Disturbing the Peace-The Beginning
It
was a dream come true for me.
A
regular spot at The Blue Devil Club, playing guitar in a four-piece
jazz combo,
my three mates on tenor sax, organ and drums. I needed to be good to
gig with
them, and I was. I'd practised on board the Star
Sapphire as a guest musician.
And after leaving the sea, I'd honed my
talent and skills in Hong Kong, and then Australia. By the time I
landed back
in London, my itchy feet tempered (for the moment, anyway) I was ready.
We
support the main show and the one after-hours, and from time to time
we're part
of the headliner's line-up.
I'm
often wandering off home in a taxi just as everyone else is waking
up...the
birds sending out experimental morning chirps ahead of sunrise, trains
and
buses and early cars making their first appearances of the day. I leave
my
guitars at work—my flat on Pentonville Road is
cruise-ship-cabin small. I think
that’s what made it appealing. But there’s barely
room for my clothes, a nice
comfy bed and an equally comfy sofa, let alone show-off space for two
solid
body Fenders (a Tele and a Strat), a handsome black Phoenix
hollow-body—Brian
Setzer plays one—and a lovely Gibson ES-175, an archtop, a
favourite of
traditionalists, though I find it uncomfortable because of an old
injury from
my Sapphire
days.
It
was a chilly night in January when my son came to see me. He rang ahead
to let
me know he’d be there, so I arranged a decent table for him,
plus a meal and
some drinks. And a bed for the night at my flat. Dom’s at
college now, studying
film production. He lives with my mum, close enough to London that he
can catch
a train in every morning. Far enough away that trekking home at that
hour of
the night wasn’t an option.
My
mum’s getting on in years but she looked after Dom when I ran
away to sea after
Emma died. And the arrangement’s stuck.
“Did
you enjoy it?” I asked, outside, desperate for a smoke and
hunting for a taxi.
It was past three in the morning.
“I
did,” he said. “Not my kind of music. But
nonetheless interesting within the
context of musical divergency.”
He
speaks like that now. College has done unforgivable things to his
vocabulary.
“I’m
going to make a film,” he added. “A documentary.
Part of my coursework.”
“About
me?” I asked, foolishly, lighting up.
“About
Ben Quigley.”
Ben
Quigley. Played rhythm guitar for Figgis Green in the late-1960s.
He’d
disappeared from radar four years earlier.
“Why
Ben?”
“He’s
a legend,” Dom shrugged. “The quiet guy in the
back. And nobody seems to know
what happened to him. I’d like to find out.”
“Angel,”
I confirmed, stubbing out my cigarette on the wet pavement.
“Anyway,
I thought you might be able to help,” Dom said, as we climbed
into the taxi.
I’m
the de facto archivist for Figgis Green. My mum is Mandy Green, the
source of
one half of the group’s name. The source of the other half
was my dad, Tony
Figgis. If anyone wants to know anything about the band—its
history, obscure
details like my dad’s first instrument (it was the
piano—when he was thirteen
he passed the entrance exams at Trinity Music College in London) or
where my
mum got her stage clothes (they were created by a fashion design
student named
Liz), whatever happened to so and so (he’s running a pub in
Epsom)—they ask me.
I’m in touch with everyone who ever played with the band. The
guy on bass was
mum’s brother. The drummer was dad’s cousin. And
the fellow who played fiddle
ended up producing records. Ben Quigley was the only one I’d
ever managed to
misplace.
And
my son was right. He was a legend.
“Have
you tried the police?”
“I
have,” said Dom, “but there’s no missing
person’s file, so they’re not much
use.”
“What’s
triggered your inquiring mind?”
“Sophie’s
sister’s got a job at the bank where he has his
accounts.”
Sophie’s
his current girlfriend. Her sister’s a temp. She once worked
for a guy who went
to prison for embezzlement.
“Nothing’s
been touched since 2013.”
“I’m
not sure how useful I can be.”
“You
know people in the music business. They’ll open their doors
to you. You can ask
the right sorts of questions. Perhaps jog some memories.”
“He
could be dead,” I said.
“He
could be,” Dom replied. “But I’d prefer
to believe that he’s not. And when are
you going to stop smoking?”
#
I
was a smoker before Emma died. And then I gave it up. A discarded
cigarette
caused the fire that took her life, and I’d assumed the
blame. In the end, it
turned out not to be my fault at all.
