The Run-Out Groove

by Andrew Cartmel

  “I always like a good lychgate,” said Nevada.

  “You know what lych means?”

  “Oh yes.” We walked through it hand in hand and we were in the churchyard. Or the graveyard if you wanted to call it that. It was a couple of acres of greenery that surrounded the church—a handsome rectangular building with a tall bell tower made of honey-coloured stone. There were flowerbeds and shrubs planted among the graves—many of which were ancient, with moss-covered ragged-edged stones that looked like time had chewed on them.

  The rich green grass was neatly trimmed and I noted the hard work that must be involved with the detached relief and awe of a man who had no intention of switching on a lawnmower any time soon.

  The wide flagstone path divided into three narrower paths that wound among the graves. The one in the middle led towards the door of the church. The other two weaved around the building to the left and right. We took the left-hand path and began to study the gravestones.

  “It’s around the back,” called a man’s voice. “In the far corner on your right.” We turned around to see the vicar standing in the church door. He was wearing a dog collar and a long black cassock with, incongruously, a lime-green tweed sports jacket pulled on over it. He came out of the shadow of the church doorway and approached us. I noticed his black shoes were scuffed and muddy.

  The bell in the tower above us began to ring as he entered the churchyard, as if on cue. I wondered if he had a remote control. He walked briskly up to us, unsmiling and, to be frank, looking a little pissed off. I would have thought he could have been a touch more welcoming, given the level of church attendance these days. “If you follow the other path it will get you there more quickly,” he said, his tone somewhere between resignation and impatience. He had red hair and a salt and pepper beard. His eyes looked weary behind gold wire-rimmed spectacles. Up close I saw he was younger than I’d first thought.

  “Get where more quickly?” I said.

  He sighed and studied the toes of his shoes. Maybe he was thinking he’d better clean them before the evening service. “To her grave. Valerian’s grave.”

  I said, “Who’s Valerian?”

  He looked up at me, startled and a little wary. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just assumed you were here to see her grave. Almost everyone usually is.” He suddenly sounded a lot more civil.

  “Oh no,” said Nevada. “We just came in to have a look because it’s so beautiful.” He squinted at her with suspicion and I wondered if she’d overdone it. She turned quickly to a grave beside her with a single pink rose lying on it. “This one for instance.”

  The vicar frowned at her. “You know the Endures?”

  The inscription on the headstone read:

  MARNIE VALMOND ENDURE

  1908–1968

  “No, no, no,” said Nevada casually. “I was just admiring the rose on it.” She hurriedly took out her phone and began taking photos, as if in support of her claim. “Isn’t it a lovely thought that someone cares so much that they go to the trouble of putting flowers on a grave, and making sure that they’re always fresh and new.”

  “It’s artificial,” said the vicar, smiling thinly. “The rose is artificial.” I looked more closely and saw that he was right. Poor old Marnie Valmond Endure deserved better, if only for the heroic proportions of her name.

  “And it’s so peaceful,” added Nevada hastily. She looked around us and smiled. “In places like these. They always remind me of Thomas Gray’s poem.”

  The vicar relaxed a little. “The ‘Ode to a Country Churchyard’,” he said.

  “The ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’, actually,” said Nevada primly. She took a deep, appreciative breath of the air, which was indeed cleaner than London air, and worth savouring. It smelled of damp and green growth. “‘The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,’” quoted Nevada. “Though of course the most famous line in the poem is ‘The paths of glory lead but to the grave.’”

  The vicar tried a smile. “Which provided the title of a very good film,” he said.

  “Paths of Glory,” said Nevada. “A masterpiece. You know, I’m not sure it’s not Kubrick’s finest picture.”

  “You know it?”

  “Know it? I’ve never been able to get it out of my head. Do you remember those scenes in the trenches?”

  “The tracking shots,” said the vicar excitedly. “They’re magnificent!” He was now officially eating out of her hand.

  “And the sequence at the end with the girl—”

  “The singer, yes!”

