‘Yeah,’ Gavin said. ‘Funny the things you forget. I hadn’t given her a second thought in all of this, but I suppose she was just as fucked up by it as everybody else.’
I looked back at him and he was staring hard at the photo.
‘So that couldn’t be her then?’ I asked, trying not to fidget in my seat.
‘Well, like I said, it does look like her,’ Gavin strained his eyes over it one more time. ‘But, nah,’ he shook his head and put the magazine back on the wrought-iron garden table. ‘I don’t see how it could have been. I mean, even if she was out of hospital by then, what would she have been doing there anyway?’
‘I haven’t a clue.’ I shrugged nonchalantly, but inside bells and whistles were going off in my brain.
So Gavin didn’t know about her secret affair with Vince either. And if it was her...If it was her, I had to meet her. That decided it, right there and then.
Good as his word, Pascal got back to me a week later. He’d emailed me some correspondence he’d had with an old police mucker of his, which I printed out pronto before calling him up to go over it.
‘Alors’, he said, ‘Now, we get down to business. Now you have everything I have about your Vincent Smith. You are familiar with the report I compiled for Monsieur Stevens, yes?’
‘Yes,’ I said, pressing play on my tape recorder. I’d taken the precaution of using a phone bug for this, just in case I couldn’t take down the notes fast enough. ‘You don’t mind if I record this, do you?’
‘Not at all.’
‘It didn’t seem like the French police were much help to you?’
‘Non,’ he said, ‘but of course, they had their reasons. Monsieur Smith had got himself too much of a reputation. After the death of his wife, he’d fallen in with a bad crowd. Drug dealers, pimps, prostitutes. Not serious criminals, you understand, but the petty lowlife that clog up Pigalle, the vermin you are always having to clean up after. Some of them are Algerian and Moroccan and, I am afraid to say, there was and still is a lot of racism in France about these people. The police do not care if they disappear, it is merely one problem off their patch. Do you know anyone besides Monsieur Stevens who knew Monsieur Smith well, Eddie?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Gavin Granger, the photographer I’m doing the book with. He was a pretty close friend of Vince’s.’
‘Did he give you any idea why his friend would have wanted to do such things? Why he didn’t come back to England when his career and those who loved him were all there?’
‘Only one reason,’ I said. ‘Heroin.’
‘Ah,’ Pascal replied. ‘I see. This is a problem I found at the time. All of Monsieur Smith’s acquaintances were what we would call unreliable witnesses. Junkies will tell you anything if they think they will get rewarded for it. They will make up tall stories to throw you off the scent, like the girl who told me that they called him The Vampire. I think she thought I was a reporter and would give her some money for saying this. Of course, I had to offer a little bit around here and there to get anyone to say anything. But I think Monsieur Smith flashed his money around too much with these people. They seemed very put out that he was no longer around to subsidise them.’
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘that reminds me. Did you ever find out who the mystery blonde was?’
‘Non. It was only from these unreliable locals, after the fact, that I hear about this woman. All I know is, she wasn’t one of the usual crowd. She wasn’t a known prostitute. But you see, the girls that go through these places, they do not last for long. I doubt we would be able to trace her now.’
Right, I thought smugly, that makes me a better detective than you are. ‘So,’ I pressed on, ‘what about these documents you’ve sent me?’
‘Well, as you know,’ the old man said, ‘my best theory about Smith was that he deliberately vanished. So what I ask myself is, where would he go?
‘This Marco, the pimp or whatever he really was, the guy he was hanging out with. It is said he smuggles drugs up through Marseilles, so the first thing that occurs to me is that Monsieur Smith would go in this direction. South. To Marseilles itself, or beyond, perhaps to Casablanca or Tangiers. These are the sort of places he would seem attracted to – they are lawless and mysterious and full of the drugs he likes. They also have a mythic resonance, and I think your Monsieur Smith, he is a romantic, he likes these things.’
‘You’re dead right,’ I said, surprised. I hadn’t expected him to think in such a writerly fashion, but maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. The French are a literary lot, after all.
