by Paul Charles
Kennedy sat at right angles to them on a new basketwork chair, low back no sides. The kind of furniture which probably looked great on some student’s sketch pad but in the real world was a right royal pain in the neck, or rather, lower back.
“Can I make you some tea, or get you anything?” the senior police officer began, still awaiting signs of a delayed reaction.
“No. No thank you. No, we’re okay, aren’t we Ken?” Kate McGuinness replied as she continued to rock her son.
“Look, ah, I was wondering” Kennedy began, but he thought better of asking a direct question.
“Oh, Neil, you poor sod.”
The DI and the DS eyebrowed each other but held their counsel as she continued, “look, Detective Inspector, I should tell you that anything that there had been between us, between Neil and myself, was long since gone. He was down on his luck - he was always down on his luck. He didn’t have enough money to get his own pad so I let him stay on here, in the spare room of course. When we split up I moved Ken’s small bed into the corner of my room; Neil wasn’t well pleased, I can tell you; and he moved into the baby room.”
“Do you mind if DS Irvine has a look around in there?” Kennedy inquired. She nodded her approval and Irvine left them to see what he might see. “Is there anybody you know who would want to do harm to Mr Burton?” “Oh, he was always involved in some kind of trouble or other, nothingserious mind you, he didn’t have the brains for that. Just bits of Arthur Daleying here and there. But I was always scared it would lead to something serious and he’d end up in big trouble. That’s why we split up. I wanted him to get a good job. To give up all the shit. The three of us were getting on good and I thought we might have a chance to make a go of it, maybe even a sister, or a brother, for Ken.” Kate stopped and smiled at Ken, wondering if he could understand any of this. The clean-faced, well dressed child instinctively knew from his mother’s body talk that something was amiss so he clung close to her, knowing that as in the past his mother would make the bad things, whatever they might be, go away.
“To be truthful,” she went on, “he just reminded me of my step dad and I did not want to go through all that shit again, you know?” But Kennedy did not know: his mother and father had always been his mother and father to him and he had never ever considered the option that they would be anything other than a couple, a very happily married couple who had the confidence to sort out each and every problem together as it came along. “You know,” said Kate, “you think,
“Oh, God, where is he tonight? Is he going to come home tonight? Is he going to get caught by the police? Is he going to get caught by someone else’s husband and get beaten to a pulp? Is he going to get hurt? Is he going to get murdered?’ it was probably so horrible you know. That’s probably why I’m…” Kate played with the hair behind her ear to help the search for lost words.
“I know I’m not yet grieving, although I know I will eventually. I’m… I hope this doesn’t sound callous of me, but I do have to admit that I’m happy in a way that Neil’s out of my life. At last. It’s hard, you know, to try and get on with things when your ex is still in your house and you’ve got a three-year-old son, God bless him, though!”
“Can you tell me about the people he was involved with?” said Kennedy, his voice a warm soft breeze encouraging answers.
“Not really - I’d warned him off bringing them around here.” Her eyes wandered around the room they were sitting in. Kennedy followed her gaze.
She had made their home a comfortable one: modest, humble, but clean, Kennedy thought. The lounge was bright for a basement, benefiting from white-painted walls. There were a few pictures on top of the unused fireplace: various shots (colour) of Kate, Ken, Kate and Ken, but none, absolutely none, of Neil “Flute” Burton. The floor was covered with a hard-wearing but easy to stain wall-to-wall light blue carpet. The three-piece suite, royal blue with cream piping, formed an “n” around the fireplace and TV. The Sony TV stood on a thick Perspex shelving unit which also housed lots of videotapes and a Sony video recorder. Above the fireplace was a print, a winter snow scene with a badly painted human out shooting (and missing) a startled pheasant.
