Fedora
Authors: John Harvey
Contents
Winner of the Crime Writer’s Association Short Story Dagger, 2014.
Private investigator, Jack Kiley, is persuaded to look into an old relationship between a photographer and a model with disastrous results.
Also includes the opening chapter of John Harvey’s new Resnick novel,
Darkness, Darkness
, out in paperback on 25 September.
Best known as a writer of crime fiction, his work translated into more than twenty languages, John Harvey is also a dramatist, poet, publisher and occasional broadcaster.
The first of his twelve Charlie Resnick novels,
Lonely Hearts
, was named by
The Times
as one of the ‘100 Best Crime Novels of the Century’. The recipient of honorary doctorates from the Universities of Nottingham and Hertfordshire, in 2007 he was awarded the Crime Writers’ Association Cartier Diamond Dagger for Lifetime Achievement. ‘Fedora’ won the 2014 Crime Writer’s Association Short Story Award.
For more about the author visit
www.mellotone.co.uk
In a True Light
Nick’s Blues
Gone to Ground
Far Cry
Good Bait
The Elder Novels
Flesh and Blood
Ash and Bone
Darkness and Light
The Resnick Novels
Lonely Hearts
Rough Treatment
Cutting Edge
Off Minor
Wasted Years
Cold Light
Living Proof
Easy Meat
Still Water
Last Rites
Cold in Hand
Darkness, Darkness
Short Stories
Now’s the Time
Minor Key
A Darker Shade of Blue
Poetry
Ghosts of a Chance
Bluer Than This
Out of Silence: New & Selected Poems
As Editor
Blue Lightning
Men From Boys
John Harvey
When they had first met, amused by his occupation, Kate had sent him copies of Hammett and Chandler, two neat piles of paperbacks, bubble-wrapped, courier-delivered. A note:
If you’re going to do, do it right. Fedora follows
. He hadn’t been certain exactly what a fedora was.
Jack Kiley, private investigator. Security work of all kinds undertaken. Ex-Metropolitan Police
.
Most of his assignments came from bigger security firms, PR agencies with clients in need of babysitting, steering clear of trouble; solicitors after witness confirmation, a little dirt. If it didn’t make him rich, most months it paid the rent: a second-floor flat above a charity shop in north London, Tufnell Park. He still didn’t have a hat.
Till now.
One of the volunteers in the shop had taken it in. ‘An admirer, Jack, is that what it is?’
There was a card attached to the outside of the box:
Chris Ruocco of London, Bespoke Tailoring
. It hadn’t come far. A quarter mile, at most. Kiley had paused often enough outside the shop, coveting suits in the window he could ill afford.
But this was a broad-brimmed felt hat, not quite black. Midnight blue? He tried it on for size. More or less a perfect fit.
There was a note sticking up from the band: on one side, a quote from Chandler; on the other a message:
Ozone, tomorrow. 11am?
Both in Kate Keenan’s hand.
He took the hat back off and placed it on the table alongside his mobile phone. Had half a mind to call her and decline. Thanks, but no thanks. Make some excuse. Drop the fedora back at Ruocco’s next time he caught the overground from Kentish Town.
It had been six months now since he and Kate had last met, the premiere of a new Turkish-Albanian film to which she’d been invited, Kiley leaving halfway through and consoling himself with several large whiskies in the cinema bar. When Kate had finally emerged, preoccupied by the piece she was going to write for her column in the
Independent
, something praising the film’s mysterious grandeur, its uncompromising pessimism – the phrases already forming inside her head – Kiley’s sarcastic ‘Got better, did it?’ precipitated a row which ended on the street outside with her calling him a hopeless philistine and Kiley suggesting she take whatever pretentious arty crap she was going to write for her bloody newspaper and shove it.
Since then, silence.
Now what was this? A peace offering? Something more?
