“I didn’t say that to her.”
“No,” said Nevada, shaking her head. “You didn’t. You told her that we should expect a speaker for your hi-fi. A speaker!”
Tinkler patted the crudely painted black wood with the pride of new ownership. “That’s right. A speaker. And here it is.”
“But she thought that you meant what any normal person would have meant by a speaker. And she translated that into a small package, and that’s what she told us to expect.”
Tinkler shrugged. “Well, that girl just doesn’t know her exponential horn-loaded loudspeakers, then, does she?” His nonchalance fooled no one. We all knew he was talking about the girl he loved, or at least lusted after, with a longstanding and no doubt hopeless passion.
Turk came wandering into the room, having devoured her breakfast, and jumped up with an effortless leap onto the top of the black box, where she crouched peering up at Tinkler. “Hello, Turk,” he said, rubbing her under the chin. “Do you like my new speaker? I know you prefer the horn-loaded designs. All the girls do.” Then he smiled brightly at us. “At least it gives the cats a new place to play.”
Nevada nodded at me. “I thought his speakers were ridiculously gigantic. But compared to yours they are just dainty adornments.” I gazed fondly at the Quads in question. Just looking at them made me want to listen to music.
“That’s because the sorry fool prefers electrostatic technology to the noble horn,” said Tinkler.
Nevada headed for the kitchen to serve the coffee, which was beginning to smell good. As she went, she said, “Come away from there before I give you the noble horn.”
“Sounds attractive,” said Tinkler. But he moved briskly away from the speaker and followed her out. I found my Luis Bonfa album—on Verve, with arrangements by Lalo Schifrin—and put it on loud enough to be heard in the kitchen. It was one that Nevada loved and it always chilled her out. Sure enough, by the time they returned with the coffee, she had begun to mellow. Luis’s guitar was working its magic. She and Tinkler set the coffee things down on the table and I went to join them, sitting in the sunshine. This took a certain amount of careful manoeuvring of the chairs—to avoid the baleful shadow of the monster speaker.
Tinkler finished stirring sugar into his coffee and said, casually, “So where are the cables?”
“What cables?”
He frowned at me. “Don’t tease me. You know I can’t stand it where serious matters like hi-fi are concerned.”
“I’m not teasing you,” I said. “What cables?”
“They were part of the deal.”
“What do you mean?”
“The deal. On eBay. When I bought the speaker for what I let this guy think was an extortionate price but actually, although of course I didn’t let on to him, was a snip.”
“A snip,” said Nevada staring at the giant ugly black box.
“That’s right. This beauty here is worth a couple of grand more than I paid for her.” Tinkler sipped his coffee, discovered it was still too hot, and set it aside.
“This beauty,” repeated Nevada, shaking her head. “There’s something creepy about you referring to it as ‘her’, too.”
Tinkler ignored her and kept on with his story. “I even convinced this guy to throw in a set of cables, too. It was a really sweet deal. And I want my cables!”
Nevada shrugged. “So what’s a set of cables more or less?”
Tinkler sighed the long-suffering sigh of an audiophile having to explain things to a civilian. “They were silver cables. Solid silver. They were worth almost as much as the speaker. And he threw them in for nothing.”
“Or perhaps didn’t,” I said, and Tinkler winced.
“Silver?” said Nevada. “You mean silver wire instead of copper?”
“Yes.”
She looked at me. “Does that make a difference? To the sound, I mean?”
“Christ, yes,” I said. I’d gone from thinking Tinkler was making a fuss about nothing concerning these cables to suddenly and poignantly sharing his pain. I turned and looked at the speaker. “You’re sure the guy’s not sending them separately?”
“No, he said they were definitely coming with the speaker.”
“Maybe the blokes pinched them,” said Nevada. “The blokes who delivered the speaker. They looked like ruffians. Would they have known how valuable they were?”
“I don’t see how,” I said. “They looked like ruffians.”
“But couldn’t they have seen that they were silver?”
“No.” Tinkler shook his head sadly. “On the outside they just looked like boring ordinary cables with a red and blue dielectric.”
