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Part Two
33
Samuel
The Times
Monday, 24 June 2019
The Metropolitan Police are investigating the discovery of human remains found by a mud-larker on the shores of the River Thames just under a week ago. They have been identified as those of Bridget Dunlop-Evers, also known as Birdie, who was reported missing by her family in 1996 when she was thirty-two years old. She had been a member of the bandOriginal Versionwho enjoyed a handful of pophits in the late 1980s. She left the band shortly after their last hit and has not been seen since. According to Miss Dunlop-Evers’ family, she had been briefly homeless, along with her boyfriend Justin Redding, who played percussion with the same band, but they might have found lodgings with a new friend who lived, according to Miss Dunlop-Evers, ‘in a large house’. Attempts to track down Miss Dunlop-Evers and Mr Redding when they were reported missing were unsuccessful and their fate has remained a mystery for nearly three decades. Anyone with any information regarding Dunlop-Evers’ and Redding’s whereabouts at the time of their disappearance is asked to contact the Metropolitan Police at their earliest convenience. Additionally, anyone with any information regarding the location of the house where the couple may have been living is also invited to make contact.
Accompanying the article is a photograph of Birdie taken during her time with the band. She is wearing a floral bandana around her neck and is holding a fiddle to her shoulder. Her hair is light brown, fine and very long, with a back-combed fringe. Her eyes are small and narrowed at the camera. Her mouth is hard and painted pink, and as predicted by the facial reconstruction artist, her chin is weak. The text underneath says: ‘Birdie Dunlop-Evers, whose remains have been found on the banks of the Thames.’
I click on the readers’ comments section underneath the article.
They are full of slightly harsh reminiscences of the summer in which their hit had been a number one for too long, when it appearseveryone had heard the song too much. A few strike a more respectful note; some remember the story of her being missing in the mid-nineties. Some remember seeing the band playing live in the 1980s. One remembers meeting Birdie: ‘She was tiny. Kind of cool. She signed my hand. She smelled like that White Musk from the Body Shop that everyone used to wear. She was actually a very talented violinist, you know, classically trained. Such a great shame. Her poor family.’
I get to the end of the comments. It’s not being greeted as a big news story. It’s a footnote. An oddity. It’s just one big news story away from sliding out of the BBC’s top ten Most Read stories. It’s now or never in terms of it hitting the right people, the people who might know what happened to Birdie.
I stare at my phone, willing it to ring. It doesn’t. I go back to my browser and continue the research I’d been doing into Birdie Dunlop-Evers and her band, the Original Version. I have read the interviews with her former band members transcribed from the period after she was reported missing. It felt to me that she had only been brought into the band because of her musical prowess, not because of camaraderie or a bond of friendship. None of her bandmates back in ’96 seemed to have any idea where she might have been for the preceding two years. None of them seemed to care. They described her as cold and secretive, difficult and demanding. They described Justin as a hippy, a space cadet, as too nice for Birdie.
I flick through the small array of images of Birdie on the internet. She disappeared just before the internet was born so there isn’t much trace of her to be researched. There’s one photo that keeps recurring though. Birdie, in a velvet hat and a huge satin pussybow, her chin held tight against the rest on her fiddle, her eyes flashing at the camera, her lips pursed. I’ve studied this photo in detail and have observed in the background a large red chair that looks like a throne, a wood-panelled wall with velvet shaded lights on it and the suggestion of the head of a stuffed beast of some description.
A thought occurs to me and I do a reverse Google search on the image to see where else it has been posted. It comes back with eighteen hits and I go through them in order. They are on nostalgia sites mainly. The Whatever Happened To sites. But then I click the ninth image and it takes me to a site that includes a link to a video on YouTube. It appears that the photo of Birdie playing the fiddle in front of a throne is in fact a still from one of their videos. The one for the song that was a huge hit. I wasn’t here in 1988. I was five years old in 1988, and still in Ghana. I wasn’t particularly aware of pop music. Not until we arrived in London when I was thirteen years old, by which pointOriginal Versionhad come and gone and so I had never before seen the video to this song that seems to have bugged the life out of everyone in the UK that summer long, long ago. I make the screen large, and I press play.
The band are all dressed alike, in flounces and cloaks and velvet and make-up. They swagger down a set of mahogany stairs that curves towards a large hallway. In the hallway are two red velvet thrones. One of the band members jumps up into the throne and slams his sticks against a drum tied around his neck. The camera pans around the hallway and follows two more band members as they stamp into a room that looks like a private bar; a woman behind the bar hands them tumblers of some kind of alcohol, amber in colour. One of them jumps up on the bar and I see theyare wearing knee-high boots with laces. The song is kind of snappy and fun. I can see why it was so popular, and the video is high-octane and exciting. The camera follows the two men out of the bar and into a room with oil paintings on the walls and a huge brass chandelier with what look like candles but are in fact lightbulbs in the shapes of candles. Then we are out again and back in the hallway and there is Birdie in her velvet layers and her hat and her red lips and violin and there … I pause the video.Thereis the precise moment that has been captured in the photograph.
I wonder about this building as I press play and continue to watch the video; the private bar gives the impression of it being a club of some sort. I wonder where it is. And then suddenly the front door swings wide open and we are in a manicured garden with small mazes carved into low hedges and a pair of cannons on stone pedestals, and the band heads down this path still playing their instruments. The lead singer has his face in front of the camera for most of the time, leaning down into it as if it is held by a very small person. And then the camera turns and we are, I see, by the River Thames – in Chelsea, I would hazard, the Embankment maybe.
The camera turns and I see the building in full: a double-fronted house, with three rows of windows; four on the bottom, six in the middle, six on the top.
Something inside my gut kicks out against my spine, hard. I hit the pause button again and I stare at the house. This video was filmed in 1988. The same year that Philip Dunlop-Evers claims his family fell out with his sister; the last time his family says they saw her; the time that she was about to be kicked out of her flat because she’d acquired a cat without permission; the same time afriend with a big house had suggested she might be able to stay with them for a while.
I take a photo of the image of the house paused on my screen and I leave my office, collecting my colleague Donal on the way.
‘Where are we going, boss?’
‘We’re going to Chelsea, Donal. We’re going to Chelsea.’
