Written in Dead Wax (3 page)

“I see.” I didn’t.

She tapped the card on her thumbnail. “What we need is someone who can do what you say you can do. Well, can you?”

“Can I do what I say I can do?”

“Yes.” Her impatient blue eyes were steady on mine. A cold draught was blowing up under my dressing gown, probing my nether regions with icy tendrils.

“Yes,” I said. “Look, let’s go into the kitchen where it’s warm. Can I make you a coffee?”

“I don’t know. Can you?”

* * *

Stung by her remark, I got out the good coffee beans and commenced the whole elaborate ritual of making it properly. While the kettle was gasping and sputtering in its battle with its no doubt horrendously calcified heating element, I managed to dart into my bedroom and put some clothes on. I might also have sparingly applied some expensive aftershave. I got back just before the water boiled and switched the kettle off.

If you’re making tea you want the water boiling, but if you’re making
coffee
you want the water just short of boiling. It’s an article of faith.

My guest was sitting in the orange plastic Robin Day chair which resided in my kitchen, chiefly so I could hang the tea towel on the back of it to dry. She seemed quite relaxed. At home, almost. Which was galling because at the moment even
I
didn’t feel at home, and it
was
my home.

When I commenced grinding the beans she put her iPod on. I didn’t entirely blame her. The unearthly scream of the coffee grinder always caused my cats to flee and hide, only to emerge and give me scandalised looks after I’d safely silenced the evil thing and put it away again. When I finished grinding the beans I had a nasty moment, remembering I didn’t have any filters. Then I recalled there were some stored with my German record cleaner. I took down the box from its appointed place, lurking above the kitchen cupboard. She switched off her iPod and looked up.

“What in god’s name is that?” she said.

“A record cleaner.” I unpacked the box and took out every component: the record bath, the drying rack and drip tray, the bottle of cleaning solution, the funnel, the label protector and spindle and finally the coffee filters that were lurking at the bottom. “I use it for cleaning records.”

“I see. That would follow. And it comes complete with coffee filters?”

“No, I substituted the coffee filters, which in my humble opinion work just as well but are considerably cheaper than the paper filters specifically designed for use with it. The record cleaner, that is.”

“How thrifty of you.”

I fixed the filter above the coffee pot and poured in the dark brown, fragrant grounds. At last. We were almost there. “In fact, they work slightly better. What are you listening to on your iPod?”

“‘Gloria’.”

“By Van Morrison?”

“By Vivaldi.”

I shut up at that point and got on with making the coffee. It was soon smelling so good I began to feel glad I’d embarked on the whole marathon. The cats didn’t quite see it that way. Turk was only now emerging from her hiding place behind one of the big Quad speakers.

As I started clattering through cupboards, looking for the good cups, N. Warren rose from her chair. She said, “Do you mind if I snoop?” She didn’t wait for an answer. My bungalow is mostly open plan, so you wander straight from the kitchen into a large sitting room and dining area. From the sitting room further doors lead off to the bedroom, bathroom, a spare bedroom and a small area which had once contained the hot water tank but now housed shelves filled with, perhaps not entirely unexpectedly, records.

I poured her coffee and followed her into the sitting room. She was staring at the records. She glanced at me. “Maybe you
are
the right man for the job,” she allowed. “How many vinyls do you have here?”

I put her cup down on the table by the sofa. “We don’t say
vinyls
, plural.”

“What do we say?”

“LPs or albums. Records, if you like.”

“Well, how many do you have here?”

“In this room? I don’t know. A few hundred. Those are just the ones I’m currently listening to. There’s plenty more scattered around the house.”

“Currently listening to,” she said. She gave me a look and then went and sat down on the sofa and picked up her coffee. She was evidently entirely unaware of the cat’s presence nearby as she sat there, warming her hands with the cup.

Turk silently stole up and jumped onto the back of the sofa behind her, landing lightly and without a sound. I’d once had a female visitor who reacted rather badly when a cat unexpectedly hopped into her lap. She had jumped out of her skin and commenced screaming in a manner that had rather raised my stock with the neighbours.

