Victory Disc

by Andrew Cartmel

  “No thanks, darling. I’m trying to forget all that.”

  11. TP37

  Despite what he’d so fiercely asserted, with smoke pouring out of his mouth like a pantomime dragon, I couldn’t really believe Danny Overland wasn’t interested in hearing his old records. After all, they were his own compositions. And they were very good. Plus he probably hadn’t heard the damned things in over half a century.

  What’s more, I’d seen something in his eye when he learned that one of those rare fragile old discs had survived. He was interested, all right.

  So I rang up Joan Honeyland. Thanks to Tinkler, I couldn’t get the notion of her being banged by the chauffeur out of my head. I was almost reluctant to ring her number in case I interrupted some upstairs-downstairs carnal hi-jinks in their bijou flat over the Soho mews.

  But Miss Honeyland picked up on the first ring, sounding composed and alert. Pleased to hear from me, in fact. I told her about meeting Overland and how he couldn’t help us with any records. “Never mind,” she said. “You’ve done remarkably well already in a very short space of time. I’m sure if there are any more out there, you’ll find them for me.”

  I said I’d do my best. I didn’t mention Overland’s withering remarks about her father. When she asked if we’d recorded his reminiscences, or whether we even thought it was worth doing so, I said, “I think it would be worth it. But he’s very busy and somewhat… cantankerous.” She chuckled dryly. “So I’ve decided to offer him a bribe,” I said.

  “If it’s a matter of money, you know I leave it entirely up to you.”

  “I don’t think money will do it. What I think might do it is a copy of that record we found. The one with his own compositions. Frankly, I think it would appeal to his vanity.”

  “Ah, yes, I see.”

  “So I’d like to get a digital copy of it that I can send him. You said you were planning to make digital copies anyway…”

  She hesitated for a moment, then she said, “I’m just thinking about the logistics. We’ve already given the records to a studio.”

  “A studio?”

  “Yes, we anticipated you, I’m afraid. We’ve already started our own attempt to make digital copies.”

  “Well, that’s useful,” I said. Although I’d rather have made the copies myself.

  “I hope so. Albert just dropped them off there. At a little recording studio in south London. The recording engineer there is said to be very good. He comes highly recommended. He’s said to be excellent.”

  He’d better be, I thought. “And reliable?” I said.

  “Oh yes. So as soon as he’s digitised the record, I shall send you a copy of the two tunes. It’s ‘Catfish’ and ‘Whiting’, isn’t it?”

  “‘Whitebait’,” I corrected her. And I wondered, if a radio operator had made the same slip during the war, would another German city entirely have been bombed by mistake? Random hell pouring from the sky in a nightmare torrent, all because of a slip of the tongue.

  “Well, if you give Mr Overland a copy of the tunes, it will have to be in the form of a copy-protected compact disc. And he’ll have to agree to return it to us once he’s listened to it.”

  “I’m sure we can arrange that,” I said.

  “He can have a copy of the proper CD, of course, when it eventually comes out. The collected album of the Flare Path Orchestra tunes. But in the meantime he’ll have to make do with the copy-protected disc.”

  She seemed obsessed with that phrase.

  “And for that we have to wait on the labours of this recording engineer fellow.” I couldn’t argue with that. So I thanked her and said goodbye.

  When I told Nevada about it I said, “I could have transferred the bloody record for her. I’ve still got the Stanton. I could have played it on my turntable and run it through an AD converter.”

  “I have no doubt.”

  “All I needed was the right cable.”

  She nodded. “And if you had done it, we could have charged her for it. Why on earth didn’t she ask you to do it in the first place?”

  I shrugged. “She wanted it done properly, by a proper sound engineer, and I suppose I can see her point.”

  “Well this joker better be good.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “He better not turn out to be some kid with a computer in his bedroom.”

  “I’ll look him up online.” I sat down at the laptop and saw that I had mail. To be more accurate, I had a notification that someone had left a message on my blog. I went to see what it was. I felt a keen flicker of excitement as I read it.

