Read Written in Dead Wax Online
Authors: Andrew Cartmel
Written in Dead Wax
Also by Andrew Cartmel and Available from Titan Books
The Run-Out Groove
(May 2017)
Victory Disc
(May 2018)
The Vinyl Detective: Written in Dead Wax
Print edition ISBN: 9781783297672
E-book edition ISBN: 9781783297689
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
First edition: May 2016
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.
© 2016 Andrew Cartmel. 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 my brother, James Cartmel,
the coolest cat of all.
1. THE DEATH OF THE DRAGON
The heating on our estate had originally been provided by a huge central boiler, which resided under the car park in a vast sealed concrete chamber. I used to imagine it curled there like a sleeping dragon, and when I eventually got a look at it, I found I wasn’t far wrong. It was like being in the engine room of a submarine: long gleaming steel cylinders receding into the shadows with a subdued hum of power.
I just walked in one day down the steps and through the door marked
BOILER ROOM
, which had been left ajar, and wandered around in the shadows until I found the guy who looked after it, an affable fat Geordie in blue overalls. His official title was Estate Environmental Domestic Heating Manager, but I didn’t hold that against him.
He let me look around because my cat had managed to get himself lost and I thought he might have wandered in here. But no feline fugitive. The boiler guy seemed to genuinely share my disappointment. I guess he could see how worried I was. As I left he wished me luck finding the cat.
I walked back up the steps from the boiler room into the daylight, blinking. As it turned out, luck was the one thing I didn’t have, eventually locating a small black and white corpse on the grass verge at the entrance to Abbey Avenue.
* * *
I took what was left of him home and buried him in the garden. It’s surprising how much comfort you can derive from knowing some bones are close by. Shortly afterwards, as if in a token of respect, the boiler on the estate also died. I blamed that on the succession of lowest-bid knuckleheads employed by the council who had failed to maintain it over the decades.
My dead cat I blamed on the clientele of the Abbey. Dizzy had evidently fallen foul of one of the luxury cars driven by the assorted Premier League football fatuities or ferally sculpted supermodels who sped along the road en route to London’s leading detox centre.
Once a genuine working abbey with its own bake house, stables and mill, the Abbey was an elegant old white structure, which I could see looming beyond my garden whenever I looked out the sitting room of what I called my bungalow—I actually lived in the lower half of a former two-storey house. It was now converted into separate dwellings and I had the ground floor rooms and the garden. The wall of my garden backed right onto the Abbey’s grounds.
Which is why I had occasion to meet one of the inmates.
It was a bright morning in an unseasonably warm September. The man had somehow managed to get into my garden and he was standing there, in a royal blue dressing gown with a gold monogram ‘A’ on the pocket and blue flip-flops.
He was staring at me as I drew back the curtain. I had been listening to music in the darkness, which is what I tend to do in the mornings while drinking coffee until my consciousness surfaces sufficiently to face the day. The man yelled something and I opened the back door and went to see what he was raving about.
“Max Roach,” he said. It took me a moment to register this. And by that time he’d also said, “Red Mitchell on bass. George Wallington on piano.”
“It’s the Gil Mellé Sextet,” I told him. I stepped out the back door and joined him in the garden. It was a little chilly. “Recorded in 1952.”
“On Blue Note, right?” The man frowned at me. He was deeply suntanned, completely bald, but heavily bearded. Which gave a mild impression that his head was upside down. He started searching the pocket of his blue dressing gown for something.
“That’s right,” I said. It was clear that the trespasser at least had a working knowledge of some rather esoteric jazz.
“It’s vinyl, of course,” he said, rummaging in his pocket.
“Of course.”
“Original Lexington Blue Note?”
“No, sadly. It’s a Japanese reissue.”
The man took his hand out of his pocket for a moment and made a curt, dismissive gesture. He shook his head with satisfaction. “I didn’t think it sounded like the original.”
I thought this was pretty rich considering he was standing in the garden. “I’ve got an original Blue Note pressing of this,” he announced. “With the Lexington Avenue address on the label.”
“Deep groove?” I said.
“Oh yes.” He reached into his pocket and triumphantly drew out an expensive-looking cigar. The cigar had the effect of making him look less like an escaped madman in a bathrobe and more like the denizen of an exclusive resort hotel who happened to have wandered away from poolside.
Which effectively he was.
“It’s a flat-edge pressing, my copy. You know what that is?” I had been trying to identify his accent, which was very faint but discernible. Something about the decisively didactic sound of the last sentence made me think Scandinavian.
“Yes,” I said.
“Those are electrostatic speakers you’re using?” he asked. I nodded. He took out a box of matches, struck one, let it burn for a moment, presumably to allow the sulphur to disperse, then ignited his cigar.
“You can always tell.” He exhaled a mouthful of smoke, shook the match out and threw it into my flowerbeds, which didn’t exactly endear him to me. Then he reached into his pocket again and took out the mangled butt of a previous cigar. Why was he carrying that around? Probably because he wasn’t allowed to smoke them in the Abbey and the discarded butt would have been a clue.
But he felt free to discard it here, in my garden. He chucked it into the pond.
That really was the last straw.
I said, “You have a flat-edge copy of this record?”
“That’s right.” He grinned. “All of my Lexington Avenue first pressings are flat edge.”
I had him right where I wanted him. I looked at the cigar butt floating in my pond and said, “You do adjust the vertical tracking angle, of course.”
“What?”
“When you play one of your flat-edge LPs. You adjust the tracking angle of the cartridge?”
He stared at me. “What do you mean?”
I tried not to overdo my look of wide-eyed innocence. “Well, your tone arm and cartridge will be set up to play standard records. And the geometry required for tracking properly on a flat record is completely different. But you know that, of course.”
He stared at me in silence. I said, feigning surprise, “You mean you don’t adjust the system every time? That means you’re getting distortion and groove wear. Your vertical tracking angle is way off. And that’s before we even start talking about the azimuth.”
That shut the fucker up.
He took his leave presently, loping back to the Abbey in his dressing gown.
I never expected to see him again. But I did. When his face turned up on the front page of the free local newspaper.
It had been jammed through my letterbox along with an assortment of pizza leaflets and taxi cards. I opened the newspaper and saw a headline that read
ARCHITECT DIES IN FALL
. Underneath was a photograph of the man, Tomas Helmer. He wasn’t wearing a bathrobe now, but a rather snazzy suit. Apparently he lived—or had lived—in Richmond, in a large house where he’d been having trouble with his guttering.
Fed up with the situation, he’d climbed onto the roof to do something about it—and had slipped to his doom.
The poor bastard. I switched on the valve amps and put the Gil Mellé Sextet on the turntable in his honour.
It sounded great. I picked up the newspaper again. The main thrust of the brief story was how ironic it was that, being a multi-millionaire and all, Helmer had proved too cheap to employ properly trained professionals to repair his guttering and had consequently paid the ultimate price.
Nevertheless, I was sorry for the poor guy. It was a shame he was gone.
But I must admit my very first reaction was to wonder what had happened to his record collection.
* * *
Soon I had other things to worry about, though.
When the boiler died, the tenants on the estate were offered the choice of a new heating system provided by the council or installing their own. Both options cost money and, given the current state of my finances, I couldn’t afford either.
So I decided to just brace myself and tough it out that winter.
It was worse than I could possibly have imagined. For a start, I hadn’t realised that a large hot water pipe from the boiler had run under my house, heating in passing the slab of concrete on which the house rested. When the boiler was decommissioned this pipe abruptly ceased its regular cycles of cheery warmth and the concrete slab around it rapidly grew cold as a crypt. And my bungalow stood on it.
