Resolution Way (2 page)

And that’s about as much as I can tell you. I still think about him, actually, more and more these days. I wonder who he would be now, if he’d just managed to get through that period
.

Who knows, maybe one day he’ll just reappear
.

On Saturday afternoon he resumed his weekly ritual of reading the print edition of the Weekend Guardian on the sofa, drinking his favourite Zeelbub cold-filtered coffee. He downloaded the debut novel by Noel Casper to his Bluesky. The dark tale of a twenty-something couple lost in Venice that carried echoes of Mann, McEwan, even Coover, but used its precursors in a smart and teasingly ambiguous way that never felt derivative, according to Barney’s review. Casper was only twenty-five and so his work was also one of “surprising maturity”, a lazy usage on Barney’s part, he thought. Irritating that
Gilligan’s Century
was criticised for being too closely indebted to its source material yet
Undeath in Venice
was praised for exactly the same reasons.

Perhaps he and Casper had mutual friends. He Googled him and the face looked vaguely familiar, young, big beard, rockabilly quiff. Perhaps they had met at Roz’s party. The usual suspects were all present and correct. Jaqui had been there, flirting with everyone. Barney boasting that his first novel had been optioned for a film and that he was writing the screenplay. Dominic holding court in a corner he seemed to have requisitioned for him and his current crop of cronies. Someone had mentioned Crane to him too, but who?

Probably there was some drunken exchange on the dance floor, shouting over Dodgy or Blur or Television or Jefferson Airplane or The Vines. Whoever had told him, perhaps they too were digging into Crane’s life, trying to write something on him. Yes, almost certainly. A tremor in the air. Word gets around, nothing stays undiscovered for very long. From zero to everyone in a mouse click. From decades of deepest obscurity to the full fifteen- minute glare of acclaim in an instant.

His phone pinged. A message from someone called Nick Skilling.

Re: Vernon Crane.

Hi Alex,

Paula Adonor passed on your address to me I hope that’s ok. I also have some work of Vernon Crane’s that you might be interested in. I have just promised the music to someone else but if you want the writing and notebooks it’s all yours.

Very best

Nick.

Uncanny. He sent an immediate response.

Hi Nick,

That’s great. I would love to see the work. Can I ask who else has been in touch about Crane? It may be an acquaintance of mine and I want to make sure we are not chasing up the same leads unnecessarily.

Best,

Alex.

A pause of a few minutes while he sat fidgeting, remonstrating with himself, too slow Alex, too slow, someone is going to get there ahead of you.

Message back:

Someone called Graeme Ferris, a record collector I think.
Do you know him?

Graeme Ferris? No, he didn’t know him. He sent back a message to the effect that he would be back in touch soon and thanks for getting in touch, then stood up and pressed dial, his heart thudding, too much coffee, he shouldn’t make it so strong.

Hi Paula? Yeah, yeah it’s Alex. Look, I was wondering. This stuff of Vernon’s. Could I have a look at it? I mean I’d like to write a piece on him myself. For a major publication. That’s right. So what I’m asking you is if anyone else gets in touch not to respond. Give me first refusal, if you like. Let me look at this stuff, follow a few leads up, sound out a few people on doing a piece that will tell Vernon’s story, present his work in the best and most comprehensive way. Ok. That’s right. Yeah. Listen …

Even tomorrow might be too late, even later today, he thought.

Let me come over right now. I’m really keen to get things moving on this. OK. That’s no problem. When are you free? Ah, yeah, yeah. That’s tricky for me. Yes, well, OK that’s fine. You sure you wouldn’t mind? That would be great. OK. Monday morning. Any change of plans, text me no problem, yeah? OK Paula, I’m looking forward to getting going on this with you. Alright, alright. Cheers. Bye.

Suddenly he was in high spirits, a rush of excitement. He shouted to Karen that they should go out to the pub and laughed when she shouted back that it was four o’clock in the afternoon, Alex! He put his head round the kitchen door and grinned at her. C’mon, we’ll just have a quick one down at the Croft.

Her hands paused above the laptop keyboard, she adopted a stern expression.

