I got back from Auntie Jan’s at about one, the scrapbook tucked inside my coat to keep it from the rain as I stepped off the bus, though I didn’t want to go straight home. Not yet. What if I found him there?
Worse, what if I didn’t?
I took the picturesque route, past my shabby fringe of Kemp Town and down to the Enclosures. These gardens, laid down in the early nineteenth century, formed the jewel of the Kemp Town Estate proper, jealously guarded by the residents of the ownership co-op. Years ago, there even used to be a constable, provided with his own cottage from which he could judge whether non-residents had dressed respectably enough to be allowed entrance. These days, things weren’t quite as formal, though I’d heard there’d been whisperings among the committee to find bylaw loopholes proscribing the exposure of pallid beer bellies. They’d already managed to ban Estate houses having for sale boards outside them on ‘aesthetic grounds’… I wasn’t sure, but I suspected prospective buyers also had to know a funny handshake or two.
The gardens were still lovely, though, even in today’s apathetic, muggy drizzle. There’s a cut, a tunnel that runs down from the rose garden to the shore, under Marina Parade. The trees curve over it, they cosset the path and—in the spring—wreath it in mottled green and the heady scent of the flowers. I took that way, shadows dappling my steps. Lewis Carroll, in his mundane incarnation as the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, had often visited friends at one of the houses in Lewes Crescent, and allegedly this path had inspired the rabbit hole down which Alice descended to Wonderland. For a moment, Grace Slick’s voice ran through my head.
Hurriedly I walked on, down out of the patchy shade and onto the seafront. Watching the grey tide calmed me down, made me think that, despite everything, it might somehow be all right. A foolish notion, maybe, but there’s something about the sea that makes you feel so small you know nothing’s really important; it only seems that way.
I leaned on the railing, its wooden poles salt-bleached and its cheerful, turquoise-painted metal uprights rust-stained. I stared at the sea, breathing its sharp, sandy air. Mum’s scrapbook crackled against my chest and, carefully, I slipped it from the confines of my jacket. This was insane. The metaphysics of last night aside, where was I even supposed to start? If the killer had gone undetected then and no questions had been asked since, how the hell could I find a scrap of evidence? And, even if I did, what would I do about it?
My fingers brushed the dry page edges. Out below the clouds, a gull screeched, wheeling down on the wind.
“Nice here, innit?”
I stifled the incipient squeak of surprise, then closed my eyes with a sort of sinking dread. “How long have you been there?”
I thought, for a moment, I smelled a waft of cigarette smoke. As my eyes flew open, it dissipated and I looked to my right. Damon Brent leaned nonchalantly on the rail beside me. His bottle green velvet jacket appeared to move gently in the breeze, open over a blue crewneck with a silver foil print on it that looked suspiciously like agapanthus leaves. I found myself glancing at his feet—cherry red Cuban heels—and a pair of distressed (and distressingly) dark gold velvet flares. A cigarette burned in his fingers, pale flakes of ash carried away on the breeze. He turned and smiled at me.
“Not long. Thought I’d come out for a walk, y’know? See what the twenty-first century’s like first-hand.” He took a drag on the cigarette. “I love the seaside. Never had much chance to go when I was a kid… but I like the sound it makes.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, still watching the ash flutter.
Could it land, transmuted somehow into something cold, gritty and real? I had, that morning, almost been annoyed to find he’d rinsed up the coffee cup he’d used for an ashtray last night. I’d wanted to know what happened to the fag ends.
“And, um, people can see you?” I asked innocently. “Only, you said how you hadn’t found anyone who—”
“People only see what they want to, baby,” he assured me. “You’re right, that’s the trouble… but it’s a blessing too. Y’know?”
He winked at me and, just for a split-second, I could have sworn he wore nothing more glam than a pale blue shirt and washed-out jeans, with a pair of designer sunglasses and a stubby ponytail. I blinked, hoping that the sudden pain in my sinuses would go away soon, and turned my face back to the greasy swell of the waves.
“So,” I said, because it was easier to talk than to be left with nothing to drown out my thoughts. “What d’you think of Brighton?”
“Yeah.” Damon chuckled. “It’s… different, now.”
“You were here before?”
I glanced over at him. The rain—a mild and intermittent drizzle before—had begun to patter harder against the water. Drops spotted the railing between us, patted against my shoulders. He wasn’t wet at all.
“Mm. Once or twice. London to Brighton and back in a day. Cheap place to come when I was a kid. All old geezers on deckchairs, or greasers havin’ it out with a coupla wannabe faces on the beach. Not so much after everything that went down in ’64, but you know…. There was a scene. Cheap boarding houses, with curtains that smelled like musty seaweed and frogs.”
“Yeah,” I said after a moment, wanting to break the trance, but still sort of wondering about the frogs.
It seemed strange to hear him mention the 1964 Riots, and I found myself wondering, from the way he talked, if he’d been a Mod. He’d have been, what? No more than a young teenager then, surely. How old had he been, exactly, when he…?
“D’you fancy going for a drink?” I heard myself say. “I mean, if people can… and, well, I know you can drink. I, um, I picked up this scrapbook from my Aunti—Aunt Jan. It’s got photos, cuttings and things that I could do with some help with… and, well, I s’pose we need to talk about how we’re going to, sort of, do this. Really.”
He took a pull on his ciggie and grinned at me. Overhead, the gulls called hoarsely on the air.
