Vinyl Detective E-Book

Andrew Cartmel

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

The fourth book in the hilarious and enthralling Vinyl Detective mystery series. "Like an old 45rpm record, this book crackles with brilliance." David Quantick on Written in Dead WaxAt the height of their success, the electric folk band Black Dog invited journalists to a desolate island for an infamous publicity stunt: the burning of a million dollars. But the stunt backfired and the band split up, increasing the value of their final album vastly. It's this album that Tinkler's got his eye on, and he hires none other than the Vinyl Detective and Nevada to hunt a copy down.Narrowly avoiding a killing spree, negotiating deranged Black Dog fans, and being pursued by hack celebrity Stinky Stamner and his camera crew, the Vinyl Detective and Nevada discover that perhaps all was not as it seemed on the island—and that in the embers of that fire are clues to a motive for murder…

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Also by Andrew Cartmel and available from Titan Books

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

1. White Mule, Black Dog

2. Love or Money

3. The House with The Moat

4. Money to Burn

5. Loopy Groupie

6. Bonfire Night

7. Red and Green

8. At This Time of The Morning

9. The Killer with Two Masks Thing

10. The Green Ceremony

11. Pink Cottage

12. Fairy Tale Kingdom

13. No Brakes

14. The Burnt Spot

15. Like Quicksilver

16. Reliant Robin

17. The Drowning Man

18. Viking Funeral

19. Team Meeting

20. Alexander Von Humboldt

21. The Sea View

22. Deckchairs in The Dark

23. Honey Trap

24. Porky and Perky

25. Farmhouse

26. Establishing Shots

27. The Statue Garden

28. Garderobe

29. Two Recordings

30. Kind of Red

Epilogue

Author’s Note

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also Available from Titan Books

THE VINYL DETECTIVE

FLIP BACK

Also by Andrew Cartmel and available from Titan Books

Written in Dead WaxThe Run-Out GrooveVictory Disc

THE VINYL DETECTIVE

FLIP BACK

ANDREW CARTMEL

TITAN BOOKS

The Vinyl Detective: Flip BackPrint edition ISBN: 9781785658983E-book edition ISBN: 9781785658990

Published by Titan BooksA division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First edition: May 201910 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2019 by Andrew Cartmel. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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For Scott Cochrane, with thanks for a lifetime of friendship.

1. WHITE MULE, BLACK DOG

I’ve been shot at before.

I had hoped it would never happen again.

The way it came about this time was, like so many misadventures in my life, largely thanks to the intervention of one Jordon Tinkler.

“How long have we been friends?” said Tinkler.

“Here it comes,” said Nevada, from the kitchen. My sweetheart tends towards the cynical.

“Am I not your best friend?” continued Tinkler, ignoring her and giving me his finest beseeching look. It made him look like a cute little puppy who just at that very instant has contracted rabies. You can sort of see the mad force of the virus swimming up in those big, moist eyes.

I sighed. “What do you want?”

“Yes, what are you after this time, Tinkler?” said Nevada. She came in from the kitchen carrying a bottle of wine by the neck in one hand and in the other three glasses, held by their stems in an untidy but somehow elegant cluster. She set the glasses deftly down on the table without so much as a clink and then proceeded to pour the wine in a precise steady stream from a considerable height, standing over the first glass with the bottle neatly aimed. The wine poured in a graceful golden flow and she didn’t spill a drop.

“What is this?” said Tinkler. “White wine?”

“Don’t try and change the subject,” said Nevada. She finished filling the glass and started on the next.

“But you only ever drink red wine!” exclaimed Tinkler, all innocence.

Nevada corrected him, frowning with concentration as she poured. “I only ever drink Rhône wine. Or Rhône style. And this is from one of my favourite Rhône producers.”

“But it’s white.”

“Yes it is. In fact, it’s called the White Mule.” She finished filling the second glass and moved the bottle over to the third. The pale golden wine glugged softly into the Riedel crystal. “But stop milking it, Tinkler. What kind of favour are you sniffing around for?” As she said the word ‘sniffing’ she picked up a glass and held it happily to her nose.

“A favour?” said Tinkler. “You wrong me. I just want to hire your boyfriend here to do what he does best.”

“Find a record?” All of a sudden I was interested.

“Yes. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I want to hire the Vinyl Detective. You do realise it was me who first thought up that name?”

“No it wasn’t,” I said. I remembered getting the idea, standing in front of the machine that printed the business cards. Late at night, in an airport, during the grinding, endless red-eye wait between planes.

In many ways it had been a bad idea and had led me to bad places.

On the other hand, it had led me to Nevada…

Now she stopped sniffing the bouquet of the wine and smiled at me. She knew I was thinking of her, the little minx. She handed me a glass.

It was cool in my hand. I gave the honey-coloured liquid a tentative sniff. It smelled good. That was about the extent of my expertise. “What about me?” demanded Tinkler, and she handed him a glass. I took a sip from mine.

It was creamy and complex and some other adjectives I had learned from Nevada.

“So,” she said, turning to Tinkler. “How much are you going to pay him, to find this record that you want so badly?”

“Jesus, you’re so mercenary.”

