The Singer (54 page)

Tears streaked her face. She had to speak to Ola, she just had to. Ola would find a way of explaining it all to Glo; Ola would know exactly what to say and do, she always had done.

Gathering all her courage up in a knot inside her, Sylvana reached
for the phone. Her hands were shaking as she dialled the familiar digits. Please God, let Ola answer the phone, she thought, please. I’ll never touch that dirty stuff again if you just let it be her and not my mother.

‘Hello?’ Glo’s voice on the other end of the line dashed her one, fragile hope.

‘M-mother?’ Sylvana began.

‘Oh, dear God in Heaven, is that my little girl?’

‘M-mother, I’m so
sorry…’

‘Are you all right, Sylvana, where are you? Where have you been? Why haven’t you called us for all this time? We’ve been going spare with worry for you, darling, please tell me you’re all right.’

Sylvana started to cry. Of all the reactions she’d expected from her mother, this tone of anguish and concern and yes, even love, was the last thing she’d thought she’d hear.

‘Oh darling, darling,’
Glo said, and then called out, ‘Ruben, honey, pick up the other line. It’s our little girl.’

‘Mother, I didn’t realise,’ Sylvana tried to find the right words to say. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you and Dad like this. I just got into a bit of a situation…’

‘Sylvana, darling, where are you?’ her father now joined in.

‘I’m in Paris,’ she said. ‘I’m all right, I’m fine, I just had to leave my band
and have a little time on my own…’ She couldn’t bring Vincent into this yet. She’d have to tell them that later.

‘What happened, what went wrong?’ asked Glo. ‘Why did you have to go to Paris of all places? You could have come back home.’

‘I don’t know,’ Sylvana started sobbing again.

‘
Shhhh
now, no one’s angry with you,’ Ruben said gently. ‘Just so long as you’re OK, that’s all we care about,
isn’t it, Gloria?’

‘Oh, Daddy,’ Sylvana choked the words out. ‘Is Grandma there?’

There was a long silence from New Jersey. For a moment, Sylvana thought she had lost the connection. Then she heard her father sigh and say, ‘Oh, honey. I don’t know how to tell you.’

‘What?’ Fear gripped her heart like ice-cold fingers. ‘What is it, Daddy?’

‘Your grandmother,’ said Glo, ‘has passed away.’

June 2002

Everything happened in a mad rush after that.

Reading that paper sent me into a tailspin, the biggest panic attack of my life.

By the time I’d seen Robin Leith’s death notice, the
Camden New Journal
had been out for a week. If anyone in the music press had seen it, if anyone was left who still realised who the dead itinerant once was, it would be all over the place by
now. So I googled it immediately, scanned down the list of entries with my heart hammering so loud in my ribs I swear I could hear it reverberating down my ears.

Only the same old Goth websites that had brought him up in the first place were linked to Leith’s name and Mood Violet. Only the same old stories I’d been reading back in November; nothing new. Nothing on the
NME
online; nothing in any
of the papers. I was sweating so hard by the end of my search I had to go and have another shower, try and calm myself down. Tried to think. Robin had died six months ago. Presumably any attempts at a police investigation had petered out by now. Presumably his
rancid remains had long been turned to ash in some industrial incinerator. He hadn’t had much of a family life, had he? Didn’t seem to
have had any friends left at the end either. No one to claim his body.

Like Donna said: mad, lost and dead. Nobody cared.

In all that time, I’d been talking to the few people who had remembered him and none of them had heard about his death. For a second I had a mental idea to do a massive ring round of all of them, just to say hello, see if any of them dropped it into the conversation. I stopped
myself even as my hand hovered over the dial, realising that I would probably sound like a gibbering idiot, realising further that if any of them had read the same paper as me then surely they would have rung me first.

Tried to reassure myself again: no one’s missed him yet, no one ever will. More importantly: no one knew I’d been to see him except Louise, who wanted nothing more to do with me,
and Christophe, who wouldn’t be telling any tales either.

That was what finally calmed me down. No one had anything to connect me to the dead man. Thank Christ, I hadn’t mentioned meeting him to anyone. All I had to do was stay as far away from Christophe as I could and if I did bump into him, try my best to act as if I’d never picked up that paper, for if I hadn’t, I’d still be none the wiser.
I only wished I’d left it on that seat, unwanted and unread.

