December (20 page)

      
'Except,
of course, for one batch.

      
'I go
to take them out myself - in broad daylight, being careful to leave doors open,
bright sunlight coming in everywhere. The temperature in the bakery is back to
normal. Very pleasant. I open the first oven. Usually we wear gloves for this;
after three at this temperature the tapes are not so comfortable to hold. I
take out the first tape.

      
'I drop
it immediately. Crash! My hand's on fire! I go charging out to the toilets to
hold it under cold water. Only when I get in there do I realise it's an
illusion. You know how extreme cold can feel like extreme heat?

      
'Prof,
explain this to me. Explain how this tape can absorb that heat- oh, it's baked
all right, it's baked perfectly, everything fused together again - so explain,
before you take the bloody things out of my life for ever, how this otherwise
unexceptional recording tape, can take all that heat and remain as chilled as
one of the cans of lager you forget about at the back of the fridge? This
frightens me. Prof, I would like you to explain what it is
about
that tape.'

The sound was like the
inside of a foundry, confused clangour, the spell broken.

      
Prof clawed at the lights.

      
It was illusion, he thought, blinking wildly in the glare.
Illusion and coincidence. The insurance company would pay for the damage at
Audico, the poor sodding night watchman would be sacked and Maurice's
long-standing favour owed to Kenneth Levin would be considered repaid in triple
triplicate, for ever.

      
Russell Hornby's voice cried out, 'What's going—?' And was
overwhelmed.

      
Prof didn't know how to handle this. Was he going to calmly
hand over these tapes to Stephen Case? Was this stuff going to be released for
mass display in Virgin Records and Our Price with airings on the more
sophisticated late-night radio shows?
      
Would it even affect other
listeners as it had him, or was it some weird individual response? Was he, in
fact, going insane? This business with Audico; he was beginning to think
already that he had dreamed the whole thing.

      
Russell said,'... it, Barney, I don't know ...'

      
The sound died.

      
Prof went still.

      
... it, Barney, I don't
know...

He staggered up the stairs
to the record shop, carrying the black box at chest level. Always, it reminded
him of a kid's coffin.
      
'All right, squire?' The dozy bloke
glancing up from his copy of
Viz
.
'You bring that box in wiv you?'

      
Prof said, 'Gonna be sick,' and lunged for the door.
      
The dozy bloke said, 'Ere, mind the
...'
      
The door opened.

      
'Ah. Prof.' Stephen Case, looking slim and dapper and hungry.
'Why did I just know you'd come early?'

      
He held out his hands. Prof stared at him, feeling old and
grizzled and frazzled, throat full of bile. Steve didn't smile.

      
Prof thrust the black box at him, and Steve wrapped his arms
around it. Prof managed to say, 'I wish you well with it, mate,' and pushed
past him into the street.

      
He threw up in the gutter. A woman crossed the road to avoid
walking past him.

      
His beard wet and disgusting, he looked up into the clouds and
gobbled some air, the carbon monoxide tasting like wine, but not
enough
like wine for him at this moment.

      
Steve looked down on him with distaste. The vein at the end of
his nose was very prominent. Prof knew this was a man who could cause him some
trouble, maybe finish him in the business. He should be afraid of this bloke,
but he was far more afraid of what he had heard on the tape.

      
.. it,
Barney, I don't know …

      
'Steve, did you know Barney Gwilliam was the engineer on that
session?'

      
Steve said, 'Was he? Dead now, isn't he?'

      
'Yeah,' Prof said.

      
'You've been drinking,' Stephen Case said with contempt,
      
'No.' Prof began to walk away. 'Not
yet.'

VI

Dead Sea Scroll

Malcolm gave her a very
severe look indeed. 'Another six months of this,' he said, 'and I'm afraid you
will have entirely ceased to exist.'

      
His features were small and precise, his hair a very strange colour
of light brown, a bit like that terrible teak furniture everybody seemed to
acquire back in the seventies.

      
'Between April and July ...' Malcolm consulted his desk diary,
'I received fourteen inquiries about your availability.'

      
Actually, Moira thought emptily, this is probably the only guy
I ever saw whose hair looks more like a toupee than a toupee does.

      
'And between July and September, precisely five.'

      
He closed the diary with a meaningful snap.

      
'Aye well,' Moira said. 'I've been kind of resting.'

      
'As you are perfectly entitled to do. However, it is my job,
as your professional adviser, to warn you that in order to maintain any sort of
career as a popular singer ...'

      
'You are my agent, Malcolm, not my professional adviser.'

      
Malcolm leaned back in his chair. His office door was open a
chink, and she knew that young Fiona, the secretary, was close to the other
side, antennae attuned for details of whoever might presently be sharing
Moira's sheets.

      
'Well then ...' Malcolm Kaufmann spread his hands.

      
'One day maybe I'll explain everything," she said.

      
They had dealt with the condolences, the psychological impact
of the death of a parent of the same sex, with the implication that this was
always a valid short-term risk for those the wrong side of their thirty-eighth
birthday.

      
'Have you sufficient money?' Malcolm asked. Meaning had

there been ...?

      
'An inheritance? No. Not to speak of. I've enough to get by.'