  If you are looking for records by the Flare Path Orchestra I have one to sell.

  There was no name, or any other indication of the identity of the sender, just the handle TP37, which might conceivably have indicated someone with the initials TP, who had been born in 1937.

  Or not.

  Of course, if they had been born in 1937, they certainly could have encountered a record by the Flare Path Orchestra, while those were briefly available. TP37 would be a little young—a mere child when the band was recording. But the discs would have been around in the post-war years for a while, when the person was older…

  Or of course they could be mistaken, deluded, or a malicious time-waster. There was only one way to find out. I sent a message back asking for more details and waited. Or didn’t wait, actually. Instead I went out with Nevada to Albert’s, our local gastro-pub, and had a meal with Tinkler and Clean Head. It was a sort of mini celebration to commemorate receiving a recent cash injection from our employer. We ate and drank a little too much, taking turns buying rounds. And, at a certain point in the proceedings, we suddenly realised that we were all of us spending Miss Honeyland’s money. Tinkler had been paid for his record, Clean Head for her services as a driver, and Nevada and I for the investigation we were doing. Everybody was, in some way or another, on her payroll.

  For some reason this seemed terribly funny.

  We got back from the pub quite late, just Nevada and I. Clean Head had gone home and, of course, Tinkler had failed to go home with her. We’d declined his offer to come home with us and regale us into the small hours with drunken self-pity leavened by sexual frustration, and put him on a bus home to Putney. The cats were waiting to reprimand us when we got in, Fanny lurking in a patch of shadow just outside the front door and Turk snoozing on our bed until we came inside, then thumping to the floor and trotting to confront us.

  While Nevada plied them with high-end cat biscuits, I checked the computer for messages. I’d like to say I’d been able to put the matter of TP37 entirely out of my mind while we’d been making merry this evening, but in fact it had been a constant background concern. Indeed, one reason for going out to the pub in the first place had been the watched-pot-never-boils principle. I figured if I sat by the computer nothing would happen, but if I turned my back on it and spent the evening out in convivial pursuits, I would come home to find a message waiting.

  Which was exactly what happened.

  It is a 78rpm disc in a nondescript cardboard sleeve (no illustration or text). I will only sell for a substantial sum in cash. You must meet me at a time and place of my choosing. You must come alone.

  I thought about this for a moment. Then I sent a message back and asked what tunes were on the record. Anybody who was actually in possession of such a disc would find this easy enough to answer.

  Then I went to bed.

  The next morning there was a new message waiting for me. It was commendably terse, as if the sender was getting impatient.

  Fringe Merchant b/w Creep Back.

  If this was a total fabrication at least it was an intriguing one. I checked these titles on search engines, but once again the mighty power of the Internet yielded nothing of use, though I did learn that a theatre company called Fringe Benefits were mounting a novel production of The Merchant of Venice. There was certainly nothing as helpful as a discography listing these titles as belong
ing to a very rare 78rpm disc of swing music recorded by the Flare Path Orchestra.

  I considered my options and then got on the phone to Charles Gresford-Jones. No reply and no voicemail. The phone just rang endlessly, echoing in that small front room in Dover, possibly with Abner the Zombie Cat listening in irritation. I hung up and tried Gerry Wuggins instead. He answered immediately.

  “Oh yeah,” he said, and burst into laughter when I read him the titles. “They were two of our numbers. Very popular they were, too. Dear me, I haven’t thought about those for years. That brings it all back. It really does. It all comes rushing back.”

  “Then this wasn’t one of the discs you had in your collection?” Before your harridan of a wife deep-sixed them, I did not add.

  “Oh no. I must have missed out on that one. But it’s a brilliant record. Lovely tunes.”

  I said, “What do the titles mean?”

  “Eh?”

  “‘Fringe Merchant’,” I said, “and ‘Creep Back’.”