Well your mood has improved lately, she said. Give me half an hour. I need, need, need to get this finished before tomorrow.

Half an hour, fine! He said, raising his hands in a conciliatory gesture and smiling.

On the train he got a text from Paula saying sorry, she’d had to leave early for work and that he could get the key from the next door neighbour, help himself to tea and coffee. She’d left the box of Vernon’s things on the living room table.

Shame we won’t get to meet up, maybe a drink later in the week if you’re not too busy? He messaged back, aware that he was flirting, pocketing his phone.

He had to take the Overground from Waterloo East to Dept-ford, having left his Soft Rail guest pass at home, standing up in one of the modified carriages from which the seats had been hastily removed to provide more space. Even so, they were jammed in and he stood with his eyes closed, sweating slightly, earphones in, controlling his breathing. The endless delays and cancellations, perhaps sabotage on the line somewhere by one of the militant re-nationalisation groups, or a fist fight in the queue for the one working ticket machine, floods and signal failures out in the Kentish hinterland.

In Deptford his Oyster was scanned by a
USG
team member at the bottom of the stairs. Two Asian youths had been detained and placed to one side, hands locked behind their backs with a kind of quick drying orange foam by several heavily equipped representatives of the
UKBA
. He took particular interest in two opposing reactions to the detention as he passed, one boy standing with his head back, expressionless, impassive, the other, head down, eyes closed, his face a ball of defeat and pain. Chinese probably, some snakeheads back home leaning on his family for the money he borrowed to get over to the promised land.

Out of the station he followed the route to the flat on his iPhone, trying not to display it too openly. It was early Monday morning but even so, there was nothing wrong with exercising caution. That was only rational, given the level of public disturbance recently, not that he didn’t sympathise, not that he wasn’t as angry as anyone about the harassment, the displacement, the heavy-handed policing. It could all, he was sure, be done much more gently, people given more time to adjust.

He was surprised to discover Paula lived in a local authority block that looked to be abandoned, then remembered her observation about not having much choice whether she would stay in London or not. He wasn’t sure whether he was still allowed access, what with all the fencing and the boarded up entryways, shuttered windows and cinder blocks, idled machinery, notices of work on-going and impending. He threaded through it all to the open central stairwell, the lift decommissioned but luckily with only three flights to climb.

The neighbour was a small woman with nicotine stained teeth in her late fifties who invited him in for breakfast. He was tempted, feeling increasingly expansive, but was also conscious of time and politely declined, let himself in next door. The flat was surprisingly dark inside, with a faint trace of joss sticks and tobacco, rather hippyish. He had imagined it would be bright and white, crisp, smart, full of tasteful dark wood and polished steel.

Well, Paula Adonor was not what she seemed.

On the coffee table there was a shoebox he assumed had been left out for him. He sat down in the armchair, lifted the top off the box, placed it on the floor. There were video and audio cassettes inside, a couple of cheap looking notebooks, some folded sheets of paper, a thick, sealed A4 envelope. He took out one of the audio cassettes,
Field Recording 4
. There was an old stereo system on a shelf in the near alcove. He slid the tape in, pressed play, sat back, closed his eyes. A thin, lambent tiredness. Only a few hours sleep last night, his mind whirling with ideas bright and sharp as knives. The tape whirred silently forward, perhaps it was blank.

He waited for a few seconds.

A tremendous scream, impossibly loud, came down out of the ceiling and engulfed him.

Alex looked around, startled, saw that there were speakers on brackets up on the wall, jumped up, reached for the volume knob, twisted it down to zero just as another scream came tearing out of them at the same volume, painfully loud.

He jabbed his finger into the stop button and waited, the blood pounding in his ears, fearful that the scream would come again somehow. He found he was sweating.

The door to the hallway was open and a sudden, terrifying image flashed through his mind. Someone damp with death coming stumbling into the living room. Mouth open impossibly wide, and eyes rolled back, ambling lost toward him, screaming.

He waited, breath held.

Well, that had woken him up. His heart wobbled back to its normal, invisible rhythm.

