Dead Dames Don't Sing

by John Harvey

  There was a new tightness in her voice, as if everything up to now had been just pleasant fooling around; now it was as if she were handing him his coat and ushering him out the door.

  “Go and see Daniel. Tell him he’s got another forty-eight hours. After that he can take his chances along with the rest.”

  Kiley knew better than most when a welcome was outstayed. The night air was cold but he decided to walk back across the Park nonetheless. When he reached Marble Arch he’d pick up a cab; until then he wanted to think, clear his head. Beyond the darkness of the trees, swans glided along the Long Water of the Serpentine like ghosts.

  When he went to make his report the following morning something was nagging at a corner of his mind that he couldn’t shake free. The sky was overcast, busy with the prospect of rain. Daniel Pike seemed happy nonetheless, cheered by Kiley’s news. All there, every page. He insisted Kiley stay for coffee and almond croissants that came, hand delivered, from a high-end bakery around the corner on Upper Street. He was more or less determined, Kiley could see, to go ahead, the chance of catching his fellow-dealers flat-footed too great an opportunity to resist.

  “I’ll call Alexandra later, agree terms. She can have the manuscript couriered to me here within the hour. I’ll have my tame experts give it the once over. And then it’s full speed ahead.”

  Seeing Kiley’s face, he hesitated.

  “What? You think there’s something not right?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “From what you’ve told me, the only possible fly in the ointment now is Frederica. There’s an outside chance, if and when she learns the sale is going ahead, she might try to take out some kind of injunction against her sister. But frankly, I think that’s unlikely. With her own novel coming out any day now, all her energies are going to be focused there.”

  “This actress Henry Swift mentioned,” Kiley said, “you think that’s worth following up at all?”

  Pike smiled. “I don’t really think so, do you?”

  Kiley shrugged. “Your call.” He chased down the last piece of croissant with a swig of coffee and reached across to shake Pike’s hand. “I’ll let you have an invoice, expenses as agreed, some time in the next few days.”

  Back outside, the threat of rain seemed to have abated. The new movie about Miles Davis was playing at the Screen on the Green. Kiley wondered why he’d never really liked Davis’s music as much as he probably should have. Perhaps there was simply too much? Like Dickens. All those albums; all those fat, baggy books. A man can only do what time allows.

  There were two emails waiting for him when he logged back on. One was from Margaret Hamblin at her offices at Hamblin, Laker and Clarke, Solitictors, where she was a senior partner—Would Jack get back to her ASAP? He would. The other was from Derek Becker, a saxophone player who’d had the misfortune to get mixed up in one of Kiley’s investigations and ended up in hospital for his troubles. Got a gig at the Vortex, Jack, this coming Sunday. Be good to see you there. There was nothing from Kate.

  When he phoned Margaret Hamblin, her assistant said she was in a meeting and might be tied up for the remainder of the day. Just minutes later, the assistant called back. Could he meet Margaret at Grain Store by the Regent’s Canal at six o’clock? He certainly could, especially if it was on her expense account and not his.

  The remainder of the day was his to waste.

  Waste it, he did.

  Margaret was at the restaurant when he arrived, tucking into some sprouting seeds and beans with a potato wafer and a dab of miso aubergine. Hint of treats to come. There was a bottle of Sancerre open and underway. A quick glance at the menu reassured Kiley the rump of lamb was still holding its own amongst the quinoa falafels and the seaweed and vegetable dashi.

  Immaculately tailored as usual, Margaret’s face was showing signs of strain: too full a work-load, too little sleep. Even with a willing partner, adopting a two-year-old well into your mid-forties was perhaps not a top idea. One of the potential witnesses in a court case involving a client had disappeared. Could be hiding out in Cyprus, family in Nicosia, more likely the Mile End Road.

  “It’s urgent, Jack.”

  “Have I ever let you down?”

  “Shall I count the ways?”

  He thought she was quoting from something but didn’t know what.