“Yeah. That’d be nice,” he said, crushing the cigarette out on the railing and flicking it into the wind. “I haven’t been— Well, I mean, obviously I ain’t been down the pub in years, but… not just for a quiet drink, like. Y’know. After we hit the big time, we were always rushing somewhere in the back of some car, dodgin’ some scene or other. I used to miss bein’ able to go out on the town, just me and a couple of mates.”
A sadness tinged his voice on those last words that seemed almost…. I nearly thought the word ‘haunting’, but stopped myself just before I got there.
“Well, they say if you’re not having a good time in Brighton you’re probably d— damn well in need of a good excuse for why not,” I corrected hurriedly.
I really had to concentrate more.
The rain still couldn’t make up its mind, vacillating between spitting showers and damp mistiness, though it seemed to be clearing as we walked the few blocks to The Crown and it had left the stonework of Kemp Town’s elegant terraces damply mellow, the pavements patterned with puddles. Damon whistled, hands buried deep in his pockets.
I wouldn’t have minded it, but I kept recognising the tunes.
* * *
The Crown had long been a welcome bolthole for me. Set off one of the village’s bystreets, between a wholefood shop and an independent clothing store, the old building still retained some of its dark wood beams. Fake extra beams had been added to the ceiling at some point, possibly in an attempt to capitalise on someone’s idea of Olde-Worlde Charme. Eric, the current landlord, hadn’t bothered to take them down, though he had bowed to the conventions of modern health and safety by pinning a notice to one that read ‘Minde Yore Hedde’.
Lunchtimes were normally fairly quiet, and this one seemed to be no exception, so I went straight up to the bar and smiled at the goateed student polishing wineglasses behind it.
“Vodka tonic, please,” I said, noting the look of unfocused confusion that passed, very briefly, over the barman’s face when he looked at Damon, busy peering at the stock of real ales.
“And… what are you drinking?”
As I turned, he’d just moved from the ales to looking at a laminated list of cocktails and shooters. I prayed silently that he wouldn’t order any kind of orgasm.
“Pint of bitter, mate. Thanks. Well,” he added, smiling at me, “it’s been years since I had a good pint. Guess you could say, recently, I’ve been more of a spirit dr— No? Okay. All right….”
I rolled my eyes.
“Don’t,” I muttered, ordering us two Plantagenet Potato Bakes (the Traditional Fayre Lunche Specialle) as well and paying for the lot. “Just don’t.”
He grinned. We found a table by the window, and I slid gratefully into the wine-red leather banquette. My sanctuary.
Damon frowned.
“What?”
“They usually play Led Zep in here?” he asked.
The tail end of Black Dog echoed faintly from the speakers behind the bar.
I shrugged. “Well, they did reform. At Christmas.”
He stared at me for a moment, then narrowed those Theda Bara eyes.
“Get out of town! Nobody’s still playin’ together after,” he paused for a second, counting quickly under his breath, “nearly forty bloody years. If you’d said, like, Son of Zeppelin or somethin’, I might—”
“No, really.” I sipped my vodka. “Honest.”
“Hm.” Damon looked incredulously at me as he lifted his pint. “Robert Plant’s balls drop yet, then?”
I snorted, and the corner of his mouth twitched into a little smile. I supposed it must be strange for him. In what I hated to think of as his day, rock ’n’ roll had already become bloated on its own success, sure… but there must still have been a freshness to it, a sense that its history was still being, could still be, written. Early twenty-first century heritage rock must come as something of a shock.
“Rolling Stones too,” I said. “They’ve never really stopped.”
I thought of Leon Fielding’s CDs, still in my bag, and wondered if I should say anything. Damon shook his head, fiddling with the wooden spoon that had our table number written on it; another of Eric’s rustic affectations.
“Shit, man,” he murmured, reaching for his cigarettes.
“Uh-uh. No smoking. Smoking ban, affects all public places.”
He groaned very theatrically. “Awww… c’mon. Seriously? But—”
“Yep, honest. After all,” I added, unable to resist, “those things could kill you.”
He narrowed his eyes again, but I slapped the scrapbook down on the table between us, derailing whatever he’d been about to say.
“Come on. Focus.”
“Hah…. This is the book?”
To tell the truth, I felt a little bit worried about showing it to him. I’d told him that Mum, Gail, and Jan had been fans and I had mentioned the scrapbook, but actually showing him… that seemed rather like reading out extracts of someone’s schoolgirl diary in the toilets at break. Damon looked at the cover and raised an eyebrow.
“Um,” I said. “Sorry if it’s a bit, er….”
“Oh, don’t sweat it,” he said, lifting his pint, carefully opening the book with his free hand. “Baby, you get used to it. So long as the pages aren’t sticky.”
“Er….”
He slipped me a big, sly grin. “Yeah, if you knew what we used to get… huh. Mainly after Saturday Loving charted in June of ’72. Yeah. One minute, gigging over a pub in Clapham, next we’re doing the fucking Roundhouse! Chicks going crazy all over the place. I’m telling you, baby,” the grin slid even wider, “if I was, like, a smaller guy… I’d never have had to buy any underwear again, y’know? ’Course,” he added, after a moment’s lecherous consideration, “you’d want to wash ’em first.”
I tried not to think about it, but it was already too late.
“Eewww!”
Damon laughed, a low, throaty sound. It stopped when he hit the first live still. Him, with the Telecaster, almost on top of the mic, shoulder to shoulder with Leon Fielding, the latter’s eyes on him, mouth half-open, fingers high on the neck of that sunburst Les Paul, forever caught in the beginning of motion.
