The Singer (45 page)

The hairs on the back of my neck prickled. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, it does. That was the name of Vince’s first manager.’

I scanned down the document. There it was in black and white. Shit,
Gavin was going to love this. ‘From what I know,’ I said, ‘Vince didn’t part with Dawson on very good terms.’

‘D’accord’
, Joseph said. ‘Then I think we could have the two of them here. The trouble is, this only gets us a couple of years down the line. All we can do now is follow Mert Ibci and he only turns up again one more time, so far. Go to the next document I sent you.’

I rustled my pages,
straining to keep up with him.

‘This time, five years later, in Seville, Spain. Here he is charged with living off immoral earnings and sentenced to three years in prison. After this,
pfhutt!
Nothing. Not yet, anyway. But as I say, I will keep in touch with my contacts. It is hard with a transient petty criminal like this Ibci, because I have only sources left in continental Europe. If he has
gone to Africa, like we suspect, I doubt I will find a thing. And of course, there is nothing to say that Monsieur Smith kept in with him, even as far as Seville. But you are sure,’ he emphasised, ‘that this Dawson character is most probably our man?’

‘It’s got to be,’ I said. ‘It sounds just like the sort of joke he’d make.’

I remembered Ray’s article: Don Dawson’s the King of Nothing Now.

‘Wow.’ My head was swimming. ‘That’s just…amazing.’

‘The game is afoot, my friend.’

‘Wow,’ I repeated, trying to process it all.

‘You have any other questions?’ the detective asked.

‘Let me see,’ I quickly scanned down the notes I’d prepared with Gavin. He seemed to have answered everything we’d thought of. But still his line about Vince absconding to Casablanca intrigued me.

‘You seem to
have had quite a good sense of Vince’s motivations. Did you form an opinion on his character?’

Pascal chewed on this for a moment. ‘This man’s character was the most difficult thing for me,’ he said. ‘Normally, people follow a pattern, whether they are a good man or a psychopath. But Smith does not seem to do this. I hear many different things about him from many different people; none of them
gave me the complete picture. I know that he is a very artistic man and I know that he likes to align himself with outsiders and outlaws; this is a myth that many creative people find attractive. I know that he loved his wife, and this made many people around him very angry. I think
that her death could have made him more erratic, but I still don’t understand why he would want to live the life
of a petty criminal when it is clear he has a very good mind. I think he is very much a romantic, and that can be a very dangerous thing. We French know all about that, of course.’

‘Do you think that’s why he stayed in France, then? That he felt more at home there?’

‘It could be. He certainly chose the most infamous quarter to make his home.’

‘But apparently, he was quite religious too,’ I
said. ‘Or so Tony Stevens told me. That’s why I found it interesting that he lived in the part of Paris where the red light district is overlooked by that beautiful church, saints and sinners together, if you like.’

‘The Sacré Coeur, you mean? Ah. Well, this church is not what it seems to be either. Do you know the story of the Sacré Coeur?’

Obviously not.

‘The basilica of the Sacré Coeur was
built in expiation for the massacre of the Communards,’ he said.

‘Er?’ I began and he laughed, then explained.

‘There was an uprising in Paris, in 1871, against the Third Republic, during the Franco-Prussian war. The French leaders had signed a treaty with the Germans, which was high treason for the people of Paris. The Communards were working-class people, supposedly republicans, but actually
anarchists who were already sick of what the Republic had become and wanted the people to run the city themselves. So they try and take the city over. The French army was ordered to put them down with extreme violence.

‘Now the butte of Montmartre, the hill on which the church now stands, it used to be a chalk mine. It is the highest place in the city and it seemed the easiest to defend. Hundreds
of the Communards hid there. So what did the army do?
Phfft!
They dynamite the exits of the mines, burying the whole lot of them alive. That beautiful white basilica that you see there now, it is
built on top of a hill of blood, a mass grave of our own, and yet built to atone not for this sin, but for the sins of the Communards. You see, the Sacré Coeur itself is an emblem of the royalists and
right-wingers; it is telling the people to stay in their place, even after we have had this so-called revolution. So for me, the saints and sinners are not side-by-side in Montmartre. It is a place for sinners only.’

‘I see,’ I said. Or at least, I thought was beginning to.