      
'Are we talking then - please excuse the cliché, Moira - of a
mid-life crisis?'

      
Moira started to laugh.

      
'A mid-life crisis is rarely funny,' Malcolm said with
feeling.

      
'I'm sorry,' Moira said. 'No. This is not what you would
describe as a mid-life crisis.'

      
She was wearing a fluffy lemon sweater and light blue
stonewashed denims. The new, ordinary, totally unsinister Moira Cairns. She
felt a touch ridiculous.

      
'Anyway,' Malcolm said. 'I'm glad you dropped in. You really
do need to do something about this man Reilly. It's gone far enough.'

      
From a drawer in his desk he took a roll of white paper and
held down one end with his metal telephone index.

      
'Endless letters and postcards I can cope with.'

      
When he'd unrolled the paper, weighting the other end with his
in-tray, it stretched almost the length of the desk, nearly five feet.

      
'But fax ribbon,' he said, 'is expensive stuff.'

      
'Jesus, he faxed all that?' After five years she still
couldn't work out whether or not Malcolm's fabled meanness was real or a pose.

      
'Thus demonstrating his frustration, Moira, at never getting
replies to his letters and his postcards. He's taking it out on me and my fax
machine.'

      
'Well, it's not gonna get him anywhere,' Moira said, nervous
at what this might have to say for all to read ... like, for Malcolm to read
and obviously Fiona, his secretary. 'It's been nearly fifteen years. I can
hardly remember what he looks like.'

      
'Moira. Time for plain speaking.' Malcolm made a steeple out
of his dapper hands. Dapper hands? It was true, she thought, even his damned
hands are dapper.

      
'You're not concentrating,' he said. 'You've got that dreamy
lo ok, meaning you intend to avoid my questions.'
      
She blinked. 'Mmm?'

      
'Don't think I haven't often wondered,' he said, 'why a young
woman of your abilities should have chosen to operate within such a confined
area - i.e. Scotland - and to sign up with an agency on the top floor of a
scruffy tenement, dealing largely in freelance pipers, dance bands and
second-rate nightclub comics.'

      
'Mustn't undervalue yourself, Malcolm. You have many special
qualities.'

      
'Gullibility, however, is not among them. I've never
questioned you too deeply, Moira, but I have, as you might say ... heard
things.'

      
'Fiona, too, probably.' Moira glanced at the almost-closed
door.

      
And ... and ... as I may have remarked before ... you are -
let's not be coy about this - you are a rather strange, witchy woman.'

      
'Aw, come on.' Moira pinched her fluffy jumper. 'Do I look
like a witchy woman?'

      
'No more than would Lucrezia Borgia in a shell-suit.' Malcolm
shuddered. 'Perhaps you should revert to the black apparel, at least we know
where we are. Now ...' From a tray he pulled out a sheet of stiff paper with a
letterhead. 'Let me deal with another pressing item. The Music Machine.'
      
'What's that?'

      
'TMM, these days, my dear.'
      
'I've never recorded for TMM, Malcolm.'
      
'TMM now owns Epidemic,' Malcolm
said patiently. 'Go on. Read it. It sounds like money.'

      
'Oh.' She unfolded the letter as she would a police summons
and looked immediately at the signature. Max Goff's used to be an inch high and
often rolled off the page. This one was concise and pointed, and you could read
the words.
      
Stephen Case, Recordings Executive.

      
The letter was similarly concise. It stated that the
undersigned would like to speak with her in connection with the masters for an
unreleased album recorded for Epidemic in December 1980 at the Abbey Studio,
Gwent.

      
Moira went very still.

      
There was a horrible drumming inside her brain.

      
She thought of the last letter she'd unfolded and the words on
it in her mother's lucid scrawl. BREADWINNER. And DEATHOAK.

      
She looked at the date. It had been posted nearly a week ago.

      
'Good news?' asked Malcolm.
      
She didn't reply.

      
It was not possible.

      
After the ambulance had pulled away, shrieking, with Tom and
the dying Deborah inside, after the police statements, after their own short
and meaningless inquest, she and Dave and Simon and their producer, Russell
Hornby, had walked out into the damp morning with the reels of tape and a can
of paraffin. They had climbed to the top of a hillock at the end of the ruined
nave of the old abbey and unspooled the tape from the metal reels and poured on
the paraffin, with Lee Gibson watching aghast from a distance. A breeze had
blown up; Simon had had to strike about fifteen matches before he managed to
bring one in cupped hands to the trail of paraffin-soaked tape, and the flames
had emerged at last, a mean and feeble conflagration compared with the savage
inferno of the Land Rover and the Lotus. But the tapes had been destroyed, and
when the others had left she'd gone alone to the summit of the hillock and
trampled the ashes into the wet ground.
      
And so it was impossible.
      
'Are you going to tell me about
this, Moira?'
      
'Huh? Oh ... it's nothing,
Malcolm.'
      
There's certainly no percentage in
it for me, if that's what bothers you,' Malcolm said huffily. 'Before my time.
I act purely as intermediary.

      
'You know me better than that,' Moira said. 'And it's still
nothing.'