by John Harvey
When Jack learned I was going through with it, he offered to lend me a gun, a Smith amp; Wesson. 38, but I declined. There was more chance of shooting myself in the foot than anything else.
I met Anna in the parking area behind Jack’s office, barely light enough to make out the colour of her eyes. The cocaine was bubble-wrapped inside a blue canvas bag.
‘You always were good to me, Jimmy,’ she said, and reaching up, she kissed me on the mouth. ‘Will I see you afterwards?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I don’t think so.’
The shadows swallowed her as she walked towards the taxi waiting out on the street. I dropped the bag down beside the rear seat of the car, waited several minutes, then slipped the engine into gear.
The place I’d chosen was on Hampstead Heath, a makeshift soccer pitch shielded by lines of trees, a ramshackle wooden building off to one side, open to the weather; sometimes pick-up teams used it to get changed, or kids huddled there to feel one another up, smoke spliffs or sniff glue.
When Patrick, Val and I had been kids ourselves there was a body found close by, someone murdered and left, and the place took on a kind of awe for us, murder in those days being something more rare.
I’d left my car by a mansion block on Heath Road and walked in along a partly overgrown track. The moon was playing fast and loose with the clouds and the stars seemed almost as distant as they were. An earlier shower of rain had made the surface a little slippy and mud clung to the soles of my shoes. There was movement, low in the undergrowth to my right-hand side, and, for a moment, my heart stopped as an owl broke with a fell swoop through the trees above my head.
A dog barked and then was still.
I stepped off the path and into the clearing, the weight of the bag real in my left hand. I was perhaps a third of the way across the pitch before I saw them, three or four shapes massed near the hut at the far side and separating as I drew closer, fanning out. Four of them, faces unclear, but Boyle, I thought, at the centre, the Sweeneys to one side of him, another I didn’t recognise hanging back. Behind them, behind the hut, the trees were broad and tall and close together, beeches I seemed to remember Val telling me once when I’d claimed them as oaks. ‘Beeches, for God’s sake,’ he’d said, laughing in that soft way of his. ‘You, Jimmy, you don’t know your arse from your elbow, it’s a fact.’
I stopped fifteen feet away and Boyle took a step forward. ‘You came alone,’ he said.
‘That was the deal.’
‘He’s stupider than I fuckin’ thought,’ said one or other of the Sweeneys and laughed a girlish little laugh.
‘The stuff’s all there?’ Boyle said, nodding towards the bag.
I walked a few more paces towards him, set the bag on the ground, and stepped back.
Boyle angled his head towards the Sweeneys and one of them went to the bag and pulled it open, slipping a knife from his pocket as he did so; he slit open the package, and, standing straight again, tasted the drug from the blade.
‘Well?’ Boyle said.
Sweeney finished running his tongue around his teeth. ‘It’s good,’ he said.
‘Then we’re set,’ I said to Boyle.
‘Set?’
‘We’re done here.’
‘Oh, yes, we’re done.’
The man to Boyle’s left, the one I didn’t know, moved forward almost to his shoulder, letting his long coat fall open as he did so, and what light there was glinted dully off the barrels of the shotgun as he brought it to bear. It was almost level when a shot from the trees behind struck him high in the shoulder and spun him round so that the second shot tore through his neck and he fell to the ground as good as dead.
One of the Sweeneys cursed and started to run, while the other dropped to one knee and fumbled for the revolver inside his zip-up jacket.
With all the gunfire and the shouting I couldn’t hear the words from Boyle’s mouth, but I could lip-read well enough. ‘You’re dead,’ he said, and drew a pistol not much bigger than a child’s hand from his side pocket and raised it towards my head. It was either bravery or stupidity or maybe fear that made me charge at him, unarmed, hands outstretched as if in some way to ward off the bullet; it was the muddied turf that made my feet slide away under me and sent me sprawling headlong, two shots sailing over my head before one of the men I’d last seen minding Patrick in Soho stepped up neatly behind Boyle, put the muzzle of a 9mm Beretta hard behind his ear and squeezed the trigger.
Both the Sweeneys had gone down without me noticing; one was already dead and the other had blood gurgling out of his airway and was not long for this world.