“But I believe they used to drink at the Nag’s Head in Camden Town.” “You’re sure there’s no one,” Kennedy began. “No, look, I’m sorry, I was so desperate for him to keep all thosepeople away. I didn’t want any of them near Ken, he’s so easy to influence at this age. Three years old is when they stop being babies and start asking all their own questions. Of course they still are babies but I mean they stop hanging on to your coattails, they start to explore, they start to think, they start to ask things, they start to want their own little friends. So not only did I not want any of Neil’s mates here, I told him if ever I found any of his gear here he would come home to find it and his clothes lying on the street with the locks changed.”
“Gear? Drugs?”
“No. No of course not,” Kate replied passionately, but then continued, seeds of doubt evident, “Or at least I hope not. No, just videos, CD players, tellys, that kind of stuff. I didn’t want this place to become like the Trotter residence in Peckham and believe me Neil seemed every bit as gullible as Del Boy, a lot taller maybe, but equally as daft, if you know what I mean.”
Her son was growing restless and reaching beyond the confines of his mother’s protection when Irvine returned. Kennedy used the interruption as an excuse to rise and bid her farewell.
“Is there someone who could come around to be with you later?” Kennedy knew that once the realisation of death had a chance to eat its way into her mind her bravado would fail and then it would be good for mother and child if there was someone there to provide comfort.
Katherine McGuinness seemed to accept this too, for she replied after a few pensive moments, “Yes, Ken’s nursery mate’s mother. She’s also a single parent and she lives a few streets away, I’ll get her to come around.”
“Good,” said Kennedy, “Well, that’s all for now, although I imagine that we’ll probably have to come back as the case develops.” When the look on Kate’s face showed she didn’t have a clue what he was on about he added, “Hopefully you’ll be able to help us tie up some of the loose ends.”
“So, anything of interest in Burton’s room?” Kennedy said as they started their journey back to North Bridge House. As ever, Irvine drove - and it would be forever, because Kennedy was so in love with being a passenger he had vowed that he would never learn to drive. This was probably not a bad idea, for a) Kennedy tended to daydream while travelling, and b) at the age of forty-four he probably would have made a terrible pupil for some poor unsuspecting instructor.
“Well now, let me see,” Irvine began, “lots of well worn unfashionable clothes, no button shirts, all T-shirts and from the look of them I’d say he picked them up from the various jobs he worked on, like crew shirts for the Finsbury Park Fleadh - last year’s featuring Christy Moore - he’s about six of those, and then some Stage Miracles crew shirts. He had a Marks and Sparks carrier bag with about a thousand concert flyers advertising the Blue Nile concert at the Royal Albert Hall in June. That item in particular caught my attention as the singer Paul Buchanan happens to be the best singer since Frank Sinatra.”
“Hmmm, I’m sure, Jimmy, it wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that they are from Scotland,” laughed Kennedy and went on, “No you’re probably right, ann rea turned me on to their record, A Walk Across the Rooftops, and he’s definitely up there with Otis. Anyway why don’t you check with the promoter and see what he would have been doing with the leaflets?” And still smiling, he added, “Anything else of note?”
“No, not really. No personal stuff, just rubbish. A couple of pairs of worn out shoes, dirty underwear, very dirty underwear, and lots of it. It would seem Kate had stopped doing his washing and he was incapable of it himself. He’d a few cassettes, they looked like bootlegs to me, but I’ve never seen a collection which displayed its owner’s terrible tast
e so quickly.”
“You don’t mean he’d Michael Bolton music do you?” ’Fraid so - and several albums.” “That’s the only reason I’d like to win the lottery, you know: sothat I could buy up every copy of his recordings and destroy them all so that humans did not have to listen to him again.”
“Ah now, sir, some people must like him, he sells a lot of records.” Irvine tried to offer a voice of reason.
“Yeah, and so did the Wombles in their day; it doesn’t mean they were any good, it just means their record company knew how to sell records to a trusting public,” Kennedy replied, but he decided to get off his pet hate or they’d never get any work done on this case. “Any telephone books or diaries or anything like that in his room?”
“Nothing at all. It’s weird. What was he - early forties? And he’s feck all to show for his life. No wonder Kate McGuinness wanted to get on to the next chapter of her life.”
