Just Another Angel (2 page)

With a rush of blood to the head, I also applied to join the Crime Writers Association and received a very curt (some would say snotty) reply that I wasn't eligible to attend a meeting until my book had been
officially
published, though I could, of course, pay my subscription dues immediately.

There was some work still to be done on
Just Another Angel
though. Elizabeth Walter was not completely happy with the original plot-twist ending that Jo Scamp, the book's femme fatale, had been trying to hide a lesbian love affair from her gangster husband. Having recently seen the film
Mona Lisa
, I wasn't happy either (!) and so some re-working was necessary. There was some marvellous correspondence (which I failed to keep) between Elizabeth and me on the lines of, ‘I'll trade you two lesbians for a more violent shoot-out scene,' and so forth.

With a more heterosexual ending, the book was put to bed around about February 1988, and it eventually appeared
in August as one of the last of the old style ‘small' hardbacks (13.5 cm x 20 cm) published by Collins or, I think, anyone else. Its cover price was £9.95.

Fortuitously, as the book opens with a complaint about Britain's antiquated licensing laws, the reform of pub hours, allowing them to open in the afternoon, came in at the end of August 1988, about a week after the book appeared.

Being once again lucky rather than good, publication day coincided almost exactly with the opening of a new bookshop on Denmark Street, London's Tin Pan Alley of old. This was a bookshop dedicated primarily to crime fiction, and was the brainchild of Maxim Jakubowski, a sci-fi buff, anthologist and later critic and crime novelist himself.

As an author, I was invited to a preview the day before the shop opened to the public, and so I hurried down to Tottenham Court Road immediately after work to find Murder One
absolutely heaving with writers and publishers, none of whom I knew and none of whom knew me.

Through the scrum I met Maxim Jakubowski, with whom I was later to edit three
Fresh Blood
anthologies. He was full of apologies, but my new book had not yet arrived, and there to prove it was a gap in the alphabetical shelving in the R section.

My despair lasted for about a minute, for by then I had located the free booze and, even better, spotted Elizabeth Walter getting out of a black London taxi with a box of books. So
Just Another Angel
did make it to the opening of Murder One
– but only just.

The book received generous reviews from Tim Binyon (
Times Literary Supplement
), Philip Oakes (
Literary Review
), John Coleman (
Sunday Times
) and F E ‘Bill' Pardoe (
Birmingham Post
), all of whom I got to know and respect, though all of whom are sadly gone now.

A paperback edition of the novel was published by Fontana in 1989 and quickly sold out. Copies seem to be rare, one changing hands in California in 2005 for $75. A second edition appeared in 1991, and it was translated into Spanish (
Un
Angel Mas
), German (
Heisse Scheine
) and Japanese, in the latter of which it is still, amazingly, in print. In English, though, this is the first available edition since 1995.

I think my first editor, those first reviewers and probably many of those very first customers at Murder One
(which still thrives, in new premises round the corner on Charing Cross Road) would have been surprised, if not stunned, to think of the Angel saga continuing into the 21st Century and (this year) in his fourteenth novel.

I know I am.

 

Mike Ripley

Colchester, July 2006

 

 

 

 

 

I was in the Gun having the first drink of the day, or the last drink of the night before, depending on how you looked at it, when she came through the door with a bunch of Hooray Henries six feet deep and twice as thick.

The Gun, I'd better explain, is that rarity in England: a pub that opens when the punters want it to. Situated an apple-core throw away from Spitalfields fruit and veg market behind Liverpool Street station, the Gun has a special dispensation to open at six in the morning to serve all bona-fide market traders. Not that Trippy and Dod and I were bona-fide marketeers – most of the real ones have pretty dubious fides – but I'd done the landlord a favour or three in the past and was known there. Which is what it's all about, really, isn't it?

The reason we were there at 6.30 am was the gig in Brighton the night before. The venue had turned out to be a private club and a gay bar to boot. We had innocently thought that the Queen's Head would be a pub. Not that that was the problem. We had arrived late to find two other members of the band had turned up and gone again when they saw the clientele, and two had simply not turned up at all. Add to that a failed amplifier, which meant the club's disco was out of action, and the club owner was about to have his hair lifted by its henna-ed roots. He at least was happy to see us, and offered to increase our wages
to £50 apiece if we started immediately. I managed to get only a couple of pints inside me in the time it took Dod to fix up his drum kit, and Trippy didn't get a chance to drop anything heavy (he's not called Trippy because he falls over his bootlaces) before he was sat in front of a rickety upright piano and swung into ‘Ain't Misbehavin''. I let him have three choruses before I got the mouthpiece into my trumpet and took the lead, fluffing the first two bars badly, though nobody seemed to notice.