Now, as my new guest sat leaning forward, sniffing her coffee with suspicion, Turk took the opportunity to stride silently behind her back. Then she eased down, one slow paw at a time, onto a cushion beside our guest, who still showed no sign of having registered her presence.

I was beginning to think I should issue a warning, to prevent a terrible accident involving hot coffee, when she reached out absent-mindedly with one hand and began stroking Turk.

“Who’s beautiful then, who’s lovely then, who wants to be rubbed under the chin then? Do you? Do you? Under the chin? Oh yes, oh yes. That’s right, you do, you do, you do, don’t you? Who’s lovely then? Who’s lovely then? Who likes having his chin rubbed then?”

“Her,” I said.

She paused and looked at me. “Sorry?”

“Her chin. She’s a girl.”

She resumed rubbing Turk’s chin while Turk exalted. “What’s her name?”

“Turk.”

“Funny name for a girl.”

“Short for Turquoise.”

“Because of her eyes.” She got it immediately. “They’re gorgeous eyes. Who’s got gorgeous eyes? Gorgeous-gorgeous turquoise eyes?” She stroked Turk’s head, gently pinning the cat’s ears back then releasing them. “It is you? Yes, I think it is you. It is. It is you, isn’t it?”

“That’s her sister.” I pointed at Fanny who’d emerged from under a chair at the sight of Turk getting all the attention.

“Oh, I didn’t realise there were two of them.”

I felt it was time to get down to business. “So you want to hire me to find a record?”

“My employer wants to hire you.”

“Can I ask who your employer is?”

“No.”

“No?”

“If he wanted to get acquainted with you he wouldn’t have sent an emissary. To wit, me.” She sipped her coffee. “Besides, he’s very busy.”

“So you’re not going to tell me who I’m working for?”

She looked up. “For all intents and purposes, you are working for me.”

“And you’re not going to tell me who
you
are working for?”

“A businessman.”

“A very busy businessman?”

She sighed. “The senior head of a very large corporation. Who wishes to remain anonymous. However I can tell you that he, like you, is a vinyl devotee.” She looked at the shelves of records. “And he has the money to indulge his pastime.”

It’s more than a pastime
, I thought. But I didn’t say anything. She looked at me. “And he is willing to pay you to find a particular record for him.”

I sat down in the only one of the armchairs that wasn’t covered in records. It was a modernist black leather chair that matched the sofa. I’d bought leather furniture because I thought it would prove cat-proof. One of many fondly held theories that had fallen by the wayside over the years. As if to demonstrate this point, Fanny stood up on her hind legs and began to diligently scratch the leather with her front claws, scoring and gouging it.

I said, “Okay. What’s the record you’re after?”

She set her coffee aside and took out an iPhone. Studying the screen, she said, “Have you heard of Everest?”

“The record label?”

“No. The mountain. Yes, of course the record label.”

I smiled happily. She could be as sarcastic as she liked; I was on my home ground here. I said, “I know it quite well. Everest was founded in the late 1950s by Harry Belock, an American who’d spent the Cold War running a company that manufactured precision components for intercontinental missiles. He decided that instead of dreaming up better ways to blow up the world, his talents would be more happily employed finding better ways of recording music. Which he proceeded to do. One of his innovations was to record onto 35mm film.”

I could see that, despite herself, I’d got her attention. “Why on earth would he do that?”

“More bandwidth.”

“But it’s film. Surely it’s for recording pictures, not sound?”

“It’s all information,” I said complacently. This was my specialist subject.

“And it sounded good, did it, this 35mm film?”

“It sounded great. Belock knew what he was doing. He spent a fortune on making custom-built recording decks that could handle the film and he hired a terrific engineer, Bert Whyte, who used them to record music with a classic three-microphone configuration.”

“Ah, yes,” she said. “The classic three-microphone configuration.”

“They recorded good repertoire using top orchestras and conductors in acoustically ideal locations like Walthamstow Town Hall.”

“Of course. Good old Walthamstow Town Hall.” She consulted the screen of her iPhone. “Well, my employer is looking for a recording of Stravinsky’s
Firebird Suite
on the Everest label, conducted by Eugene Goossens with the London Symphony Orchestra.” She gave me the catalogue number.

