Moon Over Soho Page 4

  “Got you,” I said.

  Since all I had to go on was the magical echo of one particular jazz tune, I figured it was time to find out precisely which of several hundred cover versions of “Body and Soul” it was. What I needed was a jazz expert so obsessed that the subject had consumed him to the point where he neglected his health, his marriage, and his own children.

  It was time to go see my old man.

  MUCH AS I love the Jag, it’s too conspicuous for everyday police work. So that day I was driving a battered silver ex–Metropolitan Police Ford Asbo that, despite my best efforts, smelled vaguely of old stakeouts and wet dog. I had it stashed up Romilly Street with my magic police business talisman in the window to ward off traffic wardens. I’d taken the Asbo to a friend of mine who’d tuned up its Volvo engine and gotten me a satisfactory bit of zip, which came in handy dodging the bendy buses on Tottenham Court Road as I drove north for Kentish Town.

  Every Londoner has their manor—a collection of bits of the city where they feel comfortable. Where you live, or went to college, where you work or your sports club, that particular bit of the West End where you go drinking or, if you’re the police, the patrol area around your nick. If you’re a native-born Londoner—and contrary to what you’ve heard, we are the majority—then the strongest bit of your manor is where you grew up. There’s a particular kind of safety that comes from being on the streets where you went to school, had your first snog, or drink, or threw up your first chicken vindaloo. I grew up in Kentish Town, which as an area would count as a leafy suburb if it was leafier and more suburban. And if it had fewer council estates. One such is the Peckwater Estate, my ancestral seat, which had been built just as architects were coming to terms with the idea that proles might enjoy indoor plumbing and the occasional bath but before they realized that said proles might like to have more than one child per family. Perhaps they thought three bedrooms would only encourage breeding among the working class.

  One advantage it did have was a courtyard that had been turned over to parking. There I found a clear bay between a Toyota Aygo and a battered secondhand Mercedes with a criminally mismatched side panel. I pulled in, got out, beeped the lock behind me, and walked away secure in the knowledge that because they knew me around here they weren’t going to jack my car. That’s what being on your manor is all about. Although, to be honest, I suspect the local roughnecks were much more scared of my mum than they were of me. The worst I could do was arrest them.

  Strangely, I heard music when I opened the front door to my parents’ flat—“The Way You Look Tonight,” played solo on a keyboard, coming from the main bedroom. My mum was lying on the good sofa in the living room. Her eyes were closed and she was still in her work clothes—jeans, gray sweatshirt, paisley headscarf. I was shocked to see that the stereo was silent and even the TV was switched off. The TV in my parents’ house is never switched off—not even for funerals. Especially not for funerals.

  “Mum?”

  Without opening her eyes, she put her finger to her lips and then pointed toward the bedroom.

  “Is that Dad?” I asked.

  My mum’s lips curved up into a slow blissful smile that was familiar to me only from old photographs. My dad’s third and last revival in the early 1990s had ended when he’d lost his lip just before a live appearance on BBC Two, after which I didn’t hear Mum speak more than two words to my dad for a year and a half. I think she took it personally. The only time I’ve seen her more upset was Princess Diana’s funeral, but I think she sort of enjoyed that more—in a cathartic way.

  The music continued, searching and heartfelt. I remember my mum, inspired by a repeat viewing of The Buena Vista Social Club, buying Dad a keyboard, but I didn’t remember him learning to play it.

  I went into the narrow slot of a kitchen and made us a cup of tea as the tune concluded. I heard my mum shift on the sofa and sigh. I don’t actually like jazz that much, but I spent enough of my childhood as my dad’s vinyl wallah, ferrying disks from his collection to his turntable when he wasn’t well, to know the good stuff when I hear it. Dad was playing the good stuff—“All Blues” now—but not doing anything too smart arse with it, just letting the melancholy beauty shine through. I went back through and put my mum’s tea down on the simulated walnut coffee table, then sat down to watch her listen to my dad’s playing while it lasted.

