“She was a groupie?” said Nevada.
“Effectively, yes. Although we wouldn’t have used the term at the time.”
At this point Tinkler woke up. “Groupies?” he said groggily.
Our host didn’t dignify this with a response. “Anyway, contact with her led to the death of a dear friend of mine, a comrade in arms, and a fine musician who should have gone on to great things.”
“Is that three different people or all the same guy?” said Tinkler.
“All the same guy,” said Gresford-Jones coldly. “Dead.”
Then, presumably because he just couldn’t keep his mouth shut, Tinkler said, “Still, you must have lost a lot of your friends, your mates, your comrades in arms. I mean, it was the war and all that.”
Gresford-Jones’s voice was clipped and icy. “Your point being?”
“That you… must have got used to it?” suggested Tinkler timorously.
Our host shook his head. “Oh, he didn’t die in combat.”
“Didn’t he?”
“No. Johnny Thomas was hanged. He went to the gallows.”
I said, “Why did they hang him?”
Gresford-Jones sighed. “Because of the murder.”
“Who did he kill?”
“A girl called Gillian Gadon,” said Nevada.
Gresford-Jones nodded.
“He killed the groupie,” said Tinkler.
Gresford-Jones’s shoulders slumped and he sank back in his chair like a man accepting defeat. I suddenly saw how frail he could be. He closed his eyes and simply nodded. “What happened?” said Nevada gently. He shook his head.
“It was a ghastly sex crime. She drove him to it, of course. Before she came along, he was a good steady family man.” He picked up the photo we’d brought to him and stared at it. I realised that his eyes were glinting with tears. But his voice remained firm. “It was a tremendous cause célèbre. The gutter press gloated over all the gruesome details. The way he killed her. Their torrid sexual liaison…”
He wiped his eyes on his sleeve and looked at us. “They won’t leave it alone even today. They won’t leave poor Johnny alone. Poor old fellow. Just last year there was this disgusting ferret of a local historian who revived the story. After it had all been decently forgotten, he insisted on reviving it for his own glorification. Digging it all up again, all the filth and innuendo. Every sensational detail.” His head drooped wearily. “Every drop of suffering.”
“Local historian?” I said. “So it happened around here, the murder?”
He nodded. “Yes. In Kingsdown. It was a terrible business.”
“I’m sure it was,” said Nevada, leaning forward. She was at her most sympathetic and persuasive. She clearly wanted to hear more.
“They were staying at a pub there. An illicit rendezvous. He was on leave. A weekend pass. He’d gone down to meet her. He should have been with his family, his wife and children, but instead he was in bed with her. That’s where they found her, her body, in the bed where they’d spent the weekend. He tried to run. They caught him of course.” He seemed to make an effort of will and straightened up in his chair. “And he went to the gallows. But Lucky was magnificent.”
“Sorry?” I couldn’t follow this abrupt shift of meaning—or of mood. Gresford-Jones had suddenly changed. Now he seemed almost cheerful.
“Colonel Honeyland,” he said. “He was magnificent. Stood by poor Johnny to the end. Went to see him in his death cell. Spent the night there with him. The night before the execution. He was always going down to see him. Trying to offer some crumbs of comfort to young Johnny as he sat there in the shadow of the gallows.” He smiled as he thought about it. “Our commander-in-chief, good old Bomber Harris, he got Lucky a ‘Cabinet Priority’ badge for his motorcycle. So they cleared the way for him wherever he went. And he would go zooming down to see Johnny whenever he could. Right up until the end.”
He fell silent. There was a long silence in the room. Then a moist, grisly, sibilant sound emanated from the cat. “I’m sorry,” said our host. “Poor Abner suffers from wind after he eats sardines.”
That seemed to put paid to any reverential silence. I said, “Were there any recordings made of those radio broadcasts?”
He looked at me. “Broadcasts?”
“The Battles of the Bands. Between the Flare Path Orchestra and Glenn Miller?”
He shook his head quickly and emphatically. “No.”
I said, “No?” It seemed preposterous. “Why not?”