  “Oh.” He laughed. “Fringe merchant. Yeah, you see, when you’re on a bombing run and you’re dropping your load, you’ve got a target. The centre of town or an oil refinery or what have you. And so the idea is, the theory is, of course, everyone’s supposed to get as close as possible to dead centre on the target.”

  “And a fringe merchant is…”

  “Somebody who is not dead centre, who is way out on the fringe.”

  “Because they’re incompetent?”

  “No. Because they’re bloody sensible. Or a bit windy, depending on your point of view. Out there on the fringes there’s a lot less chance of getting shot down, all of your anti-aircraft batteries being zeroed in right over the target.”

  “And ‘Creep Back’?”

  “Similar kind of thing, in a way. You’ve got your bomber stream—the stream of planes heading towards the target. And the nearer to the target they get, the hotter things get. More chance of getting shot down. So you want to start dropping your bombs as soon as you can, so you can get the hell out of there. Naturally.”

  “Naturally.”

  “So maybe you drop your bombs just a bit early. Then the bloke following you drops his just a bit early. And the bloke behind him does the same…”

  “And so the bombing creeps back.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Getting miles and miles further away from the target. Creep back. It used to drive Bomber Command mad.”

  I tried to repress a rising feeling of excitement. It sounded like my anonymous seller’s record had to be authentic. I couldn’t imagine anyone cooking up such a plausible-sounding disc. “So you actually remember the band playing tunes with those titles?”

  “Oh yeah. Like I said, they were cracking little numbers. Very popular.”

  “And do you know for certain that those tunes were recorded on a 78rpm disc?”

  “Well, they must have been, mustn’t they? I mean you’ve found a copy, haven’t you?” He paused. “You have found a copy?”

  “I might have done,” I found myself saying, guardedly.

  “Well, I’d love to have a listen to it, if you have.”

  “I’ll see if I can work something out. Many thanks for the information.” We discussed the possibility of Nevada and I coming down to his house and recording his reminiscences, as we had so notably failed to do last time. He seemed entirely amenable and we pencilled in a day.

  Just before I hung up he said, “By the way.”

  “Yes?”

  “‘Fringe Merchant’ and ‘Creep Back’. They were both compositions by Johnny Thomas. Poor old Johnny.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Brilliant, they were. And I think they were the last things he wrote before, you know…”

  He was hanged by the neck until dead. I thanked Gerry Wuggins and, on that unspoken note, we said our farewells. I immediately got in touch with TP37 and said I was very interested in purchasing the disc. This time I broke my own rule and spent the afternoon sitting around near the computer, in case I got a reply. Nothing. That evening I let Nevada drag me out to see a brace of foreign films at the Riverside. She was a sucker for anything not in English and vaguely arty, which had led us more than once into cinematic quicksand. Tonight we got a taut little Swedish thriller, and an interminable French epic about a prisoner who saw visions of deer jumping in front of cars and was then inexplicably and arbitrarily promoted to a criminal kingpin. There was, at least, a great Jimmie Dale Gilmore song at the end.

  We returned home and I hastened to my computer, fully expecting a message.

  Nothing.

  Nothing the next day. Or the next. I was starting to climb the walls. Had I somehow bungled the negotiations? Had I put the seller off? I went back and reread the previous messages, all sixty-one words of them. Assuming you count b/w as a word. It stood for ‘backed with’ and was music industry speak for any record with just one track on each side. I started obsessing about what the use of this piece of jargon implied about my mysterious correspondent.

  Or non-correspondent.

  Finally, after I’d given up hope and reluctantly accepted that somehow I’d blown the negotiations, on Saturday I got a reply.

  All right. We will meet next week. In London. I will confirm the time and the place. You must come alone.

  We then negotiated about price. This didn’t take long. TP37 now seemed to respond instantly to every message I sent. We came to an agreement and signed off. I would wait for confirmation of the time and place of our meeting.

  The final message from my correspondent read:

  Tell no one.

  I went and told Nevada. “I knew you were up to something,” she said. “You’ve been all silent and moody.” I hadn’t realised I’d given any such sign, but she could read me like a book.

  “Have I?”