‘So I ask around a bit amongst the friends I still have and this time, I ask not just about Smith, but about this Marco too, just in case they stayed in cahoots. If you take a look at the first document…’
I trained my eyes on my print-out.
‘And I found something that could be quite interesting. I think that this Marco is actually one Mert Ibci.’ I looked at the strangely spelt name on the paper. ‘Not an Arab at all, but a Turk, so you see how useful these racial generalisations can be. Anyhow, I managed to ascertain that this man was arrested in February 1982, in Marseilles, for possession of hashish with intent to supply. He wasn’t charged in the end, but he turns up again here three more times for petty drugs offences and pimping before he vanishes off the radar in the spring of 1983. What is of particular interest is that on his file there are a list of known associates and one of them is an Englishman who calls himself…Donald Dawson. Does this name have any relevance to you?’
The hairs on the back of my neck prickled. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, it does. That was the name of Vince’s first manager.’
I scanned down the document. There it was in black and white. Shit, Gavin was going to love this. ‘From what I know,’ I said, ‘Vince didn’t part with Dawson on very good terms.’
‘D’accord’, Joseph said. ‘Then I think we could have the two of them here. The trouble is, this only gets us a couple of years down the line. All we can do now is follow Mert Ibci and he only turns up again one more time, so far. Go to the next document I sent you.’
I rustled my pages, straining to keep up with him.
‘This time, five years later, in Seville, Spain. Here he is charged with living off immoral earnings and sentenced to three years in prison. After this, pfhutt! Nothing. Not yet, anyway. But as I say, I will keep in touch with my contacts. It is hard with a transient petty criminal like this Ibci, because I have only sources left in continental Europe. If he has gone to Africa, like we suspect, I doubt I will find a thing. And of course, there is nothing to say that Monsieur Smith kept in with him, even as far as Seville. But you are sure,’ he emphasised, ‘that this Dawson character is most probably our man?’
‘It’s got to be,’ I said. ‘It sounds just like the sort of joke he’d make.’
I remembered Ray’s article: Don Dawson’s the King of Nothing Now.
‘Wow.’ My head was swimming. ‘That’s just…amazing.’
‘The game is afoot, my friend.’
‘Wow,’ I repeated, trying to process it all.
‘You have any other questions?’ the detective asked.
‘Let me see,’ I quickly scanned down the notes I’d prepared with Gavin. He seemed to have answered everything we’d thought of. But still his line about Vince absconding to Casablanca intrigued me.
‘You seem to have had quite a good sense of Vince’s motivations. Did you form an opinion on his character?’
Pascal chewed on this for a moment. ‘This man’s character was the most difficult thing for me,’ he said. ‘Normally, people follow a pattern, whether they are a good man or a psychopath. But Smith does not seem to do this. I hear many different things about him from many different people; none of them gave me the complete picture. I know that he is a very artistic man and I know that he likes to align himself with outsiders and outlaws; this is a myth that many creative people find attractive. I know that he loved his wife, and this made many people around hi
m very angry. I think that her death could have made him more erratic, but I still don’t understand why he would want to live the life of a petty criminal when it is clear he has a very good mind. I think he is very much a romantic, and that can be a very dangerous thing. We French know all about that, of course.’
‘Do you think that’s why he stayed in France, then? That he felt more at home there?’
‘It could be. He certainly chose the most infamous quarter to make his home.’
‘But apparently, he was quite religious too,’ I said. ‘Or so Tony Stevens told me. That’s why I found it interesting that he lived in the part of Paris where the red light district is overlooked by that beautiful church, saints and sinners together, if you like.’
‘The Sacré Coeur, you mean? Ah. Well, this church is not what it seems to be either. Do you know the story of the Sacré Coeur?’
Obviously not.
‘The basilica of the Sacré Coeur was built in expiation for the massacre of the Communards,’ he said.
‘Er?’ I began and he laughed, then explained.
