Crime Plus Music (28 page)

“Yeah, I could see that,” the sheriff said. “They've played that one to death.”

WATCHING THE DETECTIVES

BY A. J. HARTLEY

I
T
'
S
FUNNY
HOW
A
SONG
can take you back.

In the circumstances, it's kind of hard to believe because I've been working my way to driving Janice home from work for days. It was all I'd thought about, getting her in the car away from everyone else, where we could talk and such, you know? But now she is in, and I can smell the perfume she dabbed behind her ears, and she is wearing the skirt—the blue one that hugs her hips and stops a couple of inches above the knee—and I can't think of anything to say, but I know that when I turn on the ancient cassette player, it will be there: that crooning bassline with the reggae off-beat stutter and the voice insinuating its clever words, jagged as a broken bottle, and I will be suddenly, momentarily back in 1977, hot and sweaty, and loaded with adolescent bafflement.

I say 1977, but Elvis Costello's second UK single wasn't really representative of the time, musically speaking, at least when stacked up against the big sellers of the year. “Watching the Detectives” doesn't even crack the top 100 singles for '77, a list which is dominated by disco, “easy listening,” and throwbacks like Showaddywaddy, if you can believe that. Every other song on the radio seemed to be by Abba, and Paul McCartney had long since moved from “Penny Lane” to bloody “Mull of Kintyre.” I'd like to pretend I was a teenager hipster, a rebel at the front of the punk revolution blowing the Eagles and the Bee Gees out of the water with the Stranglers and the Sex Pistols, but I wasn't. I was thirteen and I knew nothing. I'd just got my first cassette player for Christmas and the first song I ever recorded off the radio—and this hurts to admit—was “Don't Give Up On Us” by that guy from
Starsky & Hutch
.

Sad.

But a part of me knew even then that that was all kinds of fucked up, and I know that because I'd seen Costello and the Attractions doing “Watching the Detectives” on
Top of the Pops
, and something about it had got under my skin. At first it was just the look of the bloke in his jacket and tie and those huge glasses, pulling faces into the camera and twisting his lip into that pre-Billy-Idol Billy Idol sneer. I couldn't decide if it was ridiculous or brilliant, and because I was a kid who didn't know any better, decided not to like it in case I was wrong. In those days what you listened to said a lot about who you were, so you had to pick carefully.

I was scared of being different.

So I taped the bloody David Soul song and sang along to Leo Sayer and nodded in time—God help me—to the plodding, rubber-mallet-to-the-skull creative genius of Status Quo. Come back Noddy Holder, all is forgiven, right?

Anyway.

It was two, maybe three years before I ditched all that stuff, taped over my collections of whatever the hell Radio 1 thought I should be listening to, and started carving out my own little taste cave in the musical landscape. Over time I stuffed it not just with the Pistols, the Clash, the Dead Kennedys, and the Jam, but with Joy Division, the Cure, the Smiths, early XTC, Echo and the Bunnymen, and whatever else the so-called alternative eighties generated. I built my cave and it was me, and if anyone wanted to know me, they had to come into the cave, right? First thing I'd do when I met a girl was find out what she listened to. It wasn't like they had to have the same taste exactly. I mean, some people just don't know any better, do they? But you have to know where you stand on these things. I'm not going to make a serious play for someone who spends her days listening to Boney M. or—as time passed—Banana-fucking-rama. Stands to reason, doesn't it? Half the time I'd find myself wanting to slit them open just to see what they had inside them in place of blood.

The fact is that not many make the grade, especially when you factor in the other basics you want in a woman, the right kind of eyes, the figure, the way they wear high heels without looking like pigs on stilts, the shade of blond, the right amount of make up. You know what I mean. Makes things difficult.

There was this one girl, Michelle Rawlinson, who checked every box, or so I thought. Not too tall, shoulder-length hair, green eyes which wouldn't usually work for me, obviously, but which she managed to pull off somehow, and this smile that made her look ten years younger than she was. Innocent, you know? But not so innocent that it's not worth the attempt. It was a good combination.

