Jigsaw by Campbell Armstrong Page A

loyal.
    â€˜I can get him.’
    â€˜Have him run these names, Foxie. Tell him he’s back on the team.’
    Pagan looked in the direction of the tunnel. It suggested a large maleficent eye, unblinking, relentless. He saw his future down there. And he didn’t like it.
    â€˜I need a few hours to myself,’ he said. ‘Before the fray.’
    Foxie was not surprised by Pagan’s statement. He was accustomed to the fact that Frank, who had only a passing acquaintance with police orthodoxy, needed moments of privacy and contemplation before he decided his next course of action. There was at times something of the monk in Pagan’s character, Foxie thought – one a long way removed from Thomas Aquinas.
    It was already dark by the time Pagan left the Underground station. He had Foxworth drive him home. He lived in a flat in Holland Park, nothing special, a couple of upstairs rooms that overlooked a square, a small park usually dense and green in summer but withered now, and uninviting. He unlocked the door and went inside, turned on the light. The air was stale. He stepped into the living-room, set his suitcase down and poured himself a glass of Auchentoshan, a Lowland malt he favoured. He sat in an armchair and looked round the room. On the mantelpiece were old photographs – himself and Roxanne on their wedding-day, an artless black and white shot of Roxanne he’d taken one afternoon in Regent’s Park, sunshine, wind in her hair, an enigmatic smile on her lips. On the walls were posters from historic rock concerts. The Rolling Stones at Wembley. Fats Domino at the London Palladium.
    He sipped his drink slowly. Something about the apartment bothered him. Silence. The place needed noise. Let’s blow the cobwebs of quietness away. He sifted through his record collection – he hadn’t succumbed to the compact disc, didn’t believe in those smooth oily things, they lacked authenticity, they didn’t have the necessary scratchy quality – and he put a long-playing record on the turntable of his stereo. It was vintage rock and roll, Little Richard singing ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’. Pagan found the comfort of the familiar in these raucous old tunes. He refused to give up his passion for the music. He wasn’t going to be swayed by New Wave or Rap or Grunge or whatever the flavour of the month was called. More than mere nostalgia sustained Pagan’s affection for the old rock. It was wild, liberating. It drove a stake through the heart of silence. Little Richard or Jerry Lee could dynamite a room.
    Tracked by the hammering persistence of the music, he walked absently through the flat, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom. In the bathtub he found a dead mouse, a desiccated little corpse. He picked it up by its brittle tail and held it.
    He heard somebody knocking on his front door. He knew at once that it was Miss Gabler from the flat below. He opened the door. She stood clutching the collar of her robe to her throat.
    â€˜You are playing your Negro music again,’ she said. She was fragile, seventyish, and had been raised in India, where her father had been some kind of colonial administrator. ‘I have had weeks of peace, Mr Pagan. Blessed weeks. I really must protest. My nerves are bad enough. I have my angina to consider.’ She spoke of her heart condition as if it were a neurotic pet she had to nurse.
    Pagan was apologetic. ‘I’ll turn it down, Miss Gabler.’
    â€˜I would understand it if you had less violent tastes, Mr Pagan. Some soothing Haydn, a little Mozart. I would not object to these.’
    â€˜I’ll turn it down. Promise.’
    â€˜Very well. See that you do.’ Miss Gabler still held her robe shut as if she thought there was some connection between ‘Negro music’ and a menace to her chastity.
    Pagan held up the mouse close to the woman’s face. ‘Look what I found.’
    â€˜Oh lord,’ said