Sonata of the Dead Page 4

  They both stood up at once, and I followed suit. ‘Martin used a Rolleiflex, didn’t he?’

  ‘I’ve never seen Martin use anything other than a DSLR,’ said Cass. ‘He was married to his Nikon.’

  We were on the stairs now. I imagined Sarah’s footfalls. I imagined her hand on the wall as she steadied herself. Somewhere in the dust and air commingling in this narrow space were Sarah notes. I was breathing my child in. I was close to her.

  ‘Mind the equipment,’ Loz said, as she stepped into the room and flicked the light switch.

  There was a bar, but it didn’t look as if it saw regular use. The beer taps were covered with towels, and there was no fresh boozy smell, just a redolence of perfume from the recent meeting. A small bookcase was stuffed with photography volumes: handbooks and manuals and aspirational tomes by Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus, Dorothea Lange, Richard Avedon. There was a small pile of camera bags, cables and tripods.

  ‘This doesn’t look like it,’ I told them. ‘The room where he took these photos was much bigger, and it had a bare brick wall.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry,’ Loz said.

  ‘Do you know of any other studios he worked out of?’

  Cass shook her head. ‘He certainly didn’t own a studio. He might have paid for the use of one, for an hour or so. Unless he knew someone. I’ll have a word with the others. But it probably won’t be till next week now. We don’t socialise. I only know them from this place.’

  I asked Loz if she knew anybody. She wrote down the names of the half a dozen other group members, but she didn’t have numbers for any of them.

  ‘Who ran this thing, anyway?’ I asked.

  ‘It was Martin, really,’ Loz said. ‘He organised the shoots, the guest speakers. He decided what subject we’d discuss each week.’

  ‘Do you know anything about… Accelerants? Or the Accelerants?’

  ‘A band?’ Loz asked.

  ‘I think so, yes. I think Martin played guitar for them.’

  ‘Jeez,’ Cass said. ‘You think you know someone.’

  ‘No,’ Loz said. ‘I don’t know them. Martin never said anything about it.’

  ‘A man of secrets,’ I said. Nobody agreed or disagreed.

  I had nothing else to ask. I thanked them for their time, and handed them both a card with my number on it. ‘If you should see Sarah,’ I said, and they nodded.

  I left Leopold’s feeling sober and cold and anxious. I stood in the street, half-heartedly expecting a cab to turn into Swain’s Lane, thinking about Martin and wondering if Sarah might have been similarly dismantled, left in a ditch or a wood, yet to be discovered by the early morning dog-walkers or joggers, an old picture of me trapped forever in the frozen meat of her brain.

  ‘Don’t forget your pie,’ came a voice at my shoulder. It was Grey Beanie. She handed me a small carrier bag.

  ‘Do you know the Accelerants?’ I asked.

  ‘No. But don’t go accelerating that in a microwave,’ she said, raising her eyebrows at the bag. ‘You’ll ruin it.’ She tapped her teeth a couple of times against the bolt through her lip, winked, and went back inside.

  5

  I woke up early and Mengele was sitting a foot away from me, gazing into my eyes. ‘It doesn’t work if you try hypnotising people when they’re asleep, fuckwit,’ I said.

  He showed me his teeth and I politely asked that he move to one side so I could get to where I needed to be. I was convinced he was putting on weight, and for a grown Maine Coon, that’s impressive. Another kilo and I’d be able to ride him down Marylebone High Street, I reckoned, if it wasn’t for the sneaking suspicion that he was packing on the timber in order to take over the world while carrying my head on a pike as a totem.

  I took a piss-warm shower under a dribble from a scale-infested rose. Breakfast was a heel of bread that was a day away from spots of mould. I chased it with some water and made a mental note to get some shopping done or I’d be having Fishbitz and vodka for dinner. Then I sat and thought about what to do next. I no longer knew my daughter. I wasn’t like the regulation parent who, when faced with a young teenager ‘leaving home’, can identify a number of likely destinations – best friend, relative, boyfriend – where they’re likely to tip up. I had no idea who Sarah’s best friend was when she ran away, six years ago, so there was no chance I’d be able to follow that line of thinking now. She could be anywhere, but I felt very strongly that she was in London, and the chances were that if she wasn’t dead, then she knew about Martin’s death, and she was scared.

