Written in Dead Wax (19 page)

She stared at me. “What do you mean?”

I sighed and sank down on the sofa beside her. She wasn’t going to make this easy on me. “Who are these people who are competing with us to find the record?”

She shook her head. Her hair was damp and the gleaming black fringe of it swept over her eyes with the motion. “I have no idea.”

“You have some idea.”

“No more than you. I don’t know who they are, I just know they seem to be, as you say, competing with us.”

I looked at her. “You don’t know where they come from, who sent them?”

She tucked her legs up under her. Her bare feet were pressed on my thigh. She shook her head again. “All I know is that we’re not the only ones who want this record. It’s worth more than you can imagine.”

“I can imagine quite a lot.”

She hesitated. “We were aware… I was aware of the possibility of this eventuality.”

“Talk like a human being.”

She sighed and hugged her knees. I couldn’t see her eyes now. “It was almost inevitable that someone else would come after the record.”

“Did they kill Jerry?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“What about Helmer’s wife? His ex-wife?”

She shrugged again and looked up at me. “I don’t know. Possibly.”

“What about Helmer himself?”

She looked startled. “But he fell off the roof. That was an accident, wasn’t it?”

“Was it?” I said. “And what about Tinkler?”

She sat up straight, looking me squarely in the eye. “Listen, I know you’re upset about Tinkler and so am I. But you mustn’t blame yourself for what happened to him.”

“We led them to him. They followed us and we led them to him.”

She shook her head. “You don’t know that. For all we know Tinkler just fell down the stairs. God knows it seems likely enough.” That was true. I hesitated. She seemed to sense that she was gaining ground and looked me in the eyes again. “I don’t think we led them to him. I don’t think they did it.” She reached out a tentative hand and let it rest on the back of mine. “But if we did, it was
my
fault. All my fault. Not yours.”

I felt the cool touch of her hand on mine. I could smell the shampoo and soap on her. I looked away from her, at the shoulder bag she had placed in the armchair. I said, “Why do you have—”

She reached up and touched my face. Then she shifted position on the sofa and leaned forward and put her mouth to mine. I kissed her and her lips opened and I tasted her mouth. She opened the bathrobe and I reached inside and put my hand on her breast, her nipple as hard as a pebble.

We got up, moving like a single organism with four legs and, without breaking the embrace, moved into the bedroom. I shed my clothes on the way, with her helping me, tugging at them impatiently and throwing them aside. We fell down on the bed together and she wrestled her way out of the bathrobe. We threw that aside too and then her warm naked body was pressed against mine. I moved my hand down from her breasts to the small precise socket of her navel in her taut belly, then I moved it further down and put my fingers in her.

She was slick and wet and opened for me. I moved on top of her and she caught me between her fingers and guided me inside. She was smooth as silk, frictionless, slick and infinite. She hooked her legs over my shoulders as I moved into her and she said, “Yes, yes, sweet, yes, sweet, yes, love, like that, yes, like that, there, like that, yes, yes, honey, honey, honey.” She bit my ear and whispered in it, “Who’s lovely? Yes, you’re lovely.”

Tinkler said, “So she talks to you just like she’s talking to the cats?”

“Yes.”

“While you’re…”

“In the throes of passion.”

“Don’t get circumspect with me,” he said. “You mean while you’re having sex?”

“Yes.”

He whistled tunelessly. He’d always whistled tunelessly. It wasn’t as though the concussion had cruelly robbed him of a great gift.

In fact, allowing for external physical damage, including the brutal shearing of his abundant locks, he looked much like his old self. He’d been awake for three days now. On the first day they wouldn’t let me anywhere near him, but Maggie had been allowed into the inner circle. She sat with him while he’d aced his cognitive tests.

“The only thing he got wrong,” she told me later, “was that he said giraffe when they showed him a picture of a zebra.” Considering how much dope he smoked I thought it was unlikely he could ever have got that one right, though I didn’t say as much to Maggie.

“So what’s it like?” said Tinkler, lolling back in his bed and eyeing me with frankly amused curiosity.

“Her talking to me like the cats?”

