Written in Dead Wax (29 page)

I looked at the Hathors, the two original pressings. They were the Jerry Fielding, HL-005, and the Russ Garcia, HL-006. The Fielding was in good shape but had no cover. The Garcia, on the other hand, had a cover but the vinyl was a disaster, like a relief map of the moon.

I sat down and looked at them. “She was pleased with these?” I said.

“Sure.” She watched me as I sat there, going through the logic of it. “What are you thinking?”

I considered. “I’m thinking that we know quite a lot.”

She went and sat down in the only armchair that wasn’t full of records. “Like what?”

“Your grandmother said there was something crucial, some vital information in the fourteen Hathor releases.”

“Yes.”

“And she needed all fourteen of them.”

“Yes.”

I remembered the neat little rank of LPs, pristine and complete, on Mr Hibiki’s shelves. I remembered that smile as he’d added the last one.

Now suddenly, for the first time since Japan, I felt my spirits lift. I could begin to sense an answer. There was something about all fourteen albums, when you had them together…

She grinned. “Well, she didn’t put it quite as neatly as that. But that was it, more or less, yeah.”

“And she was happy with these two.”

“I’d say so. She laughed like the devil in hell when we found them for her.”

I held up one of the records, HL-005, the Jerry Fielding. “Well, one of these has no cover, so we know whatever this information is, it’s nothing to do with the cover.”

And Mr Hibiki hadn’t been interested in the cover of
Easy Come, Easy Go.
He’d been politely appreciative that it was in such nice shape, but that was as far as it went. He’d hardly glanced at it.

I held up the other LP, HL-006, the Russ Garcia. “And this is so scratched that it’s unplayable—it looks like some idiot has played Frisbee with it in a room full of broken glass—so it’s nothing to do with the ability to play the music on these records.”

Just like Hibiki had listened with polite satisfaction to the Easy Geary album, but it clearly hadn’t been what really interested him. Not the music.

She looked at me. “So, what’s left?”

I took the Garcia out of the cover. It didn’t have a protective inner sleeve, and it was much too late for one. I looked at the red and white label with the little Egyptian symbols on it. “Well, the labels for a start.”

I remembered the way Mr Hibiki had stared with such intensity at the label on each side of the record.

“I hadn’t thought of that,” she said. “So you think it’s something to do with the labels?”

I sat and thought about it for a moment. “No.” I indicated the stack of records beside her. “You say your grandmother threw those in a trash can?”

“Oh yeah. ‘Shit-can’ is actually what I said.”

“Okay, well the thing is, most of these reissues are exact replicas, especially the Spanish ones. Visually they are virtually identical, right down to the labels.”

“So it’s not those,” she said.

“No.” I remembered Hibiki’s intense gaze. He hadn’t necessarily been looking at the label at all. Instead he could have been studying something
adjacent
to it.

“So what is it?”

I said, “I think it’s what’s written in the dead wax.”

“Okay, what’s that?”

“It’s after the run-out groove, where the needle ends up at the end of the record. There’s a space there where information is written, etched into the vinyl itself.”

“Information,” she said.

I nodded. “Music is the principal information on a record, but this other stuff is a kind of information too. There’s a matrix number, which identifies the master tape that was used. And the stamper numbers that tell you where and when the record was manufactured.”

I paused, thinking. “And sometimes there are other things in the dead wax, too.”

She was looking at me. “What sort of other things?”

I went to her pile of records and eased out the copy of
Easy Come, Easy Go
. It was a Japanese reissue like the one I’d found at the jumble sale, ten million years ago. “Take this for instance. Easy Geary and your grandmother both signed it. If this was the original pressing it would have their autographs in the vinyl. Which was very unusual.”

She took the album from me and looked at it. “But they’re not here on this copy?”

“No. Only on the 1955 original. But that wasn’t all there was.”

“What, you mean there was something else… written in the dead wax?”

I nodded, going back to the Fielding and the Garcia. I could feel my pulse racing steeply. I thought,
Hibiki you bastard, I’ve got you now
.

I said, “On
Easy Come, Easy Go
there were these two other weird letters.”

“Weird?”

“They were nothing to do with the stampers or matrix. They weren’t even the initials of the engineer. We identified all those. These were something else. On side one there was a B. On side two there was a Y. So, BY.”

She was staring at me. “What does it mean?”

I looked at the Fielding album and the Russ Garcia, albums HL-005 and HL-006. “And on these we have YI and ST.”

She came over and stood beside me, looking down at the records. “So what does that tell us?”

I got up. At last I began to feel I was getting somewhere. The frustrated turmoil I’d felt since flying back from Japan was leaving me. Lifting off me like a heavy burden. “It tells us this. There are fourteen albums.” I thought of them, sitting there on Mr Hibiki’s shelf. “Each, I’m guessing, with two letters in the vinyl, one on side one and one on side two.” I found a notebook and turned to a blank page. “Putting them in sequence, this is what we get.”

“The dashes indicate the missing letters from the other eleven albums.”

She nodded, studying the letters while I poured some more coffee. She looked at me as I came back to the table and put a cup down in front of her. “You think there’s a message here?”

“Your grandmother certainly seemed to think so.”

She examined the paper again. “It’s a full-on puzzle.”

“Why didn’t she just leave you a letter?” I said.

She looked up at me. “What do you mean?”

“Instead of the big mystery, why didn’t she just leave you a letter explaining everything.”

“She did,” said Ree. “Well, she left me a letter telling me everything was in her diary.”

“And did she leave you her diary?”

“She did. But it disappeared.”

“Disappeared?”

She looked at me. “Yeah. It was all very shady.”

“You think it was stolen?”

She shrugged. “It was there and then it was gone. Maybe it slipped through a rift in the universe.” She sipped her coffee. “Or maybe, yeah, it was stolen.” She looked at me again, holding my gaze steadily with hers.

