Remix (2010) Read Online Free PDF

scowled and put on my sunglasses.
    Just too damn gorgeous, that was our trouble.
    The traffic accelerated, and we turned towards the A4. Time for Ric to spill the beans to his new sidekick. I opened my mouth to say this, but he spoke first.
    “Where did you get that horse, the big one with attitude? An Ayres, did you say it was?”
    I told him it had been a very lucky find. The pensioner who owned it had been going to throw it out - he didn’t know what it was, and thought it beyond repair. He’d said I could have it for fifteen quid, but in the end we’d settled on PS375 as being a fairer price. Ric asked about the other horses, how I got started, where I’d been to college, about my teaching job and how I got my fabulous workshop. I told him about Mum dying, and how much I missed her; he said his parents were dead too, but he’d never been close to them. They’d sent him to boarding school when he was seven, and he spent the holidays with his grandmother. We were turning off the motorway when I realized I’d intended Ric to confess all, and we’d be at his agent’s house before he had time to do this.
    I’d better get on with it. I said, “What’s Phil Sharott like?”
    “He’s a lawyer. He was a trainee solicitor in Bristol when I was there. He’d done law at Bristol.”
    “What did you study?”
    “Pure maths.”
    “Wow.” I was impressed. “You must be bright.”
    He smiled wryly and shook his head. “I didn’t qualify. I went a bit wild the first year - the exams don’t count towards the degree, and you’re allowed to retake them. The second year, I left before the end to work full time with the band. I knew I hadn’t done enough to keep up. I jumped before I was pushed. D’you have exams at art college?”
    “No.” I refused to be sidetracked. “Why would a lawyer manage a rock band?”
    “Phil wanted to make some money while he was a trainee. He’s pretty good at it. Our first record deal was his doing.”
    “What did he think of you faking your own death?”
    “He organized it.”
    I was taken aback. You’d think a lawyer would uphold the law, not break it.
    “Why?”
    “I didn’t want to go to prison.”
    “But if you were innocent, surely you’d have got off? They’d have found the real murderer. They only stopped investigating because you were dead.”
    “No, because they thought I did it. Haven’t you read it up?”
    “It’s all circumstantial, isn’t it, the evidence? Just that you had a row with Bryan Orr—”
    “Two rows. Not everything got in the papers.” He sighed. His voice was flat. “Okay, I’ll tell you how it started. Bryan had a new girlfriend. Emma. Emma Redfern. She temped one week for Phil, that’s how they met. She wanted to make it as a singer herself, and I reckon that’s why she latched on to him. I didn’t like her much, but he was under her thumb, and she went everywhere with him, you could never talk to him on his own. She said he wasn’t getting a fair deal, he needed to stick up for himself - for instance, why was it always Kealey/Orr on the credits, why not Orr/Kealey on half of them? It had never been an issue. It got blown up out of all proportion, because of her. In the end me and Bryan were barely speaking, let alone writing songs together. A lot of it was my fault, back then I was out of my head half the time, and he had written a couple of songs on his own, it’s true, that were credited to us both. I was a mess, I didn’t turn up when I said I would, I’d got unreliable. I’d lost it.”
    He was speaking more slowly now. “ On the day before he died, we were supposed to be doing a remix at Tiger Studios. I turned up two hours late. We got into an argument, then, I don’t know how it happened, me and Bryan were fighting on the floor. Jeff and Dave had to pull us apart. I stormed out, and Bryan followed and yelled at me on the main staircase. In front of a lot of people. He said, if you come back I’ll fucking kill you