I looked around the room, taking stock of everything in it. Louise had been right all along; we should never have stayed here. Now I had the means in front of me to get out, I had to take it. I had to just forget about all this and get on with finishing the book, with finding Vince Smith. Then I could get the hell out of Camden, once
and for all.

It might have been an uneasy week but it seemed, for once, that fate was on my side. No one called to ask if I’d heard about Robin. Nothing appeared in any papers. PC Plod didn’t turn up
on my doorstep and ask me to accompany him down the station. Everything stayed quiet on the Murder Mile, or at least, my part of it. To keep myself busy, I forced myself through the transcript of
Donna, wove her colourful stories through the narrative I already had, got everything in order that I possibly could and just prayed that Pascal would come through.

After seven days, I got another email.

My contact in Lisbon has come up with something positive. He has been trawling around the Barrio Alto to see what he could find. This is the perfect place for our Monsieur Smith, a place of
many musicians and a lot of decadence; it almost sounds like the Paris of my youth. There are a lot of underground members’ clubs, and enough people who owe my friend a favour. Anyhow, he has found that a man matching the description of Monsieur Smith, a tall, middle-aged Englishman who always wears a suit and carries a cane, is a regular of one of these clubs in particular. He likes the Fado singing
of one man who performs here on Friday nights and often turns up to see him, usually in the company of persons of a certain reputation. The Englishman is something of an enigma; apparently he has been coming here for many years, yet no one is sure of his business. It is assumed he is some kind of dissolute lord, a man of independent wealth anyway, as he has good manners and always tips heavily.
If you like, and you want to take a chance on it, I can tell you the places to visit. And, as you wish, you may tell your friends I have found him with the help of my contact and nothing else. Call me if you want to discuss it further.

With my heart in my mouth I dialled the number. Pascal was almost purring as he went over his findings, threw in a few more details about his friend Luís Carbone
who had done the sleuthing. A retired detective who had spent most of his life on the Portuguese equivalent of clubs and vice, he still knew the right
places to search and people to ask even if he had been off the force for nearly twenty years. The only thing Pascal was doubtful about was that if this was Vince, he had no criminal record in Lisbon and had never been linked to any nefarious activity
– though it seemed that he kept the company of plenty who had and did.

‘Did your friend check out the Don Dawson alias?’ I asked him.

‘
Oui
,’ said Pascal, ‘came back negative also. Maybe he has gone straight after all this time. Maybe he has made his fortune and is enjoying his retirement, is possible,
n’est-ce pas?’

‘Perfectly,’ I agreed.

‘Anyway,’ he continued, ‘Lisbon is not so far away,
you can get a cheap flight, spend a weekend there on holiday, even if you don’t find him or it isn’t him, it won’t be a wasted journey. After all, this was once one of the greatest cities on earth. Even Lord Byron thought so.’

Too right, I thought, a cheap holiday away from this dump is precisely what I do need. I gushed my most grateful thanks down the phone, took a deep breath and called Gavin.

I really wasn’t sure how he would react. He had been so sombre when we left each other the last time that delight was not the first emotion I anticipated from him. I wasn’t wrong either.

‘Jesus,’ was the first thing he said. ‘You’re not making this up, are you, Eddie?’

‘Honestly, I’m not. Check your inbox, I’ve forwarded the email to you.’

Actually, this wasn’t quite true. I’d sent an amended
version of his first email to Gavin, omitting the last two sentences and making out that this was the result of one of his own trails.

‘Fuck,’ was all he said to that. ‘Let me take a look. I’ll call you back.’

Ten minutes later he did. ‘Shit, can you believe that old guy?’ was what he said. ‘Sorry if I was a bit short with you earlier. Like I said to you before, I’m having trouble taking this
all in. D’you
want to come over? I’m gonna give Tony a call, see what he thinks. I think we might all need a cold one to wash this down with.’

He was still on the phone to Stevens when I arrived on his doorstep.

‘Tony’s in New York,’ he said as he cut the connection and ushered me in. ‘He’s got some industry seminar thing over there at the moment, which I didn’t realise, managed to wake the
poor bastard up at six in the morning. As you can imagine, he’s pretty shocked about it too. But he thinks we should go out there.’

