How I Left the National Grid (5 page)

‘I’ve been in a black hole,’ she’d write. There’d be so many apologies, so many obstacles, I could barely find Nataly in the writing. Sometimes the letters would stop and I’d think, that’s it, she’s gone. I’d write again, ask if she was alright. She’d say, ‘Course I am.’

I’d say, ‘What was all that about?’

She’d say, ‘Forget it.’ Every now and then we’d talk on the phone and towards the end she’d say the odd thing. Like ‘Sometimes it’s best if you keep your distance from me. I could be too much for you.’

‘I’m not going to desert you if it gets a bit rough. This life you and I are making. It’s not a merry-go-round.’

‘You think you’ve been in some bad places, you don’t know what my mind is capable of.’

‘Don’t be daft,’ I’d say. ‘What’s the worst you could do to me?’

That number stayed in the box. I left her name off it. Just in case.

2

Sam got off the tube at Shoreditch, resisting the offers of free newspapers as he struggled to follow the instructions on a crumpled printout. The pictures on the publisher’s website had suggested he was heading into a business empire, with various different wings. But having arrived at a cramped alley off the main road, he instead found himself having to search for mere clues. Fragments of the company’s aesthetic, hinted at on their lurid website.

Behind posters hurriedly pasted to walls there were few street numbers visible. Did Mason House only exist online, he wondered? Lost beneath more recent ideas? Consulting the map, Sam reasoned that it had to be somewhere between the stall selling genuine Jamaican jerk chicken at his side and the messy mobile phone shop at the end.

A sign indicated that the publishers owned the building glistening by an array of phone covers. Outside it, music played from a ghetto blaster encrusted with glitter.

As he walked through the glass entrance Sam saw a semi-circle of staff taking turns to blast graffiti onto a wooden panel. ‘Mason House’ it said. ‘The future they promised us.’ Sam giggled, unable to supress his derision.

He offered his name to a woman with a pierced lip at the front desk, and asked where he might find Martin Graham. ‘Hi Sam, yes, Martin is expecting you,’ she said, reaching for the intercom. ‘Mart, Sam is here.’

‘Great. Send him up,’ the voice replied.

She led Sam up a sticky set of steel steps at the back of the room, into an open-plan office on the first floor. Martin was a lean man with a thatch of wiry hair, and a jutting jaw. He somehow worked amongst a circle of blow-up furniture. Framed prints of book covers surrounded him on the walls. Culture slimed over
him from all sides, demanding excessive praise.

‘This is Martin,’ the woman said, extending her hand. Martin instantly flipped down the lid of his laptop. He tore off his designer glasses and rose to greet Sam.

‘Sam! It was good of you to come. I hope you didn’t travel all the way down just for this?’

‘Er, no. Not at all. I was down for other business as well.’

‘Wonderful.’

Sam found himself being steered onto a beanbag, on which he struggled to stay upright. Women with bright red lips and insolent expressions tapped at computers. Martin saw Sam taking it all in, and smiled. ‘Can we get you a drink at all? We have a blender somewhere in the office. Polly can whip us up a mean smoothie.’ A woman in a spotted headscarf rose, somewhat joylessly, at the mention of her name.

‘An orange juice would be fine.’

‘Amazing.’

‘Can I get you anything, Martin?’ Polly asked.

‘I’ll have a skinny caramel frappuccino with the chocolate space-dust,’ he said, twirling his fingers. His eyes rested on Sam, expectant and suspicious.

‘So. What have you got for me?’

Sam tried to remember his notes, but his mind went blank. A woman wearing a sailor hat pushed a pencil into a whirring machine, and Sam gritted his teeth. ‘There are forums about The National Grid online that have gone into overdrive with the rumours that Wardner’s going to make a return. They didn’t even know if he was alive. When he vanished people assumed it was suicide, but his family were always so sure he would never have done that.’

‘So these fans are not put off by this talk that he might be a murderer?’

‘I don’t think they believe he could be.’

‘I hear that he developed this intense relationship with a fan
of his. She wouldn’t let him out of her sight so he drove down to the coast with her. Stabbed her in his car and then threw her body off a cliff.’

‘That story is the reason he’s never stayed out of the papers for very long. But there was never a body, so I don’t know how that could be true.’

Martin leaned back on his chair, and started squeezing a small stuffed toy.

‘Could it have been washed away? What about the head of his record label, this Andrew Cunningham? I was told him and Wardner had a big blow out and Cunningham was found dead not long after. Could there be something in that?’

Sam shook his head. ‘There was a lot about Cunningham’s death in the papers at the time. But the coroner’s verdict was Cunningham died of a heart attack. Wardner wasn’t implicated.’

‘But then why did he vanish?’

‘Well no one even knows where Wardner went,’ Sam said, sitting up. ‘There is a market for this story. I still have all the contacts from the early years, and I’ve stayed on top of the case as it’s developed. It’s been a bit of a preoccupation of mine. I could interview those closest to him, all in the course of tracking him down. Then get his side of the story, write it up. I really think…’ He gulped. Was he really going to say these words? ‘I really think that Mason House could be sitting on the biggest music news story of the next decade.’

That was terrible, Sam thought. I’ve blown it.