Kiley shook his head. Was he really going to put himself through all that again? Kate’s companion. Cramped evenings in some tiny theatre upstairs, less room for his knees than the North End at Leyton Orient; standing for what seemed like hours, watching others genuflect before the banality of some Turner Prize winner; another mind-numbing lecture at the British Library; brilliant meals at Moro or the River Café on Kate’s expense account; great sex.
Well, thought Kiley, nothing was perfect.
Ozone, or to give it its proper title, Ozone Coffee Roasters, was on a side street close by Old Street station. In full view in the basement, industrial-size roasting machines had their way with carefully harvested beans from the best single-estate coffee farms in the world – Kiley had Googled the place before leaving – while upstairs smart young people sat either side of a long counter or at heavy wooden tables, most of them busy at their laptops as their flat whites or espressos grew cold around them. Not that Kiley had anything against a good flat white – twenty first century man, or so he sometimes liked to think, he could navigate his way round the coffee houses in London with the best of them.
Chalked on a slate at the front of one of the tables was Kate Keenan’s name and a time, 11.00, but no Kate to be seen.
Just time to reassess, change his mind.
Kiley slid along the bench seat and gave his order to a waitress who seemed to be wearing mostly tattoos. Five minutes later, Kate arrived.
She was wearing a long, loose crepe coat that swayed around her as she walked; black trousers, a white shirt, soft leather bag slung over one shoulder. Her dark hair was cut short, shorter than he remembered, taking an extra shine from the lighting overhead. As she approached the table her face broke into a smile. She looked Kiley thought, allowing himself the odd ageist indiscretion, lovelier that any forty-four year old woman had the right.
‘Jack, you could at least have worn the hat.’
‘Saving it for a special occasion.’
‘You mean this isn’t one?’
‘We’ll see.’
She kissed him on the mouth.
‘I’m famished,’ she said. ‘You going to eat?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘The food’s good. Very good.’
There was an omelette on the menu, the cost, Kiley reckoned, of a meal at McDonald’s or Subway for a family of five. When it came it was fat and delicious, stuffed with spinach, shallots and red pepper and bright with the taste of fresh chillis. Kate had poached eggs on sourdough toast with portobello mushrooms. She’d scarcely punctured the first egg when she got down to it.
‘Jack, a favour.’
He paused with his fork half-way to his mouth.
‘Graeme Fisher, mean anything to you?’
‘Vaguely.’ He didn’t know how or in what connection.
‘Photographer, big in the sixties. Bailey, Duffy, Fisher. The big three, according to some. Fashion, that was his thing. Everyone’s thing.
Biba
.
Vogue
. You couldn’t open a magazine, look at a hoarding without one of his pictures staring back at you.’ She took a sip from her espresso. ‘He disappeared for a while in the eighties – early seventies, eighties. Australia, maybe, I’m not sure. Resurfaced with a show at Victoria Miro, new work, quite a bit different. Cooler, more detached: buildings, interiors, mostly empty. Very few people.’
Skip the art history, Kiley thought, this is leading where?
‘I did a profile of him for the
Independent on Sunday
,’ Kate said. ‘Liked him. Self-deprecating, almost humble. Genuine.’
‘What’s he done?’ Kiley asked.
‘Nothing.’
‘But he is in some kind of trouble?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Shenanigans.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Someone else’s wife; someone else’s son, daughter. What used to be called indiscretions. Now it’s something more serious.’
Following the high-profile arrests of several prominent media personalities, accused of a variety of sexual offences dating back up to forty years, reports to the police of historic rape and serious sexual abuse had increased four-fold. Men – it was mostly men – who had enjoyed both the spotlight and the supposed sexual liberation of the sixties and later were contacting their lawyers, setting up damage limitation exercises, quaking in their shoes.
‘You’ve still got contacts in the Met, haven’t you, Jack?’
‘A few.’
‘I thought if there was anyone you knew – Operation Yewtree, is that what it’s called? – I thought you might be able to have a word on the quiet, find out if Fisher was one of the people they were taking an interest in.’
