Maxim Jakubowski - The Best British Mysteries III

Captain Andrews, the ruined man? The victim of the carnage which the civilised nations of the world have inflicted on one another? A man, you might say, with nothing to live for. Had he, as a last wild bid to acquire a decent income, murdered his tight-fisted, implacable trustee? A bid to free his wife from the daily toil of grubbing together enough to make their lives possible? Easy enough to feel sympathy for a man who had done more than give his life for his country, a soldier who had given all that made life bearable, had been left with the prospect of years ahead carrying round with him the body that the war had gassed out? Yet, if he has been driven to the last extreme of murder, he has to be brought to trial for it. Let judge and jury find what extenuating factors they can.

So, the Hon. Peter Flaxman? What about that typical example of the new, pleasure-devoted, careless world that seems to have come into being in the wake of all the horrors and deprivations of the years between 1914 and 1918? Is he a new breed, and a by no means pleasant one? A breed of self-seeking, hedonistic young people, uncaring of all below them in the social hierarchy? And is that, when you come down to it, what brought about the demise of a man altogether opposed to such a way of life? An old man who, you could say, represented all the virtues, all the strict morality, of an age on the verge of extinction?

Which of those two men is it – all but certain that one or the other of them put that deadly lozenge into Wilfred Boultbee’s little tin – who in truth conceived that deadly scheme? Isn’t the balance, however unfairly it might seem, equal between them? Each with the same obvious motive, each with opportunity enough, each offered the same easy means of finding a solution to their problems?

So which?

And only one answer. Startlingly plain, once one ceases to look at the human complexities and turns a steady gaze on the simple facts.

Captain Andrews, poor devil, has hands that constantly tremble, shake to the point, as Williams vividly recalled for me, of hardly being able even to hold a cigarette when he desperately wants to inhale the tranquillising smoke. I cannot for a moment see Captain Andrews carrying out that little necessary piece of legerdemain under the starched white table-napkin.

So, if it isn’t the one, it must be the other. Simple. Appallingly simple.

Right, I’m off to see the Hon. Peter Flaxman in his rooms in the Albany.

Or do they insist you have to say just Albany?

Whichever. It’s there that I’ll arrest the murderer of Mr Wilfred Boultbee, City solicitor, repository of a thousand secrets and tight-fisted representative of an age that’s going, going, gone.

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 with his trumpet aimed toward the floor, 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 was 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, ‘I’m gonna 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 Fifty-Second 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 extremes – 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 pickup groups that tinkered with Dixieland, they came close to succeeding where I was concerned. And it was true, the drugs – some drugs – helped: helped you to stay awake, alert, keep up. 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. He was a short, stubby man with a potbelly beneath his extravagantly patterned shorts and a wisp of greying beard. His ears stuck out, foxlike, from the sides 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.’

‘Forgot 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 toward 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.’

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.