The Singer

by Cathi Unsworth

  She gave a hollow laugh. I would have thought that she was mad, that she had just been playing with me all afternoon and evening if it wasn’t for the fact that, thanks to Joe Pascal, I knew she wasn’t lying. Then she looked at me sadly. ‘He’s in Lisbon, Eddie. That’s what you wanted to know.’

  The buzzer rang loudly, cutting through the sound of my jaw dropping.

  ‘And that’ll be your cab.’ She stood up. ‘You got all your stuff?’

  ‘Er, yes, yes, thank you.’ I stuffed my tape recorder back into my bag, made a quick rummage through my pockets as she walked ahead of me towards the front door. Everything was exactly where it should have been.

  She picked up the intercom. ‘He’ll be down in a second,’ she said into it, then turned to me. ‘Where to?’ she asked.

  ‘Camden,’ I said, my mind reeling too much to even think to make up an alternative.

  ‘Camden,’ she told the cabbie, then replaced the receiver.

  ‘Well, I hope you got everything you came for.’ Donna opened the front door and stood aside to let me pass.

  There wasn’t an answer to that, so I didn’t give one. Instead, I offered her my hand. ‘Thanks, Donna,’ I said as she took it.

  ‘Eddie,’ she said as I stepped into the hallway.

  I looked back into her black Spanish eyes.

  ‘Safe home,’ she said and closed the door.

  I don’t remember the journey home, or stumbling into my bed. The next thing I knew was the phone was ringing, my head was splitting and the clock by my bed said the time was half-past ten. For a moment I couldn’t think where I was or what I was doing. But then, as the answerphone clicked on, I was given an all too clear reminder.

  ‘Eddie,’ came Ray’s voice. ‘I’m just checking to see if you’re all right. Blimey, mate, I don’t know what you did to please Donna, but she thinks you’re the best thing since sliced bread. I’ve just had her on the phone singing your praises. You’re lucky you’re not twenty years older, mate, or I’d be seriously worried about your chances. Anyway, give us a ring when you get the chance. Ta-ra.’

  Donna. Jesus. I clasped my hand to my aching head as it all flooded back to me. I fucked Donna.

  I felt sordid and sick inside. How had she beguiled me that way? Had I wanted to get into this story so badly that I literally had to go where Vince had been? Had I been chasing the Time Out vamp with the chopsticks in her hair or had her fried remains been trying to resurrect her own youth via some infernal sex magick when we did what we did? Either way, it was an unholy communion.

  And yet...I dimly realised from what Ray had just said that she hadn’t told him about it. And more than that.

  She had told me where Vince was.

  That thought propelled me out of bed. Yesterday’s clothes were all over the floor in a mess. I dumped them in the already overflowing laundry basket and made straight for the shower. Ten minutes of alternate hot and cold blasts of that and I’d cleared my head and rid my body of any faint, lingering aromas of last night’s performance. Now wasn’t the time to dwell on that. Now was the time to work out how to tell Gavin I’d come about this information.

  I thought, as I put the kettle on and poured Crunchy Nut cornflakes into a bowl, I’d have to be a bit careful about what I said to him. I didn’t want him to know I’d seen Donna. Perhaps Monsieur Pascal could be of assistance.

  I poured cold milk over the cereal, moved over to the Mac, powered it up and stood there in my dressing gown, rapidly filling my face and working out what to say. Pascal was old school. Blokes of his generation could generally be relied upon to be discreet.

  As soon as I was up and online, I had it. I wrote:

  Dear Joseph, I’ve had a bit of a tip-off about Vince Smith. Now, the person who told me did so in strict confidence and I’m not altogether sure if they’re not just a random nutter, but they seemed to know enough to convince me this is worth a try. For instance, they knew about Marseilles and Seville and confirmed he had been in Tangiers, as you suspected. Only could we please keep the information between ourselves, and if anything comes of it, tell the others it came from one of your comrades? It’s just to protect my source, as all good journalists must.

  I sent that little beauty off, wondering what else I could tell Gavin if Pascal didn’t have any snouts in Lisbon. In the meantime, I called Ray, assured him that everything had gone well and proceeded to laugh off the source of Donna’s enthusiasm for my good self through gritted teeth. ‘She kept saying I looked like Dave Vanian,’ I told him.