We'd gone through our repertoire, such as it was when reduced to drums, horn and piano, each taking two solos to cover for the missing trombone, bass, clarinet and banjo, at least twice before we got requests for ‘Happy Birthday'. Three or four of them kept the customers quiet – well, actually, anything but quiet – and then the disco's amplifier was fixed by one of the regulars using an ivory-handled nail-file and we had the chance of a breather. I've always said that breathing was a good way to describe Dod drinking beer; he sort of inhaled it, and I swear I never saw him swallow. I just did my best to keep pace, knowing it would end in tears. Trippy stayed at the bar for two of his favourite Wally Headbanger cocktails (large vodkas with orange and tomato, yes, tomato, juice) then disappeared into the toilet to rifle through his portable medicine chest.

All three of us were pretty much wrecked by midnight and it was just as well that we weren't asked to play again. I don't think Trippy could have actually found the piano, and he was beginning to draw attention to himself by stumbling around the dance floor bumping into clientele – one of whom took him aside and said, ‘Darling, how do you get your pupils to shrink so?'

The upshot was, as could have been predicted, that none of us was in a fit state to drive back to London. Veteran cars that run on steam do London to Brighton easily every year. We couldn't. The three of us collapsed in the back of Dod's Bedford van to sleep it off among the mattresses, cardboard boxes and assorted ancient rugs that he keeps there to protect his drum kit when in transit. I woke up first (Rule of Life No 143: when sleeping in a strange place, always wake up first) and liberated two pints of Gold Top from a nearby unguarded milk-float. That was breakfast settled as far as Dod and I were concerned. Trippy declined, convinced that milk gives you cancer. A quick visit to a seafront Gents and we were on our way back to London before the dawn and commuters, getting to the Gun just after six.

The reason we drove to the Gun was not just a craving for alcohol. It was fairly central for all of us, me for Hackney, Trippy for his squat in Islington and Dod for his council flat in Bethnal Green. Also, I'd left my car parked round the side of the pub facing Bishopsgate. (Rule of Life No 277: always park a car facing away from where you are, to facilitate quick exits.)

Anyway, there we were and there she was.

 

In the midst of all those Hooray Henries, I naturally assumed she was a bit of a Sloane, though she did not seem to be joining in the general frivolity. The Hooray Henries had actually bought champagne and a couple of bottles of Guinness and were debating among themselves how to mix a Black Velvet. (Two-thirds stout to one-third bubbly, stout goes in first, and the Irish mix it in a jug, not the glass.) She sat slightly apart from them, as though she was not with the party but had
just come through the door at the same time, and gave off plenty of God-I'm-bored signals as the Henries fought among themselves to be the first one to pour her a glass. While flicking her blonde-streaked fringe out of her eyes, she managed to clock every other male in the pub, including me, but there was no eye-contact there, nor with anyone else as far as I could tell.

I remember her in detail because of what happened later, of course, but even so, she made quite an impression that morning in the Gun. Some women would have made an impression at that time in the morning if they'd walked in wearing a plastic bin liner; others could have come in their birthday suits and still not got served first. She was neither of them. Pretty, certainly, but not stunning enough to, say, hold up a game of darts.

But she was well dressed, and expensively, and it was the combination that set the heads turning. She had draped a white fur coat so casually over the back of her chair that it couldn't have been worth more than a grand. And although it was a fairly chill October morning outside, and not exactly a greenhouse inside, she was wearing a figure-hugging, strapless dress with long sleeves cut off at the shoulder. In fact, she was dressed in three shades of blue, for the light blue of the dress was offset by navy blue stockings and then high-heeled, really bright electric-blue shoes.

I watched her play with a cigarette for a while and take occasional sips from the Black Velvet one of the Henries had poured her. They were busy talking among themselves and spilling Guinness down their dinner jackets. They were too far away for me to hear what they were saying, but most people prefer it that way when the Hoorays are around, especially at that time in the morning. Despite a couple of spirited attempts on my part, there was none of the necessary magic eye-contact with her, so I turned back to Trippy and Dod.

Their conversation was par for the course. In other words, Dod was saying nothing, simply puckering his lips alternately around a small snifter of brandy and a cup of hot, sweet coffee, and Trippy was baiting him about Arsenal. You know the patter: ‘Are you going to see Arsenal on Saturday or would you prefer live football?' ‘Have you heard that Arsenal have lost their Mogadon sponsorship?' So on, so forth.

When it was my turn to buy the next round – bacon sandwiches this time; well, you can drink only so much coffee, can't you? – I stayed at the bar chatting to a bloke I'd once done a few odd jobs for. In the mirror behind the bottles, I saw her get up and leave, trailing, would you believe it, the white fur coat after her.

‘Well, that's one way of cleaning the floor,' I said to the barman as he delivered our sarnies.

‘Hah, mate, don't fall for that one. She's a sawdust rustler. Soon as she gets outside, she brushes out all our sawdust, sieves it a coupla times, then sells it to the wine bar round on Bishopsgate.'

‘Is that a fact?' I asked, all innocent.

