The Singer (57 page)

Well, fucking hell, Eddie, I thought to myself. I think you’ve got yourself a dynamite ending. In the court of the Mad King of Nothing…

Then Vince leaned forward suddenly, sharply. ‘So now we’re all comfortable,’ he said,
looking straight at me, ‘I wonder where you think this story ends.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ I started, in a voice not unlike Mother’s.

Vince grinned. It reminded me of that grin Christophe was wearing in the pub that day. Satisfied. Satanic.

‘I mean, I know why you’re here,’ he said. ‘Or should I say,’ he flicked a glance over to Gavin, ‘why you think you’re here.’

His eyes sparkled like the
drops on the chandelier. I felt that faint feeling again, like my blood was slowly draining out of me.

‘You’ve been writing a book about me, haven’t you? With the help of Gavin here, of course, my oldest, most faithful fan. He convinced you that because I had disappeared so long ago that by now I was probably dead. Only you are a journalist, aren’t you, Eddie? You’re not prepared to take anyone’s
word when there’s always another possibility. That’s good,’ he said, his eyebrows raising. ‘That’s what a journalist should do. After all, you don’t
want to come out with any old shitty cut-and-paste job, do you? I should think not. I deserve better than that.

‘So you did a bit of digging, talked to a few people. Started to think otherwise. That it was possible to find me.
Et voilà!
Here you
are. Well done, Eddie. Tell me, who was it who finally tipped you the wink?’

‘It was Pascal,’ said Gavin gruffly. ‘That old detective from Paris. Would you believe, he’s still alive? Tony found him again.’ He shook his head. ‘Tony never gives up the faith.’

‘Ah,’ said Vince, leaning back into his chair again. ‘Is that right, Eddie? The old Frenchman who couldn’t find me in his own city actually
managed to find me here. Most impressive.’

I tried to swallow. As surely as he seemed to have been reading my mind all evening, I knew that Vince knew there was more to it than that. He knew who had told me. It was only Gavin who didn’t and I sure as hell didn’t want to fall out with Gavin now. ‘Yeah,’ I said feebly. ‘That’s right.’

‘So,’ said Vince, ‘what do you think happens now? Do you get
the comeback interview with me, bring me back to a world that had chosen to forget me, rehabilitate me like Rick Rubin did with Johnny Cash? Because my kind of music is very popular again, isn’t it?’

He examined my slack-jawed face, my bewildered, nodding head with an expression of intense satisfaction. ‘I can read the Internet just as well as you can, Eddie,’ he said, as if explaining it to
a child. ‘I can see all the potential you can. I could become an icon, couldn’t I? A greater star than I ever was in my youth. And I dare say poor old Steve and Lynton would be so overwhelmed to see me that they’d be back in the band like a flash. Although,’ he grimaced and waved his right hand dismissively, ‘I doubt Kevin would be so keen. Though, he could easily be replaced, couldn’t he? I gather
Rat Scabies is still doing the rounds…’

I looked over at Gavin. He appeared frozen in his seat, his knuckles white around his glass of port.

‘Yes, it would be marvellous, wouldn’t it? I would be a star, you would have a bestseller, and good old Anthony could make another million quid off his back catalogue. Everyone’s a winner, right?’

He smiled that full-beamed smile at me again, raised his
glass to me and drank the green liquid down in one.

‘Only,’ and his face fell theatrically. ‘There’s just one problem about all of that.’

‘Oh?’ I said.

‘Oh,’ he nodded grimly and stood up. ‘She,’ he said, pointing to the portrait of Sylvana, ‘she wouldn’t like it.’

Oh dear, I thought, he is out of his head. Not to mention, totally mad. We should get out of here.

‘Look,’ I said, standing up.
‘If that’s the case, then forget about it. We never found you, we never came here. The book ends with you disappearing into the Paris night and nobody’s any the wiser. Me and Gavin will meet up with our contact tomorrow, you won’t be where he thinks you are, it will all peter out. But we will have written a tribute to you anyway. To Blood Truth, the greatest band that never was. After all, you
said we deserved some reward for finding you. Right, Gavin?’

Gavin looked up at me. His eyes were bloodshot. He must have had too much of that port on top of everything else.

‘He’s quite poetic, isn’t he?’ said Vince. ‘I can see why you make a good writer. But please, sit down, Eddie, let me finish. After all, you can’t come all this way without finding out the end of the story.’

