The Vinyl Detective--Flip Back, page 11
I said, “Three thousand pounds is a completely insane price.” Then I added, “Fucking Stinky.” Before Stinky Stanmer had stirred everyone up, the absolute top price anyone would have thought of asking for this album was more like three hundred pounds. And it would have been entirely possible to pick up a copy for a fraction of that.
Tinkler was looking at me with a pained expression, shifting from one foot to the other, like a little kid who needed the bathroom. “I really want this record,” he said.
“I know, Tinkler. But even so…”
“I really want it. Not just for me, you understand. I want it for Opal, too, of course. And I’d actually budgeted for five grand.”
This shocked us all to silence for a moment. Even Tinkler, who’d said it. Maybe it was hearing it said aloud.
“Five grand, Tinkler?” said Nevada. “Jesus.”
“I’ve actually got it here,” said Tinkler, and he patted the pocket of his jeans.
“What?”
“I’ve brought the money with me. In cash. Just in case.” He patted his pocket again.
“Tinkler!” said Nevada.
“What?”
“You can’t carry around money like that,” said Nevada. “Give it to me immediately. For safekeeping.”
It was a measure of Tinkler’s trust in her—and his accurate assessment of which of the two of them was a safer pair of hands—that he did indeed immediately reach into the pocket of his jeans and hand over a fat wad of bills.
“So, you see, three thousand is actually a snip,” he said, as Nevada stashed the money in her shoulder bag. I noticed she shifted the position of the bag. Now instead of hanging off her right shoulder she lifted the strap over her head so it rested on her left shoulder, with the bag tight under her right arm. No one was going to get that off her in a hurry.
“A snip,” repeated Tinkler. He actually looked relieved not to be carrying the cash anymore.
“Nevertheless,” I said, “I’ll see if I can haggle them down. I’m sure I can.”
“Well, don’t lose the record. I mean, we have the fish on the hook but it isn’t fully on the hook, so for Christ’s sake don’t lose the fish.”
It was hard to conceive of two men in the United Kingdom for whom a fishing metaphor was less apt, but I said, “Don’t worry, I won’t lose the fish.”
“And, Tinkler, just so we’re clear about this,” said Nevada. “If we do manage to get the price down for you, then we get, say, fifty per cent of the money we’ve saved you. As a bonus. Okay?”
“If you get the price down you can have a hundred per cent of the money you’ve saved me.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously. I just want that record.”
I returned to the table where Green Ribbon Guy was waiting and looking anxious, as well he might. He too was afraid of having the fish slip off his line. It was clear to him that I was a serious customer. And it was also clear to him, whatever he might say, that three thousand quid was an insane price to be asking. They’d probably picked up the record for about three pounds. So I began to haggle in earnest.
I lost track of time in the course of these negotiations. When we finally finished haggling I became aware of my surroundings again and I turned to the eagerly waiting Nevada and Tinkler.
“Two thousand pounds,” I said.
Nevada grinned and punched the air. Tinkler patted me clumsily on the shoulder. “Really? Seriously? You got him down to two grand?”
“Well, two thousand and five. The five was a face-saving thing so he can pretend he wasn’t beaten down a whole thousand quid from his asking price.” A thought suddenly occurred to me—I should have suggested two thousand and four pounds and ninety-five pence. Oh, well. Maybe next time.
“There is one complication,” I said.
“What?” said Nevada, instantly alert.
“He wants paying right now. And the record hasn’t arrived yet.”
“When is it going to arrive?” said Nevada.
“Any minute now, they say. It’s already overdue.”
“So why don’t we just wait for it to arrive?”
I glanced back at our ribbon-bedecked friend. “He was very insistent on payment immediately if we want it at that price. I think his street cred is at stake. He has to feel he’s imposed a condition.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” said Tinkler. “Give it to him.”
“I’m not so sure,” said Nevada. She looked at me. “What do you think?”
“Well, they’re not going anywhere with the money,” I said. “And they genuinely seem to believe that the record will be here at any moment.”
