The Vinyl Detective--Flip Back, page 29
“Yes,” I said, my mind racing. But mostly I was preoccupied with an intense sense of relief that I’d got there before Stinky and his team. By the skin of my teeth.
“…a creepy deserted farmhouse,” Stinky was saying. “Still a crime scene, officially. But we asked permission to film there and it turns out, you know what? One of the local cops is a fan. A Stinky Stanmer fan. So, no problem. Permission to film. Or at least, they’re going to turn a blind eye. The cops. Justice is blind! So we’re going to film there tomorrow. At the murder house. You know about the murder, do you?”
“I heard about it.”
“Well, you should read about it, bruv. Jesus, what a story. Crime of passion. How his wife turned vegetarian and she shot him because he wouldn’t turn vegetarian. That’s the gist of it, anyway. Not the details. The details are fascinating. You should read about it. On their blog.”
“You read the Lorettos’ blog?”
“Well, one of my researchers read it for me. Quite a story, though, eh?” He looked at me with his bulging eyes. “It’s as if you killed and cooked one of your cats and Nirvana got really upset about it. And then you wanted to kill and cook the other one and—”
“All right, Stinky,” I said. “I get the picture.”
It was Stinky who didn’t get the picture. If ‘Nirvana’ found any jokers messing with our cats, they wouldn’t be long for this world. The jokers, that is. And just then, as if she was sensing that someone had taken her name in vain, I heard the bathroom door upstairs open.
Stinky didn’t notice because he’d suddenly unslung his rucksack from his shoulder and was busy unzipping it. “Got something I’ve got to show you, mate. Something you must see.”
As he delved inside Nevada appeared at the top of the stairs and called down, “Who are you talking to, love?”
“You’ll never guess, darling,” I said.
“What cheer!” yelled Stinky.
There was silence from the top of the stairs for a moment, and then, “Oh, Christ. Stinky.”
Nevada came halfway down the stairs and looked at us. She was just wrapped in a towel. Normally Stinky wouldn’t have been able to conceal his delight about this, but at the moment he was entirely preoccupied with ransacking his rucksack.
I said, “Stinky was just telling me that he and his camera crew are going to Pete Loretto’s farmhouse tomorrow. To film.”
“Oh, Christ,” said Nevada again, then immediately put her hand to her mouth as if concerned that she’d said too much. But Stinky, of course, hadn’t noticed.
“That’s right,” he said cheerfully, still digging around in his rucksack. “Tomorrow. First thing. But never mind that. Look at this.” He proudly brought out an elegant-looking bag made of heavy, glossy pink paper with black lettering on it. It was the sort of bag you’d be given to hold your purchases at an expensive shop. In this case the name of the shop, there on the shocking-pink bag, was Faddish Fetish. “It’s a present,” said Stinky.
“For us?” I said. “You shouldn’t have.”
“Ha ha ha. Not only shouldn’t I have, I didn’t. No, it’s not for you, mate. It’s for Maxie. You know, Maxine Shearwater. Max Shearwater’s daughter. She’s a lovely girl, lovely.”
“Yes, I know, we—”
“I just loved that footage of her dancing on the car roof. You know, at your beach barbecue. She really went for it, didn’t she? I call her Maximum Maxine. Because she really goes for it. Have you seen her tattoo? Oh, my. Anyway, this is for her. A present. From London.”
Despite herself, curiosity drew Nevada down the stairs. She joined us in the small hallway as Stinky opened the bag and lovingly unwrapped the pink tissue paper inside, to reveal what took me a few seconds to realise was a bikini.
A microscopic bikini made of PVC.
It had strong black outlines at its edges but otherwise was completely transparent.
“I’m going to restage Maximum Maxine dancing on the car roof, and I’m going to have her wear this.”
“Have you asked her if she wants to?” said Nevada.
“She hasn’t seen it yet.”
“I’m not sure she ever will be able to see it,” said Nevada. “It’s completely see-through. It’s virtually invisible.”