‘There was an uprising in Paris, in 1871, against the Third Republic, during the Franco-Prussian war. The French leaders had signed a treaty with the Germans, which was high treason for the people of Paris. The Communards were working-class people, supposedly republicans, but actually anarchists who were already sick of what the Republic had become and wanted the people to run the city themselves. So they try and take the city over. The French army was ordered to put them down with extreme violence.
‘Now the butte of Montmartre, the hill on which the church now stands, it used to be a chalk mine. It is the highest place in the city and it seemed the easiest to defend. Hundreds of the Communards hid there. So what did the army do? Phfft! They dynamite the exits of the mines, burying the whole lot of them alive. That beautiful white basilica that you see there now, it is built on top of a hill of blood, a mass grave of our own, and yet built to atone not for this sin, but for the sins of the Communards. You see, the Sacré Coeur itself is an emblem of the royalists and right-wingers; it is telling the people to stay in their place, even after we have had this so-called revolution. So for me, the saints and sinners are not side-by-side in Montmartre. It is a place for sinners only.’
‘I see,’ I said. Or at least, I thought was beginning to.
28
Shot by Both Sides
January 1981
‘I feel horrible doing this,’ said Kevin, opening the wardrobe door.
The day before they left the squat, Rachel’s parents had arranged to send a van to collect her belongings. Kevin, Steve and Lynton dawdled nervously in the room she’d shared with Vince, gingerly attempting to separate their former flatmates’ belongings, cringing with anticipation at what they were likely to discover.
They’d packed up her college things first. Her paints, charcoals, pastels and pencils were kept in a workman’s toolbox. There were sketchbooks and scrapbooks, reference books and a big portfolio of finished work. Most of her canvasses had been hung on the walls, but Lynton found another pile of them on top of the wardrobe, wrapped in an oilcloth and tied together with string.
He lifted them down and put them on the bed.
‘Should I check what this is?’ he said.
‘Suppose so,’ said Steve, glancing round at Kevin, who nodded apprehensively.
They were three studies of Vince in thick oils, looking over his left shoulder, a stark white face against a sludge-grey background, the multiple tattoos running down his arm rendered in black and blood red. The girl in the Martini glass with Man’s Ruin written underneath had long since been joined by an array of daggers, disembodied eyeballs, tumbling dice and forked flames.
The first one was a straight portrait and that was unnerving enough: Vince in a foul mood, his eyes dark with menace, looking like he was about to coil out of the canvas and stick a knife in you. The second one, she’d abstracted his features Cubist style, so that Vince became a series of curves and angles, a geometry of black, white and red. The third was a homage to Edvard Munch’s most famous painting: Vince’s face as a skull-like mask, mouth hanging open in a silent scream, eyes completely black. She’d turned the tattoos into a sacred heart that flamed across his shoulder.
They stared at them agog.
‘God,’ said Lynton finally. ‘These are scary, man. Shit.’
Steve cocked his head to one side, regarding the third one.
‘I think she’s captured the real Vince here,’ he said. ‘D’you think she was designing our next album cover or what?’
‘Put them away,’ whispered Kevin. ‘I don’t want to look at them.’
Lynton and Steve exchanged glances. Since that night with the Scotsman, Kevin had withdrawn into himself so much it was like living with a ghost. Today, coming back from his morning trips to the newsagent and the phone box, was the first time they’d had a proper conversation out of him since then and that was only about packing up Rachel’s things.
Which was why Steve had decided they’d be better off back home for a while.
Lynton rapidly reassembled the pictures in their wrappings. ‘I’ll start taking this downstairs, shall I?’ he offered.
‘Aye,’ nodded Steve. ‘I’ll do this,’ he nodded towards the dressing table, where it was obvious who the make-up and jewellery belonged to.
‘She didn’t tek much with her, did she?’ he mused, packing bottles into his cardboard box.
Kevin stood by the open wardrobe. ‘It don’t seem right to touch her personal things,’ he said.
