Warren had just stared at him, blinking her creepy eyes in disbelief.
“And so that’s how you hurt your leg?”
“No, no, I did all of that perfectly, but then they wanted one more take. The second try, one of my feet caught on the railing when I vaulted over.”
Her expression had been like a knife fight between pity and contempt while incredulity looked on and didn’t do a damned thing.
“ ‘They’ ?” She’d gazed at him like he was something unexpected in a Petrie dish. “They wanted one more take? The film crew in your mind, Bob, wanted one more take. That’s what you’re telling me?”
Yeah, that’s what Studs was telling her and looking back he wishes that he hadn’t. Information, in the hands of an unstable woman artist, is a weapon. Probably a weapon like a nail-file in that it’s not very masculine but could still do a lot of damage, say for instance if somebody stuck one in your eye. The upshot is that Warren has Studs where she wants him, and if he can’t solve the Blake case then his reputation’s shot. It’s blackmail, pure and simple. Only not so pure. Or simple.
Wearily he reaches for the leather jacket which, he rationalises, maybe stands in for his customary trench coat when it’s at the cleaners getting all the blood and booze rinsed out, plus invisible mending on the profuse bullet holes.
“Moths”. That would be his likel
y quip when the staff at the cleaners asked him what had made them. “38-calibre moths.”
Leaving a brief note for his secretary with regard to dinner preference, Studs hauls his morally bruised carcass out into the unforgiving light and heads towards his car or would a yank say automobile?
Twenty minutes later he remembers where he got that InterCity grid of frown-lines, nudging his frustrated vehicle up another ramp onto a higher level of the Grosvenor Centre’s crowded multistorey car park. Who’d have thought there would be all these people on a Friday? Finally he wins a space by staring threateningly at a silver-haired old lady in a Citroen and, when he has both paid and displayed, makes his way down by elevator into the tinnitus hum and sizzle of the shopping centre’s lower floor. Studs weaves his way through the sedated-looking human surf, among the scrunchie-tufted mums who steer their buggy-bubbled offspring at a stately, ceremonial pace over the glittering electric-lighted tiles; between the strangely marginal and ghostly teenagers who limit their defiance to a smirk, a woolly jumper and the uncontested occupation of a bench outside the Body Shop. Studs curls his lip on one side in what’s meant to be disdain until he notices the strolling shoppers glancing at him worriedly in case he’s either having or recovering from a stroke. Taking a right turn at the elbow of the muttering arcade into a stretch that had been Wood Street once, Studs doggedly heads for the daylight out beyond the glass doors at the walkway’s end.
Abington Street’s pink incline seems bereft despite the florets of spring sun that drop haphazardly through flimsy cloud. This former main drag of the town, the bunny-run, looks weighed down by the realisation that it has no purpose anymore. It keep its head down, tries not to be noticed and sincerely hopes it’s overlooked in any forthcoming wave of redundancies. It seems to shrink from the flint glint that’s in Studs’ eye as if ashamed, like when you recognise some used-up junkie hooker as your teacher from first grade, not that he’s ever had such an improbable encounter. Certainly not with Miss Wiggins, anyway. Aw, Christ. He wishes that he hadn’t conjured that specific image. A real private eye, he tells himself, would manage to come up with hard-boiled metaphors that didn’t actually turn his own stomach. A crushed skull that’s like a broken wholegrain mustard server, for example, is a simile that gets the point across without being indelicate. Miss Wiggins hobbling up and down next to a busy traffic junction in her hearing aid, a mini skirt and heroin withdrawal is another thing entirely, a thing scorched indelibly onto Studs’ forebrain to the point where he can no longer remember what the monstrous imagery was meant to represent. Oh, yes – Abington Street. How did he get from there to all that business with … it doesn’t matter. Just forget it. Focus on the case in hand.
He slouches up the hill past Woolworths, then decides to try a saunter and eventually compromises with a kind of speedy Chaplin shuffle that’s abandoned as unworkable before he reaches the Co-op Arcade. He’s headed for a joint he knows here in this crummy burg where he can get his information from reliable sources. It’s the kind of place that ordinary people tend to keep away from, a suspicious dive where you can spot the criminal activity just from the way that everybody talks in whispers, and where any joker who don’t play by the house rules is looking for some serious payback, possibly a fine. Studs hasn’t visited Northampton library in years, but he’d still bet his last red cent it’s got the answers that he’s looking for, and what the hell’s a red cent, anyway? Is it a rouble? Or a kopek? There’s so much about this line of work, this idiom, that he doesn’t know.