“Who would have taken it?”

“There was this creepy guy who was supposed to be writing her biography. He disappeared about the same time as the diary.”

“That sounds pretty conclusive.”

“I thought so. And I’m working on tracking him down. Anyway, can you help me? To find the records, I mean.”

I thought,
Is the Pope Catholic?

“Sure. Of course. I guess.”

She took my phone numbers and left.

That night, as I got ready to go to bed, I noticed my mobile phone sitting where I’d plugged it in to recharge. It was back at full power and the screen was flashing. I had a message. Several messages.

As I unplugged it from the charger, it started to ring. It was Clean Head. I answered.

“Where the hell have you been? I’ve been trying to reach you since this morning.”

“Sorry. My battery was dead.”

“I didn’t want to tell you in front of Tinkler,” she said. “I mean him being just out of hospital and all. I didn’t want to give him any shocks, but…”

“But?”

“When we were driving today. When I picked you up from the hospital…”

“Yes?”

“Someone was following us.”

“I told you Clean Head would get us here on time,” said Tinkler.

“Don’t call Agatha ‘Clean Head’,” I said, aghast. I glanced nervously at where she was sitting, in the front of the cab.

“It’s all right, she’s given me special permission. Isn’t that right?”

“That’s right,” she said, peering out into the night as the wipers swept the windshield. “So long as he doesn’t make a habit of it.” We had reached the mini roundabout between Barnes High Street and The Terrace and the Friday traffic had suddenly come to a standstill. Snow was drifting down in a soft white curtain over the river.

“And anyway,” said Tinkler, looking at me pointedly, “you’re one to talk. It was you who gave her a nickname in the first place.”

This was true.

“How would you feel if someone did that to you?” he persisted. “Gave you a silly nickname?”

“Funny you should say that.”

Clean Head dropped us off by Barnes Bridge Station and we walked back, feet crunching on the snow, for the short distance along the Thames to the pub. “Gustav Holst lived there,” I said, pointing at a handsome red-brick house with a white lattice-work balcony and blue plaque on the wall.

“I know,” sighed Tinkler. “You’ve only told me fifty times.”

The front of the Bull’s Head is a spacious open bar with a high ceiling and, according to Tinkler, a “dangerously excellent” selection of malt whiskies. “Are you sure you should be drinking so soon after a serious head injury?” I said as they served him a Cragganmore.

“The only thing they said I should try to avoid was falling down the stairs.”

“They’re clearly not aware of your substance abuse issues.”

He sniffed the whisky happily. “I should have made it a double.” I ordered a glass of red wine, even though I felt sad whenever I thought about wine—it made me think of Nevada.

We went through the pub and into the small auditorium at the back, paying at the door. A teenage girl with a pint glass full of pound coins and a roll of fivers sitting there on a stool took the money. Tinkler insisted on paying. I had noticed that people did that now I was suddenly wealthy. This was in stark contrast to the custom previously, when I’d been broke, and when it would have made some sense, in addition to being really useful.

Tinkler also insisted that we sat right at the front, our feet virtually touching the low stage where a gleaming Yamaha grand piano, a drum kit and a variety of microphones stood, with colourful cables snaking around them. He then set about putting in earplugs. I said, “Why don’t you just sit further back and not use the earplugs?”

“What?”

“Why don’t you just sit further away from the stage and not use the earplugs?”

“It wouldn’t be the same. You’d lose the sense of immediacy. Here, do you want some? I have a pair spare.”

“Maybe later,” I said. A door clanked open at the side of the building, behind the piano, and Ree stepped through, flanked by a pair of paunchy middle-aged men who had the affable, slightly ironic look of musicians. I was surprised at how glad I was to see her. She smiled at me.

“Hey, Chef,” she called and waved as she and the musicians walked to the small bar at the back of the room.

Tinkler was staring at me. “Chef? Has she given you a sassy nickname already?”

“She liked my pasta sauce.”

“That’s stupendous.” He was grinning like the Cheshire Cat as they shut the doors and the gig began. When Ree came on and sang, Tinkler looked at me and whispered, “She’s good.” Then he took his earplugs out. “She’s really good.” Then he looked at me and hissed, “She sounds just like…”

“Her grandmother. Now shut up.”

She ended the first set with ‘Joy House Blues’, a Professor Jellaway number.

The song allegedly commemorated Jellaway’s stint as a whorehouse pianist in New Orleans and its ironic title alluded to how this giant of the music had felt about that situation. But he had turned the tables on those who exploited and demeaned musicians when he’d turned it into a hit popular song and one of the first small masterpieces of jazz.

In the interval most of the audience and all of the musicians decamped to the bar at the back of the hall or went out into the pub proper. Tinkler and I stayed put. “That was… amazing,” he said.

He took out a pale blue plastic lunchbox with a snap lid and opened it. Inside nestled a glistening, dewy bunch of grapes. They were plump and so purple they were almost black. He began to pluck them off the stalks and eat them.

“Tinkler, for Christ’s sake.” I looked around to make sure nobody had noticed. “You’re supposed to buy snacks on the premises, not bring your own.”

“Well, they’re not likely to sell grapes, are they, on the premises?” He was talking with his mouth full. Then he swallowed and smiled and said, “Hey look, here she is!” He beamed as Ree came over carrying a drink and joined us, sitting on the low podium amid a mass of cables, her knees pressed against ours.

She put her drink down on the stage. “Are those grapes?”

“Help yourself,” said Tinkler magnanimously. She did so, munching them happily.

“Were you wearing earplugs?” she said.

“He didn’t want to lose any immediacy,” I explained. She nodded, as if this made sense, then reached into a pocket and took out a small roll of banknotes.