The Singer (44 page)

‘You fucking queer.’ Donna’s words echoed through Steve’s brain. Now it was all starting to fall into place.

When
Tony finally looked up, his eyes were sad and old.

‘Here’s the number.’ Steve laid the crumpled piece of paper he’d been carrying in the pocket of his jacket down on the table between them. ‘It’s the Hilton. You might be able to catch him before he goes. You never know; he might invite you to the wedding. Make you his best man or summat.’

‘Thanks,’ said Tony dully, pocketing it without looking
at it.

‘Right,’ said Steve, getting to his feet. ‘I’ll leave you to sort out our accommodation problem then, shall I? In the meantime, none of us fancy hanging round here any more, so
we’ll be back in Hull. You might want to send someone to fetch Vince’s stuff for him, if he still wants any of it. But you don’t have to worry about Rachel, if you even were. She’s moved out already.’

Tony looked
up at Steve and nodded. It was hard to tell whether he’d even heard what had just been said.

‘Ta ra then,’ Steve headed for the door. When he left, Tony was still sitting there, staring into space.

May 2002

‘Hello, Eddie.’ Tony Stevens’s voice purred down the line. ‘I’ve got a bit of news for you. I’ve finally found our Monsieur Pascal. He’s alive and well and living in Deauville.’

This was a surprise. I pressed the button on the remote control, turning down the sound that had been blaring out from the stereo. Since I’d got up that morning, I’d been back in
1981, listening to
Butcher’s Brew
with fresh ears after Kevin’s revelations. I was intent on deciphering the lyrics, now that I understood they weren’t as abstract as they seemed.

‘Wow,’ I said, impressed.

‘I had a chat with him just now and he still seems very
compos mentis,’
Stevens continued. ‘He remembers all about the case, I hardly had to jog his memory at all. And he kindly said I could
pass his number on to you, and that he’d be happy for you to talk to him. He might have retired ten years ago, but there’s plenty of life in the old dog yet.’

‘That’s fantastic,’ I could hardly believe my luck. ‘Thanks, Tony.’

‘Not a problem.’ He sounded fairly pleased with himself too. ‘Let me know how it turns out. Even if he can’t add anything more to what I’ve already sent you, at least
it gives you a bit of colour.’

‘Damn right it does,’ I said. ‘I was thinking of going over to France to see the place for myself, but if his memory’s that good he can probably set the scene a lot better. That’s just great.’

I jotted down the number Stevens gave me. After what had happened with Louise my vain notion of going to Paris had gone right out of the window. I had no mind to be mocked
by the city of lovers now. But this was just what I needed.

The old detective was as sprightly on the phone as Stevens had implied. He still had all his files, he said, in an accent that hadn’t strayed far from its Gallic roots, despite the amount of time he’d spent in England. He said that now he was connected to the Internet, it was easier to search for any fresh news on old cases. That if
I wanted him to, he’d start digging around a bit, see if anything came up. He still had some old police friends left from back then. Still a few of the old codgers left. He sounded genuinely delighted to have been asked to help out.

We exchanged email addresses so he could send any relevant information my way, then we could talk over the details on the phone.

‘I cannot promise you anything,
Monsieur,’ he said. ‘This trail was tricky enough when it was still warm. But I will do my best for you. What say you give me a week and then I can have it all straight in my own mind at least? And you never know, maybe someone can pop out of the woodwork to help us.’

I was almost jumping up and down when I finally put the phone down and got on to Gavin straight away. I’d done enough sneaking
around behind his back for the time being, I thought, and anyway, this lead had come from his contact.

Gavin sounded mildly amused at the thought of a geriatric
gendarme coming to our aid. He suggested we got together to discuss the questions we could put to him.

‘Have you come across anything else new yourself?’ he asked me.

Lucky I was on the phone. If this had been a face-to-face conversation
I might not have been able to meet his eye. ‘Hmmm,’ I dithered, searching for something I might throw him that wouldn’t involve my extra-curricular activities with Ray Spencer. Then I remembered. The magazine Christophe had given me. ‘Well, there is something I need to show you,’ I said. ‘A magazine article with a picture of Vince in it. It doesn’t say much, but there is one interesting thing
– there’s a girl with him in the photograph. A girl with blonde hair. Now if I remember rightly,’ I reeled my mind back, ‘Pascal’s report mentioned a mystery blonde. Maybe this is her.’