“I’m his business manager,” said Nevada. “It’s my job.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll pay you. You’ll get paid.”

“You’d better. We’d better. How much?”

“A fair amount.”

Nevada sighed. “That doesn’t sound very promising, Tinkler. Suddenly I’m not sure we can even fit you in. As a matter of fact, we were thinking of taking a holiday. A nice, long holiday.”

“You can’t go on holiday. Your cats are too neurotic to be safely left on their own.”

“We have friends who will look after them. Proper friends. Not like you.”

Tinkler turned to me imploringly with his big, but slightly crazed, puppy eyes. “Oh, come on. Find my record. For me.”

“How much are you going to pay us?” Nevada was remorseless.

A look of glum resignation came over Tinkler’s face. He realised despite all his attempts at evasion he was going to have to talk turkey. “Depends on the condition. Obviously. But let’s say…” His forehead furrowed with simian calculation. “Fifty per cent of the median Record Collector guide price.”

“Seventy-five per cent,” said Nevada instantly, despite not having any idea what the median Record Collector guide price might be.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” said Tinkler. “Don’t I get the friends and family rate? Don’t I rate it? Don’t I rate the rate?”

“What is it?” I said. They could thrash out the gory financial details later. They both looked at me blankly. “What are you after?” I said, patiently. “What is the record?”

* * *

Of course, nothing can ever be straightforward.

And it all began to get a lot more complicated on the very first day I started working for Tinkler. It was a bright winter morning with a cold bite in the air. I caught the bus across Hammersmith Bridge in the low, streaming sunlight and then took the Tube to Shepherd’s Bush. From here I worked the charity shops eastwards towards Holland Park.

It is still possible to find astonishingly rare records at bargain prices in charity shops. Of course most of these shops have resident ‘experts’ to sift through their stock and pull out any choice items for premium pricing. In practice this means anything by the Beatles or Elvis being assigned astronomical price tags regardless of their scarcity or collectability. But the same chump who thinks a digitally remastered reissue of the King’s greatest hits on wafer-thin late 1980s vinyl is worth a small fortune might well let a British Vogue yellow label release of a Sonny Rollins Contemporary slip through for a pittance.

And these treasures do turn up, going for a song, to be seized on by someone like yours truly, with trembling hands and a corresponding song of gratitude in their heart.

Today, however, the god of charity shops didn’t smile and my search had yielded nothing—or rather, it had yielded a nice early Stan Getz on a French Verve reissue. But no trace of what Tinkler was after.

I wasn’t worried. It was early days yet. And checking the charity shops was just part of my strategy. I was also going to be visiting the record dealers.

I started with Lenny at the Vinyl Vault. I endured his questions about Nevada, questions that were transparently designed to run a health check on our relationship. Lenny was smitten with Nevada and was just waiting for the first sign of trouble between us, at which point he planned to swoop. In so far as someone like Lenny is capable of swooping.

But while he was picking my brains about Nevada, I was picking his brains about a record label called Hex-a-Gone.

“Hexagon?” said Lenny.

“Hex-a-Gone. Like they once had a hex but now it’s gone.”

“Oh, yeah, they had a picture of a hexagon on their label, didn’t they?”

“Yes. It was a multi-layered piece of wordplay.”

But Lenny wasn’t listening to me. I had pushed his buttons and now he was like a computer helplessly and automatically disgorging facts. “Late 1960s folk label, which was absorbed by one of the majors. Was it Atlantic? Anyway, their stuff is very rare. Very collectable. Expensive.”

This last bit was just the boilerplate, so to speak, and Lenny would have added it in response to any enquiry, in an attempt to soften his customer up for whatever price outrage he was planning to perpetrate. Now he went on for a while about how costly and sought-after Hex-a-Gone records were. Which was useful to me, because I soon learned that he had no idea what constituted the most desirable artists or rarest albums.

This was just what I’d been hoping. It confirmed that, in addition to finding gems in charity shops, it was still also possible to get terrific records from dealers at bargain prices, providing they didn’t know what they were doing.

Which, as in most forms of human endeavour, was about ninety per cent of the time.

I left Lenny’s, buoyant and optimistic about my prospects of finding Tinkler’s record. I was making my way along the winding back streets of Notting Hill when suddenly I had the oddest feeling.

It was a quiet street and I’d been on my own for the last couple of minutes, walking through this peaceful backwater in the pearly light of a winter’s day. Everyone had gone into work and no one was coming out yet for lunch.

But now, alone in the cobbled street, I had the sudden intense feeling that I was being watched.

I stopped and, despite myself, looked behind me. There was no one there.

I scanned the street. Blank white walls, black iron gates, windows with elegant curtains drawn tightly shut. Apart from some windowsill knickknacks—three beige pottery dogs and a benignly smiling brass Buddha—I was entirely alone.

I started walking again. But I couldn’t throw off the sensation that I was being followed.

I’ve begun to regard paranoia as an inevitable consequence of what I do for a living. Or at the very least an occupational hazard. And I’ve also begun to listen to my instincts. I’m not mystically inclined or a believer in the sixth sense or anything similar—I leave all that to Nevada—but better safe than sorry is my motto. And right now my instincts were telling me to walk more quickly, get the hell away from this lonely back street and out in the open, among other people.

