Rock'n'Roll Suicide (Jack Lockwood Mystery Series Book 1)

by Geoffrey West

  Ken Taylor and I had gone to Cornwall as rehabilitation after my ghastly experiences in St Michael’s psychiatric hospital. Ken had suggested the fishing break in Mousehole (pronounces Mowsell, as the locals informed me) as relaxing therapy, and his wife hadn’t objected to being left with their twins. Ken and I had reminisced about old times and relaxed in a way we hadn’t done since school. Bearded swarthy Nikki Prowse had owned the fishing launch MARY KENNY, and become a friend of ours, and he’d taken us out and lent us rods, shared his tales of his Cornish ancestors who were cutthroats and smugglers, while the sun beat down on the foaming waves and we waited in vain for the fish to bite.

  But I wasn’t dreaming about Nikki, or even Ken. I was dreaming about Nikki’s sister Miranda, whom I’d got to know well one afternoon while Ken was away touring the ruins of an ancient church. Tall blonde Miranda’s shy smile had captivated me from the moment I’d first met her, and now I was dreaming that she actually had turned up on our final day as she’d promised. We’d seen each other for three evenings running, and yet, on that final day, she stood me up without a word. Now, in my dream, she was running towards me from a distance, shouting, but I couldn’t hear her words. I couldn’t make out why she was so upset, why she appeared to be weeping and imploring me to listen, or what exactly she was trying to tell me so earnestly.

  I woke up in a sweat, re-living my disappointment when she hadn’t appeared on our final day, as she’d promised. It was only afterwards that things made sense, when Nikki told me about the married man she’d been seeing, how she’d been talking about going away with him, and that, of course, had explained her sudden departure, at the same time as that of the boyfriend, who’d simultaneously abandoned his wife and family. Although I’d been divorced a year, my marriage had effectively ended two years before that, and ever since I’d been looking for a serious girlfriend. I’d planned to ask Miranda if I could see her on a regular basis, and I’d hoped she might agree, but it wasn’t to be. Her betrayal was another setback to my delicate mental state, another disappointment I had to face. But as always at that time, it was Ken who had dragged me out of my depression. That was when we’d cooked up the idea of Crash and Burn, on the long drive back to London, while Ken kept moaning about the beloved St Christopher’s medal that had belonged to his grandfather that he’d lost: we worked out that he must have dropped it into the sea on our last fishing trip. Ken’s loss of the family heirloom apart, the prospect of interesting paid work had snapped me out of my gloom on our journey back to London, given me something to look forward to.

  My next dream was much more disconcerting. I was here, in this house, and I was observing those 1980 events. Seeing Maggi O’Kane emerge from somewhere at the back of the hallway with the guitar case, place it on the floor, take out the assault weapon, lift it and fire. Chaos was everywhere: screaming and shouting, people tumbling down as they died. But thankfully my dream ended before Maggi had committed her final act, her suicide.

  The crashing noise woke me up. Footsteps, outside on the stairs.

  * * * *

  Lying there, heartbeat cranked up high. Darkness. Apart from the splinter of moonlight that cast a ragged splinter of light along the ruined ceiling.

  Muzzy headed, I leapt out of bed and ran to the doorway. In time to see the moonlight illuminating the man running downstairs.

  Yes, I tell you, I did see him!

  The short man in the smart suit I’d seen so many times before.

  This time, I resolved to catch him, if only to prove that he wasn’t a figment of my imagination.

  I ran downstairs, keeping him in sight, watched him stumble at the bottom of the treads, then career towards the front door and pull it open. I tripped and fell down the last few stairs, spread-eagling in the hallway. Scrambled up from my hands and knees. But by the time I’d tumbled out of the front door I just managed to see his figure vanishing into the distance, melting into the landscape, swallowed up by the pouring rain. Barefooted, I stood outside, staring after him, mud oozing between my toes.

  For all the world, it had looked like Edward Van Meer, the man I knew was behind bars. My brush with death at Van Meer’s hands was what had caused my breakdown in the first place, and, since I was now seeing him everywhere, it seemed as if I hadn’t recovered yet. Yet I wasn’t acting abnormally in any other way, so, I reasoned, there had to be some rational explanation for the man’s appearance. Of course Van Meer hated me for what had happened, and he’d told me, in one long rambling letter smuggled out of Broadmoor, that he longed to see me dead. But he was in prison, not here on the outskirts of Bath.

