Angel Hunt (19 page)

I decided not to say anything about him being called Armstrong. You can tell a vicar just so much.

I opened the door and let Lara and Bell into the back, then I climbed into the driving seat and got Armstrong wound up. With a minimum of movement – and I am good I at it – I flicked a cassette into the tape-deck where the old fare meter used to be, turned on the amp and selected the rear speakers. They got Sipho Mabuse's ‘Celebration'
in all four earholes which, if not exactly up-to-the-minute-top-of-the-charts stuff, was at least politically correct.

They loved every minute of the drive to the farm cottage where Wayne – West Elsworth's Mr Music – lived when he wasn't being an expectant father. I'd swear that Bell would have waved if he'd seen any of his parishioners, not that they would have seen him now it was dark. And because I'd deliberately put on the passenger light, I could see in the mirror that even the Ice Maiden's features cracked into a smile as they swayed to the music and chatted frantically to each other.

I couldn't hear what they said, of course, as anyone who has ever tried to talk to a real London cab-driver will testify, and the music didn't help. But at least it gave me a few minutes to observe them and think.

The impression I got in Armstrong was that they were like kids in a sweet shop. Maybe it was as simple as that. Bell had gone to Cambridge to meet Lara and come back on the bus. Neither of them had cars. And Bell had asked me early on if I drove or not. Maybe they couldn't. Billy hadn't been able to.

It was a tenuous link but a nagging one, and it had cropped up before. Was it possible that these two, and Billy, had been members of Action Against Animal Abuse, the only urban terrorist movement to travel by the No 13 bus?

I felt a hand on my shoulder.

‘Anywhere here'll do, driver,' said Bell, and roared with laughter.

As we piled out he said: ‘I'm sorry, I just couldn't resist it.'

‘That'll be two pounds forty, guv,' I replied with a smile, and his face fell. ‘I can't resist it, either.'

Lara remained unamused by the exchange.

Bell led the way not to the cottage we'd stopped outside, but to the ramshackle wooden garage at its side. He reached up and took a Yale key from the narrow lintel across the double doors and slotted it into the lock. Amid all the other junk that accumulates in garages (I sometimes think they're sold complete with contents), wrapped in a big sheet of plastic, was Wayne's disco gear.

It was very much the standard beginner's kit: a twin turntable desk with built-in amp and tape-deck, control panel, mike socket and two 150-watt speakers. There were also four columns of flashing lights, which would cue into the bass and treble outputs. Wayne hadn't made it to the auto remix with synthesiser and laser beam stage yet. On each piece of equipment was the word ‘FENMAN' in the sort of stick-on letters that usually spell ‘DUNROAMIN' on the front doors of bungalows.

‘Wayne calls himself the Flying Fenman,' said Bell. ‘Can you fly this stuff?'

‘All the way to the moon, Alice,' I said, but neither of them got it. ‘I'll check my pilot's licence, but it looks easy enough unless he's rewired it for any particular reason. Where are his records?'

Bell did a double-take.

‘Er … Probably in the back of his van at the hospital. I never thought ...'

‘Now that could be a problem.'

‘I've got my record collection back at the rectory,' he said hopefully. ‘In fact, I haven't unpacked them since I moved here.'

‘Can't you use the tapes from your taxi?' asked Lara.

‘If the deck works, yeah, that's an idea. Where does all this stuff have to go?'

‘The Parish Room,' said Bell. ‘It's what passes for a village hall here. It's next to The Five Bells.'

I'd seen it on my way into the village and just assumed it was a bottle store for the pub. Still, what it lacked in architectural stature, it made up for in location.

We packed the Flying Fenman into Armstrong, the speakers and lights going in the luggage space (where normal vehicles have passenger seats) and the turntable unit lying across the floor in the back.

The Parish Room was as cold and uninviting inside as it looked from the road. It took us five minutes to find a power socket and a further 20 to untangle cables and connect the speakers and lights. I set the turntables on a trestle-table as near to the push-bar fire exit door as I dared. If the local teenyboppers didn't like the music, I wanted an escape route.

Bell sent Lara back over to the rectory to get his record collection, and she returned with a cardboard box that said on the side that it had once contained tins of baked beans. A quick scan through Bell's collection of LPs made me think we'd have had a better evening with the beans. The music was mostly folksy female imitations of the Carly Simon, Janis Ian vintage, plus a well worn copy of Mike Oldfield's
Tubular Bells
,
which he may have bought because of the pun on his name but was probably there because it's obligatory for anyone who had a stereo before 1980.

I tried the system out with a tape from the collection I keep in Armstrong. The one with no details on the cover except the word ‘Loud' in red ink. Gerry Rafferty belted out, shaking the speakers, flashing the synchronised lights and rattling the aluminium window-frames of the hall.

‘Okay, kids,' I yelled, ‘Let's boogie till we puke!'

But fortunately they didn't hear me, or the rector would have looked even more worried than he did already.

 

 

 

 

 

‘I don't remember Wayne playing the disco quite so loudly,' Bell had said over an early dinner. That was probably because Wayne wanted to work in the village again, I thought, but said nothing.

‘We're vegetarians,' Lara had said, warming up three tins of mushroom soup.

‘I've already turned down nine invitations to Christmas dinner,' said Bell. ‘In Romford, people would at least try and do a nut cutlet or a vegetable curry, but out here they just stare at you and pretend they haven't heard right.'

‘It must be difficult,' I sympathised. ‘I always say to people, why is it unusual not to eat meat? I mean, you don't eat the flesh of any meat-eating animal, do you?'

Bell considered this seriously. It was an argument Lisabeth had put to me once when I'd had a few drinks and made some crack about her vegetarianism. I hoped I was remembering it right.