“Couldn’t they tape them?” said Nevada.
Gresford-Jones seemed to seize on this. “Hardly. Tape recording didn’t exist yet. At least among the Allies. The Germans had developed it by this point. And it came back from Germany with our victorious armies. In a sense this new technology was the spoils of war.”
“All right,” I said, trying to be patient. “They didn’t have tape, but they could record it some other way. They had transcription discs.”
He nodded happily. I was a star pupil. “Exactly. We had transcription discs or, as they were called during the war years, Victory discs or V-Discs.” He looked at me. “And many performances by the Flare Path Orchestra, including those Battles of the Bands, were recorded in just this way. Unfortunately a priceless stack of these transcription recordings were dropped and broken, utterly destroyed.”
“Broken?” I said.
“Yes.”
“But V-Discs weren’t made of shellac. They were made of vinyl.”
He smiled at me. “Indeed they were.”
“And vinyl doesn’t shatter like that.”
Gresford-Jones nodded. “Correct, and what’s more, transcription recordings were actually made of a layer of vinyl that coated an aluminium disc. And aluminium itself is highly durable.” He stopped speaking and looked at me. The expectant blankness in his gaze suggested that I was supposed to say something at this point to confirm my own intellectual shortcomings.
I said, “So, what was the problem?” It sounded like the damned things were indestructible.
He squeezed his eyes shut happily and smiled. This was clearly the right question. “Ah, you see,” he said, “the problem was that during the war years there was a great scarcity of metal. All of it was being used in the war effort. So at this point in time instead of aluminium the discs were made of glass. With the result that these transcription recordings suddenly became very fragile indeed.”
“Oh shit.” I winced.
He nodded in a pedagogical way, satisfied with having made his point. “Yes, ‘oh shit’. Indeed. All the recordings were stored at Bomber Command Headquarters in High Wycombe. To keep them safe. And they were quite safe as it happened. For the duration of the hostilities. The problem came when they were moved. Shamefully, some ham-fisted private was entrusted with the task of gathering them up and transporting them to Colonel Honeyland who was going to supervise their release, after the war, in what would no doubt have been a bestselling series of albums of wonderful swing classics.” His scrawny fingers bunched into fists. Even after all these years it still made him furious. “When the discs reached him, they were in fragments.”
“I hope the private was shot,” I said.
“He certainly deserved to be. Those recordings were utterly irreplaceable. Immensely valuable.” His voice thickened. Tears glinted in his eyes once more.
And who could blame him?
But I didn’t particularly want to watch an old airman start blubbering. I cleared my throat. “You said you had a record?”
He blinked at me. “Sorry?”
“You said you had one for me.”
He came back from miles away. I had his full attention. “And you said you would pay for it?” Suddenly we were all business again. “A generous price, I believe you said.”
“Our client will be happy to,” chimed Nevada. “Yes. Indeed. Absolutely.”
“Well then, let me go upstairs and get it.” The talk of money certainly seemed to have energised hi
m. He rose from his chair and went out. His slippers shuffled up the stairs. There was a pause, and then they shuffled back down. He was holding a 78rpm disc in a plain cardboard sleeve. I was pleased to see the sleeve. It suggested that the record might have been well looked after. I felt the old excitement expanding inside me. I couldn’t wait to see what it was.
His hands trembled a little as he gave it to me, though whether that was with excitement at his imminent payout, or was just the result of the wear and tear of the years, I couldn’t tell.
I looked at the label. It was exactly the same 78 we’d found in Tinkler’s speaker. Of all the records it could have been, it was the same damned one.
He must have seen the expression on my face. “Don’t you want it?” he said, querulously. I thought quickly. Did I want it? I remembered what Joan Honeyland had said about picking up any duplicates we ran across.
“Of course we want it,” I said.
There followed a quick discussion on price. It was quick because I agreed to pay what he asked—or rather agreed that my client would pay. Miss Honeyland had given me carte blanche in these areas. When we were finished, Gresford-Jones seemed pleased, which he should have been.
