“Sorry? Skinheads? Oh, yes. Naturally. And apparently this boy violated some kind of rule of theirs by letting Billy stay. Even though Billy didn’t see anything.”
“But he did see something,” I reminded him.
There was silence for a moment. Then Pennycook said, “So I told Danny Overland about the record, and about the kind of people who had it in their possession. I still felt we should try and obtain it, for the archive, for posterity. But he said not to worry about it—when he heard who had it. He said to forget it. It wasn’t worth the risk. Also, at that time he looked down his nose at his own records from that period. He didn’t think they were worth preserving.” He looked at us. “He really hated Colonel Honeyland’s interference.”
“Yes, he has mentioned something to that effect.”
“But then he heard the digital copies, the ones you made, and he changed his…”
“Tune.”
“I was going to say his mind, but yes he did indeed change his tune. Now he is very eager to get hold of it. If we can do so safely.”
“Which is why he told us to talk to you,” I said.
“That’s right. Perhaps I can get a copy?”
“Sorry?”
“Of the digital copies, of the recordings by the Flare Path Orchestra. The other ones you’ve found.” He smiled shyly.
“Of course,” I said, making a mental note to check with Miss Honeyland that this would be okay. I looked at the picture he had on the wall featuring her father and speculated that, if necessary, we could do some horse-trading.
“Oh, thank you. That would be excellent.”
“So, how should we proceed?” said Nevada.
He blinked at her. “Proceed?”
“Perhaps we could start by getting the address of these people at the farmhouse,” I said.
“Ah, I see. Of course. Well the thing is that Billy never gave me the exact address. He was concerned, as soon as he heard about his friend being beaten, concerned that I might do something foolish. In an attempt to secure the record. So he’s been protecting me by not giving me the full information. But now this is rather a different situation.”
Yes, I thought, because it won’t be you going after these dangerous fascist lunatics. It will be us.
“I will get all the details from Billy and then get back to you.”
“Okay,” I said, and we all rose to our feet.
“Thank you for your time,” said Nevada politely. I think she was still trying to recover lost ground after offering to buy dope from him. We trooped back down the stairs and into Billy’s heavy-metal den. As we walked towards the front door I said, “By the way, when did Billy come off his bike?”
“When?”
“Yes. Was it soon after he visited the farmhouse?”
Pennycook stopped dead and stared at us. “Yes. Quite soon after. You don’t think—”
“What happened exactly?”
“The usual thing. The all-too-usual thing. He was knocked off his bike by a car.” He peered at me. “You don’t think these people could have—”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.” We shook hands in a glum silence and left. It was dark now and the wind was howling with an unnerving ferocity. We could hear the sound of dustbins rolling in the street somewhere and the clatter of anonymous things being blown past us in the night. Nevada was huddled against me as we leaned into the gritty gale and hurried back towards the street where we’d left Tinkler’s car.
“Do you really think the Nazi skinheads from the farmhouse knocked Billy off his bike?” said Nevada, shouting against the wind, which seemed to be building to an apocalyptic intensity.
“I think it falls into the large category of things we’ll never know for sure.”
“Yes, that is a large category.” She tucked herself in tight beside me, sheltering from the gale as we plodded forward.
We were halfway to the car when we heard the scream.
21. OPAL
It came to us loud and clear, over the banshee howling of the wind. A human scream sounds like nothing else, especially when it really means business, when it’s a cry of genuine terror. You know it’s not kids larking about or someone whooping with idiot glee. It’s the real thing. It raises atavistic hackles.
Without a moment’s thought, both Nevada and I turned and ran towards the sound. I had a very clear idea of what we were going to see—some accident, potentially horrible, probably caused by the savagely gusting wind that was currently hurtling around objects.
That isn’t what we saw.
What was waiting for us when we rounded a corner was a scene of strictly human mayhem—an assault in progress. Two men were attacking a woman in a vehicle.
The vehicle was our old friend: the VW hippie van with the sun and the moon painted on it.
And the victim of the assault was the girl we’d seen driving it the other day.
The two men were both large, dressed in black leather jackets, grey hoodies and jeans. It was like a uniform. They had thrown open the sliding side door of the van and they were both reaching inside, bent over at the waist, grabbing at the girl. She was lying on her back on the floor of the van, kicking at them. She wore black leggings over her slender legs and incongruously heavy boots—Doc Martens. In some distant corner of my mind I noticed that the men wore Doc Martens too. And then I didn’t have time to register anything else. They must have heard us over the wind, because they turned and faced us.
In doing so they released the girl. We came to a halt in front of them. The men stared at us. The girl lay on the floor of the van, sobbing and panting.
We were in a residential neighbourhood, in what had once been a street of small shops. The recession had wiped out half the businesses here, leaving blind, shuttered storefronts. It was late and the few shops that were still functioning had now closed for the night. Directly behind the van was a building site, apparently abandoned, in a stretch of wasteland dotted with scattered planks, mounds of earth and random piles of brick. The place was utterly deserted, except for us.