“Yes.”

“The terrible thing is, I find it quite exciting.”

“What!”

“I find it strangely arousing.”

Tinkler howled with laughter. “This is priceless,” he said.

I could feel my ears getting hot. “I’m only telling you this stuff because, you know…”

“Yes?”

“I’ve only been so indiscreet because of your…”

“Near brush with death?”

“I was going to say incipient role as a vegetable, but I’ll go with that.” I leaned back in my chair. “Anyway, from now on don’t expect to hear anything in the way of intimate details.”

“What intimate details? You’ve hardly told me anything.”

“I told you plenty,” I said. “I told you everything.”

“When I was unconscious! That doesn’t count.”

“Well, you’re not getting any more after today. We’re drawing a line under it.”

Tinkler sighed and settled back on his pillows. “Okay,” he said, finally. “I’ll agree to that, but with one proviso. If she starts dressing up in a cat suit complete with whiskers and tail, I have to know
right away
.”

There was a brisk knock and the door opened and Maggie came in and looked at us with disapproval. “What were you two talking about? I could hear the laughter from halfway down the hall.”

“Nothing,” said Tinkler.

Maggie looked at me. I said, “Nothing.” She shook her head and came over to the bedside table and put some fresh grapes in the bowl. Tinkler watched her with interest. Lying in his hospital bed, receiving visitors, Tinkler had become something of a connoisseur of vine fruit.

“Those better be seedless,” he said.

“You’re certainly getting through them,” she clucked, fishing out the dry gnarled grape stems from the bottom of the bowl and dropping them, rattling, into the metal waste bin on the floor.

“It’s my so-called friends,” said Tinkler. “Eating my fruit while I was in a coma.”

At the mention of the word “coma”, Maggie looked at him fondly and came over and kissed him on the cheek. She was so transparently happy to have him back that I was willing to forgive her any quantity of her usual bossy officiousness. We stayed for another twenty minutes and then Maggie said something anodyne about not wanting to tire the patient, and we both got up.

Tinkler looked sad to see us go. As we left, he called, “Don’t forget.
Cat suit
.
Instant notification
.”

We walked down the corridor. Maggie took me by the arm and said, “Thank you so much.”

“What for?”

“For Jordon. For everything.” She squeezed my arm. “These little chats of yours have really gingered him up. He’s so alert and suddenly full of life. As one of the consultants put it the other day, it’s almost as though he was jolted back to consciousness.”

“Jolted?”

“I don’t know what you said to him when you came to see him in his coma, when you were sitting alone with him talking, but it certainly seemed to do the trick. As the consultant said, it was almost as if he had been shocked awake. ‘Dumb outrage and astonishment’ was the way he described it. And then Jordon started laughing.”

“Laughing?”

“Yes, they were a little worried at first, until he calmed down and they did the cognitive scoring.” She looked up at me, happy tears welling in her eyes. “And then everything was fine.”

* * *

“How was Tinkler?” said Nevada.

“Really good. Improving all the time.”

“Good.” She put an arm across my chest and dug her head into my shoulder. “I’ll go and see him tomorrow.” We were lying on my bed. The cats had just jumped up to join us. While we’d been making love they’d maintained a dispassionate, respectful distance, watching us inscrutably and silently from vantage points on the windowsill and the top of a dresser. They hadn’t previously known this behaviour pattern in their little lives, but they seemed to be adjusting.

“See if you can dress up in a cat costume,” I said.

“What?”

“Tinkler. When you visit. It would mean a lot to him.”

She kissed my neck. “Listen,” she said, “I know it’s been a tumultuous few days, with him waking up and…” She propped herself up and looked up at me. “And us getting together and all. But…”

“But now we’ve got to get back to work.”

She kissed me again. “We mustn’t drop the ball. So to speak.”

“And by now Heinz and Heidi will have dug through the mountain of duff vinyl from Lenny that we lumbered them with, and they’ll know they haven’t got the record.”

She got up and began shrugging on her bra. “And they’ll know we screwed them.”

“Quite possibly.”