“I know! It will really show off her snake tattoo nicely.”
“Yes, I’m sure that’s why you bought it,” I said.
“You should love it, mate. It’s made of vinyl!” He held the transparent bikini aloft and grinned his toothy, bearded grin at us. “Just think of the low-angle shot.”
“We are,” said Nevada.
I said, “Isn’t it time you were going, Stinky?”
Of course, it wasn’t as simple as that, but we did eventually prevail upon Stinky to put his fetish bikini back in its bag and go.
When the door finally closed behind him, Nevada turned to me and said, “You only just got to the Lorettos before he did.”
“I know.”
“We’ve got to get to Max Shearwater before he does.”
“We will,” I said. “It’s all booked. First thing tomorrow.”
27. THE STATUE GARDEN
The following morning, immediately after breakfast, we got a taxi to Max Shearwater’s house. We didn’t worry about any cloak-and-dagger manoeuvres this time because we assumed Stinky would be busy at the Loretto farmhouse and, in any case, Sydney the Giantess was no longer stationed outside the B&B keeping an eye on our comings and goings.
Nevada and Tinkler and I all set off together, but Clean Head apparently had business locally and said she might join us at Max’s later.
“By ‘business locally’ she means she’s seeing Gareth again,” said Nevada.
“Do you think she’s having an affair with him?” said Tinkler.
“Almost certainly.”
“Are you just saying that to torment me?”
“Yes.”
The taxi took us up from the seafront along a route that had become familiar. Indeed, unpleasantly familiar, since it took us past The Sea View where we’d witnessed Jimmy’s arrest, and then the Lynch house, where we’d been among the last people to see Valentyna alive. We all fell silent as we passed it.
As it happened, we didn’t have far to go from there to Max Shearwater’s place. If we could have driven straight up the slope, we would have been there in a minute or two—indeed, we probably could have walked it that quickly—but the taxi had to laboriously wind its slow way uphill around some rather unusual terrain.
It appeared that in some distant epoch, part of Halig’s volcanic cone had collapsed into the sea, creating an inlet from which a jagged series of giant perpendicular stone pillars rose straight upwards, instead of the usual gentle slope of the island. The Shearwater house was situated on a broad ledge at the top of one of these outcrops of rock. It was a dramatic location, made even more dramatic by having the house extend beyond the ledge, out into the empty air high above the ocean.
The house itself was a piece of modernist architecture like a stack of glass-sided concrete boxes of different sizes, with one end of the bottommost and largest box simply jutting out over the edge, supported by nothing.
Of course, what it was supported by was the rigid structure of the rest of the house, which I guessed must include some reinforcing columns in the basement. But it looked crazily suicidal, as if the whole thing might just topple into the waiting waves far down below. I suppose that was the point.
As the taxi took the final curve in the ascending road and we got our first glimpse of the place, Nevada said, “Wow.”
And Tinkler said, “Living here wouldn’t make me nervous at all.”
“It’s bloody mad,” murmured our taxi driver, which was pretty much the extent of his conversation since we’d left Miss Bebbington’s.
Nevada looked over at me. “Does it remind you of something?”
I nodded. “The spot where they burned the money.” That too had jutted out from the slope of the island, extending over the sea. But it had been a natural formation, accidental. This was anything but.
“Do you think it’s deliberate?” said Nevada. “I mean, the resemblance?”
“You bet.”
We paid off our loquacious taxi driver and walked the short distance from the road to the house. The Shearwaters had quite a slab of property here, and a rather idyllic location, surrounded by forest at the back and facing the ocean at the front. Instead of any kind of wall or fence, privacy was provided by a dense belt of pine trees, which thinned out and simply became part of the adjoining woods at the boundary of their property. Access was through a gap in the pines, where a driveway covered with grey and white pebbles ran up from the road towards the house.