To find a crowd and lose myself in it.

I began walking as fast as I could, across Pembridge Road. Then I turned into Pembridge Gardens and hurried towards Notting Hill Gate. I kept up the pace even though I couldn’t see anyone following me. At least there were other people around now. I began to relax, but as I was crossing the street towards the Tube station a big black cab came rumbling out of nowhere, loudly blaring its horn. The noise spooked me and I turned, angry, ready to curse the driver.

But behind the steering wheel of the taxi, smiling at me, was Agatha DuBois-Kanes.

* * *

Better known to her friends as Clean Head, Agatha must be London’s most stylish black cab driver. “Careful how you parse that sentence,” was her standard comment at this observation. Because she is, if not black then at least mixed race, the sort of beautiful blend of esoteric genes which argues for the total enthusiastic mongrelisation of the human race, and the sooner the better.

She also has a shaved head, which is why we call her Clean Head.

It was warm and snug sitting behind her, on the big comfortable leather seat in the back of her taxi as we drove along the A402 towards Bayswater.

And safe.

The sense of being watched had abated as soon as I climbed into the cab.

“Thanks for giving me a lift,” I said. Clean Head didn’t reply. The intercom was on, but she was concentrating on the traffic and wouldn’t speak until she deemed it safe to relinquish her full attention from the task at hand. It was a reassuring trait in a driver.

Despite everything London’s world-class vehicular congestion was throwing at her, we were rapidly approaching the corner of Queensway. This would be a good place for me to catch the Tube.

The thing was, I couldn’t at the moment afford a cab ride all the way into the West End, particularly in the slow-motion traffic currently on display. Any spare funds I had were earmarked for our supper, the cats’ supper, and—naturally—records.

Of course, Clean Head wouldn’t necessarily charge me for the ride, but I didn’t feel I could deprive her of a paying customer, of which there were plenty, judging by the number of people leaning out to hail our taxi, then seeing the dimmed TAXI sign and subsiding in disappointment.

“Anywhere up here would be good,” I said, reaching for the door. “I can hop out.”

“Just sit back and chill,” Clean Head said, in a relaxed, droll voice that told me the traffic pattern no longer required her undivided attention. “You’re not hopping anywhere.”

“But you could get a paying fare.”

“You are a paying fare.” She glanced back in response to my startled silence. Her eyes were amused. “It wasn’t just a coincidence that I picked you up. I was looking for you.”

“Looking for me?”

“Your tootsie sent me. She said you’d be around here.”

“My tootsie?”

“Nevada,” said Clean Head in exasperation. Then, by way of explanation, “I’ve been reading Damon Runyon.” We were safely stopped at a light so she slid open the panel between us and handed me a paperback. I inspected it. The collected short stories of Damon Runyon.

“It’s not a Penguin Modern Classic,” I said.

“No, but you can’t have everything.” She took the book back from me, making sure that I hadn’t mauled it. Clean Head was a bit of a stickler about her paperbacks. She collected them, and god help you if you bent the cover of a book or, the ultimate crime, broke its spine. “So anyway,” she said, “sit back and relax. And don’t worry, it’s on the tab.”

“Now we’re running a tab with you?”

“Only if you’re working. And Nevada told me you’re working. You have a new assignment.”

“Yes, hilariously enough I’ve been hired by Tinkler.”

“Is he still porking that teen kleptomaniac?” asked Clean Head casually. I repressed the urge to ask if ‘porking’ was a term used by Damon Runyon.

There was what you might call history between Tinkler and Clean Head. It was a history that mostly consisted of him hopelessly longing to get into her—no doubt stylish and skimpy—knickers. It had persisted thus until a pretty but predatory young woman called Opal had fallen into our orbit. And, to the astonishment of us all, including Tinkler, Tinkler had had a brief and passionate fling with her. Opal had parlayed this encounter into a well-received university dissertation and, potentially, a thriving career in the media. Tinkler, characteristically, had parlayed it into a broken heart and guilt.

Guilt because he felt, in some obscure way, that he had betrayed Clean Head and ruined his chances with her. Which was weird. Especially since Clean Head did indeed behave exactly as if this is what had happened.

“In fairness,” I said, “the teenage kleptomaniac never actually stole anything.”

“We’re not interested in fairness around here,” said Clean Head.

* * *

After the Vinyl Vault, the next record dealer I was visiting was Styli, which is located north of Oxford Street in London’s West End. It had once been run by a nice guy called Jerry. Unfortunately Jerry had been murdered, brutally beaten to death. To the police this was still an unsolved case, and the perpetrators remained unknown.

But I knew who they were and I knew they were dead. A fact that still gave me a primitive stab of satisfaction whenever I thought about it. They deserved it for what they did to him.

I had liked Jerry.

He’d certainly known how to run a record store.

Which was more than I could say for Glenallen and Kempton, his two former stooges who were in charge now. It wasn’t that Styli had become a bad place, it was just that it had somehow lost its soul and whatever had once made it special. It had turned into a strictly commercial venture like so many others.