“Christ.” He frowned, fingers tracing the edge of the picture. “Leon…. That’s been a long time.”
I caught the bar-student’s attention as he hove into view with our lunches. He brought the plates over and looked, again, momentarily confused. Damon still stared morosely at the scrapbook.
“Ooh. Chillier than it was this morning, innit?” said the bar-student.
“Um. Yes.” I smiled and thanked him.
He toddled off, his expression slightly glazed.
“It was just us, starting out,” Damon said to the world in general.
With a lingering sympathy for the goateed student, I speared a piece of lettuce from my side salad. “You and Leon?”
“Yeah. We were just kids. Never thought we’d… I mean, Leon thought he’d spend his whole life working in the bloody GPO. I wasn’t much better… I had a job at Burton’s. Tailor’s assistant,” he added caustically. “But it didn’t matter, y’know? ’Cos we didn’t care if we were broke. It’s, like, every kid has those funky rock ’n’ roll dreams, y’know? But you don’t actually expect…. We didn’t believe it when this A&R guy from Garten Records starts coming on all sweet. We did this gig up Chalk Farm way, see, Christmas 1970. This bloke—Dexler, his name was, Vince Dexler—says he wants us to come in for an audition. We’re tryin’ to be all cool, y’know, and Leon puts on this big front… ‘Oh, well, we’ll see what we can do.’ Hah… bloke’s out the door five minutes, we’re swingin’ off the freaking ceiling.”
He chuckled.
“Well, we were seriously stoked, right? Biggest Christmas present ever. We thought there was going to be a big contract, record deal… all that shit. ’Course, it don’t work like that.”
“No?” I asked, dandling my fork in my potato bake.
Damon shook his head vigorously, curls bouncing.
“Mm-nn. Like I say, we were kids, we didn’t know what we were doing. Dexler says we should sign this deal memo, yeah? ‘Show a commitment to the project’ and all that crap. So we do…. ’Course, we end up locked in on the label. Can’t take any other auditions, can’t hardly play a gig without getting our knuckles rapped. We just had to hang around, waiting for Garten to offer us something—anything, y’know?—or blow the whole lot.” He sipped his pint, frowning slightly. “It could have all crumbled away then, y’know? Never got any further’n that. But we were lucky. Vince introduced us to Cris McIlroy, beginning of ’71. Said he’d be the perfect manager for us. S’pose he was, really. It was Cris that brought Charlie and Joss on board. Not that me and Leon didn’t get a say. I mean, we did, but….”
He flicked through the crackling pages, and I realised what he didn’t want to voice: that ‘choice’ could be a flexible term, especially if you hoped to get paid. I thought again of the CDs in my bag and wondered if I should tell him that Leon still had a career. Maybe he already knew.
Would he know that, I wondered? And why did it worry me?
Damon cleared his throat, flipping past a collage of ticket stubs.
“I knew Charlie, vaguely. Seen him at the Crawdaddy Club… and Joss was a pretty well-known session drummer. Cris got us all together, and it gelled well, y’know? Worked great. Contract started moving. Cris even got us Maxwell Vost to produce the album for only four points—we thought he was a bloody magician!”
He glanced up, saw my incomprehension, and looked a little crestfallen.
“Vost was a big name in the Sixties. Real shaker, y’know? And he was responsible for a lot of our sound. We were lucky to get him. Produced everything up to Rush On Love… though he didn’t stick on four points for long. Percent,” he added kindly, making me feel like a complete idiot.
I watched as, for the first time, Damon picked at his plate. Lettuce only. I’d ordered for him without thinking but, I realised, I hadn’t seen him eat before. I had to try hard not to wonder about where it went… how it all worked. Sunlight filtered through The Crown’s thick bottle-glass windows, tracing the dust in the air.
“Vost made a lot of money out of us, by the end of it. Cris too.” He stopped at a glossy black-and-white magazine photo. “But everybody takes their dues, y’know? Can’t do nothin’ about it. That’s Cris McIlroy.”
Damon tipped the book towards me. The picture had been clipped from an interview given to some nameless rag. Just a studio shot, showing a seated Damon Brent with a big acoustic dreadnought on his knee and a blank look on his face. Behind him, a balding man in his mid- or late-thirties, with tinted aviator glasses high on the bridge of his thin nose, held a cigarette in one skinny hand. He seemed to be gesticulating towards something in Damon’s line of vision. I wanted to ask if he remembered the photograph, but he’d already moved on.
“Kinda weird guy, Cris. He was okay, but a little bit high-strung sometimes. Used to play with some freakout psychedelic outfit in the States, apparently, always said he was at Woodstock. I never saw him pick up an axe. But the cat could spot a trend coming, y’know? He was good for us. Though, after Rush On Love, we wanted to start branching out, y’know? Caused a bit of tension.”
I pricked up my ears. “Tension?”
He curled his lip, lifting one shoulder in a kind of mini-shrug.
“No… well, yeah. Maybe. But not—I mean, neither him or Vost would have had anything to do with…. What?”
I stabbed my fork into my potato bake. “You haven’t actually…. I mean, d’you have any idea who would have wanted to—you know?”
Damon shook his head—far too quick to deny it, I thought. I chewed pensively for a moment, wondering how to broach this. No one’s squeaky clean, after all. Not entirely.
“So,” I said, swallowing and reaching for my vodka, “no, um… I don’t know… enemies? Nobody with a grudge? No spurned groupies, no—what d’you call it—creative differences within the band?”
