A Pleasure to do Death With You

by Paul Charles

  Friel stopped his narrative and looked at both the Camden Town policemen. His eyes lingered on Allaway a bit longer.

  Before they’d a chance to ask another question, Friel volunteered, “Look, if you feel it is relevant, I will obviously provide you with exact figures on all of these deals. It’s just…” Friel paused looking like he was having difficultly picking his words, “well, let’s say I’ve found that people, no matter how much they are intrigued, they don’t always really want to hear about other people doing fabulously. There’s a bit of, ‘Haven’t you had enough good luck already?’”

  “Okay, that makes sense, Mr Friel,” Irvine said, “and did either Mr Stevenson or Mr Mylan feel upset that the shares had done so well for you?”

  “Nope. As I said, that wasn’t the way we worked. We all had our individual successes and failures,” Friel replied, looking at Allaway again. “I’m always happy to talk about my failures.”

  “What about the other way around; was there a share Mr Mylan was involved in that you weren’t?” Irvine continued, knowing that he’d left Allaway far behind, diligently trying to work out how many years he’d have to work as a detective sergeant to collect four million pounds.

  “Oh, yes, there was one,” Martin Friel declared. “You see, I’m not a big man for futures. Can’t abide them. I think that not only are they destroying our banking business, they’re also destroying entire countries. You know, you make a jumper, like this one for example, and you sell it for say £100. Great deal, everyone is happy. But if I come along and want to gamble on what it will cost you to make this jumper in five years time and what you’ll be able to sell it for at that point, well that’s just crap, isn’t it? Someone’s trying too hard to be too darn clever.”

  “Okay, and?”

  “Sorry, I got carried away in a soapbox moment there. Patrick wanted us, Toblerone, to buy into the future sales of Tim Dickens’ CDs. He’d read somewhere that David Bowie sold the rights to his future CD sales to a bank; Bowie was happy, he got millions of pounds up front, and the bank had some genuine assets to hold on to.”

  “But surely if record sales were going to be worth anything, then Bowie would have held on to them?” Allaway asked.

  “Exactly the point I made to Patrick and Tony. I told them I didn’t want to be in on this one.”

  “I suppose though, if you were the bank who’d bought into Michael Jackson’s future sales before he died, you’d be quite happy now, wouldn’t you?” Allaway offered. “Apparently in the weeks after his death, he was selling a million albums a week, worldwide.”

  “Good point, but Tim Dickens is a friend of ours and I wouldn’t particularly want to be involved in profiting from his death. Tim wasn’t really keen on the project; it was Patrick who kept pushing it. Tim was happy the way things were. He did okay on his publishing. His records and CDs weren’t selling great, but he was happy not to be in the front line any more and was feeling comfortable and content with his life. Then one night, after one of his dinner parties, Patrick declared he’d been doing a bit of research, and he figured that he could offer five million pounds to Tim for a 50 per cent stake in his future royalties from songs and records. Tony and I thought the subject had been dropped when we both declared ourselves out of the deal, but Patrick was convinced and put his offer on the table.”

  “The five million pounds made Tim sit up and take notice, I bet,” Allaway ventured.

  “You’re not wrong, Constable; you’re not wrong. Tim nearly bit his hand off.”

  “How long ago what this?” Irvine asked.

  “About six years ago,” Friel replied.

  “Which would have been before the X Factor girl, Pricilla White, had the number one Christmas single with No More Sad Lonely City Streets, one of Tim Dickens’ famous songs,” Allaway said.

  “Correct, which was right before the same version of the same song appeared in a certain USA diva’s comeback movie. The sound track album was a multi million seller, and the diva in question also covered No More Sad Lonely City Streets on her comeback album, which has, I believe, sold over twelve million copies to date. Which was also before Tim Dickens’ own Best of CD was released and sold well all over the world; it sold six point three million copies in fact. I know all of this only because Patrick liked to remind Tony and myself about it at every available opportunity.”

  “So, what you’re saying is that Patrick Mylan was doing well, thank you very much?”

  “Yes, indeed. Not many were doing better,” was Friel’s reply, which coming from a man in the process of picking up a £4 million windfall was quite a nod.