‘Straight up, mate. How the hell do you think she can afford a coat like that?'

He had a point. A stupid one, and not worth thinking about at that time in the morning. I just delivered the bacon sandwiches.

Dod's disappeared into one of his giant hands. Trippy inspected his one for fried tomato. (He had a thing about tomato skins.) I suddenly felt badly in need of a wash and shave.

‘I'm hitting the road, you guys, before the traffic hots up.'

Dod nodded, munching away.

‘What's the next gig?' Trippy asked.

‘There's a Students' Union do at City University week after next, and I've a couple of pubs lined up wanting some mainline Dixieland for Thanksgiving Day parties next month. Shall I count you in?'

They both nodded, then Trippy asked: ‘Nothing this weekend?'

‘I'll keep an ear open for you, maybe give you a bell if the phone's still connected in your squat.'

‘Of course it is. The guy squatting in the basement is a GLC councillor; he needs his channels of communication.'

‘Okay, I'll see if there's anything doing. See yer around, y'all!'

I wrapped a paper napkin bearing the legend ‘Trumans Beers'
around my bacon sandwich and munched my way to the door, nodding to a couple of customers I recognised and avoiding the stares of a couple more I probably owed drinks to. As I stepped out on to Brushfield Street, I caught a last glimpse of the Hooray Henries ordering another bottle of what they thought was real champagne before the door swung shut.

It was a dank and overcast morning and still only just light. There were the usual market noises coming from Spitalfields, the crashing of wooden crates, shouted instructions in Cockney dialects that would have defeated Professor Higgins, and deep-throated diesel trucks warming up to ferry sprouts to Sainsbury's and tomatoes to Tesco's. The street itself was littered with the morning's best buys for the wholesalers. Judging from what I trod in, the weekend's bargains were going to be bananas and fresh figs.

I retrieved my trumpet case from the back of Dod's van. We never locked it, as Dod had well over-insured it in the hope of theft. Then I threw the remains of my sandwich to the scavenging pigeons and turned the corner to where I'd parked my taxi.

No, I'm not a cabbie, but I do own a London cab. Second-hand, they're a nice bet if you can get a good one that has been looked after. I had fallen on a little beauty, black bodywork immaculate, as cheap to run, on diesel, as almost anything can be these days in London, highly unlikely to get stolen, never known to get a parking ticket, and an engine that, even with a slightly dubious 180,000 miles on the clock, still ran as sweet as a nut. It has the added advantage that although the Licensed Hackney Carriage plate has been removed and the meter disconnected, certain people simply will not believe it is no longer a proper taxi. Now, I know London pretty well, and I'm an obliging sort of bloke who likes to help people out, and it becomes a real pain trying to stop people like that showing how grateful they are for the lift. How am I supposed to stop them if they want to press money on me?

The girl in the white fur and blue dress was leaning against the left-side doors. It looked as if I had another customer.

‘At last,' I heard her breathe. Then she looked me full in the face and said, ‘Can you take me up West to Marble Arch? If you're not off duty or anything. I just need to get out of this circus.'

The problem seemed to be that she was lost. I toyed with the idea of showing her around the corner and
pointing out Liverpool Street station, which has excellent underground services to the West End (40p a ticket and about 12 minutes if the train turns up). Then I looked her up and down again and thought that if there was anything wrong with her face it might be that her eyes were permanently too big and maybe a fraction too far apart. But sod it, I'm not an optician.

‘Marble Arch it is, miss, if you'll bear with me while I get old Armstrong here started.'

‘Armstrong?' she asked – they always do – as I let her into the passenger seats. ‘As in Louis.'

‘That's right, named after my hero.' I was impressed. She couldn't have been more than ten or 11 when Satchmo died.

‘I gathered as much from the trumpet.' Observant, too. ‘You were in the pub, weren't you.' It was not a question.

Armstrong staggered into life and I let him run for a minute before turning on the heater. As I pulled away, I opened the sliding glass panel so I could talk over my shoulder, and adjusted the driving mirror so I could see her.

‘I wouldn't have put you down as a regular at the Gun, miss. They haven't changed the juke-box there since the three-day week.'

‘First and last time,' she said, looking out of the window. ‘What was the three-day week?'

‘Before your time, miss. The miners were on strike and the power stations ran out of coal. The lights kept going out every couple of hours, so the working week was cut to three days. Brilliant. Never had it so good. Going back to five days will be the death of me.'

We were approaching the new Stock Exchange tower, and I narrowly missed a pair of jobbers hurrying
to make the first million of the morning. When I looked back in the mirror, she was staring at me.

‘Do you have a light?' And she made it sound throaty.

‘Sure.' I flipped her a French disposable lighter – I get job-lots of them from a Channel Ferry stewardess I know.

‘Then you'll probably have a cigarette as well.'

I laughed and tossed a packet of Gold Flake over my shoulder.

‘What on earth are these? My God, they don't have filters!'