“Dialectic?” said Nevada.
“Dielectric,” I said. “It’s the insulator.”
A mournful silence ensued as we all contemplated the loss of Tinkler’s silver cables. “There was nothing else?” he said. “Nothing else with the speaker?”
“Nope,” I said.
“Not an envelope, or—”
“Nothing at all.” Then I thought about it. I stood up and went over to the speaker and inspected the top of it where Fanny, ever the opportunist, had supplanted her sister and was lying in a patch of sunlight. I put my hand on the warm black wood. Nevada and Tinkler were staring at me. “What is it?” said Nevada.
I ran my hand over the wood. Fanny feinted at me with her paw. She thought I was playing.
Then I found it.
Or felt it, rather. A small scrap of adhesive tape. It was black electrical tape and almost invisible against the black wood. The tape was at the front edge of the top of the speaker, and ran down over the lip of the large opening. My fingers traced it inside. “There was something taped here,” I said.
Tinkler was already on his feet. He came over and inspected it. “If the cables were in there…”
I said, “Hanging in the mouth of the speaker…”
Nevada came over and joined us, peering into the shadowy maw of the giant box. “You think they’re in there?”
Tinkler murmured, “They fell inside…”
I nodded. “It’s possible. If the clowns who delivered it were careless.”
“Of course they were careless,” said Tinkler. I could see he had seized onto this hope and was clinging to it for dear life. “They were ruffians. They were clowns. They were ruffian clowns.” We all stared into the mouth of the speaker. And saw nothing staring back at us but darkness.
I went into the spare room to look for a torch and came back with two small, powerful LED flashlights, which gave off an intense red beam. For reasons too complex to go into here, we’d once had to rob a grave in the middle of the night and Nevada had purchased a large amount of ancillary equipment for the endeavour, including these.
“I recognise these babies,” said Tinkler happily, taking one of the flashlights. He’d been there in the graveyard with us, in the cold dark Kent night. Though he’d done precious little of the digging. But he was a keen participant now, as we shone the red beams of light down into the mouth of the speaker.
We could still see nothing, except the smooth tapering flare of the horn. “They could be at the bottom of the enclosure.” Tinkler looked at me. The childlike eagerness in his face was touching.
So, while Nevada sat blithely drinking coffee and watching us with a slightly superior smile, we got down on our hands and knees on the floor in a grovelling posture and inspected the base of the speaker. On three sides the wood was a solid, flawless piece of cabinetry without so much as an indentation.
But on the fourth was a small access panel about the size of a magazine cover. Recessed in each corner of the panel was a screw with a Phillips cross-head. I went back into the spare room and got my tools, including an electric screwdriver and a drill, in case we had to drill out one of the screws. Tinkler began to sweat at the very suggestion of this—drilling a hole in his beloved. But it looked to me like the screws hadn’t been turned for decades and might be hopelessly frozen in place.
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br /> “How old is this speaker?” I said, lying on the floor with a manual screwdriver in my hand, trying to find an angle where I both had access to the screws and room to manipulate the tools.
“Over fifty years,” said Tinkler. “Be careful there. You’ll spoil the paintwork.”
“Spoil the paintwork? It looks like a blind man with a brush in his mouth did it in half an hour while drunk.”
“But it’s still the original paint job.”
I got the head of the screwdriver seated in the top left screw and moved around on the floor to free my elbow so I could begin twisting it. Nothing. No give at all. I moved on to the next one. I worked each of the screws in turn and on the second attempt they started to rotate. With a warm feeling of triumph, and Tinkler crooning encouragement, I switched to the electric screwdriver. At the sound of it, the cats peered down apprehensively from the top of the speaker. Then, when they realised that the noise wasn’t actually coming from an electric cat-killing machine, they both hopped down to study it more closely. Tinkler was on his knees beside me and the cats were crouching between us.
Nevada came over and regarded us ironically. “Need any help there, boys?” she said. Then she bent down and caressed the cats. “And girls.”