“Ah well, let’s check with Stage Miracles, The Fleadh and the Blue Nile promoters to see what we can learn from that side.” By this point they were walking up the steps of North Bridge House, and they parted as they passed the front desk, Irvine chirping “Aye, aye, sir!”
Chapter Three
“Kennedy! What are you doing?” and before he’d a chance to answer the following Monday morning’s question, ann rea spat, “No, never mind. Listen: tune in to GLR.”
“What?”
“Immediately, Kennedy - God I don’t believe it. Listen in to Greater London Radio - now!” ann rea pleaded, her voice a few decibels louder than usual.
Kennedy retuned his radio from BBC Radio 4 to GLR, only to hear a faltering in the usual steady voice of the infrequent but popular presenter Johnny Bell.
“Okay, so here we are with this morning’s, no sorry, today’s guest, Pauley Valentini, and the good news is that we are about to give you an GLR exclusive by playing Pauley’s entire new album, yep, that’s right, from beginning to end, twelve tracks back to back and no interruptions!”
“Yeah, so what? I didn’t realise you were such a big Valentini fan,” said Kennedy.
“I’m not, dummy. Haven’t you heard? Hasn’t the news reached North Bridge House for heaven’s sake? He’s just gone and hijacked a radio station. Pauley Valentini has hijacked the radio station. He’s bleedin” hijacked GLR with Johnny Bell and he’s insisting they play nothing but his music all day long!”
“Wow!” was all Kennedy could say. After they both listened to the first few bars of the first song, “Here Comes Sad Eyes”, he continued with, “When did all this happen?”
So ann rea retold the tale of how Pauley Valentini, like so many performers before him (but certainly none after him) strolled into GLR with his guitar case and rucksack. He had been directed to studio 2B, the home of Johnny Bell’s morning show. He was left by himself to remove his rare Gibson L100 from the battered case. The guitar, approaching its hundredth birthday, sounded like a dream, producing a warm, rich sound not unlike the acoustic guitars at the top of the Beatles” classic, “Here Comes the Sun”.
Pauley had “done” Johnny Bell’s highly rated and informative show so many times before that no one, including the presenter who shared a studio with him, bothered him. Johnny, however, did think it a bit weird when Pauley removed a large piece of wood, also from the guitar case, and used it to jam the studio door shut from the inside. He then proceeded to take his rucksack and set it up on the table between himself and the presenter. He opened the top zip so that Johnny, and the producer with his engineer both in the control room on the other side of the glass partition, could see the contents of his rucksack. The contents were batteries, wires, and sticks of dynamite: Pauley’s very compact but very lethal-looking bomb.
Pauley had then very calmly announced, “Okay Johnny, at the end of this record,” (which had in fact been Christy Moore’s powerful “Listen”) “we are going to go live on air and I’m going to stay live on air for as long as I want. And I’m going to play what I want, and if anyone tries to stop me, or even tries to trick me by not broadcasting to the public then I’m going to blow the lot of us up!”
“Cool, man - whatever you want, whatever you say,” was Johnny Bell’s serene response, “let’s just be cool and get on with it.”
And get on with it they did. As they played music, exclusively Valentini’s music, the bomb squad surrounded the building in Marylebone High Street. Traffic was diverted and people like ann rea, who had mates working in the building, scooped the story.
“Are these the lengths artists are now having to go to to secure airplay these days?” Kennedy inquired playfully.
“You don’t know the half of it,” was ann rea’s instant reply. “When you get prats making announcements that artists like the Beatles - the group who single-handedly breathed life and soul into pop music - are no longer going to be played on national radio because they are too old, you can guess how big a chance the Pauley Valentini’s of the world are going to have.”
“So why did GLR announce this thing about the Beatles? Is this his gripe?”
“No, not them. It was Radio Wonderful. But GLR is as far as Pauley Valentini is going to get. But then again, maybe now it’ll be different for him now he has all of London listening to him. Pretty soon it will be the whole nation and then Europe and then by later this afternoon when they wake up for eggs over easy, America. Everyone loves a story about a nerd taking on the big boys,” ann rea replied.
