The Vinyl Detective: Low Action, page 1
Contents
Cover
Also by Andrew Cartmel and available from Titan Books
Title Page
Leave us a Review
Copyright
Dedication
1: New Girlfriend
2: Eek!
3: Acid, Man
4: Night Visitor
5: Richmond Park
6: Sledgehammer
7: Tania’s Tower
8: White Van
9: May Fair
10: Bride of Frankenstein
11: The Most Un-Punk Thing
12: Pythonesque Euphemism
13: Archive Complex
14: Wine Cellar
15: Mrs Warren’s Profession
16: Black Light
17: Stopped Clock
18: Fanzine Frank
19: Mutant Cats
20: Jet Lag
21: Vanilla Vodka
22: Leech Lane
23: Cashmere Rustlers
24: Release Gate
25: Technicolor Yawn
26: Goat Aid
27: Apple Blossom
28: Hello, My Lovely
29: Down On The Farm
30: Mickey Spillane
31: Ghoulish News
32: Time For Fun
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also Available from Titan Books
THE VINYL DETECTIVE
LOW ACTION
Also by Andrew Cartmel and available from Titan Books
Written in Dead Wax
The Run-Out Groove
Victory Disc
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THE VINYL DETECTIVE
LOW ACTION
ANDREW CARTMEL
TITAN BOOKS
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The Vinyl Detective: Low Action
Print edition ISBN: 9781785659003
E-book edition ISBN: 9781785659010
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd.
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
First Titan edition: May 2020
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © Andrew Cartmel 2020. All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
For Linda Kissick, most astute of readers.
1: NEW GIRLFRIEND
“I’d like you to meet my new girlfriend,” said Erik. “Someone’s trying to kill her.”
He offered this remark in such a casual, offhand, everyday manner that I had to repress the urge to reply, “That’s nice.”
Erik Make Loud—less pretentiously, Eric McCloud—was a former rock star, comfortably wealthy and, if you stretched a point, our neighbour. I’d never got along very well with him. Erik was self-regarding and superior, to commence a long list. But one muffled grey afternoon in a recent winter we’d undergone a very horrible near-death experience together.
And I suppose that had bonded us.
Perhaps even made us friends.
At least, friends to the extent that he’d generally now make eye contact when he spoke to me. Which is what he was doing right now as he loomed in my doorway, emanating a cloud of expensive aftershave.
I said, “Come in, Erik.” Before I shut the door behind him, I looked around outside to make sure the new girlfriend whose life was putatively in danger wasn’t actually standing there, waiting to shake hands.
Erik didn’t bother with shaking hands. He was content to slap me on the shoulder in what would have been a comradely fashion, if it hadn’t been so heavy-handedly hard, as I led him into our sitting room where our cats looked up at our guest and regarded him with suspicion. As well they might.
For a start, Erik was wearing a cap that looked like it had been looted off a dead Confederate soldier, along with an elaborately fringed and brightly beaded buckskin jacket that might have been looted off the Comanche brave who had just killed the Confederate. Plus, of course, very skinny black jeans and very expensive black sneakers. Turk took one look at this apparition then sensibly darted out the cat flap just as Nevada came hurrying in from the kitchen.
“Did I hear that correctly?” she said. She looked at Erik with shock in her mesmerising big blue eyes. “Did you actually say…?”
“Yes, dear,” said Erik, gazing at her fondly. Erik had always liked Nevada. Who wouldn’t?
“You’ve got a girlfriend?”
“He also said someone was trying to kill her.”
“One thing at a time. One earth-shattering revelation at a time. You mean a real, seeing-her-on-a-regular-basis girlfriend? Not one of your usual…” Nevada waved her hand in the air in a manner which Erik and I both understood to mean inappropriately nubile and fleeting, celebrity-besotted one-night stands.
“Yeah, going steady. We’ve been seeing each other for a few months now.”
“Mein Gott. Who is this girlfriend?”
“She’s called Helene—”
“Lovely name,” said Nevada. “It means light.”
“Does it?” said Erik. “All I know is that she plays a mean guitar.”
“Ah, so she’s a musician, too.” Nevada looked at me. “The extraordinary longevity of their relationship begins to make sense.”
Erik chuckled. “Well, yeah, it is nice to be able to connect on a musical level, you know, as well as everything else. Very good guitarist, she is. Plays big chunky phrases. Reminds me a bit of Blood Ulmer.”
“Well, I’m delighted for you,” said Nevada. She took my hand. “We’re both delighted for you. Now, what’s all this business about someone trying to kill her?”
* * *
Nevada sat down with Erik in full charm mode while I made coffee. I used the good stuff—the serious nature of the impending discussion seemed to merit it, even if it was only attempted murder. When the coffee was ready I carried the mugs through on a tray featuring a black-and-white picture of Marilyn Monroe. It was a gift from our friend Tinkler and, to those in the know, continued the murder theme.