  “And would you mind telling me what you were doing on Saturday between the hours of four o’clock in the afternoon and eight o’clock in the evening?” Irvine asked.

  “Dead easy. Some Saturdays I get to overdose in my favourite pastimes.”

  “Football?” Irvine promoted.

  “No, my other hobby - watching movies.”

  “Okay, what did you go and see?”

  “Crazy Heart with Jeff Bridges, which was just incredible, and then The Road, hard work but worth sticking with, and then I’d a pint and a pie at my local.”

  “Did you go to the movies with anyone?”

  “No, ‘fraid not. I prefer to go by myself. I go into the zone when I’m in the cinema, which makes me very boring company.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Irvine very quickly got the message to Kennedy, via Desk Sgt Tim Flynn, about Mylan’s investing in Dickens’ career.

  Having returned to North Bridge House from interviewing Nealey Dean, Kennedy requested Irvine to pick him up there. At ten forty-five that Tuesday morning, they both came knocking on the door of Rodney Stuart in Camden Town Mews.

  Rodney Stuart was a man reluctantly approaching his fifties. He was slim (ish), but not in a fit kind of way. He’d obviously lost weight but hadn’t bothered to do the necessary exercise, so the skin kind of hung off him like a corpse. His jowls were more Sigmund Freud’s chow, Lun, than Dr Freud himself. He’d obviously tuned into MTV at least once, because his dyed blonde, three-quarters of an inch long hair was oiled and spiked upwards and outwards, so that his scalp and all its blemishes were clearly visible. His red-blotched face gleamed as if someone had shined it with cooking oil. His brown, bloodshot eyes moved in a slow, uninterested way. Mr Stuart’s nod to his nationality was a Stuart’s tartan tie, undone in a permanent kind of way, and adding a bit of colour to his flawless starched white shirt. He wore severely creased black chinos and a very, very expensive looking pair of trainers.

  Just one look was all it took for Kennedy to reckon that the first quality Stuart looked for in a girlfriend was bad eyesight. Kennedy imagined someone like ann rea giving him a severe “You’re not going out dressed like that, Rodney” talking to, and never ever, for one second, making it sound like a question. Kennedy wondered if he was doomed forever to these ann rea lapses. As he sat down in Stuart’s packed office, he noticed that recalling her didn’t give him the pangs of regret they had done as close as just over a week ago.

  For all of Stuart’s physical and dress presentation, he immediately came across as very friendly and approachable, and his soft accent sounded more mid-Atlantic than Mid Lothian.

  “Sorry business this, isn’t it, man?” Rodney started off the proceedings, slipping into pure Scottish for the word “sorry.”

  “Aye, rum do, a rum do,” Irvine said, sounding even more Sean Connery than normal.

  “How long had you worked with Mr Mylan?” Kennedy asked, slightly distracted by how chock-a-block Stuart’s generously sized office was. There were files packed in every available shelf space and some even in neat piles on the floor, covering his old subtly patterned red and orange carpet, which was threadbare in a couple of noticeable, obviously busy, spots in the room.

  “Oh Paddy and I go way back,” Stuart replied. When it became clear that Kennedy was seeking more specific details, he continued, “I think I’ve known h
im just over fourteen years. I was first introduced to him when I worked for Pat Savage at O.J. Kilkenny and Co., a firm of accountants over in Holland Park. Then, when I left there a couple of years later to set up on my own, Paddy came with me as one of my first clients. O.J. Kilkenny and Co. specialises in music business clients, and they’re one of the best in that field, but I wanted my client list to be broader than that.

  Kennedy could see Irvine noting down the names Pat Savage and O.J. Kilkenny.

  “So you’d know the ins and outs of Mr Mylan’s business?” Kennedy continued.

  “Oh, I’ll say,” Stuart offered in a bizarre Monty Python, ‘nudge, nudge, wink, wink’ moment.

  “Okay,” Kennedy sighed, hoping he was drawing a line under such behaviour, “is there anything obvious in his business dealings that we should be paying attention to?”

  “I believe as this is a murder investigation and the client in question is deceased, then all client confidentiality goes out the window,” Rodney Stuart said.