‘Should they be?’
‘No. No.’
‘Because if they’re not, the minute I mention his name, they’re going to be all over him like flies.’
Kate cut away a small piece of toast, added mushroom, a smidgeon of egg. ‘Maybe there’s another way.’
Kiley said nothing.
As if forgetting she’d changed the style, Kate smoothed a hand across her forehead to brush away a strand of hair. ‘When he was what? Twenty-nine? Thirty? He had this relationship with a girl, a model.’
Kiley nodded, sensing where this was going.
‘She was young,’ Kate said. ‘Fifteen. Fifteen when it started.’
‘Fifteen,’ Kiley said quietly.
‘It wasn’t aggressive, wasn’t in any sense against her will, it was … like I say, it was a relationship, a proper relationship. It wasn’t even secret. People knew.’
‘People?’
‘In the business. Friends. They were an item.’
‘And that made it okay? An item?’
‘Jack …’
‘What?’
‘Don’t prejudge. And stop repeating everything I say.’
Kiley chased a last mouthful of spinach around his plate. The waitress with the tattoos stopped by their table to ask if there was anything else they wanted and Kate sent her on her way.
‘He’s afraid of her,’ Kate said. ‘Afraid she’ll go to the police herself.’
‘Why now?’
‘It’s in the air, Jack. You read the papers, watch the news. Cleaning out the Augean stables doesn’t come into it.’
Kiley was tempted to look at his watch: ten minutes without Kate making a reference he failed to understand. Maybe fifteen. ‘A proper relationship, isn’t that what you said?’
‘It ended badly. She didn’t want to accept things had run their course. Made it difficult. When it became clear he wasn’t going to change his mind, she attempted suicide.’
‘Pills?’
Kate nodded. ‘It was all hushed up at the time. Back then, that was still possible.’
‘And now he’s terrified it’ll all come out …’
‘Go and talk to him, Jack. Do that at least. I think you’ll like him.’
Liking him, Kiley knew, would be neither here nor there, a hindrance at best.
There was a bookshop specialising in fashion and photography on Charing Cross Road. Claire de Rouen. Kiley had walked past there a hundred times without ever going in. Two narrow flights of stairs and then an interior slightly larger than the average bathroom. Books floor to ceiling, wall to wall. There was a catalogue from Fisher’s show at Victoria Miro, alongside a fat retrospective, several inches thick. Most of the photographs, the early ones, were in glossy black and white. Beautiful young women slumming in fashionable clothes: standing, arms aloft, in a bomb site, dripping with costume jewellery and furs; laughing outside Tubby Isaac’s Jellied Eel Stall at Spitalfields; stretched out along a coster’s barrow, legs kicking high in the air. One picture that Kiley kept flicking back to, a thin-hipped, almost waif-like girl standing, marooned, in an empty swimming pool, naked save for a pair of skimpy pants and gold bangles snaking up both arms, a gold necklace hanging down between her breasts. Lisa Arnold. Kate had told him her name. Lisa. He wondered if this were her.
The house was between Ladbroke Grove and Notting Hill, not so far from the Portobello Road. Flat fronted, once grand, paint beginning to flake away round the windows on the upper floors. Slabs of York Stone leading, uneven, to the front door. Three bells. Graeme Fisher lived on the ground floor.
He took his time responding.
White hair fell in wisps around his ears; several days since he’d shaved. Corduroy trousers, collarless shirt, cardigan wrongly buttoned, slippers on his feet.
‘You’ll be Kate’s friend.’
Kiley nodded and held out his hand.
The grip was firm enough, though when he walked it was slow, more of a shuffle, with a pronounced tilt to one side.
‘Better come through here.’
Here was a large room towards the back of the house, now dining room and kitchen combined. A short line of servants’ bells, polished brass, was still attached to the wall close by the door.