I
stayed away from cigarettes for about five years, and then I started
again. My
preferred poison these days is Benson and Hedges Gold. I’d be
lying if I said I
didn’t want to stop. I do. But my willpower is weaker than my
intent.
Ben
was a smoker too.
I
knew he was missing in action. I’d followed his story, the
same way I’d
followed Gerry Rafferty’s: with a sinking heart and not much
optimism, knowing
how musical souls could be battered like the sea crashing up onto
Hebridean
rocks in a gale.
Gerry
Rafferty was ravaged by drink. He’d checked into a five star
hotel and trashed
his room. A friend had paid his bill and taken him to hospital, but
then he’d
discharged himself, leaving behind all of his personal belongings. A
missing
person’s report was never filed with the police. After that,
he’d gone to
ground…a spokesman said he was in the south of England,
being cared for by a
friend…a solicitor issued a statement that he was in
Tuscany, working on a new
album. In truth he was living with the love of his life in Dorset,
where his
body ultimately surrendered to the devastation of his addiction.
Ben
Quigley’s life was similar to Gerry Rafferty’s, but
without the six haunting
minutes of Baker
Street. He was a
sensitive soul, an excessive drinker, a musician who’d shied
away from the
attention Figgis Green had brought him. He hated touring, hated drawing
attention to himself. After Figgis Green had disbanded in the 1970s,
he’d made
it on his own, spectacularly, his soaring successes interspersed with
mind-boggling, headline generating crashes to earth.
Had
he gone to ground deliberately four years ago? Or had something else
happened
to him?
I
thought I’d start with my mum. She’s got a mind
like a steel trap, in spite of
her advancing years.
“The
last time I saw him was six…no, it was seven years ago,
dear.” She slid an
ashtray towards me at the kitchen table. She knows me too well. “It
was at the funeral of his daughter. You
weren’t here—you’d just begun to work at
sea. I thought I’d best go along and
pay my respects. There weren’t many others there. Ben was
very pleased to see
me. He asked about you and Angie.”
Angie’s
my sister. She writes best-selling mysteries under a pseudonym.
Apparently
readers are more likely to buy a novel by an author named Taylor
Feldspar than
one by Angie Figgis.
Ben
Quigley’s only child passed away at the age of thirty-nine of
a drug overdose.
She was living rough and had been for years. Her mum also died young,
from a
rampaging tumour that filled her body with its cancerous evil. Ben
didn’t marry
again.
I’d
had a look online, just to reconfirm what I knew about him, and the
last time
he’d been mentioned anywhere. There really wasn’t
much. A Wikipedia entry, a
stub which was an offshoot from the main entry about Figgis Green.
Where he was
born—Mitcham—and when—01 May 1941—and
how he came
to be the group—he was hired in 1968 after the original
rhythm guitarist, Rick
Redding, was dismissed for untoward behaviour. Specifically, causing
grievous
bodily harm to my dad.
I
was born in 1968 and I had patchy recollections of meeting Ben a few
times
while the group was still together. There was one
get-together—I think it must
have been Christmas because I remember decorations and paper hats and
my
parents giving me a toy castle with turrets and a real working
drawbridge and
little warriors in armour and on horseback that I could pit against one
another
in amazing adventures. I remember it because Ben was there, and rather
than
mingle with the adults in the lounge, he came upstairs to my bedroom
and
together we sat on the floor and invented a fantastic battle in the
castle.
Kids
are natural dreamers. Their imaginations know no bounds. It all gets
turned on
its head when they go to school and are forced to divert their
attention to
more mundane things like adding and subtracting and identifying the
three
different states of water. Ben Quigley was the only adult I’d
ever met who had
the kind of imagination that I had when I was five. He was
Sir Lancelot.
“And
did Dominic say why he wanted to do a film about him?” my
mother inquired,
adding, “He doesn’t tell me anything.”
“He
was the quiet guy in the back,” I said.
“Quite
a change from his predecessor,” my mum agreed. “He
never did like being in the
spotlight. Sometimes I used to wonder if he was actually there. I mean,
he was there—he
was a perfectly accomplished
musician and he was very professional and never missed a
cue—but his mind
always seemed to be somewhere else.”
“Must
have driven his teachers mad,” I said.
“He
did used to say that, yes, dear. He was always in trouble for not
paying
attention in school. His mother’s still alive, you know.
Although she’s much
older than me.”