  “Singing to the troops,” said Nevada. “What a great film. Certainly one of his best.” There then ensued a brief but enthusiastic discussion of the films of Stanley Kubrick in which it was immediately agreed that the black and white ones were the most interesting, with detailed reference to Dr. Strangelove, which then veered off into a symposium of vociferous agreement about the merits of a banned film by Peter Watkins, broadening out into an analysis of the whole anti-nuclear movement in the 1960s that was in danger of getting profound.

  So I said, “Who is this Valerian?”

  Nevada flashed me a look of annoyance. I was risking spoiling the rapport she had so painstakingly built up. But in fact, as I suspected, the vicar seemed quite happy to talk to us about Valerian—providing we weren’t the usual sick sensation seekers. “Oh, a rock singer,” he said. “Rather notorious and very famous. I understand she was actually quite good, extremely talented.” He smiled thinly. “A bit heavy for my taste, I fear. Her music, I mean. Bob Dylan is more my speed. The pre-electric Dylan.” I repressed the urge to ask if he had any records he might want to get rid of. Some mint vintage albums by, say, the post-electric Dylan. Tinkler would have chewed his leg off.

  “Anyway, she was a local girl and she died tragically at the height of her fame. It’s entirely understandable that people are so fascinated by her, I suppose.” He sighed. “It’s terrible to say something like this, but I rather wish she hadn’t been. A local girl, I mean. If only she had lived elsewhere, just a few miles away, in someone else’s parish.”

  And then it would be someone else’s problem, he didn’t need to say.

  “I suppose you have a lot of riffraff coming to look at it,” said Nevada. “Rock riffraff. Rock and roll riffraff.”

  “There are a lot of… visitors,” conceded the vicar. “Far too many for a small churchyard like this. And they leave things. On her grave. Sometimes very inappropriate things.” I could see we weren’t just talking about artificial roses here. “It really is quite a problem. I’ve even been in touch with the people at Père Lachaise in Paris, to see how they cope.”

  “Père Lachaise,” I said. “That’s where Jim Morrison’s buried, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.” He shook his head fretfully. “Now, they really have a problem. Vandalism, desecration, graffiti.” He glanced over his shoulder at the far side of the churchyard. “At least here we’ve managed to keep matters relatively under control.”

  We followed him along the right-hand path around the church tower. The vicar said, “Luckily there is a trust fund set up by Valerian’s father. He had seen what had happened to the tree.”

  I remembered just in the nick of time that I wasn’t supposed to know anything about this. “What tree?”

  “She hanged herself from a tree, the poor creature, and it was almost immediately mobbed by fans. So he knew what to expect with her last resting place. Hence the fund administers a small amount to care for the grave each year, in perpetuity. And it yielded enough money to pay for things.” The path led us to an area at the back in the shadow of several large and rather healthy-looking pines. They provided shelter and a sense of restfulness.

  The rural calm of the place was somewhat spoiled by the brutalist slab of concrete that he led us to, an enormous grey rectangle the size of a double bed. There was a withered bouquet of flowers lying on it. “Including the recent renovations,” said the vicar.

  “Renova
tions?” I said.

  “Yes.” He nodded happily.

  In a notch at the top of the concrete slab, a modest headstone barely protruded with the name Valerie Anne Drummond chiselled on it, and below this ‘Valerian’ and the dates of her birth and death. I noticed those quotation marks and sensed the angry old man behind them, her father. I looked at Nevada.

  She was staring at the slab of stone that covered the grave. The vicar followed her gaze and said, “See how it’s been done?” He looked down at it fondly. “We used wooden forms that guided the flow of the concrete, neatly avoiding the headstone itself. And it remains low enough not to interfere with any of the inscription on the stone.” He shook his head, smiling affectionately. “I am rather proud of it.”

  “That’s certainly… a large slab of concrete,” said Nevada.

