‘She must have been trying to escape when we saw her coming down the stairs.’
‘One can scarcely imagine her feelings when she was forced to take us back to the room,’ Dickens said softly.
‘And when she heard her victim’s dying words. No wonder she vomited when faced with the horror of his corpse. But how did you guess what had happened?’
‘Guess?’ Dickens raised his eyebrows in amusement ‘The scar was my clue. It bore such an uncanny resemblance to that which disfigured the woman in the Rope and Anchor that the whole scheme revealed itself to me. But Bella made one mistake.’
‘Which was?’
‘When she put on the make-up, she forgot that she was applying it to an image in a looking-glass. And so her scar ran down the right cheek. But Nellie’s was on the left.’
The Magic of Your Touch by Peter Robinson
‘Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth, I heard many things in hell.’
– Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’
One night, many years ago, I found myself wandering in an unfamiliar part of the city. The river looked like an oil slick twisting languidly in the cold moonlight, and on the opposite bank the towering metal skeletons of factories gleamed silver. Steam hissed from tubes, formed abstract shapes in the air, and faded into the night. Every now and then a gush of orange flame leapt into the sky from a funnel-shaped chimney.
I was lost, I know now. The bar where I had played my last gig was miles behind me, and the path I had taken was crooked and dark. The river lay at my right, and to the left, across the narrow, cobbled street, tall empty warehouses loomed over me, all crumbling, soot-covered bricks and caved-in roofs. Through the broken windows small fires burned, and I fancied I could see ragged figures bent over the flames for warmth. Ahead of me, just beyond the cross-roads, the path continued into a monstrous junkyard, where the rusted hulks of cars and piles of scrap metal towered over me.
Out of nowhere, it seemed, I began to hear snatches of melody: a light, romantic, jazzy air underpinned by wondrous, heartrending chords, some of which I could swear I had never heard before. I stopped in my tracks and tried to discern where the music was coming from. It was a piano, no doubt about that, and though it was slightly out of tune, that didn’t diminish the power of the melody or the skill of the player. I wanted desperately to find him, to get closer to the music.
I walked between the mountains of scrap metal, sure I was getting closer, then, down a narrow side path, I saw the glow of a brazier and heard the music more clearly than I had before. If anything, it had even more magic than when I heard it from a distance. More than that, it had the potential to make my fortune. Heart pounding, I headed towards the light.
What I found there was a wizened old black man sitting at a beat-up honky-tonk piano. When he saw me, he stopped playing and looked over at me. The glow of the brazier reflected in his eyes, which seemed to flicker and dance with flames.
‘That’s a beautiful piece of music,’ I said. ‘Did you write it yourself?’
‘I don’t write nothing,’ he said. ‘The music just comes out of me.’
‘And this just came out of you?’
‘Yessir,’ he said. ‘Just this very moment.’
I might lack the creativity, the essential spark of genius, but when it comes to technical matters I’m hard to beat. I’m a classically trained musician who happened to choose to play jazz, and already this miraculous piece of music was fixed in my memory. If I closed my eyes, I could even see it written and printed on a sheet. And if I let my imagination run free, I could see the sheets flying off the shelves of the music shops and records whizzing out of the racks. This was the stuff that standards were made of.
‘So you’re the only one who’s heard it, apart from me?’
‘I guess so,’ he said, the reflected flames dancing in his eyes.
I looked around. The piles of scrap rose on all sides, obscuring the rest of the world, and once he had stopped playing I could hear nothing but the hissing of the steam from the factories across the river. We were quite alone, me and this poor, shrunken black man. I complimented him again on his genius and went on my way. When I got behind him, he started playing again. I listened to the tune one more time, burning it into my memory so there could be no mistake. Then I picked up an iron bar from the pile of scrap and hit him hard on the back of his head.
I heard the skull crack like a nut and saw the blood splash on the ivory keys of the old piano. I made sure he was dead, then dragged his body off the path, piled rusty metal over it, and left him there.
I had to get back to the hotel now and write down the music before I lost it. As luck would have it, at the other side of the junkyard, past another set of crossroads, was a wide boulevard lined with a few run-down shops and bars. There wasn’t much traffic, but after about ten minutes I saw a cab with his light on coming up the road and waved him down. He stopped, and twenty minutes later I was back in my hotel room, the red neon of the strip club across the street flashing through the flimsy, moth-eaten curtains, as I furiously scribbled the notes and chords etched in my memory on to the lined music paper.
I was right about the music, and what’s more, nobody even questioned that I wrote it, despite the fact that I had never composed anything in my life. I suppose I was well enough known as a competent jazz pianist in certain circles so people just assumed I had suddenly been smitten by the muse one day.
I called the tune ‘The Magic of Your Touch’, and it became a staple of the jazz repertoire, from big bands to small combos. Arrangements proliferated, and one of the band members, who fancied himself a poet, added lyrics to the melody. That was when we really struck the big time. Billie Holiday recorded it, then Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Peggy Lee, Mel Torme, Ella Fitzgerald. Suddenly it seemed that no one could get enough of ‘The Magic of Your Touch’, and the big bucks rolled in.
I hardly need say that the sudden wealth and success brought about an immense change in my lifestyle. Instead of fleabag hotels and two-bit whores, it was penthouse suites and society girls all the way. I continued to play with the sextet, of course, but we hired a vocalist and instead of sleazy bars we played halls and big name clubs: the Blue Note, the Village Vanguard, Birdland, and the rest. We even got a recording contract, and people bought our records by the thousands.
‘The Magic of Your Touch’ brought us all this, and more. Hollywood beckoned, a jazz film set in Paris, and off we went. Ah, those foxy little mademoiselles. Then came the world tour: Europe, Asia, Australia, South Africa, Brazil. They all wanted to hear the band named after the man who wrote ‘The Magic of Your Touch’.
I can’t say that I never gave another thought to the wizened old black man playing his honky-tonk piano beside the brazier. Many times, I even dreamed about that night and what I did there, on instinct, without thinking, and woke up in a cold sweat, my heart pounding. Many’s the time I thought I saw the old man’s flame-reflecting eyes in a crowd, or down an alley. But nobody ever found his body, or if they did, it never made the news. The years passed, and I believed that I was home and dry. Until, that is, little by little, things started to go wrong.