  Back in his flat a couple of hours later, he poured himself a small glass of the remaining Springbank and slid Kind of Blue into the stereo. Maybe it wasn’t too late to give Miles a serious try. Still no message from Kate. Never mind. He had yet to finish the first fifty pages of Dead Dames Don’t Sing.

  The smoke inside the club was so thick it seemed to hang in coils from the ceiling, the smell of marijuana sweet and lingering on the air. I made my way between tables busy with mainly black bodies—West Indians and former American G.I.s—faces turned expectantly towards the small semi-circle of stage where a microphone stood lonely in the spotlight, a baby grand at an angle behind, lid optimistically raised.

  By the time I’d found myself a seat in a corner by the side wall and ordered a gimlet, a piano player with hunched shoulders and fingers like spindles was stroking the keys. After several aimless moments, the doodling became a tune, a song the audience recognized as her song, and a desperate hush fell over the room. Then there she was. Her body cocooned in a sheath of shimmering gold that emphasized the startling whiteness of her skin, the globes of her partly exposed breasts reflecting back the light. Fingers of one hand smoothing her dress down along her thigh, with the other she reached for the microphone as tenderly, as urgently as she might reach for a lover, eased it closer to her mouth and began to sing …

  As Margaret Hamblin had suspected, her reluctant witness had not strayed far from the Mile End Road, Kiley unearthing him in the back room of a greasy spoon that was trying urgently to reinvent itself as cool. Derek Becker’s Vortex gig went down a storm. Kate’s text, when it finally arrived, was brief and to the point: Cathi putting me in touch with a film buff from the Sohemians, expect more soon. Then this in the morning post …

  A very special announcement to our clients from

  Pike Fine & Rare Books

  “Dead Dames Don’t Sing”

  by William Pierce

  The remarkable and unrecorded manuscript of an unpublished crime novel by the distinguished British poet throws a completely new light on his development as a young writer. The novel is vividly set in London’s bohemian Soho in the mid-1950s and revolves around the murder of a female jazz singer who had been simultaneously involved with a saxophone player and former American G.I.

  All the available evidence suggests the novel was composed in the late 1950s, when Pierce was in his mid-twenties and still to find serious recognition as a poet. The novel’s survival is in the form of an unbound working manuscript, comprising 234 pp on white and/or light blue typing paper of A4 (i.e. 25x20cm.) Many of the pages bear Pierce’s working revisions in blue ink in his identifiable hand. The typescript is housed in its original square-cut manila folder with Pierce’s holograph title of the novel formally stated in capitals on a cream label pasted to the flap. Several pages are somewhat creased and stained, and there is occasional smudging of the blue ink, but the entire text is absolutely legible.

  This is a truly unique item for which we have fully confirmed provenance, having come to us directly through negotiation with a family member, and as such we are very proud to make it available for pu
rchase to one of our valued customers. Its rarity and biographical significance would suit a high-quality and select collection of twentieth century literary papers, and our private buyers may well recognize this as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, as, in all probability, will various distinguished institutions, in the U.K. or overseas.

  Interested clients are most warmly

  invited to contact Daniel Pike at Pike Fine & Rare Books to discuss the terms of this purchase at their earliest opportunity.

  So there it is, Kiley thought, done and dusted, his first venture into the world of rare books coasting to an end. Client well satisfied. Time to step away.

  Kate’s voice when she rang was a little ragged, as if perhaps she’d had a later night than usual, too little sleep. He didn’t ask. “The Sohemians,” she said, “They had a meeting yesterday. This actress you’re interested in, I’ve got a name. Yvonne Fisher.”

  It rang no bells.

  “Any way of contacting her?” Kiley asked.

  “Ouija board? Crystal ball?”

  “Dead, then?”

  “Not so long ago. 2010 at the age of 79. But she had a daughter, Susan, still very much alive. It was her I spoke to. Explained your interest.”

