A Darker Shade of Blue (25 page)

Think. Think again. Take your time. It's easy to get confused.

Oh, that. Yeah. It was nothing, right? Someone's drink got spilled, knocked over. Happens all the time.

That's what it was about? The argument?

Yeah.

A few punches thrown?

Maybe.

By you?

Not by me.

By Fontaine?

Fontaine?

Yes. You and Fontaine, squaring up to one another.

No. No way.

‘There's something there, Charlie,' Maureen Prior said. ‘Something between Jahmall and Jason Fontaine.'

They were sitting in the Polish Diner on Derby Road, blueberry pancakes and coffee, Resnick's treat.

‘Something personal?'

‘To do with drugs, has to be. Best guess, Fontaine and James were using Jahmall further down the chain and some way he held out on them, cut the stuff again with glucose, whatever. Either that, or he was trying to branch out on his own, their patch. Radford kid poaching in the Meadows, we all know how that goes down.'

‘You'll keep on at him?'

‘The girlfriend, too. She's pretty shaken up still. What happened to Shana. Keeps thinking it could have been her, I shouldn't wonder. Flaky as anything. One of them'll break sooner or later.'

‘You seem certain.'

Maureen paused, fork halfway to her mouth. ‘It's all we've got, Charlie.'

Resnick nodded and reached for the maple syrup: maybe just a little touch more.

The flowers were wilting, starting to fade. One or two of the brighter bunches had been stolen. Rain had seeped down into plastic and cellophane, rendering the writing for the most part illegible.

Clarice Faye came to the door in a dark housecoat, belted tight across; there were shadows still around her eyes.

‘I'm sorry to disturb you,' Resnick said.

A slight shake of the head: no move to invite him in.

‘When we were talking before, you said Shana didn't have any boyfriends, nobody special?'

‘That's right.'

‘Not Troy James?'

‘I don't know that name?'

‘How about Jason? Jason Fontaine?'

The truth was there on her face, a small nerve twitching at the corner of her eye.

‘She did go out with Jason Fontaine?'

‘She saw him once or twice. The end of last year. He came round here in his car, calling for her. I told him, he wasn't suitable, not for her. Not for Shana. He didn't bother her again.'

‘And Shana …?'

‘Shana understood.' Clarice stepped back and began to close the door. ‘If you'll excuse me now?'

‘How about Michael?' Resnick said.

‘I don't know no Michael.'

And the door closed quietly in his face.

He waited until Jade was on her way home from school, white shirt hanging out, coat open, skirt rolled high over dark tights, clumpy shoes. Her and three friends, loud across the pavement, one of them smoking a cigarette.

None of the others as much as noticed Resnick, gave him any heed.

‘I won't keep you a minute,' Resnick said as Jade stopped, the others walking on, pace slowed, heads turned.

‘Yeah, right.'

‘You and Shana, you shared a room.'

‘So.'

‘Secrets.'

‘What secrets?'

‘Jason Fontaine, was she seeing him any more?'

Jade tilted back her head, looked him in the eye. ‘He was just a flash bastard, weren't he? Didn't care nothin' for her.'

‘And Michael?'

‘What about him?'

‘You tell me.'

‘He loved her, didn't he?'

Michael Draper was upstairs in his room: computer, stereo, books and folders from the course he was taking at City College, photographs of Shana on the wall, Shana and himself somewhere that might have been the Arboretum, on a bench in front of some trees, an old wall, Michael's skin alongside hers so white it seemed to bleed into the photo's edge.

‘She was going to tell them, her mum and that, after her birthday. We were going to get engaged.'

‘I'm sorry.'

The boy's eyes empty and raw from tears.

Maureen Prior was out of the office, her mobile switched off. Khan wasn't sure where she was.

‘Ask her to call me when she gets a chance,' Resnick said. ‘She can get me at home.'

At home he made sure the chicken pieces had finished defrosting in the fridge, chopped parsley, squashed garlic cloves flat, opened a bottle of wine, saw to the cats, flicked through the pages of the
Post,
Shana's murder now page four. Art Pepper again, turned up loud. Lynn was late, no later than usual, rushed, smiling, weary, a brush of lips against his cheek.

‘I need a shower, Charlie, before anything else.'