“Have you got the matrix number?” I said.

“What’s a matrix number?”

“It’s written in the dead wax,” I said.

For the first time I saw a trace of hesitancy in her. “No.”

“Doesn’t matter,” I said and wrote down the information she’d given me on the back of an envelope. Fanny came over and attacked the pen as it moved in my hand. When I finished writing I gave her the pen to play with. “All right,” I said, looking up at my visitor. I tried to keep my voice normal. “Now, about money…”

“There’s a thousand-pound finder’s fee.”

I tried not to let the happy astonishment show on my face. With a thousand pounds I could install underfloor heating and finally build shelves for the records I’d had lying around in crates ever since I’d bought them from an unhinged clergyman who lived in Barnes.

I forced myself to speak. “I’ll need a daily fee as well.”

“What? A daily fee? Why?”

“I’ll be spending all day looking for records.”

“I see. And what would you normally be spending all day doing?”

She had me there. “But I may not be able to find your record.”

She gave me a lopsided smile. “You’re not exactly selling yourself as the best possible man for the job here.”

“Still, the fact remains that I may not be able to find it. And if I’m not getting some kind of payment for looking I’m wasting my time.”

“Well, we wouldn’t want you to waste your valuable time.” She looked around my little house, making it very obvious just how valuable she thought my time was.

“A
per diem
of fifty pounds would do.”

“
Per diem
. A bit of Latin. Nice. But sorry, no.” She smiled.

“But I’ll need travelling expenses,” I persisted. I didn’t, of course, because I already had my travel card.

She said, “That might be possible.”

I shook my head and spoke in what I hoped was a firm and confident manner. “It’s non-negotiable.”

“How much do you want?”

“Thirty pounds.”

“Sorry, no.”

“Twenty-five.”

“You can have twenty.”

“Done,” I said. With my travel card, the twenty quid every day would be pure profit, put straight into my pocket. Or, more likely, converted into cat biscuits.

She smiled broadly. “What do you know, it turned out to be negotiable after all.” Putting down her iPhone, she reached into her pocket and took out a large bank roll and peeled off a twenty-pound note. She put it on the table with her business card, gave Turk one last caress, then stood up. “Well, happy hunting. When you have some news, get in touch. You have my details on the card.” She started for the door.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “What do I call you?”

She paused by the door. “You’ve got my card.”

“Miss N. Warren?”

“Yes.” She opened the door.

“All right, N. Warren.”

“Miss,” she said, and went out, closing the door behind her.

* * *

The first thing I did was get online and search the Internet. Like I’d told her, this was usually the best and simplest way of finding a record. If she chose to ignore my advice and I happened to find a copy lurking somewhere in cyberspace for five quid and resold it to her at an enormous profit, that would serve her right.

But I didn’t find a copy. Not for five pounds or five hundred. There were some images of the record—it had the usual wacky Everest cover art—but no copies for sale. And no information about copies having ever been sold, anywhere, in recent memory. It was obviously a very scarce item. There were various mentions of it on vinyl chat rooms; sundry losers talking about how they’d love to find a copy, and speculations about how much money it might change hands for.

But no hard facts.

So I put my coat on, told the cats to expect me back in a couple of hours and went out. I tramped across the common through the long wet grass and caught a train to Waterloo and then got the Tube, the Northern Line, to Goodge Street. Between Goodge Street and Charlotte Street there is a warren of narrow back alleys, although the word “alleys” doesn’t really conjure up the scrubbed and gleaming affluence of the neighbourhood.

The area is a mixture of upmarket shops and narrow terraced residential buildings. I walked down some whitewashed stairs to what looked like the gleaming red front door of somebody’s basement flat until you read the brass plate on it, which read
STYLI
in a discreet typeface.

There was an illuminated doorbell on the left but I pushed through the door and walked straight in. A short hallway led to a staircase on the left and a door on the right. I went through the door. It led into a small lounge, carpeted and full of handsome but mismatched armchairs with green shaded reading lamps.