The Run-Out Groove

by Andrew Cartmel

  Nevada snorted. “Her keeper. That’s a bit harsh.”

  He shot her a look. “Do you think so?”

  “Perhaps not.” Nevada looked at me and I nodded. Perhaps not indeed. Poor Ambrose hadn’t won many friends among us.

  “That’s exactly what he was, though,” said the Colonel, “like some kind of keeper who has got hold of a rare and precious animal.”

  “A cash cow,” suggested Nevada. Then, hastily, “Not that I’m calling anyone a cow.”

  The Colonel grinned nastily. “No, but she is. You’re right. She is a cow. A disgusting, fat cow.” I could see that Nevada was getting nervous about what she might have unleashed. She looked again for the waitress, who was still busy on the other side of the café.

  “But you must have had a feeling,” she said, while she kept watch on the waitress.

  “A feeling?” said the Colonel, as if he’d never heard the word before.

  Nevada caught the waitress’s eye and waved. “About whether or not she was your sister. You must have had some kind of response or reaction.”

  “She didn’t say a word to me. She didn’t talk at all. I tried speaking to her, introducing myself, asking her questions. But I eventually gave up because she didn’t say anything. Not a word. Maybe she can’t. She just sat there looking at me, with those eyes of hers.” He shook his head. He actually sounded a little freaked out, or as much as a buttoned-up man like him would allow himself to be. “It’s like there is no one at home behind that fat face.”

  The waitress was working her way over towards our table. “All right,” said Nevada. “You didn’t speak to her, but you must have had some kind of feeling.” It seemed she wouldn’t let go of this line of enquiry, but I could have told her that the Colonel wasn’t the kind of man to talk about his feelings, unless they were ones of vociferous disapproval.

  I said, “She didn’t say anything to you?” He shook his head. “So you just sat there in silence?”

  “No, that would have been preferable. But that Ambrose character kept talking. And then she started singing.”

  “Singing?” said Nevada.

  “He made her do it for me.” The Colonel grinned mirthlessly. “Perhaps he thought I wasn’t getting full value. Like getting his trained monkey to perform for me.” He lowered his eyes. “But when I heard her…”

  “Yes?” said Nevada.

  “I began to think it might actually be her.” He shook his head, as if disgusted with himself for even entertaining the possibility. “But even then, there was something about it that wasn’t quite right. It sounded like her, but…”

  “It sounded more like Valerian,” I said.

  He stared at me. I felt that I’d finally got his full attention. “Yes,” he said. “That’s right. How did you know?” Nevada was looking at me.

  “That night when we heard her in the pub. I thought that then. The way she was singing, bending notes and stretching time, it was what Valerian used to do.”

  “Is that significant?” said Nevada.

  I said, “Well, if you were going to coach someone to pretend to be Cecilia Drummond you would have to go to the records. And those records feature Valerian a hell of a lot more prominently than Cecilia. And when the two sisters sing together, Cecilia is often just there in the background, buried in the mix.”

  Drummond was nodding his head eagerly. I couldn’t believe we actually agreed about something. “That’s right. If you tried to research the records, you might well end up sounding like the wrong sister.” He chuckled at the thought, as if we were already exposing some swindler. “Anyway, we’ll soon know.” He patted the pocket where he had his DNA sample securely stowed. He looked entirely happy, a man at peace. Ah, the comforting certainties of science.

  The waitress finally arrived and Nevada flashed her a smile. “We’ll have another coffee, please,” she said quickly, before the Colonel could countermand her order.

  When she left he said, “What do you know about this Ambrose joker?”

  “Just what we told you. Apparently he used to be her psychiatric nurse.”

  “But how did he get his hooks into her? She’s twice his age. I’m going to look into this bastard’s background.”

  “Good idea,” I said.

  The Colonel sighed and relaxed. Losing its characteristic frown, his face became strangely smooth. He seemed content at last. Perhaps it was having a definite plan of action, and one that might ruthlessly expose someone’s legal and moral shortcomings. “I think it is her, though,” he said suddenly.

  “What?” I said. This seemed a dramatic volte-face.