I sat back
down slowly, aware of little stars dancing in the corner of my eyes. Gavin had his head in his hands now. Maybe I’d end up carrying him home after all this. If my own legs would still carry me.

‘Now, Eddie,’ Vince stood under the portrait of his wife. ‘How do you think it was that I came by all this wealth?’

‘Drugs,’ I said. ‘That’s what Pascal reckoned. You and that
Marco, or Mert, or whatever
his name really was. International drugs dealers,’ I said it as if I was having one of my
Goodfellas
conversations, but even as the words left my mouth I realised the potency of them. ‘Well, of course, I can understand why you wouldn’t want any of that coming out,’ I backtracked furiously. ‘But you know, Gavin would never betray you about that and neither would I. None of that would be mentioned.
None of that at all.’

‘Oh, Eddie,’ groaned Gavin. ‘You doofus.’

But Vince waved his hand, as if dismissing the subject.

‘Of course I know that, Eddie. And romantic though your ideas certainly are, I’m afraid the answer is much simpler. It’s been staring you in the face all along.’ I followed his gaze up to the portrait of Sylvana. ‘You did your research on her, I hope,’ he said.

‘I thought
I had,’ I said.

‘Sylvana,’ said Vince slowly, ‘was an heiress. A proper heiress. She wasn’t just a little pixie princess, making up pop songs for a living. When her grandmother died, which she did when I was on my last tour of Britain, my lovely wife came into a multimillion dollar fortune. And when God, in his infinite mercy, came for her so quickly after that, I, as her distraught next of kin,
automatically inherited that fortune from her.’

I frowned, still not getting it. ‘But she killed herself,’ I said. ‘That wasn’t your fault. You really loved her, everyone said so.’

‘Ah,’ Vince shook his head sadly. ‘Not everyone, Eddie. For one, her parents doubted my good intentions. They couldn’t prove anything, of course, but they seemed to believe I had led her into bad ways, despite the
very real pain I was feeling for her loss.’

I stared at him. His mouth started twitching, twitching up into a grin. Then he started laughing, a horrible, shrill cacophony, a sound that matched the mad light dancing in his eyes.

‘Jesus Christ,’ I wheeled round to where Gavin was now standing behind me. ‘Gavin, let’s go.’

But Gavin just stood there, shaking his head.

‘Don’t ask him for help!’
hooted Vince. ‘He was the one who helped me clear up all the mess in the first place!’

‘Gavin?’ I said urgently, grabbing hold of his lapels. ‘Come on, let’s get out of here. He’s completely mad, can’t you see? I know he was your friend once, but Jesus, Gavin, look with your own eyes!’

He wouldn’t look. He just kept staring at the floor.

‘Do you want to take confession now, Gavin?’ said Vince.
‘Let the poor boy in on our little joke and rest your weary conscience?’

Gavin slowly raised his head. Tears were running down his cheeks. ‘Eddie,’ he said softly. ‘I should never have shown you that video. I’m sorry, mate.’

‘What are you saying?’ I was aghast. Realisation was dawning like a penny, slowly spinning on its axis, getting ready to drop.

‘I tried to stop things going this far, really
I did. I dunno, I guess I never really believed you’d actually think you could write a book. I had you pegged as a lazy lush who just liked talking shit a lot; I thought you’d soon lose interest when it all became too much like hard work. But no, you surprised me; you were really into it. Things were moving, weren’t they, Eddie? So I thought again, tried to nip it in the bud another way. I sent
Robin after you, to see if he would put you off’, he said. ‘I didn’t count on you having that mate of yours.’

‘What?’ The penny was spinning faster now, louder, like the rushing sound in my ears.

‘You sent Robin after me? You?’

He nodded. ‘I wasn’t on a press trip that time, mate. Who else do you think could have told him?’

‘I don’t know, I…’

‘And who else could have given him your number?’

I felt the hot tears spring behind my own eyeballs now. ‘And you – you saw Christophe whacking Robin?’

‘I saw your mate giving him a good kicking down by the canal.’ Gavin’s voice was flat now. ‘That was a bad move. Robin would
have only come back for more after that and then he’d have blown the gaff, told you it was me who sent him. You can’t trust the mad. I should have known that from the
start. But I fucked up, so I had to put it straight.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Eddie, why are you always so slow?’ he said it almost fondly. ‘Acutally, it was pretty easy once your mate had finished with him. Piece of rubble over the head,
pfft!
Put him out of his misery. But it wasn’t the end of you. You kept going, didn’t you, kept making connections faster than I could. Then Jesus Christ,’ his
voice raised an octave, ‘Bloody Stevens found that stupid old French bastard and the two of you were well away. It was hard for me, Eddie.’ He looked at me with ravaged, searching eyes.