Steve came over and put an arm around his friend’s shoulder. ‘It’s all right, Kevin, you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to. You go and pack up your own things. I’ll see to this.’
Kevin was shaking. Steve realised he was trying not to cry. ‘It’s all right,’ he repeated, although he doubted that it was. ‘We’re getting out of this shitehole tomorrow. Tony’s going to find us a proper place to stay, it won’t be anything like this, I promise you. Or else,’ he muttered more to himself than to Kevin, ‘his precious Vince won’t have a career any more, will he?’
Kevin gave a huge sob and slipped out from underneath him. ‘S-sorry Steve,’ he tried to say. ‘I just can’t…’ and with that, he ran out of the room, into his own, slamming the door behind him.
‘Jesus wept.’ Steve shook his head. ‘Vincent Smith, you treacherous bastard, what the fuck have you done to us?’ He went angrily back to the dressing table and continued packing as fast as he could. He found Rachel’s works in the second drawer down, wrapped up inside a velvet box.
The ferry churned its way across the choppy grey sea, a trail of seagulls squawking in its wake. The wind was high and raw, flinging stinging drops of rain against Sylvana’s face as she stood on the prow of the ferry, wrapped in a floor-length black coat, her red hair billowing out behind her.
Vincent had preferred to stay inside in the bar with his Paris guidebook, but Sylvana had wanted to be out in this. She wanted to feel her escape, every motion of the waves, while she savoured how life had suddenly turned itself around.
Vincent had been such an angel since the moment they met. Every day they’d stayed in that hotel he had been busy arranging things; getting her passport and her suitcase back from Helen, working out how they could get married by special licence and sorting out somewhere for them to stay in France. He thought that Paris was the most romantic place on earth, so that was where they should go. She didn’t ask how he had done it all. She assumed that Tony, with his big house and all his money and contacts, would have had something to do with it. People with that much money seldom had problems with officials.
She didn’t question whether it was the right thing to do, nor pause to reflect on the mistakes of the past. All she felt was the urge to travel forward, away from those dark days as quickly as she could, to blot Robin and everyone associated with him out of her mind. The love she now felt for Vincent was so overwhelming it took pre
cedence over all other considerations. It even drowned out the tiny voice in her mind that reminded her that at least she ought to tell Helen what she was up to, after all Helen had done and tried to do for her.
Helen would understand, she told herself, shaking the guilt out of her mind. Of course she would. Once she knew the true Vincent she’d be so happy for her. Vincent was a genius. The way that he spoke, he could make sense of everything, could straighten out the jumble in her mind better than any of Glo’s shrinks ever could. It came down to love and creativity, he said, two sides to the same coin, qualities that she had in spades, even if she didn’t realise it. He could help her reach her true potential. This was just the start.
She knew it wasn’t exactly the Cunard Line, Sealink ferries from Dover to Calais, but Sylvana wanted to feel the way Ola had when she had set sail to New York all those years ago, heading for a new life with her new husband by her side. Not that she’d had the courage to call her grandma yet either. But she was sure Ola would be pleased for her when she eventually did. So despite the wind, despite the spiteful rain and the roiling, chundering landscape of leaden sea and sky that stretched out before her, she was enjoying the wild ride across the Channel.
The ride to freedom.
When they finally hit the A63 back towards Hull, Steve gave up on the radio. If he had to hear ‘Imagine’ or ‘Starting Over’ one more time he’d be tempted to throw bloody thing out of the window. So what, John Lennon was dead. He’d never meant owt to Steve.
Their ride back up north had been without conversation, the dull countryside of Hertfordshire and Northamptonshire, Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire passing in a grey blur of low cloud. Now the humped mounds of slag heaps, the black arcs of pit heads, the rows of cooling towers and endless pylons demarked the boundary between the agricultural south and the industrialised north. It gave Steve a shiver, thinking what fate could have dealt him. To end up in one of those places, down a pit or in a factory, on the docks like Grandad Cooper, slaving his guts out for the money to get pissed on a Friday night and forget about it all.
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