Patrick was standing back on the path, scraping flecks of mud from the edges of his soft leather shoes with a piece of stick.
‘Look at the state of you,’ he said. ‘You look a fucking state. If I were you I should burn that lot when you get home, start again.’
I wiped the worst of the mess from the front of my coat and that was when I realised my hands were still shaking. ‘Thanks, Pat,’ I said.
‘What are friends for?’ he said.
Behind us his men were tidying up the scene a little, not too much. The later editions of the papers would be full of stories of how the Irish drug wars had come to London, the Celtic Tigers fighting it out on foreign soil.
‘You need a lift?’ Patrick asked, as we made our way back towards the road.
‘No, thanks. I’m fine.’
‘Thank Christ for that. Last thing I need, mud all over the inside of the fucking Merc.’
When I got back to the flat I put one of Val’s last recordings on the stereo, a session he’d made in Stockholm a few months before he died. Once or twice his fingers didn’t match his imagination, and his breathing seemed to be giving him trouble, but his mind was clear. Beeches, I’ll always remember that now, that part of the Heath. Beeches, not oaks.
MINOR KEY
It used to be there under ‘Birthdays’, some years at least. The daily listing in the paper, the Guardian, occasionally the Times. September eighteenth. ‘Valentine Collins, jazz musician.’ And then his age: twenty-seven, thirty-five, thirty-nine. Not forty. Val never reached forty.
He’d always look, Val, after the first time he was mentioned, made a point of it, checking to see if his name was there. ‘Never know,’ he’d say, with that soft smile of his. ‘Never know if I’m meant to be alive or dead.’
There were times when we all wondered; wondered what it was going to be. Times when he seemed to be chasing death so hard, he had to catch up. Times when he didn’t care.
Jimmy rang me this morning, not long after I’d got back from the shops. Bread, milk, eggs — the paper — gives me something to do, a little walk, reason to stretch my legs.
‘You all right?’ he says.
‘Of course I’m all right.’
‘You know what day it is?’
I hold my breath; there’s no point in shouting, losing my temper. ‘Yes, Jimmy, I know what day it is.’
There’s a silence and I can sense him reaching for the words, the thing to say — You don’t fancy meeting up later? A drink, maybe? Nice to have a chat. It’s been a while.
‘Okay, then, Anna,’ he says instead, and then he hangs up.
There was a time when we were inseparable, Jimmy, Val, Patrick and myself. Studio 51, the Downbeat Club, all-nighters at the Flamingo, coffee at the Bar Italia, spaghetti at the Amalfi. That place on Wardour Street where Patrick swore the cheese omelettes were the best he’d ever tasted and Val would always punch the same two buttons on the jukebox, B19 and 20, both sides of Ella Fitzgerald’s single, ‘Manhattan’ and ‘Every Time We Say Goodbye’.
Val loved that song, especially.
He knew about goodbyes, Val.
Later, anyway.
Back then it was just another sad song, something to still the laughter. Which is what I remember most from those years, the laughter. The four of us marching arm in arm through the middle of Soho, carefree, laughing.
What
do they call them? The fifties? The years of austerity? That’s not how I remember them, ’56, ’57, ’58. Dancing, music and fun, that’s what they were to me. But then, maybe I was too young, too unobservant, too — God! it seems impossible to believe or say — but, yes, too innocent to know what was already there, beneath the surface. Too stupid to read the signs.
Patrick, for instance, turning away from the rest of us to have quick, intense conversations in corners with strangers, men in sharp suits and sharp haircuts, Crombie overcoats. The time Patrick himself suddenly arrived one evening in a spanking new three-piece suit from Cecil Gee, white shirt with a rolled Mr B collar, soft Italian shoes, and when we asked him where the cash came from for all that, only winking and tapping the side of his nose with his index finger — mind yours.
Val, those moments when he’d go quiet and stare off into nowhere and you knew, without anyone saying, that you couldn’t speak to him, couldn’t touch him, just had to leave him be until he’d turn, almost shyly, and smile with his eyes.
And Jimmy, the way he’d look at me when he thought no one else was noticing; how he couldn’t bring himself to say the right words to me, even then.