When they come for you
, I remembered from my favourite film,
they come for you with a smile. The people who have cared about you your whole life
.

‘Do you know what it’s like to keep a secret for twenty years?
To hide it from everyone? To go through it all again when we saw Lynton and Steve, not to mention Tony, the poor, deluded, bloody bastard. Can you imagine what it did to me, keeping up the appearance that I was going along with it all? Keeping up the smiles and the jokes, making out like I thought the same as they all did. Secrets are like a stone in your pocket, Eddie. The longer you keep them,
the more they weigh and they go on getting heavier and heavier until you can’t bear to carry them around any more.’ He put his head in his hands.

‘Do you understand now?’ said Vince, by my side now. ‘Good old Gavin. My most faithful fan. I rewarded him well, of course. That flat in Elgin Crescent must be worth a packet by now. And of course, his tenancy agreement means that if there’s ever any
cleaning up to be done again, he takes care of it.’

‘But,’ I said, ‘but why are you telling me all this now?’

Vince gave a regretful smile. ‘Because this is how the story ends. Your reward was to hear it. No one else ever has.’

‘But—’ I saw my whole life flash before me and in it, I saw Gavin typing emails to Joseph Pascal ‘—but you can’t do anything to me. People will come after me. He told
Pascal we were coming here to find you. He knows where you are. If I go missing, he’ll be straight on your case.’

‘I’m sorry, Eddie,’ said Gavin. ‘Those emails you saw me typing, well, I never sent any of them. Just like I was never on the phone to Tony Stevens. You’ll notice how, by amazing coincidence, we bumped into Vince before we could hook up with Joseph’s friend? Well, it wasn’t amazing
coincidence at all. Nobody knows you came here, do they?’ he said, wearily. ‘You told me yourself you didn’t bother to tell your parents, in case they were worried about where the money was coming from, right? Louise has left you, there’s nobody waiting for you in Camden. So as far as anyone knows, that’s still where you are. In fact, we both are. And in a couple of days, I’ll start ringing you
up and won’t be able to find you. Your flat will have been broken into, your computer will have been stolen, there won’t be anything left to say you’ve ever been here. And sadly, nothing left of your book either.’

‘He’s really good at this,’ Vince said, nodding. ‘He’s a tragic genius, you know. He even got Sylvana to write her own suicide note.’

‘How?’ I said. I should have felt scared by then,
really scared. But instead I felt surreal, like I was watching some mad piece of theatre, not really partaking in it at all.

‘Didn’t he tell you that he trained as a chemist in Australia? Photographs aren’t the only things he likes developing, you know. He’s very clever. I bet you’ve never seen him looking sick, have you?’

I shook my head, thinking back to all the hangovers I’d had that had
never affected him. I just thought he’d had a better metabolism than me.

‘As for Sylvana,’ Vince continued, ‘he just fed her the right
chemical combination, slipped it into her drink, made her feel like she was dreaming. Probably how you’re feeling right now.’

He was right. That whooshing light-headedness, it was coming back stronger now.

‘You never did like to get your round in, did you, Eddie?’
said Gavin sadly.

‘I think I need to sit down,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ nodded Vince. ‘It’s better that way. Now Eddie, please, don’t feel bad. Nothing’s going to hurt you any more. You’re going to be safe and warm and protected. Here, I’ll play you some of that Fado. You’ll see what I mean about it.’

He must have slipped the needle into my arm shortly after that, because I did feel a nice, safe, warm
feeling flooding up through my veins. The room took on a magical kind of glow, like swirls of colour were dancing around me. Under the chandelier I could see Vince and Gavin and it looked as if they were dancing too, in each other’s arms, to that old-fashioned Fado that I could hear vaguely in the corner of my mind.

The colours, I noticed, seemed to be coming from that portrait on the wall, the
one of Sylvana. Only they weren’t just violet any more, they were all the different colours of the rainbow. It looked like she was moving with them, stepping out of the frame. Her hair was like red seaweed floating in the water and her eyes were as green as emeralds. She opened out her arms to me and I felt myself float towards her, into the colours, into the light.