  What if she killed Martin?

  I hissed at myself in disgust, and forced the thought down, much as I had done the previous night. But it wouldn’t sit still. I couldn’t accept that had happened, even if I no longer knew my daughter, had no empathy whatsoever with her. I wondered if she might try putting further distance between us, especially if she felt at risk, and part of me hoped she might, if it meant it took her away from the threat.

  Though I was anxious to track her down, I knew my only chance lay in nibbling away at Martin’s case, finding out why he died and who killed him.

  * * *

  I caught the Tube to Seven Sisters and walked to Bernard Road, a street of small businesses and properties gone to seed yet batting their eyelashes with For Sale or For Rent signs unlikely ever to attract anyone. Opposite a floor suppliers I saw an old electric guitar, shorn of its strings, glued and screwed to wooden battens outside a steel door. A sign above the door read LEX: LUTHIER. Most of the streetlamps were broken; target practice for the local street urchin marksmen. You never knew when you might be called upon to lump half a brick at a copper. Glass shards were set in the coping stones of a surrounding wall like the grin of a bare-knuckle boxer. The buildings huddled together as if for moral support. Television colours splashed against net curtains further down the street where the businesses gave way to a residential stretch.

  I leaned on the bell and a kid answered. He was wearing a bobble hat with the Icelandic flag knitted into it. Beneath it was long, greasy hair. He wore a T-shirt with the legend THIS IS MY FAVOURITE T-SHIRT. Over it was an ancient biker jacket with one red sleeve.

  ‘Your dad in?’ I asked.

  ‘Look, this is my place,’ he said, with not a hint of irritation; clearly he was used to it. ‘And we’re closed.’

  ‘You’re the guitar tech?’

  ‘I’m the luthier, yeah.’

  ‘Lex?’

  ‘Yes. Alex. Alex Turner.’

  ‘Do you know the Accelerants?’

  He gave me a look. I say ‘a’ look. I mean ‘the’ look. The kind of look all snoops receive before all of the cards are on the table.

  ‘Listen… Who are you? Police?’ He had a voice that made you want to ram broken champagne flutes into your ears. It dripped with arrogance.

  ‘Why would the police come calling for you?’ I asked.

  ‘Well… duh,’ he said. ‘Sometimes there are raves in the abandoned factories and warehouses around here.’

  ‘Have you heard of the Accelerants?’

  ‘Leave me alone, would you? I’m busy. No time to talk to doorstepping nutters.’

  He was going to shut the door on me so I took a chance. I blocked it with my foot and charged it with my shoulder. He flew back into the hall with a shout. I was in big trouble now with Mawker, and looking at three months in Sing Sing for using violence to secure entry. There would be more immediate grief if it turned out this kid was a karate expert, or used one of his guitars to brain me. I thought, in for a penny, and hooked my arm around his neck before he could right himself. He didn’t try any sneaky self-defence moves, so I knew I had him. I frogmarched him up the stairs to his studio, following the smell of wood glue and solder. Once the door was shut behind us I let him go.

  ‘Listen… what the fuck is your problem?’ he yipped, like one of those snappy, nervous little dogs you see in the parks with prolapsed eyes, wearing cardigans or being carried by their owners. ‘Look… yo
u can’t just do what you just did and expect to get away with it. I’m calling the police.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. I gave him a number and told him to ask for Detective Inspector Ian Mawker. ‘While we’re at it, call an ambulance too. If I’m going down for forced entry I might as well go down for GBH as well.’

  ‘Look… who are you?’ he asked again.

  ‘Doesn’t matter. Let’s just say I’m someone in a desperate situation. I’m trying to find someone who is very dear to me and I believe this person is in danger. The information you give to me could mean the difference between me finding where she is, or getting to her a fraction too late.’

  ‘You’re police then?’

  ‘After a fashion,’ I said.

  ‘Look… why do you need to talk to me? I don’t know anything about a missing person.’ Behind the arrogance, and the fancy, arty job title, I could see there was more kid in him than man. I felt a twinge of guilt, and yet another unreasonable and irrational impulse to demand of him the whereabouts of Sarah because he was in London and she was in London and he seemed like the kind of louche prick she might like to hang out with (as if I’d know), so yeah, of course he must know where she was.