  ‘That’ll be it!’ he said. ‘Course. I’m not too on the ball, am I? I hadn’t noticed it myself, but I suppose there is a bit of a resemblance. Well, enough for her fevered brain anyway. She always was obsessed with Vanian.’

  ‘Well, she was very complimentary about you,’ I told him, trying to change the subject. ‘She said you were the best punk journalist of them all and I should be writing about you.’

  ‘Yeah, well,’ Ray brushed the compliment off. ‘We’ll see. She’s being nice for now, but we’d better hope she hasn’t developed too much of a crush on you, Dave…’

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’ It was just as well he couldn’t see me squirming in my chair.

  By the time he’d rung off, Pascal was flashing in my inbox:

  Let me assure you any information you give me will be treated in the strictest confidence. I understand perfectly that you need to protect your source and compliment you on finding one so quickly. You must be quite a detective yourself!

  Well I was beginning to think so. I replied:

  Thanks Joseph I didn’t doubt your discretion. My source—

  I liked that word, made me sound like a professional, not someone who went round shagging mentally ill, middle-aged dominatrices

  —said that they had heard from him recently and that he was living in Lisbon. If you know of anyone there, maybe they could take a look around. I have no idea if he’s still using the Dawson alias, but from what I can gather he’s still involved in some kind of drugs thing.

  Pascal thought he might have a friend of a friend in Lisbon. By the time I had finished the morning’s correspondence with him, last night’s hangover had all but disappeared in the rush of anticipation. So what if I had done something slightly unsavoury to get the information I needed, I told myself. I’d still got it. And by Christ, if we found Vince, then this book would be heading for the top of the bestseller lists. They could make a documentary out of it, or a film. Even, maybe, I’d win some prizes for it, like I’d dreamed way back in cold November on Gavin’s couch.

  I supposed I could start work on Donna’s tapes, get it out of the way as fast as possible, keep moving on while I waited to see what Joseph could find. At least I knew I’d stopped recording well before all that stuff had happened that I didn’t want to think about. And in the run up to that, it had been mostly gossip, if I remembered rightly. The things I had really needed to know I didn’t need a tape recorder for.

  I rummaged around in my bag and found the dictaphone, and with it that Camden New Journal from the train back from Guildford. Hmmm, I thought, this could be interesting, I was more in the mood for that kind of shit now. Eddie Bracknell, Ace Detective, in his secret hideout overlooking the Murder Capital of Britain. That would be a few moments distraction before I got down to Donna’s dirty laundry.

  I got myself another coffee and a packet of digestives and sat down to read it. There had indeed been a hefty upswing in the murders around these parts, hardly surprising when you took a look outside at some of the citizens of the parish. Some of the crimes were pretty gruesome. Bodies in carrier bags shoved into wheelie bins. Bodies in suitcases thrown into Regent’s Canal. A lot of stabbings, gang warfare the police reckoned, to control the drugs racket, but some of them just stupid après-pub bust-ups or crack addict muggings gone wrong. Even a couple of drive-by shootings, proper South Central Los Angeles behaviour.

  They’d written a list of everyone who’d been murdered between Ca
mden, Chalk Farm and Kentish town in the past six months. My eyes trailed down the list. And my blood turned to ice.

  January 12: A man’s body found under a bridge over the Canal between Oval Road and Regent’s Park. Slumped against the wall, he had been dead for at least twenty-four hours when a concerned passer-by realised he was not simply sleeping or inebriated. The pathologist subsequently found heavy trauma to the back of the skull, made by a blow with a hammer or similar blunt instrument. An emaciated homeless itinerant and heavy drug user, the man was identified through his dental records as Robin Gordon Leith.

  ‘I took care of that thing for you,’ I heard Christophe say, loud as a bell in my head. Christophe, sitting by the fire in the Lord Stanley, surrounded by smoke, looking supremely contented, like he’d just had himself a fine meal. Christophe of whom I’d heard so little from recently. Christophe who was so sure my problems with Leith were over.

  Because he knew for sure. ‘He won’t be bothering you again, believe me.’

  Eddie Bracknell, Ace Detective, shagger of middle-aged dominatrices and keeper of the secrets of the dead, presides in his secret hideout in the Murder Capital of Britain, himself an accessory to murder.

