The Mammoth Book Of Best British Mysteries - Plot & Excerpts
It was November, late in the month and the night air bright with cold that numbed your fingers even as it brought a flush of color to your cheeks. London, the winter of fifty-six, and we were little more than kids then, Patrick, Val and myself, though if anyone had called us that we’d have likely punched him out, Patrick or myself at least, Val in the background, careful, watching. Friday night it would have been, a toss-up between the Flamingo and Studio 51, and on this occasion Patrick had decreed the Flamingo: this on account of a girl he’d started seeing, on account of Diane. The Flamingo a little more cool, a little more style; more likely to impress. Hip, I suppose, the word we would have used. All three of us had first got interested in jazz at school, the trad thing first, British guys doing a earnest imitation of New Orleans; then, for a spell, it was the Alex Welsh band we followed around, a hard-driving crew with echoes of Chicago, brittle and fast, Tuesday nights the Lyttelton place in Oxford Street, Sundays a club out at Wood Green.
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