The stereo was obviously broken. A quick scan of the living room and the kitchen revealed a CD radio but no cassette player. He decided to look through the notebooks.

The handwriting was so small that it was difficult to make anything out, just page after page of indecipherable scrawl. Some folded sheets of A4 paper appeared to be an essay called
Ontological Tectonics
.

He checked under the TV. There was a DVD player, but no video.

Alex sat back in the chair. He didn’t want to listen to the tapes at that volume, he couldn’t watch the video, the books would take a long time to decipher and possibly weren’t worth the effort anyway, plus he was keen to get back to Clapham.

Perhaps if he simply took the things and explained the situation later, sent a text promising to have them back in a day or two, well, what could she do about that? Of course he may be burning his bridges if he needed to pursue this Crane thing further, pushing her into the arms of Graeme Ferris, which was the last thing he wanted to do.

He had a brainwave; of course, the friendly neighbour. She invited him in again, laughing throatily, obviously a heavy smoker. Someone inside the flat was making loud, distressed moaning sounds, which discouraged him further. She didn’t have anything he could either watch or listen to the tapes on. He returned to Paula Adonor’s and after a few minutes of turning the various options over in his mind, let himself out of the flat and went searching the surrounding area for blank video and audio tapes, eventually buying some from Help the Aged on the High Street.

In the doorway to the flat he paused and looked around, quickly sensing that someone was following him, paused, listening, but no, there was no one there. In the flat he removed the video cassette from its card folder, inspected it, and found it was plain black and unlabelled, identical to those he had just bought, then slid the replacement in, hoping Paula Adonor wouldn’t check the box.

He thought perhaps he should make an effort with the notebooks and flicked through them a few more times but couldn’t make much sense of anything.

That scream! He smiled, well that had been a surprise.

Time to get out of Deptford.

Around 9.30 Karen told him that she was going to bed.

He stretched out on the sofa for half an hour, reading
Undeath in Venice
on his Kindle
Bluesky
, then hooked up the video player and slipped in the tape he had taken from Paula Adonor’s.

There were a series of adverts, then an episode of
You’ve Been Framed
. He fast-forwarded through it for a few minutes and pressed play
. Gladiators
. He snorted, remembered watching this when he was a kid.
Shadow eats mat!
He watched for a while, queasily entranced by the awfulness of the past.

Karen called down from upstairs telling him to turn the sound down. Yep, he shouted back, twisted around for the remote, pressed pause. When he looked back at the screen, Vernon Crane was gazing out at him.

He knew it must be Crane. He was pale and looked to be underweight, his cheekbones stood out sharply, his large, dark eyes were ringed. The image pulsed slightly; a dim, greasy light, the grain of old media. He plugged his Bangznwerks headphones into the video, prepared to press play. For a moment he felt a certain caution that he quickly shook off. A sense that he was trespassing.

Crane was dead and couldn’t know or care if this message, intended for someone else, for his lover, never reached her, was intercepted by Alex Hargreaves. He pressed play.

Crane smiled and adjusted his position.
Hello
, he said. His voice was a little gruff, Northern with a friendly lilt.

He had shoulder-length black hair, a faded-shirt with the neck seam ripped out.

You are upstairs asleep, Paula. Do you remember this? The last time we saw each other
. He reached forward and pivoted the camera around slowly. A hotchpotch of second-hand furniture, the open curtains, dusk, a hedge, a street and back to Crane.

I won’t be around much longer Paula. Tonight was the last time we’ll see each other. There’s things I’d like to have said to you but, well
.

Crane smiled, looked downcast.

Anyway, I am here because, because I wanted to see you and also because, you know, I am distributing things, here, there and everywhere. I don’t feel very in control anymore, not very in control of things at all. I am sorry I just turned up out of the blue like that. I don’t know what I expected. Hoped for
.

Crane paused and looked off to one side for a second, cocked his head inquisitively, glanced down at his hands. His expression had changed now, to something graver, more troubled.

His voice dropped.

There are things I have never told you, that I should have explained. Rob knows, Howard. It’s all got a little bit too much
.