Moon Over Soho (7 page)

“How did you guys meet?” I asked.

“I don’t think we met as such,” said James Lochrane, the drummer. Short, Scottish, belligerent, and taught seventeenth-century French history at Queen Mary’s College. “It would be more accurate to say that we coalesced—about two years ago …”

“More like three,” said Max. “At the Selkirk Pub. They have jazz on Sunday afternoons. Cy lives down there so it’s sort of his local.”

Daniel nervously tapped his fingers on his glass. “We were all watching this terrible band who were making a fist of …” He stared off in the direction of the last decade. “I can’t remember what it was.”

“ ‘Body and Soul’?” I asked.

“No,” said James. “It was Saint Thomas.”

“Which they were murdering,” said Daniel. “And Cy said, loud enough for everyone, including the band, to hear: ‘I bet any of us could play better than this.’ ”

“Which is not the done thing,” said Max. All three shared a sly smile at the transgression. “The next thing I knew we were sharing a table, ordering rounds and talking jazz.”

“As I said,” said James. “We coalesced.”

“Hence our name,” said Daniel. “The Better Quartet.”

“Were you better?” I asked.

“Not noticeably,” said Max.

“Worse, in fact,” said Daniel.

“We did get better,” said Max and laughed. “We practiced at Cy’s place.”

“Practiced a lot,” said Daniel and drained his glass. “Right, who wants what?”

They don’t do pints at the French House so James and Max split a bottle of the house red. I asked for half a bitter—it had been a long day and there’s nothing like Latin declension to give a man a thirst.

“Two maybe three times a week,” said Max.

“So you were ambitious?” I asked.

“None of us was that serious really,” said James. “It’s not like we were kids and desperate to make it big.”

“That’s still a lot of practice,” I said.

“Oh, we wanted to be better musicians,” said James.

“We’re wannabe jazzmen,” said Max. “You play the music to play the music, know what I mean?”

I nodded.

“Do you think he’s gone across the river for those drinks?” asked James.

We craned our necks and looked over at the bar. Daniel was bobbing among the crush, his hand raised with an optimistic twenty slipped between his fingers. On Saturday night in Soho going across the river might have been quicker.

“How serious was Cyrus?” I asked.

“He wasn’t any more serious than we were,” said James.

“He was good, though,” said Max and made fingering motions. “He had that whole sax-player thing going.”

“Hence the women,” said James.

Max sighed.

“Melinda Abbot?” I asked.

“Oh, Melinda,” said Max.

“Melinda was just the one at home,” said James.

“Sally, Viv, Tolene,” said Max.

“Daria,” said James. “Remember Daria?”

“Like I said,” said Max. “The whole saxophone vibe.”

I spotted Daniel struggling back with the drinks and got up to help him ferry them to the table. He gave me an appraising look and I guessed that he didn’t share Max’s and James’s envy for the women. I gave him a politically correct grin and plonked the drinks down on the table. Max and James said cheers and we all clinked glasses.

They’d obviously forgotten that I was a policeman, which was handy, so I phrased my next question with considerable care. “So Melinda didn’t mind?”

“Oh, Melinda minded all right,” said James. “But it didn’t help that she never came to any of the gigs.”

“She wasn’t a fan,” said Daniel.

“You know how it is with women,” said James. “They don’t like you to be doing anything they can’t relate back to themselves.”

“She was into that New Age stuff, crystals and homeopathy,” said Max.

“She was always nice enough to us,” said Daniel. “Made us coffee when we were rehearsing.”

“And biscuits,” said Max nostalgically.

“None of the other girls was serious,” said James. “I’m not even sure there was ever any hanky-panky as such. At least not until Simone anyway. Trouble with a capital
T
.”

Simone had been the first woman to come back to Cyrus’s house to watch the rehearsals.

“She was so quiet that after a while you forgot she was there,” said Daniel.

Melinda Abbot didn’t forget Simone Fitzwilliam was there and I didn’t blame her. I tried to imagine what would have happened had my dad brought a woman home to watch him rehearse. It wouldn’t have ended well I can tell you that. Tears would have just been the start of it.

Melinda, who obviously subscribed to notions of gentility unknown to my mother, did at least wait until everyone left the house before metaphorically rolling up her sleeves and reaching for the rolling pin.