He glanced up at me, a curious look on his face.
“Because,” I ducked under the table for a minute, pulling notepad and pen from my bag, “it must have been somebody at that party, mustn’t it? I mean, you said last night that you went upstairs about three… that’s right, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” he said. “’Bout three. Dunno how long I was out for, but it all started catching up. I got myself to the bathroom… really needed that shower by the time I was finished.”
“Nice.”
“Yeah.” He smiled sheepishly. “Well, that’s rock ’n’ roll, baby. I’d been, uh, I’d been drinking fairly heavily. I was… well, I was angry.”
Now we were getting somewhere.
“How come?” I asked, keen to prod but careful not to push him.
He gave another of those dismissive mini-shrugs and rocked back in his chair. His hand wandered to the pocket that held cigarettes and lighter, the gesture turned into a brushing away of invisible lint as he obviously remembered he couldn’t smoke in here. I wondered whether—if people only saw what they believed they saw—he could get away with it if he tried. After all, no one would smell the smoke… would they?
“Me ’n’ Inez had this bust-up,” he said insouciantly.
“Your wife?”
“Yeah. She never liked bashes at the house, y’know? She was….”
He trailed off, and I wondered what he’d been about to say.
She was… funny like that? Meticulous about not finding unconscious people on the floor in the mornings? Fond of her privacy?
I propped my chin on my hand.
“Tell me about her,” I suggested. “She was a tennis player, wasn’t she?”
“Mm.” A strange sadness touched those Theda Bara eyes as he smiled. “Top ten seeded for British chicks in ’73 when we met. She was… well, yeah, she was a fox, but she was a smart chick too, y’know? Ambitious, determined… she’d go all out for what she wanted, Inez would.”
He pulled the cigarette packet from his pocket and tossed it down beside his plate as if it had burned his hand. I watched him trying to affect complete nonchalance while picking compulsively at the corner of the carton with one thumbnail.
“We had a—well, I s’pose it was a bit of an on-off thing at first—but we got spliced in ’74. I asked her on New Year’s Eve. She said yes, we tied the knot in June. Honeymooned in Portugal. It was nice,” he added wistfully. “’Course, I’d bought the house, down by Westbury. S’pose I thought… dunno.”
He prodded at a piece of potato with his fork and frowned. I watched him take an experimental, cautious bite. He chewed thoughtfully, like someone actually unused to eating. It made me wonder all sorts of uncomfortable things about physiology.
“I mean,” he said, after a moment, “I always thought there’d be… y’know, I thought if she had a kid…. But she told me she saw this quack in Harley Street, and he said it was a no go, yeah? The rabbit just wasn’t gonna die. I thought it was that, y’know, what kinda messed things up. That maybe…. But she didn’t like talking about it. S’pose I was wrong to try and make her.”
A fall of curls obscured his eyes as he bent his head. I drew a fresh column on my notepad. So, things had been… rocky?
“Was that what you argued about, before the party?”
He shook his head, still staring at his plate.
“Nah. She, um…. See, Inez hurt her leg. Bad injury, y’know? May of ’76. Screwed up this tendon or something. She had an operation, had a cast on for, like, six weeks. She got pretty down about it and… well, I s’pose I didn’t help, bein’ away and everything, yeah? Long time. Then with the tour we done that year….”
Damon cleared his throat, looking up at me expectantly. I was supposed to save him from having to say it, I realised.
“You were, er, away a bit too much?”
His fingers drummed crisply against the fag packet.
“You could say that. Well, we was always touring, or there’d be studio work, gigs. I dunno, maybe if we hadn’t moved out of London….” His chin dimpled as he chewed his lower lip. “She got down after the leg injury. Real down. June to July, we had a tour. West Germany, Holland, France… y’know. Our second wedding anniversary, I was playin’ in Rotterdam, she was at home with a cast on her leg. I thought she understood how it had to be, y’know? How—well, p’rhaps she didn’t. Anyway, day of the party, I… sort of found out what she thought of me. That she had this other bloke on the side.”
He cleared his throat, grabbed the cigarette carton, and jammed it abruptly back into his pocket. I wasn’t sure what he wanted me to say—at least this gave us a motive to work with—so I said nothing. Damon took a long swallow of his pint and stared into the middle distance.
“I dunno who,” he said. “Thought prob’ly her coach, Graham Cooper. Smug little bastard, never liked him. But I don’t know. S’pose I didn’t wanna know, not really. But we started on at each other and, like, y’know…. Things were said.” He cleared his throat. “Stuff was thrown.”
“How did you leave it? You said you were drinking… angry.”
“She left,” he said shortly. “I told her she didn’t need to bother comin’ back. She said she wouldn’t. Packed a bleedin’ case right in front of me.”
I nodded slowly.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and I meant it. “But, um…. So, would you have, I don’t know, divorced?”
Damon shot me a guarded look from behind his kohl.
“I…. No. Yeah. Look, I might’ve said it. I dunno. Like I said, y’know, girl? It was a tough year. We were touring, doing a lot of studio work… then, y’know, what happened… happened. What cuts, yeah, is that I never got to, like, to fix things up.”
He looked away, digging back into the potato bake and flicking through the pages of the scrapbook, as if the subject was closed. I sighed inwardly. Despite all his talk about wanting answers, needing to know what had happened, he wasn’t going to make this easy for me. I’d opened my mouth to ask, carefully, about the creative tensions he’d mentioned following the Rush On Love LP, when he lit with a soft crow of delight on a blurry, grainy black-and-white shot in the scrapbook.
