Written in Dead Wax (22 page)

“And he now makes a living from making these turntables?”

“He sells a few each year. Mostly to the States and Japan. They’re not cheap, they’re high-end kit, but it’s never quite enough to make a living.”

“So he now also grows huge swathes of weed, right?”

“Yes, he has rather reverted to type there.”

“What’s the wife like?”

“Common-law wife actually.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” said Nevada, “in this day and age.”

“She’s all right. Nice, but a bit ditzy.”

Nevada’s stomach suddenly rumbled, dramatically loud in the confines of the car. We both laughed and she said, “I hope we’re going to get lunch.”

“Oh, we’ll get lunch all right. That’s going to be a strategic and diplomatic minefield.”

“Why? What do you mean?”

I said, “Because she’s probably the only pagan earth mother operating in Wales who doesn’t know one end of a green vegetable from the other.”

“How ironic.”

“So lunch is going to be an application of the triple arts of the freezer, the can opener and the microwave.”

“Oh joy,” said Nevada.

There was a long silence as we watched the landscape flashing past and the traffic, which was sparse but growing as we drove west. Finally I said, “When we get the record cleaned will you have to take it to Japan?”

She looked at me. “Japan?”

I took the plunge. “I checked that number that called you. On my landline. The night your phone wasn’t working.”

“My, you are sneaky. Yes. My employer is based in Japan.”

“But your card says GmbH.”

“Yes. Fiendishly cunning ruse, isn’t it?” She smiled, staring out the window into the distance. “Made you think it was a German concern, didn’t I?”

I said, “Actually, I began to smell a rat when Tinkler asked you about that German Rolling Stones album he covets and you didn’t know what
Sonderauflage
meant.”

She looked at me, askance but fondly. “The vinyl detective,” she said.

* * *

The sun was high and shining down onto a brilliant winter’s morning, the trees bare and the fields limned with gleaming pockets of frost. We reached Hughie’s just before eleven, feeling a little weary with all the miles we’d driven.

We made our first stop at his factory, as we’d arranged on the phone. Hughie was there to greet us, wearing gleaming black Doc Marten boots, tattered jeans and a navy blue donkey jacket. His only concession to the cold was what looked like a Cambridge University scarf. If it was, it would be a garment he had no right to wear; but then that was the least of Hughie’s misdemeanours. He was bare-headed, as if to proudly reveal the afro as advertised.

He was smoking a rollie and threw it aside as he waved to us. He had a lean yellow dog at his side. They were standing in the narrow approach road that came off the main road and ran past the low two-storey building which served as his factory, into the grounds behind. I drove in and around and pulled up by the back door of the old brown building, beside Hughie’s battered vintage BMW.

We got out of our car, yawning and stretching, and locked it behind us. I almost forgot to take the record, which was on the floor in the back of the car, safe in its box and rucksack and as far as possible from any sunlight or heat source.

We heard Hughie’s footsteps as he came down the road beside the building. The dog’s claws were clicking on the frozen surface.

I looked at Nevada. “Whatever you do, don’t mention his afro.”

As soon as Hughie came into sight she said, “I love your hair.”

Hughie grinned and rubbed his head happily, as though discovering it for the first time, and I knew that, once again, she’d got away with it. “It would make a really good Jewfro,” he said, “if only I was a Jew.” And he came forward to shake hands with me and give Nevada a rather impertinent hug and kiss on the cheek. On both cheeks, in fact.

I had to remind myself that we were in neo-hippy territory here.

The dog promptly disappeared, clattering through a large dog flap in the factory door, sensibly getting out of the cold and leaving us to our human concerns.

The grounds behind Hughie’s factory extended back a long way before coming to a high wall that overlooked parkland beyond. All of which was just as well, given the privacy required for Hughie’s agricultural operations on the site. I was familiar with the general layout, having driven down here with Tinkler when he’d had his Thorens restored, but there was now a large new structure looming on the left of the yard.

It was an odd-looking water tank rising from four steel legs like a squat alien giant who had grown tired and given up his attempt to invade our planet.

“What’s the water tank, Hughie?”

He shook his head. “It’s not a water tank. It’s a fuel tank. To feed the generator.” He proudly pointed towards a shed near the rear wall. I realised that was new, too. “I’m now energy self-sufficient.”

“By burning petrol?”

Hughie grinned. “More importantly, it prevents any spikes on the electricity grid from running the lights or the watering system. To grow you-know-what.” He indicated the greenhouses that occupied most of the yard.

“I understand you’ve had a bumper crop this year,” I said. Tinkler always kept me updated on developments at Hughie’s.

He nodded his head, his big afro bobbing. I noticed some streaks of grey in there amongst the brown. “That’s true. That’s how I was able to pay for the generator. Not to mention the fuel.” He looked at me, his eyes a little wild, but no wilder than usual. “I got an entire tanker full. I swapped it for a load of weed.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, it’s the alternative economy.” He gazed fondly at the greenhouses. “You just plant things in the earth and up they grow and then you can swap them for an entire tanker full of fuel.” He nodded at the tank, walking over into its shadow. “And I had to store it somewhere, so I built this.” He gazed up at it proudly, then looked at me. “Now we’re energy self-sufficient,” he repeated.

Nevada was staring at the greenhouses, which were fashioned of heavy-duty transparent plastic. They were big long tunnels sealed at each end, essentially like giant versions of the poly tunnels in which commercial growers cultivate tomatoes. Which was appropriate enough, because all you could see from the outside was the blurry red of tomatoes growing in dense clusters within.

They looked cheerful and festive in the winter landscape.

Of course, behind the screens of growing tomatoes was the real crop, which could just be glimpsed as a rich green background of foliage.

The greenhouses rested on flat rectangles of earth with deep trenches dug all around them, like moats. There was frost in the bottom of these, making a neat white pattern around each greenhouse. You gained access to the greenhouses by crossing the trenches using rather precarious miniature bridges or walkways. These were sheets of corrugated aluminium, which hadn’t been fastened down at either end. They were worryingly unstable under foot, as I’d discovered on my previous visit.

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.

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.