‘So you both reckon it’s him then?’

Gavin went straight to the fridge, removed two cans of Red Stripe and placed one firmly in my hand. He cracked his own open, took a long swig and then wiped his mouth, leaning back and shaking his head.

‘To be honest with you,
mate, I don’t know how it can be possible. Vince Smith, back from the dead.’ He took another swig. ‘But Tony believes it all right. He’s probably booking us flights out there right now.’

I pulled the ring on my own can. I hadn’t had a drink since that night at Donna’s, hadn’t wanted the taste of it anywhere near me. Strangely enough, I hadn’t missed it either. After the performance in the Trellick
Tower and the shock of the
Camden New Journal
, I’d been more afraid of where it might lead me if I did let myself go.

I took a delicate sip and said: ‘Do you want to go, though? Or do you think it’s all some wild goose chase cooked up by a senile old man?’

Gavin laughed and shook his head. ‘Mate, I truly honestly don’t know what I think. But I guess we’ve come this far, we might as well go for
it. After all, what have we got to lose? If it isn’t him, we get to spend the weekend in one of the coolest cities in Europe. And if it is, well…’ He raised his can. ‘Well, I guess I get to ask the mongrel where the bloody hell he’s been.’

‘I’ll drink to that,’ I said, raising my own can, feeling my appetite coming back.

‘Right then,’ said Gavin. ‘Let’s get online and grab some cheap flights.’

By the end of the afternoon, we had it all worked out. We’d leave next Thursday, call Joseph’s mate on the Friday and see this club for ourselves. We’d hang around another couple of days, come back on the Monday morning. That way we could get the cheapest last minute deal and have enough time, if it was Vince, to try and talk to him. We found a Best Western Hotel that was only thirty quid a night
and Gavin put it all on his credit card, his enthusiasm now palpable.

‘I can’t believe we’re doing this,’ he kept saying. ‘Get me another cold one, tell me I’m not dreaming.’

He didn’t want to think of any game plan in advance, though. ‘Too much of a headfuck,’ he considered. ‘Let’s just take it as it comes. We’ll work it out if and when we come to it.’

Satisfied he had achieved everything
we needed, he rang for some pizzas and more beers and it ended up just like it always had, us putting on the old videos, staying up until it started to get light again and me falling asleep on his sofa. Which, as it happened, was the best rest I’d had in a long time.

I stayed for a late breakfast, took a stroll with Gavin around Portobello before leaving. It was a glorious day, the beginning
of June and the whole place was humming. The beautiful people stretching their long tanned legs across the pavement next to the Ground Floor Bar; the sounds of dub reggae pumping out from the Rasta emporium on the next corner down; the traders calling out their end-of-the-day specials; slices of watermelon pressed to the mouths of a hundred hot, happy faces.

‘D’you know what?’ I said to Gavin.
‘I’m gonna start looking for a flat round here.’

‘Yeah?’ he said. ‘Well, good luck, mate. We’re gonna need to sell a lot of copies. But, I guess, it is still possible to find
a cupboard under someone’s stairs for less than a million bucks.’

‘You never know,’ I said.

‘You got that right.’

It was still a perfect evening when I got out at Camden and even the detritus by the tube and the bus queue
by Sainsbury’s couldn’t bring my spirits back down. I wove my way through the lot of them, humming to myself, picturing a little mews pad somewhere round the back of Portobello. Then, just as I was walking past that pub on the corner opposite Camden Road BR, the one that had been closed for a year after the opening night’s murder and had suddenly opened its doors again as Fink, I heard a voice
right up close behind me.

‘’Allo, ‘allo.’

I spun round into Christophe’s smiling face.

‘Long time no see, Eddie.’

He was looking dapper. Tanned almost walnut, looking like he didn’t have a care in the world, blue Hawaiian shirt, grey StaPrest trousers and deck shoes.

‘Where you been, mate?’

My mouth opened, shut and then opened again. ‘Er, you know, just working on the book.’

‘Oh yeah?’
he said, exhaling smoke from his casually held Rothmans. ‘How’s that going then?’

‘Yeah, yeah, it’s good, you know.’ I could feel my grin tightening into a rictus. Christophe must have noticed it too; he gave a little frown and another laugh. ‘You all right, mate? You look like you’re about to shit yourself.’