“Oh!” Damon swung the book round towards me. “Oh, you gotta see this one, baby. This is… oh, you’ll like this!”
I’d barely noticed the picture before. I’d thought—if I’d thought of it at all—that it was just a fan’s shot of a live show. Of course, it was.
“Bowie’s Nineteen Eighty Floor Show,” he said proudly. “At the Marquee, October 1973. They filmed it for TV, closed the whole place down for three days. The very last time he did Ziggy…. It was incredible, man! Not a journo in the place that didn’t keep forgetting to breathe.”
I craned my neck and looked at the photo, but I couldn’t see the glamour that he seemed to. I could see why it had found its way into Mum’s book; there was Damon, cigarette and drink in hand, looking very young and—to be honest—completely pissed, amid a knot of other people. I spotted the rest of the band, weaving amongst the crowd. He still kept reeling off roll calls and anecdotes of rock celebrity, and I failed miserably in not being able to recognise anyone.
“And that is John Baldry…. Joss was like a schoolkid, yeah, that excited to meet him. Leon was just all over the man himself, y’know. Big Bowie fan. We were so lucky to get in there…. Great night. Really great.”
As I looked, I realised that the shot had come from an inkie and that—whatever Mum’s feeling about it had been—Damon and his boys were totally incidental to it. Strange that, even so, he’d managed to get himself caught, staring straight at the camera, right in the middle of the frame.
I shook my head. He really wasn’t making this easy.
“It must,” I said, trying to drag us back to the heart of the matter, however strange and distasteful it seemed against the pub’s flock wallpaper and the fake beams, “have been just an opportunistic thing, though. Mustn’t it?”
Damon was still wallowing in the footlights of memory, looking at shots of a live show, the band shining like so many sparkly satellites from a dark, thinly spotlit stage. He frowned.
“Hm?”
“The way you were… you know. It was pure opportunity. It had to be. No one could have planned that, could they? I mean, it was risky… the house full of people like that. It must have been someone who was there that night, someone who had a reason to be angry with you, someone who had a reason to want you, er… thingy,” I finished, feeling hopelessly twee.
It just didn’t seem right to say ‘dead’ with him sat right there, looking dismally at me over half a potato bake and a pint. Damon curled his lip.
“Well, someone must have done,” I snapped. “Unless it really was an accident.”
He let the open page of the scrapbook drop from his fingers.
“No. I told you, I never done all that to myself, Ellis. Whatever they said. The… the pathologist said,” Damon screwed up his kohl-rimmed eyes, brow furrowing in thought, “there was an… epidural haematoma. I didn’t know what it meant. I always thought a haematoma was, like, a bruise, y’know?”
“Path—” I began, wishing I hadn’t. He’d mentioned this in passing once before, but I’d been in no condition to think about it. Unfortunately, now I’d started to… quite unintentionally. “Oh, no. Oh, y— You were at your own autopsy?”
“Mm-hm.” He nodded, picking at the remains of his lunch. “Well, everybody is, really, ain’t they? But, I mean, y’know… bruise be buggered, right? Half my bloody head was smashed over the sink.”
“Yuck,” I said, without meaning to. “But you…. At the autopsy, you actually watched them cutti—”
“Oh, it’s not that bad. Not really. Kinda gave me the heebies to start with, but once you stop thinking of it as yourself… well, it makes it easier. The first wound was here.” He tapped a finger against his head, just above his right eyebrow. “The haematoma. Would’ve put me down… killed me eventually. That can happen, y’know? You, like, you can bleed in your brain for hours… have a headache an’ that, but not know how bad you’re hurt.”
He paused to drain the rest of his pint. I said nothing. That first hit, though… well, that could have been accidental, couldn’t it? He’d said how out of it he was. I sipped my vodka, looking guardedly at my own personal apparition. He hunched over the table, mouth pinched tight.
“There was another one,” Damon said, putting two nicotine-smudged fingers to his left temple, “here. Couple of other bumps and scrapes. One on the back of my head. They, uh, reckoned I’d fallen out of the shower, hit myself on the sink… tried to get up, fallen again and, well, y’know. Not got up. Clumsy drunk, right? Only I could always hold my booze.” He paused, gazing speculatively at the bottom of his glass. “Shouldn’t have had those bloody pills off Leon, though. ’Ludes,” he added, putting the glass down reluctantly and flicking me a quick smile.
“Dodgy gear?”
“Nah, not as such…. He always brought party favours, y’know? And he loved to, er, experiment. I mean, I never had a problem with that, yeah, but bloody quaaludes put me to sleep quicker than a mug of Ovaltine and a foot rub. Always did.”
“Uh-huh?” My vodka and tonic paused en route to my lips as I contemplated that image.
“Yeah, y’know? You down, like, eight cups of tea just tryin’ to stay awake then, if you can fight the first half hour, you get a nice buzz… makes the world all fuzzy. Takes the edge off things. That’s why he gave ’em to me. Leon came down on the Friday afternoon, see? Me and Inez were still yellin’ at each other when he turned up. Then she split and he, well, he wanted to help.” Damon laughed softly. “Some bleedin’ help… I ended up necking a fistful of reds just trying to stay awake. Did a couple of lines early on, prob’ly about nine… more after midnight. Kept drinking. I was… huh, I was gone, baby. But that’s just the way it was, y’know? I wasn’t a— It wasn’t like they made out in here.”
