Last three all sounded the same and they didn’t sell nearly enough. You watch, there’ll be a few twitchy faces around tonight, and I don’t just mean the coke-heads.’
He paused to light a cigarette and I snatched the chance to ask him why it was so important that I be at the party. I was still nursing the forlorn hope of an early night.
‘Now that would be telling,’ he said mysteriously.
‘So tell. It’s only a five-minute cab ride. I haven’t got time to pull your fingernails out one by one.’
‘You’re a hard woman, Brannigan,’ he complained. ‘Never off duty, are you? OK, I’ll tell you. You know me and Jett go way back?’ I nodded. I remembered Richard telling me the story of how he’d landed his first job on a music paper with an exclusive interview of the normally reclusive Jett. Richard had been working for a local paper in Watford and he’d been covering their cup tie with Manchester City. At the time, Elton John had owned Watford, and Jett had been his personal guest for the afternoon. After City won, Richard had sneaked in to the boardroom and had persuaded an elated Jett to give him an interview. That interview had been Richard’s escape ticket. As a bonus, Jett had liked what Richard wrote, and they’d stayed friends ever since.
‘Well,’ Richard continued, interrupting my reference to my mental card index of his past, ‘he’s decided that he wants his autobiography written.’
‘Don’t you mean biography?’ Always the nitpicker, that’s me.
‘No, I mean auto. He wants it ghosted, written in the first person. When we saw him at that dinner, he mentioned it to me. Sort of sounded me out. Of course, I said I’d be interested. It wouldn’t be a mega-seller like Jagger or Bowie, but it could be a nice little earner. So, when he rang me up to invite us tonight and he was so insistent that you come along too, I thought I could read between the lines.’
Although he was trying to sound nonchalant, I could tell that Richard was bursting with pride and excitement at the idea. I pulled his head down to mine and planted a kiss on his warm mouth. ‘That’s great news,’ I said, meaning it. ‘Will it mean a lot of work?’
He shrugged. ‘I shouldn’t think so. It’s just a case of getting him talking into the old tape recorder then knocking it into shape afterwards. And he’s going to be at home for the next three months or so working on the new album, so he’ll be around and about.’
Before we could discuss the matter further, the taxi pulled up outside the ornate façade of the grandiosely named Holiday Inn Midland Crowne Plaza. It’s one of those extraordinary Manchester monuments to the city’s first era of prosperity. One of the more palatable byproducts of the cotton mills of the industrial revolution. I can remember when it used to be simply the Midland, one of those huge railway hotels that moulder on as relics of an age when the rich felt no guilt and the poor were kept well away from the doors. Then Holiday Inn bought the dinosaur and turned it into a fun palace for the city’s new rich – the sportsmen, businessmen and musicians who gave Manchester a new lease of life in the late eighties.
Suddenly, in the nineties, London was no longer the place to be. If you wanted a decent lifestyle with lots of buzz and excitement packed into compact city centres, you had to be in one of the so-called provincial cities. Manchester for rock, Glasgow for culture, Newcastle for shopping. It was this shift that had brought Richard to Manchester two years before. He’d come up to try to get an interview with cult hero Morrissey and two days in the city had convinced him that it was going to be to the nineties what Liverpool was to the sixties. He had nothing to keep him in London; his divorce had just come through, and a freelance makes his best living if he’s where the most interesting stories are. So he stayed, like a lot of others.
I followed him out of the taxi, feeling like partying for the first time since I’d come home. Richard’s news had given me a real adrenalin rush, and I couldn’t wait for the official confirmation of what he already suspected. We headed straight to the bar for a drink to give Jett and his entourage time to get over to the hotel.
I sipped my vodka and grapefruit juice gratefully. When I became a private eye, I tried to match the image and drink whisky. After two glasses, I had to revert to my usual to take the taste away. I guess I’m not cut out for the ‘bottle of whisky and a new set of lies’ Mark Knopfler image. As I drank, I listened with half an ear while Richard told me how he saw Jett’s autobiography taking shape. ‘It’s a great rags to riches story, a classic. A poor childhood in the Manchester slums, the struggle to make the music he knew he had in him. First discovering music when his strict Baptist mother pushed him into the gospel choir. How he got his first break. And at last, the inside story on why his songwriting partnership with Moira broke up. It’s got all the makings,’ he rambled on. ‘I could probably sell the serial rights to one of the Sunday tabloids. Oh, Kate, it’s a great night for us!’
After twenty minutes of bubbling enthusiasm, I managed to cut in and suggest that we made our way to the party. As soon as we emerged from the lift, it was clear which suite Jett had hired for the night. Already a loud babble of conversation spilled into the hall, overlaying the mellow sounds of Jett’s last album. I squeezed Richard’s hand and said, ‘I’m really proud of you,’ as we entered the main room and the party engulfed us.
Jett himself was holding court at the far end of the room, looking as fresh as if he’d just got out of the shower. His arm was draped casually round the shoulders of a classic Fiona. Her blonde hair hung over her shoulders in a loosely permed mane, her blue eyes, like the rest of her face, were perfectly made up, and the shiny violet sheath that encased her curves looked to me like a Bill Blass.
‘Come on, let’s go and talk to Jett,’ Richard said eagerly, steering me towards the far side of the room. As we passed the table where the drinks were laid out, a shirtsleeved arm sneaked out from a group of women and grabbed Richard’s shoulder.
‘Barclay!’ a deep voice bellowed. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ The group parted to reveal the speaker, a man of medium height and build, running slightly to paunch round the middle.
Richard looked astonished. ‘Neil Webster!’ he exclaimed with less than his usual warmth. ‘I could ask you the same thing. At least I’m a bloody rock writer, not an ambulance chaser. What are you doing back in Manchester? I thought you were in Spain.’
‘A bit too hot for me down there, if you catch my drift,’ Neil Webster replied. ‘Besides, all the news these days seems to happen in this city. I thought I was about due to revisit my old haunts.’
Their exchange gave me a few minutes to study this latest addition to my collection of Journalists Of The World. Neil Webster had that slightly disreputable air that a lot of women seem to find irresistible. I’m not one of them. He looked to be in his late thirties, though a journalist’s life does seem to accelerate ageing in everyone except my own Peter Pan Barclay. Neil’s brown hair, greying at the temples, looked slightly rumpled, as did the cream chinos and chambray shirt he was wearing. His brown eyes were hooded, with a nest of laughter lines etched white in his tanned skin. He had a hawk nose over a full pepper and salt moustache and his jaw line was starting to show signs of jowls.
My scrutiny was interrupted by his own matching appraisal. ‘So who’s the lovely lady? I’m sorry, my love, that oaf you came with seems to have forgotten his manners. I’m Neil Webster, real journalist. Not like Richard with his comic books. And you’re …?’
‘Kate Brannigan.’ I coolly shook his proffered hand.
‘Well, Kate, let me get you a drink. What’s it to be?’
I asked him for my