  The Colonel wouldn’t look at me. Instead he was gazing steadily at Nevada. “You know you kept asking me if I had a feeling?”

  “Yes.”

  The Colonel stared down at the table. “Well, I didn’t exactly, but I did notice something. When we sat down to eat together—Ambrose Smith insisted we have tea and cakes; very generous of him considering that it’s Drummond money that’s funding him, every penny of it. We’re keeping him very nicely—anyway we sat down together, and there was something about how she ate. The fat woman. She was almost choking because she was eating too quickly.” He looked up at us. “It was something she’d always done as a child. Cecilia. She was always impatient, always greedy.” He shook his head and chuckled. “She was rake thin, Cessie. We always joked that she should be big as a house the way she ate.” His smile faded. “Now she is.” He looked at us bleakly. “Maybe,” he added.

  Nevada put her hand on his arm. He looked at her but didn’t ask her to remove it. He really quite liked Nevada. “So you might have found your sister.”

  “No,” said the Colonel. He stood up abruptly, his chair scraping back against the floor. “She is not my sister,” he snarled. “Whatever the DNA proves, that thing is not my sister. Not anymore.”

  I began to realise that Nevada wasn’t going to be able to get the Colonel his coffee after all.

  “Wherever Cecilia is now, she’s not there. Not resident in that thing, that empty husk of lard.”

  He shook his head and left.

  * * *

  The Colonel caught a train back to London but we stayed on, as planned. We’d arranged to give Cecilia an hour to recover after her meeting with her brother before we went to interview her. So we drank another coffee, and we were just paying and getting ready to leave when we saw Ambrose peering in the window and grinning. He waved to us and pushed in through the door and came and sat at our table.

  “I’m glad I caught you,” he said.

  “We were just coming to you,” I said.

  “That’s why I’m glad I caught you.” He winced and pressed his hands together in a prayerful gesture. “I wonder if we could postpone it?”

  “Postpone the meeting?”

  “With Cessie, yeah.” He smiled. “It really took it out of her, seeing her brother after all these years, as you can well imagine, and I thought it was best if she just had a little lie-down for the rest of the day.”

  I was furious. We had come all this way especially. Nevada gave me a warning look, so all I said was, “Well, I guess you know best.”

  “Thanks, yeah, thank you for being so understanding. You see, I do know best, as you say.”

  I sighed. “Back to London, then.”

  “Yeah, we’ll rearrange the interview. Come back any time.”

  “We will,” said Nevada, and we moved towards the door. But as we did so he grabbed my arm. I turned back and looked at him. He was surprisingly strong. I suppose if he’d been a psychiatric nurse that might well have been a requirement.

  “There’s just one thing I don’t understand,” he said slowly. He had stopped smiling. “You say you’re working on a documentary.”

  I felt my heart begin to beat raggedly in my chest. Nevada was staring at us. But I kept my voice calm. “Yes?”

  “Well, then, why didn’t you have some cameras there?”

  “Cameras?” said Nevada.
>
  He nodded. “Yeah, to record the big moment. When the brother and sister meet each other for the first time in decades?”

  I said, “We’ll restage it for the programme.”

  He let go of my arm. “Oh yeah. Of course.” He nodded. “Great idea. Restage it.”

  We arranged a time to come back for our interview with Cecilia and he patted me on the shoulder and then insisted on shaking hands as we said goodbye. His palm was sweaty. I tried not to hold this against him, and failed.

  When we got outside Nevada said, “Nice save.”

  16. BABY GRAND

  On our second visit to Canterbury to interview what Nevada insisted on calling the ‘happy couple’, we drove down in Tinkler’s car. We’d told him firmly that he couldn’t join us when we went to see Cecilia, but he assured us he wanted to visit Canterbury anyway. His motives were pretty obvious—it was a Sunday and Clean Head had decided she fancied a visit to the old cathedral city, as well.

  Being Clean Head, however, she had to do the driving. This involved first sneering at poor Tinkler’s little blue car, apparently because it was an automatic. Her disdain didn’t prevent her from getting us out of London in record time and flinging us onto the M25, bound for Kent. “Quite nippy, though,” she allowed. She looked at Tinkler, who had his head out the window in the slipstream like a happy dog.