He stabbed a finger at Mum’s scrapbook, and I saw he’d been flicking through the ‘Death House Horror’ reportage. He rubbed a hand over his mouth, and I wondered if he thought he had to justify himself to me.
“I wasn’t a bleedin’ junkie. It’s not…. Look, ’cos when you’re trying to make it, yeah? You know you got no chance unless you can make your face fit right, and to do that… well, there was always something going on, y’know? You had to keep up, be amped, all the time, so you pop a couple of hearts here, a bomber there. It only got more intense after we started getting some success. Tours, gigs, press, all that shit…. You go from a couple of pills to keep you pumped to a few lines of coke, y’know? Then, when it all stopped and you got a break, you needed something to bring you back down, and it’d go on like that. Y’see? ’Course, the booze was just there to keep everybody sociable.” He gave a sour chuckle. “We all picked up bad habits. I wasn’t half as bad as Charlie. I never was.”
He’d flipped abruptly away from the pictures of police cordons and flowers, back to the feather boas and sparkly lapels. I caught sight of Charlie Davies’ surly face, glaring at me upside down.
“So, Charlie had a problem?”
Damon chuckled mirthlessly from the depths of his pint.
“Long-running love affair with the white lady, baby. I mean, it’s like I said, pretty much everybody’d do a line here and there, but with Charlie…. Well, it was a runnin’ joke, wasn’t it? Charlie and his… Charlie. It got so a couple of lines wasn’t enough. And when you get that way with somethin’ like coke, y’know, it—no matter how much—it’s never gonna be enough. Eats you up. He was strung out most of the time by the spring of ’74. When we were in the studio for the Working Man LP, he used to piss off for hours at a time. S’either Leon or Joss playin’ bass on most of that, y’know. Came to a head when I went round to his place in Notting Hill one weekend. Found him passed out with a needle in his soddin’ arm… I called Cris, and he got Charlie bundled into a clinic. He was in for a good coupla months, doin’ all that twelve-step crap, y’know? Blamed me.”
I frowned. “But—”
“That’s the way you think when you’re fucked up like that,” Damon said gently. “I s’pose… yeah, he probl’y hated me for a while. ’Cos addiction takes away your choices, your control. Y’know? Makes you resent people interfering even more… and Charlie was an argumentative sod to start with.” He smiled. “Doing all the N.A. stuff, though… it’s a lot of rules, baby. And when you give people rules, some of them are gonna follow ’em, right? But some are just gonna learn how not to get caught next time.”
The goateed bar-student wandered past again abstractedly, pausing to relieve us of our plates. He seemed less confused, looked directly at Damon for the first time. The walls didn’t melt, and the bar-student didn’t scream or faint, so I supposed things must be all right.
“Everything okay, sir?”
“Yeah.” Damon turned the pearly grin on him. “Nice. Can we get another round?”
“I’ll bring ’em over,” the bar-student said, pottering off again.
I meant to point out that it was barely two o’clock—and he was spending my money, thank you very much—but instead I bit my lip, and my frown deepened.
“You’re saying Charlie didn’t stay clean?”
“Nah. Not really.” Damon flicked back to the later pages of the scrapbook, his expression hardening as he hit that shot of Inez collapsing outside the gates. “He handled it better, but he was still using. He’d still get wasted, still get a little crazy, y’know? Though it was coke more than junk… at least when he was working.”
I nodded slowly, filing that away for future reference.
“So, he was high that night? At the party? Higher than most people were,” I added, seeing Damon’s raised eyebrow.
He smiled. “Prob’ly. I, um, I don’t really remember that much.”
I bit back a small laugh, any amusement at how much, for a moment, he looked like a sheepish teenager, quelled by the question of just how high you’d have to be before you lost your censor control as well as your inhibitions. He hated me for a while. Could Charlie really have hated him that much? Was that what it had been? Some immature, momentary snap of anger? I thought about pushing, about asking if he could have had some deeper motive, but Damon seemed preoccupied. He was frowning at the photo of his wife, at the gory headlines and the post-mortem dissection of her personal pain.
“It, er… it must be difficult,” I said, because I had to say something. I couldn’t sit there and watch the black waters close over him, cutting off any opportunity I had to prod a bit more, go over what he knew. “Seeing that. Um. Sorry.”
Damon glanced up at me and, fleetingly, I thought he’d say something, but the bar-student came back with our drinks and, in an instant, the darkness left his expression. The fluid, graceful transition and the charming smile impressed me, but I wasn’t fooled. They disappeared right along with the bar-student, and Damon shook his head, hands coming to cradle his second pint. His hair brushed the shoulders of his green velvet jacket, golden tendrils dragging a little against the nap of the fabric.
“It’s cool, baby. Really.” The edge of his mouth twisted into a cynical sneer.
“So… she stood to inherit the lot?”
Damon looked warily at me over his beer. I thought perhaps I’d hit a nerve, but he licked his lips and shrugged.
“Yeah. My royalty share too… I’d just negotiated a better split on points, that spring. Bleedin’ typical, really…. But she wasn’t there, babe. I don’t know what you’re thinking,” he looked levelly at me, “but I told you: Inez left on the Friday. Stormed off in a whirl, said she was going to, like, stay at the flat. We had a place up Chelsea way. She used to stay there when she went for… well, shopping trips, she said.”
“Mm,” I said soothingly, though he’d stopped paying any attention to me.
