December (37 page)

      
'I wouldn't claim to understand any of this.' Martin Broadbank
gently took the phone from Shelley, dropped it on its rest, 'I realise there's
a lot of background here. But I do think you need some help. I think whatever
it is is becoming a bit too much for you to handle on your own.' He took her
arm. 'Shelley, please, if you can't sit down, at least come through to the
kitchen.'

      
In the long, low-beamed kitchen, under a row of small
spotlights, Meryl was applying a cold compress to Stephen Case's nose.

      
Broadbank smirked. 'Rather rubbed him up the wrong way, I
suspect, Steve.'

      
'Or perhaps it was you, Martin.' Case eyed Shelley meaningfully.

      
'Yes, well.' Martin guided Shelley to a wooden stool. 'Let's just
accept the poor chap was feeling a little ... sensitive.'

      
'As well he bloody well might!' Shelley was riled. 'Don't you
think it would have been reasonable - not to say polite, not to say
ethical
- to explain that Tom was the
real target for tonight, not me?'

      
'No, no, Shelley,' Broadbank protested. 'It was you
I
wanted to see.' He had the grace to
blush slightly. 'That is, I'm very serious about the Love-Storey possibilities.
But, yes, it was wrong of me - and I apologise - not to tell you properly about
Steve.'

      
Case said, 'Mrs Storey, I
have
made several attempts to talk to your husband. We do have this project on the
go, and we want to do it in consultation with Tom, not have it sprung on him.
After all, this is a recording dating back to perhaps the most... difficult period
of his life and we really do ...'

      
'… want to capitalise on that,' said Shelley. 'I used to
work
for a record company, don't treat me
like the little wife.'

      
'I'm sorry ...' Case snatched the pad from his nose '… but
capitalising is really not what we're about. We think this is very important
material.'

      
'Why?' Shelley said, glancing back towards the hall.
Ring,
Weasel, please ring.

      
'Yes,' said Broadbank. 'Why, Steve?'

Tom Storey's verbal acid
attack had, it was true, taken him by surprise. But Martin had sprung back,
Meryl noticed, with some typically suave and nifty footwork.

      
And Tom Storey had been right, Martin
was
after his wife. It was now Martin and Shelley against Case.

      
Case was burbling about the importance of the work of people
like Tom Storey now that rock music,
classic
rock music, was an established art form, part of our national heritage.
      
Rediscovering lost Tom Storey
material was like finding a Turner in the attic, Case said earnestly.

      
Meryl made coffee and listened and absorbed. She, too, had
recovered. It had been a frightening night, but she'd been scared for all the
wrong reasons, because, for a few minutes, through the sheer power of his projection,
she'd thought Tom Storey was a murderer and that she was in great danger.

      
When, in fact, behind the shambling facade was probably the
most profound psychic sensibility she'd ever been privileged to encounter. Ten
years of the spiritualist church, ten years of trivia from the Other Side about
the missing fiver in Uncle Jim's sock drawer. Eighteen months of one-sided
conversations with the Lady Bluefoot.

      
No wonder she'd been frightened. Tom Storey was the real thing.

      
Meryl's tremulous excitement percolated alongside the coffee
as she listened to Stephen Case's explanations. And filled in the gaps for
herself.

      
'All I can say is it's music which seems to enter a different spiritual
dimension,' Case was saying.

      
He was a hungry-looking man, his hair pulled back into a
pony-tail because it was thinning elsewhere. A man snatching at the last chance
of being trendy, Meryl thought. Pathetic, but dangerous.

      
And what did he know about spiritual dimensions? Nothing, she
decided. He was relaying someone else's words. He was just a front man.

      
'Listen to me.' Shelley Storey stood up, pushing back her
stool. 'And if this gets any further, I'm going to come after you, Mr Case. December
1980. What happened that night caused Tom a lot of serious emotional damage.
I've spent the best years of my life trying to hold that man together. Now,
coming out here tonight, you'll never know what a hell of a step that was for
him, and he did it because he thought he was helping me. And the way it's gone
- and what he did to you was nothing to what
I'd
like to do to you - the way it's gone has probably put him
right back to where we started. If you want to compound that, you go ahead with
your seedy little schemes, but, by God ...'

      
Martin was watching the fiery Shelley with admiration. He was
standing where Meryl had seen the apparition of the gruesome man. Meryl
shivered, but it wasn't only fear this time, so much as anticipation. There was
a great secret here.

      
'Mrs Storey ...' Case was backing away, holding up both hands.
'I really think you're too close to this. We all know what happened that night.
Obviously
it's damaged Tom. But let
me put your mind at rest. We don't want to release these tapes as they stand.'

      
'What's all this about then?' Martin demanded.

      
'What we
want
is for
Tom and the others to go back into the studio and complete it. Perhaps ... to
the Abbey? We own it now. It closed down not long after that session, you know.
Nobody wanted to work there.'

      
'Hardly surprising,' Martin said.

      
'But don't you think, Mrs Storey, that it would be . ..
cathartic for Tom? To go back? Maybe his only real chance to get things
together?'

