by Jo Bannister
Fry was as dismissive as only a scared man can be. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. Creative artists have always taken drugs. Because it works. It filters out the garbage, opens the mind. It …’
‘It left you vulnerable to a kind of post-hypnotic suggestion,’ said Brodie plainly. ‘You scored, you wandered off to Planet Zog and you came back with a brand new song buzzing round your head. And yes, some of them were yours, but some of them were Sasha’s. They’re so polished Eric must have dictated them to you word by word, and hummed you the tune, as you were surfacing. And you weren’t even aware of it. The first you knew, you had a new song in your book, in your handwriting, and no memory of how it got there. But they weren’t your songs.’
‘But – how would he even know her … ?’
‘I imagine she asked him to handle her career the way he’d handled yours,’ said Brodie. ‘She sang her songs for him and he realised what they were worth.’
‘And he killed her for them?’ Fry’s deep voice soared.
‘I think so. They got together while you were in Ireland. She ended up dead, he ended up with a book full of top-class songs. A God-send for a man whose milch-cow was drying up.’
‘You don’t remember writing them,’ murmured Daniel. ‘You told me that. You take psychotropic drugs, all you know is that when you come round you’ve done it again – written another great song. Only you haven’t. You’ve just written it down.’
‘You’re crazy,’ spat Fry, almost as if he believed it. ‘You couldn’t do that if you tried.’
Daniel shook his head. ‘It’s amazing what you can do when you try, if scruples don’t get in the way. That’s how brainwashing works. You drug someone, tell him something while his conscious discrimination is off-line, and he wakes up believing it. It’s how subliminal advertising was meant to work – and maybe does work, how would we know? We can’t – any more than you could know that what was coming out of your head was someone else’s thoughts.’
Fry hardly knew how to react. Men who have lost limbs report a space in which there’s no pain because the nerves are traumatised. It was like that. Something vital to him, something precious and irreplaceable, had been taken from him, and the fact that it wasn’t hurting yet was scant comfort. Grazed knees and paper-cuts hurt then heal. This was too big to hurt.
He said again, ‘You’re crazy.’ But he knew it was the truth. Perhaps part of him had known all along, a detached part of his psyche that remained aware when the rest of him was cocooned in feather-bed layers of heroin, that was there when his manager took out the book from which he read, at intervals calculated to provide a undiminished reputation and the income that went with it, the regular bedtime story. Perhaps Daniel wasn’t telling him what had happened so much as reminding him.
But didn’t Fry want to hear it. If part of him already knew, the rest of him had walled it up out of his ken. Perhaps his addiction was less about self-indulgence than self-defence. He had come to terms – there had been no choice – with being an ex-songwriter, a flame that had burnt brightly and then died. He could live with that because his legacy to himself was some of the best songs he’d ever heard. Now he faced a more brutal reality: that those songs were in fact written by someone else. By a girl who, as his was fading, produced a talent so extraordinary she died of it.
His voice fell to a whisper. ‘None of these songs was mine?’
Daniel Hood was a kind man. He knew that Fry had taken a pride in his work long after there was any reason to take pride in himself. He took no pleasure in wresting that from him. ‘Of course they were,’ he said quickly. ‘All the early ones. Everything up to Crucifiction, and a lot of the later ones. You can tell which from the book, from the way they were written. That’s still an impressive body of work, Jared.’
‘I thought – I believed – I wrote them.’
‘I know. And maybe without you they’d never have been written. Sasha Wade approached Chandos instead of some other manager because she was touched by your music. And it was you who made the songs – even her songs – famous. With Sasha performing it, maybe with anyone else performing it, Crucifiction might never have been more than a curiosity. I know this has come as a shock. But it doesn’t mean there’s nothing of you in those twenty-odd songs. If you’d known you were collaborating with Sasha Wade, you’d still be pretty damn pleased with them.’
Finally Fry sat down beside Brodie. Not from choice: his knees folded and the sofa caught him. The open book was in front of him on the table. The blocky scrawl gripped his eye. Reluctantly he flicked through the pages. But there was no missing, now it had been pointed out to him, the difference between those songs and the others. Between hers and his. He sat back, his head swimming. ‘What do we do now?’