“She knew that night was important to me.” Damon rubbed a thumb through the condensation on the side of his glass. “There were people there, y’know, industry— I was talkin’ to people at Decca, Universal… you don’t understand, baby. They were gonna offer me blind terms, more cash. Vince had it all lined up! I needed her there. I needed— Well, it wasn’t fucking fair,” he concluded, taking a long swallow of the beer.
I blinked. What?
“Hang on,” I said, glancing at my notepad. “Vince? D’you mean Vince… Dexler? The A&R bloke from Garten Records?”
“Well, he wasn’t with Garten anymore by then. And he wasn’t reallystill strictly Artist and Repertoire… got himself a gig with one of the big companies, y’know?”
I frowned. “And, what? You mean it was going to be a better deal for the band? A new contract?”
Damon gave me another one of those looks that seemed to suggest there should be a special institution for people like me, with soft, cushiony walls and large, stocky nurses strong of hand but kind of heart.
“No, love,” he said carefully. “For me.”
It took a moment to sink in but, when it did, I couldn’t help but stare.
“Huh?”
He shifted uneasily, lifted one velvet-clad shoulder in a mini-shrug, and cleared his throat. “It’s… well, it’s, like… I mean, we’d all been wanting to get more wossname, y’know, artistic control for a while, baby. Y’know what I mean? It’s, like, we had this fantastic live vibe—we always did, yeah?—and after Rush On Love came out, we did a lot of touring. And that sort of makes you think, y’know? Brings everything into focus.”
“But you were going to quit? You were going to—”
“It’s like I said, babe….”
“Oh, for goodness’ sake!” I snapped, unable to believe that anybody could possibly be so obtuse. And he’d said he had no idea who wanted him dead? “You mean you were planning to lea—”
Across the pub, a familiar voice rang out, cutting through my indignation. Damon looked incredulously at me and I wished I knew what would happen if I slapped him. It had never seemed so tempting.
“Ellis! Hello!”
A cuss softly passed my lips, and I closed my eyes. Not now. Please. I turned in my seat.
“Ron!” I pinched my cheeks into an unwilling smile. “How are you? Jerry with you?”
“Getting in the drinks in, love. You all right?”
My friend Ron was what is generally termed a pillock of the community. He got involved in pretty much all the local committees, both the Kemp Town residents’ association and the historical society, the Neighbourhood Watch and, every year, regular as clockwork, he took some kind of voluntary officiate role at Pride, bustling among the crowds like a bantam. His partner, Jeremy, could usually be seen skulking somewhere in the background, looking faintly embarrassed.
They were, however, both lovely blokes, and I could forgive Ron his tendencies towards pomposity ever since the day I moved in, when they’d found me abandoned on the pavement by my cheapskate removal firm with all my furniture and boxes of books and clutter to hike up four flights of stairs. Ron had organised friends, neighbours, and those too weak to resist his bullying into an impromptu workforce, and Jeremy had lent tea, sympathy, and a strong arm on the dog legs.
“Can’t complain,” I said as Ron drifted over to the table, tall, skinny, and bespectacled, in a baggy t-shirt and washed-out jeans.
I supposed I couldn’t. Not unless I wanted to get myself sectioned.
“You’ll work yourself into the ground, you will,” he chided, smiling broadly at Damon. “No telling these women, is there?”
Just for the briefest of moments, his words seemed to echo into a deepness that I knew wasn’t there. This was The Crown. There were sepia photos of old Kemp Town and its elegant Georgian walkways on the walls, interspersed with more recent portraits of Brighton. Dust spun in the shafts of spring sunlight, and a faint hint of beeswax furniture polish lingered beneath the beer and the… cigarette smoke?
No. As soon as I noticed it, the smell dissipated.
“You said it… you can talk, but they don’t listen, right?”
I looked between them; Damon—to my eyes, still a kohl-rimmed vision in King’s Road and Camden chic—and Ron, the slight look of confusion passing over his face only briefly, replaced with his usual determinedly affable expression.
“You’re telling me,” he said, still beaming, then, as Jeremy hove into view behind him, holding two lagers and a packet of peanuts clenched in his teeth, he glanced over his shoulder. “Oh. Um, this is Jeremy. The ball and chain.”
Jeremy waggled his eyebrows over the peanuts.
“’E-oo.”
My mouth had gone dry. How the hell was I going to—
“Hi. Jack. Jack Yorke,” Damon said, turning up the charm, and I had no idea where he’d pulled that name from.
We seemed to be getting away with it, however. I surreptitiously tucked away the paperwork, trying not to look amazed when he told them he was attached to the University of Sussex’s Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research and we were writing a conference paper together on the social history of image branding. Had he been going through my bookshelves when I wasn’t looking? Would I even have been able to tell if he had?
We exchanged a few more pleasantries, but both Ron and Jeremy had started to get that glazed look that my particular branch of academia tends to induce in people and said they should leave us to it. Jeremy winked at me as they headed off to the beer garden, and I groaned inwardly, knowing it wouldn’t be long before I got the dreaded ‘and who was that?’ phone call.
The rictus of a smile didn’t leave my face until they disappeared.
“Who the bloody hell’s Jack Yorke?” I demanded.
Damon avoided my gaze. “Jack o’Lantern. In the Eagle,” he mumbled. “He used to, um, like, catch French spies in the Napoleonic war and… stuff. Hey, I didn’t hear you sayin’ anything, baby.”