My
mum was born in the same year as Ben. A war baby.
“How
do you know that?”
“I
read about her. Just let me think…where was it
now?”
I
waited while she went through the process of association and
elimination.
“Oh
yes, that was it, dear. She’d won a large sum of money in a
contest and the
local paper had thought it was interesting so they’d sent a
reporter and a
photographer round to the care home where she was staying and
they’d written a
story about her.”
“Do
you remember the name of the care home or where it was?”
“I’m
afraid I don’t dear, no. Somewhere in London. I was reading
it online. I wasn’t
actually paying attention to the name of the newspaper.”
Online.
The magical words.
“Edith
Quigley,” my mum added, helpfully. “She’d
be in her 90s.”
#
Ninety-six,
to be exact. I looked her up on Ancestry. Quigley’s an
uncommon name, and I
didn’t have to search too hard. Edith
Cross, who
married Joseph Quigley sometime in the first three months of 1939 in
Surrey
Mid-Eastern.
A
quick online search for Edith Quigley brought up the local south London
newspaper that had reported her contest win and gave me the name of the
care
home. I was lucky—she was born in Mitcham and she’d
married in Mitcham and
she’d lived in Mitcham all of her life. I wasn’t
going to have to travel far to
find her.
I
took my car. I do drive, though I gave it up when I was at sea, and
didn’t
bother with it when I was living in Hong Kong and Australia. I always
think of
cars as I would a horse…stabled somewhere nice and clean and
warm, all wants
and needs taken care of, and regularly taken out for a trot round the
track.
My
horse is an old silver Volvo V70. It’s fast, reliable and
tough, and has room
for all my gear in the back if I’m playing a gig somewhere
that isn’t The Blue
Devil. I bought it second-hand from the police.
Edith
Quigley’s home was a little flat in a newish building that
offered extra care
housing, bingo on Tuesdays, hot meals in the restaurant and a sheltered
garden
at the back—although it was mid-January and far too chilly
and wet to sit
outside. It would have been lovely in the summer.
A
woman named Maureen took me to see Edith in the residents’
lounge. “She’s all
there,” she whispered, confidentially, as we walked through
to the big open
room where Edith was sitting in her wheelchair, a little tank feeding
oxygen
through a transparent tube into her nose. “But her mind does
wander a bit. I
should warn you that she does tend to go off on tangents.”
“My
grandmother was the same,” I said, easily. It was true. From
my gran I learned
patience and how to listen. And how to gently nudge a meandering memory
back
into the present.
Ben
Quigley’s mum was a little bird of a woman, nothing like my
gran, who I
remembered as comfortable and cushiony and smelling of face powder and
lavender. Maureen brought us cups of tea and a plate of chocolate
digestives
and then, with a cheery wave and a warning about no smoking or open
flames,
disappeared.
“What
did you say your name was?” Edith asked, her voice as tiny as
her body.
“Jason
Davey,” I said, and then I corrected myself. “Jason
Figgis.” David is my middle
name, and I’ve used Davey professionally for as long as I can
remember.
“Oh,
Figgis,” she said. “Yes. You’re
Tony’s boy, aren’t you?”
Maureen
was right. Edith was totally on the ball.
“I
am.”
“Figgis
Green was my Benny’s favourite band. He enjoyed playing with
them.”
“I
know he did.” Time for a gentle nudge.
“I’m trying to locate Ben, Edith. And
I’m not sure where to start looking. Have you heard from him
recently?”
“Oh
yes. Quite recently.”
Little
lights and bells started going off in my mind.
“How
recently?”
“I
had a letter. It came in the post. Let me think.”
I
waited.
“No,”
she said, “it’s left me. If you’d like to
take me to my room, I could show you
the letter.”
I
wondered about the propriety of wheeling Edith into a private part of
the home.
Where was Maureen?
I
spotted her, offering plates of biscuits to two other elderly residents
sitting
by the window.
“Would
it be all right if I went with Edith to her flat?”
“Yes,
of course. I’ll be here if you need me.”
Edith’s
room was an open-plan studio affair, with a private loo that had a
shower you
could walk—or wheel—into, and lots of hand rails.
There was a tiny little
kitchen in the corner with a microwave and a fridge and a
sink—not designed for
real cooking, but meals were taken in the restaurant anyway. And the
main part
of the room had a comfy armchair and a neatly made bed and the sorts of
knick-knacks
you’d expect from a lifetime of mantelpieces.