  So was I heading for another breakdown?

  I came back into the large hallway, pondering on the dream that I’d been so abruptly woken from.

  Something in the dream was nagging at me. Some detail that the recreation of the scene I’d pictured so many times had inspired me to think of in a different way, the brain’s computer shuffling the facts and images, rearranging them in another semblance of order, perhaps a more logical one. Then I remembered.

  A door.

  That was it.

  In all the reports about the accident that no one alive had actually witnessed, the professionals’ assumption was that Maggi had appeared from the door to the cellar with her guitar case containing the weapon, then stooped down to open it, beside that same cellar door, and then shot everyone from there.

  However the only door that corresponded to what I’d imagined to be the cellar door I’d seen when I came in, was securely shut and locked when I’d tried it. Was there something beyond there that was worth looking at?

  Sleep was impossible now, so I went back upstairs and picked up the powerful torch, pulled on jeans and a tee shirt and my trainers, and returned to the main hallway. Here there was more moonlight coming through the chinks in the plywood blocking the windows, and I went over to the locked door. I tried it again, but it was firmly shut. So I went outside to my Volvo estate car and took a crowbar and club hammer from the boot, returning to attack the locked door.

  Hammering the chisel end of the crowbar into the gap, I exerted some leverage and after a while the old timber splintered and gave way. It swung backwards on its rusty hinges with a groan. I shone the torch ahead. A couple of feet in from the doorstep I could see some steps leading down. I moved forwards and began to descend, my yellow cone of torchlight shimmering around the walls.

  The last thing I remember was feeling the blow to the back of my head.

  I must have been out cold for some time. The throbbing pain made my vision blur. Someone had obviously crept up behind and slugged me with a heavy object, and I’d fallen down to the bottom of this shaft. Who could have done it? Who even knew that I was here? Clearly the man I’d chased earlier on had returned.

  Shifting carefully, checking arm and leg movements, to my relief I appeared to be uninjured. The torch was unbroken, but its pathetic yellow glimmer told me its batteries were nearly flat. I was surrounded by the cheesy smell of damp stone, and soggy soil was under my fingertips – it looked as if the soft landing had saved me from injury. As I felt around with my fingers, I wondered how hard it was going to be to climb back to freedom. I stopped when my hand encountered something hard: a ledge of stone. And on its surface, to my surprise, there was something cold and metallic. I picked it up.

  A camera. An old camera, the sort in use in the 70s, decades before the advent of digital photography. Shining the torch in the general area there was also a small black book. When I picked it up it appeared to be an old pocket diary. I could just make out the date 1980 in gold on the cover. Excitedly, I opened it up and there, sure enough, a few pages in were dates and handwriting, still legible after all these years. Unfortunately it was in a language I couldn’t understand, possibly German. Shining the torch around, I couldn’t see anything else. Whose diary could it be, I wondered? Despite my throbbing head, I felt the stirrings of excitement as I put the diary in my pocket and picked up the camera, then aim
ed the feeble torch beam towards the stairs.

  * * * *

  The camera had the name Kodak on its casing and through the small round red porthole it looked as if there was a number, indicating that there was a film still inside it. It reminded me of one of the earliest memories of my father with a similar clunky old camera, squatting on the beach to take a family photo when I was five. What were the chances that the film it contained had any images that could be developed? I had no idea.

  The following morning Bath, with its warm honey-coloured buildings, welcomed me like an old friend, and after finding a parking space, I had my sandwich breakfast sitting on a bench near the Pulteney bridge. The river foamed and swirled like Niagara as it tumbled over the three white waterfalls of Pulteney Weir, the fantastic curving steps spanning its massive width, while sunlight flashed alive the windows of the shops on the bridge, on top of the Pulteney’s three golden stone arches. Above the grey rooftops I could just make out the spire of a church.

  I took out my wallet and looked at the photo I still kept of me and my ex-wife Sarah, just before our wedding day. Was I good looking? Difficult to say. Blond hair that has a tendency to fall across my forehead, the break in my nose hardly noticeable, the scar on my chin a reminder of my bare-knuckle boxing days, and stubble that doesn’t meet a razor as often as it should. It wasn’t likely that Hollywood producers would come knocking on my door, but an ex girlfriend had once called me handsome, just before she’d taken back the complement on discovering I’d been going out with her friend.