It was enough money to keep him and Abner the Zombie Cat in sardines for a long time.
We said goodbye and left, with the record and with his promise to seek out any other memorabilia he might have pertaining to the Flare Path Orchestra or Colonel Honeyland. As he closed the door behind us and we walked through the garden gate Nevada said, “Glad you had your poker face on in there.”
“Is that sarcasm?”
“Of course it is.”
“Sorry. I couldn’t conceal my disappointment when I saw it was the same record we already had.”
“No kidding. He almost didn’t sell it to us.”
“I don’t think there was much chance of that.” We walked back past the hippie van to Tinkler’s car and got in and drove off.
“You know what our next order of business should be?” said Nevada.
I said, “Seek out the little ferret of a local historian.”
“Exactly. The one who knows all the details of the murder.”
“All the sordid details.”
“That’s right. But we didn’t get a name, did we? For the little ferret?”
“No. I don’t think he would have given us one.” I shrugged. “But how many of them can there be—local historians for this area?”
For some reason Tinkler had driven us up the hill, instead of down. And we now hit a cul-de-sac. “I was sure we could get out this way,” he said, peering crossly through the windscreen at a blank concrete wall set into the hillside.
“Evidently not.”
After laboriously turning the car around—we could have done with Clean Head and her wheel-spinning aplomb here—we finally drove back down again, into Gresford-Jones’s street, heading in the opposite direction. As we coasted swiftly along, the Volvo’s modest engine power supplemented by gravity, we passed a young woman strolling by in boots and jeans and a brightly coloured poncho.
Nevada turned her head and made a hissing noise that would have done credit to either of our cats.
She said, “It’s that loathsome little succubus. The one who stole my Hermès scarf.”
I said, “She didn’t actually steal it from you and it wasn’t actually your scarf.”
“If you’re going to tiresomely insist on details…”
“Yeah, if you’re going to be tiresome,” said Tinkler, gently applying the brakes, presumably to prevent us hurtling out of control to our doom. As I turned back to look at the girl, I thought I saw her turn and go up the path to Gresford-Jones’s house.
“Do you know what I think?” said Nevada. “I think he was in love with him.”
“Who was in love with who?”
“With whom,” corrected Tinkler.
“Charles Gresford-Jones,” said Nevada, ignoring him. “With Johnny Thomas.”
“Perhaps it was the irresistible allure of his name,” I said.
“Don’t think I don’t know that that’s a penis joke,” said Nevada. “But I’m perfectly serious. Did you see the way he reacted when he was talking about him? I think the bloke was the great lost love of his life.”
“You know what I think?” said Tinkler. “I think that was one fucking weird cat.”
8. SILK STOCKINGS
Much to Tinkler’s relief, there wasn’t time for a walk along the seafront in Dover. Having sat through Gresford-Jones’s lengthy monologue, we were now running late and had to get onto the motorway again and hightail it back to Sevenoaks.
This necessitated driving past Canterbury, which was an occasion for more unwanted reminiscences from Tinkler about grave robbing, an episode that Nevada and I were both eager to forget, but which he couldn’t seem to get enough of.
But he was the driver, so we couldn’t tell him to shut up.
The sun was setting by the time we got back to Gerry’s place and the wedding celebrations had moved into a new gear. A new gear that mainly consisted of being louder, more rowdy, and even drunker than before. Walking under red oriental paper lamps hanging in the trees—what had happened to the cowboy theme?—we managed to find the host without being confronted by a band of vigilantes this time, although Gerry’s wife did give us a dirty look as we walked past her sitting at a table, eating cake with a group of little girls. She wasn’t glad to see us back.
Somewhere behind the house a disco system in a tent was blaring out Jane Birkin singing ‘Je T’aime’ in a thunderous yet affectingly salacious voice, with loud and profane interjections from the revellers, and ensuing gales of laughter.
Gerry seemed, as ever, quite pleased to escape from the festivities and said as much as he led us back to the kitchen. Tinkler was crestfallen when he saw that the platters of food had been cleared away. “Don’t worry, mate,” said Gerry. “They’re in the pantry. Through that door there.”
