Written in Dead Wax (17 page)

As we crossed the river again, heading north, a thought suddenly hit me. “We didn’t shake them off.”

“What?” Nevada looked at me.

“That night crossing Putney Bridge. We didn’t shake them off,” I said. “We led them to Tinkler’s.”

You wouldn’t believe how many silver vehicles there are on the roads of London, once you start looking for them. I lost count of the number we passed, or were passed by, as we drove across the river to Hammersmith and then north to the Goldhawk Road.

I hit all the charity shops there. It didn’t take long, because they didn’t have much in the way of records. Then we drove past Shepherd’s Bush Common and stopped on the corner of Wood Lane. Now I’d work the Uxbridge Road. The first shop here had an impressive selection of accordion music on LP, mostly from Germany for some reason, but no jazz in evidence.

There was a plump woman sitting behind the counter trying to thread shoelaces into a pair of old-fashioned ice skates. I smiled at her and said, “You don’t happen to have any jazz records at the moment, do you?”

The woman looked up from the pair of ice skates and said, “We did have a box. But we just sold the whole thing.”

“To a blonde woman?” said Nevada.

“Yes. A pretty little thing. Bought the lot.”

As we left the store, I saw her.

She was wearing matching dark blue ski jacket and ski pants, practical enough for the chilly weather but also as close to anonymity as you could get in a plausible city outfit. She was also wearing a pair of sunglasses. They did a pretty effective job of concealing her features, but if anything they helped me. What I immediately recognised wasn’t her face but purely an animal sense of her. The way she moved.

“It’s the woman from the boot fair, the one who got chucked out,” I said.

“And it’s definitely the jazz bitch,” murmured Nevada. “The one I had the wrestling match with over those records of yours.” We had stepped into a doorway and stood there watching the woman. She hadn’t seen us. She looked up and down the street then turned left, heading towards the Tube station. There was a promising cluster of charity shops in that direction and it was where we were headed, too. As soon as the woman turned away and set off, Nevada started to step out of the doorway. I stopped her.

“What are you doing?” she said. “If we let her get ahead of us she will have cleaned out every store before we get there. We have to get ahead of her.”

“No, we have to
follow
her.”

“What are you talking about? She’ll buy the records.”

“We want her to. We want her to buy a shitload of records. More than she can carry.”

She looked at me like I was nuts, but only for a moment. Then she got it. “And she’ll have to put them in her vehicle.”

I nodded. “So we get to find out what her vehicle looks like.”

She frowned for a second, then said, “All right, but if as a result of this initiative she scoops up the record we’re looking for…”

“She won’t,” I said. “I mean what are the odds?” I was far from certain about this though. It was a chance. But one I thought we had to take.

“If that happens I’m going to want your head on a plate.”

“Way to motivate the staff.” We stepped out of the doorway and went after the blonde. I knew the location of the next charity shop and I made sure we stopped short of it, which was just as well because she popped back out of the door a few seconds after she’d gone in. No records, evidently. The same thing at the next shop.

At the third shop she stayed in for a couple of minutes then came back out with a big canvas bag, which could have contained two dozen LPs. It must have been heavy but she didn’t have any trouble carrying it. A strong woman. I tried to stop myself from speculating fretfully about what might be in the bag. We stayed out of sight at a bus shelter until she moved on to the fourth and final charity shop. She remained in there quite a long time.

Nevada and I were standing in the concealment of an open-fronted telephone booth. It was a minimal structure, but enough to break up our silhouette. “I didn’t know they still had telephone booths,” said Nevada. “How reassuring. And how reassuring to know they still stink of urine.”

“Here she comes,” I said.

The woman came out of the shop. She was still only carrying the same bag she’d had when she went in. So had she found nothing? She had been in the shop some considerable time. That would make sense if she’d been flipping through the crates. But that wasn’t her style.

She was of the sledgehammer school of record hunting. Buy everything now and look at it later.

She remained standing in front of the charity shop, scanning the street both ways. Nevada and I pressed ourselves behind the phone booth. “How long is she going to stand there?” said Nevada. Just then a vehicle pulled out of the traffic stream and up to the kerb opposite the shop front.