It had also been recently redecorated, giving the whole operation the usual soulless glass and chrome look that the corporate mindset deems modern. And they had added racks of CDs and DVDs, embracing these digital formats just in time for their extinction.

The kid whose name I could never remember but who was my enemy for life because I’d once given him hell for selling a record to someone else when it had been reserved for me—well-deserved hell, I still thought—was behind the till in the downstairs section where they sell rock and pop and current chart music.

Gilbert, I thought. That’s his name. I nodded at him as I came in and he ignored me. I went up the stairs.

This was where they kept the jazz, blues and folk. There was also a newly added display of brightly coloured T-shirts and other garments behind the till, all featuring the Styli logo. And a range of matching DJ accessories, which to me clearly signalled the dismal new world we were in.

Kempton and Glenallen were standing behind the counter against this polychromatic backdrop of branded merchandise, both leaning intently forward, talking to Nevada, who had her back to me. The two men had identical rapt expressions on their faces, gazing at her. They were Nevada’s willing slaves.

They looked up as I came in.

They both looked unhappy to see me.

On the other hand, Nevada turned around and her face lit up. And she’s the only one who matters. She gave me a kiss, brief by her standards but too long for the comfort of the two chumps behind the counter who gloomily resumed their appointed tasks.

Kempton went back to hand-lettering some plastic dividers, which would be used to separate the bins of records into some kind of coherent sequence. Glenallen picked up a digital stock scanner and cursed as he fiddled with it. But it wasn’t entirely feigned bustle. They seemed legitimately busy—and there certainly had been a healthy number of customers downstairs. So evidently the tacky new tactics were working and business was booming. They were going to have to take on a fourth staff member soon.

Glenallen hurried out with his scanner and Kempton grunted and abandoned the section dividers on the counter, disappearing into the stock room. Nevada released me. We were all alone. “I suppose you’ll be wanting to look through the records now,” she said.

“You know me so well.”

She followed me into the Folk section and took out her smartphone to peruse while I flipped through the racks of vinyl. It was peaceful up here, just Nevada and me, with all these records to look through. Presumably Glenallen and Kempton had made themselves scarce in case we started kissing again.

It was too good to last, though. A young guy hurried in, clad in a regulation Styli hoodie. He had the hood up over his head, and he was wearing a pair of enormous retro sunglasses—indoors in the middle of winter, mind you.

He mistakenly seemed to believe he was being hip. But the dark lenses merely rendered his pale face anonymous, hovering unconvincingly above his weak mouth and lack of chin.

This hooded apparition saw the pile of section dividers Kempton had left on the counter and immediately picked them up, turning to the record racks where he began industriously looking for the correct places to insert them.

I stood corrected. Apparently Styli had already hired its fourth employee.

As the hoodie minion distributed the alphabetical dividers in the Blues section I looked for the letter B in Folk, and started flipping through the albums.

“What is this record?” said Nevada. “I mean I know it’s called Black Dog,” she continued, “and that it’s folk music. But why does Tinkler want it so badly?”

“Black Dog is the name of the band,” I said. “The album is called Wisht. With a ‘t’.”

“Extraordinary title.”

“It apparently means eerie or haunted. It was their difficult fourth album.”

“Why was it so difficult?” said Nevada.

I finished looking through B and started on D, just in case someone at Styli—possibly the very hoodie minion now labouring opposite us—thought there was a musician called Mr Dog, first name Black. That would presuppose, however, that he understood how alphabetic order by surname operated. An increasingly lost skill. “They were a great British folk group,” I said. “But they wanted to become a great British rock group. And this album was their transition point.”

The hoodie minion was getting closer to us, working his way down the racks of Blues LPs. I noticed he was listening to something on his phone, the headphone cable emerging from the neck of his hoodie. He was nodding his head in time to whatever the music was, blissfully oblivious to our presence.

“Did they become a great British rock group?” said Nevada. “If I sound sceptical it’s because I’ve never heard of them. Perhaps they should have called themselves Black Cat, and then I would have.”

“No, they never made it. This was their last album.” I gave up on looking under D—a long shot, in any case—and started on New Arrivals. “Black Dog was basically a volatile mixture of wild talents who were always on the verge of flying apart. It was only thanks to the genius of their manager that they stayed together as long as they did. And once they lost him, that was the end of them.”

“One always needs a good manager,” said Nevada. “I’m yours. In case you hadn’t noticed.”

“I had.”

“But you’re not just looking for this album per se, are you? I mean, there’s some special version of it that you’re after. That Tinkler is after.” She glanced up at the hoodie minion who drifted past us. At least he had his music turned down low enough not to bother the customers. He continued putting alphabetic dividers in the rows of records behind us.

“That’s right,” I said. “Wisht was released in two different versions. The first one is the rare one.”

“Of course.”

“It was recalled to the factory and destroyed.”

“Of course it was. Why?”

“Contractual dispute within the group. One member of Black Dog wasn’t happy with it, and legally he had control. So all the LPs were destroyed, and so were the master tapes.”

“That would tend to make it scarce,” said Nevada.