Nevada frowned. I could see the conflict. She was healthily wary, but she also didn’t want to risk losing our thousand-pound—sorry, nine hundred and ninety-five pound—bonus. Finally she shrugged and unzipped her bag and carefully counted the money off Tinkler’s roll of bills.
I went back to the table and handed the cash to Green Ribbon. Fenton was watching and his eyes almost bugged out at the sight of the money. So did Green Ribbon’s, which confirmed my theory that they had never expected to sell the record at anything approaching this price. I felt a pang of regret. I wished I’d negotiated a lot harder now. Perhaps I could have got them down to a thousand pounds. Or a thousand and five.
Green Ribbon was busy locking the money in a small metal cashbox—so small that the lock was pointless, since anybody could have just picked up the entire box and run off with it—when Fenton looked up at something behind me and said, “Here it is.” I turned to see a big, paunchy man in bulging jeans and a red and grey checked shirt making his way across the tent towards us. He was clean-shaven and almost entirely bald, but despite the lack of hair, and ribbons, I could see a distinct family resemblance between him and the chief negotiator. I suspected this was Green Ribbon’s father. Mr Ribbon.
He was holding a large brown cardboard envelope of the kind almost universally used by cheapskate British dealers to send LPs, rather unsafely, through the post.
My heart gave a solid, singular thump when I saw it. Here we go, I thought. At last.
As the guy joined us I could see he was sweating heavily and in a foul mood. He looked at Green Ribbon and said, “Where is he, Aubrey?” The wonderfully named Aubrey nodded at me.
Aubrey’s dad looked at me but made no move to hand over the record. “Has he paid for it?” He was looking at me but speaking to his son.
“Yes.”
Aubrey’s dad reluctantly handed me the envelope. It had been sealed shut, which I thought was an unnecessary complication, but maybe he felt I wouldn’t think I was getting my two thousand pounds’ worth if he hadn’t made use of the patented adhesive strip.
I tore the envelope open and drew the record out. It was Wisht, all right. I turned it over… and it was the flip back sleeve. I began to relax for the first time in what felt like a very long while.
I went to the table where Aubrey and Fenton were standing and set the now-redundant cardboard envelope down on it. Then I returned my attention to Wisht.
I was holding it in my—impressively steady—hands.
At last.
11. PINK COTTAGE
I turned the cover over. This was the first time I’d seen the record in the flesh, so to speak. So I took my time, carefully studying the art on the front. Everyone who was gathered rather tensely around me must have assumed I was scrutinising it to check the condition in a highly professional way. But I was just drinking it in and, to be honest, savouring the moment a little.
The cover of Wisht featured a photograph of a young woman of vaguely Pre-Raphaelite appearance with a wild, curly mass of strawberry-coloured hair. She wore an antiquated white dress and equally old-fashioned black button-up shoes. She was standing in a rose garden with a crumbling brick wall visible through the masses of extravagantly blooming rose bushes behind her. In her hand she held a leash, and straining on the end of the leash was a large and distinctly vicious-looking, wait for it, black dog.
The dog’s angular head, with its jutting devilish ears, was pointing towards the viewer, its eyes slits of pure malevolent red. The young woman was also staring at us, her face showing an odd and rather bewildered expression. Of course it could just have been that she was a model hired for the occasion and it was late in the day and she was getting terribly tired of holding that damned dog, pulling defiantly on the end of his lead.
But it felt like there was something much more, and much worse, going on here—although it did look like the end of the day. Perhaps the end of all days. The lengthening shadows and soft twilight glow on the scene was positively eerie. It was an impressive piece of photographic art.
Of course, the image had been thoroughly treated and manipulated, including those demonic eyes for Man’s Best Friend. This would have been achieved in the dark room in those days, or perhaps during the physical printing process. No computers or Photoshop back then. The colours of the image had also been adjusted so that there was a pale greenish cast to the girl’s skin—rather reminiscent of the vampiric chick on the cover of the first Black Sabbath album. And the rose bushes had been tinted a psychedelic, intense, unreal pink which in turn reminded me of Frank Zappa’s Hot Rats, another piece of cover art featuring a scary-looking woman, come to think of it.