  32

  Wait For the Blackout

  May 1981

  Steve sat backstage at the Lyceum Ballroom, staring through rather than looking at the copy of Sounds in his hands. That record that had nearly killed them to make, that Lynton had so cryptically titled ‘Butcher’s Brew’, was number 25 in the actual charts. Tonight’s gig had sold out within a day of the tickets going on sale. It seemed the Great British Public had missed Blood Truth while they’d been away, couldn’t wait to have them back.

  Tony had been equally moved. He’d got them all separate flats, with fixed low rents, from some mate of his who had a few coming up in Ladbroke Grove all of a sudden. Couldn’t have them working and sleeping in the studio now, could he? How thoughtful. Steve now had a flat of his own with plenty of space, no need to share, no need to worry about the pigs or the neighbours. Welcome home, lads.

  But Steve didn’t feel welcome, or popular, or vindicated. He felt bereft.

  He’d lost Lynton in America, back in the Deep South somewhere. He had a suspicion it was en route to Memphis, which would have made it just perfect for Vince. The birthplace of the King and Lynton’s heroin addiction. For the first time since they’d met, Lynton had shut Steve out. The trio that had been united on their way out to the States were now splintered. Steve had spent the last two weeks on the Silver Bullet almost exclusively talking to Mouse and Earl, trying to figure out what had happened, what he’d done wrong. Kevin had just kept his head in a book, ignoring everything else between one venue and the next. Steve couldn’t blame him for that. Swotty Kevin Holme always kept his head down.

  But Steve had been hurt, hurt to the core. Every time he tried to start a conversation, Lynton brushed him off and turned his back on him. Every time Steve sat down next to him, Lynton went to the back of the bus, to Vince and his silly American bitch. Their last dates had been horrible, messy disasters. He hadn’t even bothered to play the right songs, had deliberately gone off into a world of his own just to fuck the rest of them off. Blood Truth were just sport for the audiences who bothered to turn up, target practice for lobbing beer cans. Steve didn’t blame them either.

  The only good thing that had come out of the whole, horrible mess was meeting Earl. Earl had seen what was going on, hadn’t passed comment, but had invited Steve to ride shotgun with him most nights, told him his life story as they rolled across the States. When they’d parted, in the vacuous enormity of LAX airport, the big man had pressed a number into Steve’s hand. ‘You ever wanna try and get somethin’ else goin’ on out here,’ he’d told him, ‘you give me a call. You’re good people, Steve.’

  Steve still had a faint hope that things might get better back in London but they didn’t. Despite the new flats, despite the fact Tony had managed to get rid of Sylvana for almost an entire week. Most of the songs on this album had been collaborations between Vince, Lynton and their mutual friend, with dimbo Sylvana nodding off in the corner. Steve had been shut out yet again. He’d smashed four guitars in a week. Kevin, meanwhile, had got his head kicked in. Steve didn’t know why. He just knew, when he saw the poor, battered face in the hospital next day that he wanted to put Vince in the next bed. But Vince, with that sixth sense he had that always told him in which direction trouble was coming, had already fucked off back to Paris.

  Steve had got so drunk that week he’d been woken up in the gutter outside his flat by a street cleaner; got carried out of a party he had no memory of even attending, apparently crying his eyes out; and had even found himself on the roof of the Scala cinema, after an all-night Stanley Kubrick programme, staring down into Pentonville Road as if he’d just come out of a dream, only two steps away from oblivion.

  He’d pulled himself together after that, he’d had to. Good old Tony Baloney had booked them a tour, and he needed all the money he could get. The one thing he’d managed to hang on to was Earl’s phone number. Once they’d done this last night in London, he was going to be out of there, on a plane to San Francisco where Earl had assured him there were plenty of bands who needed a guitarist of his calibre. Kevin was going to split as well. He’d always had plenty of offers to join other bands, and now he was going to take up one, with a band from North London who had met while following Blood Truth around. Maybe they would treat him with some respect. Poor bugger had earned that at least. Steve and Kevin’s grim secret was their only weapon against the indifference of the rest of them. The only way they could keep what was left of their pride intact.