Nevada and Erik were sitting at the dining table with our cat Fanny lying at the centre where other people might have situated an elegant vase of flowers. As if to emphasise the contrast, she was unconcernedly and shamelessly licking her private parts.
But Erik hadn’t noticed. He was studying a record he’d picked up from the pile in the armchair beside him, where I tended to keep my current listening selection. It was John Mellencamp’s Uh-huh, the British edition with the different and much superior cover art. As I came into the room he looked up from the album and regarded me with mild surprise—and perhaps even something resembling respect. Erik had me down as a jazz nut, which I am.
But I listen to other stuff, too.
I put the tray down on the table. Nevada glanced at it and gave me a droll look; she got the reference, all right. Then she passed Erik his mug. Fanny stopped washing herself and looked up at us attentively. Nevada peered directly into her eyes and said, “Our friend Erik is going to tell us about something terrible that has happened to his girlfriend.”
In response to this declaration Fanny yawned luxuriantly, her mouth gaping wide to reveal tiny fangs while her small ears folded neatly back, flat on her head. Then she jumped down from the table and disappeared under the nearest armchair.
Erik didn’t seem offended. He said, “The first attempt—”
“First?” said Nevada. “How many have there been?”
“Uh, let me think.”
I saw a familiar stoned-rock-star vagueness drift into Erik’s eyes. So I said, “Let’s just let him tell us the story in his own way, honey.”
“Of course,” agreed Nevada. She was all business now, perched on her chair, hands hugging one knee, listening politely and giving Erik the big eye. But he was shaking his head ruefully.
“I suppose it would be easiest to get her to tell you all about it herself,” he said. “To let Helene tell you all about it.”
“All right,” I said. “When would you like to arrange that?”
Erik shrugged. “Now, I guess.”
“Now?”
“Yeah, she’s out there in the car.”
“Out there in the car?” said Nevada, scandalised. “Don’t you think she might like to come in?”
“Yeah. Probably. All right.”
Five minutes later Erik came back with a tallish woman. Other than that it was hard to immediately discern much about her because she was wearing an ankle-length dove-grey coat and a black hat. The coat was an upmarket, and no doubt eye-wateringly expensive, version of a Spaghetti Western duster. Her hat, thankfully, was not a cowboy one but what they call a porkpie hat, as affected by the late, great Lester Young.
I wondered if she and Erik had both been bilked by the same eccentric headwear emporium. By way of illustrating the point, they hung their hats up side by side on the multicoloured Eames coat rack in our hallway.
“This is Helene,” said Erik. “Helene Hilditch.” He was rather touchingly proud.
Helene’s age was hard to determine. There was no chance of detecting lines on her face because she’d applied a swathe of striking black make-up around her pale grey eyes, suggestive of a raccoon or indeed a bandit’s mask. Set deep in those dramatic black circles, her eyes peered out at us quite shyly.
Under this theatrical disguise, Helene was clearly at least ten years younger than Erik. Which still made her, under normal circumstances, about thirty years too old to be acceptable rock-star-girlfriend material.
We all shook hands, and Nevada helped Helene take off her coat and hang it up. Removal of the duster revealed a white silk blouse so sheer it was almost transparent, disclosing an emphatically black bra underneath. The blouse was tucked into skinny black jeans, which were identical to Erik’s. But rather than sneakers Helene wore very high-heeled and pointy-toed black leather boots. Fanny crept over and sniffed these carefully. She seemed quite intrigued by our visitor.
I saw that Helene was blonde, so we could tick that rock-star-girlfriend box, at least. A rather fetching shade of platinum blonde. If it was dye, Nevada would no doubt enthusiastically brief me later. As Helene turned around to go into the sitting room, I saw there was a jagged pink streak in her hair, which even I could identify as dye. Very rock and roll.
I’d used the time lag between Erik’s departure and return to conjure up a fourth mug of coffee, which Helene now picked up gratefully. She sipped while Erik cleared his throat and, despite having said that he wanted her to tell her own story, he resumed his solo account.
“So, right, the first attempt—although of course we didn’t know it was an attempt at the time, an attempt at anything…” He lost his thread for a moment, then manfully recaptured it. “But it was. It was an attempted hit and run.”
Apparently a car had almost smashed Helene down as she was stepping off the kerb to cross the street near her flat in Muswell Hill, heading to the local park for her morning run. “I had my earbuds in,” she said. “But fortunately I hadn’t started playing my music yet. So I heard it coming.”
And she had excellent reflexes. She’d dodged back onto the pavement just in time. “It passed so close that the side of the car bashed the toe of my running shoe. If they’d been driving an electric car I would have been done for. I would never have heard them.”