‘Right,’ Gavin sounded surprised. ‘You’d better bring her over then, mate. See if we can ID her.’

‘Right you are,’ I said.

‘Oh, and one more thing,’ Gavin cut in before I put the phone down. ‘Would you mind
letting me see Pascal’s report myself? It might help.’

He sounded a little rankled.

‘Sorry, I didn’t realise you hadn’t,’ I said. ‘I’ll bring it right over.’

I started to get a bit nervous on the way over. Wondered if, by some jungle drum or other, Gavin had found out that I’d been seeing another journalist behind his back. I hadn’t heard him sound so curt before. But I managed to head that
thought off before it went too wild. He’d probably just been rankled that Tony had sent me the report and not copied him in on it. He didn’t like to be left out. So Christ knows how he would feel when I did have to fess up about Ray, but we’d cross that bridge when we came to it.

My worries evaporated as soon as I got to Elgin Crescent, dispersed by the smell of freshly-brewed coffee in Gavin’s
sunny
kitchen and the way he rubbed his hands together as I unloaded my bag on the table.

‘Right, mate,’ he said, disposition now as fair as the weather. ‘Shall we take these outside and read ’em?’

Looked like Gavin was taking the task seriously. In an uncharacteristically scholarly fashion I’d never seen him adopt before, he donned a pair of reading glasses to scan the closely typed pages,
whistling between his teeth as he came to the most intriguing bits.

‘Reckons he was hooked up with gangsters, hey?’ he said, as he reached the part about Marco ‘the Arab’.

‘The French coppers didn’t sound too helpful, though, did they?’ I asked.

‘Nah,’ Gavin shook his head. ‘I guess for them it was just another case of wiping the scum off the streets and who cares so long as they’re outta here.’

He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. I waited until he’d finished his slow trawl through the document, underlining certain sentences and suggesting a few questions, before showing him the magazine. ‘Here you go,’ I said. ‘What do you make of her?’

Gavin stared hard at it, then jerked his head back. He pushed the magazine out in front of him, as if he could see it better from a distance, then pulled
it back in to under his nose and lifted up his glasses to squint at it.

‘Jeez,’ he said, ‘that chick looks familiar’

‘Really?’ I leaned over to see if there was something there I’d missed. But she didn’t look familiar to me.

‘You mean she’s not some Parisian streetwalker?’

Gavin frowned. ‘I don’t think so, mate, but I suppose she could be. It’s just something about the expression on her face
reminds me of someone...’

Then he shook his head. ‘Nah, it couldn’t be. The hair’s totally wrong for a start.’

‘Who do you think it was?’

Gavin picked up his coffee cup and took a thoughtful swig. ‘This chick called Donna Woods. You come across her yet?’

I frowned myself, tried not to give anything away. ‘She was Mood Violet’s manager, wasn’t she? I must admit, I’m not quite up to speed on
their set-up yet,’ I lied. ‘Although I suppose I should be by now.’

‘She ran their record label.’ Gavin nodded. ‘Vada, yeah, you heard of it?’

I nodded.

‘Right. But by the time this picture was taken…’ he scrutinised the notes Christophe’s girlfriend had translated ‘…that would have been November 1981. She was in the loony bin by then.’

‘The loony bin?’ I echoed.

‘Ah, in case you hadn’t got
that far, Donna was another one of Sylvana’s casualties,’ Gavin said, peering at me over the top of his specs. ‘I guess she had to deal with the fall-out from her side of things – the madness of Robin Leith for one thing, losing her livelihood for another. Only she didn’t deal with it. She went berko. Had to be sectioned for her own protection.’

‘Really?’ I could feel my palms starting to sweat.
I glanced away from his gaze, around the raised rockery and the hollyhocks that were nodding on the gentle breeze, bumblebees humming amongst them, going about their work. Tried to push the madness and darkness away.

‘Yeah,’ Gavin said. ‘Funny the things you forget. I hadn’t given her a second thought in all of this, but I suppose she was just as fucked up by it as everybody else.’

I looked
back at him and he was staring hard at the photo.

‘So that couldn’t be her then?’ I asked, trying not to fidget in my seat.

‘Well, like I said, it does look like her,’ Gavin strained his eyes over it one more time. ‘But, nah,’ he shook his head and put the
magazine back on the wrought-iron garden table. ‘I don’t see how it could have been. I mean, even if she was out of hospital by then, what
would she have been doing there anyway?’