  “You think she’d talk to me?”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  Susan Fisher was sixty and in a more forgiving light could have passed for ten years younger. Her hair, platinum blonde with a hint of silver, looked to have been recently styled and cut; her clothes, Kiley guessed, were well-chosen or expensive or both. The apartment where she lived, on the upper floor of a late-Victorian double-fronted house on the fringes of Hampstead, was comfortably furnished, rugs in muted colors on the floor, a cat—Siamese, Kiley thought—fixing him with a look of disdain from where it lay, curled, at a corner of a well-upholstered settee.

  Three albums of her mother’s photographs and ephemera lay ready on the dining room table.

  “Tea, Mr. Kiley? Coffee? Something stronger?”

  “Tea would be fine, thank you. And it’s Jack, please. Jack.”

  “Then you must call me Susan.” She smiled. It was a nice smile. Not overwrought with meaning and secure. “When my husband died, I went back to using my own name. Fisher. It seemed ungrateful somehow, seeing he’d left me more than comfortably off. But finding myself alone after the best part of thirty years I needed to find who I was again. No longer somebody’s wife.”

  “I understand.”

  “Do you? Well, it’s good of you to say so. Now please, do start going through those things of mother’s while I attend to the tea.”

  The first album was mostly family photographs. Susan, at no more than eight or nine, already recognizable as the woman she had since become; her mother, strikingly beautiful when she was younger and possessed of a vitality that shone through even the most formal of moments; a somber-faced man Kiley presumed to be Susan’s father.

  The remaining albums contained a mixture of press cuttings, photos and playbills. Theater programs from places Kiley had heard of but never visited. Showcards from films he had never seen. Studio-shot glamor portraits in which Yvonne Fisher, wearing a skimpy swimming costume, reached up for a beach ball high above her head, or, bending low in a scoop-topped blouse, patted an obliging puppy with her hand.

  “She hated all that,” Susan Fisher said, setting cups and saucers down on a tray. “All that charm school nonsense. Pin-ups for Picturegoer and Picture Show. Signed postcards for the fans. What she wanted to do was act, not pose. But in those days, if you were an actress—a starlet, as they used to call them—it was the only way. Maybe it still is, I don’t know.”

  “How successful was she?” Kiley asked. “Looking at all of this, it seems as if she worked a good deal, but I’m afraid her name didn’t ring any bells.”

  “It was a long time ago, Mr. Kiley . . .”

  “Jack.”

  “I’m sorry, yes, Jack. All a long time ago and there are precious few names from those days, British names that is, that remain in the public consciousness. Diana Dors, I suppose. Virginia McKenna, maybe. Susan Shaw. Poor Susan—I was named after her, you know. She and my mother acted together in the first film mother made.”

  Reaching past Kiley, she turned the page.

  “There. Wide Boy. A cheap crime film, just a little over an hour long, and, as I remember it, not very good at all. Of course, Susan was the star and most of my mother’s performance ended up on the cutting room floor.”

  “You said poor Susan when you mentioned her before …”

  “Yes. Her husband, her second husband, crashed the sports car he was driving and was killed. Susan never got over it. She started drinking, drinking heavily, and never recovered. She was penniless when she died. The studio paid for her funeral.”

  “Your mother didn’t follow in those footsteps, at least.”

  “No. Though to hear her reminisce about those days, it wasn’t as if she didn’t try.”

  Turning another page, she pointed at a photograph showing a youngish woman, smartly dressed but clearly more than a little tipsy, standing between two men and smiling at the camera for all she was worth.

  “That was taken outside the Wheatsheaf on Rathbone Place. Practically a home from home in those days. And there, on the left, that’s the man you’re interested in. William Pierce.”

  Kiley peered closely. Pierce was just above medium height, dark suit, cigarette, homburg hat, cockeyed smile.

  “This is when they were having an affair?”

  “Is that what it was? I don’t know. They were close, certainly.”