  ‘Because of murder,’ I said. ‘Because of a lead.’

  ‘What murder? Look… what are you talking about?’

  ‘A client of yours – Martin Gower – his body was discovered yesterday on a patch of derelict ground in Enfield.’

  ‘I know Martin Gower,’ he said. He sounded as if he was about to be sick.

  ‘Yes, I know you do. We’ve already established that.’ The pressure was growing in him. You could see it, like the mercury expanding in a thermometer. Any moment now he was going to ask…

  ‘Am I a suspect?’

  ‘I don’t know. I doubt it. What do you think? Should you be?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Okay then. So Martin comes to you to get his strings strung or his pick-ups picked up, or whatever the fuck you do, and you chat about guitars and guitar bands and girls and chucking TVs out of hotel windows. And he mentions this band called the Accelerants. And you say—’

  ‘The Accelerants?’

  ‘And then you say—’

  ‘I don’t know of a band called the Accelerants.’

  I took a deep breath. I needed a drink but this guy only looked old enough to have Tizer in his fridge. ‘Did Martin Gower ever mention the Accelerants to you?’

  ‘Listen, I’m not comfortable with this. You’re getting angry. Angrier.’

  ‘That’s nothing,’ I said. ‘Keep up with this time-waste babble and you’ll see I make Hulk look like Buddha. After “angrier” comes “hurt” and then “hurtier”.’

  ‘Look, you can’t just do what you did. You broke in here. You assaulted me. You aren’t the police.’ The arrogance was creeping back into his voice. I was losing him. He could sense that I wasn’t going to hurt him, seriously hurt him. Soon he was going to clam up, or call my bluff and ring the number and here would be another lead smothered.

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked. I pointed at a sparkling blue guitar, a kingfisher against a muddy backdrop.

  ‘It’s a teardrop bass,’ he said. ‘A Vox. A replica of a Bill Wyman model. You heard of the Rolling Stones?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘they’re all about the jazz too.’

  I went to the guitar and picked it up by the neck. I heard air hiss through his teeth. ‘Worth much?’

  ‘Only about four grand,’ he said. His voice was all look, listen, learn, I must be important because I fix things your job can’t afford.

  I pursed my lips and made appreciative sounds.

  ‘You might want to put that back down,’ he said.

  ‘You fixing this for someone?’ I asked. ‘Bill Wyman, maybe?’

  He snorted laughter. ‘Guy who owns it wants it fretless so I’m stripping them out. He’s a Jaco Pastorius fan.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I’d be careful with that. The guy who owns it plays bass for an outfit called Lettuce. He makes Lemmy look like Julie Andrews.’

  ‘Well then, I imagine he’d be annoyed if it went back to him in pieces. So many pieces that a luthier even as rarely skilled as you would be unable to fix it. Especially with broken hands and severe concussion.’

  ‘Look, I told you I don’t know the Accelerants. Try the Dome in Tufnell Park. Try the Silver Bullet or The Lexington or the Union Chapel. Try the fucking NME.’

  ‘Tell me something you do know. About Martin Gower.’

  He flapped his arms in exasperation. ‘Look, isn’t that your job? Finding things out?’

  ‘Most of the stuff I find out is a direct result of people answering my questions. Something you are singularly failing to do.’ I’d had enough of his shit, his passive-aggressive posturing. I jammed the headstock of the bass into his desk drawer, pushed it until the edge was gripping the neck, then began to exert pressure on the body.

  ‘No!’ he yelled. He sounded like a kid who’d had his iPod confiscated. ‘Martin Gower. Okay. Martin Gower. He played guitar but he wasn’t what you’d call proficient. He wasn’t one of Malcolm Gladwell’s ten-thousand-hour freaks.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘Well look, he was taking lessons. With an old friend of his.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Guy called Craig. Craig Taft. He lives in Mayfair.’

  ‘See?’ I said, rescuing the teardrop bass from the desk drawer. ‘Smell, taste, feel, look, listen. See how reasonable you can be?’

