Mercy Beat
The Poet entered the Archway Tavern through the main entrance facing the busy roundabout which connects Holloway Road, Highgate Hill and Archway Road. He had just returned from returning the Strat to a needy little guy who desperately wanted Jimmy’s Telecaster. But this time Jimmy actually thought before he acted and decided to keep the very lightweight guitar, and to try and hold on to it for a while. “Strange guy” Jimmy thought, “nice enough but didn’t really say anything, just waited for me to make a decision”. This seemed to be a recurring theme in Jimmy’s life, people who said nothing and waited for him to act. Little things like that reminded Jimmy of the very good idea of bringing someone like Tommy in to the new band who always spoke his mind, and often contradicted him. Not a yes-man at all.
The Archway Tavern was only “famous” for one thing; being on the cover of the Kinks Muswell Hillbillies album from 1971. The place looked pretty much the same, and Jimmy had been there once before when he started his “Ray Davies Walk” a few years earlier. Jimmy had always been a big Kinks fan, and had actually played support to the Kinks in Brighton in what seemed another lifetime. That was with an early incarnation of the Post-Moderns who played mostly sixties covers and who fitted the bill perfectly. The walk took the Poet to Fortis Green, past Clissold Arms (now a wine bar) and on down Muswell Hill only to end by Konk Studios. He often took these walks in the footsteps of rock’n’roll, art or poetry or history in general. They sometimes made him feel free, happy and part of the cultural tradition that had inspired him for so long, but every now and then they made him sad and depressed, like the City of London could do. ‘Like a big garden of beauty and sadness, this metropolis’ he thought as he gazed through the windows at the beginning drizzle outside. ‘This sort of blows my idea of spending a few hours in the cemetery’ he thought.
‘Is this James Buxton?’
‘Who’s asking?’
‘My name is Sandy DeLorian’ the female voice said.
‘The Poet speaking’! Jimmy said. ‘James to my mother, Jimmy to my friends and poet to the world.’
‘I’m a friend of Nancy Lee’s. She’s missing since Saturday evening, and I think you were the last to see her.’
‘What makes you think that, and how did you get my number?’
‘Nancy called me very early Sunday morning, said she’d just left your place, and gave me your number in case anything should happen to her, and I haven’t seen or heard from her since. She sounded very scared, and she also said that someone was out to get you and that’s why she left so suddenly. She really cared about you, you know. Oh God, I’m already referring to hear in the past tense.’ The voice on the phone turned to sobbing.
‘Well hold on a tick, what do you mean out to get me? Who’s out to get me and why?’
‘She said it was something about old contracts and how you would be worth more dead than alive to some people.’
Some people could only mean the King organization Jimmy thought. ‘Well, I love to live and so does Nancy! Where are you? Can you meet me as soon as possible? We have to figure this one out and I can’t do it alone.’
‘I’m in a little wine bar at the foot of Tower Bridge, south side, can you get here?’
‘No, meet me in Little Venice. There’s a pub called Warwick Castle in Warwick Place.’
‘I’ll find it see you there in an hour, OK?’
‘Fine, tara for now, and stay safe, OK? This one’s for those who love to live.’
‘Right, cheers see you soon.’
Jimmy decided to take the Tube mostly because he was a complete Tube-maniac.
He had over the years read everything he could find about the world’s oldest underground railway system. He knew about disused stations, the Tube in the 1st and 2nd World Wars and how long it took to travel to all the stations in the system in one long run. It was a cumbersome journey though, and the world record is just under 24 hours. Today Jimmy boarded the Northern Line (Bank branch) at Archway towards Morden, changed at Euston Station for the Victoria line towards Brixton, and again two stops later, at Oxford Street for the Bakerloo Line towards Harrow & Wealdstone, finally alighting at Warwick Avenue some 35 minutes later. Crowded, yes, delays amazingly, no! He found what he believed to be Sandy DeLorian nervously smoking outside the pub. ‘Jimmy! Over here!’ she shouted from across the road. Jimmy waved and crossed over to where Sandy was waiting.
‘Wow, how could you get here so fast? Cab?’ Jimmy asked and commenced to give Sandy a hug. Sandy hesitated for a second then hugged him back and said: ‘no, Jubilee from London Bridge to Baker Street, then Bakerloo to here.’
‘Cool. Let’s get inside.’ They went inside the tiny local pub and Jimmy asked Sandy what she wanted. ‘Bourbon straight’, she replied. ‘Make it a triple!’
‘Even cooler! I’ll go for red wine’ Jimmy said, and they sat down at a table at the back of the mostly deserted room. The pub was classic Britannia, dark, racing green velvet seats, wood paneling, dart boards and mock Tudor exterior. Unusually, the barmaid seemed to be British as well. Jimmy was a man used to travelling and to meeting and working with people from different cultures but he still got somewhat annoyed with the influx of people from Eastern Europe, now working in most bars, boutiques and hotels. ‘At the end of the day, everyone’s got a right to make a living, but they shouldn’t come here and take our jobs’ as his old ex-skinhead mate Basher always said. Wonder where that name came from? No, Jimmy didn’t think like that, but he was a bit sick of all the PC-ness of the modern world. You couldn’t really speak your mind about things anymore. Jimmy was old school and used to saying exactly what he meant, even if it meant putting you foot in your mouth every now and then.
‘Tell me about Sunday morning’ Jimmy said.
‘Well, Nancy called around 4am saying she was somewhere in Shoreditch on her way from your flat, hoping to make it back to where her car was parked, in order to leave London.’
‘Did she say where she was going?’
‘No, but she said something very strange. She said: tell Jimmy that for a pilgrim, he’ not all he’s cracked up to be. What did she mean by that, do you know?’
‘Ha, easy she’s gone to her mother in Liverpool!’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because The Pilgrim and Ye Cracke are two pubs within 50 yards of each other in Liverpool, and her mother has a garage in Pilgrim Street, which has a little bedsit up top.’
‘How do you know all this? You had only just met her the previous evening.’
‘Well, Sandy, Nancy was a good talker and an even better listener. We’d better get up there right away.’
‘To Liverpool?’
‘Sure, where do you think European rock’n’roll started?’
The whole thing was getting stranger and stranger. Knowing that Nancy Lee had been to see Godfrey King on the Sunday following her supposed disappearance makes it even weirder. Or did she really visit King? And if so, why did she phone Sandy early on Sunday morning going on about pilgrims and cracked up poets? A line from a Dylan song appeared in Jimmy’s mind: ‘there must be some way out of here said the joker to the thief.’ And there must be an explanation to all this. ‘Should I call King after all these years’ Jimmy thought. No that will make things even worse. What if he’s behind it all? Let’s try and find Nancy Lee before we do anything else…