January 1981

‘I feel horrible doing this,’ said Kevin, opening the wardrobe door.

The day before they left the squat, Rachel’s parents had arranged to send a van to collect her belongings. Kevin, Steve and Lynton dawdled nervously in the room she’d shared with Vince, gingerly attempting to separate their former flatmates’ belongings, cringing with anticipation at what
they were likely to discover.

They’d packed up her college things first. Her paints, charcoals, pastels and pencils were kept in a workman’s toolbox. There were sketchbooks and scrapbooks, reference books and a big portfolio of finished work. Most of her canvasses had been hung on the walls, but Lynton found another pile of them on top of the wardrobe, wrapped in an oilcloth and tied together
with string.

He lifted them down and put them on the bed.

‘Should I check what this is?’ he said.

‘Suppose so,’ said Steve, glancing round at Kevin, who nodded apprehensively.

They were three studies of Vince in thick oils, looking over his
left shoulder, a stark white face against a sludge-grey background, the multiple tattoos running down his arm rendered in black and blood red. The girl
in the Martini glass with
Man’s Ruin
written underneath had long since been joined by an array of daggers, disembodied eyeballs, tumbling dice and forked flames.

The first one was a straight portrait and that was unnerving enough: Vince in a foul mood, his eyes dark with menace, looking like he was about to coil out of the canvas and stick a knife in you. The second one, she’d abstracted his
features Cubist style, so that Vince became a series of curves and angles, a geometry of black, white and red. The third was a homage to Edvard Munch’s most famous painting: Vince’s face as a skull-like mask, mouth hanging open in a silent scream, eyes completely black. She’d turned the tattoos into a sacred heart that flamed across his shoulder.

They stared at them agog.

‘God,’ said Lynton
finally. ‘These are scary, man. Shit.’

Steve cocked his head to one side, regarding the third one.

‘I think she’s captured the real Vince here,’ he said. ‘D’you think she was designing our next album cover or what?’

‘Put them away,’ whispered Kevin. ‘I don’t want to look at them.’

Lynton and Steve exchanged glances. Since that night with the Scotsman, Kevin had withdrawn into himself so much
it was like living with a ghost. Today, coming back from his morning trips to the newsagent and the phone box, was the first time they’d had a proper conversation out of him since then and that was only about packing up Rachel’s things.

Which was why Steve had decided they’d be better off back home for a while.

Lynton rapidly reassembled the pictures in their wrappings. ‘I’ll start taking this
downstairs, shall I?’ he offered.

‘Aye,’ nodded Steve. ‘I’ll do this,’ he nodded towards the dressing table, where it was obvious who the make-up and jewellery belonged to.

‘She didn’t tek much with her, did she?’ he mused, packing bottles into his cardboard box.

Kevin stood by the open wardrobe. ‘It don’t seem right to touch her personal things,’ he said.

Steve came over and put an arm around
his friend’s shoulder. ‘It’s all right, Kevin, you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to. You go and pack up your own things. I’ll see to this.’

Kevin was shaking. Steve realised he was trying not to cry. ‘It’s all right,’ he repeated, although he doubted that it was. ‘We’re getting out of this shitehole tomorrow. Tony’s going to find us a proper place to stay, it won’t be anything like this,
I promise you. Or else,’ he muttered more to himself than to Kevin, ‘his precious Vince won’t have a career any more, will he?’

Kevin gave a huge sob and slipped out from underneath him. ‘S-sorry Steve,’ he tried to say. ‘I just can’t…’ and with that, he ran out of the room, into his own, slamming the door behind him.

‘Jesus wept.’ Steve shook his head. ‘Vincent Smith, you treacherous bastard,
what the fuck have you done to us?’ He went angrily back to the dressing table and continued packing as fast as he could. He found Rachel’s works in the second drawer down, wrapped up inside a velvet box.

The ferry churned its way across the choppy grey sea, a trail of seagulls squawking in its wake. The wind was high and raw, flinging stinging drops of rain against Sylvana’s face as she stood
on the prow of the ferry, wrapped in a floor-length black coat, her red hair billowing out behind her.

Vincent had preferred to stay inside in the bar with his Paris guidebook, but Sylvana had wanted to be out in this. She wanted to feel her escape, every motion of the waves, while she savoured how life had suddenly turned itself around.

