The Dead Side of the Mike (9 page)

He began to think that he had been romanticising about Andrea's death, excited by its recent shock and the crusading spirit which Steve's brown eyes had inspired in him. The next morning, the Thursday, he had woken up full of St Georgishness, determined to track down the dragon which was distressing that particular damsel, but as the day passed, it was his determination rather than his knighthood which proved errant. By the Friday morning he had forgotten any idea of a quest, or perhaps he had come to see through it as a simple ruse to keep in touch with the damsel.

So he did nothing in the way of investigation. The idea receded and the arrogance which had made him think of pursuing the girl shrank into lethargic self-distaste. What had a fifty-one-year-old man of diminishing charms to offer to a girl like her? He was far too old. He was glad he hadn't made any advance; he had thus saved himself the embarrassment of her puzzled and gentle but inevitable rebuff. And to think of using the suicide of her friend as an excuse to wriggle his way into her affections was shabby, the trick of a dirty old man.

No, Andrea Gower's death had been no more than it appeared. The poor girl, to whom life had dealt more than her fair share of knaves, couldn't face the descent from the manic happiness of her trip to New York and had taken her own life. Whether Mark Lear or anyone else had spoken to her just before the suicide was not particularly important. It hadn't affected the outcome.

Andrea Gower had committed suicide. There was nothing else to think.

Two things happened on the Friday afternoon to change that conclusion. The first took place, with the perversity that dramatic revelations have for choosing undramatic settings, in the launderette.

Charles didn't visit the launderette as often as he should. The little sink that lurked behind a plastic curtain in his bedsitter was good enough for drip-dry shirts, Y-fronts and socks. And such items dried satisfactorily from hangers by the window in summer, or on a Heath Robinson system of strings over the paraffin heater in winter. These methods, and occasional trips to the dry cleaner with jackets and trousers, could keep him reasonably nice to be near for most of the year.

But the bedsitter really couldn't cope with sheets. They wouldn't fit in the sink, they took up too much space when hung up and they took too long to dry. A fellow actor of similarly unambitious domestic habits had recommended that he buy fitted nylon sheets, which, the sponsor assured him, would dry in no time and could be put virtually straight back on to the bed after washing. Charles did actually buy some, but, after one night of feeling like a kipper fillet sealed in its individual polythene bag, relegated them firmly to the bottom of his wardrobe. The action gave him the righteous feeling that he still had some standards left.

But rejecting the nylon solution made the launderette inevitable. Every now and then he had to take his prized cotton sheets down to be washed and, more importantly, to be dried. The gaps between the now and the then were longer than those recommended in most books of household management, but at least the visits always happened eventually.

Westbourne Grove was the setting for his nearest launderette, which he often considered must be the most depressing place in the world. A few other candidates – one particular lino-floored pub in Edinburgh, the waiting room at Victoria Station, the Regent Palace Hotel, the South Bank Arts complex and all of Wales – occasionally vied in his mind for the title, but usually the launderette won.

It wasn't that it was dirty. It was regularly swept and the pervasive smell of detergent suggested cleanliness. But the dejected row of plastic-covered metal chairs, the piles of blue plastic baskets and the instructions unevenly printed out in felt pen suggested the set of some Beckett paean to despair. The characters who inhabited this bleak landscape matched.

Perhaps they weren't all miserable, perhaps they hadn't all just been kicked out of loving marital homes or recently widowed, hadn't just had their illegal immigrant status discovered, and weren't facing imminent deportation; it's just that they all looked as if they had. As soon as he walked into the place Charles felt he had joined the shifting and shiftless population of London, the sort about whom earnest reports keep appearing in the
Guardian.
What made him feel guilty was that he rather enjoyed being there. Such total abnegation of human hopes had a perversely cheering effect on him.