The explosion Brodie had been waiting for seemed to have fizzled out. The demon rocker slumped beside her like an orphaned child, waiting to be told what his future held. She slid her hand over his. ‘We’ll have to tell Superintendent Deacon. I imagine he’ll want to move the interview down to Battle Alley.’
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘I don’t think there’s a lot for you to do,’ said Daniel. ‘You don’t remember any of this, do you? Mr Deacon will want a statement from you, but there won’t be much in it. The real evidence is the book. It’ll come down to whether a jury puts the same interpretation on it that we have.’
Fry’s head came up with that odd admixture of arrogance and fear. He was ashamed to ask but he needed an answer. ‘What about me?’
Brodie squeezed his hand. ‘I don’t think any of this was your fault. You behaved stupidly – God, you behaved stupidly, you spent so much time on mind-altering drugs that you were never going to know you were being used – but you had no part in Sasha’s death and no conscious involvement in the theft of her work. I don’t think you’re going to prison over this.’
‘But Eric is.’
Daniel nodded. ‘If we’re right. And if Mr Deacon can prove it.’ He was looking at the book. ‘We ought to give this to him and explain what it means. Will you do that or should I?’
He might as well have asked Fry which kidney he wanted to donate. The book was his child, he hadn’t ventured further than a few miles from it for ten years, and though he’d now discovered he wasn’t after all its biological father he still didn’t want strangers taking it away.
Brodie decided for him. ‘I’ll take it down. I need a word with Jack anyway.’ She picked it up and Fry made no attempt to stop her.
In truth, Deacon was glad of the interruption. Interrogating Chandos was as much fun as kissing a porcupine: he’d be glad when he’d had enough. But it wasn’t in him to be gracious. ‘What does she want this time? Has Daniel decided it was all done with mirrors and a bit of Blue Tac?’
‘She wants a word outside,’ said Voss.
Deacon scowled but got up, unfolding stiffly. ‘Maybe she’s trying to keep you out of prison,’ he grunted at Chandos.
‘Maybe she’s trying to save you from making a fool of yourself,’ countered the manager.
As soon as Deacon closed the study door behind him, Brodie took him by the arm and steered him into the sitting-room. She pushed him into a chair, pulled up one for herself and fixed him in place with the story she had to tell.
Deacon listened in silence. It was impossible to judge if he believed it or was waiting for her to draw breath so he could tell her it was nonsense. But when she showed him the book he flicked back and forth between the two types of songs and understood the point she was making.
When she’d finished, still for a few moments he said nothing. Then: ‘What does Fry think of this? Does he remember Chandos dictating the songs to him?’
Brodie shook her head. ‘Not even when we drew him a picture. In spite of that, he knows it’s the truth. It explains things he’d never understood. Why he can’t write any more. Why, when he was still writing, he could only do it when he was stoned. Why Chandos never got him off the stuff
. And of course, why he was so determined to have this house that he lied to Jared and me both.’
‘That was a mistake,’ reflected Deacon. ‘He thought it was the only house in England where he would be safe from his past. In fact, it was only by returning here that he linked himself to Sasha Wade.’ He looked again at the book. ‘I like this. I like it a lot. It’s good enough for me, but I’m not sure it’ll be good enough for the Crown Prosecution Service.’
Brodie was thinking. ‘What were you going to do? If I hadn’t brought you this?’
‘I was about to thank the man for his time, ask him to let me know before he went off on any foreign holidays, and leave,’ Deacon said honestly.
‘That’s exactly what you should do.’ There was an unholy gleam in Brodie’s eye. ‘Just don’t go too far away.’
Chapter Twenty-Seven
‘They’ve gone,’ said Brodie.
Daniel nodded sombrely. ‘Jack saw it too, then. The book was all he needed.’
‘No, I don’t mean they’ve arrested Eric,’ said Brodie. ‘They’ve just gone. Jack and Charlie Voss. I caught them just before they left.’ This was true if misleading.