  It didn’t last forever, or even remotely long enough. How could it? We heard Dad slip off the line and then crash to a halt. Mum sighed and sat up.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “I’ve come to see Dad,” I said.

  “Good.” She took a sip of her tea. “This is cold,” she said and thrust the mug in my direction. “Make me another.”

  My dad emerged while I was in the kitchen. I heard him greet Mum and then a strange sucking sound that I realized with a start was the sound of them kissing. I almost spilled the tea.

  “Stop it,” I heard my mum whisper. “Peter is here.”

  My dad stuck his head into the kitchen. “This can’t be good,” he said. “Any chance of a cuppa too?”

  I showed him that I already had another mug out.

  “Outstanding,” he said.

  When I had them both supplied with tea Dad asked me why I’d come around. They had reason to be a bit cautious, since the last time I’d turned up unexpectedly I’d just burned down Covent Garden Market—sort of.

  “I’ve got some jazz stuff I need your help with,” I said.

  My dad gave me a pleased smile. “Step into my office,” he said. “The jazz doctor is in.”

  If the living room belonged to my mum and her extended family, then the main bedroom belonged to my dad and his record collection. Family legend said that the walls had once been painted a creamy light brown but now every inch had been colonized by Dad’s steel-bracketed stripped-pine shelves. Every shelf was filled with vinyl records all carefully stored in vertical ranks out of the sunlight. Since I’d moved out, my mum’s sprawling BHS wardrobe had migrated into my old room along with the bulk of her shoe collection. This left just enough room for the queen-sized bed, a full-sized electric keyboard, and my dad’s stereo.

  I told him what I was looking for and he started pulling out records. We began, as I knew we would, with Coleman Hawkins’s famous 1938 take for Bluebird. It was a waste of time, of course, because Hawkins barely goes near the actual melody. But I let my dad enjoy it all the way through before I pointed this out.

  “It was old-school, Dad. The one I heard. It had a proper melody and everything.”

  Dad grunted and dipped into a cardboard box full of 78s to pull out a plain brown cardboard sleeve repaired at three edges with masking tape, containing the Benny Goodman Trio on shellac, with a Victor black-and-gold label. He has a Garrard turntable that has a 78 setting but you have to swap out the cartridge first—I laboriously removed the Ortofon and went looking for the Stanton. It was still kept where I remembered it, on the one clear bit of shelf behind the stereo, lying on its back to protect the stylus. While I fiddled with the tiny screwdriver and got the cartridge mounted, Dad carefully slipped the disk out and inspected it with a happy smile. He passed it to me. It had the surprising heft of a 78, much heavier than an LP; anyone weaned exclusively on CDs probably wouldn’t have been able to lift it. I took the edges of the heavy black disk between my palms and placed it carefully on the turntable.

  It hissed and popped as soon as the needle hit the groove and through that I heard Goodman make his intro on the clarinet. Then Teddy Wilson soloed on piano, then Benny on clarinet again. Luckily, Krupa on drums kept a low profile. This was much closer to the tune poor dead Mr. Wilkinson was playing.

  “Later than that,” I said.

  “That won’t be difficult,” said Dad. “This was only recorded five years after it was written.”

  We sampled a couple more on 78 including a 1940 Billie Holiday take that we left on just because Lady Day is one of the few things Dad
and I truly have in common. It was beautiful and sad, and that helped me realize what I was missing.

  “It’s got to be more upbeat,” I said. “It was a bigger combo and it had more swing.”

  “Swing?” asked my dad. “This is ‘Body and Soul’ we’re talking about, it’s never been noted for its swing.”

  “Come on, Dad, someone must have done a more swinging version—if only for the white folks,” I said.

  “Less of that, you cheeky bastard,” said Dad. “Still, I think I know what we might be looking for.” He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a rectangle of plastic and glass.

  “You’ve got an iPhone,” I said.

  “iPod touch actually,” he said. “It’s not a bad sound.” This from a man who ran a fifty-year-old Quad amp because it had valves rather than transistors. He passed me the earpieces and slid his finger around the screen like he’d been using a touch control all his life. “Listen to this,” he said.