      
Shelley said immediately, 'I think it would be insanity to go
back.' And clamped her lips and turned away from him, but towards Meryl who saw
that her eyes weren't quite so certain.

      
She's close to breaking
point,
thought Meryl, who'd been given a taste tonight of what life with
Tom Storey could be like. Shelley was a strong, practical woman, a pragmatist.

      
Which wasn't enough.

      
Meryl thought,
She's
reaching the stage where she'll consider anything.

Weasel ran through into the
kitchen, shouting, 'Vanessa! Princess!'

      
No sign of her. No sign of anything; she hadn't even put the
lights on. Weasel did, and he saw that the back door was ajar.
      
Daddy's
coming.

      
But he wasn't here yet. No car noise, no lights through the window,
except for two or three across in the village. It was late.
      
Too late for lights, too late for
traffic.

      
'Princess!' Weasel ran out into the night. 'Where you gone?'

      
He stumbled down to the yard, wishing he'd brought a torch,
but he wasn't going back for one now.

      
'Vanessa! This ain't funny!'

      
In the yard he shut up and stood still, listening for
movement. It was dead quiet. No trees and no bushes around the house meant no
sounds of wildlife.
      
No moon. No light.

      
With both hands, Weasel pulled on his straggly hair. Why was
she doing this to him?
      
'Vanessa!'

      
In the distance, Weasel heard a vehicle noise. He ran up the
steps and across the lawn towards the front of the house. The lawn was washed
by the lights from the sitting-room, like a floodlit bowling green.

      
As the sound increased, it was clear this was a car and it was
travelling pretty fast. Weasel imagined Tom all frozen-faced and staring-eyed
at the wheel, maybe realising this was the first time he'd done any driving at
night, since ...
      
Was
it? Was this the first time since?
      
Jesus.

      
Some trees alongside a bend in the road were lit up.
Headlights. Two or three hundred yards away. The car would have to slow for the
hairpin bend twenty yards before the house.
      
Everybody knew this bend.

      
There was another shaft of light pointing the other way from
the elbow of the road, as if a motorbike was parked by the driveway gate.

      
Weasel ran to the edge of the lawn, where it sloped down to
the perimeter fence Sir Wilf didn't like, six-foot slats nearly as thick as
railways sleepers running to the edge of the shared driveway - a nicely-clipped
hedge on Sir Wilfrid's side.

      
From up here. Weasel could see over the fence to the road
beyond, and Vanessa with a lamp standing in the middle of it.

      
What the f—?

      
'Vanessa, Jesus, what you
doing
?
Ain't you got no bleeding sense?'

      
Never spoken to me kid like this before. She was Down's - you
didn't.

      
And she was just standing there in the middle of the lane in
her blue hostess frock, holding the lamp to guide Daddy home.
      
Like a little lighthouse.

      
The big car cruising down the hill towards the bend wouldn't
get her in its headlights until it'd come round the hairpin and by then ...

      
'Noooooo!'

      
... she'd be in pieces, all over its windscreen.
      
Instinctively, Weasel arched his
body, quivering, wanting desperately to hurl himself from the edge of the lawn
to the top of the fence, vault over it. But his body knew it was too puny, too
clapped out.

      
Sobbing, he ran down the other side of the lawn, scrambling
frantically towards the main gate, waving his arms, screeching,
      
'Vanessa, Princess, get out of the bleeding
way,
he ain't rational!'

      
Headlights hit the fence.

      
As he reached the gates, Weasel tripped and fell headlong. It
smashed all the breath out of him and he couldn't even shout at her again.

      
The car look the bend too fast, like they always did.
      
Vanessa's small, dumpy figure, as
still as a little bunny frozen stiff in the headlights.

XVI

Plop, Plop, Plop

Dave Reilly couldn't sleep.

      
Wearing a ragged blue bathrobe, he sat in the armchair in his
bedsit with the light on, the walls studio-white around him. The only colour in
the room was coming out of a TV set on the plywood MFI chest of drawers opposite
the chair. The TV screen was showing - standard small-hour fare - a naff,
seventies rock video, blokes in tinsel jackets with blond bobbed hair; they
looked like singing spaniels. Dave had the sound off. '

      
The bedsit belonged to Bart, who also owned Muthah Mirth.
      
Tomorrow he'd have to tell Bart he
wouldn't be playing the next night, or the night after, or ...

      
And Bart would throw him out of the bedsit in which he'd hoped
to see out December.

      
On the TV, the video had changed. Marc Bolan, the electric
pixie who crashed his car into a tree and died. Prof Levin used to talk about
how he'd once worked with Marc.
Fey and
wispy? Are you kidding? Naked ambition, from the start. My experience, David,
fey and wispy is invariably a front.

      
Prof Levin was a straight bloke. One of the few. Too
experienced for ambition, too old for bullshit.

      
And Prof had said,

      
I mean, she's ... alive
and everything?

      
Dave's anxiety flared up like toothache. He'd heard nothing
since faxing Moira's agent. He started wondering who he could possibly phone at
this hour, for reassurance. What had happened that night that he
didn't
know about?

      
As if what he did know about wasn't bad enough.

      
Some stuff on this album
... the death sequence. You must remember that.