  “Do you mind winding that up,” said Nevada. “It’s getting a bit breezy back here.”

  “Sure,” said Tinkler, shutting the window and settling back in his seat. He gazed adoringly at Clean Head who was merging with traffic, moving us from the slow lane to the medium lane and then the fast lane in a smooth flow of manoeuvres. The car was quite nippy, as she said, but I couldn’t quite free myself of the notion that it might fly apart at any moment. This was mostly because it belonged to Tinkler, though, rather than any intrinsic judgement on the machine.

  “Have you given it a name yet?” said Nevada.

  “What?”

  Nevada patted the roof. “Your car.”

  “Yes,” said Tinkler. “Kind of Blue.”

  “Is that because of my abiding love of the Miles Davis album?” I asked.

  “No, it’s because it’s kind of blue.” It was indeed, an odd metallic shade that must have given his sister Maggie a negotiating advantage when she’d been beating the price down.

  “You realise this really isn’t a Volvo?” announced Clean Head.

  “Yes it is.”

  “Oh no.” She shook her head, smiling. I could tell she was bursting to tell us something.

  “It says Volvo on the outside,” said Tinkler. “And the inside. There, look. There.”

  “Oh, it’s been rebadged as a Volvo all right,” said Clean Head. “But it’s actually one of the last DAFs. They were a Dutch firm with some very interesting technological ideas.” She patted the gear lever. “And did you know you had a Variomatic transmission?”

  “I didn’t know I had a transmission.”

  “It’s a belt drive system. Quite revolutionary, no pun intended.” She cursed at a slow driver, slipped into the middle lane and proceeded, quite illegally, to overtake him and remorselessly bury his dwindling reflection in the distance. The engine roared. “It’s a continuously variable system. And it works in reverse. In fact, you can drive as fast backwards as you can forwards.”

  “No need to demonstrate that just at the moment,” said Nevada quickly. The little car shook, shouldering against the slipstream as we continued to fly down the motorway, obliterating all competition.

  “And, of course, it gives you optimum torque,” said Clean Head.

  “I knew that,” said Tinkler.

  * * *

  The happy couple lived at a narrow, terraced house in Castle Row near the city wall. The door sprang open as soon as we knocked and Ambrose Smith gave us his big, gold smile. “Welcome,” he said. “Come in. We’ve been expecting you.” He stood back and we had to brush past him to get inside. The house was tiny. We stepped from the front door straight into the living room. This would have been a comfortable, cosy space if it hadn’t been almost completely filled with a gleaming red-lacquered baby grand piano. Nevada and I looked at each other, thinking exactly the same thing.

  How the fuck did they get that in here?

  “Be right back!” exclaimed Ambrose brightly, and he trotted into the back of the house where I had glimpsed a kitchen.

  “It’s nice and warm, anyway,” said Nevada, taking off her coat.

  “And so spacious,” I said, trying to edge my way further into the room.

  Nevada chuckled. She touched the baby grand’s gleaming top. “This is a lovely piano.”

  “They probably have to keep the place warm for the sake of the piano,” I said. Certainly it dominated the room, and indeed most of the ground floor of the house. It was jammed into the room with two armchairs and a sofa. They had all been upholstered in the same white fabric, with a rather tasteful black pattern on it, which on close inspection turned out to consist of the repeated silhouettes of little horned goats. Nothing odd about that, then.

  I thought of the dress Cecilia had been wearing when we saw her sing. With the crescent moons on it. There was a sound in the back of the house and then Cecilia came out of the kitchen, her pale face looming in the shadows as she approached us. She completely filled the small hallway, brushing against both walls as she advanced, and she briefly filled the entire doorway, cutting off the daylight as she came in to join us. Nevada and I moved around in an intricate little dance so she could get into the room, edging into the narrow space between the piano and the chairs.