“Could you get the Hoover, please,” I said. There was sweat running down from my hairline onto my face, and I considered asking my beloved to get a towel and swab my brow for me while I laboured nobly, like a surgeon in an operating theatre with his loyal nurse at his side.
But I decided I’d better not press my luck, and just settled for the Hoover.
The first screw came free and fell ringing onto the floor. Fanny pounced on it instantly and batted it across the floor, chasing it and moving like quicksilver. Tinkler in turn was chasing her. “That’s the original screw!” he cried. While he was retrieving it I got the other three original screws out, falling one after the other musically onto the floor. Unlike her sister, Turk made no move to intercept the little bouncing objects. Instead, evidently bored by the whole enterprise, she disappeared out the cat flap into the garden.
Tinkler came back with the rogue screw and I gave him the other three. Then I swapped the full-sized Phillips screwdriver for a miniature, flat-headed one and carefully inserted the narrow leading edge of the flat blade into the line in the wood where the panel met the rest of the speaker. Tinkler said, “Be careful not to—”
“Damage the original paintwork,” I said. “Yes, I know.” I used the screwdriver to gently pry the panel open. It gave way with a pop and a stale smell of dust, revealing a large hole in the base of the speaker cabinet. Tinkler aimed the flashlight inside.
We saw it right away. There in the thick dust of decades, a fat blue curl of cable like a nesting snake, and the gleam of a phono plug. “Where’s that Hoover?” I said.
Nevada bustled in. “Coming right up.”
We switched it on and Fanny fled from the noise. Nevada held the nozzle by the base of the speaker as we drew the cable out, catching a rich flow of dirty grey dust and fuzz. The vacuum cleaner consumed it cheerfully, preventing it from becoming an airborne health hazard. As a result of these ministrations, the cables arrived shiny and pristine in Tinkler’s eager hands.
“Are they the right ones?” said Nevada. “Your precious silver cables?”
“Oh, yes,” said Tinkler happily, stroking them. “My pretties.”
Nevada switched off the Hoover and Tinkler and I were just discussing the possibility of giving the cables a test run in my system—“They’ve never been used. We’ll have to run them in for a few hours before they start to sound good”—when Fanny came streaking into the room.
She took one look at the inviting new opening in the bottom of the big black box and, before we could stop her, shot straight inside.
Our cat was inside the speaker.
“Fanny!”
“Wonderful,” said Nevada. “Now we’ve lost one of the cats.” She turned to Tinkler. “Your speaker has eaten her.”
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks, as ever, to Ben Aaronovitch for advice and support and to Guy Adams for setting the ball rolling in the first place. To John Berlyne for stepping into the breach; to Celeste Bronfman-Nadas for enlightening discussions of story technique, and for taking the Vinyl Detective to the Caribbean; to Scott Cochrane for a lifetime of friendship and for reading first drafts; to Linda Kissick, crime fiction connoisseur, for early enthusiasm; to David Quantick for reading and coming up with a blazing blurb; to Jeff Stephen for reading and for letting me play my Bill Evans record on his tasty system; to Martin Stiff for another great cover design; to Gregg Tonn and all the staff at Into the Music in Winnipeg for putting up with me as I ransacked their stock of vinyl. To all the readers, reviewers and bloggers who made the first book a success. And to everyone at Titan Books, especially Miranda Jewess for brilliant editing and having faith in the project and Lydia Gittins for doing such a superb job on publicity (“Not cheap advertising. Tube advertising”).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andrew Cartmel is a novelist and screenwriter. He is the author of Written in Dead Wax, the first Vinyl Detective novel, which was hailed as “marvelously inventive and endlessly fascinating” by Publishers Weekly and received a starred review from Kirkus. His work for television includes commissions for Midsomer Murders and Torchwood, and a legendary stint as script editor on Doctor Who. He has also written plays for the London Fringe, toured as a stand-up comedian, and is currently co-writing a series of comics with Ben Aaronovitch based on the bestselling Rivers of London books. He lives in London with too much vinyl and just enough cats.
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