“Oh, Tinkler, for Christ’s sake,” said Nevada, because it was her turn to say it. But I suspect, like me, she was ready for something to eat herself.
“No, that’s fine,” said Gerry. “Help yourself, mate. Fill your hollow leg. There’s plates and napkins over there.”
We sat down at the same table where we’d gathered before. Gerry sank into a chair and sighed. His tie was hanging loose at his collar now, and his smooth red face was more florid than ever. “So how was old Charlie-boy then?”
“Well,” said Nevada, “to be frank he was a bit hit-and-miss.”
“Hit-and-miss?”
“Yes. He was very voluble, but he didn’t tell us a great deal. In particular we got the impression that he was holding back on one subject.”
“What subject?”
“The murder,” I said.
“What murder?”
“The sex crime in Kingsdown.”
“Oh, Christ, that.” Gerry shook his head. Suddenly he looked tired, showing his years. “He’s got that bloody murder on his brain. I ask you, of all the people who got killed from our mob, in the air, during the war, all the blood that got shed. Thousands of our boys died. Tens of thousands. And he has to get a bee in his bonnet about that.” He looked at us, pale blue eyes under bushy grey brows. In the dark garden beyond the window, the music was a muffled pounding. “You know what Charlie Gresford-Jones’s problem is?”
“No. What?”
“He was ground crew. Do you know what he spent the war doing?”
“He was a rigger,” said Tinkler, who had wandered back in with a plate of food—cold fried chicken, potato salad, and some kind of curry. “He looked after the airframe on the Lancasters.”
“That’s right, mate,” said Gerry, gazing at Tinkler with new respect. “That was exactly what he was and exactly what he did. But what he didn’t do was ever fly a combat mission or any other kind of bloody mission. He spent his war on the ground. And like a lot of the people who worked on the ground, he made a lot more ble
eding fuss about the war in the air than the blokes what actually flew it.” He looked at us. “He romanticised it. They all did. Everyone who didn’t have to actually fly—or fight.”
Tinkler sat down and joined us, gnawing on a chicken leg. The curry on his plate smelled good, even cold. “Do you know what he went and done?” said Gerry. “Old Charlie-boy wrote a number about us, about all us brave fly boys on our noble mission up in the air. A big soppy sentimental bloody tune it was too. Always had all the girls in tears. Lots of slushy strings everywhere. I never could be doing with strings.”
“Can I make myself a coffee?” I said.
“Sure. Help yourself. There should be some in the pot over there.”
As I got up I said, “So there’s nothing to this murder?”
I heard him sigh behind me. “Well, there was a big fuss about it at the time. And they topped poor old Johnny for it.” I found the coffee pot he was talking about. I gave it a sniff and it smelled all right. I poured one for myself and one for Nevada. I didn’t think Tinkler would surface from his plate long enough to drink anything.
“Poor old Johnny?” said Nevada as I came back to the table and sat down. “What about the poor girl he killed?” Gerry shrugged.
“I understand it was a gruesome sex crime,” said Tinkler, licking his fingers and setting a chicken bone aside. He seemed to have gnawed it completely clean of flesh. “But Mr Gresford-Jones wouldn’t give us any of the details.”
“She was strangled with her own stockings,” said Gerry.
“So don’t you think Johnny deserved to be hanged for that?” said Nevada. “It seems fairly appropriate.”
“It’s fairly appropriate if he did it, darling,” said Gerry laconically.
No one else said anything for a while. Outside in the garden the music pounded away just at the edge of audibility, the tune not quite identifiable. He had good soundproofing in here. I broke the silence. “You don’t think he did it?” I said.
“I’ll tell you one thing, they hanged him as much for having it off with a bird who wasn’t his wife as they did for any murder he might have committed. He got hanged for adultery.” He looked at us and suddenly smiled. “You know, the other day one of the girls asked me what adultery was, and I was blowed if I could tell her.”
Victory Disc Page 8
