the room towards us listeners at the other end. It was an ideal setup.
Hughie switched on his amps while I held the record, still faintly damp, carefully by its edges.
“That’s weird,” I said.
Nevada was instantly on the alert. “Is something wrong?”
“No, no, not at all.” I held the record up to the light. “It’s just something in the dead wax.”
She was watching me apprehensively. “But there’s no question that it’s the original?”
“On the contrary, everything about this authenticates it. It’s got the autographs by Geary and Rita Mae. It’s got the initials DDP, which is Danny DePriest, who engineered it. It’s got the right stamper and matrix numbers.” I moved closer to the light. “But there’s something else here too.”
She moved closer. “What?”
“Two more letters. A capital ‘B’ in a circle on side one, and a capital ‘Y’ in a circle on side two.”
“What do they mean?”
“I have no idea.”
“Ready here,” said Hughie impatiently. He reached for the record, then smiled indulgently when I insisted on putting it on the turntable and lowering the stylus myself. He winked at Nevada. “He doesn’t trust me.”
“Very wise,” said Nevada.
We went back down to the far end of the room and sat on the sofa as the music began to play. Hughie had aligned his speakers with considerable care and the imaging was excellent. Much more importantly, the record was in great shape. “Sounds good, doesn’t it?” said Hughie proudly.
I nodded. “Sounds like it’s never been played before.”
“Just as you predicted,” said Nevada. She moved closer to me on the sofa. She sounded proud as well.
The second side of the record sounded, if anything, even better. I waited with particular eagerness for the vocal track at the end. It was an old Red Jellaway composition, a spooky little number called ‘Running from a Spell’ and Rita Mae Pollini brought out all its eerie loveliness. But by now I was taking the sonic and musical qualities of the album for granted and I was specifically listening for the tiny flaw I’d noticed before.
The one Tinkler had diagnosed as the singer being too close to the mic.
This was the first time I’d heard a first-generation copy of the track, direct from the master tape. And there it was, the undeniable popping sound. Nevada looked at me. “Is that good old Rogue Plosive?” she said.
I nodded. “Yes. But I don’t think it’s anything to do with the singer or microphone anymore.”
“Yeah, weird isn’t it,” said Hughie. He was listening keenly. “It’s not dirt on the record.” He sounded a trifle defensive.
“No one’s suggesting that it is.”
“My cleaner would have removed all that.”
“Naturally.”
“And it doesn’t sound like a pressing flaw.” Hughie sounded thoughtful now that there was no question of him being at fault. “It’s probably a noise from the session.” When the track ended he went to the turntable and played it again. I didn’t interfere this time, although I had to repress the urge to do so. The song began again, and again we heard the sound. Hughie was listening with the keen attention of a hunting dog, his head to one side. I wondered where his dog had got to.
“It’s the sound of someone knocking over a music stand,” he said.
“Maybe.” I wasn’t convinced. The track ended, and with it the record. Hughie went to the turntable and lifted the arm and switched it off. I let him. I was, finally, beginning to realise what we had accomplished. A sleepy sense of triumph was stealing over me, lulling and relaxing me. I reminded myself that I would have to drive back. Nevada had hit the wine a little too hard at lunch.
Hughie came back to the sofa. Nevada was looking at me and smiling a lazy, contented smile. She squeezed my hand and leaned over to Hughie.
“Well, it looks like we owe you two quid,” she said.
“I take cash, credit cards or PayPal,” said Hughie.
Then the lights went out.
* * *
“Oh fuck,” said Hughie, sounding irritated but unsurprised. “It’s the fucking generator.”
“Hughie,” I said, trying not to let the tension show in my voice as we all sat there in the darkness, “does this happen often?”
“All the fucking time.” He got up from the sofa and starting blundering around. The only light in the room was the distant gentle orange glow of the valve amps, slowly fading now that their power had been cut. Nevada suddenly giggled.
“I’ve got to go to the loo,” she said.
“I’ll get some candles,” said Hughie. “So you can see your way.”
“It’s all right,” said Nevada. She’d taken out her phone and the spectral glow of the screen created a pool of pale blue light. She offered it to Hughie. “Here, you can borrow this.”
“It’s all right,” grunted Hughie, searching his pockets. “I’ve got one of my own. I just keep forgetting to use the damned thing.” He took out his phone and used it to guide him to the doorway. Nevada followed. She was gone for what seemed an awfully long time. When she returned she was preceded by the ghostly glow of her phone.
“Where’s Hughie?” I said.
“He went out to look at the generator, with much cursing.” She switched off the phone and we were in the darkness again. The sofa creaked as she sat down beside me. We groped blindly for each other and then held hands. “This is fun,” said Nevada. “A power cut in Wales. In the winter. You take me to all the best places.”
Before I could answer, the dog started barking. He was downstairs and evidently very excited about something. “Jesus,” I said. “What’s going on?” But I could hardly hear my own voice. The dog’s baleful cries were echoing stridently through the whole building. Nevada said something but I couldn’t hear what. We both stood up at the same time, as if synchronised. And at that exact moment the lights came back on.
We heard Hughie’s voice downstairs and the dog fell silent. We sat down again. A minute later Hughie was in the room, shaking his head. “Spencer’s going spare,” he said. “I had to give him some biscuits.”
“Look, Hughie,” I said, “
if you don’t mind, we’d better be going.”
He looked crestfallen. I suppose he’d envisioned a convivial late session listening to music and smoking dope. “Do you have to?” he said.
I nodded. “Got a long drive back,” I said firmly.
“I suppose,” he sighed.
Nevada put a hand on my knee and stood up. She yawned and stretched. She hadn’t said anything but I knew she was as anxious to get going as I was. The power cut and the malignant cacophony of the dog had put both our nerves on edge. I got up and went to the turntable to get the record.
It was gone.
I turned and looked at Hughie and Nevada. “Hughie,” I said. Then I turned and looked at the wall behind the speakers. There was a door there I hadn’t noticed before. I opened it and stepped through. Nevada was calling something behind me but I didn’t hear what it was. The room I’d stepped into was dark. I fumbled for a light switch and found one. The room was another office, empty except for a desk and some old filing cabinets.
There were footprints on the floor, damp with melted snow.
I followed them out the door, into the hallway, down the stairs. Hughie and Nevada were coming after me now, moving fast and with a sense of urgency. They’d realised that the record was gone.
Spencer the dog was sitting waiting by the back door. He gave me an I-told-you-so look. I shoved the door open and stepped out into the cold night air. I heard the crunching of feet moving quickly on snow and then I saw the figure. Small and lean, moving fast. Wearing a dark ski suit that might have been black or navy blue.
I was sure it was a woman. And I was sure I knew which one.
As she ran, she was trying to slide the record back into its sleeve. She’d managed to steal both. “Wait!” I shouted, inanely, then I started after her. I turned my head as I ran, and saw Nevada and Hughie coming through the door behind me. Hughie raised his shotgun into the air and fired a blast into the night sky.
Written in Dead Wax Page 18