At least, I thought it was a driveway. But as we walked up it we discovered that the pebbles widened and spread out so that they surrounded the entire house. There was plenty of greenery, though, too. Low Japanese-looking trees and shrubs in beds were dotted among the pebbles. And sculptures.
These were large stone or metal statues of modern design dispersed throughout the garden. Most of them were of abstract but recognisably human figures. Some were simply giant heads, reminiscent of Modigliani or traditional African design.
“They look like Henry Moore,” said Nevada.
“Or the cover of The Division Bell,” said Tinkler. “That’s a Pink Floyd album, by the way.”
There were a few rather more elaborate installations, too. These looked like failed attempts to build robots out of junkyard spare parts. Several seemed designed to have at least some limited form of clockwork motion, although they were all peacefully stationary at the moment. They reminded me of the work of Bruce Lacey.
Studying these, we almost walked straight past Ottoline Shearwater, who was kneeling on a cushion in front of one of the beds of greenery, busy with a hand trowel and a bag of plant food. “Hi,” she called, smiling and waving at us. “Max is waiting for you up at the house.”
We came to a big circular slab of concrete on which was parked the pale blue Subaru, but not the pink one. Evidently Maxine was not in residence at the moment.
On the other side of this Max was indeed waiting for us, dressed in immaculate white trousers, bright orange Crocs, and a kind of long-sleeved African kaftan in a purple batik pattern. Oh, well; he was at home.
Max grinned, shook hands with me and Tinkler, kissed Nevada and then proceeded to give us a guided tour of the premises, of which he was obviously enormously proud. The highlight of our tour was the section of the house that extended out over the sea. Most of this was, naturally enough, given over to a living room, which had stunning ocean views. Absolutely nothing obstructed these views because the house was cantilevered so this part of it stuck out from the cliff. The seaward end of the room was all floor-to-ceiling windows. On the left they terminated against an inner wall that separated this room from the bedrooms, which had a similar layout and view.
On the right there were windows stretching all the way back to the rear wall of the sitting room. For the first four or five metres these looked out onto empty space, towards the further band of cliffs. But then the house rejoined solid ground and the garden stretched away, with its expanse of pebbles and beds of shrubs and various sculptures, bounded by a wall at the cliff edge to prevent careless art lovers from plummeting to their doom.
The rear of the sitting room was long and high and white with a fireplace in the middle of it, set in a surround of natural stone. There were paintings hung along the wall on either side of the hearth.
Max next showed us the bedrooms, briefly, and then, at the far end of this cantilevered wing of the house, a narrow utility room, hardly wider than a corridor.
After our experiences at Erik Make Loud’s, I thought Tinkler and I would never want to step into a room containing laundry appliances again. But this was different, and rather fascinating. At the far end, the seaward end, there was a sort of hinged circular steel hatch set in the concrete floor. Max delightedly flipped it open for us and suddenly a cold breeze was pouring in and we were looking down, down, down at the green and white tumult of waves moving on the surface of the ocean far below.
“Like in a medieval castle,” said Nevada.
“Yes, except here it’s not a toilet.” Max shut the hatch again and the wind ceased. “We just use it for any organic waste from the kitchen or the garden that doesn’t go in the composter. Just whoosh, straight into the ocean. Back into the great cycle to feed the marine life.”
“Did you have it in here when Maxine was little?” said Nevada. I knew what she was thinking. The hatch was much too small for a grown-up to fall through, but a child…
Max grinned. “We had a padlock on it in those days. But she’s a big girl now. And we haven’t got any pets who might come to grief.”
“Better watch out for midget visitors, though,” said Tinkler.
* * *
Max and I went off to see the real objective of our visit—his record collection. We left Nevada and Tinkler in the kitchen with coffee and pastries. It was a point of honour for me to go through the vinyl on my own this time, since I’d abnegated my duties yesterday and delegated the two of them to search Tom Pyewell’s.