‘I'll get this started.' Knifing butter into the pan.

It cost Jahmall a hundred and fifteen, talked down from one twenty-five. A Brocock ME38 Magnum air pistol converted to fire live ammunition, .22 shells. Standing there at the edge of the car park, shadowed, he smiled: an eye for an eye. Fontaine's motor, his new one, another Beamer, was no more than thirty metres away, close to the light. He rubbed his hands and moved his feet against the cold, the rain that rattled against the hood of his parka, misted his eyes. Another fifteen minutes, no more, he'd be back out again, Fontaine, on with his rounds.

Less than fifteen, it was closer to ten.

Fontaine appeared at the side door of the pub, calling out to someone inside before raising a hand and turning away.

Jahmall tensed, smelling his own stink, his own fear; waited until Fontaine had reached towards the handle of the car door, back turned.

‘Wait,' Jahmall said, stepping out of the dark.

Seeing him, seeing the pistol, Fontaine smiled. ‘Jahmall, my man.'

‘Bastard,' Jahmall said, moving closer. ‘You killed my sister.'

‘That slag!' Fontaine laughed. ‘Down on her knees in front of any white meat she could find.'

Hands suddenly sticky, slick with sweat despite the cold, Jahmall raised the gun and fired. The first shot missed, the second shattered the side window of the car, the third took Fontaine in the face splintering his jaw. Standing over him, Jahmall fired twice more into his body as it slumped towards the ground, then ran.

After watching the news headlines, they decided on an early night. Lynn washed the dishes left over from dinner, while Resnick stacked away. He was locking the door when the phone went and Lynn picked it up. Ten twenty-three.

‘Charlie,' she said, holding out the receiver. ‘It's for you.'

DRUMMER UNKNOWN

There's a photograph taken on stage at Club Eleven, early 1950 or perhaps late '49, the bare bulbs above the stage picking out the musicians' faces like a still from a movie. Ronnie Scott on tenor sax, sharp in white shirt and knotted tie; Dennis Rose, skinny, suited, a hurt sardonic look in his eyes; to the left of the picture, Spike Robinson, on shore leave from the US Navy, a kid of nineteen or twenty, plays a tarnished silver alto. Behind them, Tommy Pollard's white shirt shines out from the piano and Lennie Bush, staring into space, stands with his double bass. At the extreme right, the drummer has turned his head just as the photo has been taken, one half of his polka-dot bow tie in focus but the face lost in a blur of movement. The caption underneath reads ‘
drummer unknown
'.

That's me: drummer unknown.

Or was, back then.

In ten years a lot of things have changed. In the wake of a well-publicised drug raid, Club Eleven closed down; the only charges were for possession of cannabis, but already there were heroin, cocaine.

Ronnie Scott opened his own club in a basement in Chinatown, Spike Robinson sailed back across the ocean to a life as an engineer, and Dennis Rose sank deeper into the sidelines, an almost voluntary recluse. Then, of course, there was rock 'n' roll. Bill Haley's ‘Rock Around the Clock' at number one for Christmas 1955 and the following year Tony Crombie, whose drum stool I'd been keeping warm that evening at Club Eleven, had kick-started the British bandwagon with his Rockets: grown men who certainly knew better, cavorting on stage in blazers while shouting about how they were going to teach you to rock, to the accompaniment of a honking sax. Well, it paid the rent.

And me?

I forget now, did I mention heroin?

I'm not usually one to cast blame, but after the influx of Americans during the last years of the war, hard drugs were always part of the scene. Especially once trips to New York to see the greats on 52nd Street had confirmed their widespread use.

Rumour had it that Bird and Diz and Monk changed the language of jazz the way they did – the complex chords, the flattened fifths, the extreme speeds – to make it impossible for the average white musician to play. If that was true, well, after an apprenticeship in strict tempo palais bands and pick-up groups that tinkered with Dixieland, where I was concerned they came close to succeeding. And it was true, the drugs – some drugs – helped: helped you to keep awake, alert. Helped you to play an array of shifting counter rhythms, left hand and both feet working independently, while the right hand drove the pulse along the top cymbal for all it was worth. Except that in my case, after a while, it wasn't the drumming that mattered, it was just the drugs.