Although the woman on Wisht looked as much scared as scary. The way the photographer had caught her, she appeared very pretty, very confused, and utterly lost. I thought again what a great photograph it was.
I turned the record over again to see if there was a photo credit on the back cover. There was. When I read it, I felt as though I’d been kicked in the stomach.
It was the name of a man who had once tried to kill me and Nevada.
The sweat on my body, from the long wait outside in the sunlight, and then this hot and crowded tent, and the long strain of haggling over the record, suddenly turned icily cold.
I told myself it meant nothing, that it wasn’t any kind of an omen. And that I had to get down to business now. I quickly reached inside the flip back cover and drew out the record. It was clad in a cream-coloured paper sleeve, with the Hex-a-Gone label logo on it in rusty red. This logo involved a hexagon, naturally. It was an original inner sleeve, which was a very good sign. The inner sleeve was discoloured with age but otherwise was immaculate, which was another.
I reached carefully inside and drew out the record. I set the outer cover and inner sleeve down on the table and held the record carefully by its edges with the tips of my fingers.
It was heavy, solid and flat. And the vinyl was clean. The light inside the tent wasn’t ideal, and I’d have to take it outside and look at it in daylight to be sure, but there was no obvious damage on Side 1. Indeed, the dense pattern of tiny grooves had that intricate, almost hypnotic sheen of something pristine and perhaps never played. I flipped the record over and looked at Side 2.
My heart sank.
The vinyl here was just as fine as on Side 1. Perfect and undamaged.
But that wasn’t the point.
Everyone was looking at my face and everyone must have seen my reaction, because I made no attempt to disguise it. And they all began to manifest reactions of their own. “What is it?” said Nevada with concern.
“Ah, shit,” sighed Tinkler with resigned disgust. Aubrey’s dad was looking at me with truculent readiness, gearing up for an argument. Aubrey himself looked puzzled and Fenton was staring worriedly at Aubrey, as if awaiting a cue.
“It’s the wrong record,” I said.
“What do you mean it’s the wrong record?” said Aubrey’s dad. “It’s Wisht, and it’s in the flip back sleeve. It’s the first pressing.”
“It’s the second pressing,” I said.
“I think we know what we’re doing when it comes to identifying records,” said Aubrey’s dad. Aubrey was nodding vigorously.
“That’s just the problem,” I said.
“What is?”
“You think you know what you’re doing.”
“It’s in the flip back sleeve,” repeated Aubrey’s dad, in case I’d missed that.
“The sleeve is just one way of identifying the original pressing,” I said. “There’s also the matrix numbers in the dead wax.”
“You’re saying you checked the matrix number and it’s the wrong one?”
“I didn’t have to,” I said. I tilted the record so that he could see the surface that I’d been looking at; so that they all could. “The first release on vinyl was entirely recalled and destroyed. Except for an unknown but small number of copies. The master tapes themselves were completely destroyed. When they hastily reissued the new version, they had to record all the tracks again, and the length of the tracks were different on the second version. That isn’t noticeable on side one. But on side two…” I showed the record to Nevada. “There are three tracks on side two. In the original version there’s a narrow track in the middle and a wide one on either side of it.”
I went over to Aubrey’s dad and showed him the record. An interested crowd had begun to gather around us to hear my dissertation, and I rather wished they hadn’t. It was going to be hard enough dealing with this chump even without an audience. “But on the second pressing there’s a wide track in the middle and a narrow track on either side of it. As you can see here.”
I held out the record to Aubrey’s dad, but he didn’t take it. I went back to the table and slipped the record back in the inner sleeve, and the inner sleeve back in the cover. I went over and held it out to Aubrey’s dad again. He still didn’t take it.
“Why is it in the flip back cover then?” said Aubrey, from behind me.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe somebody had an empty cover, or a cover with a completely trashed record in it, and decided to do a switch.”