To Studs’ surprise, the library’s lower door beneath its handsome portico no longer offers entry to the building, which necessitates a short stroll past the structure’s grand façade to the top entrance. Ambling self-consciously beneath the slightly condescending gaze of Andrew Washington, uncle of the more famous George, he’s almost reached the safety of the swing doors when he realises something doesn’t feel right. Trusting instincts honed in Vietnam, Korea or conceivably in World War One, Studs glances up and stops dead in his tracks. Up at the street’s far end a black and threatening weather-front approaches, bowling downhill in a whirlwind of displaced pedestrians and flurried litter. Alma Warren.
Nerve-ends screaming like a four alarm fire, praying that she hasn’t spotted him already, Studs hurls himself through the entrance and into the leaflet-papered library reception area. Flattening himself to an unsightly leather stain against the neon handbills on the east wall, he sucks in a breath and holds it, eyes fixed on the glass door as he waits for the intimidating harridan to stalk past in the street outside. He isn’t even really sure why he’s avoiding her, except that automatic furtiveness in any situation seems like good form from a private eye perspective. It’s what Studs would do. Besides, he hasn’t got the information that his nightmare client is counting on him to retrieve regarding the Blake situation, and things could turn ugly.
In the sorry precinct out beyond the glass a great untidy avalanche in lipstick rumbles past from right to left, and Studs exhales. Unpeeling himself from the laminated posters at his rear he steps back to the door and opens it, poking his ruptured punch-bag head around the edge to squint inquisitively at the unsuspecting beatnik artist as she flaps and flounces down Abington Street away from him, like a receding storm. As he enjoys the private eye’s prerogative of watching somebody while unobserved, a further element of intrigue enters the already curious picture: heading up the street on a collision course with the descending painter is the waistcoat and straw hat clad figure of the Boroughs’ own bard-in-a-bottle, the near-universally anomalous Benedict Perrit.
As these two distinctive products of Northampton’s oldest neighbourhood approach each other, Studs is witness to a mystifying ritual. On catching sight of Warren, the inebriated poet swivels and heads back the way he’s come for several paces before turning once again and staggering in the direction of the artist, this time doubled up with laughter. Misaligned eyes narrowing, Studs wonders if Ben Perrit’s strange behaviour could be some kind of code or signal. Maybe this apparent chance encounter between the dishevelled painter and one of her current subjects isn’t quite as random as it seems. Suspicions deepening he watches Warren plant an uncharacteristic kiss on Perrit’s cheek – it’s certainly not how she says hello to Studs – and then after a moment or two’s conversation there’s a furtive transfer as what might be money or perhaps a message changes hands. Are the decrepit pair conspirators, or grotesque sweethearts, or has Warren reached the age where she pays drunks to let her kiss them? Ducking back inside the library entrance as at last the couple separate and carry on with their respective journeys up or down the sloping street, Studs muses that whichever way the cookie falls or the dice crumbles he’s now almost certain that Ben Perrit’s involved in the Blake case right up to his bleary, wounded-looking eyeballs. All Studs has to do is find out how.
To that end, he strides further on into the changed and only intermittently familiar library. He orients himself by the tall Abington Street windows in the north wall, where the filtered daylight pours down on display stands that now occupy an area which used to serve as the newspaper reading room. He can recall the register of local hoboes who once occupied the long-since vanished armchairs, most conspicuously if it happened to be raining. There would be Mad Bill, Mad Charlie, Mad Frank, Mad George and Mad Joe, possibly even Whistling Walter who, a shell-shocked veteran of the First World War, was the sole member of that company who suffered from a noticeable mental illness. All the rest were merely homeless and half-cut, though local folklore had attributed to each of them the ownership of blocks of flats in nearby towns. Conceivably, this inferred status as eccentric millionaires was dreamed up as justification for not giving any spare change to the down-at-heel, or at least that’s why Studs himself would have come up with that kind of a yarn. Progressing through to the main concourse of the venerable institution, he recalls a last-minute addition to his list of browsing bums, this being W.H. Davies who had scribbled down his Autobiography of a Sup
ertramp there under those tall windows in among the muttering and probably infested throng. And now he thinks about it, didn’t Davies go on to collaborate with one of Warren’s heroes, cockney occultist and artist Austin Spare, on their arts publication Form? The way Studs understands it Spare was an Edwardian weirdo who at one point claimed to have been William Blake in a prior incarnation, although he supposes this connection is too tenuous to be the kind of thing that his employer’s looking for. There’s nothing for it. He reluctantly accepts he’s going to have to do some heavy digging.