  “We are investigating the death of Mr Patrick Mylan, so every single bit of information we can get at this stage will be extremely helpful.”

  “So you’re saying that it could have been a suicide, man?” Stuart replied, immediately picking up on the wording of Kennedy’s statement.

  “What do you think?” Irvine asked, pushing it back again.

  “Or an accident?” Stuart countered once again.

  “Were you aware by any chance that Mr Mylan practised…” Kennedy said trying to put the interview back on track again but stalling.

  “Autoerotic asphyxiation?” Stuart completed the Ulster detective’s sentence, proving once again that the Camden Town bush telegraph was second to none.

  “Yes,” Kennedy said.

  “Look, Paddy wasn’t like you and me. When you make that much money at a relatively young age, four important things happen to you. One, you start to trust no one - particularly when you’ve been burned once. Two, it gets harder and harder to find the buzz. That’s why some people turn to drugs at that stage. Paddy didn’t; it would appear he sought his major hits elsewhere, man. And three and four are linked. All of a sudden you grow more attractive to the opposite sex, and, four, as far as they’re concerned, you become very funny.”

  Irvine started to say something. Stuart cut him off with, “I know, I know, how does one so young become so cynical?”

  “So you’re saying that Mr Mylan got his kicks from kinky sex?” Irvine asked.

  “All I can tell you is this: Paddy was no longer looking for love. I don’t know the reason why. Maybe some of his older friends can tell you, Roger and Maggie Littlewood for instance. But I can tell you this: his relationships with women were limited to when he occasionally wanted to enjoy some intimate female company. Now he clearly didn’t want to be compromised by seeking out hookers, so he found women who … well, let’s just say, women who for one reason or other were not seeking any emotional connection either.”

  “Are we talking about several women here?” Irvine asked.

  “No, not at the same time, man. He believed in monogamy - probably for hygienic reasons. I don’t know; I never asked him. We never discussed it, but he needed his woman on call, as it were, and he looked after them very well.”

  “And that’s where you came in?”

  “Oh, that hurt,” he stage grimaced. “You just made me sound like a pimp, Sergeant. But yes, I was the one who paid the bills, man, but then again I paid all his bills. I can tell you this for nothing, though,” he added, just a wee bit too camp, “I certainly never found him any of his women.”

  “How did he find these women?” Kennedy asked as he considered this non-emotional approach to dating.

  “I never knew. It was none of my business. My business was looking after his financial affairs, and I don’t mind admitting he was my biggest client, so I was certainly never going to overstep the mark.”

  “And would you have a list of these women?”

  “Well, I do have the current one’s details, a Miss Chloe Simmons. She’s been around for a few years now. She’s a bit of a sweetheart. I mean, in Paddy’s defence, he wasn’t changing them like he changed his socks. It wasn’t anything like that.”

  “We seem to be having trouble tracking her down,” Irvine said, back-tracking just a little.

  “Oh, she lives in Wimbledon, man,” he replied. Swinging around to his desk, taking a telephone book out of his top drawer and lifting a pen out of a Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream ceramic pot, he scribbled down a name, address, and telephone number on a piece of paper. He made to hand it to Irvine, but at the last possible moment switched direction and passed it to Kennedy.

  Stuart’s script was incredibly neat, tidy, and completed with a very stylish flourish.

  “So Miss Simmons is Mr Mylan’s current partner?”

  “Was,” Stuart corrected Irvine; “was Mr Mylan’s last partner. Nice girl.”

  “You met her?” Kennedy asked.

  “Yes, of course. I had dealings with her on Paddy’s behalf.”

  “And… er, was there any conflict between the two of them?” Irvine asked.

  “No, no, no,” Stuart protested, “too nice a girl. If you were looking for conflict, you only needed to ask.”

  “Oh?” Irvine said.

  “Again, it’s all going to come out and I… well look, here’s the thing, man, if you’re looking for someone who wanted to break a deal with Paddy, then look no further than Tim Dickens.”

  “You’re talking about the deal where Mr Mylan bought up a share of Mr Dickens’ songwriting, publishing, and CD royalties?”