Daniel frowned. ‘Didn’t he look at the songbook?’
‘Yes. And then he left.’
It was a complicated relationship between Daniel and Deacon. It wasn’t made any simpler by Brodie’s feelings for each of them, but even without her there would always have been friction. Deacon thought Daniel was put on earth to annoy him while Daniel thought Deacon’s mission was to misunderstand him; wantonly and deliberately if it didn’t happen naturally. He thought that was what had happened now. That if anyone else had noticed the discrepancy in how the songs were written – particularly if Deacon himself had noticed – he’d have been talking to the Director of Public Prosecutions right now. Piqued, and uncertain what to do next, Daniel subsided onto the sofa.
Fry said, ‘Eric’s downstairs?’
‘Mm,’ nodded Brodie absently. ‘Well, there’s no point us staying out of the way any longer, I suppose …’
Fry reached the stairs first.
Half way down Daniel realised the danger and tried to catch up with him. Brodie blocked his passage. ‘Who are you trying to protect?’ she hissed.
‘Jared.’
‘I don’t think you need to.’
Chandos came out of the study as Fry reached the hall. ‘You can show your face now, no one’s going to stick a Litmus paper up your nose.’
Whatever he was expecting, it wasn’t bodily assault. He was older than Fry but also bigger and stronger. Only a soul-deep rage he was incapable of containing blinded Fry to the inevitable outcome of a physical confrontation. Or perhaps he knew he was going to get beaten senseless but thought it was worth it. Welcomed the chance to swap internal wounds that killed without showing for external ones that only bled.
They rolled across the ancient floorboards like a novelty bowling-ball, arms, legs and profanities coming out at all angles. When it fetched up against the kitchen door it separated into two men again, one throwing blows like confetti, more concerned with the quantity than the aim, the other returning about one in five but actually doing some damage.
Finally Daniel managed to get past Brodie, got a hand in Fry’s collar and yanked. The combatants fell apart. There was blood on Fry’s face, uncomprehending fury in Chandos’s. Fry wasn’t even forming words any more, just howling like a trapped animal.
‘Jared! Calm down. This isn’t achieving anything.’
For a calculating man, Chandos was beside himself with rage. ‘What the ∗∗∗ do you think you’re ∗∗∗ doing, you ∗∗∗ ∗∗∗ little troll?’ Brodie listened with interest. There were obscenities in there she hadn’t heard before.
Between his bloody nose and his bruised ribs, and the pain in his heart, Fry could hardly speak. He fought weakly but failed to break Daniel’s grip. ‘I know what you did,’ he gasped. ‘You bastard. I know what you did and how you did it.’
Chandos didn’t know what he knew. Plainly something had happened, and if he didn’t know what at least he knew who to blame. He swatted Fry aside like a mosquito, which left him face to face with Daniel. ‘You again! Now what have you been telling him? You’re not going to be satisfied, are you, until you drive him completely off his head!’
Daniel had no chance to answer. Fry was back, his body bent like a bow with the bone-cracking power of his anger. But it wasn’t just anger: there was grief and humiliation mixed in there, and together they flayed him and bared his workings to the world. Chandos wasn’t exaggerating: Daniel too feared for his sanity.
Brodie was waiting for him to construct a sentence. Because she didn’t think it was going to be what it should have been. She didn’t think he was this overwrought for a nineteen-year-old girl he’d never met. She was right; and yet disappointed.
‘You let me think I wrote those songs!’ yelled Fry, his voice fragmenting. ‘You made me think that! I believed they were mine.’
Chandos tried to brush the accusation aside. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
Fry had been silenced for the last time. He seemed past caring what happened to him now. If Chandos wasn’t who he thought he was, and even he wasn’t who he thought he was, maybe it didn’t matter what happened next. He had nothing left to lose.