  As Cecilia popped into the room, clearing the door, it became obvious that Ambrose was standing behind her and had indeed been pushing her. Rather than having come into the room of her own volition he’d basically propelled her in as if he’d been shoving a trolley. We all stood in the small room trying not to stare at each other, except for Cecilia, who was focused on some interior landscape to such an extent that her gaze had been emptied.

  They were at one end of the piano, the keyboard end by the sofa. We were at the other end, by the armchairs. “Please sit down,” said Ambrose, proceeding to sit down on the sofa with Cecilia. Or rather pressing her down onto it and then sitting beside her. Nevada and I sank down into the armchairs, our knees under the piano.

  His gold smile gleamed in the gloomy room. “Well, very nice of you to come down and visit us.”

  “Is Cecilia, ah, prepared for the interview?” said Nevada. Sitting on the sofa staring blankly into space, Cecilia didn’t seem prepared for much of anything.

  “Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said Ambrose. “Aren’t you, doll? You’re ready.” Cecilia gazed placidly at him, or in his direction, and said nothing. Ambrose cleared his throat. “Well, go ahead. Ask any questions you want.”

  Nevada and I looked at each other. “All right,” I said. “Cecilia…” The woman didn’t look at me. “What was it like touring with your sister and the band?”

  “Cessie didn’t tour much,” said Ambrose quickly. “She mostly worked in the studio. Didn’t you, doll?”

  “Listen, Ambrose,” said Nevada brightly, “as a general rule could you please try and avoid answering on behalf of Cecilia? Thank you. It makes for a better interview that way.”

  “All right,” said Ambrose with a mournful look, “but I can’t guarantee that she’ll want to answer you.”

  “Then why are we here?” I said. “Why did you agree to an interview?”

  “Oh, we can still have an interview. You just ask me the questions and I’ll ask Cessie. On your behalf.”

  Nevada leaned forward, or at least as far forward as she could get before she was pressing herself against the piano. “You’ll ask Cessie? You mean later?”

  “Yes.”

  “When we’re not around?”

  “It’ll be a good system. I’ll get back to you with the answers.”

  “It won’t be a good system, Ambrose,
” I said.

  “Oh no, it’ll work fine. Won’t it, doll?” Cecilia continued to say nothing and not look anywhere in particular in the room, her empty gaze wandering lazily, passing across us with no more attention than it accorded the furnishings or the wallpaper. “You just ask me, I ask her, and I tell you. In an interview situation. Or I could just do it direct to camera if you like.”

  “You?”

  “Yes?”

  “Direct to camera?” said Nevada.

  “Like a talking head sort of thing. Or I could be like the MC. Guiding the viewer through the documentary.”

  “That’s very kind of you to offer,” said Nevada firmly. “But no.”

  “The thing is,” I said, “it’s Cecilia we’re interested in.”

  “Exactly,” said Nevada.

  “Not you.”

  “Not you per se,” said Nevada.

  Ambrose shrugged. “Well, I’m afraid I can’t guarantee when Cessie might be inclined to talk to you. She’s not always feeling that communicative. And we don’t want to pressure her, do we?”

  “This isn’t proving very satisfactory, Ambrose,” I said. He shrugged again and said nothing. His lips were shut tight and his face was stubbornly set. I could see we’d reached a stalemate. I turned to Nevada to see if she had any good ideas but suddenly she looked away from me. She was staring across the room. I followed her gaze and saw that Cecilia had abruptly struggled to her feet. Ambrose looked as surprised as we were when she turned to the piano and sat down. Her hands sank out of sight onto the keyboard.

  And she began to play.

  It was beautiful and subtle and fluent. The music just seemed to flow out of her, coming from nowhere, transmitted through her fingertips. It was a classical piece, something theatrical and teasingly familiar. Mozart, I guessed. At first just a note here and there, building up a pattern, setting a tempo, then settling into the piece with smooth assurance. She played in a minimalist way, dotting notes at exact intervals that should, by rights, have been too slow but instead seemed to milk extra emotion from the music. She remained on the beat yet somehow put a lot of space into the music, with the discrete pointillist notes growing into a bigger picture, the complexity and pace accumulating as it went along.