  There it was, digitally remastered but still with enough hiss and pop to keep the purists happy. “Body and Soul,” clear melody and just enough swing to make it danceable. If it wasn’t what I’d heard off the body then it was definitely played by the same band.

  “Who is it?” I asked.

  “Ken Johnson,” said Dad. “Old Snakehips himself. This is off Blitzkrieg Babies and Bands, some nice transfers from shellac. The liner notes say that it’s ‘Jiver’ Hutchinson on trumpet. But it’s obviously Dave Wilkins, because the fingering’s all different.”

  “When was it recorded?”

  “The original seventy-eight was cut in 1939 at the Decca Studios in West Hampstead,” said Dad. He looked at me keenly. “Is this part of a case? Last time you came over you weren’t half going on about some strange stuff.”

  I wasn’t going down that road. “What’s with the keyboard?”

  “I’m revitalizing my career,” he said. “I plan to be the next Oscar Peterson.”

  “Really?” That was unexpectedly cocky—even for my dad.

  “Really,” he said and shifted around on the bed until he could reach the keyboard. He played a couple of bars of “Body and Soul,” stating the melody before vamping and then taking the line in a direction that I’ve never been able to follow or appreciate. He looked disappointed at my reaction—he keeps hoping that I’ll grow into it one day. On the other hand my dad had an iPod so who knows what might happen.

  “What happened to Ken Johnson?”

  “He was killed in the Blitz,” said Dad. “Like Al Bowlly and Lorna Savage. Ted Heath told me that sometimes they thought Göring had it in for the jazzmen. Said he felt safer during the war doing tours in North Africa than he did playing gigs in London.”

  I doubted I was searching for the vengeful spirit of Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, but it wouldn’t hurt to check just in case.

  Mum turfed us out of the bedroom so she could change. I made more tea and we sat in the living room.

  “Next thing I know,” said Dad, “I’ll be looking for gigs.”

  “With you on keyboard?”

  “The line is the line,” said Dad. “The instrument is just the instrument.”

  The jazzman lives to play.

  My mum came out of the bedroom in a sleeveless yellow sundress and no headscarf. She had her hair quartered and twisted into the big plaits that made my dad grin. When I was a kid, Mum used to relax her hair every six weeks like clockwork. In fact, every weekend saw someone—an aunt, a cousin, a girl from down the road—sitting in the living room and chemically burning her hair straight. If I hadn’t gotten off at the year-ten disco with Maggie Porter, whose dad was a dread and whose mum sold car insurance, and who wore her hair in locks, I might have reached adulthood thinking that a black girl’s hair naturally smelled of potassium hydroxide. Now, personally I’m like my dad—I fancy it au naturel or in braids—but the first rule about a black woman’s hair is you don’t talk about a black woman’s hair. And the second rule is you don’t ever touch a black woman’s hair without getting written permission first. And that includes after sex, marriage, or death for that matter. This courtesy is not reciprocated.

  “You need a haircut,” said Mum. And by haircut she meant, of course, shaved short enough for my scalp to tan. I promised her that I’d take care of it, and she stalked into the kitchen to make dinner.

  “I was a war baby,” said Dad. “Your nan was evacuated before she had me and that’s why my birth certificate says Cardiff. Luckily for you she unevacuated us back to Stepney before the end of the war.” Or we might have been Welsh, in my dad’s eyes a fate worse than Scottish.

  He said that growing up in the London of the late 1940s it was like the war was still going on in people’s heads, what with the bomb sites, the rationing, and the patronizing voices of the BBC Home Service. “Minus the high explosives of course,” said Dad. “In them days people still talked about Bowlly getting blown up on Jermyn Street or Glen Miller’s plane going missing in ’44. Did you know he was a proper American air force major?” said Dad. “To this day he’s still listed as Missing in Action.”

  But to be young and talented in the 1950s was to live on the cusp of change. “First time I heard ‘Body and Soul’ was at the Flamingo Club,” Dad said. “It was being played by Ronnie Scott just when he was becoming Ronnie Scott. The Flamingo Club in the late ’50s was a magnet for black airmen down from Lakenheath and other U.S. bases.