And if I had seen them, the signs of our future, would it have made any difference, I wonder? Or would it all have turned out the same? Sometimes you only see what you want to until something presses your face so fast up against it there’s nothing else you can do.
But in the beginning it was the boys and myself and none of us with a care in the world. Patrick and Jimmy had known one another since they were little kids at primary school, altar boys together at St Pat’s; Val had met up with them later, the second year of the grammar school — and me, I’d been lucky enough to live in the same street, catch the same bus in the morning, lucky enough that Jimmy’s mother and mine should be friends. The boys were into jazz, jazz and football — though for Patrick it was the Arsenal and Jimmy, Spurs, and the rows they had about that down the years. Val now, in truth I don’t think Val ever cared too much about the football, just went along, White Hart Lane or Highbury, he didn’t mind.
When it came to jazz, though, it was Val who took the lead, and where the others would have been happy enough to listen to anything as long as it had rhythm, excitement, as long as it had swing, Val was the one who sat them down and made them listen to Gerry Mulligan with Chet Baker, Desmond with Brubeck, Charlie Parker, Lester Young.
With a few other kids they knew, they made themselves into a band: Patrick on trumpet, Jimmy on drums, Val with an ageing alto saxophone that had belonged to his dad. After the first couple of rehearsals it became clear Val was the only one who could really play. I mean really play: the kind of sound that gives you goose bumps on the arms and makes the muscles of your stomach tighten hard.
It wasn’t long before Patrick had seen the writing on the wall and turned in his trumpet in favour of becoming agent and manager rolled into one; about the first thing he did was sack Jimmy from the band, Val’s was the career to foster and Jimmy was just holding him back.
A couple of years later, Val had moved on from sitting in with Jackie Sharpe and Tubby Hayes at the Manor House and depping with Oscar Rabin’s band at the Lyceum, to fronting a quartet that slipped into the lower reaches of the Melody Maker small group poll. All this time he was burning the proverbial candle, going on from his regular gig to some club where he’d play till the early hours and taking more Bennies than was prudent to keep himself awake. The result was, more than once, he showed up late for an engagement; occasionally, he didn’t show up at all. Patrick gave him warning after warning, Val, in return, made promises he couldn’t keep: in the end, Patrick delivered an ultimatum, finally walked away.
Within months the quartet broke up and, needing ready cash, Val took a job with Lou Preager’s orchestra at the Lyceum: a musical diet that didn’t stretch far beyond playing for dancers, the occasional novelty number and the hits of the day. At least when he’d been with Rabin there’d been a few other jazzers in the band — and Oscar had allowed them one number a night to stretch out and do their thing. But this… the boredom, the routine were killing him, and Val, I realised later, had moved swiftly on from chewing the insides of Benzedrine inhalers and smoking cannabis to injecting heroin. When the police raided a club in Old Compton Street in the small hours, there was Val in a back room with a needle in his arm.
Somehow, Patrick knew one of the detectives at West End Central well enough to call in a grudging favour. Grudging, but a favour all the same.
When Val stumbled out on to the pavement, twenty-four hours later and still wearing the clothes he’d puked up on, Patrick pushed him into a cab and took him to the place I was living in Kilburn.
I made tea, poured Patrick the last of a half-bottle of whisky, and ran a bath for Val, who was sitting on the side of my bed in his vest and underpants, shivering.
‘You’re a stupid bastard. You know that, don’t you?’ Patrick told him.
Val said nothing.
‘He’s a musician, I told the copper,’ Patrick said. ‘A good one. And you know what he said to me? All he is, another black junkie out of his fucking head on smack. Send him back where he fucking came from.’
A shadow of pain passed across Val’s face and I looked away, ashamed, not knowing what to say. Val’s father was West Indian, his mother Irish, his skin the colour of palest chocolate.
‘Can you imagine?’ Patrick said, turning to me. ‘All those years and I never noticed.’ Reaching out, he took hold of Val’s jaw and twisted his face upwards towards the light. ‘Look at that. Black as the ace of fucking spades. Not one of us at all.’
‘Stop it,’ I said. ‘Stop it, for God’s sake. What’s the matter with you?’