Two things never changed when he went to the launderette – first, he always forgot to take his own soap, and, second, he always forgot to take whatever book he was reading. It was not from lack of foresight. He would put out the packet of detergent and the book long in advance of his departure; he would even sometimes put them just in front of the door of his bedsitter, so that he could not leave without tripping over them; but, whatever form of physical mnemonic he used, the result was always the same. He would arrive at the launderette clutching only the broken handle of his polythene bag of dirty washing.

This meant recourse to the soap machine. Since he never had the right change and could never find anyone else there who either had it and was prepared to part with it, or who spoke enough English to understand what he wanted, it usually took some time to get his soap. Often he would have to forage abroad for change and return with piles of matches and chocolate bars which he had bought rather than ask directly for what he wanted. He would then, having set his machine in motion, sit bored out of his mind, wondering why the hell he hadn't brought his book, and feeling agreeably abject, a contented piece of flotsam beached by the sea of humanity.

He should have known that something special was going to happen on that particular Friday, because as soon as he arrived at the launderette and made the regular discovery that he had left his soap at home, he found the right coin for the machine in the lining of his sports jacket. (There had been a hole in the pocket for so long that he reached his hand into the lining automatically.) To add to this serendipity, after he had started his wash and made the regular discovery that he had left his book at home, he found an abandoned newspaper on the chair next to him.

Here was riches indeed. A copy of the previous day's
Mirror
. He looked round to see if the newspaper had a potential owner, but decided that neither of the two impassive Chinese nor the dauntingly beaked Arab girl was likely to want it. He settled down to the luxury of reading every word. There was nothing else he could do. That, he decided, was probably why he liked the launderette – all the normal imperatives of life were suspended for half an hour, obedient to the inexorable sequence of rinses and spins.

As always with an unfamiliar newspaper, the
Mirror
seemed to have discovered a completely fresh hoard of news which his regular
Times
hadn't been told about. Or maybe it was just a difference of emphasis and style that made the stories seem unfamiliar. Or maybe (and this he suspected probably to be the real reason) he didn't actually take in anything from
The Times
as he flipped through it over his morning cup of coffee.

The item which shook him rigid appeared on Page 7. Had he not had time to read every word he would not have stopped for it. The headline read ‘WOODCOTE CAR BODY IDENTIFIED' and underneath was this report:

The man found dead yesterday in a car in a lonely wood near Woodcote, Oxfordshire, has been identified as Daniel Klinger, an American record producer who had recently arrived in this country from New York. Police, who removed a length of plastic tubing from the hired car, say they do not suspect the involvement of another person in the death.

He read it again to make sure that he hadn't jumped to conclusions, but the main facts didn't change. Someone called Daniel (or quite possibly Danny) Klinger had arrived recently from New York and (the tubing the police removed suggested) had committed suicide. This had happened less than a week after Andrea Gower had returned from a holiday in New York and had committed suicide. And she had had Klinger's name written on a cassette she had brought back from the States.

It wasn't enough information to produce any meaningful conclusion, but it was at least an interesting coincidence.

And, from the limited facts at his disposal, Charles could reconstruct events in a variety of ways. All were based on the premise that Andrea had met Klinger while in New York, and most on the assumption that they had had an affair. Thereafter the possibilities were diverse.

Maybe Klinger had said it was just a holiday romance and it was despair at having met another unreliable man that drove Andrea to suicide. Klinger had then changed his mind, decided he couldn't live without her, followed her to England, heard about her death and killed himself from remorse.

Hmm. That one was a bit novelettish. Try again.

Maybe . . . they had come over to England on the same flight, then he had revealed he was married/had a girl friend/had lost interest in her, she had killed herself and a week later, tortured by remorse for what he had set in motion, he killed himself . . .

Still a bit flimsy. It was all this remorse that made them sound such feeble theories. Remorse was linked in Charles's mind with broken hearts and heroines with brain fever and other motivations which belonged in the exotic pastures of romantic fiction.