“Now
where did I put it?” Edith wondered, her eyes darting
everywhere. She decided
on a large wicker basket beside the bed which seemed to contain a
collection of
completely unrelated articles: a box of tissues, a package of biscuits,
two
pairs of reading glasses, a rosary, a pair of scissors, and an A to Z
of London
from about 1975. As well as the letter from Ben, which she handed to me.
It
was still inside its envelope. I looked for a return address but there
was
nothing written on the front or the back. I checked the postmark. Sent
from
London. On the 23rd of June 2013.
“Four
years ago,” I said, to Edith, pulling the single sheet of
paper out and
glancing over the brief, handwritten scrawl.
“Has
it been that long? Dear me.”
Hello
mum. How are you?
Just a quick note to say I’m well. Still playing some
concerts here and there.
The old fans still remember. And now they’re bringing their
grandkids. I’m
booked to do a music festival next month. Love, Ben xxx
“Did
he ring you or write to you at all after this letter?”
“No,
he didn’t. It was very naughty of him. His father was the
same. Just after I
married him he was sent off to fight somewhere and he didn’t
write either.
Though of course he likely wasn’t allowed to because of the
secrecy. He was
away more than he was home.”
She
leaned forward, a little conspiratorially.
“I’m
afraid I was very naughty too. I met a handsome Yank soldier while Joe
was away
and I had a little fling.”
I
didn’t say anything. It happened a lot during the war.
“And
that’s how Ben got started. My handsome Yank was shipped out
and then Joe came
home, and we had about a month together and then he was killed in an
air raid.
So there I was, all alone, and me pregnant with Ben, so I went to live
with my
aunt and her house had been bombed. They’d put a tarpaulin
over a hole in the
roof. Two rooms weren’t habitable so I slept downstairs on
the sofa. When we
weren’t in the shelter. And my uncle, of course, was an ARP
warden so he was out
all night. They had a son, my cousin, ever such a lovely young
man…”
I
didn’t like to cut her off. I’d learned, with my
gran, that sometimes a
wandering mind was just a sign of needing to talk to
someone—anyone—who was
willing to share a little time listening.
And
so I sat, and heard about the lovely young cousin who’d died
in a bomber, and
how the V1 and V2 rockets came over Mitcham and nearly made another
hole in
Aunt Bobbie’s roof, and how part of what used to be over the
way was reduced to
rubble and the road was renamed and rerouted, and how Ben used to play
in the
ruins when he was small, because they took a long time to be cleared
away after
the war ended.
“Dear
me,” she said, after about ten minutes.
“I’ve forgotten what it was you asked
me.”
“Did
Ben write to you or ring you or come to see you after he sent that
letter?” I
asked.
“He
didn’t,” Edith said. “I haven’t
heard from him at all since. Although it’s not
unusual. He’s dreadful about staying in touch. I used to take
him to task about
it. But he’d always say he meant to, and he’d
apologise. I once asked him what
he was doing with all of his time. And he said he was thinking up
stories.”
“Stories…?
Did he want to be a writer?”
“Perhaps,”
Edith mused. “Though he never wrote anything down. I remember
when he was small
he used to tell himself stories in bed. I once listened at his door and
he was
amusing himself with a tale about a boy who lived in a tree and
didn’t go to
school. But he had to fight off magical dragons and he had a best
friend who
was a fairy. A boy fairy. With wings. And short trousers.”
I
laughed. That sounded just like the Ben I recalled from that Christmas
with my
toy castle and Sir Lancelot.
“Ben
didn’t involve you in any of his financial affairs, did
he?” I asked.
“He
pays for this flat,” Edith said.
“Does
he?”
“Oh
yes. An amount is automatically withdrawn every month from his
bank.”
Damn,
I thought. No human intervention required. I wondered about the
legalities of
having a word with Sophie’s sister.
“You’ve
been very helpful,” I said, getting to my feet.
“Thank you.”
“You’re
welcome. Your father isn’t alive, is he?”
“He
isn’t,” I confirmed. “He died in
1995.”
“Far
too young,” Edith said.
“He
was,” I agreed.
“Your
mother must still be alive though.”
“She
is.”
“Mandy
Green. I must remember to send her a little note.”
“She’d
like that. I’ll have her send you one so you have her
address.”
I
let myself out, and said goodbye to Maureen, and walked back to my car
for a
smoke.

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