We had met at what you might call a mixer at the local sixth form college. I'd already finished my A levels and was trying to figure out what I was going to do next. My qualifications should have gotten me into Oxford and Cambridge but as soon as I got into the interviews the wheels came off. With this one professor who showed me 'round you could actually see him backing off the more I talked, like he knew that I already had nothing to learn from the likes of him. That's what it's like with universities. They say they want smart, talented students, but they don't. Not really. They want kids who won't challenge them and will write down whatever they say. Society should take a big scalpel and slice the lot of them out, you know? All the worthless sheep people. Make some room for the rest of us.

So yeah, by 1985 my educational career had come to a bit of a hiatus, but I still went back to the college dances and such, and since some of the teachers recognized me no one thought to ask me why I was there. This one woman who had taught me history gave me a baffled look one time, and I just smiled at her and asked her how her husband was, even though I knew she wasn't married, and she got all flustered and left me alone.

Anyway. Michelle.

She'd asked me what I was studying and since it was obvious that she was a literature type, I said English, and then went on about
Hamlet
and
Coriolanus
for, like, ten minutes. I knew what the set books were on the A-Level exams and made sure I was ready to say things about them. It's not hard. Anyone can do English literature. It's a joke subject. So Michelle was well impressed and I suggested we go to see
As You Like It
at the Exchange. She was even more impressed with that. Thought me a real high-culture type. The fact that I could give a definitive qualitative analysis of every act at Live Aid sealed the deal.

But the Shakespeare, it turned out, was a mistake, though I suppose it saved a lot of time, showed me things I wouldn't have seen for a while. The show was weird. The woman who played the lead strode about the stage like she was a man or something, bossing people about and being all clever and funny, or so everyone else thought. Michelle about wet herself at one point, and came out all pink and happy at the end. I hated it. I don't know why, but it felt all wrong. Poisonous. As we walked back to my blood-red Ford Escort she just talked and talked about how great it was so I kissed her just to stop her mouth. I hadn't really meant to, and it didn't really go well, but I was just so angry and she was so stupid and I needed her to shut up for five minutes.

She did too. Actually she went really quiet and sat statue still in the passenger seat, and when I asked her if she wanted to get something to eat or go back to my place, she said she thought she should get home. That made me mad too. Still, it might have been okay if I hadn't turned the radio on, if Elvis hadn't started those biting, slashing lines about the girl who pulled your eyes out with a face like a magnet, the one who filed her nails while the detectives were dragging the lake. I turned it up till the bass made the floor shake, and when she asked me to turn it down I ignored her. Elvis did the bit about the parents bracing themselves for the bad news about their daughter's disappearance, and I gritted my teeth with a kind of furious joy I'd never felt before, something that took all the rage and confusion I had been feeling—had always been feeling—and put a match to it so it burned hot and furious and bright.

There was electrical tape in the backseat, the thick, double-width kind. I don't think she realized what was happening till it was too late. I'm not sure I did either. She never even screamed. The scissors weren't as sharp as I would have liked, but they did the job.

Afterwards I just drove around with her sitting next to me, trying to calm down and find somewhere to dump the body. I hadn't meant it to go like this, even though I'd thought about it before. That's normal, right? I mean, people have these dark ideas, fantasies, but they listen to Abba and Boney M. and somehow that keeps you in line, stops you from being antisocial or whatever. That's how it is. If you feel, really feel, and think for yourself, then you find the monster which is inside all of us. Love will tear us apart, right? At least it's honest. I didn't feel bad exactly, not for Michelle. It wasn't like she was a real person. Not really. But I knew that I could get into serious trouble and that was scary.

I went over the people she might have told who she was going out with, who would have seen us together in the theater, and I knew I couldn't hide the fact that I'd been with her. The best solution, I decided, was to chuck her in the canal and then say I'd dropped her at the bus station because I had to get home. I'd lined the backseat with a plastic tarpaulin before I'd put her back there, so clean-up wasn't going to be a problem, and if the police found any of her hair or anything that would just prove she'd been in the car, which I wasn't trying to hide. I even thought how I'd play it if it went to court. I was confident that I could put some doubts in a jury's mind. I'm a pretty good actor, if I say so myself, way better than the bitch who played Rosalind at the Exchange.