One of the men’s hoodies had fallen back, revealing a shaved head. His face was fat, but his body looked bulky and hard and well-muscled. His companion was whippet-thin but tall and broad-shouldered. His eyes peered at us from within the hood, cavernous and shadowed in his pale narrow face. He gave an impression of lean, latent violence. The men stared at us and we stared at them.
For a moment no one moved. Then everyone moved at once.
The girl bounced off the floor of the van and scrambled forward, heading for the driver’s seat. Fat Face spun around to pursue her, saying, “You sort them.” The Whippet moved towards us—or, rather, towards me, because Nevada chose this moment to disappear, promptly trotting around the other side of the van.
The Whippet kept coming towards me. I didn’t move. I kept watching his face, thinking it would give me some warning of whatever he intended to try. In the van the girl was now sat in front of the steering wheel and reaching for the ignition. Fat Face grabbed her from behind before she could turn the key. She screamed again, the sound almost instantly lost in the wind. Then her scream turned to a snarl as she struggled with him.
Meanwhile the Whippet was reaching inside his open leather jacket, into the pouch of his hoodie. His hand came out with something hanging from it, loose and gleaming. It was a dog chain. I felt my stomach turn cold. I suspected he wasn’t going to be using it for walking the dog—a suspicion immediately confirmed as he began to spin it over his head in a circular, scything motion, cutting through the air with a metallic, almost musical sound that mixed crazily with the howl of the wind.
He was clearly planning to use the heavy chain to lash me to a gory ruin. Inside the van, the girl and Fat Face were struggling in a tightly confined version of hand-to-hand combat. They suddenly twisted and rolled across the width of the vehicle, slamming against the window beside my head.
I saw their contorted faces, his hand pressed to her mouth.
Meanwhile the Whippet was building up speed with the whirling chain. It flashed in the streetlight. The chain was dangerously long. It would provide him with a lethal reach.
So I took a quick step towards him.
There was very little he could do with the chain at close quarters, unless he proposed smacking himself in the face with it.
Inside the van I saw the girl’s mouth suddenly open wide, revealing a set of laudably white and even teeth with which she proceeded to bite her attacker on the hand, hard.
The Whippet was staring at me in surprise, taken aback by the fact that I’d advanced on him. He’d obviously expected me to start hastily backing away from the threat of the swinging chain. Perhaps that was his standard strategy, to provoke a retreat that would leave his opponent open to a devastating attack.
There was another piercing scream within the van—this time from Fat Face. The scream seemed to further wrong-foot the Whippet, who now backed away from me. I quickly followed him. If he managed to put any distance between us, he would use it to deploy the dog chain.
Fat Face came bursting out of the van. He was holding his right hand in his left. Blood was flowing copiously from the right hand, which he was holding contorted at a very strange angle. The position of his fingers didn’t seem quite right.
“Me fucking finger,” he shrieked. “She bit me fucking finger off!” Then he pressed the bloody hand tightly under his left armpit and turned and ran. The Whippet stared after him as he continued to back away from me and I continued to advance on him, making sure I kept the gap between us closed. He was still whirling the chain above his head with athletic vigour, but an expression of perplexity had begun to cloud his features.
“Hello!” shouted a voice close behind him and he spun around to see Nevada standing there. She was holding an item she’d just scavenged from the building site—a concrete block about the size of a loaf of bread. As soon as the Whippet turned to look at her she threw it with surprising strength and force, right in his face.
The block struck him accurately, with a solid sound of impact, bouncing off and dropping to the ground and landing on the toe of one of the Whippet’s boots. It must have hurt like hell, but nothing to compare with what had just been done to his face.
That face was now terribly white and, to my admittedly rather overexcited gaze, actually looked somewhat concave. He reached his hand up just as the blood started to flow, to delicately touch what had once been his nose. Then he put his other hand there, made a low moan, and ran off with blood coursing down the front of his hoodie turning the grey material a gleaming wet black.
He vanished into the howling night after his friend.
Nevada looked at me. “Next time, pick up something heavy and hit him with it.” She touched my arm. “But otherwise… nice work standing your ground, Tiger.”
* * *
“You’re kidding,” said Tinkler, his voice unwholesomely excited even over the phone. “You’ve got the teenage slut at your place? She’s staying at your place?”
“Stop calling her that.”
“I seem to remember it was your lovey-dovey who first used the expression. Who coined the name.”
“It’s not her name,” I said.
“What is her name, then?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“There wasn’t exactly time for formal introductions when we met. And then she was out like a light when we brought her back here.”
“Why did you bring her back to your place?”
“We couldn’t just leave her there. And she refused to go to hospital. Or to the police.”
“Well, what’s she doing now? Now that you’ve got her there?”
“She’s sleeping. She’s been asleep virtually since she arrived.”
“Who can blame her?” said Tinkler airily. “Being attacked by neo-Nazis is very tiring.”
I said, “We’re only guessing they’re neo-Nazis.”
“Oh, come on. I think we can safely assume.”
Or unsafely, I thought glumly.
“So where is she sleeping?”
“Where? In the spare room.”
Tinkler chortled. “You mean the room where you keep your overflow record collection?”