‘Chimera. Hell Won’t Wait. Crucifiction, for God’s sake! All the songs that people who don’t even listen to demon rock know are mine. Only they’re not. They were written by a girl who came to you for careers advice and never went home. You killed her, and you kept her songs and fed them to me one at a time, when I was so blitzed I wouldn’t even notice.’ He barked a desperate little laugh. ‘I thought that was when I was at my most creative. I knew it would kill me, I came to realise it wasn’t even good for my work long-term, but I thought if the heroin was helping me write songs like that it was a price worth paying. But I wasn’t writing anything, was I? I was just taking them down.’
People who live through volcanic eruptions talk about an unnatural stillness falling immediately beforehand. It was like that with Chandos. Trying to fix it in her mind afterwards Brodie dismissed the obvious explanation, that he was frozen by shock. Nor was it the silence of defeat, of a man giving up. It was more as if time itself was stunned into pausing while he considered his next move. The look of furious exasperation had faded from his face but nothing came to replace it. Close enough to both Daniel and Fry to bang their heads together, he made no move of any kind. Stillness radiated from him in an expanding shell like fall-out, filling the room, filling the house around them, a stillness so profound it was not merely the absence of movement but the death of it. Unmoving himself, he was also the cause of immobility in others.
If his body was fixed, perhaps it was to free his mind. Behind the silence Brodie sensed the deep generator hum of high-speed calculation. The sound of a volcano thinking.
At length – and not one of them could have said how long the silence lasted – he said, so softly she had to strain to hear, ‘When I first saw you on stage I thought you were going to take the world by storm. You were eighteen years old, you were hammering hell out of an old Yamaha guitar, and you looked like you’d crawled on your hands and knees over broken glass to get to where the music was. I didn’t know if the raw power of your voice or the desolation of your vision was the more startling, but I thought you were the most exciting thing I’d ever listened to.’
He looked at Brodie then, and the sad ghost of a smile twitched the dark beard. ‘You should have seen him then. The energy. The fierce determination to get his songs heard. You felt, if he had to, he’d kill for them. I thought, How can a boy who wants to be heard that much not go all the way? And I asked myself, How can you know that and not go with him?
‘I had other commitments. I got rid of them. People – people in the business, people who knew what they were talking about – said I was crazy, that only amateurs put everything on one throw of the
dice. But they hadn’t seen what I’d seen, heard what I’d heard, and though I agreed with every word they said I still knew it was the right thing to do.’
Eric Chandos sighed, and lifted the broad shoulders in a world-weary shrug. ‘I still think it was. Things didn’t work out how I’d hoped but there were factors outside my control. By the time I realised the drug use had gone beyond recreational to full-blown dependence he was already a lost cause. I knew then I’d have to rethink the game plan, because commercial success was still a possibility but rewriting the standard for rock music no longer was. The hunger to be heard had gone. He’d found another way to dull the pain.’
Fry’s gaze was hot, ashamed and accusatory. ‘You could have helped. You could have got me clean. I don’t remember you even trying.’
‘That’s kind of the point, Jared,’ said Chandos drily. ‘You don’t remember. I did try. I tried very hard to talk some sense into you in those early years. I knew what you were risking, not just personally but professionally. There are rockstars who can manage an addiction and still be great. There are an awful lot more ex-rockstars, and people who never quite became rockstars, and people who had a great future behind them the first time they stuck a needle in their arm.’
Brodie waited but there seemed to be nothing more coming. ‘So?’ she prompted eventually.
‘So?’
She breathed heavily at him. ‘You’d taken risks to make a star of Jared and he was pickling his brain with jolly-juice. What did you do then? Find someone who could still write demon rock – and write it well enough for Souls to play it – and kill her for it?’
Chandos stared at her as if she was something he’d stepped in. ‘Don’t be absurd.’
‘Don’t lie to me!’ snarled Fry. ‘I want the truth. Those aren’t my songs. I thought they were but they’re not. She wrote them. Sasha … Sasha …’
‘Wade,’ Daniel supplied softly.
‘She wrote them, and then she died, and somehow I ended up writing them in my book.’ Despite the tremor in his voice, Fry had a grip on his emotions for now. ‘I know I didn’t kill her, I was in Ireland when she died. But you were on your way home by then. You met her, didn’t you? What happened?’