The best place to start, he reasons, is with Blake himself, the enigmatic figure at the centre of this cold case. Swiftly hunting down an oversized edition of the Lambeth visionary’s work, Studs finds himself a table and a chair where he can catch up with the skinny on his presumed victim. Skimming through the volume’s introduction he confirms that Blake’s dead, very dead, since 1827. The prime suspects seem to have been complications brought on by a bowel complaint, although some time before his death the poet himself had put the finger on the English Winter as a likely culprit. It’s a tempting theory, but Studs rapidly dismisses the frequently castigated season from the frame for want of motive. Without so much as a scrap of evidence providing any leads the case is going nowhere. Hell, it turns out they don’t even have a body yet, with both Blake and his wife dumped into a communal paupers’ grave at Bunhill Fields, their headstone giving only an approximate location for the pair’s remains. The other well-known literary occupants of the East London cemetery, Bunyan and Defoe, both known to have made journeys to Northampton town and to have written on their travels here, are marked by a sarcophagus and obelisk respectively. Why couldn’t it be one of them that Warren was obsessed by?
With a bad mood coming on he flips through the remainder of the intro, anxious for the consolation of the plates, perhaps a touch of Glad Day to lift up his spirits. What he finds he has forgotten is the great predominance of gloomy or downright disturbing images that typify the noted angel-whisperer’s oeuvre. Here’s Nebuchadnezzar crawling nude and horror-stricken through a subterranean underworld, while here’s the corpulent Ghost of a Flea embarking out onto its twilight stage, a bowl of blood held proudly up before it. Even on those pages where the ghouls and monsters are not present, such as the entirely saint-and-seraph decorated and yet overwhelmingly funereal Epitome of James Hervey’s Meditations among the Tombs, a graveyard damp is everywhere. Belatedly Studs realises why that last Blake exhibition at Tate Britain some time back, in company with his contemporaries Gilray and Fuseli, was subtitled Gothic Nightmares. He reflects that if Blake doesn’t turn out to have a Northamptonshire connection then he ought to have, sporting a dismal attitude like that. Northampton was the birthplace, in Studs’ estimation, of the modern Gothic movement and the painter, poet and print-maker’s obvious preoccupation with mortality would have gone down a storm at any of those early Bauhaus gigs.
He finds that he is mumbling the chorus of “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” beneath his morning coffee breath and lets his thoughts drift from the job in hand back to those black and silver nights of twenty, thirty years ago. Studs had been one of the Grand Guignol troupe that gathered like Carpathian fog around Bauhaus 1919, as the ensemble of good cheekbones were then known. There had been Studs himself, and Uber-roadie Reasonable Ray. There had been lead guitarist Danny’s otherworldly brother, Gary Ash, and naturally there had been Little John. From what Studs can recall about the genesis of twentieth-century Gothic there had never been a morbid master-plan or style agenda underlying all the vampire references and the haunted Delvaux railway stations on the picture sleeves. That stuff had all emerged from individual members of the band and, by extension, from the town that they’d grown up in; from its creepy thousand-year-old churches, from its sectioned poets, immolated witches, heads on pikes, dead queens and captured kings, this mould and madness all distilled into Pete Murphy channelling Iggy Pop over a weave of Ash’s riffs from an internal biker film and the aortal rhythm section of the brothers David J and Kevin Haskins. And from these absurdly entertaining origins a flood of mortuary chic, flensed pallor and cadaver soundtracks had arisen to engulf the Western world in melancholia and makeup, yet another purely local fever escalating into a pandemic.
On the soft peripheries of Studs’ hungover vision a septuagenarian in a rose anorak heads for Military History like a scud. He sits surrounded by cloud-chamber sibilance, letting his gaze rest on the open book without focussing the attention. The plate swims and its predominating blacks swirl into a miasma, a vortex of mausolea, a dark whirlpool opening before him as if some hired goon has just cold-cocked him with a sap. Meditations among the Tombs. He thinks back to the evening of the funeral for Little John, the patrons of the Racehorse wading waist-deep, wonderstruck, through the lamenting little guys in town for the event, fifty or sixty of them on a Lilliputian pub crawl up the Wellingborough Road and what must it have been like when they started singing? Nobody there from the Persian royal family, by all accounts.
It had all been to do with the potential stain upon the bloodline, as Studs understands it. Given all the enemies that Little John’s U.S.-supported tyrant granddad had in Persia back then in the ’Fifties, just a few years after he’d been parachuted into power, it was decided that for the Shah’s daughter to produce a malformed child would simply be providing these antagonists with ammunition. Better to pack off the infant to the other end of nowhere, somewhere so obscure that nobody would ever hear his name again or even know of his existence. Like Northampton. Was it any wonder he and John had ended up among the Bauhaus entourage, surfing the purple velvet and the glitter? They were two of the town’s many Gothic flourishes.