He had a point, but I wasn’t about to admit it. “You used to read the Eagle?”
He shrugged sheepishly. “Maybe a couple of times, when I was a kid. Look, I’m gonna nip out for a cough and drag. You want another drink?”
“No, I’m all right. It’s my money you’re spending, anyway,” I added pointedly, glancing at my watch. “Might as well get home, I suppose…. Bugger. Of course!”
“What?”
Damon looked quizzically at me as I stood up. I shook my head.
“Nothing. Well, no, not…. I’ll see you outside, okay? Just had a thought.”
Had my mind not been racing with sudden possibilities and the contemplation of fate, it would have given me an ignoble but gleeful little twinge to leave him sitting there—looking thoroughly nonplussed—while I nipped out into the beer garden.
Ron sat out by the trellis and the ill-tempered and untrammelled clematis that rambled along it. Jeremy was just rounding the glass-paned door between the bar and the terrace, back from a trip to the gents’, and I collared him before he could go any further.
“Just a minute… Jerry?”
He turned, raising an eyebrow. “Yeah? What can I do for you, Ell?”
“Um. Do you still write for that agency?”
A pained look crossed Jeremy’s face, and I almost felt sorry for bringing it up, but providence had dealt me one of those slaps upside the head that can’t be ignored. Jeremy had told me once before that, when the market for freelance features journalism got a little slow, he hooked up with an agency specialising in red-top rag human interest and ‘real life’ stories. Not so much writing, he said, as re-sequencing the phrases ‘love rat’, ‘hardening nipples’, and ‘totally gobsmacked’ into the correct house style and judiciously applying a bad pun for a strapline, but it paid the bills.
“Not… regularly,” Jerry said cautiously. “But I am in touch. Why?”
I cleared my throat. “If—just supposing—I wanted to find somebody, for an interview, say, how would I go about it?”
“Interview?” he echoed, looking confused.
I sidled closer, slipping a nervous glance out to the beer garden. I really hadn’t wanted to bring Ron into this—or Damon, come to that.
“Just say, for the sake of argument, if I did, it could be done, right? I mean, I remember you saying there were, er… facilities, for finding people. The office that you worked w—”
“Well, it doesn’t guarantee they’ll talk to you,” Jeremy said cagily. “But, yes… electoral roll searches, databases, direct mail companies. You can find virtually anybody if you know where to look. It costs, but if…. Why’d you say you wanted to know?”
I ad libbed generously. “Um, Jack has a, er, book proposal that we’re, uh, going to be working on. So, I just wondered….”
Jeremy grinned. “Oh, yeah?”
“Yes. No, it’s not— Jerry! Stop it.”
He sniggered, failing to look remotely chastened.
“Oh, come on, Ellis… he’s lush! Where’d you dig him up?”
I winced. Bad word choice. “Sod off… no, I mean it. Seriously, Jerry. Could you find someone, if I asked you?”
“All right.” He relented, but not without another chuckle. “Yeah. Yeah, it shouldn’t be too much of a problem. You need as much information as you can get upfront… name, age, date of birth, the general area to look. But if you can give me that, I’ll see what I can do. What’s the book about?”
My tongue almost caught at the back of my throat. Shit. A more than reasonable question, but I hadn’t been prepared for it.
“D… um, Damon Brent,” I said, relieved to see the total and utter lack of recognition on Jeremy’s face. “Old, er, Seventies pop star. He died in ’76 and it’s, um, well it’s sort of a biography…. Cults of fame,” I added, grabbing desperately at the lies I’d told Auntie Jan and tying them up with the plan Damon already had for me… the plan I hadn’t, until now, tried to voice. “You know. How people react to, well, celebrity death. Um.”
That, I thought, could have sounded better.
“Gruesome.” Jeremy wrinkled his nose. “Hang on, did you say Brent? He wasn’t out of that band… oh, you know…. They had that song. It was on that advert last year, for that car. Oh, what was it called?”
“Hope Diamond,” I supplemented, not thinking and immediately cursing myself for it.
“Yeah, that’s the one… God, Ron remembers them. Bloody hell. All right, I’ll see what I can do.”
“Thanks, Jerry. You’re a life saver. I’ll, um, I’ll email you the names and stuff, all right?”
“Sure. Take care, Ell.”
“Will do,” I said, smiling as I turned to leave and rather glad that I’d sent Damon on ahead.
When I got there, he was leaning against the wall outside the pub, just to the side of the weedy and slightly shabby hanging baskets, cigarette smouldering in two elegantly extended fingers, his face tipped back to catch the sun, eyes closed.
“All right, baby?” he said, not bothering to open them.
It took me aback, but only for a moment.
“Yeah. Let’s go.”
Damon cracked open one eye and peered at me. The light flamed off his hair and the foil print on his shirt. Even his bloody flares seemed to sparkle.
He smoked while we walked, talking more about how we planned to start things off. I explained about Jeremy and how he might be able to help us track down anyone not immediately accessible through a quick trawl of Google and a couple of social networking sites. That led on to explaining about the internet in general, which fascinated him, and me saying that Leon Fielding—given that he still seemed to be working—should be relatively easy to approach. The spring sunshine warmed the pavement, and Damon laughed so hard I thought he’d swallow his cigarette.
“He is? For real? Ah, babe…. That’s brilliant. I mean it. What’s he doin’?”
I dug the CDs out of my bag and showed them to him. Hooting with glee, he read all the titles and liner notes carefully before making me promise to play them in full when we got home.