  I left immediately, quickly, knowing he was now in a strong position if he wanted to get in touch with the police. My best bet was if he got through to Mawker because it would just add to the long list of things to beat me over the head with; but it wouldn’t go any further than that. The problem would be if Alex Turner passed on Taft’s name. I had to crack on and find him now, before the plods started flat-footing all over my leads. If they got to anybody crucial to my search before I did, my chances for success would sink lower than the gusset of a drugs mule whose shoulder has been tapped in Indonesia.

  I caught the Tube back down to Green Park and picked up an overpriced cheese salad cob and a coffee that tasted more of the plastic it was contained within. I didn’t know this area of London too well; I’ve seldom popped out to Bond Street to stock up on four-hundred-pound shirts, or visit the upmarket barber’s for a shave with a cut-throat razor. I wondered how Taft could afford to live here if he was teaching wannabes for a tenner per half hour. Maybe it was a sideline. Maybe he was teaching Bill Wyman.

  I googled him and found a website, his grinning photo, and an address. Five minutes later and I was on George Yard, in front of a respectable-looking building made from handsome red brick behind the Marriott Hotel. I tried the doorbell and a clean, cultured voice came through the intercom. I guessed I’d not get away with the approach I’d tried at Alex Turner’s.

  ‘Mr Taft?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘My name’s Joel Sorrell. I’m a private investigator. I’m here about Martin Gower.’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘He’s dead.’

  Silence for a moment, and then the intercom clicked and our connection was lost. I rang the bell again but he wasn’t answering. Why do I always have to run up against the chatty fuckers? I thought, as I mulled over the possibilities. Maybe he was crippled with guilt, or on the phone to Martin’s parents to find out if – after all – it was true. Or Sarah? He might call Sarah with the same agonised request. My stomach filled with snakes; I tried the door anyway: locked of course. I began pushing buttons at random in the hope someone would just release the catch and let me in. But then there was a shadow in the hall and the door yawned open and I recognised him as Taft. He was pale and tall, his hair iron grey, tied back in a neat ponytail. He wore jeans and an orange jumper. He wore odd socks. The lines in his forehead seemed deep enough to store coins.

  ‘A private investigator?’ he asked. ‘
Why? What’s going on? Who are you working for?’

  ‘Do you mind if we talk inside?’ I asked.

  He considered for a moment, staring at my face as if he might better be able to read my intentions. Then, wordlessly, he pushed the door open wide and gestured with his head to come in.

  He lived in a busy one-bedroom flat on the top floor, but though he owned a lot of stuff it seemed somehow less cluttered than Alex Turner’s place. Like Alex, he had a lot of guitars, but they were whole, not piecemeal, and arranged on mounts bolted to the living-room wall. There were a couple of music stands in one corner of the living room, and copies of various guitar-learning books lying around: The Guitarist’s Friend, Rock School, Burt Weedon’s Play in a Day. I didn’t need to see the CDs close up to know they would be heavy with guitar-led music.

  ‘What happened to Martin?’ he asked. He’d stopped in the centre of the room and stood facing me, his arms folded.

  ‘Well, the pathologist is yet to tell us the results of the post-mortem, but he was attacked violently. Most probably stabbed to death.’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’ He put a hand over his mouth. He moved, and then paused, as if undecided about something. ‘You want a drink?’ he asked, eventually.

  ‘Vodka. If you’ve got it.’

  I followed him to the kitchen where he poured me an inch of Stoli and after a moment’s consideration, a brandy for himself. Then we returned to the living room.

  ‘What can I do?’ he asked.

  Put another inch in there, I almost said. ‘Since his murder, I’ve come across mention of something – a band, most probably – called the Accelerants. But I haven’t seen any reference to them in the local press, or online. Have you heard of them?’

  Again, he looked at me as if he was unsure about something. I guessed he was a drinker because he’d put that brandy away quickly so his hesitancy there perhaps had something to do with dependency. But this? Either the Accelerants was a band or it wasn’t. I put my drink down and wondered if his guitar lessons were like this, his students attempting to extract an A7 chord from him, like blood out of stone.

  ‘Accelerants isn’t a band,’ he said. ‘But Martin did belong to them. As did I, for a while. It’s a writers’ group.’