The library drifts in and out of form about him and for some reason he finds himself remembering a wholly nondescript perambulation in the company of the hard-drinking dwarf, with John’s complexion scourged by alcohol until towards the end there was more blotch than face. Where had they been that day, the two of them, and why should he be thinking of it now? Studs has a ghostly memory of the Jazz Butcher as being somehow part of the event, although he doesn’t think that the impressively credentialed singer-songwriter had actually been present on the unremarkable occasion that is inexplicably obsessing him. More likely he and Little John had either both been on their way to visit the musician or were otherwise returning from just such an interlude, trudging the sulking backstreet rows between the Butcher’s house up near the Racecourse and the draughty chute of Clare Street closer to town centre. Where exactly was it taken, the imaginary snapshot that seems stapled to Studs’ forebrain, with the little man stamping ahead of him through thin gunmetal puddles down a silent strip of houses? Was it Colwyn Road or Hood Street? Hervey Street or Watkin Terrace? All that he remembers is the picked-scab paintwork and the greying gauze of the net curtains over …
Hervey Street. Of course. Widening his eyes he does a ‘sudden realisation’ take, then narrows them again to peer at the small type beneath the gloomy Blake plate. Maybe if Studs thinks of it as being noir rather than black he’ll come to like it more, but there below the mournful imagery is all the confirmation that he needs for now: James Hervey’s Meditations … it’s the same name, the same surname, even though that doesn’t prove it’s the same man or that he was associated with Northampton. After all, the town has got a Chaucer Street, a Milton Street, a Shakespeare Road and a few dozen other names commemorating persons without even a remote connection to the place, but all the same Studs has a hunch about this Hervey, and his keen-honed P.I. intuition never fails him.
Except when it does, of course. He winces as he recollects one of his trips with Little John to the casino, to the Rubicon down in the Boroughs just off Regent Square. It may have been the same night that his wee companion launched himself onto the roulette table like an extra ball, but what defines the evening in Studs’ memory is his own half-baked behaviour. He’d been a different person then. To be specific, he’d been James Bond in a hypothetical reworking of Casino Royale. Oh, he’d got the tux, got the black bowtie, everything. When it was getting late, he’d tossed his last remaining big-stakes chip onto the table and then, without even bothering to see where it had landed, turned and walked away from the roulette wheel with the manner of a man who’d made and lost more fortunes in an afternoon than others had accomplished in a lifetime; someone devil-may-care and assured in his relationship with chance and destiny. However, with a week’s rent riding on what was apparently a wholly unobserved louche gesture, he was obviously expecting to be halted in his casual saunter from the table and called back by an astonished croupier to collect his unexpected but extensive winnings. When this failed to happen, he’d been devastated. Studs likes to believe, despite the overwhelming evidence which clearly contradicts his theory, that the forces governing existence have a dramatist’s approach to human narrative. He likes to think such entities might have a fondness for last-minute death row pardons, million to one gambles or hair’s-breadth escapes and, as a consequence of this belief, has largely led a life of serial disappointment.
But not this time. He feels certain somewhere deep inside, beneath the steel plate that’s been in his skull since he selflessly took that landmine in the face at Okinawa, that here’s where one of his hunches finally pays off. This Hervey schmuck is hiding something, Studs is sure of it, and maybe if he’s breathed on hard enough he’ll give it up. Cracking his knuckles menacingly he stands and, taking the Blake book with him, heads towards what seems to be an unoccupied internet connection, or interrogation room as he prefers to think of it. He plans to use every low-down technique he knows to loosen up the suspect, everything from good cop/bad cop to a four-pound bag of oranges that damage the internal
organs but don’t leave a mark upon the skin. Or, failing that, he’ll Google him.
Sure enough, Hervey cracks before the sheer brute force of the search engine and before long Studs has got him singing like some kind of devout Calvinist canary. There’s a slew of largely Christian websites that have references to the man, and while the language is so flowery that Studs finds himself in need of anti-histamine, he strikes gold with the first page that he looks at. It seems that James Hervey was a Church of England clergyman and writer, born in 1714 at Hardingstone, Northampton, with his father William serving as the rector of both Collingtree and Weston Favell. Educated from the age of seven at the town’s free grammar school, blah blah, goes up to Lincoln College, Oxford, where he runs into John Wesley, blah blah blah, buried in Weston Favell parish church … Studs struggles to maintain his trademark glower in defiance of the rush of jubilation he is currently experiencing. This, he’s certain, is the lead he’s looking for. Okay, there’s no direct connection to the Boroughs, but at least this new material puts Hervey at the scene.