  “I am actually,” Stuart replied, seeming very impressed with Irvine’s inside knowledge.

  “Yes, we know Mr Mylan paid Tim Dickens five million pounds sterling for a 50 per cent share of his future earnings,” Irvine continued.

  “But did you know that unlike the majority of record and publishing deals, it was open-ended?”

  “Ah no,” Irvine admitted, committing the fact to his notebook.

  “And did you know that unlike the majority of publishing deals, the contracting partner, this time Mr Patrick Mylan, was taking 50 per cent and not the usual 10 per cent or 15 per cent publishers usually take?”

  “No, we… I didn’t know that.”

  “And did you know that after the CD distributors took their normal cut, Mr Mylan got 50 per cent of the balance. A manager, say for instance, would have normally take 15 per cent to 20 per cent.”

  “But surely Mr Mylan wasn’t a manager?” Kennedy asked.

  “Quite, and he wasn’t even doing a manager’s job, yet he was taking two and a half times what a manager would take,” Stuart said.

  “Can we just go back here a little? Could you clarify the ramifications of this deal for us?” Kennedy asked.

  “Happy to, man.” Rodney Stuart’s glee was noticeable. “You see, I learned all about this when I was at O.J. Kilkenny’s. When you do a deal with a manager, you do it for a limited period of time, and then, of course, there will be a spin-off time where that manager will continue to earn royalties on the material he worked on. Usually this is for three to five years after the contract ends and at a lower rate, usually, say, for half commission. Same with a publisher. The artist signs with a publisher for, say, five to seven years, and these days most of the better deals are written where the artist retains the rights to his songwriting catalogue at the end of the deal. Lesser so, but some of the record deals now have similar provision where if the artist is recouped at the end of the deal - sold enough records to wipe the slate clean from all and any advance the record company has paid the artist.

  “Now at the time we did the deal with Tim Dickens…” Stuart continued, but was interrupted by Kennedy.

  “You did the actual deal for Mr Mylan?” Kennedy asked.

  “Yes! As I mentioned, through my time at Kilkenny’s, Pat Savage was a good mentor, so I had the knowledge, and I knew a little about the Davi
d Bowie model. Paddy didn’t.”

  “Sorry, you were saying?” Kennedy prompted.

  “Tim Dickens was in pretty good shape, financially speaking. I mean, he hadn’t sold a ticket or a CD in anger for a good few years. I think he actually used the term ‘record’ with us in the early talks. But he had taken care of his money, so he wasn’t hurting. Paddy had made him a few offers, but he wasn’t really interested. I did a bit of research and discovered that Tim Dickens owned all his own masters and all his publishing. I also discovered that he had around five mil stashed away, so I told Paddy that, in my opinion, it was going to take a similar amount to move him. I also advised Paddy that these days, all it needed with a heritage act like Tim Dickens was for a cover version of one of his songs, or a movie or an advert to materialise, and the back catalogue would shift the proverbial truckload. I also told him that from the little I knew of artists, if the deal did work out and he started to sell records again, Tim Dickens would resent Paddy for the amount of money he was making off him. He would suddenly forget the fact that Paddy put five million quid on the table and would look at it like Paddy was stealing half of his income and - here’s the big thing - FOR EVER! Paddy was desperate to get into show business, so he was happy to make the offer. However, against my advice, he insisted that if he was going to invest five million it was going to have to be for 50 per cent of everything and forever. Or as Paddy put it, ‘For as long as he’s making a buck from his songs and CDs, then I want to make one too.”

  “Tell me this,” Kennedy asked, “the original five million pounds Mr Mylan invested, was he to get that back first before they split, or was it just recouped out of Mr Mylan’s share?”

  “Oh no, that had to come out of the overall income pot first, otherwise Paddy had a great chance of never recouping. I mean, at five million he was in with a good chance of recouping that amount over the years, even if nothing had happened to kick-start the catalogue sales again. There’s always pipeline money on CD royalties, publishing, collection societies, etc. That takes for ever and a day to come in. As I say, man, it might have taken him a while, but I’m sure eventually he’d have got his money back. That was the main reason I recommended Paddy do the deal.”