“After that we were in a lockup that Max blagged off Transport for London,” said James. “It was drafty but a lot more relaxed.”

“Though terribly cold,” said Daniel.

“Then suddenly we’re all back at Cy’s place,” said James. “Only it’s not Melinda serving the coffee and biscuits anymore, it’s the gorgeous Simone.”

“When did this happen?”

“April, May, around that time,” said Max. “Spring.”

“How did Melinda take it?” I asked.

“We don’t know,” said James. “We never saw that much of her even when she was around.”

“I met her a couple of times,” said Daniel.

The others stared at him. “You never said,” said James.

“She called me, said she wanted to talk—she was upset.”

“What did she say?” asked Max.

“I don’t like to say,” said Daniel. “It was private.”

And so it stayed. I managed to steer the conversation back around to Melinda Abbot’s “mystical” hobbies but the band hadn’t really been paying attention. The French House began
to get seriously crowded and despite the prohibition on piped music I was having to shout to make myself heard. I suggested food.

“Is the Met going to be picking up the bill?” asked James.

“I think we could stretch to some expenses,” I said. “As long as we don’t go mad.”

The band all nodded their heads. Of course they did, when you’re a musician free is a magic number.

We ended up in Wong Kei on Wardour Street where the food is reliable, the service is brusque, and you can get a table at eleven thirty on a Saturday night—if you don’t mind sharing. I showed four fingers to the guy at the door and he waved us upstairs where a stern-looking young woman in a red T-shirt directed us to one of the big round tables.

A pair of pale American students, who up till then had had the table to themselves, visibly cowered as we plonked ourselves down.

“Good evening,” said Daniel. “Don’t worry, we’re perfectly harmless.”

Both American students were wearing neat red Adidas sweatshirts with
MNU PIONEERS
embroidered across the chest. They nodded nervously. “Hi,” one of them said. “We’re from Kansas.”

We waited politely for them to elaborate but neither said another word to us for the ten minutes it took to finish their food, pay, and bolt for the door.

“What’s an MNU anyway?” asked Max.

“Now he asks,” said James.

The waitress arrived and started slapping down the main course. I had shredded duck with fried ho fun, Daniel and Max split egg fried rice, chicken with cashews, and sweet-and-sour pork, James had beef noodles. The band ordered another round of Tsingtao beers but I stuck to the free green tea, which came in a simple white ceramic teapot. I asked the band whether they played the Spice of Life often, which made them laugh.

“We’ve played there a couple of times,” said Max. “Usually the lunch spot on Monday.”

“Get much of a crowd?” I asked.

“We were getting there,” said James. “We had gigs at the Bull’s Head, the National Theatre foyer, and Merlin’s Cave in Chalfont Saint Giles.”

“Last Friday was the first evening slot that we’d scored,” said Max.

“So what was next?” I asked. “Record deal?”

“Cyrus would have left,” said Daniel.

Everybody stared at him for a moment.

“Come on, guys, you know that’s what would have happened,” said Daniel. “We’d have done a few more gigs, somebody would have spotted him, and it would be
It’s been fun, guys, let’s not lose touch
.”

“Was he that good?” I asked.

James scowled down at his noodles, then stabbed them a few times with his chopsticks in obvious frustration. Then he chuckled. “He was that good,” he said. “And getting better.”

James raised his bottle of beer. “To Cyrus the Sax,” he said. “Because talent will out.”

We clinked our glasses.

“You know,” said James. “Once we’re done here, let’s go find some jazz.”

S
OHO ON
a warm summer evening is alive with conversation and tobacco smoke. Every pub spills out into the street, every café has its customers outside at tables perched on pavements that were originally built just wide enough to keep pedestrians out of the horse shit. On Old Compton Street fit young men in tight white T-shirts and spray-on jeans admired one another and their reflections in the shop windows. I caught Daniel pinging his radar off a couple of tasty young men checking themselves out outside the Admiral Duncan but they just ignored him. It was Friday night and after all that gym time they weren’t getting into bed for anything less than a ten.

A tangle of young women with regulation-length hair, desert tans, and regional accents slid past—female squaddies heading for Chinatown and the clubs around Leicester Square.