“A few copies survived, but just a few. All this would make them hard enough to find. But what complicates the picture even further is the second release of the album.”

“The second release?”

“Yes, when the unhappy band member left, the other members of the band—”

“The happy members of the band.”

“I suppose so. Anyway, they were happy to stay together. And they promptly went back into the studio and re-recorded the album. They released it again with exactly the same songs and exactly the same cover art. Even the same catalogue number. Which makes it difficult to tell from the rare original issue.”

“The rare and valuable original issue.”

“That’s right.”

“But you can,” said Nevada, taking my arm. “You can identify it, can’t you?”

I nodded. “The two versions are almost identical, but there are some subtle differences. For one thing, you can tell them apart by the covers. The first version has a flip back.”

“And what is that?”

I showed her, illustrating the point with a copy of a John Mayall album from the Blues section. “It’s got this laminated cover, you see, and at the back it’s got these sort of…”

“Flips? At the back?”

“Yes, I guess so.”

“But surely the word is flaps?”

I shrugged, returning the Blues Breakers to their appointed section. The hooded minion had finished distributing the alphabetic dividers—rather haphazardly, I thought. Perhaps he was indeed fashionably postliterate. Now he was crouching down to get new stock off the bottom shelf and replenish the racks, head bobbing in time to the imperceptible music on his phone. “In any case, if you find a cover like that, then you’ve got the unreleased original version. And instead of being worth a few hundred, it’s worth many thousands.”

“Many thousands,” said Nevada, savouring the phrase. “That’s the kind of thousands I like.”

“And, more importantly, you can listen to the original versions of all the songs. The ones recorded when Shearwater was still in the band.”

“Is that a person?”

“More or less. Max Shearwater.”

“And he was the true genius amongst that lot?”

“He was one of them,” I said. “Black Dog was the great British folk band.”

“Only they wanted to be the great British rock band.”

“Correct. And that is what caused them to fly apart like a… detonating hand grenade.” I made exploding gestures with my hands. Glenallen came back up the stairs and into the room. He was grasping his stock control scanner. He still seemed to be trying to work out how to operate it.

The hoodie minion went out the door and back down the stairs as soon as Glenallen came in, as though there was a strict store policy that no more than one member of staff could be on duty in the same place at any one time. Because that would be too helpful. You don’t want to spoil the customers.

Glenallen smiled warmly at Nevada and then looked at me vaguely, as if trying to remember who I was.

Kempton came in from the back room, in strict violation of store policy. He stared at the counter and frowned. “Where are my section dividers?”

I said, “The new guy put them out.”

“What new guy?” said Glenallen, not looking up from his scanner.

He did look up though—his face very surprised—when I ran past him, down the stairs. On the ground floor I saw Gilbert working behind the till and some customers flipping through the racks. The hoodie minion was gone. I checked the door to the street. It was still drifting shut on its hydraulic hinge. I pushed through it into the cold, deepening gloom of a winter’s afternoon.

There was a vehicle parked just up the street.

A mud-spattered Land Rover.

The kid in the hoodie was getting into it. He slammed the door shut as I watched and the vehicle shot away, moving at speed, with a shriek of rubber. I watched them go and the uneasiness I’d been feeling all day drained away to be replaced by a chill, sick feeling of certainty.

I had been playing catch-up. I’d been missing vital clues and failing to read the signs.

And I felt a cold premonition that I was going to pay for it.

I heard the door of the shop open behind me and turned to see that Nevada had followed me out into the street. “He doesn’t work here,” she said. “And when he was skulking around up there, skulking around us, he wasn’t listening to his phone.”

“No,” I said. “He was listening to us.”

A black taxi eased out of the traffic stream and pulled in beside us. It was Clean Head. She opened the window and looked at me. “We were being followed. I should have spotted them sooner, but I only noticed them when I was circling the block waiting for you, and I realised they were circling too.”

“In a muddy Land Rover,” I said.

“You’ve seen them?”

I nodded. Nevada took my arm. “Someone’s got a lot of questions to answer,” she said.

We got into the taxi and Clean Head accelerated away. We searched for the Land Rover but there was no sign. It was long gone. And night was falling rapidly, plunging London into winter darkness. I was thinking about the figure who had gone scrambling into that mud-spattered vehicle. The hoodie minion.

There was something familiar about him. His posture. The way he moved.

Once again I had the unpleasant sensation that I was missing something important. And it was going to come back to bite us.

We crossed the river at Battersea Bridge, heading towards Putney. Nevada sat close beside me, peering at her phone. She grunted softly with satisfaction. “I looked up the dictionary definition,” she said, switching it off.

“Of what?”

“A word I’d never heard before. Wisht.” She looked at me, her face glowing in the passing streetlights. “It means to invoke evil upon. To bewitch.”

We drove across the dark glittering river, heading south.

2. LOVE OR MONEY

“Tinkler, what have you got us into?” Nevada jabbed her finger at him and Tinkler flinched. We’d collected him at his house in Putney and now we were sitting either side of him in the back of Clean Head’s cab as she drove us along the Upper Richmond Road, as swiftly and smoothly as the savage and chaotic evening traffic would permit.