“You’re behind the times, my friend. It’s now where Nevada keeps what she calls her ‘inventory’. In other words, her clothes collection.”
“Now, that’s ironic,” said Tinkler. But before I could ask him what was ironic about it, there was the sound of the handle turning on the door of the guest room. “I’ve got to go,” I said quickly. “She’s getting up.” I hung up and the girl came out of the room.
She was wearing a baggy white t-shirt many sizes too big for her with bold black lettering on it that read FRANKIE SAY RELAX. That’s a classic, I thought. On her legs she was wearing the same black leggings as the night before, but her feet were now bare. They were dirty, with the toenails painted a metallic lavender.
Her face was puffy with sleep, and her lightly freckled cheeks had for the moment a distinctly chipmunk aspect.
She had frizzy, toffee-coloured hair that hung around her face in untidy waves—a Pre-Raphaelite mess. “Good morning,” she said in a croaky voice. “Or is it afternoon?” She peered blearily at the window, trying to glean something from the daylight, then looked at me. “Evening?”
I said, “Late afternoon, early evening.”
“He never likes to commit himself.” Nevada came through from the kitchen and sat down between us, close beside me on the sofa. As if this was a signal, the girl sank into one of the armchairs. She settled into it with such utter boneless relaxation that I thought for a moment she’d gone back to sleep.
But she opened her eyes and looked at me, then at Nevada. “Thank you for letting me stay at your place.” She glanced around our sitting room. “It’s very nice.”
“Thank you,” said Nevada.
The girl stretched her feet out in front of her, studying her grubby toes in the square of sunlight that spread across the floor. “You just let me sleep?”
“You looked like you needed it,” said Nevada.
The girl yawned. “Your cat came in and slept with me. I hope that was all right?”
“Oh, did she?” said Nevada. I wondered if I could detect a note of annoyance in her voice. She glanced towards the half-open door of the guest room and right then Fanny emerged hesitantly, as if sensing that she was being discussed. I had been wondering where the little turncoat had got to. She trotted across the floor, came almost close enough to pat, then veered ostentatiously off towards the kitchen and her food bowl, glancing back at me to see if I’d taken the hint.
But I stayed where I was. As soon as the small talk was decently concluded I had a long list of questions for our guest.
“The cat was making this snuffling noise,” said the girl. “Sort of snoring and wheezing while she was sleeping. Is there something wrong with her?”
“No,” said Nevada, sounding distinctly defensive. “There is not anything wrong with her. The vet says it’s perfectly normal. She just has an unusually narrow breathing passage.”
“It was quite sweet,” said the girl. “Almost like snoring.”
I said, “I hope you don’t mind me asking, but who are you?” Nevada shot me an annoyed look. But I’d had enough of small talk, and sometimes bluntness is the best policy. The girl stared at me for an instant then got up and padded back to her room on her bare feet, emerging again a moment later clutching a small rectangle of plastic. It was her driving licence. She handed it to me.
Her photo showed her smiling brightly, revealing the even white teeth that had served her so well the night before. In it, her hair was a Rossetti fright wig. She was deeply suntanned—unlike her winter pallor now—and looked young and happy, with not a care in the world.
Her name was Opal Gadon.
Her address was given as Bridgnorth Road in Stourbridge in the West Midlands. Her birthdate was a
lso listed, and I did a quick calculation. She was eighteen.
I passed it to Nevada, who passed it back to the girl without apparently even glancing at it. But I knew she’d studied it as carefully as if she’d given it a prolonged scrutiny with a magnifying glass. “We weren’t asking for ID,” said Nevada.
“You should,” said the girl. “You’ve got a right to know who someone is if they’re staying under your roof. You’ve got a right to know.”
“Opal?” I said.
She glanced at me. “Yes.” She nodded. “Opal, like the precious stone, but with the stress on the second syllable. Oh-pal.”
“Oh-pal,” said Nevada. “How fascinating. So distinctive.”
But it was the girl’s surname that interested me. “Gadon,” I said.
“Pronounced in the French fashion,” said the girl. But I was only half-listening. It was a name I’d heard before. Where?
The Silk Stockings Murder—what I now irresistibly thought of as the Beer Barrel Murder. The girl who had died in that pub by the sea, one forgotten winter night during a long-ago war…
“Gillian Gadon,” I said.
Opal nodded. She looked me in the eye and said, “She was my great-grandmother.”
22. DISSERTATION
“So, she’s what,” said Tinkler, “writing a book?”
“No, a dissertation.”
“About her great-grandmother?”
“Well, it’s an important event in cultural history, or so she seems to think. Which throws light on all sorts of significant sociological phenomena of the period. Or something.” Actually, although her jargon was almost as bad as I was making out, I thought the girl was right about this. She was onto something.
I wasn’t about to say so in front of Nevada, though.
“And she’s travelling around the country researching it?”
“Yes,” I said.
“In her hippie dippy sun and moon van.”
“Yes, she lives in it, more or less. She has a foldaway bed and pots and pans and a little cooking stove arrangement.”
“Which is probably lethally dangerous,” said Nevada.
Victory Disc Page 21