All right, maybe . . . Klinger had wanted to keep his affair with Andrea (or something else about himself) a secret from . . . a person or persons unknown – Andrea had insisted that she was going to tell – so he had staged her suicide and killed her. Then a few days later, tortured by remorse . . .

No, whichever way he did it, remorse kept pushing its way in.

One more try. Suppose . . . Andrea and Klinger shared a secret that A Third Person had to keep quiet at all costs and so A Third Person had killed both of them, making the deaths look like suicide . . .

Well, at least it got remorse out of the way. But, even so . . . And it did raise a lot of other questions. And leave rather a lot of blanks (like, notably, who was A Third Person?).

Basically, he just hadn't got enough facts. He could go on producing theories for days, but until he knew a bit more about Danny Klinger, the theories would be worthless.

Still, he thought as he noticed that his wash had stopped, leaving stalactites of sheet across the window of the machine, there were ways of finding out more about Mr Klinger.

‘Evening Standard.'

‘Could I speak to Johnny Smart, please?'

There was silence from the other end of the line. Charles looked at his watch. Nearly five o'clock. Even Johnny should have finished lunch. On the other hand, it was a long time since they had met and Johnny's drinking habits had been heavy then. Perhaps now his lunches went on even longer. Or perhaps he'd gone home. It was Friday afternoon; in most offices that meant POETS (Piss off early – tomorrow's Saturday).

‘Johnny Smart's phone.'

‘Could I speak to its owner or is the phone the only one there?'

‘Who's speaking?'

‘Charles Paris.'

‘Just a minute. I'll see if he's about.'

There was a muttered conference at the other end of the line to decide a) whether Charles Paris was someone whom Johnny Smart would speak to, and b) whether Johnny Smart was sober enough to speak to anyone.

He came straight on the line, so the answer to a) was yes. The answer to b) was ‘just'.

‘Charles, Charles, my old body – I mean, my old buddy, what brings you to contact me after all these years? If you're suggesting we should meet up and drink seventeen bottles of wine one of these days, the answer is yes.'

‘That would be good. In fact, the reason I rang –'

‘Oh, of course, it's favour time. You want me to find something out for you.' Johnny spoke without resentment.

‘That's right.'

‘What is it this time, Charles?'

‘It's something one of your crime reporters might be able to help me on.'

‘Crime, Eh? That rings a bell. Didn't I hear from someone you're setting yourself up as a bit of a private investigator these days?'

‘Hardly. I just seem to have stumbled into one or two things. Murders, you know.'

‘I see. Is it more profitable than the acting?'

‘I don't make any money from it, Johnny. I still live from my acting – no, let me rephrase that. Any money I make comes from acting.'

‘Oh, I thought you'd given it up. I haven't seen your smiling face on the telly for a bit.'

‘Come to that, it's a year or two since I've seen your by-line in the paper.'

‘Oh, good Lord, Charles, when you get to my eminence in the journalistic profession, you don't actually
write.
You have little men to do that for you. Anyway, as the South African said, enough of this idle Bantu. I'm a busy man. I have an important meeting at half-past five with –' He broke off as some unintelligible ribaldry was shouted at the other end of the phone. ‘Sorry, sorry, I shouldn't say meeting. Brands me as old-fashioned. What I should say is, I have an important and meaningful interface at five-thirty . . . with a wine bottle. So what is it?'

Charles asked if he could have any information available on the death of Daniel Klinger. Johnny said he'd try to find out who had covered the story and ring him back.

The call came through at twenty past five. Johnny was still going to make his ‘important and meaningful interface' at five-thirty. ‘There's not a lot known, but I'll give you what there is. Reporter who covered it says there'll be more after the inquest. Early next week.

‘Anyway, this guy Klinger was apparently a record producer in the States. Had his own outfit called Musimotive. Sort of background music company, I gather. It seems that the firm's under some sort of investigation. Fraud, I suppose. That is unofficially thought to be the reason why he killed himself. Presumably he knew something nasty was going to come out.'