But you know what? It never came to that.

It was a week before they found the body. Some loser walking his dog and probably whistling Mull of fucking Kintyre found her the same day—as luck would have it—that another girl went missing from the same school. That one was nothing to do with me, but the cops thought the two cases were connected, and though they brought me in for questioning, looked over the car and my bedroom, even kept a tail on me for a few days, I was never charged with anything. Two months later they got the perv for the murder of the other girl—Peterson, his name was—but they didn't find all the remains. Handy for me, you might say, because they just chalked Michelle up to that bloke. I resented that a bit, because he was the lowest of the low and you'd think any halfwit would have been able to tell the difference between what he had done and what had happened to Michelle, but I suppose it was just as well.

I went to the funeral, partly for form's sake, partly because I wanted to see what I had done. I parked right by the graveyard and set the cassette player just right before going out to stand a bit away from the family while the coffin was lowered into the ground. It's a terrible thing to see parents grieving for a lost daughter. Terrible and great and I felt it all again, the rush of it, the power. They saw me there, of course. They were supposed to. I looked sad and serious and gave them a nod, but Mrs. Rawlinson just gave me this haggard stare and her husband had to be stopped by some brother or other from coming over. He was a big bloke who ran a scrap metal and towing service. Not someone I wanted to tangle with, to be honest, but he couldn't do anything about it, not that day, standing there in his funeral black with the sun shining and everyone watching, and that made me feel powerful too.

Did they know it was me? No. They had thought they had known right after it happened, but then when pervy Peterson got nicked they weren't so sure. I caught her dad watching my house once, just sitting in his tow truck in the street, not even looking up at the window. I called the cops on him and they made him leave, even came to check on me, apologized for the disturbance.

I liked that.

But when the coffin was in the hole and everyone started filing out I went back to my car, climbed in and rolled the window down before turning the engine on. As soon as I did the music came blaring out—“Watching the Detectives,” of course—and I pretended to take a second to figure out how to turn it down. Everyone stared—the parents, friends, relatives, this couple with a baby cradled in her mother's hands who I thought might have been Michelle's elder sister—not so much shocked as knocked back into reality, but I doubt they ever got it. I just wanted them to hear what she heard as she went out, you know? Felt fitting. Gave the whole thing a sense of closure, of ritual. I couldn't help but laugh about it later.

That was thirty years ago. I've not always been a good boy since, but I have been careful. That first time had been an impulse and it was messy. I thought a lot about the next one and made sure that the whole approach was different so that no one would ever connect the two or put me in the frame. The only thing that was the same—think of it as a kind of private joke—was the song I had playing at the end, the same lugubrious bassline, the same insinuating off-beat guitar, the same searing words about how you can't be wounded if you've got no heart. Everything else was different. Maybe not so much the girls. I mean, everyone has a type, right? But the rest was unconnected. After all, I have a life, a career, not quite the way I might have once wanted things to go, but good enough that I wasn't about to jeopardize it by getting carried away.

Then there was Janice. And Elvis on the radio. Like I said, it's funny how a song can take you back.

Right back.

Janice had only been working at Jefferson's a week. I know because she arrived two days after the police visited me for the last time. Remember Pervy Peterson, the bloke who took the rap for Michelle? Turns out he died in prison, and in his last days he confessed to a whole bunch of things. Some of them couldn't be proved, but other things—after he'd written out notes and maps and whatnot could—and the local bobbies were suddenly signing off on a lot of what the police shows on telly called “cold cases.” But he went to his grave, apparently, denying he had ever laid eyes on Michelle Rawlinson. So they came to me again, asking the same questions they had three decades earlier. I hadn't expected this but, like I said, I'm careful and had never forgotten a single detail of what I had told them at the time. So I gave them all the same answers and they went away, their duty done. There was a picture in the paper, but the next day the police said the case was no longer being pursued, so that was that. The following day, Janice showed up.