In a matter of months I progressed, if that's the word, from chewing the inside of Benzedrine inhalers to injecting heroin into the vein. And for my education in this department I had Foxy Palmer to thank. Or blame.

I'd first met Foxy at the Bouillabaisse, a Soho drinking club frequented by mainly black US servicemen and newly resident West Indians, of whom Foxy was one. A short, stubby man with a pot belly beneath his extravagantly patterned shirts and a wisp of greying beard, his ears stuck out, fox-like, from the side of his head. A scaled-down Foxy would have made the perfect garden gnome.

‘Hey, white boy!' he hailed me from his seat near the piano. ‘You here to play?'

‘Maybe.'

‘Forget your horn?'

For an answer, I straightened my arm and let a pair of hickory drumsticks slide down into the palm of my hand.

A bunch of musicians, mostly refugees from some dance-band gig or other, were jamming their way through ‘One O'Clock Jump', but then a couple of younger guys arrived and Foxy pulled my arm towards him with a grin and said, ‘Here come the heebie-jeebie boys.'

In the shuffle that followed, Tony Crombie claimed his place behind the drums and after listening to him firing ‘I Got Rhythm' at a hundred miles an hour, I slipped my sticks back out of sight.

‘So,' Foxy said, planting himself next to me in the gents, ‘that Tony, what d'you think?'

‘I'm thinking of cutting my arms off just above the wrist.'

Foxy smiled his foxy smile. ‘You're interested, I got somethin' less extreme might just do the trick.'

At first I didn't know what he meant.

*

The Bouillabaisse closed down and reopened as the Fullado. Later there was the Modernaires in Old Compton Street, owned by the gangster Jack Spot. Along with half a hundred other out-of-work musicians, I stood around on Archer Street on Monday afternoons, eager to pick up whatever scraps might come my way: depping at the Orchid Ballroom, Purley; a one-night stand with Ambrose at the Samson and Hercules in Norwich. And later, after shooting up, no longer intimidated or afraid, I'd descend the steps into the smoke of Mac's Rehearsal Rooms where Club Eleven had its home and take my turn at sitting in.

For a time I made an effort to hide the track marks on my arms but after that I didn't care.

Junkie – when did I first hear the word?

Applied to me, I mean.

It might have been at the Blue Posts, around the corner from the old Feldman Club, an argument with a US airman that began with a spilt pint of beer and escalated from there.

‘Goddamn junkie, why the fuck aren't you in uniform?'

I didn't think he wanted to hear about the trumped-up nervous condition a well-paid GP had attested to, thus ensuring my call-up would be deferred. Instead some pushing and shoving ensued, at the height of which a bottle was broken against the edge of the bar.

Blind luck enabled me to sway clear of the jagged glass as it swung towards my face; luck and sudden rage allowed me to land three punches out of four, the last dropping him to his knees before executing the
coup de grâce,
a swiftly raised knee which caught him underneath the chin and caused him to bite off a sliver of tongue before he slumped, briefly unconscious, to the floor.

As I made my exit, I noticed the thin-faced man sitting close by the door, time enough to think I recognised him from somewhere without being able to put a finger on where that was. Then I was out into the damp November air.

‘I hear you takin' up the fight game,' Foxy said with glee, next time I bumped into him. And then, ‘I believe you know a friend of mine. Gordon Neville, detective sergeant.'

The thin-faced man leaned forward and held out a hand. ‘That little nonsense in the Blue Posts, I liked the way you handled yourself. Impressive.'

I nodded and left it at that.

In the cracked toilet mirror my skin looked like old wax.

‘Your pal from CID,' I asked Foxy, ‘he okay?'

‘Gordon?' Foxy said with a laugh. ‘Salt o' the earth, ain't that the truth.'

Probably not, I thought.

He was waiting for me outside, the grey of his raincoat just visible in the soft grey fog that had drifted up from the river. When I turned left he fell into step alongside me, two men taking an evening stroll. Innocent enough.

‘A proposition,' Neville said.

I shook my head.

‘Hear me out, at least.'

‘Sorry, not interested.'

His hand tugged at my sleeve. ‘You're carrying, right?'

‘Wrong,' I lied.

‘You just seen Foxy, you're carrying. No question.'