  “They wanted our women,” said Dad. “And we wanted their records. They always had the latest stuff. It was a match made in heaven.”

  Mum came in with dinner. We were always a two-pot family, one for Mum and a considerably less spicy pot for Dad. He also likes slices of white bread and marge rather than rice, which would be just asking for heart trouble if he weren’t as skinny as a rake to start with. I was a two-pot child, both rice and white bread, which explains my chiseled good looks and manly physique.

  Mum’s pot was cassava leaf while Dad had lamb casserole. I opted for the lamb that evening because I’ve never liked cassava leaf, especially when Mum drowns it in palm oil. She uses so much pepper that her soup turns red and I swear it’s only a matter of time before one of her dinner guests spontaneously combusts. We ate off the big glass coffee table in the middle of the living room with a plastic bottle of Highland Spring at its center. There were pink paper napkins and bread sticks in cellophane wrappers that Mum had swiped from her latest cleaning job. I marged up some bread for Dad.

  As we ate I caught my mum looking at me. “What?” I asked.

  “Why can’t you play like your father?” she asked.

  “Because I can sing like my mother,” I said. “But fortunately I cook like Jamie Oliver.”

  She gave me a smack on the leg. “You’re not so big I can’t beat you,” she said.

  “Yeah, but I’m so much faster than I used to be,” I said.

  I actually don’t remember the last time I sat down with Mum and Dad for a meal, at least not without half a dozen relatives present. I’m not even sure it happened that much when I was a kid. There was always an auntie, an uncle, or an evil LEGO-stealing younger cousin, not that I’m bitter, in the house.

  When I brought this up, Mum pointed out that said LEGO-stealing cousin had just commenced an engineering degree at Sussex. Good, I thought, she can jack somebody else’s LEGO. I pointed out that I was officially a detective constable now and working for a hush-hush branch of the Metropolitan Police.

  “What do you do there?” she asked.

  “It’s secret, Mum,” I said. “If I tell you I have to kill you.”

  “He does magic,” said my dad.

  “You shouldn’t keep secrets from your mum,” she said.

  “You don’t believe in magic, do you, Mum?”

  “You shouldn’t make jokes about these things,” she said. “Science doesn’t have all the answers, you know.”

  “It’s got all the best questions, though,” I said.

  “You are not doi
ng these witchcraft things, are you?” Suddenly she was serious. “I worry about you enough as it is.”

  “I promise I am not consorting with any evil spirits or any other kind of supernatural entity,” I said. Not least because the supernatural entity I’d have most liked to consort with was currently living in exile up the river at the court of Father Thames. It was one of those tragic relationships: I’m a junior policeman, she’s the goddess of a suburban river in South London—it was never going to work out.

  Once we were finished, I volunteered for the washing up. While I was using half a bottle of Sainsbury’s own brand washing-up liquid to scrub off the palm oil, I could hear my parents talking in the next room. The TV was still off and my mum hadn’t spoken to anyone on the phone for over three hours—it was beginning to get a little bit Fringe. When I finished, I stepped out to find them sitting side by side on the sofa holding hands. I asked if they wanted more tea, but they said no and gave me strange identical, slightly distant smiles. I realized with a start that they were dying for me to leave so they could go to bed. I quickly grabbed my coat, kissed my mum good-bye, and practically ran out of the house. There are some things a young man does not want to think about.

  I was in the lift when I got a call from Dr. Walid.

  “Have you seen my email yet?” he asked.

  I told him I’d been at my mum’s house.

  “I’ve been collating mortality statistics for jazz musicians in the London area,” he said. “You’ll want to have a look as soon as you can—phone me tomorrow once you’ve done that.”

  “Is there something I should know now?”

  The lift doors opened and I stepped out into the tiled lobby. The evening was warm enough to allow a couple of kids to loiter by the main doors. One of them tried to give me the eye but I gave it right back and he looked away. Like I said, it’s my manor. And besides, I used to be that boy.