  “And this?” Kiley pointed at the other man. Taller, leaner of face, hat at a rakish angle, a sardonic look in his eyes.

  “Anthony LeStrange. He was a writer. A screenwriter. It was Anthony who was meant to be turning William’s book into the film that would be my mother’s vehicle to stardom. A night club singer in love with two men, one white and one black. Quite daring for its day.” She shook her head. “My mother used to laugh about it later in life: the film that was never made from the book that was never written.”

  “Never? You’re sure?”

  “A few lines scribbled on the back of an envelope, perhaps, but other than that, I doubt it very much. And I’m sure my mother would have said if it were.” She smiled a trifle sadly, recalling her mother’s pleasure. “I think they were all too busy having a good time.”

  “Come round for dinner,” Kate had said. “Latish. Eight-thirty. Nine.” They sat in the window of Kate’s apartment, the table fitting neatly into the bay. It was only the second time Kiley had been there since she’d moved in. There were still books in boxes, newspapers and magazines in overlapping piles on the floor.

  “I spoke with Daniel today,” Kate said. “He seems really pleased. Apparently he’s had one or two serious offers already. Big money, too. Just as well. I see news has sneaked out on to the web. Famous poet’s sexy Soho past. Be in the papers tomorrow. The broadsheets, at least.” She stopped, seeing the shift in Kiley’s expression, the frown. “What? What’s the matter?”

  “I just hope he’s not about to fall flat on his face.”

  “I thought you assured him everything was okay?”

  “As far as I could tell. I offered to poke around further, but he wasn’t interested. Too anxious to go ahead.”

  “And you think that was a mistake?”

  “I hope not. I don’t know.”

&nbs
p; “Was this something Susan Fisher said? Something to do with her mother?”

  “Not really, no. Just some stupid itch that won’t go away.”

  “Calamine lotion, Jack. That or a good night’s sleep.”

  Dinner over—fillets of brill, new potatoes, broccoli, green beans—Kiley said no to a second glass of wine, stood stranded between table and door.

  “Go home,” Kate said, not unkindly. “Get some rest.”

  He woke at three, a little after, seven minutes past, the time top right on the screen when he switched on the computer. Typed the name into the search bar: Anthony LeStrange. William Pierce’s drinking companion, screenwriter and friend. Who was to say he hadn’t turned his hand to fiction as well? There were eleven entries under his name, four of them immediately relevant: Wikipedia, IMDB, filmmakers.com, screenplaylists.com. Seven screenplays filmed between 1949 and 1962 and LeStrange was listed as co-writer on three more and an associate producer credit on two others. But nothing to suggest he’d ever turned his hand to other forms of writing, not even the shortest of short stories, an article on screenwriting for Sight and Sound.

  Before going back to bed, Kiley went across to the window and looked down at the street outside. A young fox, lean and with a healthy brush of tail, stood stock still at the curb edge, nose in the air, before trotting neatly across the road and disappearing out of sight.

  Almost the next thing he knew was the phone going, jerking him awake. Susan Fisher’s cultivated voice. “Jack, I hope I’m not calling too early?”

  “No. No, not at all.”

  “It’s just that I’ve remembered. Anthony had a brother. Christopher. I think he was some kind of a writer, too.”

  Kiley thanked her, bundled out of bed, splashed water on his face and set coffee on the stove. Christopher, then. Christopher LeStrange. LinkedIn offered him the opportunity to view the profiles of 25 top professionals with that name. PeekYou, better still, boasted 43 with the same name or near enough. Then there were Facebook, MySpace and Spokeo. Two cups of coffee later, Kiley was bowed down by information overload, disappointed and confused. If Susan Fisher had been correct in remembering Anthony’s brother as a writer, he seemed to be a writer who—unless he were the Christopher LeStrange whose research area had been disorders of the lower bowel, or the LeStrange with a seemingly inexhaustible interest in the Southern India Railway companies of the 1860s—didn’t seem to have published a thing.