Music of the Night by Martin Edwards

Author:Martin Edwards
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: crime and mystery; crime anthology; original stories; crime collection; vintage crime, cosy crime; detective fiction; gentle crime fiction; flame tree press; creepy stories; Ian Rankin; Mick Herron; Reginald Hill
Publisher: Flame Tree Publishing
Published: 2022-01-28T12:57:36+00:00

His Greatest Hit

L.C. Tyler

Intro

It’s where we all end up, I suppose. In a box in the ground. You can’t take your royalties with you. You can’t take the stretch limo. You can’t even take your secrets.

First verse

“So, when he did that last farewell tour, he really meant it,” said the man standing next to me.

The open grave left neither of us in any doubt of that. The coffin was already partly obscured by the handfuls of earth that the vicar had politely encouraged mourners to scatter over it. Not many handfuls. There were few of us gathered today at this grey, pebble-dashed church, overlooked by the wide, purple Cumbrian fells and the cloudless spring sky. It was, by any standards, a small funeral. Very small indeed for somebody of Tony McGarva’s former eminence and street cred. Some family were there. A couple of old friends. And, for reasons I was still trying to guess at, my agent had generously consented to come with me. I couldn’t quite place the man who had just spoken, though his face was sort of familiar.

“Yes,” I said. “That third farewell tour really was the final one. I don’t think they made much money on it. Musical tastes had moved on. And now, sadly, Tony has too.”

“They had to get permission to reopen the grave,” he said.

“Whose idea was it to bury him with his first wife?” I asked.

“Her sister’s, I think. His second wife’s still alive, of course, so that was never really an option. Not that she’d have been keen, even if she was dead.”

“Two wives, two divorces,” I said. “Quite restrained for a rock star.”

“How did you know Tony exactly?” he asked.

I laughed. It was clear to both of us that I didn’t quite look as if I belonged to the world of rock and roll; but nor, to be fair, did he. “We were at university together,” I said. “Then for a while he was just somebody I read about in the newspapers. Later I met him at a college reunion and he invited me up here to stay every now and then. I think – recently anyway – he was a bit lonely in a Cumbrian village with one pub and no shops. It’s a while since he wrote anything or recorded anything. They still occasionally play his stuff on the radio, of course. At least, that big hit he had in the late nineties – ‘Stolen’.”

He nodded. I don’t know if you can nod bitterly, but if you can then that’s what he did. Maybe he thought ‘Stolen’ was overrated. Some people do.

“My name’s Ethelred,” I said, since we had not yet introduced ourselves. “Ethelred Tressider.”

He nodded again.

“I write crime novels,” I added. “Nothing to do with the music industry at all.”

He didn’t offer his own name in return. He seemed to think I should know.

“That song – it was about his first wife’s death, of course,” I said. I thought I should show that I wasn’t totally ignorant of the music scene, however much of a mystery writer I was.

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