Patrick loosed his hold and stepped away. ‘Trying to shake some sense into him. Make him realise, way he’s going, what’ll happen if he carries on.’
He moved closer to Val and spoke softly. ‘They’ve got your number now, you know that, don’t you? Next time they catch you as much as smelling of reefer they’re going to have you inside so fast your feet won’t touch the ground. And you won’t like it inside, believe me.’
Val closed his eyes.
‘What you need is to put a little space between you and them, give them time to forget.’ Patrick stepped back. ‘Give me a couple of days, I’ll sort something. Even if it’s the Isle of Man.’
In the event, it was Paris. A two-week engagement at Le Chat Qui Peche with an option to extend it by three more.
‘You better go with him, Anna. Hold his hand, keep him out of trouble.’ And slipping an envelope fat with French francs and two sets of tickets into my hand, he kissed me on the cheek. ‘Just his hand, mind.’
The club was on the rue de la Huchette, close to the Seine, a black metal cat perched above a silver-grey fish on the sign outside; downstairs a small, smoky cellar bar with a stage barely big enough for piano, bass and drums, and, for seating, perhaps the most uncomfortable stools I’ve ever known. Instruments of torture, someone called them and, by the end of the first week, I knew exactly what he meant.
Not surprisingly, the French trio with whom Val was due to work were suspicious of him at first. His reputation in England may have been on the rise, but across the Channel he was scarcely known. And when you’re used to visitors of the calibre of Miles Davis and Bud Powell, Charlie Parker, what gave Val Collins the idea he’d be welcome? Didn’t the French have saxophone players of their own?
Both the bassist and the drummer wore white shirts that first evening, I remember, ties loosened, top buttons undone, very cool; the pianist’s dark jacket was rucked up at the back, its collar arched awkwardly against his neck, a cigarette smouldering, half-forgotten, at the piano’s edge.
The proprietor, Madame Ricard, welcomed us with lavish kisses and led us to a table, where we sat listening, the club not yet half full, Val’s foot moving instinctively to the rhythm and his fingers flexing over imaginary keys. At the intermission, she introduced
us to the band, who shook hands politely, looked at Val with cursory interest and excused themselves to stretch their legs outside, breathe in a little night air.
‘Nice guys,’ Val said with a slight edge as they left.
‘You’ll be fine,’ I said and squeezed his arm.
When the trio returned, Val was already on stage, re-angling the mike, adjusting his reed. ‘Blues in F,’ he said quietly, counting in the tempo, medium-fast. After a single chorus from the piano, he announced himself with a squawk and then a skittering run and they were away. Ten minutes later, when Val stepped back from the microphone, layered in sweat, the drummer gave a little triumphant roll on his snare, the pianist turned and held out his hand and the bass player loosened another button on his shirt and grinned.
‘Et maintenant,’ Val announced, testing his tender vocabulary to the full, ‘nous jouons une ballade par Ira Gershwin et Vernon Duke, “I Can’t Get Started.” Merci.’
And the crowd, accepting him, applauded.
What could go wrong?
At first, nothing it seemed. We both slept late most days at the hotel on the rue Maitre-Albert where we stayed; adjacent rooms that held a bed, a small wardrobe and little else, but with views across towards Notre Dame. After coffee and croissants — we were in Paris, after all — we would wander around the city, the streets of Saint-Germain-des-Pres at first, but then, gradually, we found our way around Montparnasse and up through Montmartre to Sacre Coeur. Sometimes we would take in a late-afternoon movie, and Val would have a nap at the hotel before a leisurely dinner and on to the club for that evening’s session, which would continue until the early hours.
Six nights a week and on the seventh, rest?
There were other clubs to visit, other musicians to hear. The Caveau de la Huchette was just across the street, the Club Saint-Germain-des-Pres and the Trois Mailletz both a short walk away. Others, like the Tabou and the Blue Note were a little further afield. I couldn’t keep up.
‘Go back to the hotel,’ Val said, reading the tiredness in my eyes. ‘Get a good night’s sleep, a proper rest.’ Then, with the beginnings of a smile, ‘You don’t have to play nursemaid all the time, you know.’