I kept looking at Aubrey’s dad while I said this and his eyes flickered away from mine. He wouldn’t meet my gaze.
And he wouldn’t take the record. I turned around and went to the table and held the record out to Aubrey. He wouldn’t take it either. So I just set it down on the table in front of him.
“I’ll take our money back. Please.”
Aubrey and Fenton gave me identical frightened looks and then both turned to Aubrey’s dad. I sighed and turned around and looked at him, too.
He seemed to be searching for words. When he finally found them, they were, “All sales are final.”
“I think not,” I said.
But Aubrey was nodding vigorously. “All sales are final,” he said, in perfect imitation of his father.
I could feel both Nevada and Tinkler shifting at my back. “On the contrary,” I said. “As your website never gets tired of stating, you provide a hundred per cent, no-quibble guarantee.”
“This wasn’t a website sale.”
I pointed up at the sign hanging from their banner over the table, depicting Wisht. “And that isn’t the record you’re advertising.”
“It’s the flip back copy.”
“It’s the flip back cover. It is not the original pressing.”
Aubrey’s dad was shaking his head. “All sales are final. No refunds.”
“I think you’ll find you’re wrong about that,” I said. I could hear the blood roaring in my ears. “You have tried to sell us goods under false pretences. Now that we have established that, you are going to refund us every penny.”
Aubrey was looking at his dad. I could see his dad’s face tighten. “You can’t just change your mind—”
“I haven’t changed my mind. I still want the record you’re advertising up on that sign. If you’ve got it, give it to us and you can keep the money. Otherwise give the money back.”
“You’ve got the record.”
“It’s the wrong record. And now you’ve got it.” I gestured to where it lay on the table. “I’ve given it back. So give us our money back.”
I stepped towards Aubrey’s dad. I could feel Nevada right behind me.
“Call security, Aubrey,” said Aubrey’s dad, his voice as tight as his face.
“No need to do that,” said someone.
A man stepped out of the circle of onlookers who were avidly following this little drama. He was big, with grey hair and a grey beard and I knew I should recognise him. He was wearing a white shirt with tiny blue flowers on it, brown corduroy shorts over gnarled pinkish legs and a white linen jacket with a purple flower in the buttonhole. “No need to call security,” said the man. He came and stood at my side and gazed at Aubrey’s dad, smiling a mild smile. “Although you can if you like. If you do call them, be sure to ask for Trevor and tell him Max would like a word.”
Aubrey’s dad was staring at the newcomer with a look of almost childlike wonderment. “Mr Shearwater,” he said.
Of course, that was who it was. Max Shearwater went over to the table and picked up the copy of Wisht. He pulled out the inner sleeve and quickly glanced at the record, then he smiled at me. His eyes gleamed with intelligence—and mischief. “He’s right, you know,” he said. He ambled over to Aubrey’s dad and handed him the record. Aubrey’s dad took it. Max pointed at the sign. “It’s not the original version, is it?”
Aubrey’s dad looked at the record, then looked at me. He was cornered. But instead of frowning—which he was very good at—or breaking down in tears, suddenly his face lit up. He’d had an inspiration.
“I don’t suppose you’d autograph it for us, would you, Mr Shearwater? Autograph the album cover?”
Max Shearwater studied him closely. “You do realise that this is the version that I disowned? The one that was released by the chaps, after I left the group, without my permission?”
“Ah,” Aubrey’s dad’s eyes shuttled guiltily towards me. He was about to own up to having lied through his teeth. “Yes…”
“And you still want me to sign it?”
“Ah, yes…”
“Fine.” Max Shearwater nodded at me. “Give this man his money back and I’ll sign it for you.”
Aubrey’s dad went over to the table and handed Aubrey the record and gestured impatiently for Fenton to give him the cash box. While Fenton and Aubrey went through a bag of Sharpies and indulged in some swift bickering over which colour would look best for the autograph, Aubrey’s dad unlocked the box and took out a roll of bills.