Tinkler thought we were on our way to supper, which we were. But en route we intended to interrogate him about what the hell was going on.

“Got you into?” he said, looking back and forth at us. “Nothing. What are you talking about? What have I done now?”

We told him about being followed. He stared at us, a convincing picture of innocence—or at least bafflement—and shrugged.

“So you have no idea why anyone would be keenly interested in our business?” I said.

“No.”

“And you don’t know of anyone else, perhaps someone rather dangerous, who is currently looking for this very same record?”

He shrugged again. “No.”

I said, “Why are you after it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Yes, what do you mean?” said Nevada, looking at me. “He’s a record nut. Why wouldn’t he be looking for a record?”

I indicated Tinkler. “He doesn’t listen to folk music.”

“Yes, I do. Or at least I listen to rock. And Black Dog are folk-rock. So I listen to the rock part.”

Nevada frowned at him, eyebrows pensively angled. “No, you don’t. You’re being shifty. You’re up to something.”

I leaned towards Tinkler. “What haven’t you told us?” The back of a taxi is a good place for getting intimidatingly close to someone.

Tinkler sighed. “Okay, I’ll tell you.” He looked at us, then leaned forward conspiratorially. “Is the intercom off?”

“Yes, it is.”

“So Clean Head can’t hear me?”

“No, she can’t.”

He relaxed. “You see, it’s about Opal.”

Nevada shot me a quick glance. This disclosure was evidently an unexpected bonus. “What about her?”

“Well, you remember Opal was into folk music?”

“This record is for her?”

“Well, she’s a huge fan of Black Dog, and she’s never heard the lost original version of Wisht. I thought if I got a copy, it might, you know, win me a way back into her heart.”

“Back into her knickers, you mean,” said Nevada.

I said, “Wait, if I find a copy of the record you’re going to give it to Opal?”

Tinkler snorted. “Of course not. No, I’ll make her a sacrilegious digital copy, which will be more than adequate for whatever pitiful MP3 device she’s using, and the lovely, lovely analogue original vinyl I will keep for myself. In my own collection. Forever. Or at least until I can sell it for a thumping and obscene profit.”

“That sounds more like it,” I said.

“But that’s all I’m guilty of. Being pathetic and grovelling and trying to get my ex-girlfriend back. I don’t know anything about weird people following you around and eavesdropping on your conversations.”

Nevada nodded. “Okay, we believe you. But why didn’t you tell us this in the first place?”

“Because I was embarrassed. It was humiliating.” He looked at me. “But you’re still going to find the record for me?”

I nodded. “Of course,” said Nevada. “We have a business agreement.”

“Good.”

“But just so we’re clear,” she said, “we’re doing this because you’re sad and lonely and a sexually desperate loser.”

“Yes. Okay. All right.”

“On an ill-fated quest, an obviously doomed bid to reawaken the affections of a frankly unsuitable girlfriend who is gone for good.”

“How many times do I have to say yes?”

“Okay. That’s settled,” said Nevada. “But still, you should have been totally on the level with us. Up front.”

“You’re saying I wasn’t up front? Or on the level?”

“No. Not sufficiently so. You have transgressed and so you deserve mild punishment.”

“What kind of punishment? How mild?”

Nevada leaned towards him. “You know when I said the intercom was off and Clean Head couldn’t hear you?”

“Oh, shit,” said Tinkler.

* * *

Tinkler had the good grace to offer to pay for dinner at Albert’s, our local gastro-pub. Clean Head dropped us off by the railway crossing because the pub was in a narrow little alley where she couldn’t drive the taxi. I asked her to join us but she said she had to work. Tinkler was bereft. We hurried down the winding Dickensian alley to Albert’s, braving the winter wind until we were gratefully pushing through the stained-glass door.

It was warm and cosy in the pub and smelled of good cooking and beer. Albert himself wasn’t immediately in evidence behind the bar, which in many ways was a bonus. He was probably in the kitchen second-guessing whatever new expert chef he’d hired. They were always new because they were always leaving. Because Albert was always second-guessing them. He fancied himself a gifted cook. Which indeed he was. But far too lazy to run a busy kitchen in even this tiny pub. So he had to hire someone else to do the cooking for him, while he constantly looked over their shoulder.

We found our favourite table. Albert took a brief break from chef-bothering and came out of the miniature galley kitchen at the back of the pub to tell us about today’s specials. We ordered food and—after a microscopic examination of the wine list by Nevada—drinks.

Albert returned to the kitchen, and harassing his new chef.

The Australian girl behind the bar was also new, which explained why soon after we arrived she checked her watch and went to the radio at the back of the bar and switched it on. An annoying and all-too-familiar piece of theme music started up, followed by an unctuous announcer’s voice declaring, “And now for Stinky’s Stellar Stars.”

Nevada winced. “Stellar stars,” she said. “Jesus Christ.”

“The series in which Stinky Stanmer profiles the music stars of past, present and future,” continued the announcer smoothly. Or with what passed for smoothness in the realm of Stanmer.

Tinkler was looking at me as though he expected me to explode. I didn’t feel like exploding. I just felt weary. But I got to my feet and started for the bar.