  The vicar nodded. “Several tons. It had to be.” He glanced at her. “Somebody kept trying to dig up the grave.”

  “Really?” said Nevada. “How awful. What sort of people would even think of doing such a thing?”

  22. BLACKLOCK

  I must admit, my first reaction was a feeling of considerable relief. It seemed I wasn’t going to end up in Canterbury prison for grave robbing after all.

  Nevada, on the other hand, was extremely pissed off. She’d spent hours on the Internet researching the tools we’d need for the job, including a sophisticated turf cutter that would have allowed us to remove the layer of grass on top of the grave and replace it afterwards so that it would appear that nothing had been disturbed. “I even found one that operated virtually silently,” she said, sulkily. “So we could go in at the dead of night.”

  I felt a little disloyal that I didn’t share her disgruntlement but, after a while, as we stared at the water flashing below us as the train carried us through Chatham on our way back to London, my relief began to give way to disappointment and frustration.

  We had literally hit a dead end, an unbreakable obstacle. I thought about the giant concrete slab on Valerian’s grave. What would we do now? I’d been so sure that this was the right next step, and that we would learn something crucial.

  Now it was all gone.

  I forced myself to count my blessings; at least Nevada wasn’t online researching concrete-breaking machines that operated silently, by the dead of night.

  We got into Victoria just as the rush hour was beginning in earnest and rode back to Hammersmith on a packed Tube train, then got off and squeezed onto an equally packed bus that sat endlessly in traffic before working its way cautiously across the bridge and gradually trundling south, homewards. Nevada only perked up when she found Fanny and Turk waiting for us in the kitchen and making affronted noises about not having been fed yet. While she was pouring out some stopgap cat biscuits I checked our landline.

  There was a message from Dr Osterloh, inviting me to come and visit him at his office tomorrow.

  * * *

  Bayswater is an intriguing neighbourhood. There’s a lot of money there, and a great deal of it from the Middle East. Hence the presence of the Islamic bookshop, mosque and assorted interesting restaurants. I came out of the Tube station and walked up Queensway. I’d deliberately got here early, so I could hit the charity shops. An unusual and cosmopolitan neighbourhood like this could yield some remarkable finds on vinyl. The first two shops didn’t have any LPs, but in the third I found some nice recordings of Glenn Miller’s Army Air Force Band with arrangements by Eddie Sauter.

  I thought it would be unprofessional of me to turn up with a bundle of LPs under my arm, so I paid for them and got the girl to put them behind the counter to pick up later.

  I left the shop with the sense of a job well done already and walked past the Whiteley’s shopping centre towards Westbourne Grove. I turned off at the old art deco swimming baths, down a shady side street lined with trees. On the corner was a house, huge by London standards, and painted bright pink. It was the end of a terraced row of dwellings, all with the same flat-faced three-storey facades and shallow front gardens. Judging by the long wall that ran around the right side of the house, there appeared to be a very large back garden indeed.

  I went up the steps and rang the bell, well aware that a house like this in a neighbourhood like this was worth a few million at least. It was Osterloh’s office, but also his home.

  The doctor’s secretary let me in. Her name was Adela, and after speaking to her on the phone I wasn’t surprised to learn that she was Swedish. I was surprised, however, to see she was six feet tall and had a black Mohawk that added considerably to her height.

  Call me a sad victim of stereotype, but I’d been expecting a blonde.

  She led me down the hall to a doorway on the left. Inside was a tiny sunlit lounge with two grey silk sofas facing each other. “I’ll go and get the doctor,” she said. “Can I offer you anything to drink? Coffee? Tea?”

  “Coffee, please.”

  “Please sit down.”

  She went and I sat down on one of the sofas. The walls were painted white and hung with bright, cheerful posters. Most of them were by the Belgian graphic artist Folon, though one was a Chagall. It was a friendly, welcoming room. Or at least it was until I noticed, standing in the corner, a life-sized cardboard cut-out of Dr Osterloh clutching his book. He was grinning toothily like a proud father holding his newborn. I was staring at it when he came in and he immediately registered the direction of my gaze.