Martin laughed. ‘I don’t know about that. But of course, I’m curious. Otherwise I wouldn’t have called. I think we could make this happen.’ As he smiled Sam noticed a rather sharp set of incisors.

Behind Sam, someone coughed.

‘Ah, yes,’ Martin said. ‘Sam, I’d like you to meet the person whose been pushing this story down at my end. Camille.’

He raised his eyes as a slender, dark-haired woman stepped
forward. As she looked up he saw she had brooding, finely cut features. She wore a white vintage lace dress, with a blue bow in her hair.

‘Camille, this is Sam,’ Martin said. Sam noticed Camille’s face had vulnerability, as if it could express any emotion at just a moment’s notice. As she leant forward to shake his hand Sam had the sense she wasn’t aware of the potency of her presence.

‘I’m glad you came down,’ she said. ‘I was worried this book was going to be pie-in-the-sky.’

Sam laughed. Her voice was an unusual combination of accents. The soft, creamy vowels of a Parisian blended with a touch of recent Cockney.

‘No, I’m going to pull that pie right out of the sky,’ he said.

She laughed. ‘I don’t know if Martin has told you,’ she said, ‘but I used to read all of your columns in the weeklies when I was at school. I loved your character studies of Robert. I think you really got what he was about.’

‘I’m glad you think so,’ he replied.

‘I read all your articles on The National Grid again when I was preparing a brief for Martin,’ she continued. ‘Have you never thought about releasing them as a collection?’

‘No, I haven’t,’ Sam said, rubbing his neck. ‘But if you were instrumental in getting Martin interested in the story I should probably thank you.’ He found himself taking on the rhythms of her voice.

‘Only if you manage to escape unscathed,’ Martin said.

‘I don’t believe he was a murderer,’ Camille replied. She stood upright, and clasped her hands against her hips. ‘How could he go from
Top Of The Pops
to cold-blooded murder in a year?’

Martin made eye contact with Sam. ‘Let’s hope he didn’t, for Sam’s sake.’

‘It would just break my heart to even think that he was a killer,’ Camille said. ‘When I was a girl, he was one of the few people who seemed to speak about the truth of the modern
world. I used to read him talking about Manchester, and their club scene, and it made me think England must be so exotic!’

‘That’s great. That’s just great,’ Martin said, looking between them. ‘Now, where is that file I had for Ivan? We put together a budget for this guy to write a book on his hunt for Banksy, and I see no reason why we can’t work with the same numbers.’

‘Great.’

He leant over a computer on the corner of his desk and clicked a few times, before walking over to the printer as it spewed out a page. He handed it to Sam.

‘As you can see,’ Martin said, ‘we’ll give you £1500 just to get you on your way, and that should be more than enough to fund your first few weeks of research. Do some interviews with the key players from Wardner’s life. Whoever will lead you to him. He’ll need to be tracked down by the final deadline to release the final payment, which is obviously the biggest.’

‘It’s okay. I can do this full-time.’

‘For one and a half grand?’

I would need to find Wardner straight away, Sam thought. The money would cover the first mortgage payment. He could go back to Elsa with his head held high, just.

‘Can you live with that?’

‘Of course. I’m itching to get started.’

Polly came back into the room, with a plastic flask of orange juice and a glass of elaborately decorated milky fluid. ‘Thanks, Polly,’ Martin said.

‘That’s so exciting,’ Camille said, her eyes on the piece of paper. ‘And if you are lucky enough to be able to speak with Wardner you must phone and let me know what he’s like straight away.’

‘If I survive it.’

‘I wouldn’t be brave enough to try and track him down.’

‘Sounds like you know as much about his work as I do?’

‘Maybe. Wardner’s records meant the world to me,’ she said.
‘I grew up in Paris and had those terrible teenage years. Bullied at school, always trying to hide. Just lived in records, that sort of thing. Spent a week inside ‘Tainted Love’.’

‘That must have been cramped,’ Martin said.

‘Bit pretentious, isn’t it, to live that way?’

‘No, I don’t think so,’ Sam said.

‘Anyway,’ she answered, blushing. ‘Here’s my business card, Sherlock. If you ever need a Dr. Watson, you know where to find me.’

‘Thanks,’ Sam said. He fished a scrap piece of paper from his pocket, and receiving a pen from Martin, scrawled out his numbers for her. ‘I could do with those too,’ Martin said. ‘We got your new number off a journalist who used to work with you, and we weren’t even sure it was right.’

‘Tristan?’ Sam didn’t let on he was the only friend he still had in that world.

Martin nodded, finishing his drink nosily. ‘I can see that I’m going to struggle to keep Camille on task now, Sam. You have her all fired up.’

Camille looked Sam up and down. ‘He does indeed,’ she said.

Twenty three years of my life had been leading to this moment. I was about to start recording my debut album.

It felt a bit like being a teenager, when every moment seemed important, permanent.

We were booked into a wood-panelled recording studio out in the Hertfordshire countryside. As we pulled into the drive in a battered Volvo an ashen-faced Robert Plant was leaving, flanked with his entourage. We hadn’t had our advance through yet so all our instruments were still in bin bags. When Theo moved to pull his bass out the back seat Simon pulled him back.

‘What are you doing?’ Theo asked.

‘What I’m doing is preventing Led Zeppelin from seeing that we still use black bin liners to transport our instruments.’