Vincent had been such an angel since the moment they met.
Every day they’d stayed in that hotel he had been busy arranging things; getting her passport and her suitcase back from Helen,
working out how they could get married by special licence and sorting out somewhere for them to stay in France. He thought that Paris was the most romantic place on earth, so that was where they should go. She didn’t ask how he had done it all. She assumed that Tony,
with his big house and all his money and contacts, would have had something to do with it. People with that much money seldom had problems with officials.

She didn’t question whether it was the right thing to do, nor pause to reflect on the mistakes of the past. All she felt was the urge to travel forward, away from those dark days as quickly as she could, to blot Robin and everyone associated
with him out of her mind. The love she now felt for Vincent was so overwhelming it took precedence over all other considerations. It even drowned out the tiny voice in her mind that reminded her that at least she ought to tell Helen what she was up to, after all Helen had done and tried to do for her.

Helen would understand, she told herself, shaking the guilt out of her mind. Of course she would.
Once she knew the true Vincent she’d be so happy for her. Vincent was a genius. The way that he spoke, he could make sense of everything, could straighten out the jumble in her mind better than any of Glo’s shrinks ever could. It came down to love and creativity, he said, two sides to the same coin, qualities that she had in spades, even if she didn’t realise it. He could help her reach her
true potential. This was just the start.

She knew it wasn’t exactly the Cunard Line, Sealink ferries from Dover to Calais, but Sylvana wanted to feel the way Ola had when she had set sail to New York all those years ago, heading for a new life with her new husband by her side. Not that she’d had the courage to call her grandma yet either. But she was sure Ola would be pleased for her when she
eventually did. So despite the wind, despite the spiteful rain and the roiling, chundering landscape of leaden sea and sky that stretched out before her, she was enjoying the wild ride across the Channel.

The ride to freedom.

When they finally hit the A63 back towards Hull, Steve gave up on the radio. If he had to hear ‘Imagine’ or ‘Starting Over’ one more time he’d be tempted to throw bloody
thing out of the window. So what, John Lennon was dead. He’d never meant owt to Steve.

Their ride back up north had been without conversation, the dull countryside of Hertfordshire and Northamptonshire, Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire passing in a grey blur of low cloud. Now the humped mounds of slag heaps, the black arcs of pit heads, the rows of cooling towers and endless pylons demarked the
boundary between the agricultural south and the industrialised north. It gave Steve a shiver, thinking what fate could have dealt him. To end up in one of those places, down a pit or in a factory, on the docks like Grandad Cooper, slaving his guts out for the money to get pissed on a Friday night and forget about it all.

Inside, the fear that Vince’s disappearance would send him back there, snatch
defeat from the jaws of victory. That the world of tour buses and recording studios, riotous fans and fawning journalists would fade away into the fog like the road behind him; that in the end, that was all that was really fit for the likes of him.

‘You got any tapes?’ he asked Lynton, slumped in the seat beside him, staring out of the window at the flat, monotonous land. ‘I can’t listen to this
shit any more.’

Lynton nodded languorously and reached down to pick up the army surplus bag at his feet. There was a clicking of plastic as he foraged amongst the tapes. ‘Here,’ he said finally, selecting one and sticking it into the machine.

A mournful, brooding trumpet note coiled up through the air like cigarette smoke, blending in perfectly with the bleakness of their surroundings.

‘What’s
this?’ asked Steve.

‘Kind of Blue,’
, Lynton said, leaning back in his seat and closing his eyes.

‘Oh.’ Steve realised, as he took the turning back into Hessle, Lynton was finally playing him Miles. ‘Yeah. That makes sense.’

They took the train from Calais to Gare du Nord, watched the sun go down in a molten pink sky and saw Paris appear out of the darkness in a fairy tale of lights.

‘Wow,’
Sylvana breathed. ‘It’s so beautiful.’

Although she was less sure of that when they left the grand environs of the station and turned out onto the main road. The buildings here slouched alongside the pavement in dark huddles, eyeing them through baleful yellow slits of windows, as if loitering with intent. There was that strange atmosphere of menace that always lingers outside major termini,
along with the opportunist hawkers, fly-by-night cab drivers, pickpockets and streetwalkers.