The band and I didn’t so much proceed up Old Compton
as ricochet from one clique to the next. James nearly fell over as a pair of white girls ticked past in stilettos and pink knit mini dresses. “Fuck me,” he said as he recovered.

“Not going to happen,” said one of the girls as they walked away. But there was no malice in it.

James said he knew a place on Bateman Street, a little basement club in the grand tradition of the legendary Flamingo. “Or Ronnie Scott’s,” he said. “Before it was Ronnie Scott’s.”

It wasn’t that long since I’d been patrolling these streets in uniform and I had a horrible feeling I knew where he was going. My dad’s been known to wax lyrical about a youth misspent in smoky basement bars full of sweat, music, and girls in tight sweaters. He said that in the Flamingo you basically had to pick a spot where you were prepared to spend the night ’cause once things kicked off it was impossible to move. The Mysterioso had been designed as a deliberate re-creation of those days by a pair of likely lads who would have been the quintessential cheeky, cockney barrow-boy entrepreneurs if they hadn’t both been from Guildford. Their names were Don Blackwood and Stanley Gibbs but they called themselves the Management. It had been a rare weekend shift when me and Leslie didn’t end up on a shout to the street outside.

The trouble was never inside the club, though, because the Management hired the roughest bouncers they could find, strapped them into sharp suits, and gave them carte blanche on the door entry policy. They were famously arbitrary in their exercise of power and even at eleven forty-five there was a queue of hopefuls down the street.

There’s always been a tradition of po-faced seriousness about the British jazz scene and a kind of chin-stroking “yes I see” roll-necked sweaterness to the fans—my current company being a case in point. Judging from the punters in the queue, old tradition was not the Management’s target demographic. This was Armani-suit, dress-to-impress, bling-wearing, switchblade-carrying jazz and I didn’t think it likely that me and the band were going to make the cut.

Well, definitely not the band anyway. And to be honest that
suited me because whereas the band had grown on me, a night of semiprofessional jazz has never been my idea of a good time. If it had been, my dad would have been a happier man.

Still James, in the grand tradition of belligerent Scotsmen down the ages, was not prepared to give up without a struggle, so ignoring the queue he went immediately on the offensive.

“We’re jazzmen,” he said to the bouncer. “That’s got to count for something.”

The bouncer, a side of meat that I knew for a fact had done time in Wandsworth for various crimes that started with the word
aggravated
, at least gave this some serious consideration. “I’ve never heard of you,” he said.

“Maybe maybe,” said James. “But we are all part of the same community of spirit—yes? The same brotherhood of music.” Behind his back Daniel and Max exchanged looks and shuffled back a foot or two.

I stepped forward to head off the inevitable violence and as I did I caught a flash of “Body and Soul.” The
vestigium
was subtle but against the Soho ambience it stood out like a cool breeze on a hot night. And it was definitely coming from the club.

“Are you his friend?” asked the bouncer.

I could have shown my warrant card but once that’s out in the open all the useful witnesses have a tendency to melt away into the darkness and develop impressively detailed alibis.

“Go and tell Stan and Don that Lord Grant’s son is waiting outside,” I said.

The bouncer scrutinized my face. “Do I know you?” he asked.

No, I thought, but you might remember me from such Saturday-night hits as “Would you please put that punter down I’d like to arrest him,” “You can stop kicking him now, the ambulance has arrived,” and the classic “If you don’t back off right now I’m going to nick you as well.”

“Lord Grant’s son,” I repeated.

I heard James whisper behind me, “What the fuck did he say?”

When my dad was twelve his music teacher gave him a secondhand trumpet and paid, out of his own pocket, for Dad to have lessons. By the time he was fifteen he’d left school, gotten himself a job as a delivery boy in Soho, and was spending his spare time hungrily looking for gigs. When he was eighteen Ray Charles heard him playing at the Flamingo and said—loud enough for anyone who was important enough to hear—“Lord but that boy can play.” Tubby Hayes called my dad Lord Grant as a joke and the nickname stuck from then on.

The bouncer tapped his Bluetooth and asked to speak to Stan and told him what I said. When he got a reply I was impressed by the way his expression didn’t change as he stepped aside and ushered us in.