  “I told her not to put that in here,” he said crossly. “Adela!” He looked up to see that Adela was clinking through the doorway with coffee cups on a tray. “Thank you, Adela.” We each took a cup from her. “Now, would you mind taking that away, please?” Adela nodded and picked up the cardboard cut-out. It grinned over her shoulder as she carried it out. It looked like she was wrestling with him.

  Dr Osterloh sat down opposite me. He was wearing a black roll-neck sweater and baggy, expensive-looking charcoal-grey trousers. On his feet were a pair of gleaming mahogany-brown brogues. He looked very relaxed, but then he was at home. “Sorry about that. Underneath the shambolic exterior Adela is actually highly organised. And very good with the clients.” He smiled at me. “I always enjoy the reaction of people who have spoken to her on the phone but never actually met her before. They’re always expecting some kind of little blonde. And they get…” He didn’t bother to complete his thought but just shook his head fondly. “I find it charming, her appearance. But quite inexplicable.”

  I thought it was charming, but highly explicable. I said, “I imagine it’s the influence of Stieg Larsson.”

  He looked at me with interest. “Ah, is that what it is? I’m afraid I’ve never heard of him, but then I don’t follow modern music. Indeed, the last time I took any interest in popular recording artists is when Valerian was my client.”

  “You haven’t had any musicians as clients since then?”

  “Not in the same sense.” He smiled. “People come here and talk to me. I operate my practice out of this house. People come to me; I no longer go to them.”

  “But you were actually on tour with Valerian.”

  “Oh yes.” He shrugged. “I had more energy in those days.”

  “How did you happen to end up with her as a client?” I already knew one version of this story, but I wanted to hear his.

  He frowned. “Hmm. I must have been recommended by a friend. Someone in the band? No, they were all fearless, loveable extroverts who were innocent of any appetite for self-analysis.” As an assessment of the only member of the band I actually knew, Erik Make Loud, I thought this stood up pretty well, even after all these years. “No, it must have been someone in her management or some person like that,” he said. “But the important thing is that we did meet, and we hit it off, and I knew we could work together.”

  I nodded and took a sip of the coffee. It was shockingly bad, watery and bitter. I thought I concealed my reaction pretty well, but he must have picked up on something because he said, “How is the coffee?” He actu
ally made it sound like a genuine question instead of the usual bit of social white noise. “Is it really that dreadful?”

  “No, it’s fine, I just—”

  He held up his hand. “I would consider it a personal favour if you were candid with me. You see, I don’t drink the stuff, so I have no idea.”

  “Well… it’s not great.”

  “Excellent, thank you. That’s very useful to know. In future I will get Adela to go out and buy some fresh from one of the dozens of coffee bars that have sprung up in the main road.”

  I said, “She’ll hate me for making all the extra work for her.”

  He grinned. “On the contrary she will be delighted to have the chance to get out and meet her many friends among the local students and young mothers who throng those places. She will be grateful to you. Now, where were we?”

  I set the coffee aside, relieved not to have to maintain the pretence of drinking the swill. “You were telling me about how you met Valerian and started… working with her.”

  He nodded. “Yes, that’s what we call it.” He smiled. “Work. Because that’s what it is.”

  “From everything I read about her she didn’t seem the type to have a…”

  “Shrink?” He chuckled. “Maybe she wasn’t.” He spread his hands. “And yet there we were. I suppose we just hit it off. I think she only saw me because someone had talked her into it, but when we met we got along.” He looked at me. “It was as simple as that. I don’t think I was quite what she expected.”

  I said, “Viennese couch and all that?”

  “Exactly. With a lot of theory and lecturing. But that’s not my approach. I’m very down to earth and practical.” He examined his hands, as though expecting to find the dirt of honest labour under his fingernails. “I began by making some very simple practical suggestions about how she could make life easier on herself.”