Before I could get there, Albert came hurrying out of the back of the pub. “Janine,” he said.

“Yes?” said the Australian barmaid.

“Could you turn the radio off, please?”

“But we always play the Stinky Stanmer show,” said Janine. Her willingness to argue with him suggested that Albert had once again fallen into the trap of sleeping with the help. Or maybe it was just because she was Australian.

“This week, a half-forgotten legend of the British music scene…” continued the announcer.

“We don’t play the radio,” said Albert, “when he is in here.” He nodded at me. “Not the Stinky Stanmer show, anyway.”

“Why not?” said the barmaid pugnaciously. I decided it was both because she was Australian and she was sleeping with him.

He gestured vaguely towards me. “We have an agreement.”

“What kind of agreement? Why?”

During this Socratic dialogue, the radio kept right on playing. And now the oleaginous tones of the announcer had yielded to something even more awful. “Good evening, space cadets,” chirped Stinky. Even though he was safely many miles away and only a digital transmission, it was horribly as if he were in the room with us.

Albert gave me a helpless glance and then turned back to Janine, who was standing, slim suntanned arms determinedly folded, right in front of the radio. Nobody was getting past her. Evidently a Stanmer fan.

But I had once helped Albert out of a rather tricky situation, and in return he had promised a moratorium on playing the radio whenever I was in his establishment. With special reference to Stinky Stanmer.

Albert moved closer to Janine and lowered his voice. I was nonetheless able to make out the words. “At university together… based his whole career on imitating him… Stinky is rich and famous… always steals his ideas… gets more rich and more famous… while he hasn’t got a pot to piss in.” An anxious glance in my direction to make sure I couldn’t hear any of this. But I could. All of it, quite clearly.

I think Albert’s hearing had been damaged by years of standing behind the bar with his head beside the radio.

Stinky was still running through his repertoire of wooden catchphrases and stilted patter. The Australian girl’s face was darkly angry in a way that suggested trouble for Albert later, and possibly also sooner. But he leaned past her and switched off the radio. As he did so, Stinky was saying:

“The great lost British folk band—”

The radio went off and there was suddenly silence in the pub. I was on my way back towards the table where Tinkler and Nevada were sitting when suddenly I spun around on my heel and went back to the bar, my heart thumping.

“Could you turn it on again, please?”

Janine looked at me truculently. Albert with astonishment. “Turn what back on?”

“The radio. Please.”

Janine turned to look at Albert. “You said…”

“Please,” I said.

I guess the note of urgency in my voice cut through all the usual crap, because Albert turned the radio back on. Stinky was saying, “A legendary British folk group—some would say folk-rock group—Black Dog was basically a volatile mixture of wild talents who were always on the verge of flying apart, like a detonating hand grenade. It was only thanks to the genius of their manager that they stayed together as long as they did. And once they lost him, that was the end of them.”

I remembered, with glum vividness, a hooded figure scrambling into a muddy Land Rover.

“Their last album, Wisht, was released in two different versions. The first one is the rare one. It was recalled to the factory and destroyed because of a contractual dispute within the group. The band’s co-leader and accordion player, Max Shearwater, wasn’t happy with the record, and legally he had control. So all the LPs were destroyed, and so were the master tapes. A few copies survived, but just a few. That would make them hard enough to find…”

I remembered the same figure crouching over the record racks, virtually at our elbow, while I’d talked to Nevada.

“But what complicates the picture even more,” continued Stinky, “is the second release of the album. When the unhappy Max Shearwater left, the other members of the band went back into the studio and re-recorded the album. They released it again.”

Now I knew why he’d looked so familiar.

“With exactly the same songs, the same cover art. Which makes it difficult to tell from the rare and valuable original issue. The two versions are almost identical. But there are some subtle differences. You can tell them apart by the covers. The first version has a flip back…”

“Okay, you can turn it off now,” I said.

Once again, there must have been something in my voice, because Janine turned it off without an argument. Albert took one look at me, then fled back into the kitchen. I returned to our table. I looked at Nevada and Tinkler. I wondered if my face was as pale as theirs.

Probably.

“That evil fucking little shit,” said Nevada.

“How did he know…?” said Tinkler.

“The fucking fucker eavesdropped on us.”

Tinkler shook his head. He looked like he’d been hit with a baseball bat. “Now he’s told everyone.”

“At least it wasn’t a TV show,” I said. “Only radio.”

“He doesn’t have a single original idea in his head, does he?” said Nevada.

“He’s told everyone about the flip back version,” said Tinkler. I thought he was going to cry. I knew how he felt. “If there are any copies out there, prices will go through the roof.”

“There are copies out there,” I said. “I know there are.” I could feel it, but I didn’t add that, because I’m supposed to be the rational one.

“Maybe,” said Tinkler. “Maybe. But now we won’t be able to get one for love or money.”

Our drinks came and we proceeded to all get drunk.

Once again Stinky had fucked things up for us.

Little did I realise, this was going to be the least of our problems.

3. THE HOUSE WITH THE MOAT

Nevada was curled up in one of our armchairs, reading a Patricia Highsmith novel—in French, of course. She looked up at me with those disquieting blue eyes and said, “Honestly, what’s wrong with you?”