  The diary had a name Geertrud Altmeier in the front of it, and the name was vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t remember where from. At the back of the little book there were some lyrics to what seemed to be a song, or perhaps a poem, though the German language was impenetrable to me. I leafed through it again, and found some English names I recognised: John Lennon, 8 December, followed by some words that I memorised, intending to get them translated as a priority: er wurde nicht von einem verwirrten Einzeltäter erschossen. Die Umstände von John Lennons Ermordung waren viel komplizierter. Roughly translated I later discovered this meant: he wasn’t killed by the lone assassin – it was more complicated than that.

  I finished my coffee and packed the diary away to study in detail later on.

  I found ‘Woodley Cameras’ in a side street, between a chemists’ and a newsagent. Tony Woodley, the proprietor, appeared to be a personable sixtyish character, who wore a loose-fitting cream pullover that almost hung to his knees, and had a shock of wild frizzy grey hair, protruding front teeth and milk-bottle-lens spectacles. Tony assured me there was a good chance that the film inside the camera could be developed with success, despite its antiquity. “Wow an Old Kodak!” were his words, and he was so enthusiastic to see the museum-piece that he cheerfully gave me a lesson on the correct way to remove a spool of film from such a picture taker. “Take it slowly, never open the back till it’s fully wound in. There you go – right on the end of the reel! There’s a fair chance we can get some good shots from this – it all depends on how it’s been stored. A cellar sounds hopeful: cold conditions preserve the chemicals best.”

  When I remarked on the posters of Marc Bolan and T-Rex as well as of a 1968 concert of the Rolling Stones, my new friend enthused about his fascination for the music of his youth. I told him about Crash and Burn, and he listened with rapt attention, telling me of his brief career as bass player with the Mansion House Plumbers, a 1960s group I pretended to have heard of. He even peered at the diary and carried it into a back room in search of a German-English dictionary. My interrupted sleep and the stress of the past days was catching up with me, so I was somewhat relieved when Tony was called away to a phone call, assuring me that he’d send the film away to a specialist film lab, and if there were any images on it to be developed there was every chance that they could be produced, even after all this time.

  * * * *

  A week later I was at home in Brookham, a sleepy village just off the A290, between Whitstable and Canterbury in Kent. Brookham has a 14th-century church, The Lion’s Head pub – great for a relaxing pint in front of a roaring log fire, and Annie Kilbride’s grocery-cum-supermarket that always has that cosy soggy-cardboard smell that reminds me of seedy shops on holiday campsites.

  I’d bought The Gate House several years ago as a ‘project’, and at the time it had seemed a good idea. I’d imagined rebuilding the collapsed sections of the roof, and the tumbling-down rear wall at weekends, and once it was watertight starting to modernise the interior. I’d even started building an extension at the back, but hadn’t got beyond constructing the foundations and the hardcore base for the floor. But after the first year, when I’d also managed to do the main weatherproofing jobs, work had got busy and weekend breaks were a luxury I couldn’t afford. A century ago my house had been the small welcoming post for Adelaide Grange further back along the hill, the large estate that had been in existence since the middle ages. But the old house had been demolished to make way for blocks of luxury flats, the upmarket estate unimaginatively christened Adelaide Heights.

  The kitchen/breakfast room at the rear was my favourite room, affording as it did a view out across the entire Glossop Valley, which stretched out far below, reminding me just how high up Brookham was compared to the rest of this part of Kent. When the post arrived I’d been tinkering with my manuscript, but was delighted to see the envelope with the name Tony Woodley Photography on the front. I’d arranged with someone at Canterbury University to translate the diary, but they were busy for a few days, so I’d arranged to take it in then.

  I opened the wallet and pulled out the prints, laying them out on the table. Most of them were shots of Border Crossing, Maggi O’Kane’s band, doing stage performances, or of individuals within the group playing their instruments, relaxing, sleeping or smoking wakky baccy. Then I recognised a couple as exterior street scenes. The large old gothic building looked remarkably like the ones I’d seen in books of ‘The Dakota’, the New York apartment block where John Lennon and Yoko Ono lived, outside which the former Beatle had been gunned down. I looked closer. In the distance there was the outline of what might have been Yoko Ono, a back view, quite a way away, and nearer to the camera was what looked like John Lennon’s back, his head turned to profile slightly, allowing a view of the trademark granny glasses and Lennon hairdo. In the foreground was a crouching man, who was fumbling inside his jacket pocket.