The car had smoked-glass windows and Helene hadn’t been able to see who was inside—or even to tell if it was a man or a woman. Or indeed if there had been more than one person in the car. But she had got her phone out in time to take a photo of the fast-vanishing vehicle.
Again with the excellent reflexes.
And she’d caught the licence number.
“I suppose I should have just forgotten it, put it out of my mind. I mean there was no harm done.”
“No physical harm,” said Erik fervently. “But what about the psychological, the psychological harm?”
Helene nodded. “Anyway, I was really angry about it.” She didn’t strike me as someone who had been psychologically scarred by the experience. She struck me as someone you didn’t particularly want angry with you.
As if to confirm this, Erik said, “You don’t want to get in Hel’s way when she’s cross.” He shook his head with an it’s just not worth it expression on his face.
“So I went to the police,” said Helene. “But of course they just thought it was an accident. Not even an accident, because there wasn’t any damage or injury. They didn’t know why I kept pestering them, or what all the fuss was about. After all, I was fine, wasn’t I? But I did keep pestering them. And finally they told me the car had been stolen.”
“It had been stolen by someone about half an hour before they tried to run her over,” said Erik. “And they abandoned it immediately afterwards.” He glared at me as if I’d been at the wheel. “Pretty suspicious, eh?”
“It could just have been joyriders,” I said.
“That’s what the police think,” said Erik with contempt. “If it was, they didn’t get much joy. Or do much riding.”
The second attempt took place when Helene had returned to her flat in the early hours one morning. “I smelled gas as soon as I stepped in the front door. So I opened all the windows and went to look in the kitchen. One of the burners on the stove top had been turned on, but not lit.”
“You couldn’t have left it on yourself?”
“No.” Helene was thin-lipped and adamant.
“But it’s not just that,” said Erik. “It’s the day it happened.”
“The day?” said Nevada.
“Yeah, you see, we’ve got into the habit of Helene coming to stay at my place on the weekend and also on Tuesday and Thursday nights.”
I could see that Nevada was impressed. Sleeping over four nights a week: this was a serious relationship.
“Because, you see, Tuesdays and Thursdays are Bong Cha’s regular nights off.” Erik looked at us to see if we were following. We were; in Nevada’s case, avidly. “But on this particular week, Bong moved her nights off around, because her sister was down from Birmingham and… Anyway, she took Wednesday night off. So Helene came over on Wednesday instead.”
“And it was the following morning, when I came home, that I found the gas on,” said Helene.
“You see what we’re getting at?” said Erik.
“Yes,” I said. “Normally on a Wednesday night Helene could be expected to be at home.”
“That’s right.” She nodded. “At home sleeping in my own bed. So someone came in, in the middle of the night, and switched on the gas. Making sure, they thought, that I wouldn’t wake up.”
“So you see what that means,” said Erik. “It has to be someone who knew our regular routine well enough to expect Helene to be at home that night.”
“And it was just sheer luck that I wasn’t. It’s a small flat and it was a cold night, so I would’ve had the windows shut. I would have suffocated. I never would have woken up.”
“Or if you had woken up,” said Erik, “you might well have lit up a roll-up.” He mimed rolling a cigarette with his fingers. “Like you usually do. And then… boom.”
“That’s right,” said Helene. “Either way I would have been dead.”
Not to mention the neighbours, I thought.
“That’s right,” said Erik, looking at Helene. “Someone is trying to kill my girl.”
Helene reached over and fiercely grabbed his hand. They squeezed their hands together, gazing into each other’s eyes. Nevada gave me a quick and amused these two should get a room look. Helene seemed to sense it, because she turned back to us, eyes staring out from that black bandit’s mask. “And then there was the third attempt,” she said.
* * *
Their account of what they called the third murder attempt involved Erik disclosing his use of illegal drugs.
If they expected either Nevada or myself to be deeply shocked and upset by this revelation, and possibly flee the room in horror, they were disappointed. Nevertheless, Erik seemed at pains to justify his behaviour.
“We don’t indulge that much. Just generally on Friday nights, when we watch Graham Norton. Isn’t that right, babes?”
Helene nodded. “We like us some Graham on a Friday night. Putting the cares of the working week aside.” I wondered when was the last time that either of these two had been required to concern themselves with the working week. But I forced myself to concentrate on the story.
It seemed that Erik had a habit of keeping his cocaine in ‘wraps’—folded pieces of paper. For this purpose he used pages torn from a high-class skin magazine—photographs of nude models. “And I have a particular way of folding them, ah…” He glanced at Nevada with embarrassment. It was interesting that he wasn’t bothered at all by Helene hearing this, but then she’d probably got to know Erik and his quirky habits intimately by now.