She put the bra on backwards, fastened it, then twisted it around and slipped it over her breasts. I could have watched her doing this forever. “I’m going to have a shower,” she said. She found her panties on the floor and pulled them on. “And then we’re going to come up with a plan of action.” She came back and sat on the bed and kissed me. “And perhaps you could make us some dinner.”

“Perhaps I could.”

“Those chicken pieces were really nice. The mini drumsticks? The ones you did the other night with the lemon and the garlic? I couldn’t help noticing that you’ve got a freezer full of them.”

I said, “That’s because I buy chicken wings for the cats.”

She leaned over and began stroking Fanny and Turk, who had established themselves on the bed now. “I thought chicken was bad for them. I thought the bones splintered and made them choke.”

“Only if it’s cooked. Raw they’re fine. They’re evolved to eat rodents and birds, which are full of bones. They’re small carnivores.”

“Are you a small carnivore, are you?” she said, patting Fanny. “Are you, are you, are you?”

“The raw wings are good for their teeth. Essential, in fact. Have you ever tried to brush a cat’s teeth?”

“Do you have lovely teeth?” she said, turning her attention to Turk. “You do, don’t you?”

“But they only eat the two smallest joints on the wings. So I have to trim the other one off. Which is why I’m always left with a freezer full of the drumsticks. So I casserole them with olive oil and lemon and garlic.”

“Oh, okay, I see,” said Nevada, getting up. “I thought it was your signature dish. Lovingly prepared especially for me. And now it turns out it’s the cats’ leftovers.”

“That’s right.”

She started for the door. I said, “I think we have to change our tactics.” She stopped in the doorway and looked back at me.

“What do you mean?”

I sat up. “This random searching of charity shops and boot fairs and jumble sales, I just don’t think it’s going to work.” She came back and sat down on the bed again, peering at me. She looked concerned.

“What are you suggesting?” she said.

“The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced the record’s still in Helmer’s collection. After all, she only got rid of half of it.”

“The ex-wife?”

“Yeah, I think she still had the record when she died. She hadn’t got rid of it yet.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Call it a hunch.”

Nevada swivelled around so she was sitting beside me on the bed, her back to one of the pillows that was propped against the headboard. “But that’s going to present some difficulties. If we try and go after it, I mean. Her flat in Chiswick will still be a crime scene. The police wouldn’t let us anywhere near it.”

“I don’t think the records are in the flat in Chiswick.”

I could feel her looking at me. She said, “But she arranged to meet us there, so we could have a look at them.”

I nodded. “That’s where she arranged to meet us all right. But why would the records have been there? That was
her
flat. I had the impression she bought it after she split up with Tomas. So why would any of his records be there? Helmer would have kept them at his house in Richmond.”

“She might have moved them,” said Nevada. “She might have taken them to the flat in Chiswick.”

“Why? The only thing she wanted to do with those records was to get rid of them. If she’d taken them from the house in Richmond she might as well have gone directly to the charity shops with them. Why take them to Chiswick? Why move them twice? It doesn’t make sense.”

She lay down beside me, rolling over onto her side so she could look at me. She took my hand. “So you think she just wanted to meet us at the flat so she could vet us?”

“Right.”

“And so the records…”

“They’re still in the house in Richmond.”

* * *

We were coming home in the taxi the following morning when Clean Head said, “There’s something I have to tell you.” She glanced back at me in her mirror. “You were right about the light motorcycle.”

“What?”

“You were right about them putting it in the SUV and everything.”

“What?” said Nevada.

“I had a friend of mine, another cabbie, take a look.” She paused to concentrate on a tricky traffic manoeuvre then resumed. “They were parked outside a shop and my friend happened to be driving past. I’d asked him to keep his eyes open for a silver SUV in the area. So when he saw it he stopped and parked nearby then went for a coffee and walked back past the SUV and gave it the once-over. He said they had a lightweight scrambling bike in the back.” She glanced back at me. “You were even right about the size. It was a 60cc.”

“Holy shit,” I said.

“He only took a quick glance, because he didn’t want to attract attention.”

“Good,” I said.

“But he said they had a lot of other kit in there.”