I was sitting on the sofa, hunched over the laptop. I sighed. She could read me as easily as that book. I said, “I wasn’t aware I was radiating disquiet.”

“Stroppiness,” she corrected me.

“Or that.”

“It’s perfectly obvious, from the way you’re ignoring poor Turk.”

It was true. Our cat Turk—short for Turquoise—was standing on the coffee table, peering over the computer screen at me. I hadn’t even noticed that she was there.

As soon as I looked at her, she extended her paw.

“Sorry, Turk,” I said. I knuckle-bumped her, which is what she had been waiting for. She then subsided contentedly into a sprawled heap on the coffee table and resumed licking herself shamelessly. I looked at Nevada.

“I’m preoccupied,” I said.

“I know. I noticed.” She put a bookmark into her Patricia Highsmith and came over and sat beside me on the sofa. “I like a man who takes his work seriously.” She kissed me. “But you shouldn’t let it gnaw at you.”

“I can’t help it. When I started this project, a first pressing of Wisht by Black Dog—a presumptive first pressing, that is—”

“I love the use of the word ‘presumptive’.”

“Because in theory the original version has been completely suppressed—”

“In theory.”

I sighed. “You see, when we started looking for that record, copies were cheap. And any one of those copies might have turned out to be a true original.” Despite the theoretical complete suppression, several hundred of the originals had escaped into the wild.

So to speak.

“Because most people didn’t know about the flip back, right?” said Nevada. “I still want to call it a flap back, you know. I think that would be a much better name. Anyway, most people didn’t know about it.”

“That’s right,” I said. “Unless you really knew what you were looking for, a rare original could easily be mistaken for one of the common ones.”

“And pass unnoticed, by whatever fool was selling it.”

“Yes,” I said.

“And we, by which I mean you, but actually of course I mean both of us, and the cats, would have scooped it up.”

“Yes.”

“For a bargain sum. And then we could have sold it to Tinkler at a hugely inflated price.”

“The friends-and-family hugely inflated price,” I said.

“And everyone would have been happy. In Tinkler’s case, ‘happy’ meaning miserably and hopelessly pursing a sexual lost cause.”

“Yes,” I said. It was a pretty fair summary.

“But then Stinky went on the radio.”

“Yes. And he got everybody stirred up. By everybody, I mean his small audience of listeners.”

Nevada shook her head. “In fact, almost a million—I checked. Unimaginable, I know, but that must also include all the radios that are on all over the country playing in the background, unheard, while people are doing better things.”

“No doubt,” I said. “Anyway, now suddenly everyone is interested in the original version of Wisht and on the lookout for it.”

“So prices are soaring.”

“Yes. Copies are selling for about ten times what they cost just a week ago.” I’d just been on Discogs and I was still trying to get my blood pressure back down.

Nevada winced. “Ouch.”

“And Stinky has also got everybody confused about what the hell a flip back version is.”

“In other words,” said Nevada, “people don’t know if they’ve got an original copy or not. Everybody is mixed up now.”

“Everybody was mixed up before,” I said. “But back then it was to our advantage. It gave us the chance of finding a rare version of Wisht being sold as a common one.”

“And getting a bargain,” said Nevada avidly. She really liked the idea of a bargain. So did I, for that matter.

I shrugged. We could forget about that now. “Unfortunately, now it’s all flipped around with even the cheap version being mistakenly priced into the stratosphere.”

“All thanks to flipping Stinky,” said Nevada. I thought she was being a model of restraint.

I said, “I’ve begun to resign myself to the fact that we’re never going to find this record.”

“I understand your despair, but it’s still no justification for ignoring Turk.”

“True.” The cat watched us from the coffee table with her strange, pale eyes. She looked from one of us to the other. She might have been aware that we were talking about her and closely following our conversation. Or she might equally have been thinking about that satisfying crunching sound a mouse skull makes when you sink your teeth in.

“What I’m really dreading is telling Tinkler.”

“Tell him what? That you’re going to quit? You’re not going to quit, are you?”

I shrugged. “It isn’t fair to go on charging him expenses if we’re never going to find the bloody record for him.” I looked at the computer. “Anyway, he knows something’s up. He’s been trying to reach me all evening.” I indicated an annoying little flashing icon on the corner of the screen. “No point postponing it. I’ll tell him now.”

“But he’s paid us until the end of the month.”

“We’ll give him his money back.”

“The hell we will. We’ll think of something. You’ll think of something.” Nevada put her arm around me. “You’ll find it.”

“I have a feeling I’m being wheedled.”

“I am a world-class wheedler.”

I clicked the icon and Tinkler’s petulant, chubby face appeared on the screen. “Where have you been? I’ve been trying to—”

Suddenly the image froze and the sound went dead. This wasn’t unusual. For some reason, we’d been having trouble with the broadband lately. Digital technology at its finest.

The frozen image of Tinkler’s face had caught him looming at the camera in a grotesque mid-expression. “My god, he looks ugly,” said Nevada. “And that livid illumination doesn’t help. He seems to be in a shoestring production of Dante’s Inferno.”