‘I haven’t a clue.’ I shrugged nonchalantly, but inside bells and whistles were going off in my brain.

So Gavin didn’t know about her secret affair with Vince either. And if it was her...If it was her, I had to meet her. That decided it, right there and then.

Good as his word, Pascal got back to me a week later. He’d emailed me some correspondence he’d
had with an old police mucker of his, which I printed out pronto before calling him up to go over it.

‘Alors’
, he said, ‘Now, we get down to business. Now you have everything I have about your Vincent Smith. You are familiar with the report I compiled for Monsieur Stevens, yes?’

‘Yes,’ I said, pressing play on my tape recorder. I’d taken the precaution of using a phone bug for this, just in
case I couldn’t take down the notes fast enough. ‘You don’t mind if I record this, do you?’

‘Not at all.’

‘It didn’t seem like the French police were much help to you?’

‘
Non,’
he said, ‘but of course, they had their reasons. Monsieur Smith had got himself too much of a reputation. After the death of his wife, he’d fallen in with a bad crowd. Drug dealers, pimps, prostitutes. Not serious criminals,
you understand, but the petty lowlife that clog up Pigalle, the vermin you are always having to clean up after. Some of them are Algerian and Moroccan and, I am afraid to say, there was and still is a lot of racism in France about these people. The police do not care if they disappear, it is merely one problem off their patch. Do you know anyone besides Monsieur Stevens who knew Monsieur Smith
well, Eddie?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Gavin Granger, the photographer I’m doing the book with. He was a pretty close friend of Vince’s.’

‘Did he give you any idea why his friend would have wanted to do such things? Why he didn’t come back to England when his career and those who loved him were all there?’

‘Only one reason,’ I said. ‘Heroin.’

‘Ah,’ Pascal replied. ‘I see. This is a problem I found
at the time. All of Monsieur Smith’s acquaintances were what we would call unreliable witnesses. Junkies will tell you anything if they think they will get rewarded for it. They will make up tall stories to throw you off the scent, like the girl who told me that they called him The Vampire. I think she thought I was a reporter and would give her some money for saying this. Of course, I had to offer
a little bit around here and there to get anyone to say anything. But I think Monsieur Smith flashed his money around too much with these people. They seemed very put out that he was no longer around to subsidise them.’

‘Oh,’ I said, ‘that reminds me. Did you ever find out who the mystery blonde was?’

‘
Non
. It was only from these unreliable locals, after the fact, that I hear about this woman.
All I know is, she wasn’t one of the usual crowd. She wasn’t a known prostitute. But you see, the girls that go through these places, they do not last for long. I doubt we would be able to trace her now.’

Right, I thought smugly, that makes me a better detective than you are. ‘So,’ I pressed on, ‘what about these documents you’ve sent me?’

‘Well, as you know,’ the old man said, ‘my best theory
about Smith was that he deliberately vanished. So what I ask myself is, where would he go?

‘This Marco, the pimp or whatever he really was, the guy he was hanging out with. It is said he smuggles drugs up through Marseilles, so the first thing that occurs to me is that Monsieur Smith would go in this direction. South. To Marseilles itself, or beyond, perhaps to Casablanca or Tangiers. These are
the sort
of places he would seem attracted to – they are lawless and mysterious and full of the drugs he likes. They also have a mythic resonance, and I think your Monsieur Smith, he is a romantic, he likes these things.’

‘You’re dead right,’ I said, surprised. I hadn’t expected him to think in such a writerly fashion, but maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. The French are a literary lot,
after all.

‘So I ask around a bit amongst the friends I still have and this time, I ask not just about Smith, but about this Marco too, just in case they stayed in cahoots. If you take a look at the first document…’

I trained my eyes on my print-out.

‘And I found something that could be quite interesting. I think that this Marco is actually one Mert Ibci.’ I looked at the strangely spelt name
on the paper. ‘Not an Arab at all, but a Turk, so you see how useful these racial generalisations can be. Anyhow, I managed to ascertain that this man was arrested in February 1982, in Marseilles, for possession of hashish with intent to supply. He wasn’t charged in the end, but he turns up again here three more times for petty drugs offences and pimping before he vanishes off the radar in the
spring of 1983. What is of particular interest is that on his file there are a list of known associates and one of them is an Englishman who calls himself…Donald Dawson. Does this name have any relevance to you?’