Max’s records were in a games room on the ground floor. It was windowless, with soft grey carpet and grey walls. There was a pool table in the centre and the walls were lined with white storage units especially designed for vinyl. Max turned the lights on. “A few years ago Maxie earned some pocket money by sorting my record collection into alphabetical order for me.” He shook his head. “Or at least, Maxie’s idea of alphabetical order. So, good luck. If…” He smiled and paused. “Let’s think positive about this. When you find the record, just come to my office and we’ll discuss terms.” He gestured to a doorway down the hall, and left me alone.
I turned to the records. I recognised the shelving they were stored in as coming from everyone’s favourite Scandinavian flat-pack furniture emporium. And it was a sizable collection, requiring such storage solutions. There were ten units, each five shelves high. Doing a quick estimate, that meant about two and a half thousand records. They’d better be in some kind of sequence or I was going to be here all day.
It only took a few seconds to realise what Max had meant about his daughter’s idea of alphabetical order. The LPs were alphabetical, all right, but by title. So, nothing under B for Black Dog. Instead I looked under S, and found Scarlet Ceremony, their second album, in what was clearly an early or first pressing. At this point I started to get interested, indeed excited. This confirmed that Max actually did have some records by his old group in this collection. It also confirmed that his daughter was a complete ditz, because there were several hundred classical records in the S section, just because they all had Symphony in their titles.
I moved quickly to the last of the shelving units, looking for W. At the very end of the bottom shelf in the last unit I found White Ceremony, the first Black Dog album. I could have howled like a dog myself in frustration. Maxine may have had nutty ideas about what constituted a title, but within her own system she was scrupulous about maintaining alphabetical order. If Wisht was here, it should have been the next record along, to the right of White Ceremony. But there was nothing there. The collection simply ended at this point.
Then I took another look at the section of blank wall beside the shelving unit. It had thin vertical lines in it, running from floor to ceiling. And, looking closer, I saw a pair of indentations at waist level. With a warm flow of recognition I realised that this was a wall closet.
I put my fingers in one of the indentations and tugged. The section of wall hinged open, folding into slim, tall doors on smoothly oiled rollers. I pulled the other section open, but already my sense of triumph was draining away.
In front of me was what appeared to be a flat green expanse of wall with a thin white line painted down the middle. And a narrow band of netting hanging across it.
Netting…
I realised this was a ping-pong table. Or rather, a flat sheet of fibreboard which when placed on top of the pool table, would turn it into a ping-pong table. I found the edge of the board and moved it aside, and suddenly I was looking into a closet with one last white storage unit standing in it. Most of the shelves of the unit were piled with board games, but the top one was full of records. I moved to it and checked the first record on the left-hand side.
My heart sank. The LP was Work Song by Nat Adderley. A great jazz album, but too far along in the alphabet. We’d gone from White Ceremony to Work Song with no Wisht in between.
So that was that.
Game over.
How appropriate for the games room.
But then something occurred to me. The LPs on this shelf were jammed in very tightly together. I could understand the impulse to get the rest of the record collection neatly into this last shelf and not have an untidy few stragglers spilling over into the one below.
So, maybe…
I tried to pull a few records off the shelf. It wasn’t easy because they were squeezed so tight. Patiently I worked half a dozen or so free from the centre of the mass and eased them from the shelf. This suddenly created a more reasonable fit—indeed, I imagined I could hear the poor compressed records sighing with relief—and it also gave me room to operate.
I slid Work Song off the shelf…
And there it was. Jammed in on the left of the Adderley album, it had slipped forward as the shelf had been relentlessly packed, until its spine had ceased to be visible.
Wisht.
It was the flip back cover. I took the record out of the sleeve. It was in perfect condition—and it was the original pressing, with the narrow track between two wide ones on Side 2.
We’d done it.
* * *
I carried the record back down the corridor, feeling strangely weightless. I couldn’t wait to see Tinkler’s face when he saw it. I knocked on the door of Max’s office. “Come in,” he called. I opened the door. It was heavy and thick and swung on an impressively smooth and noiseless mechanism. It was the door of a recording studio.