  Not that this tour had been a shambles, oh no – the opposite in fact. Steve looked upon it like the end of The Wild Bunch, going out in a blaze of glory, burning everything down so that no one could follow them. This band had been his whole life; he could give it nothing less. He had played each night like his life depended on it, even the new songs, the songs he hated, he had made incandescent with his simmering rage, raising the game of the rest of them while he did it. Kevin had been behind him all the way, a fucking little powerhouse; they were channeling each other’s energy now, giving the punters something to remember for the rest of their lives. They could give them nothing less either. Afterwards, Steve had sated himself not with drink but with which ever beautiful lass was throwing herself his way that night, and they were getting more beautiful, seemingly by the day. Steve was bloody thankful to all of them. Tried to give them something to remember him by and all.

  And now…Now the hours were ticking down on his teenage dream.

  He thought of Johnny Rotten, how America had fucked it for the Pistols too, then pushed the thought away; too many memories were coming hot on its heels.

  He folded up the music paper, put it down on the bench beside him unread, Johnny’s words in his head. Ever had the feeling you’ve been cheated?

  Sylvana sat on the bed in the apartment in Montmartre. She had never felt so lost or alone.

  Vincent had insisted she had to stay here while he did this one last tour, to protect her against Steve and what he was likely to do when he announced he was leaving the band. So that as soon as he was back they could be together for always, without anyone’s interference. Those songs they had written together, in Paris and on the tour of the States, would form the basis of their first album. They would be the post-punk Nancy and Lee, he said. Getting a deal would be easy.

  Sylvana didn’t know if she even liked Nancy and Lee. She didn’t know very much any more, if truth be told. Life had started to blur around the edges shortly after her wedding night, shortly after he had given her that first taste of the dream stuff.

  She hadn’t been sick again after that first time. She had instead found that state of bliss and perfect happiness Vincent told her would come to her, that feeling that no one else would ever be able to hurt her again. God, it had been the best sensation she’d ever felt;
all her fears and doubts had melted away as she realised Vincent was right yet again. Before they’d had to go on that goddamn tour, they’d spent weeks in bed, just writing songs and poems together, wrapped in the golden arms of their dreams. The rest of the world had just faded into the background, almost ceased to exist at all.

  America had been a shock to her system. She couldn’t believe the hostility of Vincent’s band. Steve had nothing but sarcasm for her, wouldn’t even look her in the eye. Little Kevin, who looked so harmless, radiated silent hatred in her direction. Even that Lynton who’d been so nice to her before had totally blanked her for the first two weeks. Thank God Vincent had managed to bring him around, the last two weeks had been kinda OK, although there were always some hairy days when Vincent couldn’t seem to magic any of the stuff they needed out of the air like he usually could.

  Sylvana had not been prepared for withdrawal. The shivers, the cold shakes, the constant itching. At first it hadn’t been so bad, just like a cold with added layers of anxiety, but it had brought out other qualities too, in both of them. Vincent had turned on her a few times during that tour. It was nothing like the way Robin had treated her, that mad, relentless rage. No, with Vincent it was the opposite. He became cold, sarcastic, as if she was nothing but a pathetic child he had no interest in looking after. The first time had been that bikers’ joint in Alabama. The way he’d spoken to her, in front of everyone, Sylvana had felt like her world was about to fall apart. Then when that redneck had thrown a bottle in his face, after that, he’d been back to normal again, attentive, loving. Maybe it had scared him, she thought. But she’d seen it again, several times since then. One moment he’d be all over her, the next…well, he wouldn’t be there.

  She’d tried to stay in Paris while they recorded the album, really she had. Vince had left her with enough stuff to keep her going, had given her a number to call if she ran out or got scared, of a guy called Marco who he said would sort her out. But Sylvana was too scared to ring the number. She was scared of using her schoolgirl French for anything other than the barest essentials. She had spent one week sitting in on her own, timidly venturing across the road to the boulangerie when she got really hungry, picking up bottles of water in the little shop on the corner, fumbling with the strange francs she wasn’t used to using. But without Vincent, she didn’t have the nerve to go out exploring the fairy-tale city at night. She just sat in her darkened room, staring out at that big white church he loved so much, remembering the candles he had lit for their love, only a few short months ago. In the end, she could stand it no longer. She got a taxi to the airport, bought the first flight she could back to London.