“Is this a subtle way of telling me that we are not going to meet this evening?” Kennedy smiled into the phone.
“It depends, Kennedy. Sadly it is a good story and Mary Jones - Remember her? She used to work at Camden Town Records - well she’s now the programme director at GLR and she’s giving me the inside info as and when it happens. I’ll talk with you later in the day; maybe we’ll have a chance to grab a bowl of your favourite pasta at Trattoria Lucca at the end of the day. The song’s finished. Listen, I’ve gotta go, talk to you later Kennedy.”
All he could hear was telephonic static in one ear and the next Valentini song beaming out at him from GLR, via his valve radio, in the other.
Chapter Four
DS Irvine, dressed as ever to the nines - Donegal tweed suit, mustard coloured waistcoat, checked shirt, green tie and well worn but even better polished brown leather shoes - walked into Kennedy’s office on the third floor of North Bridge House.
The volume from the radio stopped him in his tracks. “That sounds great, tidy wee song. Who’s that?”
Now Kennedy liked music and the music he liked - the Beatles, Otis Redding, Ray Davies, Jackson Browne, the Blue Nile - he liked with a passion, but outside of that he had little or no knowledge of what was going on.
“It’s a track from the new, and soon to be very popular, Pauley Valentini album,” Kennedy announced, very matter-of-fact. Irvine was impressed at how effective the crash course ann rea was obviously giving Kennedy in the UK music scene was.
“Colour me impressed, as much with the music as with your knowledge,” he said as he sat down by Kennedy’s desk.
“Oh don’t be - I mean, do be at the quality of the music but not at my knowledge of it,” Kennedy replied modestly before setting about filling in Irvine on the recent goings on at GLR.
“Holy shit!” was all Irvine could find to say.
“Aye, it might be blessed, but it still smells a bit, or as my mother would say, ‘It’ll all end in tears.’ Anyway,” Kennedy swung around in his chair and lowered the volume of his wood-finish radio, “we’d better address ourselves to our more immediate problems. I’m sure the bomb squad will help Pauley get the hit he so badly needs.”
“Yes, right. Back to the Flute Burton death. I was just coming in to tell you that we’ve checked with the Mean Fiddler people - they’re the promoters of the Finsbury Park Fleadh - and they tell me that they had about six hundred people working for them on the day and of that number thirty would have been the stage crew. Burton was part of the stage
crew, he was what they would call a casual humper.”
Kennedy gave Irvine a “What?” look.
“A humper, sir, someone who humps heavy equipment around the stage. He would have helped unload the artists” equipment from their trucks and move it onto the stage and then at the end of the evening repeat the process in reverse.”
“How much would he have been paid for that?” Kennedy inquired as he tidied his tidy desk.
“About £80 per day,” was Irvine’s quick reply. “After deductions.” “And how often would he work?” “Apparently at the moment as often as he wanted: up to seven days aweek,” replied Irvine, and went on, “the people who staged the Blue Nile concert, Asgard Promotions, their offices coincidentally are just directly opposite us at 125 Parkway, their man Steve Cheney says they get all their crew from Stage Miracles. Stage Miracles also supply the Mean Fiddler for the Fleadh and their other shows. Stage Miracles claimed to know not a lot about Burton. He worked for them a bit but apparently would be “`unavailable”“ for several weeks at a time. Anyway, when they did use him they would collect the money from the promoter, deduct their percentage, NI contribution and tax and pass the balance on to Burton on a weekly basis.”
“Did they give you any indication as to what kind of chap he was? Who he hung out with? That sort of thing?” Kennedy felt that Irvine’s investigation had borne little or no fruit.
“Nope, not a lot, they said they didn’t know a lot about Burton or what he did outside their work for him.”
“What about the Blue Nile leaflets? What was he doing with them?” Kennedy ticked off another question on his mental note pad.