It was a big sports utility vehicle, or people carrier as they’re called.

And it was silver.

The woman went back to the door of the charity shop and opened it and said something. She stood back and two skinny teenagers came out of the shop, each carrying a yellow plastic crate of records. I guess that the kids worked in the store and had been enlisted to help. They’d evidently thrown the crates in as part of the deal. The woman in the ski suit had just bought everything. She looked sufficiently well heeled to have no trouble coming up with a generous purchase price… for pretty much anything she wanted.

The big side door of the people carrier was thrown open. A brawny man got out and helped the kids put the crates into the vehicle. I got a good look at the guy’s face and his short cropped blonde hair.

It was the jerk from the boot fair. The knucklehead who had knocked me off my feet.

I was surprised at how unsurprised I was.

They loaded the records, the kids went back into the shop, and the man and woman got into the people carrier and drove away.

* * *

We told Clean Head to drive us back to the hospital, going by the most circuitous route possible and taking at least an hour to get there. We wanted to visit Tinkler one more time and on the way there we wanted to have a good look for our new friends. But knowing what their vehicle looked like turned out to confer surprisingly little advantage to us.

From time to time we spotted the silver people carrier, or a vehicle very similar. Sometimes it was in front of us, sometimes it was behind us, and a surprising amount of the time it wasn’t in sight at all.

After about twenty minutes Clean Head opened the sliding window that sealed her off from the passenger compartment and said, “I think you’re right. A silver SUV is definitely tracking us. But that doesn’t really help us until we know what the other vehicle is.”

“You think there’s definitely another vehicle?” said Nevada.

“It’s the only way to do it properly.”

I glanced out the window to our right and watched a small figure on a lightweight motorcycle dart past. The rider, who looked like some kind of courier with a shoulder bag, was sexless and anonymous behind a full-face helmet. Bike and rider vanished into the traffic flow ahead of us. I said, “I’ve been seeing a lot of those small motorcycles. You know, trail bikes, around 60cc, that sort of thing.”

“There’s a lot of them on the road,” said Clean Head.

“It could be that,” I said, “or it could be someone changing their helmet and their jacket and looking like a bunch of different riders on different bikes.”

“A motorcycle?” said Nevada. “I’d been looking for a car. But a motorcycle, they could pack it up and put it in the people carrier and carry it around with them.”

“If it was small enough,” said Clean Head.

“Around 60cc,” I suggested. There was silence while this sank in.

I said, “They could even alter details on the bike. Use decals, make it look like a different colour. Switch the number plate. We’d think it was a different one but every time it could be the same bike.”

“It could be,” said Clean Head. “Or it could also just be that there’s a lot of small bikes on the road.”

I said, “Let’s review what we know. There are two of them. A man and a woman. Both blonde. Both athletic types. Kind of Germanic-looking. For the sake of discussion let’s call them the Aryan Twins.”

“I like it,” said Nevada. “The Aryan Twins. Heinz and Heidi.”

“And they’re also looking for
Easy Come, Easy Go
.”

“We don’t know that for certain. I’m playing devil’s advocate here. All we know is that they are buying up all the jazz they can find. How can you be certain they’re after that one record?”

I’d been thinking about this. “When I was at the boot fair that guy…”

“Heinz,” said Nevada.

“Right. He pushed me away from a box of records I was about to look through. What he didn’t know was that I’d already given it the once-over.”

Nevada shrugged. “So what?”

“You see, he just shoved me aside and looked through that one box and then he went away.”

“So?”

I said, “He didn’t bother with the others.” Nevada was looking at me now. I could see her mind working behind her blue eyes. “I think that’s because he’d seen me go through the first two boxes. So he wasn’t interested in them.”

“Because you’d already been through them,” said Nevada.

I nodded. “That’s right. He didn’t check the other crates because he didn’t have to. I’d done it for him.”

“Because we were looking for the same thing.”