  “Yes. It was obvious you were working on something and it wasn’t going great and you didn’t want to tell me about it until you had it sorted. Do you? Have it sorted?”

  “You tell me.” We sat down at the computer and she went through all the messages I’d exchanged with TP37. Then she looked at me. “Are you going to meet them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you going to go alone?”

  “No fucking way.”

  12. CHELSEA

  TP37 turned out to be Toba Possner, a woman who lived in Chelsea, and had in fact lived there for the better part of half a century. I assumed she had indeed been born in 1937 but it didn’t seem polite to ask.

  Our first intimation that she lived in Chelsea came from Tinkler, or rather a friend of his who was able to trace the messages I’d received back to an Internet café on the King’s Road.

  “That’s all right, then,” said Nevada when she found out.

  I said, “There being no psycho killers in Chelsea.”

  “Well, there are. But at least they have nice shoes.”

  I’d gradually talked Toba Possner away from her position of total anonymity, and of demanding that I meet her alone. I’d achieved this by explaining, truthfully, that if she didn’t insist on a payment in cash that was physically handed over to her—say in a brown paper bag on a park bench—I could get her considerably more money for the record she wanted to sell. I suggested instead that she should accept an electronic bank transfer or, if she was old-fashioned, as seemed likely, a cheque. We’d make the payment to her on sight of the record.

  I also added that if she’d personally known Lucian Honeyland, we’d be willing to pay her extra for any anecdotes or reminiscences she might have—provided we could record them. This seemed to swing it. She agreed to meet. I told her I wouldn’t be on my own, that I’d be bringing my wife with me.

  “Wife?” said Nevada.

  “I thought she was more likely to agree if I said wife rather than girlfriend.”

  “Hot girlfriend. Extremely hot girlfriend.”

  “Extremely hot girlfriend.”

  She looked at me. “Are you sure this isn’t a rounda
bout way of proposing to me? By lying to a total stranger? Because that would be so sweet.”

  I said, “Well, I don’t feel like she’s a total stranger to me anymore. And it isn’t exactly a lie. You’ve been living with me for over a year, so you’re my common-law wife.”

  “Am I? Good lord.” She looked at the cats, lolling side by side on the floor in a slice of sunlight. “Hello common-law kittens,” she said.

  Toba Possner agreed to the terms of the meeting, provided we promise to make payment to her using a certified cheque made out to cash or a money order of some kind. “In fact, anything that doesn’t involve giving away her name or personal details,” said Nevada.

  “That’s right,” I said. “Another one of her preconditions is that she remains anonymous.”

  “She’s got a lot of preconditions. And anyway, how can she remain anonymous? You already know her name and address.”

  “But our client doesn’t. Toba made it very clear that it should stay that way. She doesn’t want Miss Honeyland to find out who she is.”

  “Why?”

  We found out when we went to meet her.

  * * *

  Toba Possner’s address was in a side street just past Chelsea Old Town Hall. Clean Head, who was now officially on the payroll, dropped us off outside the big front gates of the estate where Toba lived. We walked under the shadow of a stone arch towards a tall metal gate, where we buzzed at a buzzer and were admitted into a large courtyard, with five storeys of dwellings rising above us in long stone ranks on three sides.

  The estate belonged to the Sherman Trust, a charitable institution that provided affordable accommodation for those on low income. This meant that poor people could live even here, in the heart of one of London’s most fashionable, and expensive, neighbourhoods.

  Nevada was jealous. I could tell. “The cats wouldn’t like it here,” I pointed out. “They wouldn’t have a garden and there’s all that traffic right outside.”

  “That’s true,” she said, and took my hand. We walked up the dim echoing coolness of a concrete staircase to the top floor, arriving just a little winded. We then proceeded along a narrow walkway with front doors on our left and a stone wall on our right, slightly more than waist high, which looked down into the wide shadows of the courtyard. There were welcome mats outside many of the front doors, and numerous flower pots, and even some gnomes. Tinkler would have been delighted.