  Could it be a hitherto undiscovered photo just prior to John Lennon’s assassination? I would need to get it appraised by an expert. Further down the pile were some more pictures of Border Crossing.

  It was in the final ones in the reel, the last three, that the real surprise came.

  They were horror stories. Two men were standing in the corner, one of them firing an assault rifle, and his targets were dead and dying. Maggi O’Kane herself wasn’t in any of the shots.

  The two men wore combat jackets, had short hair, and were clearly not friends or associates of Maggi O’Kane.

  They were obviously contract killers, brought in to kill everyone and make it look as if it had been Maggi’s work.

  Chapter 2

  THE SURVIVOR

  “Giles, you can’t be serious—”

  “—I’m deadly serious, Jack. I’m telling you to forget it.”

  “But this picture shows that Maggi and her band were murdered by professional hit men, then Maggi was framed as being responsible. These are proof.”

  “All you’ve got is photographs that may or may not be genuine.”

  Giles Mander was sitting opposite me at his massive desk in Figaro Publications’ London office, where traffic roared down Kingsway six storeys below us. A Picasso was hanging on the wall behind him, the absurdly large stylised face on the canvas contrasting strangely with Giles’s classic good looks, his pinstriped suit and reddened cheeks, nostrils flaring as he breathed deeply, scowling at the floor.

  “Giles, just look again at the photograph!
”

  He picked up one of the massacre pictures and held it an inch from his eyes, frowning and screwing up his face as if he’d swallowed a wasp.

  “You could have faked these.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “To create a stir. To publicize your book.”

  “For God’s sake! You can’t seriously believe—”

  “—that you’d resort to trickery? Why not?”

  I let the question hang.

  Giles shook his head at last, the mass of golden curls swishing around his face, making him look more like an angry cherub than usual. “Sorry, Jack, but frankly, this is one more problem I can do without. I was against this book deal from the start. Ken was a fool to persuade the directors it would sell.”

  “Ken’s a close friend.”

  “Ken made bad decisions, that’s why he was sacked. Commissioning his mate, who isn’t even a professional writer, to do Crash and Burn was one of them.”

  I breathed deeply, feeling my fists clench and doing my best to control my temper.

  “Listen Jack. Just look at the positive side of things.” He took a deep breath, stared at the desk. I noticed a nervous tick under his left eye, the lines across his forehead. “You’ve nearly finished Crash and Burn and presumably you’d like the second payment of your advance against royalties as much as we want the finished manuscript. So why not save us both a heap of bother and just write up the last chapter of the book as we agreed and we can call it a day?”

  “Write lies you mean. What about John Lennon’s death? The accepted version is that the man was assassinated by four shots from a lone gunman, but that’s categorically challenged in the diary, if my primitive translation is correct. If there is some doubt, then that’s a minefield, particularly if that’s the reason Maggi and her band were murdered. The crux of it is, you’re asking me to say that Maggi was a murderer when I know—”

  “—Just what do you know?” He held my gaze. “Okay,” he shook his head as if to dislodge uncomfortable thoughts, “for what it’s worth I know perfectly well you’re not the kind of guy who’d fake these pictures, but I daresay the technology exists for someone else to have done it – someone who planted the camera there, hoping to stir up trouble exactly like this. And it must have been done around the time it happened, so finding the culprit is next to impossible. The point is it’s all so long ago that nobody cares anymore: for goodness’ sake, you were six and I was four, and more than half of our prospective readers weren’t even born! As for the diary, it’s just a single person’s ramblings: without substantiating evidence it’s utterly meaningless. The known facts are that witnesses and extensive police investigations point to the inevitable conclusion that Mark David Chapman shot John Lennon on his own initiative – he even admitted it. This photo shows us nothing new. As for Maggi O’Kane, I’m sorry Jack but you need to get a grip. The way you talk about her to me, the way you’re so clearly irrational about all this business isn’t normal. You’re obsessed with a dead woman, Jack, and that isn’t healthy. Maggi O’Kane wasn’t that brilliant a musician. If she hadn’t died as she had she’d probably have fizzled out in a year or two and been forgotten by now. As it is, her only real claim to fame is as a suicidal mass killer. The rest of the book is on track – you’ve worked hard and done a good job. All I’m asking you to do is dredge up the official facts from the internet, chuck in some quotes from any relatives you can find and finish the damned thing. This is Friday. You’ve got until Monday morning to reassure me that you’re writing the Maggi O’Kane chapter exactly as we agreed.”