“Exactly,” I said. “But the good news is, they haven’t found it yet. We haven’t found it, but neither have they.”

Nevada looked at me for a moment, processing this, then nodded. “Otherwise they wouldn’t still be looking,” she said.

“Exactly. So we’re all looking for the same thing and they haven’t found it yet.”

“But they’re certainly proving to be a nuisance.”

“I agree,” I said. “So I’m going to fix their wagon.”

“What do you mean?” said Nevada.

I said, “When it comes to vinyl in London, don’t fuck with me.”

The next day I put the plan into action.

We drove north, making judicious use of the bus lane through Barnes and speeding across Hammersmith Bridge. I looked down at the birds wading in the water. The sun glittered on the Thames. The birds picked their way delicately across the mud.

“Don’t let the other vehicle lose us,” I said to Clean Head.

“If there is another vehicle.”

We went to visit Tinkler in hospital, staring at his absent face and trying to think of encouraging things to say to each other. Then we drove to the Vinyl Crypt.

The Vinyl Crypt is located in what used to be a bus garage in north London, near Highgate. We took a fairly discursive route there, zig-zagging from Victoria to Ladbroke Grove to Regent’s Park. I leaned forward in the taxi and said, “It’s good that you’re not making it too easy for them, but make sure you don’t lose them.”

There was just a disgusted sigh from the driver’s compartment. I looked to Nevada for support, but she wasn’t offering any. Instead she gazed at me languidly and said, “What are we doing, exactly?”

“In a word,” I said, “sabotage.”

“French is such an expressive language.”

Lenny’s Vinyl Crypt was a legend among record collectors.

You might once have found a gem at Cheapo Cheapo in Soho or even stumbled on something no one else had spotted at the Record and Tape Exchange in Notting Hill. But no one has ever found anything of value at Lenny’s.

A few times I’d thought I’d got something—some wonderful treasure—but when I got it home it was always knackered. I persisted, foolishly, for years buying stuff from there. Always thinking I had beaten the jinx, but always finding some hidden scratch or pressing glitch that would ruin the listening experience.

“It was like a dolls’ hospital for damaged records,” I told Nevada. “No one who had any good or interesting LPs to sell would ever take them to Lenny’s. It’s for the unwanted, the cast-offs. If a charity shop can’t sell its records or if you hold a jumble sale and you’ve got some real dross left over, you go to Lenny’s and dump it for a few pennies.” I looked at her. “It’s where bad little records who didn’t say their prayers at night or brush their teeth end up.”

“Poor bad little records,” said Nevada. “But why would any of this have prevented Tomas Helmer’s ex-wife dumping the records there?”

“It wouldn’t,” I said.

“Then why the hell haven’t we been to this place?”

“Because we only just found out that was her
raison d’être
.”

“Great,” she said. “More French. It should be
raison d’agir
, actually, since we’re talking about her motivation to action.”

“I stand corrected.”

“At least, anyway, we’re racing there now.”

“That’s right.”

“And they might have the record.”

I smiled. “Even if they don’t, we can make good use of the place.”

* * *

Lenny was wearing a beret that might have looked jaunty or hip on somebody else. Somebody who wasn’t also sporting the swamp-varmint long grey hair and long scary beard combo as popularised many years ago by ZZ Top. He also wore a smart-looking camelhair coat and a tartan scarf, both of which made absolute sense given the icy temperature in the Vinyl Crypt.

It was a big damp concrete space, lit by the merciless glare of long fluorescent tubes hung by chains from the high curved ceiling. The walls of the building were green corrugated steel reinforced by girders sunk at intervals into concrete blocks in the floor. The space was big enough to accommodate several double-decker buses, which of course it once had. It always made me think of an aircraft hangar and there was a ghostly smell of fuel that had never left the place. Lenny had fitted it with narrow rectangular tables that had once served a school refectory. They lined both walls of the long structure.

The tables along the walls were stacked with crates of records. There were additional crates underneath. There were more tables, of various shapes and sizes, dotted in the centre of the cement floor, enough of them to make the big space seem almost cramped.