‘Think about it. Humans only eat meat from animals that eat grain or grass or similar. Cows, sheep, pig, chicken, duck …'

‘I think you'll find some exceptions – unpleasant ones – but it's an interesting idea.' Bell said it like he was already considering it for the next week's sermon.

They hadn't actually asked me if I was a veggie or a vegan, and I'd accepted Bell's invitation to food and a bed for the night in return for offering to run the disco. He repeated how grateful he was for my standing in for Wayne, as both he and Lara had other plans. He didn't specify what they were, nor did he mention showing me Billy's video gear again, but now I had time to snoop around myself.

Just after seven, the front door of the rectory opened and two young girls came in without knocking. They both wore long, belted raincoats and carried small torches. I had forgotten that they didn't run to street lights out here on the tundra.

Despite the overdone eye make-up, I recognised the first one.

‘Hello, Stephanie,' said the rector. ‘Hello, Amy.'

‘Hello, Geoffrey,' said Stephanie, ignoring Lara and looking at me.

‘This is Roy, he's standing in for Wayne tonight,' said Bell, and Stephanie rolled her eyes up until the whites showed. ‘Stephie and Amy here, they take the admission money and run the bar.'

My expression must have betrayed me. ‘It's a non-alcoholic bar,' said Bell quickly. ‘Alcohol-free lager, cola, crisps, that sort of thing. Let's go across.'

I grabbed my coat from the back of a chair. ‘See you later?' I asked Lara.

‘Perhaps. Depends what time we finish.' She was giving nothing away.

The rector led us over to the Parish Room again and unlocked the door and hit the light switch. There was a small kitchen and two toilets off in a side annexe, and I helped him set up another trestle-table and load it with boxes of crisps and cans of soft drinks from a padlocked pantry. He gave the keys to Stephanie, telling her to get more if she needed them and to make sure she locked the takings away at the end of the evening.

The two girls knew the score, and they went round the hall pulling curtains and setting out folding chairs down the side, leaving plenty of dancing space. Then they set up a card table near the door and opened an empty cashbox. They did all this with their coats firmly belted, which I thought was a bit odd. It was no sauna in there, but it wasn't that cold. I thought country girls were tough and wrote love-letters to the milkman in the ice on the inside their bedroom windows in the morning.

I got the Flying Fenman warmed up and tested the lights with a Bob Marley tape. The two girls looked mildly interested, and with the light show going, they flicked off half the lights at the main switch. I suspected that all the lights would go as soon as the rector did.

‘I'll leave you to it,' said the rector. ‘If you have any problems, I'm across at the rectory, and don't hesitate come and get me or send Stephie or Amy.'

‘No problems,' I promised.

‘I'll pop back for ten-thirty; that's closing time.'

‘Okay. Leave everything to me.'

He turned so the girls couldn't hear him.

‘I feel I have to say this, Roy, but take it in the spirit it's given.' Here it came. ‘You're in charge here, and you'll be the only adult, so you'll be responsible.'

For what?

‘Like I said, Geoffrey, no problems.'

He smiled, wished us all a good rave-up and left.

Okay, so he was a vicar and he had to play it straight, but there was no need to make any big deal out of playing music for a bunch of harmless adolescents, was there?

Stephanie waited until the door had closed after him, then she produced a pair of high-heeled shoes, one from each pocket of her raincoat, and dropped them on the floor, then kicked off her sensible school-issue flatties. Amy did likewise and they both stepped into their new shoes as if they'd rehearsed. They both took off their raincoats in the same, choreographed way. Underneath, Stephie was wearing a brown suede mini skirt and matching halter. The gap in the middle was vaguely covered by a cowgirl-style fringe from the halter. Amy – the elder of the two unless my eyes deceived me – wore a red lurex tube that ended just as the fishnet tights started to cover her legs.

I realised why they didn't need central heating in the Parish Room.

 

By 8.00, the joint was jumping and I was a hit.

I knew I was, because Stephie told me so as she brought me another alcohol-free lager in a plastic cup. (Not half bad if cut with vodka from the quarter-bottle I keep in Armstrong's glove compartment for emergencies.)

‘I don't know any of this stuff you're playing,' she shouted into my ear, ‘but Wayne only does about four records an hour ‘cos he talks so much. Tries to be the big DJ and all that crap. You just keep it rolling.'

She was half-sitting on my knee by this stage, showing off to her friends that she had influence over the disc jockey.

If she got much closer she could prove grounds for assault to the magistrates as well.

I didn't want to let on that I had just about exhausted my supply of music already. My taste and the taste of the audience diverged in both style and content quite radically. The rector's taste split from everybody about ten years ago, but I had been able to use one of his Paul McCartney LPs by announcing it as a remix. They seemed to swallow that. Maybe some of them had even read about the Beatles in history lessons at school.

I flipped through the rector's box of records one more time, to make sure I hadn't missed anything, and found I had. The only record less than ten years old was Simply Red's
Men and Women
LP. That might have a couple of tracks familiar to the more ancient among the audience, say the 14-year-olds, as it was less than three years old.

‘Wayne had hundreds of records,' Stephie was yelling.

‘I go for quality not quantity,' I shouted back.

I wondered if she'd have been impressed by the time, as a student, I ran a disco with one Rolling Stones LP and the soundtrack from
A Clockwork Orange.
I decided not to boast. She'd have been about two at the time.

I had the LP out of its cover, balanced between thumb and middle finger, when I noticed the writing on the sleeve. I had to hold it closer to one of the disco's traffic light set-ups to read what it said. Alongside the list of tracks for side one had been added, next to the listing for Cole Porter's ‘Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye',
the words: ‘Even if we cry a little, it's for the best. Love, Lucy.' And then there were two little crosses signifying kisses.